Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett

Roderick Random by Tobias Smollett

Originally published: 1748
Acquired: October 2008
Read: December 2023

I am a Victorianist, so I have no issues with reading texts many others find old or dull. However, I am beginning to think that some kind of switch was flipped around 1820 or so that made literature become good—presumably this was done by Jane Austen. This reminded me a lot of Henry Fielding's Tom Jones (published a year later), in that it goes on and on and on and on without stopping. The focus on interiority that makes the novel the novel just isn't here yet, but even a lot of the dialogue comes in the form of reported summaries of conversations. It's like listening to someone tell you a story, only the teller is an older relative and they have no clear point and no clear direction and soon all you can do is nod politely and hope it doesn't go on too long. But of course it does. Fool me once, eighteenth-century picaresques,* shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. Hopefully I am not fooled into picking up a third one.

* Everyone calls this book a picaresque, but David Blewett, editor of my Penguin Classics edition, goes to great pains in his introduction to establish that it's not one.

Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, No. VIII (Chs. 18-20)

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1843-44
Acquired: December 2023
Installment read: January 2024

No. VIII (Chs. 18-20)
I'm not sure sure I believe the "Charles Dickens sent Martin Chuzzlewit to America because sales weren't what he hoped for and he wanted to inject some life into the novel" theory. Because if Charles Dickens knew what he was doing wasn't working, why would he immediately subject us to three whole chapters of SODDING PECKSNIFF!? I mean, I knew we'd have to cut back to England at some point, but A WHOLE INSTALLMENT OF PECKSNIFF is just asking me to drop my subscription, Charles.

This is the fourth in a series of posts about Martin Chuzzlewit. The next covers installment no. ix. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Nos. I–III (chs. 1-8)
2. No. IV (chs. 9-10)
3. Nos. V–VII (chs. 11-17)
   

Hugos 1965: The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber

The Wanderer by Fritz Leiber

Every year, when I finish my Hugo voting, I pick up the oldest Hugo-winning novel I haven't read yet. For 2023, that brings me to Fritz Leiber's The Wanderer, which beat out three novels I haven't read (though one, Cordwainer Smith's The Planet Buyer, I will get to someday) to win the 1965 Hugo Award for Best Novel. Leiber is my first repeat winner in this sequence of posts, as he won Best Novel or Novelette in 1958 for The Big Time.*

Originally published: 1964
Acquired: September 2023
Read: October 2023

As the epigraphs and some of the early dialogue in the novel makes clear, this is an attempt to take the space opera concept of planets that can move through interstellar space (as seen in, for example "Doc" Smith's Lensman novels) and apply some real-world logic to it. If a mobile planet appeared in Earth's solar system, what would be the result? The book unfolds like a disaster movie, following a number of parallel plotlines about different people dealing with effects like the break-up of the moon and some incredibly high and low tides.

I was very into it at first, but the more I read it, the less interested I was; at 346 pages (in my Gollancz edition, at least), the book is just too long proportional to the amount of interesting things that happen. Leiber reminds me of his contemporary Clifford Simak, good at both mood and character, but it felt like not much was actually happening. Groups of people very slowly make it from point A to point B. And it just keeps going on and on and on. The beginning of the book, as the disaster begins to unfold, it utterly captivating, but having grabbed you, Leiber assumes you will continue to be captivated by the same thing slowly unspooling for hundreds of pages. Probably could have been a cracker of a novella, but my least favorite of the seven novels I've read in this sequence thus far, except for The Forever Machine.

I read an old winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novel every year, plus other Hugo-related books that interest me. Next up in sequence: The Collected Short Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume Two

* Though not the first repeat of winner of the award; that was Robert A. Heinlein, with Double Star in 1956 and Starship Troopers in 1960. However, I skipped Starship Troopers as I've read it before.

Five Further Very Good Short Stories I've Read Lately

I've been enjoying these posts, so here's another one. This is the third in a series.

"The Prophet of Flores" by Ted Kosmatka

In school they taught him that through science you could decipher the truest meaning of God's words. God wrote the language of life in four letters—A, T, C, and G.

I read this late last year in an excellent anthology, much mentioned by me, called Twenty-First Century Science Fiction. Kosmatka was a new-to-me author. The story was originally published in Asimov's in 2007, and doesn't seem to be legally available online in text form, but it was released as an audio reading in an episode of the StarShipSofa podcast, which I've linked to above.

The story is set in a universe where science ended up showing that six-day literal creationism is true, and follows a paleontologist in that world—who ends up involved in the discovery of the very real so-called "hobbits of Flores," which threaten to upend science. The worldbuilding is incredibly well done, the story is tightly written, and it got pretty intense. Much like a similar story for Ted Chiang, it's a neat way of exploring science and technology issues in our world. It was later expended into a novel called The Prophet of Bones; this got mixed reviews but I must pick it up.

"The Silence of the Asonu" by Ursula K. Le Guin 

To perceive the Asonu thus is almost inevitably to interpret their silence as a concealment. As they grow up, it seems, they cease to speak because they are listening to something we do not hear, a secret which their silence hides.

This Le Guin story was originally published (under the title "The Asonu") in an environmental magazine called Orion in 1998; it was subsequently incorporated into her 2003 story cycle Changing Planes, which is where I read it. It has since been reprinted many times, including in Lightspeed magazine, which is what I've linked to above.

Like most of the Changing Planes stories, it takes the reader onto another "plane" and explores the people who live there. The Asonu start out capable of speech, but gradually give it up as they grow older; in one example, an Asonu elder says eleven things in the last four years of his life. The story explores the way humans want to make sense of things, want utterances to have meaning, want to ascribe wisdom to what is cryptic. Like all of Le Guin, clever and kind of funny, but also dark.

"Muallim" by Ray Nayler 

“I must go to the school, or I will be late.”
     “Are you avoiding the subject?” Irada asked.
     “The first subject is math,” Muallim said. “There is no avoiding math.”
     “Hey – that was a pretty good joke!”
     “That was not a joke,” Muallim said as it walked out of the yard. “There really is no avoiding math.”

This is a more recent story than most of what I describe in this post; it's the very first story in the most recent volume of Neil Clarke's The Best Science Fiction of the Year, and was originally published in Asimov's in 2021. It's about a UN inspector who goes to Khynalyg, a (real) remote village in Azerbaijan to evaluate the success of a program to use a robot instructor in schools. Somewhere (I forgot where now) I found a negative review dismissing it as cliché, but I actually found it a sharply observed story about how interactions between different societies can surprise us, and how often technology is put to unexpected use. Clearly written, cleverly done.

"Five Sphinxes and 56 Answers" by Kij Johnson 

And, riddles solved, Phix kills herself. She has served her purpose in advancing the hero's story, and now she is extraneous, a potential plotline complication down the road when sex with his mother, his blinding, and his ignominious death should be driving the story; and so she is hustled off-stage. She throws herself from the column and dies.
     A life depends on the answers to the Sphinx's riddles: yours, if you are wrong—but hers, if you are not.

I read a volume of Kij Johnson stories last fall and overall enjoyed them, but this was probably my favorite. (It was originally published in an online litmag called Diagram, which ISFDB does not seem to know about.) It bounces back and forth between a take of the sphinx myth, a modern girl growing up who is captivated by riddles, and embedded riddles that resonate with the events of the story. Johnson is probably one of the best writers in terms of craft in the contemporary sf&f space, and this story certainly helps show that. Like much of her work, it's a striking reflection on the stories we tell and what we think of the nonhuman.

"History Report" by Simon Rich 

My Great-Grandfather told me that all dates ended with the same custom. After the two people had finished all the alcohol they’d been served, one person would ask the other to come over to their dorm room to watch “Arrested Development.” “Arrested Development” was a non-“Spider-Man” show that you played by putting small, round disks into a machine. The reason it existed was to create a way for people on dates to gauge each other’s interest in becoming naked, without having to directly ask them. The way this worked was a little complicated, but my Great-Grandfather was able to explain all the steps. First, you asked the other person if they had seen “Arrested Development,” and they would respond, “Some, but not all of it.” This would be your prompt to ask them if they wanted to come to your dorm room to watch the episodes they’d missed. If they didn’t want to see you naked, they would say that they had to “finish a paper,” which was an expression that meant that they were not attracted to you. If they did agree to watch “Arrested Development,” it meant that they probably wanted to see you naked. But here’s where it gets complicated: sometimes it didn’t mean that. Sometimes it just meant that they wanted to watch “Arrested Development.”

Now, this story I discovered where I least expected it: driving home from dropping my family off at the airport, I didn't happen to bring my iPod and was thus forced to endure This American Life. The last segment of the episode I listened to was a reading of this, a 2022 New Yorker story about how two people fell in love, narrated by their great-grandson after everyone has left the Earth due to the climate apocalypse. (Unfortunately, Ira Glass introduces it with a joke about StoryCorps that made me confused about what it was trying to do at first.)

It's quite funny, it's nostalgic if you went to college and dated in the mid-2000s, and it's a pointed take on the things we say are important versus the things we actually act on. If you didn't go to college in the mid-2000s as I and evidently Simon Rich did, you might not find it very entertaining, but I suspect that most of the people who care about my recommendations for short fiction probably did.

Doctor Who: Dalek Empire by Nicholas Briggs (ed.)

Doctor Who: Short Trips #19: Dalek Empire
edited by Nicholas Briggs with Simon Guerrier

Dalek Empire is a 2001-08 audio spin-off series from Big Finish (its first, actually, I believe), chronicling a Dalek invasion of the galaxy, focusing on the humans caught up in it when the Doctor's not around to save anyone. I picked it up in a sale a few years ago, but have never actually gotten around to listening to it; there is always too much new Big Finish to listen to first! The range engendered a tie-in of its own, the sixteenth volume of Big Finish's Short Trips series of anthologies, which was released between the third and fourth series.

Published: 2006
Acquired: July 2008
Read: December 2023

I haven't heard Dalek Empire, but I know the broad outlines of the plot; probably there's stuff here I'd get better having heard it, but I felt okay for the most part. Most of the stories here fall into two buckets. The first is made up of character studies of Dalek Empire's three human leads: "Kalendorf" by Nicholas Briggs and "Alby" and "Suz" by Sharon Gosling. "Kalendorf" takes place at the very beginning of the series, during the initial Dalek assault, while "Alby" and "Suz" take place later on, delving into the thoughts of those characters. They were all decent stories (I liked the horror of the Daleks in "Kalendorf") best, but also the ones that I suspect would most benefit from actually having heard the series.

Most of the rest of the stories are side stories to the Dalek invasion of the Milky Way, many of them including the Doctor in some capacity. But in these stories, he doesn't go around defeating dastardly plans; because the events of Dalek Empire already proceed without him, they're kind of what you might call "future historicals," featuring the Doctor on the fringes of future history, helping the little people, but not making any significant changes. My favorites among these included Ian Farrington's "Hide and Seek," where the third Doctor and Jo help a group of refugees evacuate; Farrington captures the Doctor and Jo particularly well.

The best of them as definitely Joseph Lidster's "Natalie's Diary," which is about a young woman named Natalie trying to stay alive during the Dalek assault on her planet, aided by the seventh Doctor, Ace, and Hex. As usual for Lidster, the strength of the story is in its characterization, as Natalie slowly discovers the hardness of the world she has come into. Ace and Hex aren't focal characters, but are deftly drawn, recalling one of Big Finish's best runs. The story is framed by a history student reading Natalie's diaries sometime later, which I think is set during the events of Dalek Empire III (when the Daleks return). The other ones are fine enough, though I found Ian Farrington's "Private Investigations" and Justin Richards's "Mutually Assured Survival" kind of pointless and dull.

There are two stories that break from this format. One is Simon Guerrier's "The Eighth Wonder of the World," which isn't a Dalek Empire tie-in at all, but a follow-up to the first Doctor serial The Daleks' Master Plan, featuring the sixth Doctor and Evelyn investigating what happened to a Dalek left behind in ancient Egypt during that adventure. Guerrier does his usual clever and interesting work, but it feels too fanciful in this context; Dalek Empire just isn't this kind of Dalek story.

The other is the volume's definitely standout, "Museum Peace" by James Swallow. Long after the events of Dalek Empire II: Dalek War, Kalendorf is retired and visiting a museum devoted to the Dalek War, contemplating how time has moved on. The Doctor is there, too (who he already knows; more on that in a minute), in his eighth incarnation, contemplating some terrible action against the Daleks. It's a deftly written, powerful story about grief and anger and moving on. Clearly when it was written, Swallow intended the eighth Doctor to be thinking about obliterating the Daleks, though subsequent revelations in "The Day of the Doctor" mean that can't be the case. But it holds up regardless—you can imagine the Doctor is at some terrible low during the Time War. (Or, in a very tenuous pet theory of mine, it takes place between To the Death and Dark Eyes, with the Doctor driven to despair.)

The book also includes the script for The Return of the Daleks, a 2006 audio drama that crossed the seventh Doctor into the events of Dalek Empire, as well as a sequel to the tv story Planet of the Daleks. (Hence, how Kalendorf knows the Doctor.) It wasn't a particularly great audio (I have actually heard it; it was a freebie for subscribers to Big Finish's main Doctor Who range), and reading a script is honestly never really that interesting. It feels like it's there to pad the book out—a whole forty pages! Given how many authors contribute two stories, one wonders if the volume was put together in a hurry.

(Despite the cover, the first, second, fourth, and fifth Doctors do not appear in this book.)

Every three months, I read the unread Doctor Who book I've owned the longest. Next up in sequence: Short Trips: The Quality of Leadership

Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, Nos. V–VII (Chs. 11-17)

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1843-44
Acquired: December 2023
Installments read: January 2024

No. V (Chs. 11-12)
The only thing less interesting than reading about Pecksniff is reading about his daughters. Like, what have I even been given to latch onto here? Who cares about them? It was only during chapter 11 that I realized their name wasn't spelled "Pecksnif," which is maybe a good barometer of how much I care... as is the fact I have no inclination to go back and fix the spelling in my earlier posts!

Chapter 12 does give us some of Tom and Martin, the faint bright light in this morass. I did quite like this line about Tom: "To say that Tom had no idea of playing first fiddle in any social orchestra, but was always quite satisfied to be set down for the hundred and fiftieth violin in the band, or thereabouts, is to express his modesty in very inadequate terms." A good Dickensian metaphor. At the end of this chapter, things fall apart between Martin and Pecksniff, and Martin loses his position.

‘And where?’ cried Tom. ‘Oh where will you go?’
     ‘I don’t know,’ he said. – ‘Yes, I do. I’ll go to America!’
     ‘No, no,’ cried Tom, in a kind of agony. ‘Don’t go there. Pray don’t. Think better of it. Don’t be so dreadfully regardless of yourself. Don’t go to America!’
     ‘My mind is made up,’ he said. ‘Your friend was right. I’ll go to America. God bless you, Pinch!’

I seem to recall that Dickens packed Martin off to America as what we might call a ratings gambit, because sales of the novel's installments weren't what was hoped for, sort of akin to doing a soft reboot of your tv show's premise. I didn't realize that happened only five installments in. The decision to go to America is pretty random, and Tom's reaction pretty funny; I am not even sure what Martin means by "Your friend was right." Well, we'll see if it saves the novel. Certainly, if Martin's the character who actually goes to America, he'll actually have to be in the book! I have a bad feeling we'll keep cutting away to Pecksniff, though.

No. VI (Chs. 13-15)
What's this? Three whole chapters of Martin Chuzzlewit about... Martin Chuzzlewit!? These chapters see Martin put his plan to go to America into action. More importantly, I think, we get a sense of Martin as a character, as someone who tends to be impatient and quick to judge; there's this whole bit where he negotiates passage to London assuming the other guy doesn't want to give him something he actually does want to give him. He comes across as overly cynical about other people but also overly naïve about himself; when he advertises that he'll work for passage, he excepts tons of offers but gets none.

He ends up hooking up with some guy from the earlier chapters, Mark, who agrees to serve as his valet, and then (after a really boring conversation with Martin's sort of fiancée), they are off. I like Mark; Martin is making himself not too great, but I guess that's the point of a bildungsroman. Some good funny stuff from Mark complaining about the sea voyage. Is Dickens's soft reboot of the book going to pay off? We shall see.

No. VII (Chs. 16-17)
With the sixteenth chapter, Dickens is on much firmer footing. That is to say, he's doing jokes. I don't know why this book that was initially about a family vying for an inheritance is now all about jokes at the expense of the American newspaper market, but it's an effective transition—in that I am enjoying it much more. "Here’s the Sewer’s exposure of the Wall Street Gang, and the Sewer’s exposure of the Washington Gang, and the Sewer’s exclusive account of a flagrant act of dishonesty committed by the Secretary of State when he was eight years old; now communicated, at a great expense, by his own nurse." Lots of fun stuff.

The next chapter is less funny but still fun enough, and somewhat more purposeful, though I still don't know that I have a strong sense of what Martin wants in life beyond a vague desire to strike it rich. So far, though, maybe the transition to America is working.

This is the third in a series of posts about Martin Chuzzlewit. The next covers installment no. viii. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Nos. I–III (chs. 1-8)
2. No. IV (chs. 9-10)
   

Otherworld Barbara Vol. 2 by Moto Hagio

Otherworld Barbara Vol. 2
by Moto Hagio
translation by Matt Thorn

Moto Hagio is one of those writers I've been slowly working my way through, but as is so often the  case, much more slowly than intended. I read volume 1 of Otherworld Barbara back in December 2017... I got to the second and final volume exactly six years later!

Collection published: 2017
Contents originally published: 2003
Read: December 2023

This is definitely to the book's detriment. Otherworld Barbara is one long, complicated story, about a girl dreaming of an imaginary island in the future, scientists studying life on Mars, adoptees and surrogates swapped with one another, cannibalism, people who dive into dreams, research into immortality, the coming of a genocide, and much more, and all I had to go on was a couple recap pages in the front and my vague memories of the first book. If I was smart, I would have read this right after volume 1!

Still, I enjoyed this a lot, even when I wasn't totally sure what was happening. There's a lot of cool science fiction concepts here, and Hagio actually manages to pull them all together in a coherent way. On top of that, this book shows her mastery of the grammar and rhythm of the comics form, with some really emotional beats forming around the reveals here. I particularly liked the stuff about fatherhood, and the twists at the end are surprisingly good. Maybe someday I should reread the whole story in one go and then actually understand it, but for now I will focus on the Moto Hagio I haven't read yet. The Poe Clan here I come... in probably six more years!

Twenty Years of Reading Logs, Part 5: Other Comics

This is the fifth (and penultimate) post in my series breaking down my reading habits over the past two decades, celebrating my two decades of detailed tracking of my own reading. Previously, I did a whole post on DC Comics; this one covers the rest of my comics reading diet. (Note that both posts only count comics that I read as books, i.e., graphic novels and collections. Confusing, comic books are not books, so I don't log them.)

	2003-07	2007-11	2011-15	2015-19	2019-23	TOTAL	PCT
The Transformers	0	0	0	60	13	73	2.5%
Spider-Man	½	1	7	2	0	10½	0.4%
Thor	0	0	0	5	1	6	0.2%
Other Marvel	½	7	8	8	6	28½	1.0%
K. Gillen	0	0	0	0	16	16	0.5%
B. K. Vaughan	0	6	0	9	1	16	0.5%
Avatar	0	0	5	3	3	11	0.4%
A. Moore	0	2	3	5	0	10	0.3%
H. Pekar	0	0	6	2	1	9	0.3%
Calvin & Hobbes	0	0	1	7	0	8	0.3%
K. Straub	1	2	4	0	0	7	0.3%
Scott Pilgrim	0	0	6	0	0	6	0.2%
M. Hagio	0	0	3	2	0	5	0.2%
The Walking Dead	0	0	2	1	1	4	0.1%
Other Comics	2	6	20	15	10	53	1.8%
TOTAL	4	24	65	119	52	264	9.0%
PCT	0.7%	3.9%	9.7%	19.3%	10.6%	9.0%

The peak of my comics reading is basically just the peak of my Transformers comics reading. For a couple years, I read an issue of IDW's Transformers comics over breakfast every day, which was enough to make Transformers rise to 2.5% of my overall reading of the past two decades! Take that out, and the 2015-19 span would see a mere 59 comics read. In grad school, I ILLed a lot of comic books, and those were mostly DC, but occasionally others.

Some specific notes:

• Marvel Comics make up 1.6% of my reading over the past two decades... compare to DC Comics's 13.5%! I guess you can tell which superhero universe I am partial to... (What was the comic I read that I classed as half Spider-Man and half something else? To be honest, I can't be bothered to figure it out.)
  
• Harvey Pekar and Moto Hagio are two writers whose oeuvres I am supposedly working my way through, but clearly that is not happening very quickly!
• Brian K. Vaughan and Kieron Gillen: I would not have guessed I had read the same amount of each writer, given I think of Kieron Gillen as the poor man's Brian K. Vaughan. The Vaughan stats are basically Y: The Last Man, Saga, and Paper Girls; the Gillen are The Wicked + The Divine, Die, and Once & Future. I guess I should go read Ex Machina to boost Vaughan's numbers or something.
• Kristofer Straub: Someday I'll get around to reading chainsawsuit and Broodhollow. Someday...

Just one not very exciting installment of this series left! Nonfiction!

Bloodstone by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning, Michael Lopez, Scott Hanna, et al.

from Bloodstone #1

In 2001, twenty-five years after Ulysses Bloodstone was killed off, Marvel brought him back... sort of. Bloodstone was a four-issue miniseries focused on the daughter who never knew her father. Eighteen-year-old Elsa and her mother move to Massachusetts, having inherited a mansion from Elsa's father; down on their luck, they have no other financial resources. Elsa's mother doesn't want her to know her heritage... but of course she soon stumbles on it and ends up taking her father's monster-fighting mantle.

As I said in my previous post (see item #1 in the list below), Bloodstone ends up retooled a bit here. Elsa inherits a piece of his bloodstone gem in the form of a choker, but other than that, there's no substantive connections to his original 1970s appearances, no mentions of the conspiracy he battled or the gem's importance to his quest to defeat monsters. Instead, he's a more generic monster hunter, battling the kind of creatures that might appear in a Universal monsters film, like Dracula or armies of mummies. He has a Frankensteinesque manservant and a vampire legal executor, and the ability to teleport around the world to deal with monsters.

from Bloodstone #4

So this all is what Elsa inherits, accidentally teleporting into danger and figuring a way out of it with the help of the manservant (Adam) and a nerdy teenage boy who has a thing for her. The result is pretty fun, actually. This is nothing deep, but if you don't want to read about a sarcastic teenage girl mocking an undead warlord trying to raise an army of mummies in Egypt... why are you even here? This is pure comics.

The art is occasionally a bit skeevy, and sometimes a little confusing, but it's exactly the kind of art the story calls for, I think. Notoriously, this story was recently revealed to be rewritten by Gail Simone in one of her earliest comic assignments; my understanding is that she punched up the dialogue (to make it more Buffyesque) after the comic was written. I think you can see the signs of this if you know; Joss Whedon talks about how he was once hired to punch up the dialogue on an already recorded film. This meant everything he added had to be done via ADR, and thus the characters became wittier when they were offscreen and he didn't have to match mouth movements. Similarly, here there's a lot of jokes that come from off-panel and aren't totally reflected by the visuals, tonally. Still, if you hadn't told me, I don't think I'd've noticed, it all works together fairly well.

from Bloodstone #2

Bloodstone has never been collected, though Marvel has twice solicited printings of Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters claiming it will be included. When I first conceived of this project reading through Marvel's Bloodstone stuff, the four issues could be found fairly cheaply on the secondary market, but since then 1) the Gail Simone reveal came out, and 2) Elsa Bloodstone appeared in a MCU animated film on Disney Plus, so now people are more interested in the character, and the issues range from $30 to $150 apiece on MyComicShop.com. Thus, I had to settle for getting them on comiXology.

This iteration of Elsa Bloodstone made just one further appearance of sorts, in a handbook-style one-shot called Marvel Monsters. The book presents profiles of various Marvel monsters, from Bombu of Oobagon VIII and Devil Dinosaur to the Molten Man-Thing and Rorgg, in an in-universe style. It's made up of blog posts by Elsa and e-mails to and from her as she tries to assemble information on all sort of monsters from across Marvel continuity. Again, you can get it on comiXology. I found it hard to read every word—I just don't care about Marvel monsters that much—but I did find it occasionally interesting, and Elsa's voice gave it a lot of charm. There are a lot of goofy monsters in the Marvel universe!

Bloodstone was originally published in four issues (Dec. 2001–Mar. 2002). The story was written by Dan Abnett & Andy Lanning [with dialogue by Gail Simone], penciled by Michael Lopez (#1-4) and Tom Derenick (#4), inked by Scott Hanna, lettered by Jon Babcock, and edited by Mike Marts.

Marvel Monsters: From the Files of Ulysses Bloodstone and the Monster Hunters was originally published in one issue (Jan. 2006). The issue was written by coordinator Michael Hoskin, with Madison Carter, Jeff Christiansen, Sean McQuaid, Stuart Vandal, Eric Moreels, Ronald Byrd, and Barry Reese, and edited by Jeff Youngquist.

This is the second post in a series about Elsa Bloodstone. The next installment covers Nextwave, Agents of H.A.T.E. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters (1975-2012)
   

Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, No. IV (Chs. 9-10)

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

Originally published: 1843-44
Acquired: December 2023
Installment read: January 2024

No. IV (Chs. 9-10)
I was complaining to a friend that Martin Chuzzlewit had appeared precious little 150 pages into the book Martin Chuzzlewit. "Your beloved George Eliot," she said, "waits until two hundred pages of Daniel Deronda to introduce Daniel Deronda." Okay, sure, but the difference here is that I am happy to read about Gwendolen Harleth, but I am much less happy to be reading about Pecksnif. There was a good Dickensian descriptive passage about finding Todger's inn but other than that there's not very much of the Dickens that I enjoy here. More Pecksnif tedium. (I just realized that he's on the cover for some reason. Is he the main character and the title just some kind of feint? God, I hope not.)

This is the second in a series of posts about Martin Chuzzlewit. The next covers installment nos. v-vii. Previous installments are listed below:

1. Nos. I–III (chs. 1-8)
   

Once & Future: The Complete Series by Kieron Gillen and Dan Mora

Once & Future: Deluxe Edition, Book One
Once & Future, Volume 4: Monarchies in the U.K.
Once & Future, Volume 5: The Wasteland

Collection published: 2021
Contents published: 2019-21
Read: November 2023

Written by Kieron Gillen

Illustrated by Dan Mora

Colored by Tamra Bonvillain

Lettered by Ed Dukeshire

Once & Future is a recently concluded thirty-issue comic series from Boom!, written by Kieron Gillen and illustrated by Dan Mora (with Tamra Bonvillain on colors). It concerns an attempt by a sort of undead King Arthur and Merlin to reinscribe themselves on Britain; the main character is a modernist academic who discovers that the grandmother who raised him is Britain's chief monster hunter—and that he's inherited her story.

It's been collected in five trade paperbacks; over the past few years, volumes one, three, and four have been finalists for the Hugo Award for Best Graphic Story, so those are the ones I've read. This year's Hugo voter's packet came with PDFs covering the complete series: book one of the "deluxe edition" (collecting volumes one through three), volume four (the one that was actually a finalist this year), and volume five (which was eligible for the 2023 award, but was not actually a finalist). So I decided that once I finished Hugo voting, I would go back through and read the series in its entirety, in order.

Like a lot of Kieron Gillen comics, it's pretty good but it reads as though it could have been better, like it could have done more with its premise and its characters than it ended up doing. Once & Future has two big strengths; one is the way it uses its very concept to interrogate the idea of British identity. In the first volume, King Arthur is brought back by Anglo-Saxon supremacists... but what they've forgotten is that Arthur wasn't Anglo-Saxon, he was a Briton who fought off Saxons! So he turns on them and begins expunging what he sees as invaders from Britain. Bits like this recur throughout the series, deft moments of pointing out the way the stories we glom onto culturally often don't actually say what we imagine they do. A lot of the time the story is about the conflicts between different versions of the Arthur mythos, the early medieval version clashing with the later one; there's some fun stuff with Beowulf in volume two. The particular highlight in this regard is Boris Johnson's hilarious cameo.

Collection published: 2022
Contents published: 2021-21
Previously read: August 2023
Reread: November 2023

The other highlight is the character of Bridgette McGuire, the retired monster hunter, a grandmother who gives no shits about your feelings and will do anything to anyone—including her beloved grandson—to keep Britain safe. As Gillen points out in the series afterword, she's the kind of character who can be a vehicle for adventures forever, but that doesn't stop her from developing and changing in ways both small and big over the course of the series. I always enjoyed her shenanigans and dialogue.

However, the series doesn't do enough with its interesting premise. There's a lot of big action sequences, and certainly Dan Mora does a great job illustrating them, but it felt to me like Kieron Gillen spent more time asking "how could this mythological idea be used to make a comic book action set piece?" than he spent asking "what does the Arthurian mythos tell us about modern Britain?" I loved those moments, like I said above... but honestly, there just weren't enough of them across the series's thirty issues. At time the overlapping mythologies get confusing, and not in a good way; I don't think the series adequately delineates the difference between the multiple Arthurs, for example, and some of it gets wacky. Why would Tennyson's Arthur be steampunk!? The last volume feels like Gillen thought the series was going to run another thirty issues but was suddenly given only six to wrap it all up... I was surprised to learn from the afterword that he actually had twenty-four more issues than he originally thought he was getting!

Collection published: 2023
Contents published: 2022
Read: November 2023

I also felt that Duncan and Rose, the ostensible leads, deserved more of a character throughline than they ended up getting. They often end up feeling along for the ride, and I wanted a stronger sense of their development and choices in the face of all the weird things they go through.

Other than some of the jumpy issues near the end, it is (as Gillen-penned comics usually are) a pretty smooth read. There's a number of clever ideas in here. Mora's art gets a bit too grotesque at times but is usually excellent; Tamra Bonvillain is a revelation on colors. But I can't help feeling there's another version of this story that consistently treats its mythology as something to be interrogated rather than as a basis for clever set pieces.

Plus to name your final volume "The Wasteland" but then claim the poem was written by "T. S. Elliot" is a pretty unforgivable mistake!

Reading Lucky Bucky in Oz Aloud to My Son

Lucky Bucky in Oz by John R. Neill

In my write-ups of The Wonder City of Oz and Scalawagons of Oz, I argued that John R. Neill was doing something different to what L. Frank Baum and Ruth Plumly Thompson usually did; if we were to use Farah Mendlesohn's categories, Neill's first two books were more akin to immersive fantasies than the usual portal/quest fantasies of an Oz book. His third and (sort of) final Oz novel, however, sees him revert to a classic Oz formula: an American child comes to Oz and needs to journey to the Emerald City. Neill's implementation of this formula probably owes more to Thompson than to Baum; the explanation for the trip is far-fetched even by Oz standards (Lucky Bucky is on a tugboat whose boiler explodes, propelling him through the air all the way to the Nonentic [sic] Ocean) and he gains a faithful animal companion (in this case, a living wooden whale). Shades of Yellow Knight or Speedy, perhaps.

Originally published: 1942
Acquired: October 2023
Read aloud: December 2023–January 2024

The book starts quite promisingly. Bucky Jones lands on a volcanic island—one that belches out foodstuffs and is inhabited by bakers perennially under siege by pirates looking to steal their pies; that is to say, "pie-rates." The pirates are using the wooden whale Davy Jones as their base of operations, and soon they end up stranded on the island while Bucky ends up on the whale. Bucky wants to go home, and Davy (who assumes the two must be cousins) says their best bet is the journey to the Emerald City and ask Ozma. Davy must travel up and down rivers, over land, and even across the Deadly Desert to make this journey. Davy is a bit dour but faithful, Bucky is eternally optimistic. It's a good pairing and a classic formula.

Unfortunately, it's much like Thompson's work in another way; it's one of those books where nothing very interesting seems to happen on the journey. Bucky and Davy arrive somewhere, they leave, they arrive somewhere, they leave. There is very little actual danger and even less cleverness; the one time you might imagine them having to do something interesting (when an underground river takes them into the Nome Kingdom), they get bailed out by Number Nine (whose been monitoring their progress on the Wizard's tattle-scope) via the Ambassa-door. When they get to the Deadly Desert, Polychrome randomly shows up to use the rainbow to help them across, in a scene ripped straight out of Purple Prince. Indeed, the whole set-up of intriguing characters on an utterly forgettable journey comes is highly reminiscent of that book. By the time my son and I got to the end and looked at Bucky's journey on the Oz Club map, he couldn't remember what the Zerons they met in an early chapter were—and neither could I.

Meanwhile, in the Emerald City, Ozma initiates a very period-appropriate public works project, putting the people of the city to work painting Oz's history on the walls of her palace (or of the city itself, Neill seems to get them confused). The Wizard supplies magic paint, and Jack Pumpkinhead paints such a good picture of Mombi that the picture comes to life and flies off. Later, so do a bunch of other sorcerers and witches from Oz history (these all being original characters) and dozens of paintings of the Wizard. This is fun stuff, but ultimately goes nowhere. Mombi is pretty easily defeated, and even though she hides in Davy Jones, never actually threatens our heroes.

Still, in the usual Neill fashion, one has the sense of Oz as a bizarre place where anything can happen. When Davy Jones reaches the core of the Winkie Country, he finds the rivers abruptly end. This turns out to be because the Scarecrow and the Tin Woodman had the Wizard get rid of them, because they were constantly falling in them! (Recalling, it seems, Little Wizard Stories, among others.) Weird things are always happening in Oz, even between books. There are flying bellows-birds, and a country of uncles (including the Uncle Sam, which confused my son, as he's just called Bucky's uncle, and he wanted to know how Bucky's uncle got there). We learn the Tin Woodman has six nieces, who all married tinsmiths; I want to know more about his extended family! We learn that there was a time when Ozma, Glinda, and the Wizard used to hunt witches together (between Dorothy and the Wizard and Road to Oz?), and that a sorcerer named Old Trickolas Om was the worst to ever bedevil them, besides Mombi herself; the exploits of many of these other witches and sorcerers are briefly detailed, and we even learn that many dark magicians inhabit the Winkie wilderness yet, assaulting innocent travelers. Wow. What I like about Neill is that he just goes for it... even when, admittedly, it doesn't make a lot of sense.

(There is some very bad internal continuity in this book; many events simply cannot happen in the sequence described.  At one point, Number Nine sees Davy Jones enter the Nome Kingdom and travels there to intervene. Then he returns to the Emerald City, and the painting of Mombi comes to life, and it takes refuge in Davy around the same time he and Bucky meet the Zerons... which happened before they went to the Nome Kingdom. Time travel? Wonder City received a massive edit... but on the other hand, Lucky Bucky didn't receive one it desperately needed.)

As always, though, my son enjoyed it immensely. The sheer exuberance of Neill's Oz is perfect for a five-year-old, and he really liked the ending, where the bakers' volcano is moved to a lake near the Emerald City, and Davy gets a job delivering its wares—plus, the Wizard uses the volcano to send up firework displays at night. Why not? 

Here's my son's picture of Lucky Bucky:

(I for one would have liked to have known why Bucky abruptly decides he'd rather live in Oz than go home. This book overall is better than Scalawagons for an adult reader... but still not up to much. Certainly reading it aloud is the way to go, though.)

Next up in sequence: The Runaway in Oz

Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters by Dennis Hopeless, John Warner, Stever Gerber, Juan Doe, Mike Vosburg, Sal Buscema, Val Mayerik, Alan Kupperberg, et al.

Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters

Collection published: 2022
Contents originally published: 1975-2012
Acquired and read: November 2023

Writers: Dennis Hopeless, John Warner & Stever Gerber with Christopher Yost, Rick Spears & Faith Erin Hicks

Pencilers: Juan Doe, Mike Vosburg, Sonny Trinidad, John Buscema, Bob Brown, Sal Buscema, Val Mayerik & Alan Kupperberg with Joh James, James Callahan & Faith Erin Hicks [and Pat Boyette*]

Inkers: Juan Doe, Bob McLeod, Sonny Trinidad, Rudy Nebres & Bob Wiacek with Victor Olazaba, James Callahan, Faith Erin Hicks, Rod Santiago & Rudy Mesina

Colorists: Wil Quintana, Diane Buscema & George Roussos with Ulises Arreola, Nathan Fairbairn & Cris Peter

Letterers: Dave Lanphear, Dave Sharpe, Tom Orzechowski, Sonny Trinidad & Jim Novak with Faith Erin Hicks & co. [and Pat Boyette]

Having at last finished my journey through Justice Society comics, I can finally read something else! I am next turning my attention to Elsa Bloodstone, a character with an interesting, complicated legacy—which is, of course, one of my favorite things about superhero comics.

Bloodstone & the Legion of Monsters collects all of the original 1970s appearances of her father, Ulysses Bloodstone, plus a few one-shots featuring her, and a four-part miniseries, Legion of Monsters. It does not collect, despite what the solicitation indicated, the 2001-02 miniseries that introduced Elsa and indeed, remains inexplicably uncollected. But more on that in a future post. The stories are put in a somewhat weird order here (though I can see the logic), but I will go through them in publication order.

I don't know why "dopey but loyal actor" and "camp film director" are key recurring characters in this series, but I am here for it.
from Marvel Presents #1 (script by John Warner, art by Pat Boyette)

The earliest issues are nine featuring Ulysses Bloodstone. Ulysses made his debut in Marvel Presents #1, appeared again in the second issue of that title, and then transferred over to the black-and-white series Rampaging Hulk, appearing in seven of its first eight issues. Ulysses is an immortal; ten thousand years ago, he was present when the magical bloodstone was shattered, and a bit of it was embedded in his chest, granting him immortal life. He's spent his time tracking down other fragments, stopping those who misuse them—especially rampaging kaijuesque giant monsters. There's a core of a good idea here, but I didn't find it to be terribly well executed. The first two issues, in particular, are very choppy; writer John Warner clearly thought he was setting up a long epic when he wrote Marvel Presents #1, and then issue #2 has to hastily wrap up and explain everything, and completely ignores some key aspects of issue #1 in the process!

To be honest, I don't really know why this is happening but it looks good, so I am here for it.
from Rampaging Hulk vol. 1 #2 (script by John Warner, art by Bob Brown & Rudy Nebres)

His six issues of Rampaging Hulk are fine; mostly the high point is the beautiful black-and-white artwork. I did like Bloodstone's supporting cast, a lackadaisical actor turned assistant monster hunter and a crusading journalist, but the actual stories focused too much on the tedious machinations of a globe-spanning conspiracy, and never seemed to really go anywhere. Bloodstone was always on the backfoot, bizarre twists were being piled on top of bizarre twists, new complications being introduced at random. And again, it all gets abruptly cut short, this time in a one-issue conclusion by writer Stever Gerber that somewhat tastelessly discards the characters you've spent six issues getting to know. So what was the point?

That was (spoiler) the end of Ulysses Bloodstone, and as far as I know, he's stayed dead. I did pause reading the collection at this point to read the 2001-02 miniseries, but I'll cover that in another post. The short version, though, is that Ulysses's somewhat overcomplicated backstory was played down; no more mention of the bloodstone fragments or the conspiracy, he just became a flamboyant hunter of monsters of all sorts and his mantle passed on to his daughter, Elsa. The omission of this miniseries from this collection is, frankly, obnoxious and inexplicable. Elsa was then reinvented with a somewhat different backstory in the miniseries Nextwave: Agents of H.A.T.E., which I haven't read yet but will next. I can see why this isn't here (it's twelve issues long and not all about Elsa) but the retooling of a retooling is jarring.

Now, this is my preferred way of doing a retcon.
from Astonishing Tales: Boom-Boom and Elsa #1 (script by Rick Spears, art by James Callahan)

It's this retooled Elsa who is the focal character of three short comics from 2009-10, reprinted from Marvel Assistant-Sized Spectacular #2, Astonishing Tales: Boom-Boom and Elsa #1, and Girl Comics #2. The first is kind of meh, but the other two are fun stories about her overdramatic, overviolent life and her friendship with Tabitha "Boom-Boom" Sparks. You can never go wrong with some Faith Erin Hicks.

Using one's powers for... sandwich making.
from Girl Comics vol. 2 #2 (script & art by Faith Erin Hicks)

Lastly, there's Legion of Monsters (2011-12), a miniseries where Elsa has to work with some monsters, helping defend an enclave of ostensibly peaceful monsters from an attack via plague. The art is nice to look at, dark and moody, and I certainly appreciate any superhero comic that attempts to do something different, but I found both art and writing difficult to follow and ultimately got a bit lost in the contortions of it all; I think the story assumes a deeper familiarity with Marvel's bench of monster characters than I actually possess.

Not the naïf she seems.
from Legion of Monsters vol. 2 #1 (script by Dennis Hopeless, art by Juan Doe)

So overall, it's not the best Bloodstone collection that could have been published. If I hadn't read the 2001-02 miniseries in the middle, I don't think it would have been coherent at all; as it is, it seems to be about two characters related in nothing other than their name and the vague concept of monster hunting.

This is the first post in a series about Elsa Bloodstone. The next installment covers the 2001-02 Bloodstone miniseries.

* Pat Boyette illustrated the second half of Marvel Presents #1, as indicated in that issue's credits, but is omitted from the collection's credit page.

Charles Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit, Nos. I–III (Chs. 1-8)

The Life and Adventures of Martin Chuzzlewit by Charles Dickens

Every year over my winter break, I read one new-to-me novel by Charles Dickens. This year, I am trying something new and going to read and write it up by installments; Martin Chuzzlewit originally appeared in nineteen monthly parts from January 1843 to July 1844, the installments averaging 2.8 chapters. My plan is to alternate them with other books, and each week, review as much as I've read since last week. My guess is this will take me about two months, but we'll see. In the last few years, I've burned out on some mediocre Dickens novels, so my hope is this will liven it up a bit.

Originally published: 1843-44
Acquired: December 2023
Installments read: January 2024

No. I (Chs. 1-3)
At some point, Dickens became the king of the opening. I remember being gripped by the birth scene of David Copperfield in David Copperfield (1849-50) (though maybe that's because I read it with my newborn son on my lap), the opening court scene of Bleak House (1852-53) is amazing, as is the birth in prison of Amy "Little Dorrit" Dorrit in Little Dorrit (1855-57), and who, of course, can forget Pip in the graveyeard in Great Expectations (1860-61), a scene burned into my memory by its Wishbone adaptation? When I read A Tale of Two Cities (1859), I went so far as to write, "I imagine there's not a Dickens novel that doesn't open great; he knew how to set a scene. Mysterious riders in the night, cryptic messages, well-observed humor about people taking public transit. I was totally into it."

Well, clearly Charles Dickens did not have this power yet in 1843. The novel opens with a weird, satirical, only intermittently humorous history of the Chuzzlewit family, then moves on to a long and tedious chapter about the Pecksnif family, then to another long and tedious disquisition about an old man in an inn, who we very belatedly learn is Martin Chuzzlewit... though, not the Martin Chuzzlewit, who at the end of the first installment of the novel ostensibly devoted to his "life and adventures" is still resolutely off-screen! Wow, way to hook 'em, Boz. A lot of Dickens novels, I have found, begin strong but get tedious, but much worse are the ones that—like Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39)—start tedious and continue in that way. Hopefully this is not one of those.

No. II (Chs. 4-5)
Far be it for me to play backseat editor, but if I'd been Charles Dickens's publisher and got the manuscript, I'd've told him to dump the first three chapters and start with the fourth. It's perfect Dickens: having heard that old Martin Chuzzlewit is dying, everyone vaguely related begins lurking nearby, hoping to somehow finagle themselves into his good graces—and thus, of course, his will. The whole chapter culminates in a meeting between all the relations, who all despise each other and spend their time wittily insulting each other. It would have been a delightful, intriguing opening, but it makes a strong fourth chapter instead.

Unfortunately, the fifth chapter is dull, focusing on Pecksnif's former student (Mr. Pinch) recruiting a new student, who turns out to be the younger Martin Chuzzlewit. It doesn't half take its time about it; in other books, Dickens does the "many disparate characters doing stuff" thing well (e.g., Our Mutual Friend [1864-65], Bleak House) but so far I am finding it hard to latch onto any of them here.

No. III (Chs. 6-8)
I have to say, Dickens is very much overestimating how interesting I find Pecksnif. Like, he's funny, but he's not that funny. The three chapters here cover Martin Chuzzlewit and Mr. Pinch coming to know each other better, the two of them being harangued for money by Slyme, a lawyer, and Pecksnif going on a coach journey to London. Plus also a guy quitting working at a pub. It's a bit all over the place, still, and it all goes on a bit too much. Like, I do find some of the Martin/Pinch interactions very cute (such as Martin falling asleep to Pinch reading Shakespeare), and there are a couple good jokes in their encounter with Slyme and his associate, Mr. Tigg, but it just goes on and on and on. This has the undisciplined sprawl of the eighteenth-century picaresque (never a favorite genre of mine), but instead of being about one person, it's about a million of them for some reason.

It feels weird to say this, but Bleak House was much more tightly written!

This is the first in a series of posts about Martin Chuzzlewit. The next covers installment no. iv.

The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch by Gene Wolfe

Sword & Citadel: the second half of The Book of the New Sun
The Sword of the Lictor and The Citadel of the Autarch
by Gene Wolfe

Collection published: 2021
Contents originally published: 1981-82
Acquired: May 2022
Read: September 2023

I knew these books would be weird and disjointed going in, but I had no idea how weird and disjointed. I'm writing this up about two months after finishing this volume, which was honestly too long to leave it because at this point I have no idea what I actually read, just vague memories of fragments: Severian at a party, Severian meeting a boy named Severian, Severian at war, Severian climbing a tower where different levels are in different times. What was this whole series about? I've no idea.

Was it my fault or what it the books'? Well, it's definitely at least partly the books' fault, I know that, but how much? I think it's at least partly mine; I read these in a pretty fragmented, jumpy way, and I don't think I got as much out of it as I could have with more sustained focus. As I said last time, they say you don't read Book of the New Sun, only reread it, so at some point in the future, I will give these books a second go and see if they click for me. But I think that will be awhile yet.

A Mollmann Family Christmas

exploring the Mollmann woods

My wife and I used to split our trips home for Christmas between our two families, often driving from Cincinnati to Cleveland on Christmas Day. Since moving to Florida and having kids, though, we've kept to one location for Christmas, and we've made that her family in Cleveland, since we always do my family for Thanksgiving.

But I do have treasured memories of Christmas Eve at my grandparents'. Ever since I was a kid, the whole Mollmann family convened in their basement—though first, two kids (usually one boy and one girl) had to carry a figurine of Baby Jesus to his place in the manger. Then we'd eat cold cuts for dinner, snack on "ordervs" and desserts, and do presents.

My kids have never done Baby Jesus, since we haven't been to Cincinnati for Christmas since they've been born. When I saw my grandmother—then ninety-five, now ninety-six—this summer, I realized I needed to make taking the kids to a Mollmann Christmas a priority, and stop assuming it would just happen someday.

Christmas... tractors?

The timing was bad this year. The kids' and my wife's last day was the 22nd, which could mean flying on the 23rd or 24th. I concocted a plan: what it, this time, we drove? This would avoid holiday ticket prices, give us more flexibility on traveling with presents, and not require us to rent a car. It's about 13.5 hours from Tampa to Cincinnati according to Google, which is more like 16+ with kids, a bit much... but what if we stopped at my parents' place in Tennessee? Hayley then suggested we didn't have to just do Cincinnati, we could also go to Cleveland; having a car would give us that flexibility.

So, a plan was concocted:

• 23rd: do an early Christmas morning at home and then drive to Tennessee (possibly power through if things were going really well)
• 24th: drive from Tennessee to Cincinnati, do Christmas Eve at my Grandma's
• 25th: do Christmas morning and lunch with my family, drive to Cleveland, do Christmas dinner with Hayley's dad's side
• 26th: celebrate Christmas with Hayley's dad
• 27th: celebrate Christmas with Hayley's brother and his family
• 28th: drive back to Cincinnati
• 29th: one day in Cincinnati to do stuff
• 30th: drive from Cincinnati to Tennessee
• 31st: drive from Tennessee to Florida

serious business!

A nine-day trip... six days of which we would spend driving! Were we insane?

I was fearful it would be a miserable disaster... but actually it all went pretty fine. The kids are old enough now (five and three) that long car trips aren't so tough, and they both have tablets these days. There were only two days of very long driving; Tennessee-Cincinnati is just 3.5 hours, and Cincinnati-Cleveland is four. My ambition of driving straight through on day one did not work out when we didn't get to Tennessee until midnight through a combination of 1) late start, 2) bad traffic, and 3) the world's slowest McDonald's, but we were out the door by 8am the next day and got to Cincinnati by noon.

It was great to do Mollmann Christmas, both at my Grandma's and my parents'; Son One did Baby Jesus, and he took it very seriously. Son One got matchbox cars in the gift exchange, and Son Two a stuffed owl, so both were pleased. Son Two very much enjoyed Grandma's punch, though he also spilled it all over. It was a lot more fun to do Christmas morning with my family instead of over Zoom! The Cleveland trip was quick but nice. On the 29th, we took the kids to the "Holiday Junction" train display at the Cincinnati Museum Center, which has a massive model train display plus LEGO trains supplied by my brother's LEGO User Group. We also got to see my friend David, who we haven't seen in some time.

The trip back was nice. We left for Tennessee in the morning so we got to do a lazy afternoon there with my parents, who had driven down for New Year's, and our drive home was perfectly smooth. No bad traffic, no bad fast food, and some good fun thanks to my inspired downloading of a Ramona Quimby audiobook.

So... do it again next year?