In Pursuit of My Own Library

Lady Mechanika Volume 3 by M.M. Chen In this Volume we collect the stories of the The Lost Boys of West Abbey.   I was somewhat surprised in the length of this collection as compared to the first two volumes.  It felt incredibly punctuated and short. The adventure and intrigue were over in the blink of an eye and had little meat to the story.  Though it had the typical stereotypes of Holmesian crime and steampunk, it utterly lacked the flair I had noticed in the first two volumes to poke fun at its obvious use of those stereotypes. There just wasn't room in this overly condensed story for any of the banter and mystery.  Right from the start you know exactly where this story is going and you almost want to give up from there, but then I realized it was so short I might as well carry out to the end. I really saw the potential in the story line but was mostly left with a shake of my head at the cliche.  This doesn't make me lose hope on the whole franchise, but it c

Lady Mechanika Volume 2 by M.M. Chen This volume collects the story of The Tablet of Destinies .  As the title alludes, we are getting ready to set forth on an Indiana Jones style adventure.  Secret societies, cryptology, imperial territory, dirigibles; all the perfect tropes for Lady Mechanika to go on a Victorian adventure to, the dark continent ... Africa! Mr. Lewis returns as Lady Mechanika's steadfast, if inebriated, mechanic, inventor, mad genius extraordinaire.  The good doctor has vaguely vanished and been replaced with an archaeology professor on a quest for whatever secrets archaeologists are hoping to uncover. Of course, they end up finding it and it ends up being cataclysmically horrific.  Then enter the secret societies and cryptology and you have another smashing adventure with Lady Mechanika.   While everything is an overdone stereotype in this series, I like it's over the top nature and honestly found a compelling revelation at the ending.  These

Now that I'm back in the reading game, I decided to keep it light.  I don't want to knock myself back down in the doldrums with some heavy hitting fantasy, so I kept it simple with some steampunk comics! Lady Mechanika Vol. 1 by Joe Benitez My mom started doing her version of LitCube for me this year.  This month was Metal May, an all steampunk themed box.  It seems only appropriate that I also happened to unknowingly get the Lady Mechanika series on Netgalley for the big May release of Volume 3. This first Volume collects together the comics of the Mystery of the Mechanical Corpse .   Lady Mechanika introduces you to some pretty standard steampunk tropes with a cyborg woman dressed in Victorian gear running around solving Holmesian crime dramas.  The kicker is I actually find these escapades interesting and her surrounding cast of characters enjoyable. The mystery is also entwined with the greater saga arching mystery of who made Lady Mechanika.  Surprisingly, I

I have been reading for well over 2 decades now and this has to be one of the worst reading slumps I have ever hit.  I just couldn't pick up anything that felt like I had to read it.  Even perusing Netgalley was drawing a complete zero.   When that happens, I usually try to go to the library or my massive Kindle stockpile for out of genre works to really shake it up.  Usually I do that with Clive Cussler.  I picked up at Raise the Titanic! and even tried Vixen 03 .  Both books just left me wanting to find his address and chuck the books in his face.  They were trash.  That's my official review there.   I felt disappointed that I had nothing new to put online.  Then I remembered I hadn't finished the "Septimus Heap" series.  I looked them up on Amazon and found that for some fortuitous reason they were on sale for $3 each.  How am I going to say no to $3 paperbacks? Welcome to my review of the books that saved my reading slump. Darke by Angie Sage This