Reading List: June

Ah, summer vacation. It’s so easy to read when you have nothing else to do… And to compensate for last month’s lackluster choices, June has been packed with cool books and comic books.

The Sword, vol. 1: Fire
The new series by the Luna brothers is as riveting as their previous efforts (the incredible Ultra and the extremely entertaining Girls). Just like it happened with the aforementioned books, I enjoyed the compelling story and the great dialogue a lot more than the artwork, but the visuals are still good enough. All in all, The Sword is shaping up to be another amazing series!

Avengers: The Initiative, vol. 1: Basic Training
Avengers: The Initiative, vol. 2: Killed in Action
Avengers: The Initiative, vol. 3: Secret Invasion
My friend Brock let me borrow these books written by Dan Slott and Christos Gage, and drawn by a variety of artists. The best penciller is, by far, Stefano Caselli, whose dynamic and incredibly expressive style is nothing short of spectacular. The story itself is entertaining, but I wish more characters that die stayed dead forever. And yes, I understand this is a Marvel comic and people are therefore going to come back from the dead, but I think this crutch is doing the book a disservice, seeing as the premise for The Initiative lends itself to introduce new characters on every issue if need be. Basically, The Initiative is the book in which new superheroes go to boot camp to train and get their license to use their powers. So, if this is the training grounds for superpeople, you can kill as many characters as you want and keep bringing new ones into the book. The KIA story arc is lots of fun, and lot of people die. Then, when you find out that well, all of those heroes actually kind of survived, it certainly diminishes the impact the story had. But maybe I’m just weird.

Proven Guilty
The eighth book in The Dresden Files series, I already talked about how awesome it is here.

Victory of Eagles
The long anticipated fifth installment in Naomi Novik’s Temeraire series, I wrote about what a great book this is just yesterday.

Harley Quinn: Preludes and Knock-Knock Jokes
Harley Quinn’s adventures as written by Karl Kesel and drawn by the great Terry Dodson are more fun and less silly than I thought they would be. Dodson’s artwork is superb, and he draws a very dynamic, very round (in all the right places), and extremely cute Harley Quinn. Kesel’s stories are entertaining, and I like his alliterations and plays on words. The only problem is that pretty much every character uses both puns and alliterations when speaking, resulting in every character sharing the same voice. I think it would have been better if only, say, Harley, spoke like that. When you have everyone doing the same thing, it just doesn’t ring true. Still, this trade is a very entertaining read!

X23: Target X
Written by Craig Kyle and Christopher Yost, this is the second X-23 miniseries, and it is a lot of fun. Kyle and Yost know how to tell a compelling story and how to write true-to-life dialogue, and when you combine this with the jaw-dropping artwork of Mike Choi and Sonya Oback, the result is a terrific read.

White Night
The ninth book in The Dresden Files series, I already told you why you should read it here.

The Collection
I had already read six novels by Bentley Little, and I was understandably curious about this book of short stories. The Collection features thirty-two tales by the horror author, and I would be hard pressed to find one I didn’t like. The subject matter is usually shocking and disturbing, and even though Little’s prose is not exactly beautiful, his stories pack a good punch, and I couldn’t help but keep reading them one after another. If you like horror, you should check out this book.

The Sword, vol. 2: Water
The second volume of this awesome series by The Luna brothers is more action oriented, as Dara faces one of the big three. I can’t wait to see what happens next!

And that's it for June. Let's see what I manage to read in my travels next month. Probably not as much, but whatever I read will hopefully be as good as what I read this month. Enjoy!