Harvey Pekar, Best of American Splendor (2005)

The title of this volume of American Splendor implies some kind of "best-of" volume to my mind, one that curates the best material from previously published volumes of Harvey Pekar's autobiographical comic. In fact, it's exactly the opposite; this volume seems intended to scoop up all American Splendor stories that had come out since 1991's The New American Splendor Anthology, but had not made their way into 2004's Our Movie Year. If anything in here had been reprinted in a volume I'd read before, I didn't recognize it. This means that the stories reprinted here cover quite a span of time, from 1991 (so before even 1994's Our Cancer Year, which is mentioned in some stories as something Harvey and his wife Joyce are working on) up to 2004, though they mostly seem to be concentrated in the mid- to late 1990s. If you're reading the American Splendor collected editions in publication order (as I mostly am) this has the odd effect that a lot of what's collected here precedes what was reprinted in the previous one, Our Movie Year, which covered 2000 to 2004; I don't think there's a single story in here where the American Splendor film is an actual done deal! In a lot of them, Harvey goes on about how he needs the money from a movie to make up the income he will lose when he retires from his job as a hospital file clerk.

The sequencing within the volume is also weird. In the beginning of the book, there are a couple stories where Harvey references his recent hip surgery; near the end, there are a bunch where he is dealing with his bum hip because he hasn't had the surgery yet. I don't understand why they weren't put into an order  that would read more clearly. There's even a point where there's three back-to-back stories set at San Diego Comic-Con and obviously the one that happens last is placed before the other two. Why?

(Maybe someday a publisher like Fantagraphics will do some kind of definitive reprinting in order? That would be nice, and I would buy it, since most of my American Splendor volumes were borrowed from the library.) 

Best of American Splendor

Collection published: 2005
Contents originally published: 1991-2004
Read: March 2026

Stories by Harvey Pekar [with Colin Warneford and Joyce Brabner*]
Art by Dean Haspiel, Josh Neufeld, Joe Sacco, Frank Stack, David Collier, Gerry Shamray, Sam Hurt, Joe Zabel, Gary Dumm, Colin Warneford, Paul Mavrides, Alex Wald, J. R. Stats, Jim Woodring, Carole Sobocinski, Spain [Rodriguez], Scott A. Gilbert

Anyway, how is the actual content?

I think the other reason the sequencing of the book didn't totally work for me is that it begins with some weaker material: stories that are short but not punchy, ones where Pekar recaps the life of someone who did jazz, retellings of things we already know from other Pekar books. At first, I started to worry that the reason some of this material had been uncollected so long was that it wasn't very good! 

The first story to really click for me was almost a hundred pages in, "TransAtlantic Comics" (illustrated by Frank Stack) where Harvey has a bad encounter in a parking lot that causes him to freak out, but then in the middle of his bad weekend he receives a package from England, containing the work of an autistic autobiographical cartoonist named Colin Warneford, whose comic is included in the narrative. You can definitely tell how Colin is influenced by Pekar and his artistic collaborators, but his story does a good job of illuminating his own worldview and is actually kind of moving. (It doesn't seem like Warneford has ever published any other work, alas.) Then we go back to Harvey's bad weekend.

I like that they changed the name of the book to American Splendour for this issue, though it did momentarily make me freak out that I'd been misspelling the name of the comic for years before I figured out what was going on.
from American Splendour: Transatlantic Comics (script & art by Colin Warneford)

After this, I felt the book picked up and became more consistent, nailing that telling of quotidian stories through the comics medium that Pekar is so good at. I liked "Veterans' Rights" (illustrated by Stack), which is all the kind of turf-war bullshit familiar to anyone who works in a large bureaucratic organization: different people squabbling over who will do what when. I also liked "Flight to Chicago" (art by Joe Zabel and Gary Dumm), about the tribulations of trying to fly from Cleveland to Chicago when you have a bad hip, and "Windfall Gained" (art by Stack), where Harvey gets in a minor traffic accident, but actually ends up coming out ahead financially when he finds a guy willing the do the work incredibly cheaply. Harvey is a guy with a lot of neuroses, and I appreciate how much he's willing to demonstrate these to the reader; "Candor" (art by Joe Sacco) is all about an incredibly overcomplicated freakout he has over thinking he lost something he didn't actually lose, which ultimately results in him locking himself out of the house at 6am for an hour in pouring down rain.

I love how this captures the anger of the crowd.
from American Splendor: Windfall #1 (script by Harvey Pekar, art by Joe Zabel & Gary Dumm)

from American Splendor: Windfall #1
(script by Harvey Pekar, art by Josh '95)

As I said earlier, there are a number of stories about Harvey's hip; "A Decision" (art by Josh Neufeld) caps that whole run off with a tale of how he finally makes the decision to get it replaced. It has a good moment of indignation that I found very funny. I also liked the sequel-of-sorts to "Windfall Gained," "Windfall Lost" (art by Stack), which has a funny bit where when Harvey shares his driver's license with someone he hit in an accident, the guy immediately goes, "You gonna write a story about this?" Again, this one really shows of Harvey's almost neurotic nature, plus his cheapness, to good effect.

All three Comic-Con stories are quite strong; two are a type of American Splendor story Pekar does from time to time, where he tells you someone else's story. In this case, it's about a guy who became a phone salesman... but was almost too good at it and began losing himself in it. (He quit to become a cartoonist, hence Harvey bumping into him at Comic-Con.) There's also a funny one where Harvey meets Matt Groening: "See, I noticed a list of yours in a magazine of the 100 greatest people, and I was only number ninety-six on it. You meet a few more people that impress ya, and I'll fall completely off it. So I was trying t'impress ya, to at least solidify my position, and maybe move a few notches up." He then threatens to take out Lynda Barry:

I'm guessing Lynda Barry ultimately won.
from American Splendor: Comic-Con Comics (script by Harvey Pekar, art by Scott A. Gilbert)

(A cameo I did not expect: Mike Richardson, who I know as the writer of Star Wars: Crimson Empire, but who was the publisher of Dark Horse, who published American Splendor in the 1990s and 2000s.) 

It would be easy to see Harvey as a crank, and that's often how he depicts himself, but one of my favorite stories here shows off his empathetic side. "Interviewing the Interviewer" (art by Stack) is about Pekar being interviewed by a reporter, but then he keeps calling her up because he wants to know how she's doing. It's simple but effective. There's even a story by Harvey's wife Joyce here, "Be Careful Not to Pull Too Hard on Loose Ends" (art by Neufeld), about the writing of Our Cancer Year, and Joyce's own neuroses about the possible return of the cancer. I liked this one a lot too.

I was into this lady's story enough that I actually googled her a bit to see if I could figure out what happened to her in the twenty-five years since this came out.
from American Splendor: Bedtime Stories (script by Harvey Pekar, art by Frank Stack)

It's been around three years since I read my previous American Splendor volume; hopefully it's less than three years before I get to my next one. I have only two to go! 

Next up in sequence: American Splendor: Another Day

* They are both credited on the individual stories they write but not the collection's title page. 

Reading The Speckled Rose of Oz Aloud to My Kids

"The Early Days of Oz" was a series of books from Books of Wonder back in the 1990s, all written and illustrated by Donald Abbott, chronicling, well, what it says in the title. There were six, two of them being prequels to The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, and the other four set in the gap between Wonderful Wizard and Marvelous Land, when the Scarecrow ruled the Emerald City. I assume this was all mostly because Abbott's illustrative style (at least in these books) is very imitative of W. W. Denslow. As a kid, I owned the two prequels, but just one of the interquels, The Speckled Rose of Oz. I am not motivated to pick up the other interquels (Magic Chest, Father Goose, and Amber Flute), but I was willing to read the one I already owned to my kids in the gap where it takes place.

The Speckled Rose of Oz
by Donald Abbott

Published: 1995
Acquired and previously read: late 1990s
Read aloud: April 2026

Rereading it, I feel validated in this decision because it is, quite frankly, awful. There are probably some ingredients here for a good Oz adventure, but the plot is terribly constructed. At its beginning, the Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, and the Cowardly Lion are judging a flower competition. (Abbott always calls the latter simply "Lion" because he's no longer "cowardly," which I guess makes sense, but is not really consistent with any of the following books.) One of the entrants is Sir Gyle, who turns out to be the brother of the Wicked Witches of East and West out for revenge, and who attempts to assassinate the Scarecrow wirh a fire-breathing flower. Then all the flowers of Oz begin to disappear, because of an evil living tree called Poison Oak. You might think these two things are linked... but no, it's a complete coincidence! The three friends of Dorothy travel to stop Poison Oak, secretly being harassed by Sir Gyle. On their way, they bump into Lady Minerva Moonstruck, the daughter of the Old Man in the Moon, who is searching for her missing husband. When they find Poison Oak, they defeat him quite easily, but then his pet spider turns out to be Lady Minerva's husband, who also wants to take over Oz... but don't worry, they don't need to do anything interesting or clever, because she turns up and recaptures her errant husband. The threesome then has to go back and defeat Sir Gyle.

None of it is interesting or clever. I did like the idea of Sir Gyle (I'm always down for peeks into the lore of the wicked witches), but reading it right after Wonderful Wizard, where this trio is clever, kind, and brave when they have to do things, the contrast here is stark, given they mostly bumble their way around and accomplish everything either by accident or with the assistance of Glinda. Abbott is a very sloppy plotter; there's a particularly bad bit where the Lion falls into a chasm, the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman go on without him, and the Lion catches up to them a bit later, and we learn that in the same amount of time they walked to Poison Oak's cottage, he landed in an underground river, was carried away by it for miles until it flowed to the surface, and then somehow tracked the other two to the cottage.

At least it's short, and at least the pictures are nice. My kids were, as always I suppose, entertained well enough, but I'm pretty sure a couple days after we'd finished it, had already forgotten its insubstantial happenings.

Continuity note:

At the beginning, Gayelette is mentioned as one of the participants in the flower competition. Gayelette is the sorceress mentioned in Wonderful Wizard as binding the Winged Monkeys to the Golden Cap. She was never mentioned again the Famous Forty, so it's weird to me to imagine her as someone still alive in the present day of Oz, as opposed to being a distant historical figure.

Hugo Awards 2026: The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

Every year, I vote in the Hugo Awards, reading as many of the finalists in the categories I care about as I can prior to the deadline—indeed, I don't think I've ever missed a finalist except deliberately. I buy all the finalists in Best Novel and review them in detail, along with other finalists by authors that particularly interest me; everything else I include in a series of ranking posts I do at the end of the process.

This year, the first finalist I'm writing up (though it's not the first I've read) is The Everlasting by Alix Harrow, a finalist for Best Novel. Harrow has placed regularly on the ballot since 2019, when she won Best Short Story for "A Witch's Guide to Escape: A Practical Compendium of Portal Fantasies." That's her only win so far, but she had short fiction on the ballot in 2020, 2022, and 2023, and her debut novel, The Ten Thousand Doors of January, was a finalist in 2020.

Harrow has a recurrent interest in storytelling, and how the possibilities of stories can be literalized through sfnal devices like alternate universes. The Ten Thousand Doors of January represents portal fantasies as places that can be accessed through, well, portals; her two "Fractured Fables" novellas made alternate versions of fairy tales into alternate universes her main characters could jump between, Everything Everywhere All at Once–style.

The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow

Published: 2025
Acquired and read: May 2026

Instead of alternate universes, The Everlasting explores storytelling through the device of time travel. (Note that I experienced this book largely knowing nothing about it, but I'm going to give away some aspects of the premise here that I discovered as a reader myself.) One of the two main characters is Owen Mallory, a scholar who specializes in legends of Sir Una Everlasting, a mythical figure from the history of his country of Dominion, a figure who resonates with the Arthur mythos from our world. (She's sort of King Arthur and his knights all in one.) Thanks to time travel, he's able to back to when Sir Una was alive, but what he discovers is that her story has been edited over time through time travel, adjusted to fit the needs of the present. In his time, Dominion has recently concluded a war, and Una serves as an inspiration to the populace and the soldiers—including Owen himself.

I found this a cracker of a premise. I'm very much interested in stories about stories, about the ways that the stories can change people and society. And I'm very much a sucker for stories that take a metaphor and literalize it through some kind of sfnal premise. In The Everlasting, stories aren't just being tweaked over time in the telling to suit the needs of the present-day society, they're actually being tweaked via time travel. The historian actually goes back in time in order to alter the story to make it work out the way it needs to!

There are definitely shades of Howard Zinn's A People's History of the United States here; imagine if people could go back in time and make Columbus into the hero history needed him to be! I was reminded also of David Mattingly's history of Britain under Rome that I recently read, where he makes the point that when Britain had an empire in the nineteenth century, that was the point where the British told stories about how Britain being part of the Roman Empire was a good thing, actually, that helped the British. Me being me, I was also spending my reading triangulating the book in terms of the contemporary genre, and I think it would appeal to fans of Some Desperate Glory by Emily Tesh and The Ministry of Time by Kaliane Bradley. Those aren't two books that it occurred to me to put together until now, but all three are about time travel, nationalism, and storytelling; Ministry of Time and The Everlasting are very different books in execution, but both are about someone who falls in love with their object of historical study while their government uses time travel for nefarious purposes!

I liked the main characters, Una and Owen, a lot, though I perhaps liked the side characters of Owen's father and professor even more; every return appearance by them was gold. On a prose level, Harrow is a strong writer, as I just really enjoyed reading it. Sometimes stories in this area can be a bit "twee" or "precious" in my opinion (see: oh-so-many Tordotcom novellas), but Harrow isn't that at all.

At the two-thirds mark, I thought this book was the one to beat. Unfortunately, the last third or so moves the book in a different direction than the one I've laid out here, which I found less interesting. It's not bad, but the book previously had been working on two registers: the social commentary of the time travel/storytelling idea, and the personal level of Owen and Una's story. But near the end, 1) the focus of the novel squarely becomes on Owen and Una escaping from the time travel trap, and 2) a lot of that is done via the character of Vivian, who is the novel's villain. But making it all about Owen and Una and Vivian and their personal struggles means that the political/social stuff about the power and importance of stories kind of drops away in favor of time travel mechanics and romance. Which are both interesting, sure, but I found the book more interesting when it was doing all three at once. 

 Basically the social stuff totally vanishes from the narrative, and I found that disappointing compared to how big of a role it played in the beginning, especially considering it was the clever thing that drew me into the book to begin with. Especially given that ultimately pinning everything on Vivian (and she literally turns out to be responsible for everything bad in Dominion history) really undercuts the book's commentary on the way this kind of thing does happen in the real world. The book does gesture at pointing out it's not all down to Vivian near the end:

The poor downtrodden folk of Dominion, Vivian had called them, but they didn't strike me a victims. I had seen them send their sons cheerfully to war; I had seen them beaten bloody for protesting it. They had put a medal around my neck for something I hadn't done, and spit on my boots simply for being born. And they hadn't been tricked or forced into any of it—they had chosen, over and over, cruelly or kindly, selfishly or bravely. (254)

It's a good bit, but it feels tacked on because 1) narratively, the focus of the ending is all on stopping Vivian, and 2) we never really get a sense of what a history of Dominion without Una would be like. I especially wondered what a version of Dominion history where the good aspects of Una's story were emphasized without the bad ones could be like—if such a thing is even possible. Without that, I feel like the book has the depressing conclusion of pointing at a vast social problem, and then just saying that there's no way of fixing it, so all you can do is get out with your loved ones.

This may seem like a lot of criticism, but ultimately I very much enjoyed the book. It did a lot of interesting things. I just wish it could have carried those things through to the end more consistently.

The Cosmere by Brandon Sanderson: Mistborn: The Bands of Mourning

The third Mistborn novel in the "Wax and Wayne" subseries, The Bands of Mourning, is very different from the other two, in that our protagonists leave Elendel for the first time, travelling to the city-state of New Seran in pursuit of Wax's sister, who was abducted by Wax's uncle back in the first Wax and Wayne book. (I guess; I honestly did not remember this subplot, though I did remember Wax's uncle was evil.)

It's impossible to read a Cosmere novel (impossible for me, anyway) without thinking about "magic systems." Sanderson is praised for his "hard magic," where everything is meticulously thought through. This just doesn't work for me at all. I actually recently had the privilege of getting to briefly chat with Ann Leckie, author of Raven Tower, and I asked her if she could explain her approach to fantasy, and she said she approached it like a science fiction writer. And I was like, "Aha, that's why I like it!" She takes a fantastic premise but then thinks it through completely logically. It's a good example of what China Miéville calls "rationalized alienation": the difference from our world (what Darko Suvin would call the novum) is thought about in a methodical way. Compare the Harry Potter novels, with their "soft" magic system, which seems to have little organizing structure other than what J. K. Rowling thought would be good at the time she wrote a particular book.

Why, then, do I not like Brandon Sanderson, with his methodical magic systems? At least part of it is that for all their methodical nature, they still feel quite arbitrary. In Leckie's novel, there's an initial fantastic premise (anything a god says comes true, but this requires energy, which the god can acquire through worship), but that's it, everything flows logically from that simple initial conceit. Sanderson's metals, on the other hand, do not have a simple initial fantastic conceit. In the Mistborn novels, for example, there's three different "metallic arts" (allomancy, feruchemy, and hemalurgy), each of which has its own rules; there are sixteen different metals that can be used in these arts, meaning there's forty-eight different powers people can have. And each metal's use in each power feels arbitrary: why should zinc enflame emotions in allomancy but store mental speed in feruchemy? why should iron pull on metal in allomancy, but store physical weight in feruchemy? And that's without getting into when different powers interact; it all comes across as arbitrary. There's a system, I guess, to the extent that anything you can stick into a table (there's six pages of explanation in the back of the book) is a system, but there's no clear organizing principle to it all. The system doesn't feel "rational" or "logical."

My other issue is that it feels like there's nothing to it other than the system. Miéville says that the thing about rationalized alienation is that it's also something you can read metaphorically. Harry Potter's magic may be unsatisfying from a logical standpoint, but it's all about self-actualization, which makes sense in a YA series about teen protagonists. Ursula K. Le Guin is probably the queen of this; her magic is powerful because it lines up with the character's understanding of the universe. In being able to Name things, Ged says something about us as readers too. But what's the metaphorical resonance of burning nicrosil? You've got me. I like to quote Jo Walton's essay about "SF Reading Protocols" a lot, but I recently noticed something Jeff VanderMeer says in the comments on it:

I’m having some difficulty with this idea–as I read it–of the literal *versus* the metaphorical, since metaphor has so much to do with the subtext of a story. If you don’t have subtext, you have a pretty flat story–it doesn’t resonate. Metaphorical interpretation is key, on some subconscious level in a reader, between a text that is alive and one that, after a first reading, is dead. Some SF writers write “flat” in this regard and some do not–some resonate.

Is VanderMeer talking about Sanderson? Not that I know of. Has he ever read Sanderson? I've no idea, but he certainly could be. So when people in this book start to talk about what happens if someone invents this or that allomantic power, or combines this, or does whatever with their feruchemy, I tune out, because it's all meaningless magical jibber-jabber (what I sometimes call "thaumababble," the fantasy equivalent of technobabble).

My other issue with Sanderson is that for as much as the magic systems are (supposedly) deep, the worldbuilding often feels shallow. This was a particular problem with the first Mistborn trilogy, which were all about liberating an oppressed people from an enslaving empire, but where absolutely no thought seemed to have been put into the oppressed people, or even what it's like to live under oppression; one was sort of left thinking Sanderson didn't know anything about imperialism or colonialism beyond what he had read in other similarly shallow fantasy novels. (Like everything in a Brandon Sanderson novel, there's ultimately a magical explanation for this, but it still feels shallow when you're reading it.) Sanderson and his fans like to criticize Harry Potter for its not-very-thought-through magic systems and worldbuilding, but honestly, Mistborn feels fairly similar to Harry Potter to me in that it often feels like things other than the magic system are made up when we need them, and no sooner. I never really believed there was a whole world outside of Elendel in "Era 2" until this book actually sent us into it; even having done so, one feels like there's exactly the bits of New Seran we need to support Wax and Wayne's story, and no more.

The Bands of Mourning: A Mistborn Novel by Brandon Sanderson

Originally published: 2016
Read: March 2026

Okay, this has become more of an essay about Brandon Sanderson and the Cosmere in general than an actual review of The Bands of Mourning, and one that probably reveals more about my own interests and obsessions than the actual book. So how is the book?

Well, actually, it's pretty good. If you can put all that stuff I just complained about aside (and there's a degree to which you can't—though it's even more likely that you, the person who is reading this review, don't care about any of this at all), it's probably the Mistborn book I've found the most interesting and the most successful. That is to say, I did find The Alloy of Law good fun but honestly it also felt to me like The Alloy of Law wasn't really trying to do very much other than tell a basic crime caper. Bands of Mourning, as I said, takes Wax and Wayne outside of Elendel... but it also brings outsiders into Elendel, as we get our first hint that there are people on this planet outside of a small region, with their own society and their own agenda. If you think what's interesting about speculative fiction is the creation of "epistemic crisis" (this is my take, at least), then this is a decent example of it, and it's probably the thing I'm most interested in seeing future Mistborn novels develop.

On top of that, I found this book had the most interesting depictions of the characters thus far. I find Wax himself a little one-note, but Wayne is always good fun with his sideways but strangely logical way of looking at the world, and this book has a lot Steris, a character who (to be honest) I did not even remember from previous books, who Wax is marrying for financial and social reasons, not love. There is a little bit of a tendency for us to be told Steris acts a certain way as opposed to seeing her act this way, but once the story gets underway, we do get to see her do a lot of stuff in her own way, and I found it enjoyable. I also like Marasi, though I feel like she doesn't get as much interesting stuff to do as the other three characters. Sanderson's end note says Marasi, Wax, and Wayne will return in the next book, but I hope the lack of Steris is just an omission as opposed to an indication she won't play a central role in the fourth and final book of this sequence.

As always, the use of the allomantic powers is probably the thing I am least interested in here, as well as the greater mythology. Wax actually dies for a bit, and talks to God(!) about suffering; this actually reminded me a lot of a similar discussion in Orson Scott Card's The Worthing Chronicle, which I reread recently, and I found the points here similarly unconvincing. (Is this because both Card and Sanderson are Mormons?) But put all that aside, and look for a book about some decent characters doing interesting things, and this is the best Mistborn novel thus far.

Every nine months I read another novel of the Cosmere. Next up in sequence: Mistborn: The Lost Metal

Reading Roundup Wrapup: May 2026

Pick of the month: The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow. It's Hugo-reading season, which means I'm reading the best science fiction and fantasy of 2025. This is just my second novel, so there's definitely time for things to change, but this is my favorite of them so far: an interesting tale of time travel and storytelling. Are we trapped in stories that make our lives worse?

All books read:

1. They Bloom at Night by Trang Thanh Tran
2. Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins
3. Star Trek: Vanguard: Precipice by David Mack
4. Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler by Susana M. Morris
5. Doctor Who and the Cave Monsters by Malcolm Hulke
6. Coffeeshop in an Alternate Universe by C. B. Lee
7. The Space Cat by Nnedi Okorafor and Tana Ford
8. Murder by Memory by Olivia Waite
9. The River Has Roots by Amal El-Mohtar
10. The Marvelous Land of Oz: Being an account of the further adventures of the Scarecrow and Tin Woodman and also the strange experiences of the Highly Magnified Woggle-Bug, Jack Pumpkinhead, the Animated Saw-Horse, and the Gump; the story being A Sequel to The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum, illustrated by John R. Neill
11. The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow
12. The Transformers: Til All Are One Compendium One (part 1/part 2/part 3/part 4/part 5/part 6/part 7/part 8) by Simon Furman, Bob Budiansky, Don Perlin, Ian Akin & Brian Garvey, et al.

I have occasionally been sneaking in extra stuff between Hugo reads, too: see #3 and 5.

All books acquired:

1. The Everlasting by Alix E. Harrow
2. The Incandescent by Emily Tesh
3. The Raven Scholar: Book One of the Eternal Path Trilogy by Antonia Hodgson
4. Inventing the Renaissance: Myths of a Golden Age by Ada Palmer
5. A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett
6. Shroud by Adrian Tchaikovsky
7. What Stalks the Deep by T. Kingfisher
8. Oz-story Magazine, Number Three edited by David Maxine
9. Legion of Super-Heroes, Volume 3: The Fatal Five by Paul Levitz, Keith Giffen, Scott Kolins, Jeff Johnson, et al.
10. The Time Team Unearthed by Adrian Salmon 

Obviously mostly Hugo reads, but I did pick up a couple other things, too. 

Currently reading:

• The Raven Scholar: Book One of the Eternal Path Trilogy by Antonia Hodgson
• North Woods by Daniel Mason
• Doctor Who and the Day of the Daleks by Terrance Dicks 
• Star Trek: The Original Series: Harm’s Way by David Mack
• A Short Stay in Hell by Steven L. Peck
• The Struggle for Mastery: Britain 1066–1284 by David Carpenter

That said, the stuff I am "reading" is piling up as I prioritize those Hugo books!

Up next in my rotations:

1. Star Trek: Vanguard: Declassified by Dayton Ward, Kevin Dilmore, Marco Palmieri, and David Mack
2. The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Sixteenth Annual Collection edited by Gardner Dozois
3. The Poe Clan Vol. 1 by Moto Hagio 
4. On Progress in Physics and Subjectivity Theory: An Amateur’s Meanderings as Inspiration for Actual Physicists by N. Otre Le Vant 

Books remaining on "To be read" list: 668 (down 1)

Honestly, I was a bit surprised this went down, not up! 

Star Wars: Knight Errant by John Jackson Miller, Books 3 & 4

Star Wars: Knight Errant, Volume Two: Deluge

Collection published: 2012
Contents originally published: 2011-12
Acquired: January 2013
Read: December 2025

Scripts: John Jackson Miller
Pencils: Ivan Rodriguez, Iban Coello, David Daza, Marco Castiello
Pencil Assists: Andrea Chella
Inks: Ivan Rodriguez, Sergio Abad, Vincenzo Acunzo
Colors: Michael Atiyeh
Letters: Michael Heisler

Knight Errant lasted two more story arcs after its novel installment: thus, volumes two and three make up books three and four of the series. I feel like these deliberately tried to remedy some of the faults of the first comic arc and the novel, in that both delve into Kerra Holt's backstory more and thus her characterization. In volume two, Deluge, Kerra returns to her home planet for the first time since her childhood, alongside a squadron of Republic starfighters who actually dare to fight the Sith. The story delves into her childhood friendships, her guilt, and her expectations for the actions of others.

This was certainly my favorite Knight Errant story, though it still has its weaknesses. While some other Knight Errant arcs feel a bit stretched, this one actually feels compressed: the idea that Kerra had a positive relationship with the squadron, and then they kind of betray her, and then she redeems them, is a good one, but her relationship with them feels squeezed in amongst everything else the story is doing. I think this needed more time to breathe in order to be effective. 

Additionally, the story suffers from the same thing as the rest of the Knight Errant comics, which is inconsistent and low-quality artwork. The art is fine enough I suppose, but struggles to communicate action—in a very action-focused series—and doesn't do a lot with faces—in a series with few supporting characters, there's not much character-revealing dialogue, which means we need to learn character from art.

Still, I enjoyed it well enough, and if the series had gone on like this (or gone on at all), it would have been solid enough even if it never hit the heights of writer John Jackson Miller's Knights of the Old Republic. 

Star Wars: Knight Errant, Volume Three: Escape

Collection published: 2013
Contents originally published: 2012-13
Acquired: May 2013
Read: January 2026

Unfortunately the last installment, Escape, is probably the weakest Knight Errant story yet. In a very big way, this is down to the art: we still don't have one artist who can make it all the way through a storyline, and Marco Castiello's Kerra becomes a generic big-breasted female comic book character. (I note that back in the novel, Kerra specifically noted she was not well-endowed!) On top of that, Castiello shows little visual imagination: the hardware and soldiers he draws are largely straight out of the Clone Wars even though this story takes place a thousand years prior! (Colorist Michael Atiyeh does his best to disguise this, God bless him.)

I didn't find the story here very interesting, either; the idea of Kerra hunting down her missing family had merit, but it felt like there were too many coincidences and the story's optimism often felt unearned given some of the horrific events it depicts. I also feel like two arcs in a row delving into Kerra's backstory is too much: backstory is not character.

Overall, I would argue that Knight Errant was a victim of the release pattern Dark Horse adopted for its ongoings during the late EU. Though I'm sure there were good sales-related reasons for it, instead of releasing traditional monthly ongoings (as they had with KOTOR and Legacy), they instead alternated between different miniseries. Knight Errant isn't made up of fifteen issues, but rather Knight Errant  #1-5, Knight Errant: Deluge #1-5, and Knight Errant: Escape #1-5, with a six-month break in between each arc. (This model was also used for Dark Times, Invasion, and Agent of the Empire.) At the time I'm sure that resulted in a loss of storytelling momentum; that doesn't matter so much in retrospect, but I think the way it constrains the shape of the stories does. Miller's KOTOR had stories of one, two, three, four, six, and even twelve issues. This kind of flexibility, being able to move between intimate one-offs and massive epics, while incrementally moving forward all the time, is the real strength of the medium of the ongoing comic, and Knight Errant's straitjacket of five-issue stories keeps it from living up to the potential of its premise. Miller created a compelling world, but the series as published doesn't get to explore it enough.

Star Trek Playlist: The Enterprise

I like to build little playlists of soundtrack music for myself to listen to as I work. A lot of these are pretty obvious: I have a Star Wars one with all the opening and closing tracks from each film, plus significant character themes.

One of my favorite ones draws from the Star Trek movies, which is based around tracks from each film that focus on the Enterprise. Here's the complete set:

1. Jerry Goldsmith, "The Enterprise" (from Star: The Motion Picture: Limited Edition)
2. James Horner, "Enterprise Clears Moorings" (from Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan: Newly Expanded Edition)
3. James Horner, "Stealing the Enterprise" (from Star Trek III: The Search for Spock: Newly Expanded Edition)
4. Jerry Goldsmith, "A Tall Ship" (from Star Trek V: The Final Frontier: The Complete Score)
5. Cliff Eidelman, "Clear All Moorings" (from Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country: The Complete Score)
6. Dennis McCarthy, "The Enterprise B" (from Star Trek Generations: Expanded Collector's Edition)
7. Jerry Goldsmith, "How Many Ships" (from Star Trek: First Contact: Limited Edition)
8. Jerry Goldsmith, "Star Field / Positronic" (from Star Trek Nemesis: The Deluxe Edition)
9. Michael Giacchino, "Enterprising Young Men" (from Star Trek)
10. Michael Giacchino, "Undersea Enterprises, Inc." (from Star Trek Into Darkness: The Deluxe Edition)
11. Michael Giacchino, "Yorktown Theme" (from Star Trek Beyond: The Deluxe Edition)

The Enterprise theme from Star Trek: The Motion Picture of course needs no introduction or justification. Say what you like about the six-minute flyby of the ship, but the Enterprise has never looked better on screen, nor has it ever been treated better by a filmmaker. Part of that is, of course, Jerry Goldsmith's beautiful score for the sequence, which captures the majesty and the beauty of the starship in a way no one else ever has, before or since. My iTunes tells me it's not my most-played track on the list, but that's only because I originally had the non-limited edition of the TMP soundtrack; if you added my plays of the same track from that version, it would take the top spot.

Goldsmith reprises the Enterprise theme in the other tracks from him I have on the list: "A Tall Ship" from ST V, "How Many Ships" from First Contact, and "Star Field" from Nemesis. "A Tall Ship" is good stuff; I think on the whole, the ST V soundtrack finds interesting things to do with Goldsmith's original themes from TMP in new ways, and this track is no exception. Unfortunately, the directors of the TNG films never gave the Enterprise-E the kind of extended beauty shots the directors of the original films did, so the tracks from FC and Nemesis just feature brief restatements of the Enterprise theme from TMP over short establishing shots. (I'm sure there's a reprise of the Enterprise theme somewhere in Insurrection, but I don't have it on my list.)

For both ST II and VI, my list uses the track in the movie where the Enterprise is launched from spacedock. Arguably, neither James Horner nor Cliff Eidelman composed an "Enterprise theme" the way that Goldsmith did (or Giacchino later would), but both of these are great bits of music that turn something procedural into something majestic. Horner's piece is exciting and thrilling, while Eidelman's is almost mournful—the last time we would see the "original" Enterprise on the big screen. (Yes, I know the Enterprise-A is not really the original Enterprise, but it looks like her and it has the original cast on board.) I use the version just called "Clear All Moorings" from the original ST VI album, not the one that adds the "Spacedock" theme from the complete score.

Other than Goldsmith's original theme, my favorite Enterprise-focused piece of music is certainly "Stealing the Enterprise" from ST III. This is the thrilling piece that plays during what is the very best sequence from the entire film, when the Enterprise crew steal the Enterprise in order to travel to the Genesis planet. I could watch that sequence a million times and never be bored. "And... now, Mr. Scott." "Sir?" "The doors, Mr. Scott." "Aye sir, I'm working on it." The surprised relief on the faces of William Shatner and James Doohan as the doors finally open is utterly convincing. Oh, and then "GOOD MORNING CAPTAIN." Listening to the music never fails to bring me back to this.

There are actually two versions of this track on the ST III expanded soundtrack; I have the one closer to the music used in the finished film on my Enterprise playlist, but there's also one with some nice Prokofiev-esque flourishes as well.

Dennis McCarthy's soundtrack to Generations is by far the weakest ever composed for a Star Trek film, but there is a very quick restatement of Goldsmith's Enteprise theme combined with McCarthy's own Generations theme when we first see the Enterprise-B.

Lastly, there are the three tracks composed by Michael Giacchino. Though his style of scoring isn't totally to my taste, one can't deny that his score was the first to treat the Enterprise with the reverence she deserved since the original films—though this is because J. J. Abrams gave him the space to do it. The scene where Kirk first sees the Enterprise in space has this amazing theme under it. (I prefer the 2:40 version from the original soundtrack to the longer version from the deluxe edition, since what's added onto the longer version is not Enterprise-focused.) The scene from Into Darkness that most prominently reprises this is the reveal that the Enterprise is hidden underwater on the planet Nibiru. Can you hide a starship underwater? Who cares, so long as it looks and sounds this cool.

The track I selected from Beyond isn't Enterprise-focused per se, but it's in the spirit of the tracks I selected from ST II, III, and VI, except in reverse: instead of the Enterprise launching from spacedock, it's from a scene where the Enterprise returns to spacedock, a beautiful scene of the stasrship making its way into and through the amazing Starbase Yorktown. Yorktown is the focus here, not the Enterprise, but still it's a worthy track anyway. As one of the commenters on the YouTube video I've linked says, "Yorktown is the Federation itself represented in one city.  We the audience, and the characters on the Enterprise, get to see this beautiful 'snow globe' filled with people from all walks of life and all races living and working together harmoniously.  All the while they're surrounded and supported by technological marvels so advanced that they're damned close to magic.... This sequence tells the audience, and Kirk's crew, 'This is worth fighting for.'"

Put all this together, and you have a beautiful 34-minute journey through some of the best film music ever composed. Will the playlist ever get any longer? The prospects on this front seem pretty dim at the moment (it has been ten years, the longest of any such gaps), but I live in hope. 

The Penguin History of Britain #1: Roman Britain (54 B.C.–A.D. 409)

I spent the first several months of 2025 working my way through the Pelican History of England, a series of nine paperbacks chronicling English history. These were originally published from 1950 to 1978, with updates extending to 1995, but beginning in 1996, Penguin allowed the series to fall out of print as they replaced it with a new series, the Penguin History of Britain. This series was made of longer volumes (compare the Pelican Roman volume's 189 pages to the equivalent Penguin volume's 539!) and originally published in hardcover. My plan is to work my way through this series in 2026, beginning with David Mattingly's An Imperial Possession, which covers British history from the arrival of the Romans to their withdrawal. (Like with the Pelican History, the volumes were not published in chronological order; this came out sixth.)

An Imperial Possession: Britain in the Roman Empire, 54 BC–AD 409
by David Mattingly

Originally published: 2006
Read: January 2026

The Pelican Roman volume was one of my least favorites; I wrote, "I don't know that I've ever read a history book by an archaeologist before; if I am to be uncharitable, it certainly reads like it was by an archaeologist." Unfortunately, David Mattingly is also an archaeologist and unfortunately, the book has much the same issue as its predecessor, in that it feels more like it jumps from place to place cataloguing things rather than telling a story about the time Britain spent under Roman occupation. However, the issues aren't as strong; presumably because of the greater space, I did have a better sense of the broader context and story. Of the Pelican volume, I complained, "But I often felt like I didn't know why things were happening: why did the Romans decide to conquer Britain? why did Boudicca rise up against it all? why did Roman influence fade? Often it felt like were just getting brief summaries of places things had happened without the actual context for the actual happenings." These questions are all ones that Mattingly actually does address here. On the other hand, I still do feel like we got a lot of description of what a villa's layout is without much of a sense why we might care to know this.

The best part of the book is its first chapter, where Mattingly argues that the British have too often identified with the Roman conquerors of Britain, rather than the British that were conquered. Because Britain itself was an empire when many of the histories of Britain began to be written in the nineteenth century, there was a tendency to for writers to see the Romans as benignly civilizing a bunch of "primitives," because that was how the British post hoc justified their own invasions of "primitives." As Mattingly points out, "[e]ven today, more than half a century beyond the effective end of a British empire, mainstream views of the Roman empire are.... closely bound up with issues of national nostalgia for our own lost empire. As a result, we have a curious and ambiguous relationship with our Roman heritage, which is difficult to reconcile with the hard facts of Roman conquest and domination" (4). If we move away from this way of viewing Roman Britain, Mattingly claims, then we get a more accurate view of the power relationships: the British elite weren't "Romanizing" because they recognized the Roman way of life as better, but because they wanted to maintain what power they could in a time of Roman domination. It's not as strongly put, but it reminded me of Howard Zinn's first chapter in A People's History of the United States, revealing the self-serving stories our national myths are rooted in. I just wish this project had been better and more clearly carried out into the rest of the chapters of the book, which occasionally feel more like Mattingly is trying to score points against rival scholars rather than speak to a general audience.

Ursula K. Le Guin, Interfaces (anthology, 1980)

This is an anthology of original sf put together by Ursula Le Guin and her agent, Virginia Kidd, back in 1980. Between this and Le Guin's other anthology that I've read, the Norton Book of Science Fiction (1993), I think I have to conclude that while Le Guin's short fiction is very much to my taste, Le Guin's taste in short fiction is not exactly to my taste. There's a whiff of the Ellisonian form of the "New Wave" in here, stories that trade a bit too much on sex or violence or literary effect but forget to be an interesting story. I'm not enthusiastic to write up stories I dislike, though, so you'll mostly just have to infer those by omission. (The book has fifteen stories and two sets of poems.)

Interfaces
edited by Ursula K. Le Guin and Virginia Kidd

Published: 1980
Acquired: July 2023
Read: March 2026

Still, there was some good stuff. "The Reason for the Visit" by John Crowley didn't totally make sense to me, but I was fine with that, because the conceit was interesting and the way it was told was very well done. (I don't want to give away the premise, because working it out for yourself is one of the story's pleasures.) I liked the narrative voice of "The New Zombies" by Avram Davidson and Grania Davis, though otherwise found the story trite and obvious. "Earth and Stone" by Robert Holdstock was weird and I didn't exactly get what happened, but I did enjoy the ride. Gene Wolfe's "A Criminal Proceeding" was a great little piece of dystopian satire, I found it hilarious and sadly prescient. I enjoyed Edward Bryant's "Precession," though mostly for its depiction of grading student essays and dealing with student freakouts, which was apparently little better forty-five years ago. I did not totally get James Tiptree, Jr.'s "Slow Music," about those who opt not to become immortal, but I liked what I did get.

My favorite story, though was Michael Bishop's "A Short History of the Bicycle: 401 B.C. to 2677 A.D." The story does one of my favorite sfnal moves, which is to take a pretty absurd premise and extrapolate with utter seriousness; in this case, it's the idea that bicycles are a creature that independently evolved on an alien planet; the story alternates between the scientist studying the ecology of bicycles and extracts from scientific writing. It's a weird idea well told; it's also a strong metaphor for the human treatment of nature. Lots of well done little details and good jokes, a perfect little tale. From the ISFDB it seems to have only been reprinted the once, in a collection of Bishop's work from 1983, which seems a real shame, as it deserves a wider audience.

(re)Reading The Wonderful Wizard of Oz Aloud to My Kids

As I have been reading all these apocryphal Oz books aloud to my kids, my wife keeps commenting that instead of reading them all these mediocre latter-day books, what I really ought to be doing is rereading some of the original ones. Kid Two, after all, was not even born yet when I read the original Baum novels, and even for Kid One, it was so long ago, they barely remember them. I felt like this had some merit—do I really want someone to remember, say, The Patchwork Bride of Oz moreso than Patchwork Girl?

I've been picking the apocryphal Oz books at random from a list I assembled; most recently, that lead me to The Speckled Rose of Oz by Donald Abbott, which takes place during the gap between Wonderful Wizard and Marvelous Land, when the Scarecrow rules the Emerald City. Well, this seemed like a clear enough reason to go back at last: reading a book set in a gap neither of my children recollected seemed pretty pointless! So I decided we'd reread Wonderful Wizard, then do Speckled Rose, then continue on into Marvelous Land.

Even though Kid One had Wonderful Wizard read aloud to them five years ago, they are still fairly familiar with its contents: they've heard the audiobook a couple times, read the Shanower/Young adaptation at least twice, and seen the MGM film. And Kid Two has seen the MGM film as well.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum
illustrated by W. W. Denslow

Originally published: 1900
Acquired: January 2011
Previously read: umpteen times
Read aloud: March–April 2026

It was well worth rereading. First off, it's just very good. The book has been often imitated, even (especially?) by Baum himself, but rarely bettered. Maybe it's the nostalgia, but I think the book has a sort of joy and a pleasure in it that has very rarely been captured by other Oz books. The Scarecrow, the Tin Woodman, the Cowardly Lion are all at the most themselves: each possessing a singular virtue that they don't believe themselves to possess. Oz itself is a land of wonders and marvels, full of unknown dangers and extraordinary beauties. The characters' problem-solving skills are at their most important, because the landscape they move through is full of mysteries, and there are no convenient Magic Belts or wishing pills that can save them. To a degree, anything can happen. But also problems can be solved through the rational application of thought; I think Baum very much gets the pleasure of what China Miéville calls "rationalized alienation": this world works different from ours, but you can figure it out. Things don't differ arbitrarily; if you accept his starting premises of how a living scarecrow or man of tin would work, then what follows on them those ideas makes sense. So there is pleasure to, say, the Scarecrow and company working out how to get the Cowardly Lion out of the deadly poppy field. And this would be hard to get back to in a later book, where these characters are all "celebrities" and have very powerful friends.

Partially, though, I don't think the other books ever could capture what made this one work so well. I am thinking of what Brian W. Aldiss says in The Trillion Year Spree about the difference between the original Dune and its sequels, a difference he said was "perhaps true of most series novels in SF. The first novel derives much of its power from our delight in and discovery of a new environment. The pleasure of future volumes is different in kind. Familiarity and complexity replace the higher satisfaction of revelation" (398).

It was also worth doing because of the increased age of the kids. Unlike on previous reads, I think they got that the Scarecrow, Tin Woodman, and Cowardly Lion are intelligent, kind, and brave even before they see the Wizard... though also Kid One insisted that the Wizard must not be a humbug because he did give the threesome what they wanted, so I don't think they totally got how (at least as I think the first book makes clear, though later ones seemingly walked this back a bit) the gifts were nothing more than placebos. What Kid One did grok on this reading was the fact that much of what appears in the Emerald City is not actually green, and that the Wizard is just tricking everyone through the use of the green spectacles.

And of course the illustrations of this one are so good. We usually read a chapter or two before bedtime, and the kids listen in their beds, with me coming to show them any pictures. But the original book (which we of course read in its Books of Wonder facsimile edition) has pictures on almost every page, so I let the kids sit next to me as I read it. 

It was interesting reading the book shortly after the two Ages of Oz books by Gabriel Gale and Lisa Fiedler. Those are prequels to the original series, so I could see some of the connections a bit better... though also the account given by the Winged Monkeys of their history does not agree with what Gale and Fiedler added in in their books!