Reading Toto of Oz Aloud to My Kid

Gina Wickwar's second Oz book following The Hidden Prince of Oz is also the last one published by the International Wizard of Oz Club. It came out over eighteen years ago, the longest gap the Oz Club has ever had between continuation novels (the previous record was seven years between Ozmapolitan and Wicked Witch and between Wicked Witch and Hidden Prince). I'm guessing this means no more continuation novels for the foreseeable future; my understanding is the Oz Club printed way more copies than there was demand for the books, and now the physical supply is something of an albatross. (According to some articles I read about Wickwar, she was working on a third Oz book, a sequel to Queen Zixi of Ix called Queen Zixi in Oz, but there's no sign of it many years later.)

Toto of Oz by Gina Wickwar
illustrated by Anna-Maria Cool

Published: 2006
Acquired: June 2024
Read aloud: December 2024–January 2025

For Hidden Prince and Toto, at least, there is a faint whiff of "why bother?" about it all. I don't mean that in a mean way, but previous Oz Club publications had been further installments by Royal Historians (Ruth Plumly Thompson, Eloise Jarvis McGraw and Lauren Lynn McGraw, Rachel Cosgrove Payes), or those associated with them (Dick Martin), giving them something of an official imprimatur. Hidden Prince and Toto, though, are indistinguishable from so many of the other latter-day canon-consistent Oz publications from the likes of Emerald City Press or Hungry Tiger Press or the Royal Publisher of Oz.

In this one, Toto loses his growl again (the previous occasion being a somewhat underexplained subplot in Lost Princess) and sets out on a quest to find it again, alone, being too proud to tell everyone else what's wrong. Meanwhile, in the Scotlandesque country of Kiltoon, King Firth the Fourth's bride-to-be vanishes on their wedding day, causing the royal poet to venture forth on a quest... though not to find princess, but to kidnap Toto and bring back to Kiltoon to cheer up the king, who loves dogs. Meanwhile meanwhile, an orphan boy named Davy is whisked away from Louisville, Kentucky on the day of the Derby along with a horse named Lollipop; when they arrive in Oz, they find out that some enchantment prevents Lollipop from speaking, unlike most animals in Oz, the solution to which can be found in Kiltoon.

Like Hidden Prince, it has a Ruth Plumly Thompson vibe, and like Hidden Prince, I found it a bit weak... though I did enjoy it more than Hidden Prince. Hidden Prince was overstuffed with returning and original characters, and though there are probably still a bit too many here, it's not as overwhelming as in Hidden Prince. Sonny probably doesn't need McTavish the hoot owl with him, though, a character we are often told is grumpy but rarely seems to do anything actually grumpy; Davy and Lollipop don't need to be joined by a pair of living condiments, but thankfully, Wickwar seems to realize that herself, because she packs them off pretty quickly (similar to moves made in other overcrowded Oz books, like Hidden Valley). To that subplot's benefit, Toto has just one other character, Gladstone the guinea pig (he's a pig who makes gold guineas, a joke totally lost on the children of 2025, or indeed I suspect, 2006).

Still, I think all three subplots would have benefited from more characterful moments, the kind of thing the McGraws were so good at in Merry Go Round. Davy and Lollipop would have benefited from stronger interaction; their emotional bond should have been a key part of the book, a thing Thompson was great at with her human/animal pairs, like Pompa and Kabumpo, Ojo and Snuffer, Speedy and Terrybubble, Tompy and Yankee, or even David and Humpty. It's trickier to do if the animal can't speak, but Baum managed to give Hank more of a personality in Tik-Tok of Oz before he could talk than Lollipop gets here. Similarly, I think Gladstone could have been put to better use; surely Toto's character arc ought to have been him overcoming his pride and learning to accept help, but it's strangely muted if that's what Wickwar was going for.

Still, though, I found this fun to read aloud. The Scottish kingdom of Kiltoon (like many of Thompson's vaguely European pocket kingdoms, in the Gilliken country) lends itself to a lot of enjoyable accents, though my Scottish is a bit hit-or-miss! Queen Finna (who turns out to be a sea fairy from Baum's The Sea Fairies) is a great villain, one my kid loved to hate, even if I found the parameters of her exile to Oz somewhat underexplained. There are also, somewhat unusually for an Oz book, a few scenes of physical peril that kept my kid on edge, such as attacks by various guards. And though few post-Thompson authors have been as good as her or Baum for coming up with interesting weird places to visit, Wickwar's rate is above average, with the Dog Pound and the Isle of Sandwich.

Like a lot of Thompson novels, though, the ending is a bit of a letdown, with Ozma and Dorothy using the Magic Belt to just appear in Kiltoon and sort everything out, though Wickwar does manage to give most of the main characters a nice moment of heroism or two. And unlike in Lost Princess, we actually do get an explanation of what happened to Toto's growl! And indeed, my kid was hooked to this idea of re-losing the growl.

So overall fairly enjoyable; I would read a third Oz book from Wickwar if it continues to upward trend, though at this point it feels somewhat unlikely.

Next up in sequence: The Rundelstone of Oz

Captain America / Black Panther: Flags of Our Fathers by Reginald Hudlin, Denys Cowan, Klaus Janson, et al.

Once again, I went into a Black Panther miniseries with low expectations, and once again, I was pleasantly surprised. Captain America / Black Panther is a "flashback" story set during World War II, showing how Captain America and the Howling Commandos came to Wakanda to stop the Nazis from stealing vibranium, meeting the then-current Black Panther. This was something we originally learned about in a brief flashback story during Christopher Priest's run, here expanded to four issues. Though I think in that story, the Black Panther was T'Challa's father T'Chaka, whereas here it's T'Challa's grandfather... whose real name I'm pretty sure we never actually get now that I think about it. The Marvel web site tells me his name is Azzuri, which sounds vaguely familiar, but I don't remember in which previous story we learned that.

from Captain America / Black Panther #2

Anyway, this might be branded as a Captain America / Black Panther story, but I actually felt like neither man was the protagonist. Black Panther, as my comments above indicate, is a largely mysterious presence here. More of a heroic ally than a hero, he doesn't make any big decisions or choices, just assists the the other characters in doing what needs to be done. Captain America's role is pretty straightforward heroism, punching Nazis, etc. I did wonder if there was space to do more with him confronting racism, but there are a couple nice touches there, as Black Panther asks him to imagine what race will look like in the country the Captain goes back to after the war.

No, the real protagonist is one of the Howling Commandos, Gabe Jones. Gabe is a black man in an otherwise white unit almost a decade before the American armed forces were integrated in real life. Gabe narrates the series, and finds his loyalties tested—does he owe his allegiance to the nation that discriminates against him because of his race, or to the country where people who look like him can live in utopia? Hudlin gives us a number of interesting sequences where he weighs up the ways different people react to him, from Steve Rogers to his fellow commandos to Black Panther to the Nazis. His decisions are the most significant ones of the story, and I really enjoyed what writer Reginald Hudlin did with him, giving a real heart and emotional core to what otherwise might have been a generic superhero punch-up.

from Captain America / Black Panther #1

Denys Cowan pencils; he's done a number of Black Panther stories, and I've enjoyed his work on them, especially the 1988 miniseries, as well as elsewhere in DC series like All-Star Comics and Convergence: Detective Comics. He does great here as well, with good character focus and decent action.

I thought this would probably be generic punch-up, and based on Hudlin's other writing (which tends to neither be hit nor miss, if that makes sense), I wasn't expecting much. But this is certainly the best Black Panther comic I've read from him, with solid superheroics and using the framework of black utopianism to tell a story with surprising depth.

Flags of Our Fathers originally appeared in issues #1-4 of Captain America / Blank Panther (June-Sept. 2010). The story was written by Reginald Hudlin; penciled by Denys Cowan; inked by Klaus Janson (#1-2), Tom Palmer (#3-4), and Sandu Florea (#4); colored by Pete Pantazis; lettered by Joe Sabino; and edited by Axel Alonso.

ACCESS AN INDEX OF ALL POSTS IN THIS SERIES HERE

Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, Nos. VIII–X (Chs. 23-31)

No. VIII (Chs. 23-25)
Sir Barnet and Lady Skettles, very good people, resided in a pretty villa at Fulham, on the banks of the Thames; which was one of the most desirable residences in the world when a rowing-match happened to be going past, but had its little inconveniences at other times, among which may be enumerated the occasional appearance of the river in the drawing-room, and the contemporaneous disappearance of the lawn and shrubbery. (375)

I feel like Dombey and Son is drifting a bit in this installment, languishing. It's not bad... but I'm also still not quite clear where the novel is going following from the death of Paul Dombey. In these chapters, we follow Florence mostly, with a bit also about Uncle Sol and Captain Cuttle. Probably this is all going somewhere... but where?

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1846-48
Acquired: December 2024
Installments read: January 2025

If the novel has a main point, though, it's clearly Florence's emotional deprivation. In this installment, Florence overhears the aunt of an orphan talking to her charge about Florence: "your misfortune is a lighter one than Florence’s; for not an orphan in the wide world can be so deserted as the child who is an outcast from a living parent’s love" (381). There are a lot of emotionally deprived orphans (or seeming orphans, e.g., Great Expectations) in Dickens, but (perhaps I'm forgetting something) I can't think of any nonorphans so deprived as Florence. How bad is it to have a parent who doesn't love you, doesn't even hate you, just doesn't think of you at all? All the stuff about Florence is sort of quietly devastating, and for me anyway, she's emerging as one of Dickens's best female characters. 

I'm not really sure where this is all going to go, but I continue to mostly enjoy the journey.

No. IX (chs. 26-28)
Am I hitting some kind of mid-book slump? Again, an installment I was mostly pretty "meh" on—except for the stuff about Florence, of course, who I continue to have great empathy for. I think the problem is when there's too much stuff about Dombey himself (and his social circle). But all that does lead somewhere in this one, which is... Dombey is getting remarried! What implications will this have for Florence, who doesn't even get to meet her new mother prior to the engagement? I would say it can't make her life worse, but there's over half the novel to go, so it probably will.

What is up with Mr Carker? I don't trust that guy. You might object to a key character only emerging halfway through a novel, but I guess that's serialization for you. Indeed, I like the way he's slowly emerging as a figure of significance. (Douglas Adams does something similar with a minor character in the Doctor Who serial The Pirate Planet.) ((I am willing to bet no one has ever compared these two texts before.))

No. X (chs. 29-31)
Say what you will about our man Charles Dickens, but he knows how to pace a serial. Dombey and Son consists of nineteen parts, but the last is double-length (a two-part finale), so the end of installment no. x is the exact midpoint of the novel. At the end of the first quarter, Paul Dombey died; at the end of the second quarter, Mr Dombey gets remarried.

But poor Florence! What is going to happen to her? Dombey's new in-laws are clearly up to something (I am a bit worried I should know what this is but that I glazed over it when I was bored in a previous installment, but I'm sure I'll figure it out), and Dombey's new wife clearly has regrets about it... but is willing to go forward with the plan anyway.

This installment basically totally revolves around the lead-up to the wedding. It has been a while, actually, since we have checked in on some of the side characters. Soon, I am guessing? But in the meantime, I continue to be very into the trajectory of Florence, surely one of Dickens's most put-upon female characters!

This is the third in a series of posts about Dombey and Son. The next covers installment no. xi and beyond. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Nos. I–IV (chs. 1-13)
2. Nos. V–VII (chs. 14-22)
   

Cover B: Will Brooks's Doctor Who Comics Covers

Will Brooks is a Doctor Who artist, known for his skilled photomanipulations; he's done some covers for Big Finish over the years, for example. His most prominent professional work, however, is probably doing the majority of the photo covers on Titan's Doctor Who comics output from 2015 to 2019. All of his work for Titan (covering Doctor Who, Torchwood, and Sherlock) is collected in this hardcover Kickstarter volume that I backed earlier this year, here without straplines or other trade dress. These were typically the "cover B" (as opposed to the artwork "cover A"), hence the volume's title. Along with the actual art, we get some behind-the-scenes commentary on design choices, licensor approvals, and so on.

Cover B: The Titan Comics Covers
by Will Brooks

Originally published: 2024
Acquired: July 2024
Read: December 2024

I'm not much of a reviewer of artwork, so I don't know that I will have a whole lot to say about this book, but I can tell you that I liked it. I don't think every cover works perfectly—sometimes you just don't believe two people are in the same scene, or that a person fits with the background—but Brooks has a strong sense of composition and a keen eye for striking imagery that many other Photoshop artists who make covers for tie-in fiction lack. Even in some of the weaker covers, you can tell a lot of work went into it. 

Some I would dearly love to own an art print of, such as his cover for Doctor Who: The Eighth Doctor #4, which recreates an iconic Paul McGann publicity photo for the 1996 tv movie, but with the Doctor in his "Night of the Doctor" outfit. He seems to particularly have a lot of good covers featuring Clara—see for example Twelfth Doctor: Year Two #2 and 3. Or maybe I'm just in love with Jenna Coleman! I don't think I can my review consist entirely of links to the Tardis wiki, but get a load of this picture of Matt Smith in a Time Lord collar and fez! Brilliant. I also like a lot of his "story tribute" covers, particularly the one for The Happiness Patrol on Seventh Doctor #3.

He talks a bit about something I complained about when reading and reviewing Titan's Tenth Doctor range, the inconsistent appearance of his companions Gabbie and Cindy on the covers. Before him the photo artists had never used the same stock photo model twice, but he selected models for all the Titan comics companions so he could be consistent. I do wish they had looked more how I imagined them from the interior art, but I think he did the best job he could within the constraints he was operating under. (See them on, for example, the cover of Tenth Doctor: Year Three #14.) I did particularly like the inclusion here of the drafts of the written-but-never-published story about how Gabbie travelled with the twelfth Doctor.

Outside of Doctor Who, I think the cover to Sherlock: The Blind Banker #2 is brilliant. (Also, was there really a Torchwood comic featuring the Vervoids? Not sure I can bring myself to believe it, even with the cover in front of me!)

Anyway, if you like Doctor Who art, this is a good "coffee table" book, one I'm happy I jumped on when it became available for a limited second run on Kickstarter.

Beyond A Christmas Story: Watching the "Parker Family Saga"

Though it's a Christmas staple for many, A Christmas Story (1983) isn't a movie I grew up with. I think if you're from Cleveland, it's mandatory viewing because it was filmed there, but I of course am from Cincinnati. I am pretty sure I never saw it until after I began dating Hayley. Early in our relationship (winter break 2007/08, I think), we took a tour of "emerging Cleveland," and one of the places the tour went was Tremont, where the Christmas Story house resides; now it's a museum devoted to the movie, but that was still in development then. Many houses in the neighborhood, though, had the famous "leg lamp" in the window, and from that, I believe, Hayley realized I'd never seen it. I don't know if we watched it right then, but if not, I'm sure it was soon thereafter.

Famously, the movie is run in a twenty-four-hour marathon on cable on Christmas Eve; Hayley's stepmother always tunes into this, so whenever we'd stay with her dad's family over Christmas, I'd catch at least pieces of it.

The movie is adapted from the semiautobiographical stories of Jean Shepherd (1921-99); what many people don't know, I think, is that before A Christmas Story, his memoirs formed the basis of two tv movies aired on PBS. After A Christmas Story, there were two more PBS tv movies in the late '80s, plus the (long-term) success of A Christmas Story itself resulted in a number of follow-ups: a second theatrical movie (1994), a direct-to-DVD sequel (2012), and an HBO Max original (2022). There's very few overlapping cast members between all these movies, aside from a couple of the PBS ones; Peter Billingsley, who plays Ralphie in A Christmas Story, for example, doesn't pop up again until the 2022 movie. The one constant is writer Jean Shepherd himself, who narrates as the adult Ralphie in all the movies that were produced during his lifetime.

I don't know when I learned this fact; it's perfectly possible to watch A Christmas Story ignorant of it. Now the lede of the A Christmas Story article on Wikipedia notes it's part of the "Parker Family Saga," but the article on the "saga" was only added in 2020, so it probably wasn't so prominently noted back then. In our lore-obsessed era, people even wonder if it's possible to watch A Christmas Story without seeing the "first" two movies... even though those movies are set later, and made by an entirely different group of people!

What is a bit surprising is that you can find a lot of people who note that A Christmas Story is part of an overall "series"... but seemingly no one who has actually watched their way through all its constituent movies! But if you read my blog, you know I love excuses for complicated marathons (I am, after all, the person who nonsensically watched (most of) the James Bond movies in book publication order), and this Christmas when watching the marathon at Hayley's aunt's house during the family Christmas party, I was reading about the "Parker Family Saga" on Wikipedia on my phone, and I discovered that there's actually a DVD set you can get from Amazon (out of stock now). So I took advantage of an Amazon gift card I had got in my stocking, and placed an order.

(I should say I have some doubts about the provenance of this set... but hey, it sure is convenient, and there's no other way to get the PBS ones on home media as far as I know.)

My plan: to watch the movies in internal chronological order and blog my way through them over the next couple months. (This means I will somewhat unseasonably end up watching A Christmas Story Christmas in March, but given others of the movies take place on the Fourth of July and Thanksgiving, there's not really a way to marathon them that doesn't include some amount of unseasonability.)

---

Hayley and I began this process this past weekend with the first movie chronologically: A Christmas Story itself. Released in 1983 (so third in production order), the movie is set in (approximately) 1940, when Ralphie is nine years old. As I said, I've seen it once all the way through before, and many times in bits and pieces during the cable marathon. 

I don't have much to say about it, to be honest, except that I really enjoy it. I'm sure there are people who don't like this movie, but it seems to me that if you're sympathetic to what the movie is trying to do, you must like it, because it's one of those stories that is so completely itself. Is it "great art"? I don't know, but it does accomplish exactly what it sets out to do perfectly. If you want a set of anecdotes about childhood that are nostalgic without being saccharine, that capture the perspective of a child but with the knowledge of adulthood, I don't know that you could do better. I've always liked the parents, and this my first time really watching the movie since becoming one myself, and the moments of parenthood ring true, both the dad's eternal exasperation and the mother's alternation between punishment and support.

That the movie succeeds as well as it does is surely a testament to the casting. It would be possible to look at the smarmy picture of Ralphie's grinning face on the merchandise and dismiss Peter Billingsley, but he's actually a pretty gifted comic performer, doing a lot with his face. Ian Petrella as his little brother Randy is hilarious. The standouts for me, though, are the parents, Darren McGavin and Melinda Dillon, who I think just embody their characters. Were they really 1940s parents? No they were not, but I believe it when I watch the movie. McGavin gets lots of great bits throughout, but I think it would be easy to overlook the skill of Dillon, who also gets a lot of nice moments, particularly the hilarious bit with the soap.

The movie is set in northern Indiana, and mostly filmed in Toronto, but the house exteriors and department store scenes were filmed in Cleveland. The department store, Higbee's, was a real place... but in Cleveland. Despite this, it appears as itself in the film, apparently as part of the deal to allow filming. Higbee's was an eleven-story behemoth; my wife's mother likes to talk about her Christmas trips to Higbee's, and it sounds like a magical place. Alas, it became a Dillard's in 1992, and now the building is a casino.

Having established the foundation of the "Parker Family Saga" movie that everyone knows and likes, I am curious to see where things go from here!

This is the first in a series of posts about the "Parker Family Saga." The next installment covers My Summer Story.

Star Trek: The Destiny Era: Section 31: Control

2140-64 / late 2386
Section 31 has, of course, been a controversial addition to the Star Trek universe since its debut in Deep Space Nine's "Inquisition." At the time, I was all in on it; as a teenager, it appealed to my cynical view of the world. Of course, it seemed to me (it's very easy to be cynical when you're young) the Federation had to be as bad as all the other interstellar polities. That's how the world works.

My opinion has been changed by twenty years of further thinking, and twenty years of further exposure to the Section 31 concept. I do really like "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges," a Section 31 episode that does what Deep Space Nine did at its best, push our characters into interesting ethical situations that tested Federation morality. And though I find some aspects of DS9's "The Final Chapter" pretty badly done, I do like that in the end, the Federation triumphs because of how hard people like Bashir work to stop Section 31's attempt to genocide the Founders. Attempts to do the right thing in trying circumstances are ultimately what win the day. But I didn't care for the depiction of Section 31 on Discovery, and overall I haven't cared for its depiction in the novels outside of the original Section 31 tetralogy. The idea that Section 31 has some kind of widespread sanction within the Federation hierarchy, or that is somehow actually necessary to the survival of the Federation, is just a non-starter for me. Fundamentally, the appeal of Star Trek—to me anyway—is that working together to do the right thing eventually pays off even when it is difficult. (As I am forever telling my children, "If it was easy, it wouldn't be worth doing.")

Star Trek: Section 31: Control
by David Mack

Published: 2017
Acquired: September 2024
Read: December 2024

All of this is to set up the fact that there is pretty much no way I could ever like Control. I find the premise of the book fundamentally misguided and misjudged, un-Star Trekky in its utter essence. This is what we learn here: according to Control, back in the 2140s, an Earth computer programmer came up with an artificial intelligence called Uraei that could monitor all communications and data and use it to head off threats before they could begin. As time goes on, Uraei gives itself more and more power, eventually establishing "Section 31" within Starfleet to act on its behalf. As Earth becomes integrated into the Federation, Uraei begins acting on behalf of the whole Federation.

I have a couple big issues with the idea of Uraei. The first is that, as much as Section 31 stories in the past had the organization claiming the Federation owed its continued survival to Section 31, you didn't have to believe it, because your only source for that claim was Section 31, and as we saw throughout Section 31 stories, much of the time they actually ended up causing more problems than they solved. But Control makes it very clear that there would be no Federation without Uraei, there would be no Federation without continued extrajudicial executions and murders! Like, what the fuck? This is not what I want to read in a Star Trek book, it goes fundamentally against the entire ideal and appeal of the series premise.

Indeed, many of the "good" things our heroes have done over the years turn out to just be the manipulations of Uraei in action. Oh, you think Captain Kirk did a great thing by putting aside his prejudices and bringing about peace with the Klingons? Well, it was really all part of Uraei's masterplan. If you believe Control, the utopian aspirationalism that gives Star Trek its appeal is utterly impossible and can never happen. Sorry, suckers.

People complain about the "grimdark" nature of Picard and other shows of the Paramount+ era, but this goes further than any of them. Go write some other science fiction story about a utopia that owes its existence to facist violence, sure. I love me some Omelas. But as a Star Trek idea, it just sucks, I'm sorry, and should never have been approved by the licensor.

My other issue is that Uraei is so powerful that entire idea of Section 31 honestly doesn't even make any sense. Based on the things we see it manipulate people into doing, why does it need this group of people to work on its behalf in an actual organization complete with cheesy black leather uniforms? What does it gain from them, other than people who can go rogue? Why would Uraei let cockamimie plots like the Founder genocide or Cole's in Abyss go forward? The book itself flags this up in chapter 40, when we learn that Uraei itself has occasionally gotten rid of Section 31 when it became a liability, but Uraei is depicted as so powerful, I don't really get how Section 31 could become a liability to it in the first place. Indeed, it doesn't really make sense that Bashir could even defeat Uraei...

...and again, the book flags this up at the end, where we learn that all the events of the book are part of its masterplan, and now its more powerful than ever! Well, great, I do love reading Star Trek books because I like reading books about how the security state can never be stopped and all human action in pursuit of a more noble future is futile, thanks.

Other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how was the book? Well, as for the actual characters and story, putting aside all of the above (and it's pretty much impossible to do, because without all of the above, you don't have a book), I didn't find much to enjoy here. I'm coming to think that most characters in David Mack's Star Trek books are pretty much the same, I find them to be selfish and kind of petty. It's how Bashir is written here; I don't see the conflicted, passionate, optimistic man I loved on Deep Space Nine. It's how Data was written in Cold Equations, it's how Sarai was written in Fortune of War. It's how all the "bad guys" in this book and his other books like Fortune of War are written too. One of the things that really defines Bashir on screen are his friendships: with O'Brien, with Dax, with Garak. Unfortunately, the Bashir plot in the Destiny-era novels has largely kept him away from all them, making him not feel very Bashirlike, and I have never bought into the Sarina relationship that provides the core of these books. It's probably not a coincidence that the one time Bashir did feel right to me here was when he goes to Cardassia Prime and briefly hangs out with Garak.

It's all very one note; really the only thing that distinguishes the "good guys" from the "bad guys" are what side they're on. There's little sense that anyone here is trying to do the right thing in trying circumstances; even if that's technically what's happening, you don't feel it the way you do in, say, an Una McCormack novel. There's probably an interesting book to be written about Bashir grappling with the decision of undoing Uraei, but it's a weirdly small component of the book. (Also, the characters are like, "If we undo Uraei, the Federation will collapse!"... yet when they do it, and the Federation doesn't collapse, they don't seem to notice.)

The problem is, there's a core of a good idea here, but I think the book blunders into a pretty common mistake. There's often a fundamental misconception about AI. The danger of AI isn't that it will do things we don't want it to do. The danger of AI is that it will do exactly what we tell it to do. There's a group of people who like to worry about AI now who have this idea of the paperclip maximizer—you tell an AI to make paperclips as efficiently as possible, and soon its destroying humanity in its effort to produce paperclips. What many of the people who worry about AI in this way fail to notice is that paperclip maximizers aren't some futuristic danger, they're a current one. Humanity doesn't need AI to come up with systems that ruthlessly pursue a goal... these are what corporations are! The past couple weeks' discourse around UnitedHealthcare should make that patently obvious; insurance companies are paperclip maximizers, pursuing shareholder profit at the expense of everything else. Putting an AI in charge of insurance decisions would be a problem not because the AI would go rogue and start pursuing profit over people, but because the AI would do exactly what it was told to do and start pursuing profit over people.

I bring this up because I think Control doesn't really grapple with the human complicity in the development of Uraei. A group of humans designed and implemented Uraei, but weirdly, I don't think we ever get the sense of why they did this, why they thought it would be a good idea. The question of Control seems to be, "What would happen if an AI went too far in sacrificing due process and civil liberties for security?" but the question of Control ought to have been, "Why would human beings think sacrificing due process and civil liberties for security was a good idea?" But I don't think the book grapples with this question in an interesting way, in either its twenty-second- or twenty-fourth-century plotlines. Particularly with the inclusion of the more ruthless post-resurrection Data, it seems there was room for an interesting exploration of AI and the security state, but Data seems to be here largely because, 1) Mack had written about the character before in the Cold Equations trilogy, and he likes sewing together threads from across his Star Trek oeuvre, and 2) Bashir needs a very powerful ally outside the Federation to make this plotline work, and where we left Data after The Cold Equations and The Light Fantastic is convenient for that.

I also think the idea of Uraei sort of misses the point of what the security state is actually about, which is not really about protecting people, but about propagating its own power. Uraei seems to actually believe in its own mission, and actually do things that benefit the Federation. But I don't think the real organizations and real people that Section 31 and Uraei are a science fictionalized take on really have such goals, and thus any kind of a critique falls flat.

I should be clear that I don't think this book was intended to be an endorsement of the security state... but if it's meant to be a critique, it's a pretty poor one. This thing is utterly terrible... but you can't have utopia without it! Yes, everything Uraei did is depicted as reprehensible, but the novel doesn't offer much of a counterargument to its claims. It has been suggested to me that we're not supposed to take Uraei at face value, but if so, there's little textual evidence to support this. If the author meant the reader to take the book a different way than I have, they have done a poor job in conveying their message.

Using Section 31 in Star Trek to criticize the security state: good, great idea. Using Section 31 in Star Trek to say, well, the security state is a necessary evil and utopia is utterly impossible: what the actual fuck, to be honest, and those are words I don't use lightly. Thank god Picard obliterated this whole timeline.

Continuity Notes:

• Chapter thirteen gives us a little potted history of United Earth, which brings into aligment the various contradictory statements about the timing of this from sources like First Contact ("Poverty, disease, war. They'll all be gone within the next fifty years.") and "Attached" ("What if one of the old nation states, say Australia, had decided not to join the world government in 2150?")
• I think this is the first-ever "novelverse" reference to the book Memory Prime, an old favorite of mine, though I don't think the depiction of Memory Prime here has anything in common with how it was shown in the original book.
• There is a very small reference to Star Trek Beyond, as we learn Uraei had someone transferred to that film's NX-326 Franklin in 2164, the same year it disappeared.

though those of us in Spinal Consistency Club didn't like how the horizontal stripe was handled in the original run, either

Other Notes:

• Those of us in the Spinal Consistency Club are grumpy about the lack of effort in matching the original 2001 tetralogy. But those of us in Font Club do appreciate the maintenance of Parsi (I think) in the logo, even if it's got some fancy embossing here.
• L'Haan disses another character by comparing them to an Orion socialator. Aside from this feeling like a very un-twenty-fourth-century move (so much for sex positivity, remember what I said about all the characters being petty), "socialator" was the sci-fi term for prostitute on the original Battlestar Galactica.
• My copy is an eighth printing; in all those reprints, apparently no one has ever caught that it should be "burying the lede," not "lead."
• I did not buy at all the idea that you would for some reason take an award-winning investigative journalist and turn her into a "Features" editor, nor do I believe that in the Federation the practice of noncomplete clauses would still be allowed.
• One thing that did ring true: Ikerson's graduate student who's in it all for the free food.

I read Destiny-era Star Trek books in batches of five every few months. Next up in sequence: The Next Generation: Hearts and Minds by Dayton Ward

Charles Dickens's Dombey and Son, No. V–VII (Chs. 14-22)

No. V (Chs. 14-16)
This deviates from the structure of the last couple installments. Instead of going Paul→Paul→someone else (probably Walter), here we get Paul→someone else (indeed, Walter)→Paul. In the first chapter, Paul and Florence attend an end-of-term party for the students at Paul's school, but Paul suffers an attack of illness. The whole chapter has a kind of dreamlike quality, and though the installment came out in February, and the party actually precedes summer break, it actually felt very appropriate to read it in December; tonally, it felt very appropriate for Christmas, with its nostalgic, wistful tone.

Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1846-48
Acquired: December 2024
Installments read: December 2024–January 2025

There's also some good jokes about an eternal Dickens bugaboo, the oversystematization of that which should not be systematized. In this case, there's a funny bit about how the teachers at Paul's school rate him at 6¾ on a scale of one to eight for "natural capacity" and "general disposition to study"... though only at a four for "gentlemanly demeanour" (208). Paul, however, is "undecided whether six three-fourths, meant six pounds fifteen, or sixpence three farthings, or six foot three, or three quarters past six, or six somethings that he hadn’t learnt yet, with three unknown something elses over"!

Incidentally, when sick, Paul perceives things around them changing size and position; it seemed to me that this could be (based on my limited understanding) an example of a malady named after a different Victorian novel, Alice in Wonderland syndrome, but in some quick Googling, anyway, I didn't find anyone else making that connection to Dombey and Son. Maybe I don't understand AIWS, or maybe I misread the novel? For example, it's noted that "Mr Toots’s head had the appearance of being at once bigger and farther off than was quite natural" (213). It's very vivid, though, making me wonder if Dickens himself suffered from it at some point.

The Walter bit goes on a bit too long, like all the other ones, but we do see that Walter is beginning to invest himself emotionally in Florence. Florence, incidentally, is probably the Dickens girlest Dickens girl who ever Dickens girled, being a beautiful naïve slip of a girl who the men adore. The statement that she was "something precious, unattainable, unchangeable, and indefinite – indefinite in all but its power of giving him pleasure, and restraining him like an angel’s hand from anything unworthy" (243) could sum up so many of Dickens's female characters.

The big spoiler for this section—which I did not know going in, so avert your eyes if you want that to be true of you as well—is that the "Son" of Dombey and Son is no more following this section. That's right, Paul dies one-quarter of the way into the novel of which he is one-half of the title!

I did not see this turn of events, partially for that reason, and partially because it seemed like we were in for a very typical Dickens formula: the bildungsroman about a boy with an emotionally deprived childhood, e.g., Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), David Copperfield (1849-50), Great Expectations (1860-61). I would say it's clever of Dickens to subvert your expectations that way... except that two of those examples postdate this novel, so it wasn't a formula yet! But anyway, it's a very effective piece of writing either way, Dickens at his sentimental best. He would bring himself to tears reading the chapter aloud at public performances, apparently; I would have loved to see and hear such a thing.

No. VI (Chs. 17-19)
'Wal'r,' said the Captain, handing it [the watch] over, and shaking him heartily by the hand, 'a parting gift, my lad. Put it back half an hour every morning, and about another quarter towards the afternoon, and it’s a watch that’ll do you credit.' (300)

The first and third chapters here are about Captain Cuttle and Walter respectively, and they're fine for what they are. (Is Captain Cuttle the character my friend said I'd like?) But the clear standout here is the middle chapter, "Father and Daughter," about how Florence is mourning the death of her brother Paul and how her father just doesn't care for her or her feelings in any way, shape, or form.

I occasionally have remarked that I want to have more access to Florence's interiority, but I think I'm just projecting my twenty-first-century expectations onto this novel. Dickens wasn't a realist, like those Victorian writers that came after him, such as George Eliot or Elizabeth Gaskell, his project wasn't to reveal character by taking you into someone's head. Dickens reveals character through dialogue and action. In the realist novel, you have this artifice, that the narrator somehow knows what Hetty Sorell or Molly Gibson were thinking. Dickens projects no such artifice—well, he projects a different one. His narrators never claim to know what someone is thinking, only what someone is saying and doing. Imagine someone else telling you the story of Florence Dombey because it was real; they wouldn't give you her thoughts via free indirect discourse or something because they don't know them. But what they could tell was what she did, how she looked out at the happy family across the street every day, and that would be enough to let you know how she felt, because that's how humans always figure out how each other feel. You need to imagine a Dickens novel is being related to you by a friend who knows the story in detail.

So of course we don't have access to Florence's interiority, and you should stop hoping for it! Dickens does a great job of communicating what's going on inside her regardless, particularly in that devastating scene where Florence goes to see her father.

I don't think this is an absolute; clearly we do get a bit of Paul's interiority in his last couple chapters, as he's dying. But it's not a move Dickens makes a lot, and he only deploys it to make a particularly strong point. His next novel after Dombey and Son would be David Copperfield, which is (I believe) his first told in the first person, so we finally do get that dose of interiority... but the old-fashioned way. He would use it in just two other novels, both ones I rank among his best, Great Expectations and Bleak House (1852-53).

No. VII (Chs. 20-22)
'You are too great a man, Dombey, to be thoughtful. In your position, Sir, you’re far above that kind of thing.' (314)

This is probably the first installment of Dombey and Son that I found ho-hum. It had its moments, but none of the three chapters was a great one. In the first, Dombey hangs out with a new character, Major Joe Bagstock—he's who I've quoted above, and he is in general quite funny. In the second, Dombey and Bagstock go on a trip and bump into Mrs Richards, who reveals her eldest son (whose education Dombey sponsored) has gone bad. In the third, said son shows up at Dombey and Son looking for a job so he can straighten himself out, and doesn't get one directly, but Dombey's clerk gets him a placement with Walter's uncle, the instument-maker. (Walter himself is missing, his ship unheard of since its departure.)

It's all fine, and definitely there are some great bits, but it felt to me like things were being moved into position for the next phase of the story—whatever that may be.

This is the second in a series of posts about Dombey and Son. The next covers installment no. viii and beyond. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Nos. I–IV (chs. 1-13)
   

The Fourth Doctor Novelisations: The Genesis of the Daleks (1976) and The Pyramids of Mars (1976)

Back when I read my way through the first Doctor novelisations, I noted how the very idea of a "Doctor Who book" was emerging. Doctor Who in an exciting adventure with the Daleks (1964) was literally the only Doctor Who book in the universe when it came out; Doctor Who and the Zarbi (1965) was the second.

Doctor Who: The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two
by Terrance Dicks

Collection published: 2022
Novels originally published: 1976
Acquired and read: December 2024

But by the time the first two books collected in The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two were published, things were very different. Doctor Who and the Genesis of the Daleks and Doctor Who and the Pyramids of Mars were the fourth and fifth novelisations to feature the fourth Doctor—and the 23rd and 27th Target novelisations overall. By this time, there was no need of the novels to stand alone, to work for people who hadn't seen the television programme, or even the stories being novelised. The function of these books are very different to those earlier ones, part of a project to pump out the books to meet the demands of an enthusiastic child readership. And of course, no one was better at meeting that demand than former script editor Terrance Dicks.

When I read Dicks's Doctor Who and the Dalek Invasion of Earth (1977), I observed that the novel's unfortunate weak spot was the Daleks themselves:

I think probably the Daleks are a bit tricky to capture on the page, but I don't know that Dicks even really tries; [...] I don't think the book really sells you on their alien nature or their monstrousness. It seems to reckon (perhaps accurately) that you'll already know and care what a Dalek is because you've seen one on tv!

I felt the same way here, and I would extend that observation to Davros, the Daleks' creator. Maybe something about the Daleks doesn't capture Terrance Dicks's fancy (I haven't read any of his third Doctor Dalek novelisations yet), maybe he more broadly just can't vibe with a Terry Nation script, I don't know. But I felt like The Genesis of the Daleks had all of the to-ing and fro-ing of its tv counterpart, but little of the atmosphere or intensity. I know the inclusions in The Essential Terrance Dicks were determined by fan vote, but I kind of suspect fans were more voting on the quality of the original stories than that of the books in question per se. Of course, I can see how this book would be invaluable in 1976, when there was little chance you were going to see Genesis of the Daleks again, but while this book was of course an effortless glide to read, I found it had little to recommend the 2024 reader.

Pyramids of Mars, on the other hand, seemed to have lit up Terrance's imagination. This might be an unambitious novelisation of a story I've seen several times, but I found there were a lot of nice little touches here. While The Genesis of the Daleks seemed to go from dialogue sequence to dialogue sequence, faithfully recapitulating the script, The Pyramids of Mars has an original prologue about the Osirans, an original epilogue about Sarah Jane after her travels with the Doctor, and a number of long bits of dialogue-less prose that set the scene atmospherically or provide backstory. I suspect, based on all the original Dicks novels I've read, that the historical setting did more for him than the science fictional one of Genesis. This is pretty straightforward stuff (though Dicks carefully removes all references to "1980"), but it works on its own to a degree that Genesis did not. My current litmus test is to imagine my six-year-old reading these (I haven't actually tried to foist one on them yet, though), and I felt like I could imagine them getting a complete novelistic experience out of Pyramids that I don't think they would Genesis. 

I think it also helps that this is the first of the books I've read in this sequence where Tom Baker comes through. Doctor Who and the Loch Ness Monster (1976) was too early for Dicks to have a sense of how Baker plays it, and Nation always writes a pretty generic Doctor, but here Dicks captures the moody, capricious nature of Tom Baker on the page pretty effectively. I look forward to seeing how this is handled in future novelisations.

The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two, by the way, has a foreword by Robert Webb of Mitchell and Webb fame, and it's a good one. "If I told you that Terrance Dicks taught me to read, I would be exaggerating. But not much."

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Doctor Who and the Ark in Space

Doctor Who Magazine Graphic Novel Reading Order (From Stockbridge to Beyond Segonus: A Doctor Who Magazine Comics Marathon, Part 57)

From the inside, the reading order for the Doctor Who Magazine graphic novels seems pretty clear... but there are quite a lot of the things, and the release order of the collected editions is nothing like the release order of the original strips, so I imagine it can seem pretty intimidating to an outside reader. So to cap off my ongoing series of posts about the DWM comic strip (for now, anyway), I've written up a reading order for the collections.

Basically, the short answer is to do the volumes in the release order of the original strips. For example, the back-up tales go best by original publication, because characters from them eventually cross over into the main strip, so it's nice if you already know them. The past Doctor volumes best go by publication order, because they usually reflect what's going on around that time in publication order; most notably, the stories in Ground Zero lead straight into End Game.

In most cases, I would just read the strips in the order they are reproduced in the books, but in a couple cases, I've suggested a different order in my notes.

I've given issue numbers, but in a simplified form; if a single issue is being skipped, or put in a different volume, I'm not being pedantic about its positioning.

1. 
   Fourth Doctor: The Iron Legion^a (#1-38)
   
2. Back-Up Tales: The Return of the Daleks^b (#1-46) 
3. Fourth Doctor: Dragon's Claw^a (#39-60)
4. Back-Up Tales: Black Sun Rising^b (#31-64)
5. Fifth Doctor: The Tides of Time (#61-87)
   
6. Sixth Doctor: Voyager (#88-107)
   
7. Sixth Doctor: The World Shapers (#108-29)
   
8. Seventh Doctor: A Cold Day in Hell! (#130-50)
   
9. Seventh Doctor: Nemesis of the Daleks (#152-62)
   
10. 
    Seventh Doctor: The Good Soldier (#164-79)
    
11. Seventh Doctor: Evening's Empire (#180-92)
    
12. Seventh Doctor: Emperor of the Daleks (#193-211)
    
13. Multi-Doctor: The Age of Chaos^c (#305)
• "Under Pressure"
• "Metamorphosis"
• "The Last Word"
• "The Age of Chaos"
14. 
    Multi-Doctor: Land of the Blind (#212-26)
    
15. Multi-Doctor: Ground Zero (#228-43)
    
16. Eighth Doctor: End Game^d (#244-71) 
17. Eighth Doctor: The Glorious Dead^d (#273-99)
18. Eighth Doctor: Oblivion (#300-28)
    
19. Eighth Doctor: The Flood (#329-53)
    
20. Ninth Doctor: The Cruel Sea (#355-64)
    
21. Tenth Doctor: The Betrothal of Sontar (#365-80)
    
22. Tenth Doctor: The Widow's Curse (#381-99)
    
23. Tenth Doctor: The Crimson Hand (#400-20)
    
24. 
    Eleventh Doctor: The Child of Time (#421-41)
    
25. Eleventh Doctor: The Chains of Olympus (#442-50)
    
26. Eleventh Doctor: Hunters of the Burning Stone (#451-61)
27. Eleventh Doctor: The Blood of Azrael (#462-74)
    
28. Twelfth Doctor: The Eye of Torment (#475-88)
29. Twelfth Doctor: The Highgate Horror (#489-500)
    
30. Twelfth Doctor: Doorway to Hell (#501-11)
    
31. Twelfth Doctor: The Phantom Piper (#512-23)
    
32. Multi-Doctor: The Clockwise War^e (#524-30) 
33. Thirteenth Doctor: Mistress of Chaos (#531-48)
    
34. 
    Thirteenth Doctor: The White Dragon (#549-77)
    
35. Multi-Doctor: Monstrous Beauty^f (#579-83)
36. Fourteenth Doctor: Liberation of the Daleks (#584-97)
    

Notes

1. The contents of these two volumes were later collected in one as The Fourth Doctor Anthology.
   
2. 
   I suggest reading each collection of back-up tales immediately after the main strip volume its contents were (largely) published simultaneously to. In particular, this maintains chronology for the character of Ivan Asimoff, who appears in Dragon's Claw, Black Sun Rising, and Voyager.
3. Reading the volume here and in my suggested order means you start with three Virgin New Adventure–era stories (tying up that phase of the strip) and end with a "past Doctor" one (setting up the next era of the strip).
4. Note that the strips in this collection are arranged out of order, but best read in original publication order; just pay attention to the original publication details.
5. This volume is the finale to the twelfth Doctor strips, but is branded as "multi-Doctor" because it contains some unreprinted past Doctor material to get the volume up to full length. You can read that material here if you want, but if you wanted to experience it closer to original publication sequence, that would be between Land of the Blind and Ground Zero.
6. 
   This volume is the finale to the thirteenth Doctor strips, but is branded as "multi-Doctor" because it contains some unreprinted past Doctor material to get the volume up to full length. You can read that material here if you want, but if you wanted to experience it closer to original publication sequence, that would be between Land of the Blind and Ground Zero, except for Monstrous Beauty, which would best go before The White Dragon.

Jumping-On Points

Obviously you can always start at the beginning with The Iron Legion! But there are other good places to kick off. I think mostly any Doctor's first volume is a safe enough bet. In particular, though, I would suggest:

• End Game. For a modern reader, the eighth Doctor stuff may read better than the fourth and fifth Doctor material, despite its classic status. It has a more of a character focus, and is better, I think, at using continuity with light callbacks that enhance your reading pleasure, as we are used to from, say, Buffy or the 2005-22 series. If you find yourself intrigued, you can jump back and read books like The Tides of Time to discover the stories this era is drawing on.
• 
  The Betrothal of Sontar. If you are a new series person, you may find it easier to jump on board with a new series Doctor. In that case, I would suggest skipping The Cruel Sea (for now), as I don't think the strip really got to grips with the new series style until David Tennant came on as the Doctor. The Betrothal of Sontar, The Widow's Curse, and The Crimson Hand are three strong volumes showing off the diversity of the DWM strip at its best, and you can continue on from there. Eventually, the strip will slowly drop in older continuity that you can eventually loop back to and explore. Similarly, I think The Chains of Olympus, Doorway to Hell, and Mistress of Chaos are all good points to begin for their respective Doctors.

Should I Work in Other Stuff?

If you look at my own sequence below, you'll see I worked in a lot of other stuff from outside the Doctor Who universe. In general, I would say, "No," you don't need any of this stuff to enjoy the DWM strip, especially if it's your first time through it. Make things easy on yourself, and just do the Doctor Who parts. Some specific notes on stuff I added in:

• 
  The Transformers UK. I read this because the character of Death's Head begins in The Transformers and appears in DWM strips collected in A Cold Day in Hell! and The Good Soldier. Those strips will work on their own if you haven't read Transformers, because the Doctor doesn't know who Death's Head is either. It's quite a commitment to read The Transformers UK, partially because the UK TF strip incorporated the American comic, so you would "need" to work that in too!... and you would thus actually be reading more Transformers than Doctor Who, I think.
• Death's Head. Marvel has collected (most) of the original Death's Head series in a volume called Freelance Peacekeeping Agent; there's also a modern series collected as Clone Drive. If Death's Head's appearance in the DWM strip leaves you curious, sure go ahead and read this stuff... but I doubt it will, since DWM is not Death's Head at his best. Technically speaking, the first seven issues of Death's Head volume 1 do take place in the Doctor Who universe. Everything else takes place in the Marvel universe. If you are very much a completist, the one I would recommend tracking down is "Time Bomb!" from Death's Head vol. 1 #8, reprinted in The Incomplete Death's Head #9 (but not in any trades, alas), as it features key roles for the seventh Doctor and Josiah W. Dogbolter, and is written by DWM's Steve Parkhouse.
  
• 
  The Daleks. The 1965-67 Doctor-less comic strips from TV Century 21 are fun enough and collected in a convenient Panini "bookazine"; you can read them pretty much whenever, but in particular, you may benefit from doing them prior to Liberation of the Daleks, which uses some of their iconography to good effect.
• The Sleeze Brothers. Against all my expectations, I did find this kind of charming. These characters debuted in a story collected in A Cold Day in Hell! before getting their own series. Definitely nonessential but fun enough.
• 
  The Ultimate Comic Strip Collections. Panini have collected all their Dalek strips in two volumes and all their Cybermen strips in a single large volume. For the most part, these volumes contain nothing you can't get from the collections I've listed above if you include the back-ups... except that volume 2 of the Dalek collection includes a single eight-page story about the Peter Cushing Doctor from the DWM 1996 spring special, Daleks versus the Martians, collected nowhere else. It seems a shame Panini couldn't have included this alongside their other Cushing story in Monstrous Beauty; it's probably not worth chasing down, though.
  

This post is the fifty-seventh in a series about the Doctor Who Magazine comic strip and Marvel UK. The next installment is currently unknown. Previous installments are listed below:

Reading Roundup Wrapup: December 2024

Pick of the month: When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead. This was a kind of random pick from my wife's shelf, but I ended up really liking it, a charming YA book that is the clear best of a somewhat shallow month, reading-wise. More later.

All books read:

1. Star Trek: Section 31: Control by David Mack
2. The Hidden Prince of Oz by Gina Wickwar, illustrated by Anna-Maria Cool
3. Cover B: The Titan Comics Covers by Will Brooks
4. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Hearts and Minds by Dayton Ward
5. Doctor Who and the Ark in Space by Ian Marter
6. When You Reach Me by Rebecca Stead
7. Doctor Who: The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two by Terrance Dicks
8. Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson

I've actually done some solid reading this month, but it's not reflected in the raw numbers; The Essential Terrance Dicks is an omnibus of five novels, and I've made a lot of progress through two large books I haven't finished yet (see below).

All books acquired:

1. DC Finest: Justice Society of America: For America and Democracy by by Gardner Fox, E. E. Hibbard, Sheldon Moldoff, et al.
2. Doctor Who: The Essential Terrance Dicks, Volume Two by Terrance Dicks
3. Star Trek: The Next Generation: Hearts and Minds by Dayton Ward
4. Gnomon by Nick Harkaway
5. Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
6. Doctor Who: The Church on Ruby Road by Esmie Jikiemi-Pearson
7. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson
8. DC Comics Classics: The Legion of Super-Heroes: The Life and Death of Ferro Lad by Jim Shooter, Curt Swan, and George Klein
9. Star Trek: Lower Decks: Warp Your Own Way by Ryan North and Chris Fenoglio
10. Loki Modern Era Epic Collection, Vol. 1: Journey into Mystery by Kieron Gillen, Robert Rodi, Jamie McKelvie, Doug Braithwaite, Pasqual Ferry, Richard Elson, Whilce Portacio, Mitch Breitweiser, et al.
11. Loki Modern Era Epic Collection, Vol. 2: Everything Burns by Kieron Gillen, Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, Matt Fraction, Carmine Di Giandomenico, Richard Elson, Alan Davis, Stephanie Hans, Joe Bennett, et al.
12. The Visitors from Oz by L. Frank Baum
13. All Wound Up: The Making of The Tik-Tok Man of Oz by Eric Shanower
14. Sleepless in Cincinnati: A Romance Anthology by Sarah Wilson Gregory, J. M. Clark, and the B2B Writing Group
15. Doctor Who and the Space War by Malcolm Hulke
16. The Pelican History of England: 1. Roman Britain by I. A. Richmond, revised by Malcolm Todd
    

Obvious Christmas always means a lot of books: #4 and 7 were gifts from SantaThing, #9-11 from my wife (and kids), and #12-14 from my sister. But even without that, it would have been a high-yield month, as I bought a lot of books for myself too!

Currently reading:

• Dombey and Son by Charles Dickens
• The Best Science Fiction of the Year, Volume 8 edited by Neil Clarke
• The Pelican History of England: 1. Roman Britain by I. A. Richmond, revised by Malcolm Todd

Up next in my rotations:

1. The Pelican History of England: 3. English Society in the Early Middle Ages (1066-1307) by Doris Mary Stenton
2. The End of the World: Classic Tales of Apocalyptic Science Fiction compiled by Michael Kelahan 
3. Victorians and the Prehistoric: Tracks to a Lost World by Michael Freeman
4. Star Trek: Coda, Book I: Moments Asunder by Dayton Ward
   

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 670 (up 8)