So my life has been in a smidgy bit of an uproar lately, for various reasons – my library card expired, for one thing, right on the day that half my books were due to get renewed! I had no idea the expiration date was so soon; it feels like I just renewed it a few weeks ago. And, see, I have this friendly blue library card with an elegant number that I have memorized, and it has one of the earliest extant drafts of my signature, which I had only invented recently when I got the card in 2001. …
10 CommentsReading the End Posts
So Shan said that she found it difficult to read Understanding Comics because it was lots of information coming at her all it once – and I thought that was ratcheted up a few notches in Reinventing Comics. It was still full of interesting things to consider. Scott McCloud talks about the directions comics are taking, the revolutions that have to take place for comics to Take Their Rightful Place, including limited representation by anyone who isn’t white and male. He handles these delicate subjects quite well, without being a jerk at all or failing to recognize his position of…
3 CommentsSo in case you’ve been living in a hole and not hearing about The Hunger Games – it’s a grim, grim dystopian future, and every year the government makes each of the twelve districts send one boy and one girl (ages 12-18) to participate in the Hunger Games where they all get placed in a specially designed Perilous Terrain and fight to the death on live TV. Katniss, our dauntless protagonist, volunteers to take her little sister’s place, and the other tribute turns out to be the baker’s son Peeta (I know, right?), who once saved Katniss and her family…
13 CommentsI told Colleen at Foreign Circus Library that I love books about research, and she ever so kindly sent it to me in the post! Lucky me, I read it over the weekend. Poor Connie has just got through with her qualifying exams – sounds like a nightmare, that lot, I don’t think I was sufficiently sympathetic to my dear friend tim when she was having quals (sorry tim!) – and her scatty New Age mother demands she go fix up her (Connie’s) late grandmother’s old house and get it sold. While living at the house, Connie finds a little…
11 CommentsI was all sick and unhappy today, but on the other hand, I got a bunch of books from the library on Sunday, including a number of books about Iran – would you believe, with all this shit going down in Iran that is all over the news all the time and everyone is fighting for their freedom, and on Saturday I received from the lovely Colleen a copy of The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (hooray! It sounds just like one of Barbara Michaels’ books, with the spooky past and everything!), and today, oh heaven, I received from PaperbackSwap…
2 CommentsIn Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud writes about the structure, creation, history, and vocabulary (among other things!) of comics. He does it, of course, in graphic novel form, with a little cartoon Scott McCloud telling us what is going on. I love this because when he talks about a technique that graphic novels use, voila, he can show it to us too! The book never becomes boring, which is partly down to the fact that it’s an interesting topic, but also partly because the form allows a lot of room for humor. (I was going to write “and whimsy”, but I…
11 CommentsI wish I could do something more helpful for Iran. I want justice to triumph.
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