Current and recent reading (June 2022)

I've been suffering from blogger's block for the past few months. To try and break it, I figured I'd go over some books I've read recently, or am in the process of reading:

• The World of Fanzines - A Special Form of Communication, by Fredric Wertham, most famous for his Seduction of the Innocent, which lead to the Comics Code, and made him in many ways an enemy of comics, weird fiction, and the like. And yet, he became a big fan of fanzines as a medium, and writes about them insightfully and appreciatively, even when they satirize him. Cites from a variety of sources, and dedicates the first half of the book to reproductions of fanzine art.
• Sailing - an Informal Primer, by Richard Ulian, is an acquisition from back when I gathered up quite a few books about maritime subjects, preparing for it being a bigger focus of my Dungeons & Dragons campaign. I'm glad I got this one - it helps me make sense of description of sailing in fiction, and gives some ideas of the kinds of problems you might run into. Possible seeds for challenges and hazards in games that are focused there.
• The Study of Folklore, edited by Alan Dundes - this collection is a treasure trove of classics in the field. It's grouped by subject, and is wide-ranging - which is good, because folklore is very wide-ranging itself.
• Contested Culture - The Image, the Voice, and the Law, by Jane M. Gaines - a difficult read, encompassing two fields I'm not very acquainted with: legal and culture studies. But I'm enjoying my slog through it. This critical look at copyright law and how it relates to the creation of culture, and who gets to be termed a creator thereof, is a nice complement to all my reading about folklore.
• Subterranea - Journey into the Depths of the Earth’s Most Extraordinary Underground Spaces, by Chris Fitch - each one of the vivid studies in this book could inspire a dungeon delve or other underground adventure, from terrifying natural phenomena that either themselves or taken to a slightly larger extreme could become a significant adventuring challenge, to depictions of human habitation below the surface.
• The Complete Wargames Handbook, by James F. Dunnigan - I am starting to feel that I could at least get something out of a hex-and-chit wargame. Also interesting to get some perspective on how an out-and-out board wargamer saw role-playing games in a book published in 1980. A third edition is available online (pdf), although I'm reading a copy of the first edition.
• Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition Keeper's Rulebook - the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Dungeon Master's Guide was a huge disappointment when it came to helping me do my work as a dungeon master. This, so far, seems to be much better at providing guidance as to how to actually run a game of CoC, although I haven't done this myself yet.
• Apocalypse World 2nd Edition - this edition is supposedly less edgy than the first one. It still has a bit of that left left, but having persevered in reading through a few chapters, I'm already seeing why it's become a classic, as well as a template for a whole genre of RPGs.
• Welcome to Mars - Politics, Pop Culture, and Weird Science in 1950s America, by Ken Hollings - a book based on a limited radio series (found here; out of order, unfortunately). Made me revisit the start of the Atomic Age, and realize how fascinating it is, in itself, in its effects on our culture and society, and in its fictional and gaming potential. Also full of horror stories resulting from Operation Paperclip, MK-ULTRA, and many human experiments.
• The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, by Erving Goffman - I went all in on Goffman after encountering his frame analysis in Gary Alan Fine's Shared Fantasy, and reading this is already rewarding.
• Night's Black Agents, by Fritz Leiber - More well-known for his Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories, this shows Leiber as a very good modern weird/horror fiction writer, as well. An easily available, Lovecraftian sample is The Dreams of Albert Moreland, originally published in a now scanned fanzine (The Acolyte 10, pdf).
• Analog Science Fiction & Fact, Sep/Oct 2020 - I used to manage to keep up with Analog so that I would finish one before the other came around. Towards the middle of 2020, as I started accumulating RPG and other books, this fell by the wayside. I was also not very happy with the early 2020 issues, which made it easier to decide to cancel. I still have a backlog, and I finally finished this one. Mixed bag. Two stories that should express the gamut of the magazine pretty well are available from the publisher online: The Chrysalis Pool by Sean McMullen (pdf) is a weird tale with Arthur Machen vibes, while The Writhing Tentacles of History by Jay Werkheiser (pdf) is a more typical hard science fiction story, with animalistic aliens that would make fine inspiration for your next science fiction or fantasy game.