Books
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Beowulf
I intended to read a different version of this graphic novel, but neither my local comic book store nor my local library had it in stock, so I went along with what they had, paying careful attention to NOT get the version based on the recent film, but instead, this version based on the historic novel. If you somehow escaped High School English without reading Beowulf, I’ll get you up to speed. Beowulf is the longest surviving Anglo-Saxon poem in existence, and what a poem it is. It tells of events, both real and imagined, dated to the time of Scandinavian King Hygelac, around 450 – 600 AD. The poem…
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Jimmy Corrigan, or, The Smartest Kid on Earth
If you still think that graphic novels are childish and can’t rip your heart out just as easily as any other novel out there, you haven’t been paying attention to this blog lately. Because this little challenge I’ve been doing has really opened my eyes to a whole new world, and I’m so glad that I decided to take this one on. My latest graphic novel was Jimmy Corrigan, or, The Smartest Boy on Earth, by Chris Ware. Initially I wasn’t sure if I was going to like this book, because the illustrations are quite busy, the writing tiny and sometimes hard to read, and it looked like it might…
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The Tale of One Bad Rat
The Tale of One Bad Rat, by Bryan Talbot, is a pretty amazing accomplishment. Mr. Talbot started out with the goal of writing a graphic novel that took place, at least partially, in the Lake District of England, home of Beatrix Potter and the characters of her children’s books. From that beginning, he took the image of a young homeless girl being harassed by a bearded ‘Jesus Freak’, (his words) in the Tube, and constructed a tale around her. For the girl to be homeless, Mr. Talbot decides that she needs a reason to have left home. So his character is the victim of sexual abuse by her father, and…
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Persepolis
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rl6kH3xPwDU[/youtube] Persepolis is a story told in two graphic novels, The Story of a Childhood, and The Story of a Return. It is also the name of an award winning animated film based on these graphic novels. The stories are the autobiography of Marjane Satrapi, a woman born in Iran in 1969, and they follow her through the overthrow of the Shah, and give voice to the crushed hopes of the Iranian populace when things go from bad to worse under the fundamentalist rule of the Ayatollah. Marji’s family is very progressive and open minded, and they encourage her to be a free thinker, to read and understand the events…
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The Inheritance of Loss
I finally finished The Inheritance of Loss, by Kiran Desai. I was so looking forward to reading this book, as I had heard nothing but good things about it. I even asked a woman on BART if she were enjoying, as she was reading it while on the way into the city, and she said that she was engrossed, and couldn’t pull herself away. I started this book almost a month ago, and I’m sad to say that I had a really difficult time getting into it. It’s sad, because the book is beautifully written. It’s the congruent story of a retired judge in Northern India, his granddaughter, his cook,…
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I Killed Adolf Hitler
I Killed Adolf Hitler, by Jason, is my first book for the Graphic Novels Challenge. I’ve never tried graphic novels before, and haven’t been a huge fan of comic books since my days of Betty and Veronica, with the obvious exception of the Buffy, Season 8 comics. So here I find myself treading into a new medium, where an entire book can be read during lunch, and more is said in pictures than in words. The example I chose for a graphic, I suppose, isn’t a good one, since most of the frames contain words, but there are pages in the book that don’t contain any. Pages where the deadpan…
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In For a Penny, In For a Pound…
I’m still working on my Book Awards Reading Challenge, which runs from July 2007 through the end of June, 2008, and requires participants to read 12 award winning books in 12 months. In addition, I just joined the Graphic Novels Challenge, and the TBR Challenge. I’m hoping to join a Non Fiction Reading Challenge as well, though that hasn’t been announced yet. So, what the heck, I’ll join one more, the Man Booker Challenge. The rules of this challenge are to read 6 winners of the Man Booker Prize, or books that were short or long listed for the prize, in 2008. OK, I’m in, though for this challenge, I’m…
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TBR Challenge
Well, it’s a new year, and apparently in the book blogging world, that means, time to take on some new challenges. Amongst the select few books that got to stay when we purged our bookshelves recently, one shelf is full of books that I want to read, but haven’t had a chance to get to yet…in other words, To Be Read books, TBR. This challenge can be found here, and the rules are: ** Pick 12 books – one for each month of 2008 – that you’ve been wanting to read (that have been on your “To Be Read” list) for 6 months or longer, but haven’t gotten around to.…
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Graphic Novels Challenge
Dewey, from The Hidden Side of a Leaf, has decided to host a Graphic Novels Challenge. I’m here to confess that I’ve never read a graphic novel, and haven’t had much interest in them. But there’s a film out right now, Persepolis, which the review in our newspaper said is so much like the graphic novel, you get pretty much the same experience by reading the book that you do watching the film. I’m not sure if we can get to Berkeley before it goes away (which may be soon), and it’s not playing out here in the sticks, so I’m thinking I’ll go for the graphic novel instead, and…
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Boom or Bust
For awhile there, this was starting to look like a book blog…I had so many book reviews, and I was just tearing through books at an alarming rate. I love reading, and I like writing the reviews, so this seemed like a good thing to me. But lately….not reading so much. You might think that with the writers’ strike affecting the quantity of new programming on television, and the fact that we didn’t move meaning I’m not quite as addicted to HGTV (though now I’m watching for ideas of how to fix our place up for us, not how to get it ready to sell), plus the fact that I…
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What to eat in the New Year
One of my gifts for Christmas this year was a cookbook, The Art of Simple Food, by Alice Waters. So far I’ve made exactly one meal using the cookbook, but I’m going to say, GREAT gift. Really, I think if one buys the right cookbooks, one needs very few, but they need to do certain things. They need to give you good, basic information about how to cook good food. That’s it. This book does that, including tips on putting together a great home kitchen (what knives you really need, what pots and pans, that kind of thing), and tips on how to make really good food, rather than just…
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The Golden Compass/Northern Lights
The Golden Compass (published first in the U.K. under the title Northern Lights) is the first book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy. The protagonist, Lyra Belacqua, is an 11-year old girl being raised by the professors and staff of Oxford’s (fictional) Jordan College. She leads a fairly rough and tumble life, learning what the professors have the time to teach her, and the ability to teach, considering they are used to talking to college students and fellow professors, not children. She also learns the arts of lying, self-defense, and the value of loyalty in her life outdoors, running semi-wild with the Gyptian children who frequent Oxford. Lyra has…
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Paradigm Shift
I’m a reader, and I grew up in a family of readers, and even the side of the family that I didn’t know until I was an adult, all readers. I grew up surrounded by books, where the most expensive part of moving from one state to another was the books, because the furniture we had wasn’t really worth shipping, but the books were. So, the biggest walls in our house were always covered with books, which were alphabetized (for fiction) and categorized then alphabetized (non-fiction). Always, books were the number one thing in the house. In my adult years, however, we have often had the luxury of a room…
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Don’t Look Behind You
When I was a little older than Maya is now, I discovered the semi-creepy world of Lois Duncan. She writes young adult fiction, and her books all seem to dwell on the darker side of life. You may recognize her name from one of my favorite of her books, I Know What You Did Last Summer, which was made into a slasher film starring the Gorton’s Fisherman as the arch villain, which I never bothered to see because heck, there was no Fisherman in the book, and it wasn’t a slasher book. That book is the story of the aftermath of a tragic evening, when four high school kids are…
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Rhett Butler’s People
While preparing for this post, I discovered that a new book was being released in the Gone With the Wind family. I knew I had to read it, knew I had to find out more about my favorite characters, and what might happen with Rhett and Scarlett. Last week, we walked to the library, where a fresh copy was being held for me. Pant pant. (That’s my eagerness to get home and dive on in…) I have a couple of different thoughts on this book. First off, I really liked it. I found it to be well written, much better than Scarlett, and I liked how the author took characters…