Friday Reads

I finally got Covid. I had a pretty good run, but that ended on Monday morning. (My youngest, watching the test with morbid interest: “Wow, Dad, the positive line showed up even before the control line did! You must be really infected!”)

I’ve had it pretty easy compared to others1, but combined with some minor flooding in the living room —homes in Los Angeles are not built for weather, as it turns out— my ambitious plans for reading (and writing) this week have crashed and burned.

So instead of the healthy fiber of research and non-fiction, I’ve been devouring literary comfort food. Lots of comics. Some sci-fi. Some private eye noir.

X-Force by Benjamin Percy and various artists, mostly Robert Gill on this run — The X-Men books got overhauled in 2019 under a master plan spearheaded by Jonathan Hickman. The mutants decide to create their own island nation, and demand recognition from the world in exchange for several life-saving and life-extending drugs that they alone can provide. This makes them even more of a target than ever before, so the mutant nation has X-Force, its own black ops team, to protect its interests and neutralize threats. Percy is great at engineering massive threats and mayhem. But he also shows the emotional weight of doing the nasty things to protect a nation surrounded by a world that hates and fears it. The artists have all been absolutely top-shelf as well. This utopia is going to end in blood and tears —all utopias do, and the X-Men never get more than a few months of peace and security— but it will be a wild ride.

The Three-Body Problem by Cixin Liu — The celebrated and massive tale of alien invasion and the human response. I took a crack at this back in 2019, but got distracted. I figured being pinned to the couch by illness would be a good time to pick it up again.

When The Thrill is Gone by Walter Mosley — Another installment in the Leonid McGill PI series. I’ve been reading them out of order, and I realized this is the last one for me until Mosley writes another, so I’m taking it slow.

I also preordered Birnam Wood by Eleanor Catton and I’m really looking forward to it. But couldn’t pick it up from my friendly neighborhood bookstore because, again, Covid.

What are you reading? Please add your suggestions in the comments.