The fourth A of the month is for Am I Actually the Strongest, Vol. 1, by Sai Sumimori and Ai Takahashi, about a layabout reborn as a baby in a fantasy world with what is assumed to be a rubbish power. But he finds imaginative ways to use it and his mana is exceptionally high.
B is for The Black Moon Chronicles, Vol. 5: The Scarlet Dance, written by François Froideval, with poster-style art by Olivier Ledroit that's more illustrative than sequential. I haven't got into this series yet. It's like someone's shouting the story at you while they run past.
C is for Cosmoknights by Hannah Templer, a future sports comic about a girl who runs away from home, after previously helping a princess run away too. She teams up with a pair of lesbian princess rescuers, but there's a male on their trail, trying to coerce a way into their gang.
D is for Dark Spaces: Wildfire by Scott Snyder and Hayden Sherman, about a group of female prisoners on day release to fight forest fires. Told that a house in the fire's path contains a fortune in cryptocurrency, they risk everything to sneak in there and get it before it burns.
E is for The Egyptian Princesses, Part I, a black-and-white graphic novel by a Ukrainian writer and artist, Igor Baranko. Circa 1150 BC, two young daughters of the pharaoh Ramesses III are led into a deadly trap, but survive it to discover magic, mysteries and weird old men in the desert.
F is for Flywires, Vol. 3: Organic Transfer, by Chuck Austen and Matt Cossin. Illegal reproduction has run rife on a generation ship and drastic measures are now required to keep life support running. Feels like the creators were told to quickly wrap it up, but at least it got an ending.
G is for Gleipnir, Vol. 1, by Sun Takeda, about a sad boy, Shuichi Kagaya, who turns into a sports mascot costume when agitated, and the weird girl who realises she can unzip the costume, climb inside it, and use its strength to kill people. It's all very saucy and symbolic.
H is for The Hanged Man of Saint-Pholien, the brilliant fourth Maigret novel by Georges Simenon, translated by Linda Coverdale and read by Gareth Armstrong. The maudlin Maigret follows a shady character all the way to the German border, only to provoke his suicide at the train station. It leaves the great detective decidedly out of sorts.
I is for It Waits in the Woods by Josh Malerman, another short ebook that's free to read in Prime Reading. A scary movie just dying to be made, it's about an 18-year-old film-maker who goes into Central Michigan's National Forest with a camera to find her sister, who went missing three years ago.
I'd been picking at Les Justes by Albert Camus all month but time was running out so J was instead for Jack Wolfgang, Vol. 1: Enter the Wolf, by Stephen Desberg and Henri Reculé. It's a fun James Bond adventure in a world where animals have learnt to walk, talk and come up with megalomaniacal schemes.
K is for Kaya, Vol. 1: Kaya and the Lizard-Riders, by writer and artist Wes Craig. A tough girl tries to get her princeling half-brother to safety among her crush's lizard-people, after robot invaders torch their home. Lovely artwork in nice, rectangular, digital-friendly panels.
L is for Legend of the Scarlet Blades, Vol. 4: The Abomination's Hidden Flower, by Saverio Tenuta, translated by Samantha Demers. Glorious artwork and an epic story. For the full effect I think it would be better to read all four books at once rather than over the course of three years.
M is for Miao Dao, a horror story by Joyce Carol Oates about Mia, a 13-year-old girl being sexually harassed at school by older boys, and at home by a stepdad. She befriends some feral cats, and one becomes her protector. Read by Amy Landon, who does a great "creepy man" voice!
N is for November, Vol. 2: The Gun in the Puddle, by Matt Fraction and Elsa Charretier. I didn't feel that this moved the story forward a great deal from volume one, but maybe the problem is that I whizzed through it too quickly rather than soaking up the mood and the artwork.
O is for The Owl, by J.T. Krul, art by Heubert Khan Michael, a spin-off from Project Super-Powers, where Alex Ross and his team gave public domain characters the care and attention usually reserved for Marvel and DC heroes. I read this out of order (a late substitution for an audiobook I wasn't close to finishing) so it was my 100th book of the month!
P is for Public Domain, Vol. 1: Past Mistakes by Chip Zdarsky. I adored this. A Jack Kirby/Steve Ditko/Bill Finger realises he owns a major superhero, not the writer and his company. What really made it for me was the big left-turn it takes after the lawyers talk.
Q is for The Queen in Hell Close by Sue Townsend, a comic Penguin 70 about a new government kicking the royal family out, and making them sign on. A brilliant portrayal of what it's like to live without money, but also rather a nice tribute to the Queen. I read it on the bus, and it was the first book I ever read with my reading glasses on. It does have very small print, to be fair!
R is for Rage, written by Jimmy Palmiotti, with art by Scott Hampton and Jennifer Lange. A chap gets thrown in prison after his ex pretends he kidnapped their daughter. Knocked out by another prisoner, he wakes up to see that everyone else in the cell has been beaten to death…
S is for Second Best Thing: Marilyn, JFK, and a Night to Remember, by James Swanson, a short ebook about the one and only photograph of Marilyn Monroe and JKF together, on the night of his birthday fundraising event, and the private party (or two?) that followed. The kind of thing I would never normally have read, but reading challenges can sometimes prod you in odd directions.
T is for Throne of Ice, Vol. 1: Orphan of Antarcia, by Alain Paris with art by Val, translated by Lindsay Marie King. A fantasy story set circa 8000 BC on Antarctica, when humans supposedly still lived there, before it froze, and a vicious queen wanted her king's illegitimate son dead, while one wiley retainer stops at nothing to keep him alive.
U is for The Unwritten, Vol. 1: Tommy Taylor and the Bogus Identity, by Mike Carey and Peter Gross. Tom is famous for the Harry Potter-ish novels his long-lost dad wrote him into, but then a journalist reveals he may not be his dad's actual son, setting some wild events in motion. Pretty cool.
I'd hoped that The Veiled Woman, a Penguin mini by Anais Nin,would be the V this time around, because I'd already read quite a bit of it this month, but sadly the light in the pub in which I was waiting for my daughter was too dim for a print book with a tiny font. Never mind, maybe next year! So V was instead for Void by Veronica Roth. While Ace works as a janitor on a interstellar cruise ship, time passes quickly (or normally) elsewhere, so today's baby could be next year's elderly man – it's The Forever War as service industry. When a favourite passenger is murdered, Ace can't help investigating.
Similarly, I'd hoped that Witching Hour Theatre by Jonathan Janz would be the W, but I wouldn't have finished it in time. It's very good so far, though. It's about a lonely chap who spends every Friday at an all-night horror movie triple bill with other aficionados. Instead, W is for Wings of Light, Vol. 1, by Harry Bozino, with art by Carlos Magno, based on an original story by Julia Verlanger. A former Retroworld slave becomes a cadet in the Brotherhood of the Stars, and on his first assignment rescues a pregnant woman from the axe, causing a diplomatic incident.
X is for XO Manowar, Vol. 1: Soldier by Matt Kindt, with fabulous art by Tomas Giorello. I picked this out because my other remaining X books were lengthy omnibuses of X-Men comics and the Xeelee Sequence (estimated reading time: 45 hours!), but it was an unexpected treat. A roman soldier, who got some space armour and then retired to an alien planet after his adventures on present-day Earth, gets dragged off to war again.
Y is for Young Hellboy: The Hidden Land, written by Mike Mignola and Thomas Sniegoski, with art by Craig Rousseau. Little red and Professor Bruttenholm are stranded on a lost island, where they meet another of Hellboy's idols. Aimed at kids, I think, but it was good fun.
And last but not least, my final Z is for Zenith: Phase Four, by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell, another mind-boggling attempt to reprogram your consciousness via superheroes and pop stars. I've got 78 other 2000 AD books I haven't read yet – I should do something about that. Together with Zenith: Phase Four and Nameless, that takes Morrison to the top of my leaderboard for I think the first time ever, at 67 books read, ahead now of Garth Ennis (66), Moorcock (62), who I think lost the lead in 2022 or so, and Terrance Dicks (59), who probably knocked Enid Blyton off the top in 1983.
These are my reading stats for the month. 61 graphic novels, 22 audios, 20 prose, and 1 book of poetry. Fantasy and sf shared honours as top genre, 23 each. Male writers predominate, but a bit less than usual thanks to manga. 50 of the books and audiobooks were written by Americans, 54 were by writers from 13 other countries.
As usual, I'll take a month off reading now to write a novel of my own (and to finish off the next issue or three of TQF!), but I've already been thinking about how to attack my TBR list again next October. It needs to again be something that lets me switch between audio, digital, print, etc depending on where I am, what I'm doing, whether there's good lighting!
I thought about maybe reading only books with an average rating over 4 on Goodreads, so that I'd only be reading the best of the best. But filtering my Goodreads list like that produced mainly very fannish stuff, like manga and Transformers. Great works of literature are often rated lower, because of all the people obliged to read them who don't like them! For example, The Old Man and the Sea's average Goodreads rating is currently 3.8 out of 5.
A challenge of challenges could be fun, collecting together all the various reading challenges people set, like the OcTBRChallenge badges, or the Reading Glasses challenge, mush them all together, and try to complete as many as possible.
One writer friend lets a random number generator pick which books he reads, which could also be fun. I could narrow it down to only unread books up to 150pp, of which I have 1549. Maybe have a separate random generator for audiobooks. But I could easily get stuck with something short but boring.
I think my favourite idea at the moment is to start with literally my shortest book, then read a book one page longer. So say a 48pp book, then 49pp, 50pp, and see how high I can get. In parallel I could do the same with audiobooks, start with a 1hr book, then a 1hr15, etc. We'll see.
My main goal next time may seem odd, given that I've just finished 104 books and audiobooks in a month: to spend more time actually reading each day.
That's a lot of books! But it was often just a half hour for a graphic novel at lunch, an audiobook while working, a short ebook at bedtime, and so on. The only time I really got properly stuck into a book was when I was out and about, waiting for the kids at the coach station, or reading in a nearby pub while one of them was at a birthday party. I've got a lot of work on at the moment, and I do love working late after Mrs Theaker goes to bed, but I know it's not a healthy habit…
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