Rosewater Press

I know, I know. I said literally one Little Aimless Library ago that I wasn't gonna cover serialized comics, and then I come back with a standard magazine-sized floppy with “issue one” right on the cover. This sucker isn't a fragment of an ongoing story, though: it's an anthology comic that ran for all of one issue. It ran me four bucks and costs only a little more online, so it's not like I'm asking much of anyone I might inspire to seek it out. All my qualms about comics are void in this case. And how could I not talk about something with this cover art? Jesus Christ, it's a thing of beauty. Artist and co-editor Pat Boyette didn't have to go half this hard; remember, this is issue one of an unproven comic in an unpopular genre from a publisher who seem to have barely existed. There are plenty of reasons to wish industrial society had never progressed past its sunny optimism phase, and for me art like this is a big one. I miss when space felt like our glor...

It’s probably going to become apparent, as this series goes on, that I read more comics and manga than prose. Of course, I can’t predict the future. I have no way of knowing which books will stick out to me. Maybe I’ll never write about sequential art again. But the simple fact of the matter is I grew up in a home that didn’t discriminate. Not against comics, I mean. My father brought Aquaman into my world with the same reverence he held for Ivanhoe or Ray Bradbury. It was all literature to me.          T hat being said, there is one major mark against both comics and manga: serialization. It’s not a problem for me as a fan; anyone who’s been to the comic shop with me knows how fat my pull box can get. But as a reviewer, I’d rather recommend standalone media, works that only necessitate a single purchase. I don’t want to saddle anybody with a subscription. So while I’ve been greatly enjoying everything from Absolute Martian Manhunter to Don’t Call It Myst...

 I'd like to try something a bit different today: a review of a normal book, something a little afield of the sort of geeky prose this blog was created to discuss. Another ambition of mine, aside from inspiring non-Who fans to give Faction Paradox a shot, is to get Who and Faction Paradox fans to broaden their horizons. As I've alluded to in the past, genre and series fiction - for a variety of reasons - can be an isolating place to be. There is little belief in movement to and from this realm, both from those who read it and those who don't. I'd like to start doing short, snappy reviews of non-Who books - non-genre books, even - to get some of y'all out of your comfort zones. I've tentatively titled this post "The Little Aimless Library" in reference to my Aimless Thoughts  series. Subject to change, of course.     The book I'd like to talk about today is Transit  by Anna Seghers, a 1944 novel about refugees in the second World War, translated fro...