Desultory. I was going to make that my whole review. Get it? Get it? Cause that the book was desultory and so was my review, see? See what I would have done there? But then I wanted to gripe about some stuff, so I decided to expand upon the ways in which it was desultory and have a moan about them. I can do that if I want. The Rules of the Internet say so. I was anticipating enjoying Forbidden Fruit. Sex and religion in the lives of American teenagers? That is very interesting! Plus, I flipped through it and…
2 CommentsTag: nonfiction
Again with the piles of information! I had to read this one chapter at a time and then take a long break to think about all the things contained in each chapter. In Making Comics, Scott McCloud gets down to discussing the specifics about creating a comic book – everything from the placement and spacing in word bubbles, to the construction of panels in a way that’s intuitive to the reader, to the interaction of words and pictures. There can never be too much discussion about the interaction of words and pictures. Seriously. This book made me sad I can’t…
6 CommentsI don’t know what I can really say about Persepolis that hasn’t been said already. What I love about the first volume of Persepolis is that it’s always about how Marjane interprets the events around her, much more than it is about the events themselves. As she and her family live through the Islamic Revolution, watching its agenda shift and their country change around them, little Marjane acts on what she thinks she understands. There’s a lovely bit where she insists on spending all her time with an uncle who’s a political dissident. Although she is initially interested in him…
3 CommentsSo I have been reading Iran Awakening on and off ever since the Iranian election took over the news. This has been quite a while. I wanted to read it because I felt like I didn’t know enough about Iran and the United States, and the revolution and everything. I thought it was fascinating, how she told about the changes in political power throughout her life. She talks about helping in the revolution, and how afterwards she was asked to wear a headscarf, how people told her Just wait! We want to deal with women’s rights but there are so…
5 CommentsSo 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 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 CommentsSo when I was a wee lass, struggling with greater than/less than and detesting long division that ended with remainders (this is why I don’t like math! – because lots of things end up with solutions that are very untidy and not whole numbers AT ALL), the BBC was creating a miniseries about a DJ at a mental hospital radio station and the patients there, called Takin’ Over the Asylum. And although I was too wee to care at the time, they were being surprisingly careful not to be an asshole, and getting their actors to perform four major mental…
4 CommentsI have to say, this was the perfect airplane book. I know because I spent eighteen hours traveling to London last week (I know, right? Long flight with several layovers), and Thames was my primary reading material. My grandmother sent it to me for my birthday, and originally I wasn’t going to bring it along on the trip. It’s a big fat hardback with heavy pages and four sets of plates (two color, two black-and-white) – very beautiful, but not practical on a plane trip where luggage has weight considerations. But I couldn’t resist. Thames wasn’t what I expected –…
1 CommentAh, books about books. I read this because I can’t get ahold of Nick Hornby’s much-touted books about books. Anne Fadiman writes about all kinds of aspects of loving books: marrying libraries, loving your books, plagiarism – all kinds of things. I liked some of these essays a lot – the one about marrying libraries made me wince because I could picture myself agonizing over how to organize and sort out my books with someone else’s. I was interested to read an essay from the perspective of a woman who loves books and doesn’t mind destroying them. (I wrote, destroying…
9 Comments