Been a while since I've last posted. Finished this in the meantime:
The Count of Monte Cristo and
Les Miserables are both really long in that 19th century novel way, but Dumas' writing style feels a lot more modern to me, in terms of readability, even when he's packing in incidental characters. It's been a while since I read that book, but I don't remember there being whole segments that I just skimmed through to get back to the main narrative action. That said, the core story in
Les Miserables is undeniably great.
If you enjoyed
The Name of the Rose, I could not recommend more highly Orhan Pamuk's
My Name Is Red, which has a number of similarities, but is overall much better, in my view.
It's been a while since I read Goethe's
Faust, but that's quite a fascinating, imaginative work.
Next book: Dante Alighieri The Divine Comedy
I've had an edition of that for years, but only covered the
Inferno portion (I expect the same is true of many people). I'll have to remedy that at some point.
For a long time, the only collected editions of the George Perez run on
Wonder Woman were four trade paperbacks that covered the first 24 issues; a few years ago, the contents of those four trade paperbacks were bound into a single hardcover Omnibus edition. However, that Omnibus was unnumbered, which did not augur any future omnibuses, and the smart money would have been that the remaining 40+ issues of the Perez run would remain uncollected and inaccessible. However, probably by the grace of the 2017
Wonder Woman film, here is Volume 2, covering issues 25-45 (as well as the second Annual).
There were a few points in reading this where I found myself wishing that I had refreshed my memory in respect of the earlier issues, because Perez really hits the ground running and there are very few wholly new stories here, the bulk of the time spent elaborating on earlier arcs (in particular, the final arc brings back the Silver Swan and a few characters who had by that point not been seen in more than twenty issues). The most compelling material in this collection is undoubtedly the first half, which is heavily concerned with Perez's expanding the Amazon mythology by journeying to Bana-Mighdal, the sister city of Themyscira, where a corrupted form of the Amazon culture survived through the centuries, but evolving in a very different direction. This also features greater development for Diana's nemesis the Cheetah, a villain that only Perez every really used well, at least in this initial form. There's a lot less emphasis in these issues on the Kapatelis family, who formed Diana's main human supporting cast in her early introduction to the wider world. Apollo, the Greek god descended to Earth, takes a prominent supporting part (and frequently a humorous one), the other gods being almost entirely absent.
If this volume has an obvious point of inferiority compared to the earlier issues, it is that this is the point in the series where Perez had stopped illustrating as well as writing. The various replacement artists are more than capable, but George Perez is one of the all-time great pencillers, and none of the succeeding ones can quite live up to his beautiful work in the early part of the series.
