8. 11/9/09 The Sandman Volume 5: A Game of You by Neil Gaiman (approx. 100 pages)

Neil Gaiman rocks, and so does The Sandman. This is not my favorite volume, but its like how a "bad" episode of Battlestar Galactica is better than almost all other television. And yes, I am aware that I am showing my uber-nerdiness here. This volume is a good example of the complex ideas that consistently pop up in the Sandman books. It looks like a dream fantasy, but has a great deal to say about personal identity, how much we construct ourselves and how much the outside world has to do with it. And doesn't everyone have a right to be, whether we approve of them or not? I don't know if I'm meant to compare the Cuckoo with Wanda the transsexual or not, but I do. Most readers now automatically feel that Wanda has the right to be whoever she wants to be, whoever she knows she is, and we're all proud of her for leaving her roots to do just that. At the same time, we're all rooting for the Cuckoo to be defeated when all she wanted was that very same thing- to escape from a place where she was trapped in a mold created and enforced by others. If you haven't read The Sandman, you should really give it a shot, and try not to let the graphic novel format scare you, or trick you into underestimating it. Plus, it hilarious to think of Morpheus as the original Emo Kid.