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Tag: memoirs

Review: Boy Erased, Garrard Conley

You know how sometimes you feel that you’ve become inured to the world’s cruelty, and you realize that consuming the news every day and hearing about humankind’s fundamental inhumanity has turned you into a person who doesn’t flinch at each successive news story that comes on Morning Edition, and yes, sure, that’s good and necessary for your own mental health, but on the other hand, are you possibly becoming a robot person incapable of empathy because, like, what kind of human isn’t shattered anew every time they hear about what’s going on in Syria? You know that feeling? Boy Erased,…

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Review: After the Falls, Catherine Gildiner

Here are two recommendations to further your happiness: 1. Go read Too Close to the Falls. It is a lovely, touching, frequently laugh-out-loud funny memoir about Catherine Gildiner’s childhood in Lewiston, New York, and her friendship with her father’s delivery man, Roy. I cannot say enough good things about it. Toward the end, it gets quite a bit sadder, but the rest of the book is so wonderful that I did not really mind. Gildiner’s account of stabbing a classmate with a compass and being taken to a psychologist for evaluation is one of the funniest bits of life writing…

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Burma Chronicles & Love and Rockets

And now for some comics that did not rock my world but count towards the Graphic Novels Challenge anyway: Burma Chronicles, Guy Delisle Once again Guy Delisle, French-Canadian animator and cartoonist, went a-traveling to a faraway land with an oppressive regime.  In this case, his wife Nadège was working for Médecins sans Frontières (MSF); Nadège, Guy, and their small son Louis take off for Burma (Myanmar) for a year.  Delisle notes at the beginning of the book that the UN has recognized the regime and calls it Myanmar, but that many countries, including Canada, have not.  Hence Burma. If I…

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Pyongyang, Guy Delisle

I first heard about Guy Delisle over at A Life in Books, when Lesley reviewed Pyongyang, and since then it seems he’s been popping up all over the place.  Delisle writes travelogues in comics form of the time he has spent living in countries with oppressive regimes, which is a slightly weird thing to be known for, but never mind.  Pyongyang chronicles Delisle’s two-month stay in North Korea, where he is supervising the animation of a children’s cartoon. From the first page I loved Pyongyang.  Delisle starts by excerpting the travel information he’s received about going to North Korea.  “Do…

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Reviewing other people’s grief

Alone in my sublet apartment, no library books whatsoever and no library cards also, and my sublessor having very few books unrelated to law and class anxieties, I picked up Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking and read it.  It’s a very unfortunate book!  When Joan Didion’s only daughter Quintana was in the hospital with a serious brain problem, she and her husband went home for dinner, and her husband died.  Being a writer, she wrote about it.  Attempting to research death, she finds herself without a road map for grieving.  She finds herself subconsciously taking measures to bring…

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Guest review: Blankets, Craig Thompson

That’s right, everyone!  My puppy voice paid off!  My mumsy has agreed to review Blankets here guestily.  I am hoping that she will find she loves doing guest reviews and will subsequently write about some of the cool and interesting books she read when she was getting her master’s degree in pastoral theology.  She has many books about women in the Bible and feminism in Catholicism and like that, and I would slap a Women Unbound label on the reviews she would write of them, and then I would pretend they counted towards my totals.  Because I have been shamefully…

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Undress Me in the Temple of Heaven, Susan Jane Gilman

The word “grandiose”, in my family, is a loaded word.  When one of us uses the word “grandiose” to describe someone, we understand that we actually mean “might possibly benefit from medication; updates as warranted”.  I bring that up because if I had been traveling in Communist China with a girl I didn’t know very well, and she had started talking about the project she was working on that was going to be important to national security, I’d have called home and said, “Claire is waxing grandiose,” and my parents would have said, “You get her on a plane and…

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West with the Night, Beryl Markham

For Jeane’s Dog Ear Challenge: West with the Night was the nonfiction book on an obscure topic/on a topic you don’t often read about.  I had a broad selection of Jeane recommendations for this one, since she is always reading books that sound interesting but that I would never pick up on my own. West with the Night is Beryl Markham’s memoir of growing up on her father’s farm in Africa, and becoming a horse trainer, and eventually learning to fly a plane.  Beryl Markham sounds like a pretty cool person, though from reading her Wikipedia article it sounds like…

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I’m Looking Through You, Jennifer Finney Boylan

Heeheehee, this RIP Challenge is jolly good fun.  At this rate I will have read way too many spooky books before Halloween.  I should pace myself, except I can’t because The Girl in a Swing just came in at the library and I went and picked it up today and I really really really want to read it. Jennifer Finney Boylan‘s I’m Looking Through You is all about how Jenny Boylan (Jenny! hooray! More people should be called Jenny!) grew up as a boy in a spooky old house, haunted by ghosts and writing under the wallpaper.  She writes with…

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Fun Home, Alison Bechdel

I love a memoir, y’all, and you know what I love more than a memoir?  A graphic novel memoir.  Delicious.  My library has a new section on their ever-growing graphic novels shelf, which is Biography.  When I went in yesterday (collecting films for my poor sick little sister and lots of excellent books for me), I took three of the five books from the new wee little section.  Including Fun Home – which I remember the library not having last time I checked, and I was well cross about it. Fun Home is Alison Bechdel‘s memoir about her father, a…

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