Duckworth, the Difficult Child

 
Duckworth, the Difficult Child
by Michael Sussman
art by Julia Sarda
Atheneum Books

2019

 

 

There's a bookstore near-ish where I live that specials in children's books and YA, and their restrooms are wallpapered with decoupage made of illustrated pages. One page really caught my eye, and thanks to some internet sleuthing, I managed to track it down.

 
Duckworth, the Difficult Child is about a little boy who (from his perspective) gets swallowed whole by a giant snake, or (from his parents' perspective) insists on wearing a Halloween snake costume around the house, pretending he's been swallowed. The artwork in the book is firmly on Duckworth's side.

 
I really Julia Sarda's art in this. She uses a lot of bold colors and patterns against a white background, and while she uses lines for internal details within each figure, she doesn't draw visible outlines around any of them. It's quite distinctive, and I love it. The giant orange snake dominates every page it's on, and manages to look neither threatening nor goofy.

 
I was probably a 'difficult child' the way Duckworth's parents mean it, so it was fun to read about a kid with a big imagination, who is oblivious to social cues, who still muddles through okay by the end.

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me

 
 
Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me
by Mariko Tamaki
art by Rosemary Valero-O'Connell
First Second
2019

 

 

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me  is a graphic novel about a teenage lesbian's emotional journey to finally be the one to break up with her pretty but inconsistent girlfriend.

 
Freddy is Asian-American and has a White father. She lives in present-day California, and has a racially diverse, all-queer friend group. In addition to watching the story unfold, we also get a kind of voice-over narration as Freddy writes several emails to an online advice columnist, and at the end, as the columnist writes back.

 
The story opens at a high school Valentine's Day dance. Freddy is there with her friends. Laura Dean shows up late, sweeps Freddy off her feet for a few dances, then disappears, until Freddy finds her making out with another girl in an empty classroom. Later, Laura breaks up with Freddy by text. They stay broken up for a week, until Laura suggests they get back together, and Freddy agrees. This is the third time this has happened, hence the title.

 
While they're broken up, Freddy is miserable, despite her friends' attempts to help her, but when they get back together, she becomes a bad friend in other ways, skipping out on her friends on short notice whenever Laura texts. The person who suffers the most from this is Doodle, who obviously has a crush on Freddy, and is also going through something difficult in secret, and really needs her friend's support. Eventually Freddy learns the self-respect she needs to break up with Laura, and at prom, we see her and Doodle dancing together.

 
Rosemary Valero-O'Connell's art is pretty. It's black outlines on white, with a couple shades of grey and one shade of pink used as accent colors. This style of having a single accent color, used artistically rather than for symbolic meaning, is something I've now seen a few times in recent comics.

 
I think this one would actually be appropriate for teenagers. It also won an ALA award for excellent YA literature. We see some kissing, and a few panels of Freddy and Laura lying on top of a bed in tshirts and boxer shorts, but this is a story about emotions, mostly. We also hear a reference to the existence of heterosexual sex, that there are such things as condoms, that they can break, and pregnancy can result.
 

Although all the characters are queer, what we see them struggle with is not understanding what their identities or sexualities are, but rather, what to do with them, with universal questions about what you deserve from a relationship, or how to balance your partner and your friends.

Nonsense Novels

 
Nonsense Novels
by Stephen Leacock
NYRB

1911, reprinted 2004

 

 

More than anything else, reading the short stories in Stephen Leacock's Nonsense Novels reminds me of an afternoon spent watching Looney Tunes. Each story parodies one of the popular genre fiction styles of its day. 

 
Leacock published the collection in 1911, so they were written a good 20-30 years before the cartoons they resemble, but it would be easy, for example, to envision Daffy Duck as Doorlock Holmes acting out the role of the detective in Leacock's mystery story. (Robert Coover's short story "Hat Act" feels like a Tex Avery cartoon in much the same way.)

 
There's also a ghost story, a Gothic romance with an orphaned governess, a Horatio Alger style rags-to-riches story, a story of piracy and shipwrecks, a sentimental Christmas story, and a utopian future history scifi story, along with others belonging to genres that have died out, or at least I'm unfamiliar with.

 
Leacock relies on dramatic irony for a lot of his humor. Although he writes ridiculous variations on classic stories, and the characters are all idiots, the narration is always 'straight.' Leacock trusts his audience to know enough about the genres to get the joke. 

 
The Great Detective spends his whole story deducing that the kidnapping victim he's searching for is a dog, never finds the poor thing, uses his mastery of disguise to imitate the victim and win the dog show, and then gets put down by the city dogcatcher. A man communicates with the ghost haunting his neighbor's house exclusively by leaving cash on his neighbor's coffee table - when the cash vanishes, that's the ghost talking back, right? 

 
I loved the rags-to-riches story. Everyone in the big city (even the police) punches the plucky young man when he announces his intention to do honest work. But when he takes up a life of crime, they treat him like a celebrity. In the house he burgles, he can't set any of the wooden furniture or even the books on fire, because 'they've been fireproofed,' but the iron elevator and its steel cables catch fire instantly...

 
Apparently Leacock was a student of Thornstein Veblen, and I feel like it shows a bit in his attention to class inequality, and the thoroughness of his 'boring, safe future' utopia. I think one's enjoyment of these stories depends on familiarity with the styles being parodied, but the ones where I was fully in on the joke, I enjoyed a lot.

The Girl from the Other Side 5

 
 
The Girl from the Other Side 5

Siuil, a Run

by Nagabe
Seven Seas

2018

 

 

In the previous volume of The Girl from the Other Side, Shiva was reunited with her aunt, Shiva's aunt turned into an Outsider, Shiva and her aunt briefly lived together with Teacher, and then one of the Outsiders from the forest brought Shiva and Teacher the aunt's severed head.

 
In volume 5, the first thing we learn is that Shiva's aunt isn't dead exactly, she's turned into a living tree, and shed her Outsider skin during the transformation. Apparently this happens to everyone who is Cursed, sometime after they lose all their memories, which also always happens. Teacher wonders why he's lasted so much longer than the aunt did. The forest outsider also says some more cryptic things about how Shiva is a soul and how the other Outsiders want to retrieve souls and bring them to their Mother.

 
Shiva gets mad at teacher and they have a fight. He knew the aunt was losing her memories and didn't warn Shiva.

 
After the fight, Teacher goes off into the woods alone. He meets another soldier from Inside who's trying to retrieve Shiva. The soldier has become an Outsider, and nearly succeeds in chopping up Teacher with his sword. The soldier says the king wants to get Shiva back so she can be sacrificed and her soul can be consecrated to their god. (The imagery showing the soldier's plan is particularly grotesque.) Some Outsiders from the forest intervene and Teacher escapes.

 
He rushes back to the abandoned house he and Shiva have been living in. They fight again, then talk, then kind of make up. They also find a map Shiva's aunt left that shows another village further out. Teacher thinks they should walk there to get away from the soldier. On the walk, he tries to understand all the things he's heard about Shiva and souls and the Curse, but he can't. (I don't understand it yet either!) This book ends with Shiva and Teacher arriving at a new village.

 
By this point, unanswered questions and cryptic, incomplete answers are both starting to pile up. One of the Outsiders seems to have implied that the Curse came from Inside, somehow, and maybe that all Insiders (that is, the humans living in towns and villages inside the wall that separates them from the forest) have souls stolen from the Mother of the Outsiders. The Insiders' god is also called a Father, so I feel like this is all related to some original divine couple, but I can't quite make out what happened in the past or how all the pieces fit together. Hopefully volume 6 will provide a few more answers!

Fear of Fighting

 
 
Fear of Fighting
by Stacey May Fowles

art by Marlena Zubar
Invisible Publishing

2008

 

 

Fear of Fighting is another book I've had on a to-read list forever, and can no longer remember what prompted me to seek it out. It's a novella or short novel narrated in the first-person by Marnie. She recently got dumped by Ben, her boyfriend of two years, and we watch her slide into depression.
 

Marnie pines for Ben, feels alone and lonely, feels invisible. She quits her office job, drifts apart from her friends and family, lets her cellphone lapse, stops leaving her apartment entirely. She spends the winter inside, getting everything delivered. She reminisces about her relationship, and cyberstalks Ben and his new girlfriend on social media. Ben is in a band, has a dog, and honestly doesn't sound that great.

 
Then, unexpectedly, spring arrives, and Marnie starts feeling better. She goes outside again and reconnects with people. Ben's new girlfriend comes over in tears because she's sure he's cheating on her. The two women get drunk, make out, and steal Ben's dog. As summer approaches, Marnie moves into a new apartment and a new phase of her life.

 

Fear of Fighting came out in 2008, and it's a lot like Radio Iris except with first-person narration. If I'd tried to write a literary novel in my early 20s, it might have looked a lot like these two. There are real limits to 'writing what you know.'

 
In fact, one of my main experiences reading Fear of Fighting was an acute awareness of how different I am now than I was then, and how books like this speak to me differently now. There was a different experience I could've had if I'd read it when it first came out, but it's no longer available to me.

 
I did appreciate following the narrator through her depression and out the other side. Sometimes in stories like this, the Sad Girl's life just gets worse and worse and then the story ends on that lowest point.

 
The book is illustrated by Marlena Zubar, whose art here reminds me somewhat of Carson Ellis. Each of the 40ish short chapters gets its own illustration, which slightly surreally depicts an object or mood mentioned in the narration

The Little One

 
 
The Little One
by Kiyo Tanaka

translated by David Boyd

Enchanted Lion Books

2021

 

 

One thing I like about vacations is that the hotels usually have NHK, which is a bit like Japan's equivalent of BBC. Recently, I discovered an NHK channel on Roku. They often have half-hour segments highlighting a particular artist, or someone with an interesting job or hobby. Which is how I learned about Kiyo Tanaka, and her book, The Little One.
 

The Little One is a children's picture book. A little girl sees a tiny shadow creature. It leads her to a house and offers her tea, then leads her into the closet. The two explore and play in a mysterious night forest. Then the girl leaves, and goes home, and tells her dad about her day.

 
It's a simple story that's nicely ambiguous. It could represent an actual supernatural encounter, or just a little girl's imagination as she plays. The art is very cute, a little more realistic than cartoony, and the magic forest looks like a lot of fun.

 
The NHK segment on Tanaka focused on her art. She etches into copper plates, then inks them and uses them to make prints. If I hadn't watched the feature, I think I would've assumed her illustrations were ordinary ink drawings, but supposedly being etched and printed makes the lines softer, somehow. 

 

The Little One isn't Tanaka's only book, but it is the only one that's been translated into English.

99 Ways to Tell a Story

 
99 Ways to Tell a Story
Exercises in Style

by Mark Madden

Chamberlain Bros

2005

 

 

As its subtitle suggests, 99 Ways to Tell a Story was inspired by Raymond Queneau's Exercises in Style, which I read earlier this year. The basic format is the same - Madden tells a brief story, and then produces 98 variant tellings of the same information. I think I actually like Madden's version better. His story is simpler, and the nature of the visual medium allows him more interesting variations.

 
A man sits at a desk typing. He gets up and closes his laptop. He walks into the other room. A voice from upstairs asks 'What time is it?' He answers 'It's 1:15.' He hears a 'Thanks' as he opens the refrigerator. He looks into the open fridge. He bends down to stare and thinks 'What the hell was I looking for, anyway?'
 

Madden shows us the story from a variety of camera angles, including a fun version that zooms from a planetary wide-shot to a microscopic close-up over the 8 panels. He imitates various comic styles (political cartoon, horror comic, newspaper strips, manga) and pays homage to several specific artists (Jack Kirby, Hegre, the Bayeux Tapestry.) He presents the story as a map, an infographic, and one of my favorites, an inventory. He also retells the story as a Charles Atlas comic-book ad. He even does a mashup of his story with Queneau's.

 
It's hard to do a collection like this justice. I enjoyed Madden's creativity, and I appreciated that there was nothing similar to the gibberish Queneau produced in the 8 or so variations where he used fixed word-lengths to retell the story incomprehensibly. This book is a keeper.

A Quick and Easy Guide to They / Them Pronouns

 
A Quick and Easy Guide to They / Them Pronouns

by Archie Bongiovanni and Tristan Jimerson
Limerence Press

2018

 

 

Someone I know through work, who has a a nonbinary gender identity, mentioned to me that they had bought multiple copies of A Quick and Easy Guide to They/Them Pronouns so they could hand one out to anyone they knew who was confused. So I thought I might also read the book for myself. It's a work of graphic nonfiction, primarily intended to educate a group we might call 'the straights' about nonbinary identity and gender-neutral pronouns. There's also a section speaking directly to nonbinary readers.
 

Bongiovanni is themself nonbinary, and Jimerson is a cisgender (that is, non-trans) man. In addition to speaking to multiple audiences in terms of targeting both readers who are nonbinary and might be having trouble getting others to respect their pronouns and readers who know someone nonbinary and might want to understand their pronouns better, the coauthors also speak to people with different levels of comfort and familiarity with gender diversity, including readers who might be presumed hostile. 

 
One consequence is that tonally the book is kind of all over the place, switching from explaining to requesting to demanding to attempted coercion (like 'do this or you'll get in trouble with your boss') with not a lot of separation. It's very short, only 60 small pages, so maybe there simply isn't room for some things. I did wish they'd say more about why people use they / they pronouns beyond 'it's none of your business!'

 
I suspect that the book is most useful for a nonbinary person thinking about how to talk about their pronouns to someone else. I don't know how successful just handing this book to someone and asking them to read it would really be, although the authors repeatedly suggest it.

 
One way I tend to think about these things is that there are probably tiers of allyship. Using someone's correct pronouns after they've told them to you seems like the most minimal level of acceptable behavior. Helping out one friend by correcting your other friends if they misgender them is harder, but still an important show of basic human respect. This is probably the difficult conversation that the book does the best job of modeling and preparing the reader for.

 
Doing things like always calling any unknown person 'they,' never calling people 'ma'am' or 'sir' or referring to them as 'that guy' or 'that lady,' or always including your own pronouns when introducing yourself to a new person - those feel like requests of a different order. They're part of an ongoing political and cultural movement. They're aimed at normalizing gender-neutral language and creating a social environment where a nonbinary person is less likely to be accidentally misgendered by a stranger. I support this. But participating in that project feels like a higher level of allyship, not something I think is necessarily wise to ask of everyone (because, priorities), and something where the people who are participating deserve to be told the reasoning behind the request. Let us not pretend that cooperation with activism is the same thing as simply having good manners.

Inside the Critics' Circle

 
 
Inside the Critics' Circle

Book Reviewing in Uncertain Times

by Phillipa Chong

Princeton University Press

2021

 

 

Inside the Critics' Circle is part Princeton Studies in Cultural Sociology series, like Banding Together and American Zoo, which I enjoyed earlier this year. Chong conducted interviews with newspaper book reviewers, most of whom are working authors who write reviews on a freelance basis. One purpose of her book is to understand the feeling of crisis that surrounds the practice of journalistic book reviewing, which is separate from longform literary criticism and academic writing about literature.

 
Chong argues that book reviewing is characterized by several forms of uncertainty, and that reviewers' sense of vulnerability, and the field's sense of crisis, is largely a reaction to all this uncertainty. First is 'epistemic uncertainty,' which means that reviewers do not have an objective standard they can judge books against, and can't be sure in advance if other people will feel similarly about the books they review. One thing Chong observes is that because book review section editors can't know if books are good or not before they assign them to reviewers, they pick 'important' books rather than 'good' books to be reviewed. Editors also try to make a 'good match' between the book and the reviewer, by picking someone who either is similar to the author they're reviewing, or writes about similar topics or in similar ways.

Reviewers also operate under 'social uncertainty,' because they don't know how other people will react to them based on what they wrote. This is especially due to the 'role-switch reward structure' where authors who will want their own books reviewed in the future are the ones writing reviews. In general, this gives them an incentive to 'play nice,' both because they know how it feels to get a negative review, and because they have reason to fear professional retribution, such as getting revenge reviewed or snubbed for a literary award when the shoe is on the other foot. Reviewers are more willing to 'punch up' against famous authors.

 
Reviewers also experience 'institutional uncertainty,' meaning that the very rules of the game they're playing are unclear. Since most reviewers work full-time at other literary activities and only review occasionally, they have no sense of themselves as 'real critics.' They feel threatened from below by amateur reader-reviewers (like me!) and from above by academic literary criticism. In defending the value of what they do against what they perceive as a widespread question 'do we even need book reviews anymore?,' the reviewers defend their work as both being more accessible than academic criticism, and as being of higher quality and addressing the artistic quality of the work rather than just giving it a thumbs up or star-rating.

 
I have to tell you, I liked this one a lot, both because I enjoy reading book reviews on the New York Times, Lit Hub, and Tor, and because I've been writing so many of them this year. Obviously I'm immune to the 'switch-role reward structure' here - I'm not a working author myself, and also, no one who writes these books will probably ever see my reviews. But I do care about writing these things well. And actually, in the amateur rpg world I sometimes hang out in online, there are the same issues of reviews often being written by people who are themselves writing things for others to review.

Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told 1

 
Batman: The Greatest Stories Ever Told 1
DC Comics

2005

 

 

Last year, I read most of DC's Greatest Stories Ever Told series, except for the two Batman volumes. (Although I did read Batman / Superman, Batgirl, and the Joker, so you know, he still showed up some!)
 

This volume collects 13 stories, ranging from 2 to 20 pages, from the late 1930s to the early 2000s. We get the original version of Batman's origin story (a retcon that appeared 6 months after the character was first introduced), a modern retelling, a few stories showing him still mourning his parents' memory, a couple near-deaths for Robin, a Catwoman origin story, and a 1970s reintroduction of the Joker. 

 
There are several stories that depict Batman as trying to do good rather than just warring on crime. We see him decline to arrest low-level criminals who seem repentant, comfort crime victims, and spend Bruce Wayne's money on various charitable endeavors.