My Scattered Thoughts

Wow. 

If you liked Harriet the Spy, you’d probably like this one. But it’s no kids book, even though it’s about a kid.

The comic is laid out like it’s drawn on a notebook of lined paper, complete with binder holes drawn in. The art is wildly varied, sometimes intricately detailed and sometimes dashed off in quick scribbles. Like a kid might draw. It’s a powerful artistic technique for telling a story that might otherwise feel a little worn.

It’s the kind of comic book that non-comics readers would probably go for (and comics readers too). Just amazing stuff. The kind of thing where I don’t really know how someone could make it. I can’t visualize the process that went into making this book. I can’t say enough good things about it.

An amazing work of art.

When I first tried to read The Tombs of Atuan I bounced off it hard. I was something of a completionist reader at the time and it took a lot for me to stop reading a book. But I stopped reading this one. I only picked it up again a couple of years later and I don’t really remember liking it much. It was too slow and quiet. Not enough wizards and dragons. Very little magic.

Re-reading it as an adult, I was taken by its rich emotional subtlety. Subtlety that, I think, was completely lost on me as a child. There’s a tenderness and a kindness that Ged shows towards Arha that is probably more magical than anything he does in the previous book. There’s something really powerful in the way that Le Guin depicts this growing relationship between a man and a woman, each trapped in their own particular way. 

As a child, I read A Wizard of Earthsea, and I could relate to the raw emotional displays of jealousy and anger and pride. Even though those things cost Ged quite a bit, they also led him to the kind of adventure that I craved, full of magic and wonder and mystery. The kind of adventures that wizards have.

It’s only now that I realize the wizardry of wisdom and kindness and how powerfully Le Guin shows them here. She snuck some powerful stuff into this “children’s book”. I’m probably a better person for having read it as a child, even though I think I missed most of what was going on.

I’m happy I read it again as an adult.

I think I liked Siddhartha and Narcissus and Goldmund more. (I’ve been meaning to read The Glass Bead Game for years. I read this on the recommendation of a coworker.

I think if I’d read this as a teenager it would’ve blown my mind. It captures a kind of anxious thinking that beset me as a child. I thought the first 2/3s of the book were exceptionally strong, but the magical mysticism of the last 1/3 sort of left me a little cold, even though that’s probably what would’ve entranced me the most had I read it 20-25 years ago. It’s a young man’s book, I feel. 

There’s a precision and specificity to Helen DeWitt’s writing that I find utterly charming and disarming. If you like getting your toes wet before jumping in the deep end with a novel, these stories are an excellent intro to her writing.

Many of the stories seem to focus on the difficulty of dealing with the world when you care about things that most people don’t care about that much. Like precision in language or hearing foreign language books read by native speakers who also need to have an aesthetically appropriate name. (“Entourage” is a pretty searing indictment of billionaires.)

“My Heart Belongs to Bertie”, “Brutto”, “Improvisation is the Heart of Music” were three that I especially liked.

(It’s a smorgasbord! Sometimes I think, I haven’t been reading that much, and then I go back over my list of recently read books…)

The Wild Storm v1 & 2 by Warren Ellis: Back in the Noughties, I read pretty much all of Warren Ellis’ comics. He’s really tops when writing team books (see also: Planetary, Nextwave, Injection, and others) and this series sees a return to form. Deeply mysterious, witty banter, and the art’s gorgeous. I look forward to seeing where it goes.

Clean Room v1-3 by Gail Simone: Bright, vibrant colors make the creepiness and horror muchly more so. If you’re prone to nightmares, definitely stay away from this one. 

Real Magic: Ancient Wisdom, Modern Science, and a Guide to the Secret Power of the Universe by Dean Radin: This book’s got the most succinct and thorough overview of the history of Western occult practices and movements that I’ve ever read. Worth it, just for that. Unlike much occult writing, extremely readable.

All-New Wolverine Vol. 1: The Four Sisters by Tom Taylor: Absolutely injected new life into the whole Wolverine thing which–at this point–is feeling pretty tired. (See also: Old Man Logan.) A nice balance of humor and high stakes.

The Mighty Thor Vol. 5: The Death of the Mighty Thor by Jason Aaron: I’ll read pretty much anything Jason Aaron does at this point. Brings the Jane Foster/Thor story to an excellent conclusion. I look forward to seeing what he does next.

Lady Killer by Jamie S. Rich and Joelle Jones: A showcase of Joelle Jones’ excellent artwork. I don’t have much stomach for gore these days or I might’ve enjoyed it more. ’50s housewife is secretly an assassin. Very Mad Men-y. She’s doing a new Catwoman series. Could be good! Regardless, the art will be great.

White Teeth by Zadie Smith: Read this one for my book club. I’ve been seeing this book displayed prominently in bookstores for what feels like years and years. It had a definitively mixed reception from my book club, but I quite liked it. “Hysterical realism” is a phrase I ran across on the internet related to this book and I think it’s extremely on the nose. I wasn’t sure about this book until about the mid-point, but then it really gets cranking and I was very much onboard at that point, thoroughly enjoying the ride. Some useful insight about the immigrant experience, I’m thinking. At the sentence level, the writing is swooping and fantastically exuberant.

Space Opera by Catherynne M. Valente: Perhaps the most worthy successor to Douglas Adams, re funny science fiction. Boundlessly creative, it really is almost too much at times. It’s hard to imagine one brain coming up with all this stuff. But then one only has to read her other books to realize this isn’t just a one-off kind of thing. Me, I just imagine painstaking and painful wordsmithing. Still, a joy to read if you love to see words bouncing around all over the place. Eurovision in Space! Brilliant!

The Library at Mount Char by Scott Hawkins: A book about magical “librarians”. (Apart from getting their magical powers from books, I didn’t find them very librarian-y. A minor quibble.) I kind of had to read it. Sometimes you want to just eat some popcorn, you know? Gonzo, bonkers, magical weirdness. I dug it.

Wolf in White Van by John Darnielle: (I liked Universal Harvester more.) (Yes, it’s that John Darnielle. Of Mountain Goats fame.) Captures, in a way that’s harrowing, that dangerous time of life from about 15-22 years old. The protagonist has an adventure-game-by-mail business that’s quite alluring, although I wanted it to be more fantastical. The image of the “wolf in white van” definitely sticks. This book has the kind of eye for detail that makes me think “boy, I really haven’t been paying attention to the world around me…”

Equinoxes by Cyril Pedrosa: It’s the details that stuck with me, even as the “plot” of the thing eludes me. The small ways that people are decent (or indecent) to one another. The weight of history. The ways in which people relate to art, photography and painting. The small moments that heap together to make a life. It’s a beautiful book.

My Pretty Vampire by Katie Skelly: A silly comic about a vampire. Kinda sexy, in a campy vampire sort of way. Reminded me a bit of Mac Wellman’s Dracula play.

If Found…Please Return to Elise Gravel by Elise Gravel: One of the most charming and delightful books I’ve seen all year. On its face, just a bunch of doodles. But so endearing and heartwarming.

Hellboy (Library Edition, Volume 1): Seed of Destruction and Wake the Devil by Mike Mignola: When the Hellboy comic first started coming up, it was a recurring topic of conversation among my friends and I. (We were so excited for that movie!) I wanted to see if 1) my kid would like it, and 2) if I’d still like it. No to 1 and yes to 2. The art is so great. Worth picking up, for sure, if you’ve never read it.

I don’t think I’m exaggerating to say that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West is one of the best books I’ve ever read–and I’ve read a few of them. The writing in this book is so exquisite that I often had to set the book down. At one point, I shouted after reading something so profound. This book was so incredible, to me, that I almost don’t even know what to write about it.

Have you ever read a book by a dead author and mourned their death, because there’s not even the slightest change that you would ever get to meet them? For me, Rebecca West is one of those writers. 

So what’s it all about? It’s a 1930s travelogue of the Balkans. It sounds fairly innocuous, but when reading this book I felt like I was peering into the secret history of the world (or at least the European portion of it). When King Alexander of Yugoslavia was assassinated in Marseille, France (an event I’d never read about!) Rebecca West decided that she would travel to the Balkans for the express purpose of trying to understand why this region of the world kept setting Europe on fire and why, she correctly intuited, it would do so again. I think she succeeded.

Why did World War I start? The assassination of Archduke Ferdinand is the first thing that springs to my mind. I know there were other things too, but the why of that event never went deep enough for in explaining how that event caused the human abattoir of that War to End All Wars. Now, I feel like I understand it in my bones. I feel like understand, emotionally, how and why that thing happened and how it fed into the bloody massacres that followed, the ones we’re all still reeling from, even though we don’t quite realize it. It wasn’t a quick process. I had to read ~1100 pages to get there.

But okay, you may be thinking, What’s the big deal here? You understand how and why WWI started. Is that really worth all the time and energy you put into this?

Yes.

I don’t know, you kind of have to take my word for it. I’m still struggling to fit this book into my brain. I’m not sure I ever will. It’s one of those books I was tempted to start re-reading as soon as I’d finished it.

Check it out. I don’t think you’ll regret it.