The Cameron Book Club 2020

7 min readJan 1, 2020

A new decade, and a new chance to get back to reading even more. Last year, in 2019, I kept a log of every book I read. My initial goal was to read a book a week, which I missed by more than half.

This year, I’m setting more achievable goals. Anyway, this article is primarily for myself, to remember what I read during the year and how I felt about it, but if you’re interested, feel free to follow along!

1. A Tale of Sand

By Jim Henson, Jerry Juhl, and Ramón K. Pérez

As you can tell from this image alone, A Tale of Sand is incredibly colorful, creative, and, frankly, visually stunning. It’s the realization of Jim Henson and Jerry Juhl’s feature screenplay in graphic novel form, as it never ended up getting made into a live-action film.

Still, this feels like the perfect medium for this story. Ramón K. Pérez does an incredible job of taking the fairly abstract concepts and melding them into a story with powerful moments and a great pacing. Not to mention the incredible artwork, with colors and paneling (or lack thereof) that shift and change throughout in order to fit the story and tell it in the best way possible.

Definitely worth a read.

Grade: 9.5/10

2. Binti

By Nnedi Okorafor

With the various awards and praise that Binti has received, I expected it to be really special, or at least have a particularly unique take on the sci-fi setup, and I suppose it does, in some way, but I think that it confuses random ideas thrown together for uniqueness.

Overall, this novella feels more like something that would show up on a novice fiction-writing site than anything revolutionary. Nothing is really contextualized, events happen without much motivation, and characters are written out as quickly as they’re introduced.

Grade: 3/10

3. Before Watchmen: Minutemen/Silk Spectre

By Darwyn Cooke and Amanda Conner

I’ve been on a Watchmen kick lately, having recently watched both the 2009 film and the new HBO series, so I wanted to see what the Before Watchmen books are all about. However, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that, no matter how many stories are stuffed into it, the world of the Watchmen is just not a fitting story universe.

Watchmen doesn’t need anything to flesh it out. In fact, it works better as a simple, standalone work. It involves a lot of suspension of disbelief already, so adding more stories into it doesn’t really lighten that load on the reader, and I just found myself getting less and less interested in the world these authors were trying to portray.

The Minutemen storyline was particularly slow and uninteresting, while the Silk Spectre’s held my interest, but ultimately doesn’t mesh together well with what we know of Laurie from her time on the Watchmen.

Grade: 3/10

4. Before Watchmen: Ozymandias/Crimson Corsair

By Len Wein, Jae Lee, and John Higgins

The Ozymandias storyline was definitely far better than either the Minutemen or Silk Spectre, which I wrote about above. The story of Adrian Veidt, chronicling how grew up, trained in martial arts, and gained the moniker of “The Smartest Man in the World,” all set against the backdrop of the inevitable events of the Watchmen, was interesting and engaging.

Still, like the others, it just really didn’t need to be shared. I enjoyed it well enough, but it wasn’t a super meaningful addition to the Watchmen universe.

And then there’s the Crimson Corsair, which was just straight out of left field. I’m not sure why they decided to make this comic, actually. It’s loosely based on the feel of the comic-within-the-comic pirate story in the original Watchmen, but is both less interesting and much stranger. Overall, this feels like one you can safely skip.

Last but not least, this book includes a short Dollar Bill origin story, which I found strangely more engaging than Nite Owl’s tale, and has some fun quirks that make it a good read. Also, it’s much shorter and more concise than the others, so that helps.

Grade: 5.5/10

5. Touch

By Claire North

Last year, I read The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North, and I really enjoyed it (you can read my review at #18 here). Unfortunately, I can’t say the same about this book.

Touch feels similar to Harry August in both premise and style, being set in a recognizable, “real” world, but having elements of (almost-arcane-feeling) magic that seem to exist in the sub-straits of our awareness of the world around us.

That feels great at first, but as it moves on, it became clearer to me that this book was all premise and little story. Revolving around a “ghost” who inhabits other people’s bodies and has the ability to move between bodies with simply a touch, it’s absolutely an interesting idea, but it isn’t executed in as meaningful or high-stakes of a way as Harry August is.

Overall, it felt like Touch should have been a short story rather than a good-sized novel that loses its motivation in the middle.

Grade: 5/10

A Respite

Well, it’s been several months since I finished reading anything. Thanks to COVID, I’ve had my plate full (and then some) simply adjusting to the way the world is now, and I’ve found it challenging to sit and read. Though, every time I do, I find it incredibly relaxing and fulfilling.

I’m back to reading a bit more now that I’ve had time to get a bit settled, and I’m going to try to keep up my pace and reach the goals I set at the beginning of the year!

6. Comics for a Strange World

By Reza Farazmand

7. Poorlier Drawn Lines

By Reza Farazmand

A friend gave me this (and the following) book for my birthday, and I burned through them super quick. Poorly Drawn Lines has become one of my favorite comics, and these books are amazing.

They don’t really lend themselves to a grade, so I’ll just leave you with my recommendation. Pick up these books, you’ll enjoy the humor and sharing the jokes with friends!

8. Brave New World

By Aldous Huxley

Brave New World is, of course, a classic, defining work of science fiction, and it’s easy to see why. Huxley paints a picture of a world foreign from our own (and far more so from the one he lived in when he wrote it in 1931), but not unimaginably so.

The London of the future that’s in the book is filled with imaginative technologies, but the key among them are the production of children in what is essentially a manufacturing facility and the happiness drug “soma.”

Overall, Huxley’s future world encapsulates a captivating analysis of human behavior and holds a mirror up to our collective action. That being said, the book’s plot is disjointed, its story and character development are both quite lacking in depth. I understand why this is a classic work of science fiction, particularly being written nearly a hundred years ago, but it is far more due to the world he built than the story he told.

Grade: 7/10