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Reading Roundup, 2023 Q1 · Pick Up and Deliver

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Welcome to pick Up and Deliver the podcast where I pick up my audio recorder
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as I step off the train and deliver an episode to you while I walk
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home. I'm Brendan Riley. Well, good afternoon, listeners. It's a
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lovely day here in suburban Chicago. The sun is out the grass screen,
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the birds are a chirpin, and we're all enjoying ourselves on this lovely day.
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Given that it's mid May, we're well past the end of the first
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quarter of twenty twenty three, so I thought today I would talk a little
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bit about what I've been reading. For those of you new to this segment,
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the Reading Roundup, I talk about the books that I read in the
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first quarter, in the previous quarter of the year, and I guess sometimes
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i'll talk about the books generally. Sometimes i'll talk about if you are going
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to thematically connect them to a game, what game might be. I'm not
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sure how much I'll do that today because I have a lot of books that
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i've read, a lot of more comics so they read quickly. But I
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also have been reading audiobooks again lately, which means I'm a little a little
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more behind on my podcasts. I've had to trim down the podcast than I'm
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listening to, but I was finding that the pleasure of the podcast experience was
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dipping for me a bit. I was finding a little bit less enjoyment in
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them, and I had kind of forgotten how much I really like audiobooks,
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and so I installed the incredibly easy to use library audiobook apps Libby and Hoopla
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on my phone, which made it very easy for me to listen to those
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instead of my podcasts. So I decided that I would listen to two audiobooks
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a month, one somewhere around the first and one somewhere around the fifteenth of
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the month, and then my podcasts in between, with my goal of not
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getting further behind them my podcast backlog. So each time I finished an audiobook,
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I go and look, and if I'm over the line i'm keeping,
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I delete episodes until I'm caught up. So so what I'll do is I'll
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just go through the stuff I've read. I'll give you a little commentary here
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there as I think of it, and we'll see how far we get.
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I mean, I get all the way to the end of March. I've
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read quite a few books this month or this quarter so far, but I'll
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do my best. First off, we have The String Bags by Garth Ennis
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and p J. Holden. This is a sort of comedy war drama about
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a couple of soldiers who are flying old time like World War One era planes
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in World War One in World War Two at the beginning of World War Two.
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It's not clear to me why they're flying the old planes, but they've
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gotten stuck flying them because the RAF needs every plane they can get. And
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it's a pretty good war comic. I mean, there's not a whole lot
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to say other than what I've just said. It's kind of funny in the
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way that a lot of Garth Ennis comics are funny, meaning that pretty dark
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and violent but enjoyable. That's The String Bags. The artist on that is
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PJ. Holden. Next up, I read I read gun Dog by Gary
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Wida. This is an audiobook form gun Dog was. It's a post apocalyptic
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war narrative in which aliens came to Earth and enslaved humankind, and we tried
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to fight back by building basically these big titans, and we lost. But
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one of the characters escapes and goes and finds a titan and starts causing all
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manner of trouble. And I'm not sure if there is going to be a
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follow up or if there was a sequel to it. I mean, it
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was just published last July, so it's possible there is going to be a
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followup, and hasn't I published yet. I thought it was pretty good,
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I mean, entertaining, probably not super memorable, although I do still remember
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the plot, which you know, is something. It's been four months,
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so I could very well have forgotten the plot by now if it was entirely
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unmemorable, but it's so. It was good, not amazing, but good.
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Next up, I read Astonishing X Men Volume five ghost Box. This
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is a Warren Ellie comic that I think I had because it was a Warren
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Ellis comic and I sort of thought it would be readable without having read the
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other Astonishing X Men series. But it was not. I couldn't really understand
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what was going on. It was fine, but it did not. I
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also did not enjoy it enough for me to want to go read more of
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that. I've also learned Warren Ellis has done some kind of unpleasant things in
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his personal life that make me less inclined to go read his stuff, which
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is a bummer. He was a favorite comic writer of mine for a long
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time, but there are plenty of great, great writers to read whose personal
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lives don't make me unhappy. So the next up was The Death of Missus
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Westaway by Ruth Ware. Ruth Ware is an excellent suspense writer, and this
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one was an excellent novel. In this one, you have a young woman
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who was raised by a single mother and who is contacted by a contacted by
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a lawyer because she has the same name as her She has the same name
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as the long lost granddaughter of this very wealthy woman. And even though this
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main character knows for certain she can't be the child of this old woman,
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she's desperately poor and it seems like there's a chance she's going to get some
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money out of the will, so she decides to pretend to be this long
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lost granddaughter and go anyway. Ruth Ware is very good at writing tension filled,
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very emotionally driven mystery books, and I would say this one really shines
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reminded me a little bit of Thomas Cook if you've read any of his stuff,
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has a similar a similar kind of tension or feeling to it. Definitely
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worth recommending, if you are worth checking out if you get a chance.
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The Death of Missus Westaway. I read the comic The Trial of Sherlock Holmes.
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These are from the Leah Moore Sherlock Holmes comics that she's been writing.
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Honestly, I don't even remember the plot. I thought it was pretty good.
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I rated it four stars, so I must have enjoyed it, but
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I don't remember. Don't remember it. The Company of the Dead was an
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interesting one. This is an alternate history story in which the Germans one World
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War One and the United States broke up into the Oh no, it was
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World War two, excuse me. Germans won World War Two, and they
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divided America up into German territory and Japanese territory, or actually, no,
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all of America's Japanese territory, because America then in the midst of the fighting,
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had a revolution as well, and the South broke away and became the
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New Confederacy, which of course is horrible. And then in the context of
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this, you have these characters who are playing around with a time travel device,
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trying to figure out how to put the world in a different path,
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not knowing that in fact had all even change once into this divergent and unpleasant
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path, and of course the center point of the divergence and the reason I
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picked the novel up to begin with. It's Shenanigans on the Titanic Titanigans whatever.
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This was fine. It was a little convoluted in too long, but
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I enjoyed it, and any kind of time travel story I like. Not
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really big on alternate pasts or alternate histories, but it was fine. Three
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stars. Next up, we have Hidden Figures, the untold story of the
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African American women who helped with the Space Program. This was an excellent book.
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It is the book on which the movie was based, although it's much
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more detailed than the film. I watched the film. It was good,
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but it was sort of like the cliffs notes of the book. The book
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had much more detail about the different women featured in the movie and the lives
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that they led as they made their way through slightly more progressive institution than the
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rest of the world was at the time, but still had to fight an
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awful lot of discrimination and unpleasantness. Nonetheless, it's ultimately a hopeful book and
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really uplifting and interesting. Definitely worth checking out. If you get a chance.
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I really like that. That's Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shutterlee and that
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was four stars. Next up we had Dug Tennapel's graphic novel Creature Tech.
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This is when I got a long time ago, I think, on a
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discount shelf and I picked it up because it just looked weird and it turned
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out, Yeah, it's really weird. The premise of this one is that
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there is a set of technologies that are being hoarded by a secret government agency
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that have been stolen from I think Aliens or perhaps from the Russians, and
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we have like a big pile of them. And for a long time there
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was a scientist whose job it was to investigate these secret technologies. Then they
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got fired and for a long time they sat dormant, and now this new
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guy was picked to go investigate these technologies. And the first one he finds
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is weird parasite that attaches to his body and he becomes like this weird hybrid
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person, and of course then other trouble starts as well and he has to
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fight them. It's so good. It's a fun romp, really weird,
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delightfully drawn. Not a whole lot to write home about after the story is
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done. I mean, I really enjoyed it. I'm not going to keep
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it. In fact, I think I already donated it away. But it
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was enjoyable at lasted. That's Creature Tech by Doun Doug Tenepaul. I gave
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that three stars. The next one I got was a graphic novel called Barry
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the Lead by Gabby Dunn art by Clara Rowe. This is a comic book
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with a sort of reporter reporter angle to it, a good journalism thriller,
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well written and interesting to read. That's Bury the Lead. Four stars.
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Next up I read the next in the I read Zoey's Tale, which is
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a John Sculsy novel in the Old Man's War universe. Now, I did
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read the original Old Man's War a while ago, and I did not realize
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that it was an ongoing series, and I found Zoe's Tale as a an
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available book on Hookla, and so I just got it without really looking into
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it. And I read it and it was very enjoyable. But you know,
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it was about a quarter of the way and I'm like, oh,
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dang, this is definitely not the next book in the series. I'm looking
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sure enough, it's book four and I'd only read book one, and it
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turned out they were not entirely linear linear, but pretty linear. So reading
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that book was interesting and fun, and I liked it quite a bit,
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but it was hard to make sense of it. Nonetheless, I really enjoyed
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it. Four stars. Zoe's Tail. Then it went back and checked out
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the other John Scalzy Old Man's Tale novels, starting with The Ghost Brigades,
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which was the second one, and this was really good, very enjoyable,
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and of course informed. Some of the stuff that shows up in Zoe's Tale
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helped me understand what's going on there. If you've read Old Man's War,
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I recommend all of these. They're really good. They capture a lot of
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the same spirit. Scalzi has such a funny writing voice, but also a
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good sense of character development. None of these books are all that serious,
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but really interesting. I also really like in the Old Man's War universe,
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human beings are one of many races that are sort of fighting for control of
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the galaxy, and the military division that runs the colonies and the outward expansion
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of space from Earth is pretty corrupt and borderline fascists. Without the ideological racism
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that's been part of most fascist movements. But it's certainly militaristic and brooks no
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descent, and also in time it incredibly manipulative, but I think the book
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develops that in an organic way that works really well. So an excellent one.
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The Last Colony, and this is the one where they're really wrestling with
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the question of like, what does it mean to be a person? What
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happens if a person is transferred from one body to another, etc. Etc.
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Or that's the Ghost Brigades. Then I read The Last Colony, which
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is another John scalz One. I finished this in early March. This is
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the third book in the Old Man Wore A series. I sort of figured
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like I might as well just dive into it and get as much as I
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can done with it. This one tells the story of a new colony being
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formed as part of a military operation, and our main characters are stuck right
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in the middle of it and ultimately get very mad that they're being manipulated this
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way. The Last Colony also provides a really interesting counterpoint to Zoey's Tale.
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Right if you're reading Zoey's Tale is the fourth book. It explains a lot
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of what's going on in third book, but it is a parallel story,
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so I could enjoy the third book quite a bit, even though i'd read
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the fourth book. Honestly, I think they probably worked better read in the
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other order. But the Last Colony very good, not quite. I give
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three stars, not four. Then I read The Gun Slinger my Stephen King.
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This is again as an audiobook. This is a book i'd read before.
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I'm not sure why I wanted to return to it. It's an awful
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lot of like walking and chasing. It's this gun slinger who's chasing kind of
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the devil, and it's kind of the whole book. It's pretty good or
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well written anyway. Ultimately, I'm not sure how much I enjoyed it.
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I have given myself the task of reading the second book in the Dark Tower
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series. There's seven of them. I'm gonna read the second one and see
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if I like it better, having like, see if it grabs me.
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If it does, I'll read the rest of the series. If not,
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I'm probably gonna be done. Even though I have friends who swear by it
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and think The Dark Tower is the Bee's Knees, I'm not committed yet.
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Then I have a number of Warhammer forty thousand novels and graphic novels. I'm
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going to read you all the titles of them, just you can see.
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I read The Priests of Mars by Graham McNeil, Assault on Black Reach by
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Kyle or Nick Kim. I liked Graham McNeil's writing quite a bit, and
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so I sought out some other stuff he wrote. I wrote read the comic
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Warhammer forty thousand, arns Kelgar, which is a story of a Ultramarine leader,
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which was pretty good. And then I read a couple more Graham McNeil
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novels. I read Nightbringer, and I read Warriors of Ultramar. Now,
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these are all in the same series and about the same characters, with sort
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of evolving stories, and McNeil does a really nice job of giving us a
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well rounded story, even in this kind of decadent and one note universe,
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and I've really appreciated that. So I enjoyed those novels quite a bit.
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I read the mcbeating novel Death of a Dreamer, that's like all the mcbating
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novels. I read the Teen enginean Ninja Turtles graphic novel of the last Ronin,
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which is sort of like the end of the cycle of Teenange Ninja Turtles,
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still written by Eastman and Laird, so still pretty good. I didn't
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like it as much as other people seem too, but I thought it was
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fine. And then finally I read The Nice House on the Lake, which
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was an amazing grassic graphic novel with a really bizarre horror or twist or horror
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theme an idea. It's hard. I mean, it's got to kind of
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love crafty and cosmic horror element to it. It is not love crafty and
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per se, but it has that same feel. It is dark and twisted
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and funny and really well drawn, and I highly recommend both volumes one and
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two by That's by James Tinny and the fourth and volumes one and two I
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gave five stars, which is the only five star ratings I gave in the
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quarter. And finally I read How to Live Safely in the Science Fictional Universe
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by Charles You. I gave this three stars. It was fine and I
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can see why people really liked it, but ultimately I spent too much of
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the book kind of trying to struggle to move forward because I didn't I was
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having trouble grasping the story of it, which is kind of the intent,
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but still didn't work for me. So that's how to live safely in the
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science fictional universe. Well, I hope that you aren't too disappointed that there
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was not more game content. It is the end of the semester and the
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end of the quarter, and I felt like talking about book. So that's
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what I did. I talked about books. What have you been reading lately?
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Head over to board Game You Guilt three two, six nine and share
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your last quarters reading. I'd love to hear if you're reading in the books
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I read, what kinds of books you've been reading? And so on.
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Thanks for joining me on my walk today. I hope to your next walk
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is pleasant. Spine walks. Good bye. Brought to you by rattle Box Day