I'm starting to burn out on comics. I think my strongest desire to engage with them was when I was a kid, but given all of my reading experience now, I'm just not getting anything from them. I'm hoping to find some actual graphic novels within comixology, because marvel and dc are boring. The last Avengers comic I read had good artwork, they did their best to make the story as epic as possible, introducing super powerful ancient beings and so on. I guess I'm too old for that, or I prefer stuff that's not so grandiose. I also get annoyed with the strong push of evolution in half the comics. Iron Man seemed useless in the Avengers volume I finished, and Wolverine, an addition to the team, did one thing and that's it. Spider-man also seemed annoying, not comical as I remembered him.
I tried to find the comics I had read as a kid, so I could get some closure, but I haven't been able to find any of them, most comics from the 90s are still behind paywalls.
Two books I've been slow rolling are The Godfather and Johnny Reb & Billy Yank. The Godfather is better than I expected, I like Puzo's clear and direct style, and he is skillful at telling, not showing (always been irritated by the show, don't tell idea, sometimes I want it told to me) when necessary, as you the reader are not fully aware of the mob scene. Johnn Reb & Billy Yank was written by a Confederate veteran who served in General Lee's army of Northern Virginia. It's by far the best Civil War book I've ever read and the writer is so skillful I get completely engrossed and feel as if I were there. Those guys back then could write really well. I remember a history professor I had had once discussed why he thought Civil War era men were such good writers. He wondered if the time period in which they grew up, the 30s-50s, had a ton of newspapers and written material men were able to access, and the technology of farming had developed to where they could probably read while farming at times. So many of them seemed well-read and are clearly great writers, and usually anything I find from that time period is very well written. It was the last period of time before the telegraph and speedier, shorter forms of communication developed, so anything written had to be clear and descriptive. It was the last real dominance of the written word, and it shows in how common men were better authors than our best today.
deadline.com
