Books of Spring (2022)

"In Lankhmar on one murky night... met for the first time those two dubious heroes and whimsical scoundrels, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser."

May 31, 2022

This email is coming a bit late because I was sick with Covid, which set my writing and publishing schedules back by a few weeks. I’m doing better now but only just getting back into my regular work habits.

Anyway, this is the second installment of my “Books of…” feature (the first is HERE ). Over the course of the last few months, I’ve read a hodgepodge of different things, but I wasn’t sure which books to include in my list below and which to skip. I read a few books this spring which were fun and breezy but not exactly ones I would recommend in this newsletter, and others I read that were very good but very dark and not quite fantastical enough to include in a list like this. Finally, I’ve been reading a lot with my daughter before bedtime, and while I’ve enjoyed several books quite a bit, they aren’t exactly meant for adult readers. (I will say, if you want something to inspire creativity in a young person and you don’t mind scatological humor, then Cat Kid Comic Club is really excellent. It’s inspired ME to write and draw my own comics!)

While my winter reading was filled with revelatory novels that felt ripe for sharing, my spring reading was less fulfilling. I still read some awesome books, but the experience itself lacked the same cohesion I felt during my winter reading. That being said, the following three books were important to me in different ways, which I’ll try to articulate below.

Alright, enough prattling. Here are the Books of Spring (2022).

All of the Marvels

I feel like I first heard about this book from Austin Kleon, but I can’t say for sure. All I know is that I loved the idea of a guy who took it upon himself to read every single Marvel superhero comic ever made, which is exactly what author Douglas Wolk did before writing All of the Marvels.

I have always been a DC comics gal — mostly due to the heavy influence Batman: The Animated Series and Justice League: The Animated Series had on my adolescence and young adulthood. With the cartoon DC universe inspiring me, I started reading comic books, mostly DC and Vertigo stuff. I tried to read some of the Grant Morrison X-Men comics (then later the Joss Whedon run), and I dipped my toes into the Mark Millar Ultimates series, but I could never quite figure out what was happening, and the DC stuff just seemed to make more sense. I had more grounding in the DC characters due to the animated shows, and there was something appealing about the totally made-up world of DC that made it feel less like a our gritty and grim real world and more like a fantastical playground. If I had to choose between the “real” New York City of Marvel or the made-up Metropolis of DC, I was ready to punch my plane ticket to Metropolis.

For several years, I bought stacks of comics each month, my expenses growing higher and higher and my wallet getting thinner and thinner. Finally, after I had more comics languishing in the “unread” pile than I could justify to myself, I decided to cut back. I realized I was reading out of obligation and not out of genuine pleasure. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy comics, but things had gotten so bloated, and I was reading too many series, that I just couldn’t keep up. It was the law of diminishing returns. So I stopped my subscriptions and eventually resold a lot of my collection to a comics store. Comics were fun, but they just weren’t that fun anymore.

Flash-forward to a few months ago when I picked up a copy of Wolk’s All of the Marvels, and suddenly my kid-like enthusiasm for comics came roaring back. The way Wolk weaves together the various narrative and thematic threads of Marvel’s superhero comics made me see just what an enticing and utterly bonkers project the whole Marvel comics universe really is. Wolk’s book is not an encyclopedia of all the different Marvel series, plot lines, and characters; instead, he deals in themes and overarching narratives, in motifs and scope. After reading this book, I have a much better sense of what the Marvel comics are about as a whole, and how the different characters and series thread together to create this whole. The things Wolk chooses to highlight are idiosyncratic at times, but that’s all for the better. This isn’t a dry history or impersonal reference work; this is the work of a singular point of view and voice, of a man filtering the Marvel world through his own experiences, beginning as a young man and ending as an adult and father.

(The book is worth reading just for the chapter on Master of Kung Fu alone. It’s a fascinating look at a series that overcame its own limitations and prejudiced roots, which took reader feedback seriously, and which ultimately turned into something much richer and more nuanced than it had any right to be. I had never heard of this series before, but now I’m curious to seek it out.)

More than anything else, Wolk’s book inspired me to start reading comics again. Thanks to my Hoopla app through my local library, I have access to comics for free, and when reading on my ipad, it’s almost like having the books in my hands. This time, though, I’m not just reading DC. I’m reading more Marvel comics because for once, I understand what’s going on, I have a slew of recommendations via Wolk’s book, and I understand that there’s no need to actually be a completest when it comes to reading superhero comics. This was the great insight for me when reading Wolk’s book. He states right from the beginning that the best way to read Marvel comics is to just start reading: Pick a series that looks interesting and go for it. There’s nothing wrong with starting to read and not knowing what’s going on. In fact, as Wolk argues, that’s just part of the process. Marvel’s comics are designed to be entered at any point, through any path. Getting caught up in the wave of the story, getting carried along even though you’re not sure where you’re going or what’s gone on before, is all part of the process.

I tried this theory out myself. I was interested in the Infinity Gauntlet stuff (mostly due to my husband’s explanations of things; not really due to the Marvel movies which I have not seen). I picked up the collection of the Infinity Gauntlet six-book series on Hoopla and started reading. I had almost no idea who any of the characters were or about their relationships to one another (beyond the more famous characters like Captain America, Thor, and Dr. Strange). Pretty much everything was opaque to me at first. But I followed Wolk’s advice and let myself get swept along with the story. And you know what? It worked! I got caught up in the narrative, in the totally over-the-top melodrama of it all, and I had a blast. I found a new way of approaching comics that helped unlock the key. I had been treating Marvel (and DC) comics like I would a fantasy series like Harry Potter or A Song of Ice and Fire; I thought I had to read everything and follow every thread in order for it to “work.” Instead, I realized that I can just read whatever looks interesting and let the story wash over me. I realized I could live with the confusion on some level, and once I accepted this, I ended up having a lot more fun reading superhero comics.

Circe

Everyone knows about Song of Achilles. It’s Madeline Miller’s more famous book, and objectively speaking, rightly so. It’s tragic and beautifully written; it hits all the feels.

But, honestly, I think I like Circe more. Maybe because the central character is a woman, and I found her more relatable in that sense. Or maybe it’s because I really love stories about people who can do magic — about what it’s like to have the power to transform and alter reality — and Circe is very much about the power and the peril of doing magic.

The story was also more surprising in a way. I already knew the basic outline of the Achilles, Patroclus, Trojan War stuff, and while I know the basics of The Odyssey too, and Circe’s role in that story, I either didn’t know or had completely forgotten about her connection to so many other Greek myths and characters. Circe has SO MUCH Greek mythology in it, it took me back to my elementary school days reading Edith Hamilton’s Greek Mythology and watching Clash of the Titans on VHS. This book has it all: the Titans, Glaucus, Scylla, Medea, the Minotaur, Daedalus, Prometheus, the Olympians, and of course, Odysseus and the stuff from The Odyssey. And at the center of it all, a goddess who is rejected by her own immortal family, a goddess who has powers that even the Olympians fear, a goddess who is inexplicably drawn to mortals in a way that will alter both their lives and her own. I loved Circe as a character, a woman both powerful and insecure, both vulnerable and fearless.

The way the story dealt with things like motherhood and the female experience also really resonated with me, and I appreciated how true Circe’s own thoughts and emotions felt. Miller has a gift for writing fantasy that has a deep emotional resonance, and for crafting characters that are drawn from mythology but feel absolutely real.

I don’t want to get into too many specifics because part of my enjoyment of this book was in being surprised by how things turned out. Most readers probably won’t like Circe more than Song of Achilles, but for me, it was just as good if not better than Miller’s first novel.

Swords and Deviltry

I feel like everyone knows Conan. Even if most people have never read the Robert E. Howard stories, they’ve seen or heard of the 1980s movies. Conan the Barbarian is the quintessential pulp fantasy hero, the epitome of Sword and Sorcery.

But Swords and Deviltry is not a Conan book. It features another set of Sword and Sorcery icons, but these icons are not nearly as well-known as Howard’s Cimmerian. Which is a shame! This was my first foray into the stories of Lankhmar, and my first experience with Fritz Leiber’s inimitable duo, Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser — but it will definitely not be my last! I know there are tons of readers out there who’ve read all of Leiber’s Lankhmar stories, but I am not one of them, and I know I’m not alone. I feel like those in the know — those who listen to things like the Appendix N Book Club — might have familiarity with the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, but I also have a sense that these stories have been lost amidst the vast wealth of fantasy literature that’s come out in the half-century since Leiber’s stories were published in book form. They didn’t get a big-budget Hollywood movie to keep their memory alive like Howard’s Conan.

Swords and Deviltry starts with the origin stories of the main characters. Fafhrd’s origin starts in the frozen north where he lives with his mother in a community that is ruled for the most part by his mother and her cadre of women who use magic to keep everybody in line. When Fafhrd falls for a traveling actress, he faces the wrath of his mother and the young woman he is betrothed to. I was surprised and delighted by the way that Fafhrd is depicted as a brash and sometimes foolish young man, by his sense of humor and his fallibility, and by the richness of Leiber’s world building.

Similarly, in the Mouser origin story, I loved the mixture of high fantasy (lots of magic and wizardry) with the relatable and flawed characterization of Mouse and Ivrian. I also really liked the horror-tinged flavor of this story and the final one in the collection, “Ill-Met in Lankhmar.”

“Ill-Met in Lankhmar” is perhaps the best-known of the three stories that make up Swords and Deviltry, and without giving too much away, what struck me most about this story was the way it mixed sword and sorcery with weird horror stuff and layered in playful banter and fun character moments. I told my husband it was a bit like reading a Conan story with Peter Parker’s Spiderman as the central character. Mouser and Fafhrd get into one mishap after another, and I found myself laughing and chuckling along with their schemes. But then, on a dime, the story can turn from playful to horrific, and that sense of swashbuckling adventure mixed with cosmic, existential dread was very different from the Conan stories I was more familiar with.

I must say, I LOVED this first collection of Lankhmar stories. Fafhrd and Gray Mouser are lovable rogues and at the same time, deeply flawed and fascinating people. They felt very real to me. Leiber’s writing is just the right shade of being pulpy without being purple. And the world itself — most especially the decadent and foul streets of Lankhmar’s metropolis — was vividly drawn and very memorable.

If you’ve only vaguely heard of Lankhmar and Leiber’s books, I highly recommend you seek them out and begin reading (also, speaking of the Hoopla app, if you’d rather skip paying for the ebooks, consider renting them for free on Hoopla). They are definitely old pulp fantasy from last century, but they still have a lot to offer the contemporary fantasy reader.

So what about you? What have you been reading this spring?

Jennifer M. Baldwin

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