Lately I've Been Reading...

1.  The Founding by Dan Abnett.  The Founding is an omnibus, collecting the first three of Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts books, part of the Warhammer 40K series of genre novels.

Now, I know what you're thinking because I was thinking it, too.  "Ugh.  Warhammer?  Seriously?"  But this book was really, really cool in the way that only dystopian British sci fi can be.  Like a lot of British sci fi writers, Abnett got his start writing for 2000 A.D., and that spirit shows through clearly in The Founding.  So  does the book's paranoia and epic scope.

I loved this book and can't recommend it highly enough.  It was easily the best thing I've read in the last six months or so.


2.  The Massive #1 through #4 by Brian Wood (Dark Horse).  When I started getting back into comics, I mostly started with superhero books because the thing that drove me back to comics in the first place was my kids, and they--especially Emma--massively prefer superhero stories to indies.  That, however, was more than a year ago, and so now I find myself back at the place I was when I left the comics scene in the first place, and that's frustrated with the Big Two publishers, and their Event mentality, and the lack of creativity in superhero comics in general.  So I've started reading more indies (again), one of which was The Massive from Dark Horse.

Long story short: the book is okay.  It hasn't really hooked me yet, and that's bad after four issues, but the art is really good, and you get the idea that Wood is working to something here.  I may stick around a while to find out what that something is.


3.  The Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick.  I'd never read any of Dick's work, but I've liked the very vast majority of the movies that they've made about his stories, so I finally got this one from the library.  If all else failed, I at least wanted to read "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale."

But I found this book disappointing.  In the intro, they talked about Dick's sense of paranoia and his vision of the future, and I'm sure that stuff was cutting edge when he wrote it, but at least for me, it didn't really hold up.  For me, these stories read a little like a cross between Heinlein's Juveniles and the stories of O. Henry.  Which is okay, but all things considered, I preferred the more legitimate paranoia of Gaunt's Ghosts.