I've got to admit, the swarm of bats was stylish and appealing, but for me this comic was let down by the inclusion of Jim Gordon's affair with Essen. For one, this is a pretty hackneyed storyline at the best of times, although in this instance I suppose it does symbolise the creeping corruption that Gotham inflicts on everyone who lives there. Mostly, though, it just makes me dislike Gordon, and that's a shame, because in general I'm more interested in him than I am in Batman. I usually feel more sympathetic to Gordon, but he's a whiny cheat here, and it's not even in service of an interesting plot. I don't know, perhaps Essen returns in the future as some important part of the whole Batman universe, but comics are short, and right now it seems a shame to waste pages on something so utterly unoriginal.

Bats over banality, please.

The second comic in the Year One series, and Gordon and Batman are beginning to be aware of each other. That is, Gordon's tasked with tracking him down, and it's pretty clear from the get-go that's he's suspicious of Bruce Wayne. At least, one of the other cops, Essen, is suspicious of Wayne and she convinces Gordon easily enough. From Batman's side, it's increasingly clear that Gordon is one of the few honest cops working for the city, but they're still suspicious of each other, and never really get close enough for conversation. Obviously comics aren't very long, and it's only to be expected that they won't come to an understanding over the course of a single issue, so I don't think that's causing my somewhat average reaction to this, but average I am finding it. Perhaps my sense of disconnection to the story is a result of the fact of both main characters also being somewhat disconnected, but perhaps not. I'm mildly interested, but that's about it. 

I'm reading the Year One graphic novel, which collects four sequential comics, and this is the best of them.

The comic follows Jim Gordon's arrival in Gotham, alongside Bruce Wayne's return to that city and his taking on the role of Batman. In one sense the stories are the same - they certainly reflect each other - but that reflection is one of opposites. Gordon has a family, is not very well-off, and is constrained to working within the law while being surrounded by cops who are entirely corrupt. Wayne is alone, enormously wealthy, and works outside the law while being surrounded by law-makers who are also entirely corrupt. It's a very well-structured set-up, and although I'm honestly pretty indifferent to the art, that structure is what's giving this the highest rating of the four. 

Interesting and extremely intelligent collection of essays. While there's a broad range of topics covered, a substantial amount of the essays here are closely focused on popular culture, read through a feminist and antiracist lens. Books, television shows, films... Gay is clearly a voracious consumer of culture, and there's a wide variety of texts covered here. An essay on the Sweet Valley High book series contrasts with one on Django Unchained, another on The Help, and another still on The Hunger Games. While I haven't seen or read all the things that Gay writes about, the essays are clear enough, and descriptive enough, that I can easily follow her arguments. 

A repeated refrain, throughout the book, is how it's possible to enjoy pop culture that most assuredly isn't feminist, while still retaining feminist ideals. (Catchy tunes can have dreadful lyrics, for instance.) As Gay says at the end of the book, "I would rather be a bad feminist than no feminist at all," and I think that's accurate, certainly for me at any rate. There's a difference between enjoying flawed texts while knowing they are flawed, and refusing to recognise those flaws exist. I can do the first, and I hope to avoid the second. 

I was lucky enough to get an advance copy of this from the publisher, and it's going straight on my list of favourites. It's absolutely outstanding, a really focused collection where all the stories have a shared and simple theme: teen girls, and how they survive being the protagonists of fairy tales and slasher films. I love horror, and make no mistake: the stories here are horror stories. They're tragic, often bleak, and consistently bloody - but what separates them from a lot of horror stories of the type is that each story is careful to contain genuine kindness and unselfish love. They're not just horrifying, they're hopeful, and I love that.

I've been trying to decide which of the ten stories here is my favourite, and it's an uphill battle. There's not a single one of them that's less than excellent, so picking a favourite is nearly impossible. I think, however, that I have to give the edge to the opening story, "Some Kind of Blood-Soaked Future," in which the sole survivor of a slaughter tries to take on the responsibility of preventing future massacres, and then learns to lay that responsibility down again. I just love that ending: the determined renunciation not of trauma, but of the idea that trauma is the sole definition of future life. 

This is an exceptionally well-curated collection, the first of its type, collecting together the best short fiction stories of the title. These are all reprints, as Year's Best collections tend to be, and I've read some of them before, but some were new to me.

My favourite was "Desiccant" by Craig Laurance Gidney, which was no surprise as it was also my favourite story in the vampire noire anthology Slay, edited by Nicole Givens Kurtz, which was where I first read it. "Desiccant" is a story of substandard housing, where the red dust that spreads over everything turns out to be more of an infestation than first suspected. It's a very original take on vampires, one overlaid with environmental justice, and I love it. A very close second place goes to a story I hadn't read before: "Giant Steps" by Russell Nichols, in which a woman eschews motherhood and her young daughter in order to be an astronaut. That's a very bare bones description, but I don't wish to spoil anything! Suffice to say, I was riveted.

As in any anthology, there's a very few stories that didn't much appeal to me, but the vast majority collected here were absolutely excellent, and all credit to Ekpeki for editing this volume, which is notable for its enormous range in story genre and theme. I look forward to this year's volume! 

I think this is my favourite one yet! It's basically one big dangerous trip to Georgia, by which I mean Black Sea Georgia, not the U.S. state, and I admit I had to pull up a map to find the town they first arrived in over there, which led me on a rabbit hole of reading about civil wars and independence movements and so forth, so it was some time later that I came back to the actual book to keep reading. The trip is all in service of getting medicine to stop the Pack kids going loup, and when I read the blurb for the book I thought "Oh good, it will probably have quite a bit of Doolittle in it" - sue me, he's my favourite, even though he's only a very supporting character. (I find his constant exasperation with stupidity relatable). And it did, so I was pleased. 

I don't want to spoil anything, so I'm limited in what I can say here, but I do think this: that the onset of magic has clearly made political relationships between populations orders of magnitude more complex, and I enjoy that. When it comes to urban fantasy, the inter- (and intra!) species politics are the biggest draw for me I think. This isn't always as exploited as well as it could be in every urban fantasy I come across, but this book does it particularly well, even if it's primarily in a setting that we're unlikely to go back to, with parties who may also not be seen again, once Kate and company return to Atlanta. Still, I'm looking forward to the next volume.

I read and reviewed the two books collected here separately, so this is basically just for my own records. I gave both of them three stars, so the collected rating's easy to figure. I did like the second more than the first, as I think it was a little pacier, and the story generally more interesting. Basically, though, these are popcorn mystery reads with an increasingly likeable protagonist. Kinsey was perhaps a little bland in A is for Alibi, but by the second book she's getting more compelling secondary characters to bounce off, and that's helping to keep my interest. 

A vast improvement on the previous volume! I was actually shocked when the first two women Harry ran into weren't described in terms of their tits, but then both of them had grey hair and so this apparently limits his ability to be insufferable in this specific area, though it probably won't last. It follows on from the last book, where Harry lost his girlfriend to the vampires, and he's dealing with it by moping and snarling and generally alienating the few friends he's managed to make. Happily, a war between two different fairy courts comes along to give him a kick in the arse, and Dresden is stuck where he usually is, i.e. the middle of trouble.

Four books in, and I've got an ambiguous relationship with this series. I think the worldbuilding is fantastic; it's mostly the reason I keep reading. I know that vampires and fairies and shapeshifters and miscellaneous magic users are all urban fantasy staples, but I do enjoy seeing the political manipulations and relationships within and between groups playing out, and credit where it's due, Butcher makes it all very entertaining. I just wish I liked his main character more. Half the characters in any book are out to kill him, and honestly, I can kind of see their point. He's a bit annoying, particularly in the way that he relates to women, but his characterisation does seem to be improving as the books go along. The improvement is glacial, but it's there, and I can tolerate him for the sake of the politics. 

I saw this film many years ago, when it first came out, and to be perfectly honest I don't remember much about it bar the final crash and the major death. So in many ways, reading this novelisation was like coming across a whole new story. On the whole, I found Kirk's part of it more affecting. I've read a few TOS novels that are set in the twilight years of his career, and they've all got that underlying sense of loss and grief, as Kirk realises that he's gotten old, and that his days on a starship are numbered. I just find this a very compelling take on the character, and I'm far more interested in it than I am in the loss of Picard's brother and nephew, because let's be realistic here: they barely appeared in the series, and I've got no emotional attachment to them whatsoever. I feel for Picard, of course, because I do have an attachment to him, but I always got the feeling that, the very odd episode aside, he's not particularly close to his family. Which doesn't preclude his feeling grief for them, of course, but even so... Kirk's got the better part of this novel, I think.