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This has one of my personal bugbears - constantly shifting perspective within scenes. Sometimes this can work, especially if it's making a wider point in the structure of the story, but here it's unfocused and jumping, making it hard to follow who is thinking what and who knows what at any particular point in a scene. A shame, because the central idea here of looking at two hundred or more years of history with a black lesbian vampire at the heart of the story is very good and throws up lots of interesting angles and ideas. The idea of powerful billionaires hunting vampires in order to secure their own immortality rings a lot differently now, when powerful men are literally injecting the blood of the young, than it might have done when originally published in the 90s.

Yes, yes, I should read the original before watching the adaptation, but sometimes you can't help it. What's interesting here is the way the TV series tells the story in a much more conventional way than the novel, especially omitting the framing device that allows the novel to speed through many parts. There are times when I wished it would slow down a little and explore ideas a bit more, but it's a good read and raises a lot of interesting questions - and what if our whole existence is just part of a fable to explain the lost history of a distant future?

A really interesting story of how Lily's father left her family when she was just six so he could join the Bhagwan's movement and focus on himself. An exploration of the effects this abandonment and her father's later behaviour had on her as his life fell apart in different parts of the world.

An absolute doorstopper of a book, packed with information, covering every aspect of the dissolution in quite forensic detail, illustrating a lot of the stories around the dissolution and showing what a massive social upheaval England went through during the later years of Henry VIII's reign. Maybe too detailed if you want just a brief overview of the period, but Clark has obviously done a lot of research to draw out all these facts and stories and brought them together in one volume.

I found the middle sections of this the most interesting where Crow talks about the rise and fall of Imperial Spain and the art and literature that came from that era. The rest of it has some interesting moments but all filtered through a very dated perspective of assuming "the Spanish people" are homogenous s a group of peasants without agency who just wander around in the background of history. Particularly annoying when he reaches the twentieth century, where the section on the Civil War is just anti-communist axe-grinding, then the section on post-Franco Spain has a "how dare these people want to live modern lives" attitude to it.

I'd read some issues of Concrete back in the 90s and then thought about it again recently. Luckily, this volume was in my local library and was an interesting rediscovery of a very different age, both in the world Concrete exists in and the perception of comics and portrayal of superheroics. It's a very gently kind of story-telling, focused much more on the character than his exploits and adventures and trying to grapple with the idea of what it would be like to be transformed in that way.