Best Reads in 2024: Graham Bradley's Lineup
Upstream Reviews' Contributors post their favorites from this year.
I’m a trucker so I read a lot, mostly audiobooks. Mainly I’m into sci-fi, fantasy, history, and some thrillers. I’ve also gotten into more comics over the last year.
Here are some of the best books I’ve read in 2024:
Fiction
TENURE, by Blaine L. Pardoe and Mike Baron
I’ll write a full Upstream review of this book later. It’s up for pre-order on Amazon (releases in January), and you can check out my video review. What an awesome execution (heh) of a story that could have very easily devolved into Daily Wire-caliber cringe. Have you ever read a news story about Antifa and been frustrated that they hurt people with impunity? TENURE is going to be very cathartic for you.
THE LION OF DESERET, by Mike Barham
This book is still in beta and I got to read it and offer feedback. I had an awesome time with it.
Set in a post-crash America, the story focuses on how the Mountain West rebuilds under the infrastructure of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). The Church owns a significant amount of land and tangible resources, especially with farming, and so it ramps up its charity efforts and forms a regional government to create stability in the middle of the chaos.
In such a world, warriors will be needed, and we witness the story play out through the eyes of an unnamed protagonist who is a veteran. He joins the militia and becomes instrumental in protecting its borders. He himself is not a member of the Church, giving him an outsider’s perspective. Like with TENURE, I was very impressed that the author put real effort into telling the story well, instead of making it a puff piece for his faith.
Christian fiction is by-and-large unreadable to the masses, outside of the classics by C.S. Lewis and such. Here we get a post-apocalyptic prepper story with brains, heart, and a warning. It’ll be my pleasure to own a print copy once Barham releases it.
UNDER THE JOLLY ROGER by L.A. Meyer
This detailed historical fiction series came out during the mid-2000s surge of YA. It’s had success but isn’t nearly as widely-read as it deserves. Meyer not only studies the time period and the way of life, but several ways of life, from the upper classes to the street urchins, the Navy, pirates, and more. Then he wraps it in some of the most poetic language and period-accurate lingo that you can imagine.
Bloody Jack has both teeth and heart, going as close as it needs to in order to show the realities of early 1800s England without descending into drudgery or nihilism. Mary “Jacky” Faber is a young girl orphaned by a plague and forced to take up with a street gang of kids. She eventually pulls a Mulan and joins the Navy, pretending to be a boy, where she’s ultimately discovered during a voyage in the Caribbean.
In the second book she ends up in a girls’ school in Boston where she uncovers an illicit relationship between a local man and some of the girls there. UNDER THE JOLLY ROGER is the third book, wherein Jacky returns to England and is rapidly pressed into service on another ship. She tries to get out of it by revealing that she’s a girl, but this only puts her in greater danger from the captain, who’s a real SOB.
On top of Meyer’s effort to tell an accurate story, he puts his characters into real trouble and never takes the easy way out. Consequences are very real in this world and he follows Jacky from start to finish in a way that just leaves you satisfied. There are nine more books in this series and I’m pumped for that.
Non-fiction
GEORGE LUCAS: A LIFE, by Brian Jay Jones
I’ve been meaning to read other biographies written by Jones and this was a fantastic introduction to his work. Even better, it showed the genesis of George Lucas’ career, his love of technology and filmmaking, his early missteps, his runaway success with Star Wars, and all of the intricate details in between that have defined his career.
It blows my mind just how loose his writing process is, and how he made up most of the Star Wars lore on-the-fly, especially during filming. He was just chasing themes and ideas and when something worked right, he put it into the story. The man loves the technical and engineering aspects of making something imaginary come to life, and Jones walks you through it all masterfully.
MASQUERADE, by Alfred F. Young.
I’ve read other books about Deborah Sampson and this has got to be the most comprehensive and objective one. If you’re unfamiliar with her, she was like an American Mulan, the first woman to take a bullet in combat during the Revolution because she posed as a man. (She was above-average height for her time, and not all that attractive).
In an era of our history that is replete with fascinating personalities, her story is often lower on the ladder because her impact wasn’t all that significant, but even so her story is worth telling, and telling with accuracy.
Some books have fictionalized and sensationalized her narrative, while others have propped her up as being a lesbian, a transgender, or in the biggest reach, black. Young takes a proper historian’s approach to Sampson and lays out the facts, then dedicates some space near the end to either debunk the false narratives, or state clearly what we do and don’t know about Deborah.
From now on, MASQUERADE is my go-to book when talking about this woman.
DREAMER OF DUNE by Brian Herbert
Obviously with a resurgence of DUNE sales (thanks to the movies), people will have greater interest in the man behind the typewriter, for that I would direct you toward DREAMER OF DUNE, written by Frank Herbert’s own son. It’s partly a biography as well as a youth memoir of Brian’s childhood, growing up mostly broke because his dad was an underemployed writer constantly on the run from creditors and an ex-wife.
Frank had numerous strengths and a couple of weaknesses, namely that he was never good with children, so while his relationship with Brian was strained growing up, they did better together once he was an adult. Brian lays out the details with honesty. I thought it was cool to get a glimpse at Frank’s research process, his devotion to his craft, and to his wife during her long years of illness in the seventies and eighties.
Last year I gave up on the latter half of Frank’s Dune series, deciding that the original trilogy was good enough for me. Brian’s work with DREAMER made me seriously reconsider that. I want to see just what Frank wanted to say about it all in the end. Fantastic biography.
Comics and Graphic Novels
ROOK EXODUS by Geoff Johns
Johns is a veteran of the comic industry, known for his work on DC’s legacy characters like Green Lantern and Flash. A few years ago he and a bunch of other creators started an imprint under Image comics called “Mad Ghost,” which has since spun off into “Ghost Machine,” and appears to have autonomy from the Image brand. I don’t pretend to grasp all the internecine politics of it, I just know that the creators of the various Ghost Machine titles are also the owners of the properties therein, which limits the likelihood of corporate meddling in the artistic process.
ROOK EXODUS is a Ghost Machine title and, in my opinion, their absolute best work. Set in a future where mankind has terraformed other planets, our main character is a castoff from Earth who took a job on the world of Exodus, where the terraforming has since started to regress. All of the rich people abandoned the world, leaving the broke blue-collar types behind to scrounge or die.
Rook is a “warden” who wears a high-tech helmet to control a specific genus of animal. His helmet links him to crows and ravens. He teams up with Swine (controls pigs) and Dire Wolf (controls wolves) as they debate whether to build a rocket from scraps, or try to salvage Exodus’ terraforming project and thus save their animals.
Opposing them is a violent warlord named Ursaw (controls bears) who has no qualms about killing wardens in his quest to dominate the scraps of Exodus.
Rock-solid premise, very compelling characters who conflict with each other very well, and incredible art that commands your attention all the way through. The first arc will collect in a trade paperback in April, and I can’t recommend it enough.
JUNKYARD JOE by Geoff Johns
In 2021 Geoff Johns released JUNKYARD JOE, which absolutely blew my mind when I read it this summer. It sits at the intersection of a few things I love and it builds something wonderful there.
Our main character is Morrie “Muddy” Davis, who served in Vietnam. His unit had an experimental robot soldier, although nobody knew it at first. When “Joe” jumped on a grenade and his fake skin got blown off, they realized he was some new Pentagon project, and they were glad to have him on their side.
Later they get into a fight with some Viet Cong and most of Muddy’s comrades are killed, along with some innocent Vietnamese. Joe, who has now bonded with the human soldiers and “corrupted” his own source code with new values, gets remotely shut down by Henry Kissinger.
Muddy Davis goes home and becomes a successful cartoonist in the vein of Charles Schulz and Bill Watterson. (The book even reprints strips from those comics with syndicate permission.) After almost fifty years of publication, Muddy becomes a widower and retires; he’d been using the comic as an outlet for his experience in the war, having kept the secret all these years about a robot soldier.
Then Joe appears on his doorstep, having reactivated from storage. Muddy doesn’t know why he’s there and he does his best to hide Joe, because Deep State operatives are looking for him, and they won’t hesitate to kill in order to get their property back. Things get even more complicated when a family moves in next door, and curious kids end up making friends with the robot.
If you love G.I. Joe, RoboCop, Charlie Brown, Calvin & Hobbes, and great artwork, this book is everything you’re looking for and more. The paperback is around $12 for the whole story. Because it’s attached to a larger Ghost Machine chronology, this particular title isn’t continuing right now, so if you get this book you don’t need to worry about sequels. It’s one that you’ll buy and read over and over, especially around Christmas.
ROCK N’ ROLL NINJA by Meyer and Dixon
Richard Meyer is better known by his YouTube persona “Ya Boi Zack.” He was one of the earliest and most influential voices in the 2017 pushback against the corruption of the comic book industry, having already been an avid collector for decades. Despite the best efforts of a malicious industry and its corrupt journalist friends, Meyer established a beachhead to fight the rot of bad art, bad stories, political infection, and audience attacks, while simultaneously building his own publishing company from the ground up.
Since then he’s put out around a dozen titles, mostly in his Jawbreakers series of superhero books, and he’s hired established talents like Chuck Dixon and Matt Bahr to work for him. His turnaround time was really bad for a while as he brute-force-learned how to do every part of the business, but he’s got his method down now and the books are coming along much faster than before.
ROCK N’ ROLL NINJA was announced back in December of 2021 and just got fulfilled this spring. The start is similar to JUNKYARD JOE, in that a bunch of soldiers in Vietnam are thinking about what they’ll do once they get home, and it all goes gonzo from there. My full Upstream review has the details, or you can watch the video from my channel below.
In order to buy Meyer’s books, you’ll have to follow his campaigns on Indiegogo, as he doesn’t sell anywhere else.
I hope Johns gave a call-out to G.I. Robot. This looks like a pretty direct swipe.
https://infogalactic.com/info/G.I._Robot