Rigaroga's Odd Order

Tag: John Griogair Bell

  • Check out my projects!

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    Check out my projects!

  • Norse Mythology

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    Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman is a retelling of a sequence of stories from the overall Norse corpus. There’s an arc, but it’s not a smoothly contiguous novelized story. But, the collection of stories are a good series, and well written. I also read this in conjunction with the Norse Mythology audiobook, read by Neil…

  • The Atrocity Archives

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    The Atrocity Archives by Charles Stross is the first book in the ongoing Laundry Files series, for which there’s also several short stories to be found not listed with the series. I read this in conjunction with The Atrocity Archives audiobook, read by Gideon Emery. This is the first time I’ve read anything by Charles…

  • Mittens

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    Mittens: A story about two women falling in love and doing really weird things to each other by Phoenix Baker doesn’t quite deliver on the “doing really weird things” promise in the subtitle other than hints and thoughts of things that happen later, and the two characters appear not so much to be “falling in…

  • Mud and Horn, Sword and Sparrow

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    Mud and Horn, Sword and Sparrow by Brandish Gilhelm is the first book by the creator of Index Card RPG and host of the Drunken & Dungeons channel on YouTube. This was a good, short story. There’s a unique narrative voice and a compelling swords and sorcery adventure. It’s worthy on its own merits, and…

  • I Can Explain

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    I’ll be honest. I picked up Mockingbird Vol. 1: I Can Explain by Chelsea Cain, & al., because I saw the kerfuffle about the cover for the second volume, and grabbed both to support the series. It then languished in my to-read stack for a long time, but I got around to this and devoured…

  • A Nation Under Our Feet Vol 1

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    Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet Vol. 1 by Ta-Nehisi Coates, & al., is narratively deep and visually impressive. There’s social, political, and economic allegorical levels to the story, which are welcome complexity to the overall genre. The inter-, intra-, and extra-, relationships that T’Challa must navigate and learn from are well developed and…

  • The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe

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    The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe by Kij Johnson is full of luscious Lovecraftian dread and danger that wakes to well answer the faults of its inspiration, a fine example of new Cosmicism with nostalgia and foreshadowing and familiar and novel. Plus, there’s talk of libraries and a magical cat. I made 18 highlights. Originally posted…

  • Demons by Daylight

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    Most of the narrative in the stories collected in Demons by Daylight by Ramsey Campbell occurs at night. Daylight, my ass. That’s about the level of quality here, with a few brief but truly good creepy spots that shine, in this rather mediocre repetitive-feeling collection not really worth the light needed to read the pages.…

  • Shibumi

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    I picked up Shibumi by Trevanian, pen name of the late Rodney William Whitaker, because it appears on screen in John Wick 2, and I was curious. I felt I found some inspirations from the book, but the two are very different. For the first tenth of this book, I was increasingly righteously pissed off…