Robot-mel London, United Kingdom

I read the first five Wet Moon books in the space of a couple weeks. Five ends on a bit of a cliff hanger and I was a bit devestated I'd have to wait a whole year to find out what happened to poor Trilby. I had pre-ordered a copy on Amazon but then they didn't ship it to me and told me it'd take one to two months to get a copy after it came out! I went to Forbidden Planet twice trying to find a copy but they were sold out. Eventually I had a different comic book shop order me a copy and was able to get it this week. YAY!!!!

This book is so beautiful and so emotional. The artwork and the layout of the panels is just stunning. The story really sucks you in. The contrast of Trilby crawling through the swamp with the slumber party in the begining is a brilliant combination of the horror and every day life. The whole book is very depressing and sad. I wanted to give all the characters hugs. The way they reacted to the terrible thing that happened to their friend just felt so real and so sad. But their lives kept going and the things that happened with Trilby weren't the only sad things in this book. One of the things I liked best about this book was that even though the characters were still the same beautiful men and women of the earlier books Ross had somehow managed to totally remove their sexiness as was fitting for the tone of the story. This series is the best one being produced in comics today. Now I have read 6 I am going to go back and re-read all of them. It's such a great story that is developing into something quite scary. But at the same time remains very real. I totally love it.

Because I'd been reading quite a lot of books in French about internal alchemy I thought it'd be good to go back and re-read something about internal alchemy in English as there were a couple things I wasn't sure I was understanding correctly when I was reading about them in French.

I bought this book because Isabelle Robinet is one of the best scholars in the field on this topic. It was great to see that some more of her work had been translated into English. This book comprises of four essays on alchemy. While it contains an introduction to the topic I really wouldn't recommend this as an introductory text for anyone but for people who are already familiar with the concepts of internal alchemy it is a great way to gain further understanding of this complex topic.

The first essay looked at how practitioners of internal alchemy viewed the world and it's correspondences differently to traditional yin/yang and 5 phases cosmology. Based on these ideas they would reverse them. But of course it was also more complicated than that. But it was interesting to see that in their interpretations yang and yin were never solely the one thing but contained each other within them. (Like the famous symbol, which actually was a much later invention).

The alchemical language looked at the way words and metaphors from external alchemy was used in internal alchemy. This essay helped me realise that the things that had been confusing me in the French were because they were using a different basis for some of the alchemy than I thought. It wasn't about the qi and jing as much as about yin/yang and more "physical" ideas.

The role and the meaning of numbers explained the importance and significance of different numbers within the practice. A great reference and explanation.

The last essay was the one I found most interesting. It was the one that had the most historical context and looked at how our definitions of weidan (external alchemy) and neidan (internal alchemy) were not at all consistently used that way in texts during the late Tang and early Song and that some practitioners would use them the other way round, that there wasn't a total consistency in their use. It was fascinating and insightful.

This was a really short book that I read in a couple days. But I'm glad I bought a copy, as it's also one that I think I will need to re-read several times to begin to understand everything that it contains. I think it's great that Golden Elixir Press is printing these scholarly works on alchemy at such an affordable price. I shall definitely be buying the others they've produced.

This is the first of the "lesbian" pulps I've read that I've not liked. When I was reading books about queer pulp they talked about the ones that were read by lesbians and the ones that were read by men. This definitely fell into the ones aimed at men category. It was late 1968 so it was much more sexually explicit than the other books I read but it was also the straightest! Despite the title and the description of Kat as a "lesbian" she in fact only slept with three women and six men in the story! She spent the entire time in lust/love with a man and her exploits were all geared towards seducing a guy at the magazine that she wanted to work for. While I (obviously) have nothing against bisexual characters this really just had the feel of "A lesbian just needs a good hard man to convince her of her errors".

The book was a continuous stream of sexual encounters, most of which Kat didn't enjoy at all (only the men could make her orgasm) and she saw herself in a downward spiral of degredation and realised at the end that she was a "slut". There was none of the introspection or insight I've read in other pulp books. There were occasional moments but they were all about depressing things. It was a nice change to read a book where the woman was at home with her sexuality but when she was interacting with women she was written exactly as a male character, with other men referring to her with male pet names. (But then she slept with them anyway). I'm afraid I wouldn't recommend this one and am kinda confussed why it was reprinted. Surely there are much better pulps out there, I know all the others I've read have been brilliant

I must admit I do not enjoy the new Love and Rockets as much as I enjoy the collections. But I think that is just because I prefer longer stories to shorter ones. This is a fairly slim graphic novel that is divided up into 5 stories. Having read Gilbert's Palomar series I'm getting more out of his stories than when I first started reading them. But I must admit the cast of characters is so big I spend a lot of time trying to remember who everyone is and how they are related. The story is (mostly) followable without remembering but it is much better when you can remember all the connections. Jamie's story mostly focuses on his new character of Frogmouth, who honestly I find a little annoying. But this time he introduces us to her younger sister, whose a funny looking wannabe punk and I enjoyed her stories much more. The third issue of this series remains the best for me as it had just such an amazing heartbreakingly good story. But it is still nice to read these and get new stories.

Tereska is definitely turning into my favourite newly discovered author for this year. I just want to read everything she's written. This book was about a young girl who was going to a Catholic school in Paris at the start of World War 2. It's about the lives and loves of her and her friends and all the mistakes people make while they are growing up. The main character is interesting and insightful (and quite bisexual). She comes from a non-conventional family where her father is an atheist intellectual happily having a mistress and a wife and they are all ok with that. (Though some of her friends find it shocking). I'm not really that fond of books about teenagers, despite seeming to have read so many of them lately. But this one was really good. From one prespective it was interesting to see the approach of war and how that made everyone feel a bit more reclese and confused. The book had a wonderful part where the young girl and her friend went through a series of bars in Paris looking for the friend's lover who had stolen the families gold. They went to strip clubs and gay bars and bars where everyone was cross dressing, and they picked up a drunk Polish girls and the woman who was having an affair with her father. It was all very lovely and strange. This is the fourth book by Tereska that I've read and I think I have four or five left to read. At the rate I'm going I will probably manage them all this year!

This book was mentioned in the Jack the Ripper and the Occult book I read awhile ago. I was unable to locate a printed version but Bill made me a gorgeous hand bound copy from a free ebook that I found. This book is everything I had hoped Marie Corelli would be but without her style. It is set an ambigious time and place with a man who is instantly in love with this beautiful woman who it turns out is a magician. The story has them as reincarnated souls that are bound together throughout time. Fleta is attempting to join a mysterious order and fails. The plot of the book goes in many unexpected places but it is part fairy tale part occult. The diversions and the unexpectedness of it all I throughly enjoyed. The only downfall of this book is that the style is a little bland and some of the descriptions can be a bit confussing. It would have been amazing I think to take Collins' ideas and characters and have them written in Marie Corelli's lavish style. As it was I still really enjoyed it and will have to see if she's written any other novels. It was so great to read a book about magic where the main character was a woman.

I borrowed a copy of this from the library as due to the popularity of the tv series and the out-of-printness of this book copies on amazon start around £50! I have to say I would NOT pay £50 for this. It was an enjoyable enough story. It felt more like generic fantasy rather than GOT. The similarity being the names of the places the characters came from, and even in a comic being too many to easily keep track of. But it was much more a generic story about a would-be-knight than anything else. It also highlighted the lack of roles for women in that world as there was only one female character who had two conversations in the whole story. The art really isn't all that great though. Standard Marvel/DC type and looks kinda cartoony and not very interesting. The story was quite enjoyable though and I found myself getting caught up in it and wanting to finish it all in one go. I have reserved the second volume from the library. Not a brilliant graphic novel by any streach of the imagination but alright to read.

I enjoyed this queer pulp novel an awful lot. It was such a wonderful mixture of realism and fantasy. The main character Paula was living poor in New York with an alcholic father and a soon-to-be-proposing boyfriend. At 18 she was working a dead end job as a secretary and looking forward to being married. But then she met her fiance's aunt and all that changed. Paula's relationship with Byrne definitely bored on the fantasy part of the story. She met a lesbian instantly fell in love and changed her whole world. It was like there was a story of this ordinary girl trapped in this world of poverty and alcholism who practically invented this perfect rich lesbian who'd be able to take her away from it all. The mixture of the reality and the fantasy was odd but made for interesting reading.

Part two where you learned of Bryne and Greta's relationship felt much more realistic. Here were two girls who fell in love and started having sex. Not realising there was anything wrong Greta told her mother how WONDERFUL it all was and her mother freaked out. The resulting breakdown Greta suffered was realistic and terribly sad. One thing that bothered me about the book was how Greta was then portrayed as a horrible monster. She was violent, an alcoholic and had sever mental health issues but you couldn't help feel sympathy for her anyway. It also raised the question of responsibility and happiness in relationships and how much you should sacrifice yourself and feel responsible for another's behaviour.

While the book was flawed it was still very enjoyable and I will definitely track down more books by this author.

So when we were in Paris in March I found a french copy of this but decided not to buy it as Paris was full of lovely French comics that hadn't been translated from English ones. So I was able to borrow this from a friend. It was really great to have a 40K story where the main character was female. It didn't make any difference to the story that she was a woman, she behaved like all the male characters in 40K stories but I kinda liked that.

The book is a collection of comics, done by different artists and I'm guessing writers and as such the story isn't nearly as cohesive as you'd expect a single graphic novel to be. The story seemed to go off in several different directions but it was still enjoyable. My only complaint was the version I read was novel sized which made it too small to see all the art well and sometimes had trouble reading things. The French version was a large hardback (And I'm pretty sure it was colored) which I think would be a much better to read it.

I started reading this book over a decade ago. My friend and I had gone on a long weekend trip to San Fransisco to hang out with the queer dyke culture there. My friend bought the book and I read the first couple pages while coming back on the plan, but I hadn't slept from the night out before where many drinks had been consumed and I had succesfully managed to pick up a girl in a nightclub. It was all very decedant and the book seemed a perfect mirror for life in San Fransisco and hanging out in the queer clubs in Seattle. Though of course I was too fucked up at the time to read much and I forgot about it for years until I found another copy at the library.

The book is a series of chapters about lives of punk dykes in San Fransisco in the mid 90s. More memoir than fiction, not even the names are changed, but that sense of reality and glimpse it give you are intense. I totally loved it to start with but there is just a series of women one after the other, drunken nights and there is no arc or destination or coherance to it so after awhile it just seems a bit repatative. I think it probably would have been better if the stories of the girls had been balanced with more stories about life outside of the sex. There were some moments of pure brilliance though, visiting her girlfriend's family in the South was pretty horrible and striking as were the stories about prostitution, the mushroom trip was really descriptive and told so very well. I got this from the library and have already ordered another book by the author. Having read so many older queer books it's nice to read one more recent.

So I read Fun Home which was Bechdel's book about her dad where every chapter got more complicated and showed a deeper insight into his life and their relationship and it was all very interesting and tragic. I was interested to read her book about her mother having had one or two issues with my own. But I have to say overall there really wasn't much here. While Fun Home gave you a really good sense of the complexity of the dad, the mom was treated much more superficially, she was a teacher, she wrote poetry, she liked to act in local theatre. You'd eavesdrop on her converstations with Alison but really there wasn't much there. Likewise there didn't seem to be much in their relationship. Alison felt unwanted and not as valued as her brothers but really her mum didn't seem that bad at all and it seemed like they had a fairly normal relationship. There were hints of more trauma beneath the surface about her mom's homophobia but that was hardly touched on. Likewise while fun home was all layers this book felt very flat and didn't really get any deeper. I'm afraid that despite having a psychology degree, and courses in child development I just wasn't that interested in her favourite child psychologist that she kept quoting. The best bits for me were about Virginia Wolf which made me convinced I really should read more of her books. This book was good it just wasn't fantastic like her last one. I think you'd probably get more out of it if you have more of a typical relationship with your mother as it seemed to be aiming at finding some general truth about mothers and daughters which I'm afraid because of my personal circumstances I just couldn't identify with at all.

I must admit i was expecting a bit more from the first cyberman adventure. I liked the artic base and the astronaunts (ironic that they considered there should be black astronauts in 2000 but that they still referred to him as a negro). I liked the old and sick pre-regeneration doctor and the way Polly and Ben tried to compensate for him. It seemed like a good start but then it all kinda fell apart. The arrival of the other planet and the cyberman's lack of a plan seemed rather silly. Of course the biggest problem was the sexism in this story. Polly, being a woman, wasn't considered a big enough threat to even be locked up with the Doctor and Ben and all she had to do was make cups of tea and coffee!!! Which she got yelled at for doing wrong! It's only a few years away from Zoe defeating the entire invasion fleet and sending missles into orbit with the power of her brains! But what a big difference those few years make. I love Polly and Anneke Wills but this was just too sad.

This book was mentioned in the queer pulp book I read. It was originally published in the 19th century as a true account of a woman who lived in the "Wild West" dressed as a man. This version was published by the University of Oklamhoma Press and contains several different versions of Charley's story.

The "autobiography" reads to start with like a novel, it tells the story of her parents who had her out of wedlock, the mother thinking her father was dead and marrying a man she didn't love because she was already pregnant. It was all very dramatic. When Charley was born she spent time living with servants before being sent to school. She seemed to have gotten married about 12 or 13 then when her husband was murdered she decided to seek revenge on the killer by dressing as a man and hunting him down. Her life as a man to start with seems very unrealistic. She claims to have made 1000s of dollars working on boats which seems rather unlikely. But parts of the story definitely sound more plausible, running a bar and on the trail west which were excerpts taken from her diary. It seems impossible reading this how much was factual but that doesn't really matter as it is an entertaining story anyway.

The next part is the account of Mountain Charley written by a newspaper man. The woman he describes has a totally different background and different adventures. Dressing as a solider and joining the army. I found his section much less interesting.

I'm not really very interested in the US in the 19th century or cowboys but nonetheless this was an interesting story of someone living the life of another gender. So I would recommend it.

The edition of this book that I read had a very 70s looking threesome on the cover. The books starts with a young Jewish girl on a train fleeing for her life with her family in 1940. They are all heading to Portugal to escape the war. The story is the tale of this group of refugees. Most of the characters are Jewish but others are fleeing France for other reasons. Some want to flee the war completly traveling to the US or Brasil. Others want to go and join the fight in the UK. In the meantime they are waiting in this beautiful beach resort where it is sunny and they are untouched by the war. The characters are all very interesting and the book gives a nice insight into their lives before the war and the different ways they are dealing with their trauma.

There is a bit of sex in the book as the characters have affairs and try out different diversions to keep their mind off what is happening. One of the things that I love most of Tereska Torres is that her books always (or at least all the ones I've read so far) have queer characters. It's just very normal and a part of life. It's so nice to see, particularly in a world war II setting where the reality of queer people is often missing. Here there is a married woman who had a brief flirtation with lesbianism in her youth but fled it and got married. There is a beautiful young girl who falls desperately in love with her even though she has no idea what she's doing, until she reads Radclyff Hall and suddenly the wool is lifted from her eyes, so to speak.

I really enjoyed this. Torres is rapidly becoming one of my favourite authors and I am trying to track down and read everything she's written.

The third book of the Hungar Games was quite possibly the grimest book I've ever read. While not quite as good as the first one I did enjoy it much better than the second one. I loved the fact that the "hidden" society that showed up to rescue everyone was just as corrupt and horrible as the one that people had been fighting against. It all felt so horribly pessimistic and realistic. The way they used Katnis and the way everything was centered around propaganda was quite depressing. One thing that would have been nice would have seen how people actually took a more active role in the rebellion and how they were able to break such strong control by the central government. So much of that happening "off screen" made it seem less realistic than it should have been. The last 100 pages or so though more than made up for it. Things just kept happening one after the other each more unbelievable than the last. I can't believe how good this series was. I would recommend it very highly. I think it is probably the best fiction I've read all year

I read the second volume of hunger games yesterday. It was enjoyable but I didn't love it quite as much as the first one. In a way the world seemed even darker which was very good. The problem I found was that Katniss didn't seem to have quite as much agency. While in the first book she was very much a pawn of the games and the people she was handling she felt independent in her mind and actions. In the second book, particularly with the reveal at the end she felt much less in control. The fact that President Snow was such an active character was also a bit disappointing as it put a face and a person to blame for the nameless and pervasive evil that was in the first book. However, despite all that I found it very enjoyable. The way the different rebellions were handled the way it all seemed so very hopeless. I think I enjoyed the paranoia and the claustrophobia of the first half of the book the most. Started book three afterwards and I'm looking forward to seeing how it all turns out.

I have to say this book was a bit disappointing. It's one of the first things that either Burroughs or Kerouac wrote and I'm really glad I had the chance to read it. It captures the events (again) of the Lucien Carr David Kammerer murder. Having just read a better version it was a bit disappointing. Neither writer managed to get anywhere near their later prose styles. What it was was like visiting old friends and seeing what they were up to. It was another interesting and different version of the same people hanging out in New York. Listening in on conversations not heard before and getting a new glimpse into their lives. Interesting just nowhere near as good as later novels.

I read the first book of the hunger games triliogy and now understand why people love it so much. I grabbed a copy at smiths for emergency train reading and couldn't put it down. The lead charcter is just engrossing. She's strong, smart but also angry and surley. The book just has the best gender balance of any distopian fiction ever. I really recommend it!They are really engaging. I put the first one down to eat dinner and do an afternoon of work but read it all in a few hours. For a kids book there was an awful lot going on

I think it really is an excellent book for girls. It reminded me why I spent my teen years reading science fiction. I didn't see her as that indecisive just really focused on staying alive. I thought it was a nice twist that it was the boy who was in love and the girl was just thinking what do I have to do to survive this and keep my family safe. I don't think I want to see the film though as I think it would ruin my idea of what she's like.

I also liked how in the first book while the culture in the capital was supposed to be horrible the people she interacted with were all really nice. As were the "rich" people in her village. The threat and the evil was very undefined and pervasive but not really something tangible, like voldemort, that was identifiable. With the exception of the "careers" it was kinda just good people letting bad things happen. And even in the case of the nicest people support and encourage the killing, I'm thinking of the designer who is really nice but whose job it is to prepare children to kill.

I think Katniss in the first book is powerless to go against the society even though she risks her life hunting to break the rules she's not willing to help the girl and the boy she sees trying to escape. And seems to hate that she has to go along with it but when she acts against it when she gets angry about the trials she's then terrified her family will be punished. It really is a very good example of a powerful distopia that people hate but support cause they can't do anything to change it (though I suspect that changes in the next two books)

It was very claustrophobic and very scary and I realy enjoyed it.