Thought Train to Pusan

I’m not sure why it took me so long to finish Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, after the first volume grabbed my attention and imagination so thoroughly. But slowly, as I read through more installments, I saw that the series was scattered with highs and lows. The tenth and final volume, The Wake , is a somber affair, regarding the events immediately following the “death,” of Morpheus, the Lord of Dreaming. But just like Despair before him, his death is more of a regeneration, if you will, as you cannot kill a concept or the personification of a concept. And yet, people are affected, as are their dreams, and we see characters from all of the past volumes come forth and take part in mourning the death of the Dream King. There are three issues within the volume itself, which contain the events within the dream world, entitled: Chapter One, Which Occurs in the Wake of What Has Gone Before", "Chapter Two, In Which a Wake is Held", and "Chapter Three, In Which We Wake...

The Kindly Ones is the ninth book in Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel series of The Sandman. After finding the previous installment to be slightly lackluster compared to some of the others, I had been putting off reading this volume for a while. But now that I have, I can tell you that this hesitation was not warranted, despite being the largest and longest inclusion to the series. In fact, the heft that The Kindly Ones bares allows for many of the interconnecting tales within to be fleshed out in detail, thus making this volume one of the strongest in the series, in my opinion. More than anything, however, The Kindly Ones is the novel in which everything really comes to a head in the series, after simply providing us with snippets along the way up to this point; many characters return and are once again interwoven in the world of dreaming in one way or another, and we see where most everything was ultimately heading after all this time. While many things occur throughout this nov...

World’s End is the 8 th volume of Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel series “The Sandman”, but does not focus on any direct story-arch of the series as a whole. Similar to the 3 rd and 6 th volumes of “The Sandman”, World’s End is essentially a collection of short stories, this time being told by a collection of various characters that find themselves all in the same place at the same time. All of the tales are related in some way to one another, but in the most minimal sense. Each story on it’s own is quite interesting, yet the volume as a whole is slightly lacking when compared to some of the previous installments of the series. That’s not to say that it’s not a good, speedy read, but there is something less than satisfying about it when all is said and done. The story begins with a man named Brant Tucker, as he drives his sleeping friend, Charlene, back to Chicago, when they hit a sudden summer snowstorm. Being driven off the road and injured, the two manage to make th...

Brief Lives is the 7 th volume of Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel series of The Sandman, and while I am obviously already a fan of these books, this installment has struck me as my favorite to date. All the fantastical and bizarrely wonderful things from the previous episodes are strongly present, but there is also something more… something simple, human and remarkable. Here’s the deal: Have you ever had a song stuck in your head throughout the entirety of reading a book? I have, and it was with this one. Whenever I picked it up and read a page, my brain started blasting, “Red! The color of Desire/ Black! The color of Despair” at me, over and over again. But in all honesty, that wasn’t really a bad thing. It actually makes a lot of sense, as this addition to The Sandman focuses heavily on the family of The Endless, two of which are the twin embodiments of Desire and Despair. (Oh, my dear brain, your mind-palace is far more organized than I ever realized.) But although...

Last night I dreamt that I needed to work my way through a zombie-ravaged high school in order to make it on time to my Irish dance recital with Idris Elba. After a gravity-free performance, I did not feel well, and promptly gave birth to a small, wooden sheep. Surprisingly, my baby sheep was somehow animated enough to defecate on my hands while I held it, all while my sour mother looked on and rolled her eyes at me. Maybe this nonsensical construction in my mind is a telling picture as to my internal self. Maybe it is a description of my past, or my fears for the future. Whatever the case, if we are to see it all through Neil Gaiman’s eyes, even the most fleeting fragments of our dreams have the ability to affect a person, tell a story, or even alter the course of the world. And so we come to The Sandman: Fables & Reflections , which I saw as an illustration of just that. The sixth volume of Gaiman’s graphic novel series does not directly connect to the overall sto...

While I’m usually knee-deep in reading psychology textbooks from cover-to-cover, my love of reading had led me to decide to join up with the fifth annual Cannonball read this year! But only a half-Cannonball goal of 26 books, due to school restrictions and so on. Thus, throughout the year I shall be posting reviews of all the books I read here. In any case: For my first review of my first ever Cannonball read (be gentle with me and my terrible writing!), we have the fifth volume of Neil Gaiman’s graphic novel series, The Sandman. Usually I love the instalments in this series, but A Game of You , in my opinion has so far been the least interesting. But then again, I’ve heard that Gaiman sometimes describes this installment as his favorite in the series, due to the fact that it is most people’s least favorite. Cheeky thing, hey? It all centers around a young woman, Barbie (who was previously seen as a minor character in the second Sandman volume, The Doll’s House ), l...