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Book Chain, etc, Week 20
May. 17th, 2026 09:06 am#20: A book whose title has more letters than the title of the previous book
May: Make/Making
Third attempt: How Comics Were Made by Glenn Fleishman. An illustrated history of the various complicated methods by which newspaper comics have been transferred from the artist's drawing board to the newpaper page. I'm reading my backer copy of the Kickstarter-funded first edition; a second edition has subsequently been released by a major publisher with the title changed to How Comics Are Made, presumably because the publisher in question also owns one of the largest surviving comic syndicates and doesn't want people getting the idea that newspaper comics are a thing of the past.
(The Genghis Khan book just hasn't been holding my attention, and will probably end up going back to the library with not much more of it read.)
Miscellaneous
Reading all the Penric stories one after another may not have been a wise decision; they were written to be able to stand alone and be read as and when a person came across them, which means among other things that each one has to set up the premise and characters for what might be a first-time reader, and that gets a bit repetitive when read all together. There are also some other recurring narrative effects that are fine within the context of individual stories but can get to be a bit much in the aggregate, and a few things one notices when reading them in chronological order when that wasn't always the way they were written.
Despite all that, the stories themselves are very good.
I also finished reading The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, which I've been reading on and off since March. The amount of time I've taken to finish it isn't a knock against the quality of the book; it's just that it's the kind of book where you read an essay and let it digest for a while before starting the next one, and also a good book to read a bit of on days when I wasn't feeling like tackling a whole book. And every now and then it had to go back to the library and I had to wait a couple of weeks for it to come around again on the hold queue.
May: Make/Making
Third attempt: How Comics Were Made by Glenn Fleishman. An illustrated history of the various complicated methods by which newspaper comics have been transferred from the artist's drawing board to the newpaper page. I'm reading my backer copy of the Kickstarter-funded first edition; a second edition has subsequently been released by a major publisher with the title changed to How Comics Are Made, presumably because the publisher in question also owns one of the largest surviving comic syndicates and doesn't want people getting the idea that newspaper comics are a thing of the past.
(The Genghis Khan book just hasn't been holding my attention, and will probably end up going back to the library with not much more of it read.)
Miscellaneous
Reading all the Penric stories one after another may not have been a wise decision; they were written to be able to stand alone and be read as and when a person came across them, which means among other things that each one has to set up the premise and characters for what might be a first-time reader, and that gets a bit repetitive when read all together. There are also some other recurring narrative effects that are fine within the context of individual stories but can get to be a bit much in the aggregate, and a few things one notices when reading them in chronological order when that wasn't always the way they were written.
Despite all that, the stories themselves are very good.
I also finished reading The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, which I've been reading on and off since March. The amount of time I've taken to finish it isn't a knock against the quality of the book; it's just that it's the kind of book where you read an essay and let it digest for a while before starting the next one, and also a good book to read a bit of on days when I wasn't feeling like tackling a whole book. And every now and then it had to go back to the library and I had to wait a couple of weeks for it to come around again on the hold queue.
