The First Set of Books for 2023
Feb. 11th, 2023 10:03 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chuckroTacky: Love Letters to the Worst Culture We Have to Offer by Rax King - King is a disaster human and an excellent writer, and this uses the vehicle of “tacky” culture to tell you her life story. (Jethrien read it first and lured me in with the last chapter about Meat Loaf. If you ever hear me refer to “motorcycle” as an emotion, this is where it comes from.) It’s funny, it’s poignant, it gets pretty dark at times but it’s from the perspective of having made it through to the other side.
Die by Keiron Gillian - Six teenagers are pulled into the world of a fantasy roleplaying game…and five reappear traumatized two years later. Twenty years after that, the fantasy world comes calling again. There’s a lot of deconstruction of the LitRPG genre here, but also some genuinely clever worldbuilding and deep literary cuts. There are a bunch of sequel hooks (I don’t know if there’s going to be a second volume), but the arcs of the main characters get completed and the various mysteries pretty much all get addressed. Also, the painted artwork is gorgeous.
Evil By Design by Chris Nodder - Like Usable Usability, this was arguably reading for work. The gimmick is that it centers around using the seven deadly sins for product and sales design; in practice it’s a great overview of business school psychological tricks that you can use to manipulate people and separate them from their money. There are a number of suggestions for how you might use these powers for good (or at least how you might recognize when people are using them on you), but there’s also plenty of justification for why manipulating people is probably okay in the grand scheme of things.
The Illustrated Al ed. Josh Bernstein - The idea here was to do an illustrated “music video” for various Weird Al songs that never had them, and each song was done by a different artist. There were a bunch of problems with this: 1. The songs that didn’t get music videos are generally B-sides, so you’re already trying to pick the “best” of Al’s second-tier work. 2. Making a good music video is a lot more than just illustrating the events of the song, and some artists didn’t get that memo. 3. Some of the songs didn’t age well (“Trigger Happy” is high on the list). All of that said, the “epic” songs were the ones that generally worked the best, because they have a bit of a plot and actually translate well into graphic novel form: “Biggest Ball of Twine” was probably my favorite and “Jackson Park Express” did a romance comics pastiche that really used the comics genre to do something clever with the song. “Everything You Know is Wrong” gets an honorable mention for making me actively laugh out loud because the rabid wolverine in Al’s underwear is, in fact, the superhero. “Albuquerque” was overall decent except for the problematic depiction of the person Al fights for the snorkel, and the fact that I can’t decide if the author got the joke about his “Flock of Seagulls” haircut, which was depicted as three seagulls on the person’s head. (It’s a reference to the 80s band Flock of Seagulls and their frontman’s distinctive hairstyle.)
Die by Keiron Gillian - Six teenagers are pulled into the world of a fantasy roleplaying game…and five reappear traumatized two years later. Twenty years after that, the fantasy world comes calling again. There’s a lot of deconstruction of the LitRPG genre here, but also some genuinely clever worldbuilding and deep literary cuts. There are a bunch of sequel hooks (I don’t know if there’s going to be a second volume), but the arcs of the main characters get completed and the various mysteries pretty much all get addressed. Also, the painted artwork is gorgeous.
Evil By Design by Chris Nodder - Like Usable Usability, this was arguably reading for work. The gimmick is that it centers around using the seven deadly sins for product and sales design; in practice it’s a great overview of business school psychological tricks that you can use to manipulate people and separate them from their money. There are a number of suggestions for how you might use these powers for good (or at least how you might recognize when people are using them on you), but there’s also plenty of justification for why manipulating people is probably okay in the grand scheme of things.
The Illustrated Al ed. Josh Bernstein - The idea here was to do an illustrated “music video” for various Weird Al songs that never had them, and each song was done by a different artist. There were a bunch of problems with this: 1. The songs that didn’t get music videos are generally B-sides, so you’re already trying to pick the “best” of Al’s second-tier work. 2. Making a good music video is a lot more than just illustrating the events of the song, and some artists didn’t get that memo. 3. Some of the songs didn’t age well (“Trigger Happy” is high on the list). All of that said, the “epic” songs were the ones that generally worked the best, because they have a bit of a plot and actually translate well into graphic novel form: “Biggest Ball of Twine” was probably my favorite and “Jackson Park Express” did a romance comics pastiche that really used the comics genre to do something clever with the song. “Everything You Know is Wrong” gets an honorable mention for making me actively laugh out loud because the rabid wolverine in Al’s underwear is, in fact, the superhero. “Albuquerque” was overall decent except for the problematic depiction of the person Al fights for the snorkel, and the fact that I can’t decide if the author got the joke about his “Flock of Seagulls” haircut, which was depicted as three seagulls on the person’s head. (It’s a reference to the 80s band Flock of Seagulls and their frontman’s distinctive hairstyle.)
