The sand of dreams

After what has to have been one the most relaxed vacations ever, it's a bit hard to get into the whole work thing. Not surprising, that. In between grumbling about alarms and digging my way from under two weeks of stuff not done, complaining about the weather, being generally surprised by the Wimbledon upsets and the frequency of matches going to extra time in the World Cup, I have managed to finish up with The Sandman 2.

Now, to be perfectly honest, the whole Sandman mythos for me had been a bit vague. As in, it's this thing I'd been hearing about for ages. But no details appeared to be particularly forthcoming. So when I did get around to reading Preludes and Nocturnes, I had no particular expectations, or benchmarks for that matter, except Gaiman's writing. And let's be honest, graphic novels are an entirely different beast compared to the  kind with more words and less graphics.

What I did decide to do though, was go back to this Sandman re-read I'd seen on Tor. All of a sudden things made a lot more sense. Why The Sound of her Wings had seemed so different from the others in that collection, among other things. So it was with renewed curiosity that I started with The Doll's House. And what a story that is.

Each issue is at the same time completely isolated yet part of a whole. As barely-there characters from Preludes and Nocturnes suddenly make appearances and the narrative strings start getting collected towards a conclusion it begins to appear, the notion that here is another story beneath the pages, hiding, that you can only catch glimpses of, that is waiting for you to work it out for yourself from the hints that are everywhere.

This is everything that I have come to expect from the darkly ominous Gaiman. Now I am really hooked. And I really like Morpheus :).

Currently: being not particularly productive :(
Listening to: Ramin Djawadi - 2500 toms of awesome