I read the first of Rothfuss' fantasy novels The Name of the Wind last year and found myself moderately happy with it. The Wise Man's Fear continues the story of Kvothe, a redheaded medieval wunderkind equally adept at music and magic, and sees Rothfuss develop his fantasy realm with layer upon layer of further world-building. Kvothe straddles the line between flawed anti-hero and the more traditional heroes of legend seen in Tolkein, and his story operates more like an episodic bildungsroman than an intricately plotted epic. There are many elements of these novels that I like, but I'm reserving full judgement until after the series has been finished.
DMZ Volumes 1-4 by Brian Wood and Ricardo Burchielli
This 12 volume series tells the high concept story of an American civil war that has reduced Manhattan to a modern-day hell-on-Earth. Matty Roth is a journalism intern who finds himself stranded in this demilitarised zone between the United States of America and the Free States of America. At the time of writing, I've read the first four volumes, which deal with Roth's increasing disillusionment and assimilation into the DMZ, and the political pointscoring that often leaves the inhabitants of Manhattan exponentially worse off.
Othello is arguably one of the Top 5 Shakespeare plays, and I say arguably because, well, when it comes to Shakespeare pretty much everything is arguable. Reading this again was a great pleasure for me... whenever I read Shakespeare I seem to get more and more out of it, and this time (while I was programming a Close Study unit for my Preliminary Advanced English class) was no exception. The mystery of Iago continues to fascinate, the alleged culpability of Othello is as divisive as ever, and the tragic sexual politics surrounding the female characters ensure a certain relevancy some 400 years later.
The Tamaki cousins had quite an impressive debut with the bewitching coming-of-age tale Skim, and here they take things to another level altogether. This One Summer explores the same genre with more depth, playing out parallel stories of a summer holiday as experienced by adolescents on the cusp of teenage-hood, older teens clumsily crashing their way into adulthood, and adults struggling with the weight of their own secrets. I really enjoyed this graphic novel, it's beautifully drawn and made a strong emotional connection with me.
I've just started reading this series from Image comics. The artistic style is really cool; super-detailed and reminiscent of watercolour paintings, and the narrative takes a few risks by launching straight into the action and letting the world-building emerge after the fact. It's a science fiction opus in the vein of Image's Saga, with elements that call to mind the Stanley Kubrick/Steven Spielberg film A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. I'll be continuing to read this one.
Alison Bechdel's memoir of growing up in a funeral home features in many graphic novel best-of lists, and Bechdel herself occupies a special place in popular culture and literary criticism for the concept of the Bechdel Test (does your novel, TV show, or film have more than one female character? Do they speak to each other about something other than their relationship status? Congratulations, your text just passed the Bechdel Test... and many texts don't!) Fun Home is an erudite, brave, finely-observed and raw look back on Bechdel's life with her deeply troubled father. At several points in this book I had to stop and fully digest what I had just read; such was its depth and intimacy. This graphic novel certainly deserves it's place in the canon.
A few people recommended this novel to me, and it accumulated quite a few awards, as well as high praise from many reviewers and literary critics. But, alas, I just didn't like it. For a start, it feels unevenly structured, and took several hundred pages to get to a point where I could fully appreciate what the book was about and what was going on. Also, for a novel that takes place across several decades, it has this odd quality of seeming perpetually set in the same year - one without historical or social event; a place without time. It's not an unambitious novel. I just found it tedious and unnecessarily drawn-out in its self-flagellating masochism (as opposed to harrowing, which I assume is what Yanagihara was going after). I got to the end and felt like I had just wasted a whole bunch of time.
Marele Day's late '80s Sydney-side detective novel has found itself back in the limelight on the 2015-2020 HSC Standard English Prescriptions List so I brushed up on it in order to contribute a sample essay to an upcoming Cambridge Checkpoints textbook. As far as HSC texts go, there's a lot in Day's crime novel for students to sink their teeth into - Harry Lavender explores the encroaching influence of technology, the way that people present themselves to others and the public world, and the masculine nature of the crime genre. I really enjoy Day's writing, she has an arresting way with words and really knows her way around an extended metaphor. Harry Lavender stands the test of time.
I listened to this memoir as an audiobook, which was great because it was read by the man 'imself, swearing and all... there's something therapeutic about listening to Barack Obama casually say the word 'motherfucker' and recount his rebellious youth. Surprising cusswords aside, Dreams of My Father goes beyond your usual making-of-the-man memoir. Obama has a lot to say about notions of race as he muses on his upbringing in Hawaii and Indonesia, about his journey to Kenya in search of the father he never really knew, and about his early political career in Chicago. In his writing of this book, Barack Obama reveals himself to be that rare thing - a politician with real intelligence and talent.
Keeping on the theme of great political figures, Kate Evans' graphic novel biography of Rosa Luxemburg shines a bright light on the tragic and inspiring story of the early 20th century Marxist who dared to stand against the Great War. Luxemburg was a socialist who stood in stark opposition to the European communists who were all too willing to dilute the philosophy of Karl Marx in order to get ahead (mostly men who showed little interest in the inclusion of women in the socialist dream). Luxemburg's story is both courageous and sad, and it's a shame that her political legacy as a groundbreaking feminist isn't more widely recognised. Evans does a great job of translating Red Rosa's life (and her political theories) into an exciting and fast-moving narrative.
I've had this sitting on my shelf since it first came out back in 2009, and I decided to finally pick it up in response to the recent and continuing discoveries of prehistoric remains that are rewriting the story of humanity's origins. The Bone Readers is more science than history, but in the frame of Big History it occupies the point of intersection between the area of our past claimed in equal measure by historians and scientists. Tuniz, Gillespie and Jones have a lot to say about the often volatile debates that surround who 'owns' this part of the human story, and even the outright contradictory gets a look-in when it comes to the various theories of how humans first got to Australia. This book also outlines several new and mindbending technologies that are being utilised to trace the timelines of 'prehistoric' humanity (begging the question as to whether or not we can continue to consider 40 000 BC as 'pre'-history anymore). Highly recommended reading for any historians or history teachers out there.
Matt Furie's scatterbrained comic strips are collected together here in all their bizarre and fatuous glory. I'm not sure why I picked this up, or what I expected, but I laughed a few times nonetheless. Furie has this tendency to build an anti-narrative in the space of just four panels, using non sequiturs and graphical asides that focus on the grotesque, all in the name of capturing an atmosphere of senseless small-scale hedonism reminiscent of the Young Ones. The anthropomorphised characters are sometimes hard to tell apart, but it doesn't really matter all that much.
The Divine by Asaf Hanuka, Tomer Hanuka and Boaz Lavie
This stand-alone graphic novel mixes a Heart of Darkness/Apocalypse Now scenario with South-East Asian folklore to create a very cinematic war/fantasy adventure. The illustrations are magnificent; beautifully detailed and somewhat terrifying in their unexpected brutality. The panels are no doubt drawn this way to reflect the traumatic history of Indochina, a theme that fuels much of this story's exploration of the fictional nation of Quanlom (inspired by the colonialist and postcolonialist histories of Burma, Vietnam and Cambodia). I won't say much more, but I think this would make a great text for a Year 10 or Year 11 English class.
Speaking of cinematic, this one-shot graphic novel pioneers the 'queersploitation' genre through the blending of blaxploitation film conventions with the medium of comics. Virgil tells the action-thriller story of a closeted gay cop in homophobic Jamaica who, after being brutally outed by his colleagues, embarks on an ultra-violent revenge quest (with all the requisite blood detailed in a particularly lurid pink). Orlando uses his archetypal action hero and numerous B-movie tropes to effectively explore pertinent civil rights issues in rather entertaining fashion.
Earlier this year I read Nesbo's popular crime-thriller Headhunters, and enjoyed it immensely. I immediately sought out another of Nesbo's stand-alone thrillers, The Son, and found it equally as gripping. The Son weaves together fast-paced, densely-plotted interconnected stories of police corruption, addiction, and organised crime. There are more than a few unexpected twists along the way and Nesbo expertly controls what the reader does and doesn't need to know to build to an incredibly tense and satisfying denouement.
I first read this when I was about 20 years old and, whilst I could appreciate how significant it was, I didn't really appreciate it as a novel. Now at 36 years old, and as I gear up to teach 1984 to my Advanced English class early next year, I find myself appreciating Orwell's novel a whole lot more. It's almost universally acknowledged that Orwell's novel earns its masterpiece status via its satirical deconstruction of governance, however, some critics out there have noted that the narrative lacks in plotting and characterisation. Upon re-reading 1984 just recently, I would say that these elements of the novel are undeserving of such criticism. Winston Smith is a weary and downtrodden protagonist entirely worthy of canonisation, and O'Brien's dualistic nature could not reflect the novel's central themes more effectively. And surely if it was plotted more intricately then this would just detract from the quintessentially dystopian setting?
The Chrysalids by John Wyndham
My friend Kira read this classic dystopian science fiction novel recently and recommended it to me, and it did not disappoint. Knowing that Wyndham is responsible for the Midwich Cuckoos, I have always associated him with those creepy blonde children in the film version of said novel, so I've actually sort of gone out of my way not to really read any of his stuff. The Chrysalids turned out to be in complete antithesis to my prejudices, telling a post-apocalyptic parable that sets the ideologies of evolution and religion in brutal, implicit opposition of one another. Wyndham has an elegiac and gentle storytelling-style, reflecting a distant future through the familiar prism of childhood innocence. A book that definitely deserves its classic status.
Speaking of classics, I finally got around to reading this philosophical and fairytale-like children's classic. De Saint-Exupery uses his Little Prince to explore his own ideas of adulthood and all its ridiculous self-built fallacies. It took me a while to adjust to this tale's collision of science fiction and fable, but in the end I found myself very taken by the allegorical elements in each of the Prince's stories to the marooned WWII pilot. Beautiful in its simplicity, and something that I think will stand up to many re-readings.
This is another book that I've had sitting on my shelf since it first came out. Eggers tells the true story of Adbulrahman Zeitoun, a Syrian-American small business owner living in New Orleans during the disaster of Hurricane Katrina. Zeitoun opts to stay in his city while his family evacuates and spends his time after the hurricane paddling around in a canoe, feeding abandoned dogs and giving lifts to stranded people. Things go horrendously awry for Zeitoun when he gets arrested as a 'looter' and is incarcerated without a phonecall in terrifyingly bleak conditions. Eggers tells his story very closely from the dual perspectives of Zeitoun and his wife, and creates a gripping Capote-esque non-fiction narrative of a city reduced to shockingly apocalyptic conditions. My enjoyment of the book was marred, however, by recent real life developments surrounding the Zeitoun family that have seen Abdulrahman imprisoned for physically attacking his now ex-wife... upon finding this out I almost stopped reading the book as it was a bit hard to stomach Eggers' depiction of Zeitoun as humble everyday hero. I'm glad that I persevered though as the book has much more to say about American corruption in New Orleans than it has to say about the protagonist.
Patrick Ness developed this children's novel out of an idea by the now-deceased Irish novelist Siobhan Dowd, and has created something really special and perfectly pitched. I read it in a day while travelling to the city and the back on the train, and I must have looked quite strange towards the end when I started crying in my train seat while I read the last few pages. All I'll say is that the novel deals with a 13 year old boy who finds himself visited by a huge tree-monster while his mother battles terminal cancer. A little under two months ago my own Mum passed away from cancer, so this book hit me really hard. Context is everything, hey? My own context combined with Siobhan Dowd's (she developed this idea while she herself was dying from the same insidious illness) to make this a really difficult but rewarding read. I recommend it regardless of your context.
An fascinating selection of books. How many of these are school text? The books I had to read when I was at school, apart from Othello, were mainly 18th century romance eg Tess of D'urbervilles, Mansfield Park - English seems to be more interesting these days.
ReplyDeleteWe use Othello for Year 11, and 1984 is a HSC text. I'm hoping to use A Monster Calls with Year 10 next year; the goal is to get kids interested in reading :)
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