Books

I read…a lot. Here’s where I ramble about books and printed media.

📚 The Woman in the Woods and Other North American Stories edited by Kel McDonald, Kate Ashwin, and Alina Pete

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53/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

One of a series of six (eventually; five are published, the sixth is in production) anthologies of short comics based on indigenous cultures; this one is stories from North America. I enjoyed all the stories, with a good range of humor, heartfeltness, and darkness.

Michael holding The Woman in the Woods

📚 Past Prologue by L.A. Graf

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52/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

More time travel shenanigans to get everything wrapped up means more opportunity to get a little confused as to which version of each character is in which setting, but it works out in the end. And the final scene is actually a nice way to finish things off.

But once again, the back cover blurb is wrong, but has just enough relation to make me think that there were some major rewrites and the blurbs were written from the original pitch instead of the final work for some reason.

Michael holding Past Prologue

📚 Future Imperfect by L.A. Graf

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51/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Part two of this trilogy involves a lot of time travel, or dimensional travel, or both, which occasionally makes it a bit difficult to keep track of who is where/when, but for the most part tracks decently.

The back cover blurb is somewhat closer to the plot of the book than with the first book in the series, but still has some notable differences. Maybe the blurbs were written much earlier in the planning process, before rewrites and editorial adjustments? The cover image also has no relation to the story.

Michael holding Future Imperfect

📚 Present Tense by L.A. Graf

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50/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Set directly after “The Naked Now”, the Enterprise decides to use their extra three days to do a low-stakes check on an away team on a boring planet. Suddenly, everything goes wrong! The first book in a trilogy, so nothing gets wrapped up here, but it’s the usual Trek adventures. Some extra points for having cave exploration scenes that were claustrophobic enough to wig me out a little.

Weirdly, the summary blurb on the back of the book (and thus, on this site) is entirely unrelated to the actual plot.

Michael holding Present Tense

📚 The Howling Man by Charles Beaumont

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48/2022 – ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Overall not a bad collection of short stories, and I can see why the book got the high-profile list of authors to do introductions and provide their memories of Beaumont. However, many of the stories haven’t aged well; they may have been “dated but still worthwhile” when the collection was published in the late ’80s, but forty years further on, they’re just “dated and cringeworthy”. Don’t regret reading it, but definitely won’t be keeping it in my collection, either.

Michael holding The Howling Man