Talkin' about all kinds of books: Books, comic books, and...uh...well I guess that's it . My name is Nick, by the way. (He/Him, all are welcome on this channel except rude people)
The best thing about this "EC revival" is the cover... The rest is okeyish at best, it actually got me a bit upset to the point I felt almost insulted by how dumb one of the stories is, guess which one :D and my hopes were not even that high tbh. Before the read I kept telling myself "if the stories are bad, then maybe the art will be good or the other way around". But neither is good :( I will get the 2nd issue, just bc I preordered the first two issues together, but if it won't get suprisingly better then I won't be spending money on this. On a more positive note, very nice review my guy, accurate, to the point, level headed, we need more comic reviews like this :)
Yeah the cover is dope, Lee Bermejo is great. Maybe they can get him to do an interior story and that'd help things. I appreciate the kind words, thank you very much!
The audio book is great especially with the different characters and the jumping between the two stories. Highly recommend the performances on the audio version.
So for me round one goes to Hello Darkness, but I'm still looking forward to future issues of Epitaphs. I love the classic EC format as well and was nostalgically hoping for something more along those lines. For me, these stories were mostly enjoyable but too predictable, and the politics were plain old heavy handed. As for upcoming authors, I down for whatever James Tynion IV writes. This is my first visit to your channel, enjoyed the vid! Looking forward to more
This was so funny. It totally makes sense, as soon as a new medium is invented pornography has to be there as well. Probably the most recent example is VR technology.
I’ll check out Hello Darkness! Sounds great. Reminds me of the Paul Simon song sounds of silence. I read Nice House by the Lake volume one and I enjoyed it. Tynion is great sometimes. I’ll check out Abyss out of curiosity. Great vid!
@@maxwashingtonmusic7000 I was mistaken, Hello Darkness isn't spearheaded by Tynion but he does have a story in it which will continue in later issues. I still have to read Nice House, I liked the first issue but didn't read on
But this guy doesn't actually write does he? He's content to complain about the state of things without actually doing anything to help it. Which means he's like the guy in the life raft who wants to b**** but not do anything to help you get to shore. Generally those guys get tossed into the water. This guy's a hack. You can complain all day but if you roll up your sleeves and do something then you have some merit. You're not a Creator you're a cultural parasite
I don't blame you for not liking that aspect of the series. Personally, it didn't bother me in the least, so I can't relate. Take it with a grain of salt and give it another chance some day. The overall story and character progression is worth it, at least in my opinion.
Will still be looking forward to the videos you do post! I know that if I stopped enjoying making videos I would be doing the same thing you are. There is no reason to not have fun with a hobby.
Thanks man! This lack of motivation is also the reason our live chat about Buffy hasn't happened 😅 If you ever start exploring doing lives for your channel, hit me up, would be happy to guest star.
I have 4+ hobbies and I’ve come to terms with getting burnt out on one, I just focus on another till the motivation is back. Taking a step back is very important!
Sorry to hear you feel unmotivated Nick, but you need to take care of yourself. I appreciate all the videos you put out so far, I've hunted down a number of books/comic books based on your vids. Be safe! ✌
Thanks for all the videos and effort you've put into the channel! Ive been around for about a year, and always look forward to your reccs, no matter when you drop them. With you and BookishRealm, both stepping away from RU-vid this morning, I'd rather have passionate reccs than not - so all the best with whats next, and looking forward to more whenever you come back ! 🙏 👍
Thank you very much for the kind words! I'll definitely still be around, I've already got a couple videos filmed for Garbaugust, but yeah I just need a break from the sheer quantity.
So glad you enjoyed this. I read it a couple of months ago and loved it, for all the reasons you said, and the golden afterglow that memories of the film brought to my reading experience. I'm definitely going to give the next book in the series a go soon.
Halfway thru I started skimming, the screenplay portion made for a very boring movie and then they’d repeat what happened. After This Wretched Valley, my worst read of the year.
Nice review. Glad you had a good time. I remember that the amazing European locales were a big part of the appeal of the film to me. I am a big fan of both the movie (which I loved) and the book (which I read because of the movie and also really enjoyed). I picked up a few Ripley sequels, but couldn't really get into them. I might give them another try, but if you do, I hope you enjoy them.
Great book review, Nick! After you read the book, did you check out the movie? I usually do that to see what they kept in and what they changed. My recommendation for a book about con-artists is Jim Thompson's The Grifters. Book (and movie) are amazing!
Spoilers - I felt the same reading the book. I didn’t figure it out by the first chapter, but also fairly early on at which point it became frustrating to read because I spent the rest of the book just hoping it wasn’t that all three of them were the same because of how cheap it felt. It is genuinely infuriating because the writing is good! And if the twist would have been that Lauren and Olivia are both girls being held captive or even if Lauren and Olivia were the DID system being held captive it would have been predictable but could have still been a good book!! But putting all of them together just cheapened the whole thing so much and I’m actually upset I wasted time reading it.
Ethan Frome is one of those books that even my readerly friends dislike, so I wanted to share a few words about why I love it. Maybe it's from devouring the Jack London Alaskan tales or the comic book version of Frankenstein with its opening arctic scenes while spending part of my boyhood in Michigan winters, but I love cold weather tales. Wharton's descriptions of the setting, for me, are glorious. Similarly, My Ántonia, by Willa Cather, comes to mind as it has lovely passages about the prairies. These books aren't always about pace and plot; they attempt to capture more than action through the written word. For some, this can be boring, and I understand. I often find writing like this exhilarating and thought-provoking. Another lens through which I look at Frome is that of fairy tales. It can be read as an American Gothic fairy tale with a classic narrative frame structure. You can read Zeena as a kind of witch draining the life force of those around her. Like the Black Forest in the Brothers Grimm, we get the wintery Starkfield village and surrounding woods. The fairy tale reading ties into two other related lenses. One is the notion of horror and how monsters function in fiction. Here, it is related, as it commonly has been in books and movies, to images of sick or disabled people, for example, the images of Zelda with spinal meningitis in Pet Sematary or the true story of Joseph Merrick as portrayed in books and films like The Elephant Man. Another compelling perspective is that Ethan Frome is an American tragedy, much like The Great Gatsby, set against a rural backdrop. Both books grapple with the American Dream, as Frome and Gatsby yearn for a new identity and a fresh start despite their challenging economic circumstances. They are both in love. The question of choice looms large in these tragedies: what options do the characters have? The decisions they make in the hope of changing their lives lead to their tragic downfall. I enjoyed your video and the concept for this series. I just wanted to offer a second opinion on Ethan Frome. Best!
This is probably the best argument I've heard in favor of Ethan Frome. You've certainly done a better job selling it to me than my English teacher did lol While I won't go so far as to say you've changed my mind (I still feel that if I were to read it again, it'd bore me again), I will say there certainly is more to it than I originally perceived. Thanks for the comment!
@@anotherbooktubechannel Thanks! Part of the beauty of art for me is enjoying multiple and differing perspectives. Sometimes, one work offers multiple levels of enjoyment; other times, it just feels like work.
@@anotherbooktubechannel Potentially. The teacher has to love it and get buy-in from students. I'm not sure about general classes. You can do much of the same work with short stories from the period that deal with naturalism and other themes. Plenty of YA novels have protagonists who feel mentally and physically lost or trapped, and they might be better for those classes. In AP Literature classes, the goals are different and specialized. On the textual level, Ethan Frome has some beautiful writing and characterization, which allows students to practice literary analysis. This mirrors the first and second essays on the exam. Since it is thematically rich, it can be used in essay three, where students analyze an entire work through a specific focus. Unlike many shorter works classified as novellas, Frome is considered a novel by AP standards and is allowed for use on the test. It isn't easy to cover many full texts in a school year, so a few shorter ones can help if the teacher has a connection to them.
Great video! Man, I would kill to get hold of Sandman. Interesting that I only want the graphic novels from favorite authors- Joe Hill, Neil Gaiman, Clive Barker, Stephen King etc... Good luck for the rest of the year! I also want to keep going with Robert McCammon! 😀
A note on the Expanse Novellas you may already know, some characters, backstories, and technologies are introduced which payoff and clear some fog of exposition in the proceeding full novels. Especially for the last two books, there's quite a bit of call back to those novellas. But it's really no big deal, especially if you're already this close to the end. If you finish and want more Amos though, his best story is a novella!
Definitely related to your thoughts,cause i remember first time reading asterios polyp and thinking,that could only be done in a comicbook and not in any other medium
I just finished reading Ghost Eaters. I was disappointed. I like horror to be scary. I was annoyed...more than scared. Clay didn't execute an excellent concept.
Big David Mazzucchelli fan since Batman and Rubber Blanket. Love this book! Years since I read it! I think I need to reread it again. Thanks for reviewing!
I think you might have read it in a different mindset than the author intended. This is an American Political Satire book first instead of a dystopian book first. The author uses the story as the vessel for political satire and each character portrays how America acts towards the prison system. The solitary confinement isn't just a chapter in that, it's about how prisoners are neglected although the neglect is obvious. The protesters are there to enhance the ideology that the mass majority of Americans don't really care about the negatives of the prison system, Americans just want to enjoy their own personal lives even if others are suffering. Also the main female protestor starts to enjoy the reality show which shows the hypocrisy of "Americans actual do care" but don't care enough to do something. The 2 main female characters are there to show that murderers (or people in general) but the system is rigged where they are forced into bad situations. I do think it has flaws but I think it also does a wonderful job of being american political satire
