Nyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyynnnnnnnnggggg. Come on, dude. Is what I was saying throughout most of Habibi. I wanted to be saying what I was saying throughout most of Thompson’s previous book, Blankets, which was nothing actually because I was so breathless from the beauty of the story and the illustrations. I wanted that to be the case with Habibi, and occasionally it was, like when the characters were telling each other stories from Muslim traditions. Craig Thompson never didn’t succeed at making his stories beautiful. If he had stuck to this, we’d be having a very different review right now. Let me back…
3 CommentsTag: incest and rape
Margaret Atwood‘s The Handmaid’s Tale is feminist dystopian satire. It was sort of a box-tick read, but it was very good, and well-written, and I’m glad I read it and I never ever want to read it again. In slightly-future America, now a fascist misogynist theocracy called Gilead, Offred (but June, really) is a Handmaid. This means that she has viable ovaries, and is responsible for producing babies. Once a month she has sex with the Commander to whom she belongs, and her life is sharply circumscribed – she can’t read, can’t walk in public by herself, can’t talk to…
13 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 know, I know. I know I said I was done with Jodi Picoult. But I was at my aunt and uncle’s last night, and I had The Charioteer but I am in London, I don’t have loads of books with me, and I didn’t want to use up The Charioteer because I love it so much. So I read The Tenth Circle, which my aunt and uncle had on their bookshelf. The issue: date rape. The court scenes: none – shocking, I know. However, there is a murder. As Jodi Picoult’s books go, this is not one of her…
5 CommentsThe Brooklyn Follies is all about a middle-aged man called Nathan Glass, divorced, a cancer survivor, estranged from his daughter, who goes to Brooklyn to die. While there, he reunites with his nephew Tom, who is working in a bookshop for an earnest, checkered-past-y, rather gullible man called Harry. The events of the story come together to give Nathan a life again. Hm. I cannot decide what my final verdict on the book is. In parts, I really really liked it. It was extremely well-written, as I noticed from the first. I would say this was its most notable characteristic,…
Leave a CommentI will preface this by saying that I liked this book a lot. However, due to that habit I have of forming expectations when I read about things, it was also not at all what I thought it was going to be. Because I forgot about the whole second half of Nymeth’s review or something, but the only thing that stuck with me was a girl goes off to live with her cousins (there is really no phrase I find more appealing in a book synopsis than goes off to live with) and I had a vague sense that they…
4 CommentsThere has never been a more picked-up-at-random than this book. Basically I was at Bongs & Noodles before the storm, trying to pick out a good hurricane book. And I kind of wanted to get Special Topics in Calamity Physics, but I had already read it. And I kind of wanted to get The Unconsoled, by Kazuo Ishiguro, because of how haunting I remember Never Let Me Go was, but I felt doubtful about it. So I sat on a chair gazing at my options, and then I realized that what I really wanted was to read The Far Pavilions…
3 CommentsI confess. I got this one because it has the same title as the book Lucas writes on One Tree Hill. And you know what I realized when I was composing this review in my head while washing dishes? I realized that Lucas’s book title? Ravens is meant to refer to his basketball team, the Tree Hill Ravens. Which kind of makes me want to gouge out my eyes. Like, bad enough he’s written a pretentious book full of pretentious sentences and given it a pretentious title, and bad enough they’re pretending that this idiotic autobiographical book about Lucas and…
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