roach's reviews
269 reviews

 

(Quote translated from German.)

Geoff Johns' Aquaman was an earlier attempt to update the character for a modern audience by dealing with its reputation head-on. In this, Aquaman is confronted with the same opinions that people have about this DC franchise in real life. They make fun of his ability to "speak" with fish, joke about his goofy outfit, and ask him whether he's seen all the funny parodies of his online. No one takes him seriously and he deals with that.
There has been other media since then that tried to tackle this reputation of the character, like the 2018 Aquaman movie or, more successfully, the show The Boys with its stand-in character called "The Deep". But this comic came before all of that. So while its attempts at incorporating the character's reception and standing in modern pop culture into the story might be a bit on the nose now, it must have been pretty fresh back in 2011.

The actual story itself is pretty decent with some cool visuals including a bunch of humanoid deep-sea monsters wanting to feed on humans. But as with most comic book serials, the story doesn't go in-depth much and doesn't give much to hang onto afterwards. So, this compilation of modernized Aquaman comics pretty much just does what a comic does most of the time: Colorful, light entertainment for a quick read. Nothing more, nothing less. 

 

As a huge fan of the experimental rap trio clipping., I always thought that their 3-track EP The Deep was an overlooked project in their discography. When I found out that there was a whole novel to flesh out that exact concept, I was very interested.

The setup about mermaid descendants from African women that were thrown overboard from slave ships is immediately intriguing and the story deals a lot with what it means to grapple with the difficult history of a people.
The mystical traditions of this mermaid people, the wajinru, work very well as metaphor to explore the importance of history and the burden of memory, but also generational trauma and the power of community. Solomon manages to build up a good atmosphere around this unique setting and puts together a couple of very interesting characters.

The afterword written by clipping. themselves also adds some nice words about how this story was created and morphed from storyteller to storyteller, which adds a bit of another layer to it. 

 

Jenny Odell's How to Do Nothing has been getting pretty divisive reviews from what I had seen before starting this book and after having read it myself, I can see where those came from.

I enjoyed the first half of this book a lot. It's not that Odell opened up my eyes to something I wasn't already aware of, but it was very satisfying to see it all put into words so well and spiced up with references to historic events and other texts. The first half of the book deals more specifically with the fact that people are more and more evaluated by their productivity these days, with rising pressure for people to put usefulness before any personal needs. Odell examines what "usefulness" and "productivity" actually mean and how we ended up with these definitions controlling our lives. To add some color, she includes stories of people throughout history who tried to resist and escape these exploitative systems, which was really interesting to me. And, of course, she adds her own anecdotes, as this book is also partly about her own journey following the titular question.
It's only in the second half of the book when Odell works herself up to the subject of the fight for our attention more directly and writes about the constant flood of media and engagement, and how that cripples our abilities to form grounded opinions and make our own decisions.

I think a lot of the criticisms about this book come from a place where people expected a more explicit taking apart of how media is designed to waste our time and how to escape it. But this book is more than that and takes a bunch of steps back to look at the bigger picture, which I actually liked. Like I said, the productivity-obsessed development of society is a very interesting subject to me and her exploration of that was very engaging for me.
It's the second half that let me down a bit more though. It's also here where Odell's personal anecdotes can be a bit much. For the most part, they add a good tone to the whole thing. She talks a lot about birdwatching and it's actually a pretty fitting analogy for connecting with the world around us a bit more again and purposefully shifting our attention to something that enriches our personal experience on this planet instead of fulfilling expectations of others. But it does get a bit repetitive at points and I can see how people could get annoyed by that after a while.

Still, this book has very strong chapters and makes for a generally thought-provoking study of the systems that we are born into these days. About the evolution of capitalistic tendencies growing into any and every part of our lives trying to exploit every part of our existence. 

May Leitz's second novel is a lot more sincere and personal than Fluids was. There are still plenty of similar themes and subjects, but Girl Flesh goes into a less pulpy direction and instead focuses more on character growth and incorporates some self-reflection of the author.

The two main characters are arguably two pieces of Leitz herself and many of their plights and hopes seem to mirror the author's own personality to a degree. The one being a musician and the other an online micro-celebrity writing about horror and/or true crime.
As a content creator herself who has spent hours researching, discussing, and analyzing true crime, gore media, and grimy fiction, May Leitz explores what that might do to a person through the characters in her book. The guilt of participating in making a spectacle of someone else's suffering, as well as how these stories fuel the growing fire to fight injustice. The book also takes on the unique experience of being a secluded person experiencing small-scale fame and all the parasocial relationships that come with it. Subjects like childhood trauma through a problematic household and transphobia are also subjects that pop up. Many of which are probably at least partially inspired by personal experiences and it makes for interesting character building in-between the gruesome violence.
It's also a fresh breeze of air to get a story like this, filled with and inspired by so much despair and suffering, that's spearheaded by two women with a genuinely harmonious relationship, ready to fight. It is satisfying to see them empower each other and demand a better future for themselves while refusing to succumb to victimhood.

This was a very fitting follow-up to Leitz's first book and I'm looking forward to where she's going from here. 

 

What a strange, strange text this one is.
This weird book with the aggressively vulgar title by award-winning Swiss author and journalist Urs Allemann is a strange literary experiment that's hard to take in, hard to rate, hard to talk about, and all of that kind of feeds right into the point of it.

This book isn't truly about the repulsive titular activity. Rather it's about a narrator trying and failing to imagine said thing which works as an exercise on the power of the written word without real-life actions. It reads to me like an exploration of what language can do to us through a single word. The title is such an abhorrent concept that nothing else is needed to disturb the reader or make them cringe. It's so awful that we don't even want to acknowledge, let alone imagine it. And neither does the narrator, really. He goes on rambling about how he is sentenced to follow the title and spins up an incoherent story in a desperate attempt to convince the reader that what he's saying is true. But he fails miserably because he can't actually fill it with sense or purpose.

The narrator's disgusting ramblings might start out shocking and difficult to read, but become more and more ridiculous as you read on. I had full on belly-laughs while reading some of this because the narrator tries so hard to be vulgar while barely being able to string his insanity together into a coherent story. Urs Allemann creates a literary character that's trying to be relevant but chooses a shortsighted strategy. The narrator's story isn't real. It's all lies. And the reader just watches the narrator stumble through his own language.
The author created a story about storytelling in which we watch the narrator character fail to create something from the awful lie he chose. Where we watch him fail to follow through with his own thought experiment and use the power that the abhorrent titular word has over us to any substantial effect. 

Why is the narrator ruminating on this specific subject for so long? Why is he trying to convince the reader all of this nonsense is actually going on when it's clear it's just his limited imagination? Does the narrator want attention? Does the narrator think that a story needs to be shocking to have an effect on the reader?
I think the narrator is trying to prove to himself that he's even capable of intellectually handling such a horrible subject. He's trying to gain power over this word that has a power over him. The fact that the title of this book is so abhorrent and repulsive to virtually everyone shows how much power this written word has over us and the narrator is trying to conquer it. To win over it and use it as a tool, the way words are supposed to work for us. And he continually fails at that.
The way his disconnected ramblings point at how writers and readers process text is pretty clever. At one point the narrator talks about how a stabbed baby would bleed, but stabbed paper, blank or written on, does not. Paper doesn't bleed, no matter the pain. Because what's on the paper isn't real and we, as writers and readers, create its meaning. And yet it can make us feel intensely uncomfortable. It's an allegory for how there is a difference between the act and the word, even if it makes us feel similarly. An allegory for how an idea can be repulsive even if it isn't really happening and how our mind processes those ideas. And that's the whole crux that Allemann's text explores through this.

 

Once again, Philip K. Dick comes with a future world full of interesting concepts ripe for exploration.
A societal divide between psychically gifted people with different abilities and the ones that fear manipulation and invasion of privacy by those people... An industry for an artificial afterlife to let the living communicate with their loved ones even after death... A capitalistic nightmare of having to pay your own apartment door with cold hard cash to be allowed to enter or leave... Lots of wild stuff.

The book introduces all of these subjects and makes for another typically entertaining Dickish scifi world. All the different elements make for lots of creative implications that could have been explored much further and the book very often made me wish it would take a step further before moving on some other way.
For example, when a psychically gifted character is introduced with complicated, potentially god-like time manipulation abilities fairly early on, I was very curious how Dick is gonna handle this character without writing himself into a dead end or a deus ex machina situation. But the story pretty quickly went into a completely different direction that left all of that potential behind for the most part.
In some ways Ubik is like a colorful bag of clever individual surprises, but things can feel a bit disconnected which made the stakes less effective for me. In fact, I wish the book was longer to tie things up more thoroughly.

As it stands, Ubik was an entertaining casual read, but not a book that left much of a lasting impression on me. It's well-written and got those fun creative ideas from Dick, but didn't tie it all up into the neatest package. 

 

(Quote translated from German.)

I've read one or two short stories by Junji Ito before, but this was the first time I grabbed a full-length work of his (or at least the first volume of it).

Right from the first pages, Ito's beautiful art style jumped out to me again. He has such a good eye for framing his subjects and locations, and so many creative ideas for all these otherworldy, surreal visuals.
The setup of the plot makes for good ground to string a bunch of different creepy situations together and I enjoyed most of the chapters that were included in this first volume.

It's really easy to see how Junji Ito became such a huge name in the horror genre. His body horror concepts and distinct creepy atmosphere are a ton of fun. 

 

Gabrielle Wittkop's The Necrophiliac is a vile novella written in incredibly engaging and poetic prose. The book is structured like the diary of a man who spends his free time digging out corpses of all genders and age groups to have his way with them in the safety of his own four walls. Wittkop doesn't shy away from any and all of the gritty details during these endeavors and through that builds up a constant discrepancy between foul crime and oddly romantic appreciation. So much so that it can become humorous at points but in the end, it still takes a very skilled writer to paint a descriptive subject of such a disgusting act with so much emotional color.

The book doesn't necessarily follow something like a plot or conventional three-act-structure, but serves more like a straight-forward character study in which the author picks up on themes like one's powerlessness after death, the beauty of impermanence in a macabre way, and what it means to appreciate something.
I thought for a long time about how exactly I would rate this book. It is undoubtedly captivating, unique, and very well-written, but I think I need (or want to) read this again someday to really get into the points it's trying to make. I definitely want to read more of Wittkop as well. 

 

The most remarkable thing about McCarthy's The Road is probably its accomplished sense of emptiness. If you are looking for a post-apocalyptic story that believably portrays the world as an empty, dead landscape, this book is gonna have you covered.
The book also picks up on some interesting existential themes with its focus on this father and son duo trying to survive in this desolate world. The father's moral struggle with raising a child in such a hopeless, joyless world is an interesting one. As well as the way death changes its meaning when life becomes such a haunting experience.
It's unflinchingly dreary and cold, but never completely hopeless, so to not make the entire journey stakeless.
The ending, without spoiling anything, was a bit too straightforward to me and could have capitalized more on some of the aforementioned themes, but it is a solid, fair conclusion to the story in its own right. 

 

(Quote translated from German.)

I'm absolutely not the target audience and I wouldn't have read this Sailor Moon spin-off manga if my niece hadn't wanted it for her birthday. But seeing that she is such a huge fan of the franchise right now and I'm remembering watching some episodes of the show myself when I was a kid, I was curious to read this one before I had to wrap it up for the birthday party.

To me, the Sailor Moon franchise has always been an odd mix of surprisingly progressive and oddly reductive themes, flip-flopping between an empowering breaking of gender norms and an awkward clinging to stereotypes.
I've been wondering if my outside point of view was accurate or not, but at least judging from this single volume of Sailor Venus prequel stories, that seemed about right.

I don't know how much of this spin-off's style and storytelling varies from the original series, but Codename: Sailor V follows a very repetitive formula throughout each little story. When it comes to the magical girl action, every enemy basically did the same thing of stealing people's energy and turning them into mind-controlled minions for Sailor Venus to fight and it doesn't care to deviate from that in a single story. I know this is written for young teens, but I did expect or hope for a bit more variety. I remember liking the monster-of-the-week aspect of the original show when I was a kid, so this volume was a bit disappointing in that regard.
It also frequently dives head-first into gender stereotypes about what makes a "real girl" and where they belong or not. Sometimes those themes are set up to be challenged by the way of the main character rebelling against them and at other times they are just taken for full. The whole subject of gender-conformable behavior even went so far that this book, at least in the German translation, had a kind of awkward argument where one character jokes about another being trans, which came unexpectedly.
There are also odd things like using Egyptian hieroglyphs to symbolize Greece for no reason, which I hope was just a joke lost in translation and not a genuine error.

Again, like I said, I'm not at all part of the target audience and this was more a curiosity read out of happenstance than anything else, so take this whole review with a grain of salt if you're a fan of it. I think there is much worse that teens could read.