Persepolis.....Persia.....Iran.....Islam....all through the eyes of a child

I know nothing about Iran...and neither do you. This will provide an interesting snap shot of life in Iran just before and after the Islamic Revolution of 1979. Stereotypes are nicely smashed here. The cartoonist's childhood is unlike anyone's you probably know. This is on the Grade 10 currciuclum though I am not sure how students would react to its content. I guess I will just give it to one or two to read and see what they think. I love that she listened to Kim Wilde and Iron Maiden at about the same time I did. 

Dead @17...Maybe I was tricked by the pointy...

So if you like teenage girls, monsters, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, skaters, and axes...this may be for you. I think I was tricked into thinking it was good because the comic girls are super cute. Ah well. 

Straight off the Farm....

If you are a fan of Fables, read more Fables. this is ok, but pales in comparison to one of the comic book world's greatest creations--Fables. 

Fell...one of the gems of my collection

This is a great book. Mine is Volume 1:Feral City. Which begs the question, "Was there a Volume 2?" I'll be back in a second. And sadly nope. You should read this if you like detectives and cool comic book art. The weirdness reminds me a little bit about the film Seven.

Because it's going to be a TV show Plus it's KURT

And no I wish that was the copy I had. May have to track that down for Cog and I. I just started this novel because I have never read it and it's being made into a TV show. It's very much a Vonnegut novel so far, what with the science fiction and quirky characters. And he taught me a new word HELLRAKE. More to follow.

Flood...an awesome example of what comixx can do.

This is another graphic novel that my Wee sister bought me for Christmas and it's awesome. Why? Because it is literally a wood cut novel. He carves, applies ink, and voila creates ridiculous art. Plus the story is intriguing. Seek it out. Maybe a library has it to borrow. 

War and Peace...Volume 2...Sorry Alaina, I am little behind.

The story so far: War versus Napoleon--Russia lost, but  it's like they don't even know they did. Weird secondary story line about the Masons (of whom I know nothing about), and the burgeoning relationship between Natasha and Prince Andrew...Oh, and a whole lot of peace. Plus a wolf hunt and 19th century merriment. To be continued. And yes, the writing is brilliant...I am just slow.  

I have no idea what the hell this is about

One of the things I love about my sister, is that she buys me completely random commix at Christmas time. Usually they are super interesting because they are like nothing I ever read. This one revolves around the character Manhog. There are no words and it makes ZERO sense. I have no idea what the "hidden signs and portents" are, and I honestly don't care. Ah well.

Diversity good, but maybe vet the books first...

So the school division has decided to introduce a lot of new titles into our library that celebrate diversity and tell stories from the LGBTQ community's perspective. This is all well and good, but if you are going to add books to the list, they still need to be teenage live relevant (I think). This book is written from the transgender experience, but the historical content would be lost on 21st century high school kids. However, it does have one of the best one-line poems I have ever read. So there's that.

SLIP

"I want to be as thin as the scars on my wrist". Brilliant. 

Mathew Shepard...RIP.

I had almost forgotten how horrific the world can be and then this arrives in our library at school. The murder of Mathew Shepard is one of the most heinous hate crimes in recent memory. Sadly, the world he left has not necessarily improved. However, the fact that we can have gender neutral bathrooms and Gay Pride and LGBT diversity in our schools must mean we are trying to do something right. Although some of these poems seem trite on their own, the book as an artifact is, at times, as powerful as The Book Thief.  Read the introduction, the poems, the footnotes, the explanations...read it all, then read it again. The brutality and the loneliness of his death is heart wrenching. 

Another from the pile...off the table, in the closet..inside, outside, upside, down...

The best here...well that cover is clever. Based on the opening three pages of ads..I still want a Prada bag (to display like art in a room all its own), the mini-article on Nazis and amphetamine, and a funny Adam and Eve cartoon....bakes him an apple pie..."I'll be damned!" Ah, yup. 

Sometimes I read Magazines...from stacks that never seem to dwindle.

The best of the best here: a funny cartoon about hipsters and their moleskines, "Cut to the Bone" an essay on the horrors of working in a chicken factory if you are an illegal/semi-legal/totally legal immigrant...yes, capitalists are still assholes, and possibly the small review about a book called The Great Cat and Dog Massacres whereby Londoners killed their pets prior to the expected German attack in 1939.  

Convoluted...Like many big events in the DC Universe

This collection is excellent if you can fight through the convoluted story line. Great splash pages, Wonder Woman as a Star Sapphire, and crazy old Sinestro going really crazy. However, if you don't know this universe you will be reading this three times just to figure it out.  

Wow...Not so much Boys Scouts...IE...Not so much prepared

So this is the first book I have "read" by listening to it. I will probably buy a hard copy later as it is excellent. So far the most intriguing, though horrific part, is the Japanese's treatment of the Chinese in the event known as "The Rape of Nanking" I knew it was awful, but the accounts here are seriously disturbing. Aside from that, the first-person accounts all say the same thing;

1. The Americans completely underestimated the "small people".

2. The Americans were completely unprepared for this attack.

3. The Americans were so unprepared and delusional with regards to what an Asian nation could do that even during the attack, especially early, they thought it was a training exercise. They could NOT believe in a Japanese attack (to their detriment, obviously).

4. That heroes would emerge, because heroes needed to emerge.

 

The Book I Started During Passive Resisitance to Brad Wall

Time will tell...just started as a cleanse from the brainiac War and Peace.

And when Brad Wall finally gets his way...these are the books you can take out of the library..

One Damn Fine Poet

If you like sordid tales of booze, horseracing, gambling, women, dames, broads, barflys, bar room fights, bad jobs, good wine (which you should drink while reading this), Shostakovich (which you should listen to while reading this), then this is the poetry collection for you. In fact any of his poetry collections are totally accessible tales from the bottom rung of society. I love this guy, almost as much as I love Mickey Rourke.

Brilliant Dialogue..Excellent Female Voice (as far as I can tell)

There are a variety of stories in here (that they of course made into a singular movie with Scarlett and Thora Birch). I was taken by what I believe to be an authentic teenage girl voice, if that voice was filtered through a weirdo cartoonist. Of course now I must re-watch the movie, but this collection is a gem.

Way Better Than Previously Thought...the 3 1/2 hour movie not so much

When I first read this I was none too impressed because it was not nearly as cool as V for Vendetta. That remains true, but there is enough here to recommend it to non-comic readers. Rorschach of course is the best character, and Dr. Manhattan remains the most annoying. The comic within the comic makes more sense in the grand scheme of things too. However, the 3/12 hour movie is painfully long and should have stripped the whole comic in a comic story. Unfortunately, the characters are not as compelling as Eve or V, but I understand and accept this novel's placement within the canon of comic literature.

About Time....

The newest selection...I should be done in three days...A part a day...Seems likely...Alaina will begin the journey with me, and finish long before I do I suspect. So far so good. The first tenth is all nobility and their scandals. Eventually a battle occurs, and the most interesting aspect is the thoughts of the soldiers in the midst of battle. Often they don't seem to comprehend the scale of the decision they have made to go to war. The idea of social class is also an important part of the novel so far. Granted I am only 1/2 through first book.

To Be On a Curriculum Near You Soon...I Hope.

I am in the "Louis Riel--Hero" camp of historians. Therefore, this great bit of poetry by Scofield is a welcome voice. If it were up to me we would read it in its entirety for either ELA A 30 or History 30. Or possibly, both. It covers his life from childhood to hangman's noose and is all the more powerful as a result of Scofield's First Nations' heritage and inclusion of Cree words every now and again. The Orange Poems are intersting as they rife on the Orangman conflict and Thomas Scott. However, the very best work comes from the section that uses excerpts from a Canadian Settler's Almanac. The almanac is legit Canadian history (primary document and all that) and Scofield's poems are responses to those European settlers that rolled on into the Prairies to change everything, forever. 

The Other Less Dense Dennis Lee book of Poetry

Ok, this one has moments of utter confusion, but unlike Un, some of it makes sense. From the opening line, "If it walks like an apocalypse" to the finishing notes of "But the breadcrumbs are gone, and the story goes on." one gets the sense that the world is a messy mess of messdom BUT that we can fix it. Do I recommend reading this? Not so much, but it's much better than Un. Again, not a student of poetry so maybe I am completely daft. 

WTF WTF WTF WTF WTF

This is Dennis Lee's critically acclaimed book of poetry Un. I am clearly too dumb to understand what the hell is going on it. Even reading the blurbs that support it leave me at a loss. This is how the book opens:

In wreck, in dearth, in necksong,
godnexus gone to the fat of the land,
into the wordy desyllabification of evil - small
crawlspace for plegics, 4, 3, 2, 1, un...

Well now that I type it out it makes complete sense. 

Sorry Dennis, I don't have the skill set for this. 

A Great Canadian Writer, but maybe a wee bit misogynistic

Of course this is a must read, and for me it's a re-read of sorts. "The Lamp at Noon" and "The Painted Door" are among the greatest Canadian short stories ever written. After further discussion, maybe its not so much misogynistic but rather realistic. The men were absent and focused wholly on their farm and the women were trying to survive.

The Current Book...ABANDONED

Started this yesterday, so far so good. Science Fiction for the 1980's kids. John Hughes references and Atari gaming galore. More to follow. So, the more to follow includes the realization that this is not an important book and that people like it because of their ridiculous feelings of nostalgia for the 1980's. This includes those that never experienced the 1980's who feel nostalgic about them anyway. It's as if the author was trying to cram in as many allusions and references from his past that he could. Ah well, 1/3 through...time will tell. So at 3/4 the way through I realized I did not care how this finished, did not care about video game allusions, did not care about all his obvious movie allusions, and tore the book to shreads in a fit of pique. 

A Life...a sad life.

The story of a man...a poor man who becomes a teacher, then a professor, has a wife, then a daughter, then a career, and writes a book, and deals with life's ridiculous disappointments, and an affair, and then death. It's fairly sublime, well-written, but very little actually happens. The wife is a horrific shrew of a woman...but maybe that was the author's fault, rather than the woman's. I'll come back to this later. 

The Collector...NOT a How-To-Guide

So butterflies and a lock of hair and a key...yup, all the things a burgeoning serial killer needs. I think this novel must have influenced Thomas Harris somewhat. The novel, written in 1965, is the story of an obsessed man who decides to collect a beautiful girl. The first third of the book is interesting as we get a delusional narrator who attempts to explain his plight.  He loves her, therefore he must capture, imprison, and look at her. And that's really as far as it goes...looking, as he is incapable of the act itself. The middle third (more really) is from Miranda (the captive's voice) and I am hear to tell that John Fowles does not capture the female voice like, say, S. E. Hinton does the teen male voice in The Outsiders. In fact, Miranda is wholly unlikable, judgmental, holier than thou, and a bit of a jerk. Maybe that's the point...I did not feel sorry for her until the end, an end I will not ruin here. Fowles, is no Nabokov that's for sure.

Poets, Artists, Writers...in times of need they are all we have.



I can't explain 9/11 any better than you can. I can't explain Trump America any better than you can. I will leave it to the poets, and the writers, and the dancers, and the singers, and the composers, and the film makers...no one will get it right, but at least it's a start. As such, this book of poetry attempts to do just that. And for the most part succeeds. 

The Lost Highway...an interesting book, that might be better than I think

Ok, so his Mirimachi Trilogy of books are great and always about horribly destructive families and their ridiculous decisions. In fact, one has my favourite title of all time in For Those Who Hunt the Wounded Down. In fact, I think I  will reread the trilogy because unlike YA trilogies each book stands alone AND they are not about vampires or dystopian nightmares. That being said, this book is good, though not great because of the protagonist's philosophical musings and his all around annoying nature. The best character is  Amy (a minor character that I feared for the whole time).

Moby Dick...Finished

This is a huge, difficult, long, intense novel. However, that being said, I will read it again one day. For now I will just leave you with my favourite image from the last 200 pages. Ahab, his new harpoon, and instead of tempering it with water he uses the blood of his HARPOONERS. Brilliant. Also. I am looking forward to reading critical essays describing what it all means, as I am sure there are a lot of them.

A Bit of a Cheat, But Later it Will all Become Clear

This is well deserving of the Giller Prize. I loved the idea of giving dogs human consciousness and winding them up and watching them go. Apollo and Hermes open and close the novel. They made a bet. Anyway, aside from that this means I have to read Alexis' novel Pastoral (2014) and his new The Hidden Keys (2016) because, according to Maclean's, "Alexis has passed the halfway mark of his planned quincunx, five linked novels, and the series is clearly going to be a tour of (almost) abandoned genres" OK, one QUINCUNX is a sick new word for me, and two, this all reminds me of the abandoned genre McSweeney's that I have yet to finish. It's really too bad that I don't teach Creative Writing anymore. Ah well. 

One Fine Story, That...

Thomas King is a great writer, and an excellent storyteller as this collection of Massey Lectures displays. He is at his best when telling stories about stories and story telling. He never preaches, and his emphasis on oral tradition and its ability to save First Nations culture is important. He bogs down sometimes when he becomes political...some of it is obvious, some of it is dated. All in all though, this is a great little book for writers and readers alike.