Reading List: April

Well, I managed to read three books in between my work at the farm and the time I spent hanging out with my girlfriend. Also, I got to read some cool trades, so, all in all, April turned out to be a good month reading-wise. This is what I read:

Pandora Drive
This horror novel by Tim Waggoner was so wrong and so disturbing that some of the mental pictures it conjured will stay with me for the rest of my life. A gruesome but entertaining tale!
Lazarillo Z
I bought this book while I was in Spain because I thought it could be really funny. At the same time, I was afraid it would turn out to be a horrible waste of money, but the truth is somewhere in the middle. In the vein of Price, Prejudice, and Zombies, this is a retelling of the classic story adding zombies and creatures of the night to the tale. The result is interesting and amusing, and while it won't become a classic like the one it was inspired by, I don't regret having read it.

Cycle of the Werewolf
This is an old book by Stephen King I had never read before because it was fifteen bucks at Barnes & Noble, and, for such a short story, I thought it was overpriced. I understand it is packed with beautiful illustrations by Berni Wrightson, but I simply wasn't willing to spend the money. Enter Amazon, and their great deals, and yours truly ended up buying the book. And hey, it turned out to be a very enjoyable tale. I liked the structure, the very impressionistic descriptions, and the way King uses precise brush strokes to create this world and characters. It was a quick read, but tremendously entertaining.

Iron Man: Hypervelocity
A friend of mine let me borrow this Iron Man trade because the awesome Adam Warren wrote it a few years ago. You should know by now that Warren is one of my favorite comic book creators (both as a writer and an artist) thanks to Empowered, so I was interested in reading Hypervelocity. Warren did the layouts but not the finished artwork, yet the pictures were still pretty to look at. As for the script, both story and dialogue were pure Warren, and the overwhelming technobabble fit the character perfectly and proved how literate, inventive, and resourceful Warren is when it comes to using the English language. A fun read!

Mysterius the Unfathomable
I had been eagerly anticipating this trade by Jeff Parker and Tom Fowler, and it was a lot of fun. The story was weird, interesting, twisty, and very entertaining, and the artwork by Fowler was extraordinary. A terrific read!

And that's it for April. It seems like I've settled for two or three books and a couple of trades a month, so I guess that's what you should expect next month as well. Swing by then, and find out!