Puppets is out today! I can’t decide if I want to read it or Fallen Night first…

JOMP Book Photo Challenge // Feb 4 // Cover Lust

The House In The Cerulean Sea, Under The Whispering Door, and In The Lives of Puppets by TJ Klune.

I love these covers so much. The color palette, the text fonts, everything. Their similarity lends to the idea that they share a world. (sorry for the photoshopped addition, but ITLOP isn't out until April 25th.)

For general reading and buying, paperback. If I’m looking for something collectible or if there’s a special edition, I hope it’s hardcover.

pls reblog. also consider: does your answer change for graphic novels?

(there’s a text post version of this floating around but seeing the results would help me more!)

Catwoman: Lonely City by Cliff Chiang (covers 1-4 shown)

Ten years after Batman has died, Selina Kyle is released from prison to a new Gotham. No more capes & cowls, no supervillains, and a lot less freedom under Mayor Harvey Dent. When Kyle discovers Batman left her one final secret in the cave, she gets a crew and plans one final heist before the city falls to chaos (just like the good ol' days)

bonus: book three variant cover

I love this cover and this Ivy look so much I had to share.

(spoiler-free thoughts below...)

5/5 - Simply incredible work. A top-tier Catwoman story, up there with Selina's Big Score and the Genevieve Valentine run. The world is well thought out, the emotions of the story are well-balanced, and I especially appreciated seeing the post-criminal lives of Croc, Riddler, and Ivy. I hope Cliff Chiang gets more writing opportunities in any world, and more art opportunities in the DC world because I truly think he can do some amazing things here.

JOMP Book Photo Challenge // March 01 // TBR This Month

Another ambitious pile, especially with ADOFN (Priory took me six weeks and this one's a little longer) and this is going to be a busy month for me otherwise. But, gotta have goals!

(see below for full list and thoughts...)

Star Wars: Hard Contact and Alphabet Squadron - I started these in February, enjoying HC but might start AS again cuz I think I missed an important detail somewhere...

The Extraordinaries by TJ Klune - I'm excited for In The Lives of Puppets in April so this will tide me over until then. B&N is getting special editions of his Green Creek series later this year too.

A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin - Been peripherally on my TBR for a looong time and I think it's finally time.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay by Michael Chabon - I guess this is the month for legacy TBRs finally making it to the top of the pile. This historical fiction about two young men in the early days of comics caught my eye when I first started at the book store about five years ago.

A Day of Fallen Night by Samantha Shannon - The long-awaited follow-up to The Priory of The Orange Tree, one of my favorite books of the last five years. This standalone prequel is slightly longer than the first, and I want to make sure I can focus and give it the time it deserves. I may not get to it this month, but I'm so glad it's finally here!

Berlin.📚📚📚

Can we appreciate how awesome these covers design is? I literally didn't notice they fit together like this until I had them lined up for taking my posts photos.

These are amazing!

Some penguin classic covers I made of some of my favorite books.

Hm. Lobelia Sackville-Baggins is indirectly responsible for the defeat of Sauron and the destruction of the one ring. Because if she wasn’t so annoying, maybe Bilbo wouldn’t have felt the need to make Frodo his heir in order to stop Lobelia from inheriting Bag End, which led to Bilbo leaving the ring to Frodo, who then was made ringbearer, and went to mordor and destroyed it, which made Sauron lose all his powers and not take over the world

Incredible!

This is part of my ongoing Discworld jacket embroidery project. Of course Great A'Tuin has to be on there. And of course it has to be the biggest one of them all.

I'm going to put the finished product in my masterpost, but I'm so proud of the thing that I have to put it in an extra post beforehand. Enjoy!

watching the US ban more books and make robot police dogs

JOMP Book Photo Challenge // Feb 28 // Read In February

Original pic was my goal for the month, green checks are what I actually read. I didn't get to the other three, they'll probably roll over into next month. I came upon three others (up top) and glad I liked all of them. I'm in the middle of SW: Hard Contact (circled) and liking that one too.

Six and a half titles plus a tall stack of weekly comics (not pictured), pretty good month!

JOMP Book Photo Challenge // Feb 27 // Freebie

African Samurai by Thomas Lockley & Geoffrey Girard

The true story of Yasuke, the first (and probably only) black samurai to serve a lord in feudal Japan, Oda Nobunaga. In case that sounds familiar, Netflix made a show VEEERY loosely based on him (at least the book didn't mention mechs and mages in the 16th century). Always a good handsell for me in my military town, and one I insist goes on every history table we make.

The Private Eye by Brian K. Vaughan, Marcos Martin, & Muntsa Vicenete

50 years ago, when the digital cloud "burst" and spilled everyone's secrets, the world goes post-internet and privacy becomes society's top priority. This makes the work of a private eye all the more difficult, but if you need information on anyone, you call Patrick Immelmann (no, of course that's not his real name.) P.I. has stumbled into trouble much deeper than he imagines, and it's consequences could repeat the events of the "burst" all over again.

(spoiler-free thoughts below...)

3.5/5 - I bought the HC edition when it came out in 2015 and have just got around to reading it. Maybe my expectations for it were so high (it was all anyone was talking about as it was being released on Panel Syndicate where it's still up for name-your-price!) and I waited so long that the story didn't quite click for me like I was hoping. I was more interested in the world at large, where pay phones and Blockbuster Video exist again, but so do hover-cars and the police and the news are the same organization. That said, it's a classic noir story told in a sci-fi world, both things I love so I'm glad I've finally read it. I'm fans of both Vaughan and Martin, and I'll be checking out even more Panel Syndicate comics soon.

JOMP Book Photo Challenge 📚

February 2nd, 2023: Currently reading

Fantasy paperback week (mostly)! What a wonderful, musty week indeed.

This, my friends, is one of my favorite things. It is a set of Ace Books’ unauthorized publications of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy (1965). The story here is tortured (and you can find a fuller accounting on Kirkus Reviews). Basically, Donald A. Wollhiem approached Tolkien about producing an American edition of the books in paperback and was snootily turned down (Tolkien apparently saw paperbacks as “degenerate”). Offended, Wollhiem hunted around and found an apparent loophole in copyright law at the time (I do not pretend to entirely understand this) that had allowed the trilogy to fall into the public domain in the US. He quickly published these books, beating Ballantine’s revised editions to shelves by five months. Tolkien and Ballantine waged a war against Ace in the papers, accusing them of pirating the trilogy — eventually Ace relented, gave Tolkien royalties and let their (still popular editions) go out of print.

The cover art is by Jack Gaughan, who was featured on many Ace books. I feel like I know him primarily through covers for Jack Vance novels, but he has a distinct sort of mid-century medieval style I really enjoy. I love these covers, with their bright colors. They actually reflect the content of the books better than the covers on the Ballantine editions — Barbara Remington’s strange triptych evokes some of the books, but because of the Ace edition, she didn’t have time to read the books before she commenced painting.