Written by: Peter Carey
First line: Dead, and no one told me.
Why you should read this book: When talented horologist Catherine Gehrig learns of her lover's untimely death, her entire world seems to run down, and Catherine can't even publicly mourn her loss, because her lover was married and worked at the same museum where she restored automatons. Only their boss knows her situation, and he sends her to another site to restore a stunning artifact, one that comes with its own story of love and loss. As Catherine repairs the fabulous machine, she reads the story of its benefactor, Henry Brandling, and begins to heal from her loss.
Why you shouldn't read this book: I found all the main characters pretty unlikeable as human beings; everyone is so caught up in their grief that they can't be bothered not to be terrible to everyone around them.
Wednesday, June 10, 2015
The Chemistry of Tears
The Party after You Left
Written by: Roz Chast
First line: I survived conjunctivitis.
Why you should read this book: I'm sure I've read plenty of Chast's work without realizing it; her hilarious cartoons have been featured prominently in the New Yorker for years. Most of the pages in this book were laugh-out-loud funny to me, a surprising consistency of modern irregularity and relationship absurdity. Just a really nice collection of cartoons for adults.
Why you shouldn't read this book: In your day, things were different, and you like it that way. You liked it just fine. Also: you feel that mixed marriages are an abomination, no matter the mix.
The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil
Written by: Stephen Collins
First line: Beneath the skin of everything is something nobody can know.
Why you should read this book: Dave, an almost completely ordinary man, lives an almost completely ordinary life on an island called Here, where perfect conformity isn't just a dictate, it's a way of life, until the day his previously nonexistent beard goes crazy and starts to take over. All the island's hairdressers and all the island's gardeners can't keep this irrational and non-conforming facial hair in check, and eventually Dave must capitulate to the beard, because there is no controlling it. Meanwhile, everyone on the island will be affected by the chaos of the beard incident, learning that a little uncontrolled chaos can be a positive thing for a society.
Why you shouldn't read this book: You strongly believe that unconventional hairstyles disrupt not only the learning process, but the stability of society in general.
Friday, May 22, 2015
Nemo: River of Ghosts
Written by: Alan Moore
First line: ...And so...*koff*...that's the story.
Why you should read this book: What the story lacks in sense and meaning, it makes up for with ghosts, swamp creature spawning, dinosaur attacks, and a lot of gratuitous robot Nazi chicks in bikinis. Basically it's a distillation of a bunch of awesome/awful pulp fiction tropes so beautifully bottled that it doesn't have to follow any sort of logic. Includes the merest nods to Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, and the earliest history of superhero comics, but only in a way that's completely incidental to the little fantasy presented here.
Why you shouldn't read this book: Certain things, to you, are sacrosanct, and those things include novels you read when you were a kid and characters out of history.
Maus: A Survivor's Tale II: And Here My Troubles Began
Written by: Art Spiegelman
First line: Summer vacation.
Why you should read this book: As book II opens, '80s era Vladek has just been left by his second wife, while '40s era Vladek has just been sent to Auschwitz, and Art continues to piece together his father's evolution and the blurring of lines between then and now in the mind of his father. The author's frustration with his father, who passed away between the publication of these two volumes, continues to mount, as Spiegelman desperately tries to empathize with the man who, he feels, has made his own life more difficult. There's no real resolution here, as emphasized by the point in the book when Vladek says "And here my troubles began," along with the his insistence on the last page that he and Art's mother "lived happy happy every after" despite the fact that they are both still mourning Anja's death by suicide over a decade earlier; there is only the acknowledgement that the living choose whether or not to continue living, and how to deal with suffering.
Why you shouldn't read this book: There are no happy endings for Holocaust survivors, apparently.
Maus: A Survivor's Tale I: My Father Bleeds History
Written by: Art Spiegelman
First line: It was summer, I remember.
Why you should read this book: Still the only graphic novel to win a Pulitzer, this powerful memoir intertwines the story of young Vladek Spiegelman's ordeal living through the early days of World War II, and the tale of his adult son, decades later, struggling to understand the angry and difficult man his father has become. The simple metaphor of Jews as mice and Germans as cats does little to dehumanize the triumphs and increasing struggles of the protagonists, for whom basic survival becomes a full time occupation. Potent and heart-rending, this is a serious work of literature wrapped in black and white drawings.
Why you shouldn't read this book: I personally don't read Holocaust literature after the sun goes down, because it gives me nightmares.
Angry Youth Comix
Brown Girl Dreaming
Written by: Jaqueline Woodson
First line: I am born on a Tuesday at University Hospital/Columbus, Ohio,/USA--/a country caught/between Black and White.
Why you should read this book: This lovely, award-winning autobiographical novel in verse examines the difference between north and south, black and white, age and youth, freedom and oppression, family and stranger, and a hundred other dichotomies as seen from the eyes of a young girl. Little Jackie seeks to understand the past and find order in the present in order to grow into her own future. Great first person recollections of family relations, the civil rights movement, growing up, and finding oneself.
Why you shouldn't read this book: No sympathy for Jehovah's Witnesses.
Thursday, May 7, 2015
Shutter Volume 1: Wanderlost
Written by: Joe Keatinge
First line: Can we go home now?
Why you should read this book: Kate Kristopher has given up the life of adventuring that she inherited from her father: she's tired of chasing and being chased by monsters while staring into the complex chasm of reality. Her twenty-seventh birthday is also the ten-year anniversary of her father's death, and all her plans to live the quiet life of a professional photographer are disrupted when she is attacked by a bunch of scimitar-wielding ghosts and a mechanical man while visiting her father's grave. Suddenly, everything she thought she knew about her family and her personal history is shaken, stirred and turned upside-down, and it doesn't seem to matter that Kate's given up the life, because the life is not about to give her up.
Why you shouldn't read this book: You expect your father's secrets to stay buried.
The Savage Sword of Conan Volume 18
Written by: Chuck Dixon et al.
First line: The Zamoran dawn sheds crimson tears of a rebellion met with doom.
Why you should read this book: Fighting, death, thievery, death, sex, death, magic, death, betrayal, death, monsters, death, and more fighting, and more death. I should probably feel guilty about how much I enjoy slipping into the world of Conan, a world in which one man defeats gods (sometimes on a daily basis) and survives impossible odds every single day. Conan lives by a code, and while it wouldn't get you or me very far in our world, in Conan's world it always makes sense and it always ends with Conan surviving.
Why you shouldn't read this book: You demand accountability in your fantasy fiction.
