The marvelous Kiese Laymon on Confederate flags and SEC football. On competing for the one single diversity spot in the writers’ room: Aisha Harris writes about the unbearable whiteness of TV writers’ rooms. Nobody could be more excited about the new Star Wars trailer than stars John Boyega and Daisy Ridley. Recovering the history of years in slavery, and the story of a forgotten forced deportation: An article that opens with an oddly upsetting anecdote. New details emerge about that Harry Potter play! (It’s not a prequel, it’s a sequel! Joke’s on you, prequel-wanters! You’ll never ever learn more about…
7 CommentsTag: comics
Beautiful Darkness (Drawn and Quarterly) opens as a girl called Aurora has tea with a boy she has a crush on. (They met at the ball the other night.) Then — in seconds — they find themselves struggling to survive in the woods. They are all very wee, and the woods are normal-sized. They also appear to have emerged from the decomposing corpse of a little girl. Possibly — the book isn’t explicit about this — all of the tiny people are aspects of the dead girl’s personality, now set free to roam freely and tinily around the woods. If that synopsis seems unwarrantedly weird, don’t blame me. Apply…
17 Comments“Being sixteen is officially the worst thing I’ve ever been,” says Kimberly Keiko Cameron at one point in the comic Skim. And the book certainly reminds you of all the things about being sixteen that were garbage — if not Kim’s particular problems, then certainly the general experience of being sixteen. Called “Skim” as an unkind joke — she isn’t slender, white, and blonde like the popular girls — Kim is an outsider at her private high school. She’s not an outsider in a Carrie way, but more in the sense that high school makes so many people outsiders: that…
20 CommentsBefore I get started with this review, it’s time for PRAISE PLEASE, a segment I do sometimes because I need praise like oxygen. I decided that in 2014, I was going to read 20% non-white authors. I got a slow start because by the time I resolved this, I already had ten reviews scheduled or in need of writing, and they were all of books by white authors. However, in the first third of the year, my books have been 40% by authors of color. Half POC authors would be best, but I am still pretty pleased with myself. (I’ve…
29 CommentsI started keeping a new TBR spreadsheet a few months back, with different tabs for pleasure reading, research reading, and forthcoming books. Maybe some weekend when I’m bored, I’ll set it up so that I can track when I read/review one of the books on the list, and it’ll make automatic pie charts of my percentages of gender, nationality, and whether the American cover was better or the British one. (Currently all that stuff is on another spreadsheet.) (Yes, I like spreadsheets. Sue me.) Anyway, Marbles, by Ellen Forney (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository), was the very first book…
9 CommentsThroughout her childhood, Laurie Sandell’s father would enrapture her with stories of his brilliant, varied, and successful life: top grades at the best universities, meetings with Henry Kissinger to advise on policy, multiple awards for valor in the Vietnam War. As an adult, she spun through years of dysfunction and uncertainty before becoming an interviewer of celebrities. But Sandell also begins to learn things about her father that make it clear he isn’t, and never was, the person he claimed to be. Cover report: Same cover in England and America. I like it! To begin with the good things about…
12 CommentsUpon finishing the second volume of Brian K. Vaughn’s most recent series, Saga, I have decided to be excited about Vaughn. This could have happened sooner, except unfortunately Runaways was my introduction to him, and it is not great around race and it put me off him. But having read Y: The Last Man and Saga, I think that Vaughn’s writing is great, and I like that he creates comics with end-dates in mind, so I’ve decided to hop (at last!) on board the Brian K. Vaughn train. My favorite thing about Saga is the relative tininess of its stakes…
14 Comments