Books
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Pyongyang
Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, by Guy Delisle is a graphic novel that tells the story of the author’s trip to the capital of North Korea in 2001. Delisle is a French cartoonist, and was in Pyongyang working with Korean cartoonists at the time. Delisle does a wonderful job of capturing the bizarreness of life in a totalitarian country, one that lives almost outside of the world, shut off from the west, and especially its sworn enemy, the United States. He describes a bleak, strangled society where the people live in such poverty that up to 1/3 of the population receive food from foreign aid, the average person works…
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Book Shopping
Ted and I went in to Berkeley on Saturday afternoon, and stopped off at Cody’s books on 4th street. Cody’s is constantly changing, trying to stay in business in this world of Barnes & Noble and Amazon.com. They closed their flagship store on Telegraph Ave a few years ago, which saddened me a great deal. I was born in Berkeley, and though we left before I was old enough to remember living there, all of our visits during my childhood seemed to make a stop at Cody’s. Then I became an adult, and again, most visits to Berkeley included a stop at Cody’s, one of the best bookstores around. But…
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American Born Chinese
Though I finished my Graphic Novels Reading Challenge, I’ve been sucked in enough by the genre that I decided I would try a few more. From other reviews I’ve read on the Challenge’s blog, I decided to try American Born Chinese. It is a tale of learning to accept oneself, ignoring the disparaging attitudes of those around us. Although American Born Chinese deals with the slings and arrows of racism, I would argue that the themes of acceptance and self-awareness translate well to all of us, and that anyone who has ever felt self-hatred in the face of society and its harsh criticisms can find something to identify with in…
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Plainsong
Plainsong, by Kent Haruf, is the kind of book that you read feeling like you kind of know what’s coming…there are no great surprises in plot, no great mysteries. Yet the telling of the story is so beautifully done, the characters so real and true and honest, that you don’t mind that you’ve pretty much figured out how things will turn out. Plainsong is a story told from many different angles and edges. There is the schoolteacher, Maggie Jones, who is a kind and giving woman, who turns out to be the fabric that binds the other narratives together. There is Guthrie, the father of two young boys, also a…
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The Book Thief
The Book Thief is a tale of World War II told from a different point of view than any other book I’ve read on the subject…and at the same time, it’s just like the other World War II books I’ve read. I’ve read the Diary of Anne Frank, Number the Stars, The Snow Goose, and at least several others. I’ve seen many WWII movies, including The Thin Red Line and Saving Private Ryan. All of these books and films are told from the point of view of the allies, or that of people fleeing the tyranny and death camps of the Nazis. The Book Thief is the story of a…
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Atonement
I thought I would publish this book review, which I wrote over a week ago but was waiting until after the weekend to post, and then things changed in my world and I forgot about it. But it’s been sitting there, waiting patiently, and it gets the pity party off of the top of my page. Can’t spend too much time feeling sorry for myself, can I? No. So, here’s a book review from last week. I’m writing this review a bit differently than I have in the past, in that I’m not quite half-way through the book, and I’ve got a lot of thoughts swimming around in my head…
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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…