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Friday, January 12, 2024

Friday Book Recommendation (Jan 12)

This week's reads: 

Tamsin by Peter S Beagle: This was a delight. Beagle's voice and his ability to get inside the soul of his narrator, with honesty and grace, is undimmed from his phenomenal The Last Unicorn. If that one is the only Beagle book you read I strongly recommend picking this one up. Is there anything mind-blowing in it in a plot sense? No, you've seen a lot of these elements before. But his grounding it in the history of a place, and the slow patient build of it, and the senses of aching loss and beauty and the confusion of adolescence all coalesce into something special. 

Cloak and Dagger: Child of Darkness, Child of Light by Bill Mantlo and Rick Leonardi: Being an old person, I pulled out my original issues of these from 1984 as research for the New Salem project. Leonardi's artwork is so gracefully stylized, his line work and person-sketching so distinctive - that it almost obscures just how accurate his backgrounds are to the NYC of the time. And it is very grounded in time: the just broken city that was midtown Manhattan at the time overlapped with the core plot tying into the 1982 Tylenol poisonings. Except because since this is a comic book they actually catch the guy. It's all written in the slightly florid early '80's Marvel style, but I prefer that over a lot of current stuff (c.f. old person). Lacking any superhuman elements other than our titular characters it's a very grounded comic looking at morality in a failing world. 

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