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Filtering by Tag: BOOKS
Books I Read: 100 Demons
I’ve read Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred! Demons! before, but I wanted to read it again because I find it so inspiring. My first encounters with Barry’s work were with Ernie Pook’s Comeek, and I’ve been a fan ever since. I love One! Hundred! Demons! for a variety of reasons: the work is beautiful, the stories are moving, the message is about persevering regardless of what anyone else’s thinks or what happens to you. My favorite strips in this series are the ones focusing on her childhood, how maligned she was yet kept insisting that she might one day have something to say. I read this slowly so I could savor how precious these artworks are.
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Books I Read in February: Favorite and Least Favorite
This year, I decided to read only books with pictures. In February, I read seven books. (You can find those books and my short reviews here.) My favorite book was Mimi Pond’s Over Easy, a fascinating look at a San Francisco Bay Area diner scene of days past. My least favorite was Manu Larcenet’s adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, which was a disservice to the source material and narratively disjointed.
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Books I Read: My Most Secret Desire
I’ve read Julie Doucet’s work before and liked it, but My Most Secret Desire didn’t quite work for me. It is very strange, and I like strange, but this book is primarily a series of renderings of freaky dreams. Dreams in which she has a penis or is pregnant with something weird or odd people do frightening things. Is this the female unconscious or just chaos? I felt it leaned heavily into grotesque without any accompanying insight.
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Books I Read: The Saga of the Swamp Thing 1
I don’t usually read superhero comics, but I picked up The Saga of the Swamp Thing 2 and then realized I needed to read The Saga of the Swamp Thing 1 first. I chose this series because I was dazzled by the art and also because I’m aware that Alan Moore is considered a comic book god. I liked parts of Book 1—I mean, it’s weird as fuck—but the story feels fragmented, and I think I had a hard time having an emotional connection with a plant, aka The Swamp Thing, which, by his (its?) own admission, is what he is. Anyway, I can never follow these action driven plots with so many characters. A mixed bag experience for me, I guess.
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Books I Read: A Child's Life and Other Stories
I can’t remember the first time I read A Child’s Life and Other Stories, but it would have been over 20 years ago. The book seared itself into my brain. The art spellbound me, the stories were set in the Bay Area where I had grown up, and the rage and pain of a young person who was neglected at home and acting out sexually and through drugs and alcohol was deeply familiar to me. I could say this book changed my life, but that sounds overdramatic and like a cliche. I will say that when I sat down to reread the book, I wondered if it would have the same effect on me all these years later. And it did. It makes me want to be braver and more reckless and more honest in my own work. And that’s invaluable. Thank you, Phoebe Gloeckner.
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Books I Read: Pretending Is Lying
What a curious ride Pretending Is Lying by Dominique Goblet is. A hazy graphic memoir. A disturbing accounting of childhood trauma and its consequences. A visual depiction of navigating life, relationships, and love that reels through time and place to land defiantly nowhere. I really liked it. Not for the unimaginative.
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Books I Read: Over Easy
Wow wow wow. Over Easy is so great! This book was such a delight, and I read it slower and slower as I neared completion because I didn’t want it to end. I’m a bit younger than author Mimi Pond, but I grew up in the East Bay so the people types and general places and all over vibe was very familiar to me. I appreciate that she focused on this important place and special time and fantastic cast of characters rather than feeling like she had to deliver up some sort of action-oriented plot. I loved this book. I’m sure I’ll read it again in the future.
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Munch
A selection of art books for sale at an estate sale. For more of my L.A. photographs, follow me on Instagram.
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Books I Read: After land
After Land is an extremely strange book by Chris Taylor. I loved it for the images. It’s haunting and weird and striking. The story is elusive and slippery. If you’re looking for something that’s different, this book is that.
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Data Baby Is a New York Public Library Book of the Day
Thank you so much to The New York Public Library for making my memoir, Data Baby, a Book of the Day!
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Books I Read in January: Favorite and Least Favorite
This year, I decided to read only books with pictures. In January, I read eight books. (You can find them and my short reviews here.) My favorite was Pierre Le-Tan’s A Few Collectors, a lovely, sweet, unexpected collection of small essays and delicate drawings about curious people the author knew who collected things and what happened to those collections. My least favorite was Chester Brown’s Paying for It, a sleazy, callous tour through the sex industry told by a man who sees women as cum receptacles.
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Books I Read: Can of Worms
Can of Worms by Catherine Doherty is a remarkable semi-autobiographical account of the author’s attempt to track down and reconnect with her birth mother. Unflinching and insistent, it peels back the layers on what happens when the mother-daughter bond goes wrong and the devastating effects on the truth-teller.
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Books I Read: Paying for It
The first time I read Chester Brown’s Paying for It was around the time it was originally published, I believe. I decided to buy a new copy and reread it when I heard that the woman who had been Brown’s “last girlfriend” before he started paying for it had directed a movie adaptation of the book. I seem to remember liking the book more the first time I read it. This time I found it kind of grim and sort of ick. I write about a fair amount of stuff related to this subject matter, and I even ran a website for a year where I posted anonymous emails men wrote to me about paying for it, but this comic is so dark and weirdly dissociated and lacking in any kind of empathy that I read it faster than usual just to get it over with. If you don’t know anything about paying for it or why guys pay for it or the politics of paying for it (particularly in Canada, Brown’s country of origin), this book may be of interest. Also, the drawings are cool. But to the Brown on these pages, sex workers are receptacles to be judged, used, and discarded. That take is retrograde, boring, and depressing.
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Books I Read: A Few Collectors
I’m in love with A Few Collectors by Pierre Le-Tan. It is a wunderkammer of a book, an extraordinary collection of small essays about collectors that Le-Tan knew and / or admired and / or encountered. I’m not even sure what this book is about, because I don’t think collecting is it. Perhaps how to live one’s life, or the importance of beautiful things, or the inherent transience of existence. I actually read it slower and slower because I didn’t want it to end. Also, the printing is beautiful. It’s a coffee table book in miniature.
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Books I Read: Parasitic City #0.1
Parasitic City #0.1 is a total insane, very extreme comic book by Shintaro Kago. As I wrote in my newsletter: “it’s for anyone with an amputee fetish, a bio-clothing fetish, a bio-furniture fetish, a bio-prosthesis fetish, or a bio-firearm fetish.” There’s a woman, and a war, and copulating chairs. It’s sci-fi meets hentai. It’s weird.
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Books I Read: Ten Days in a Mad-House: A Graphic Adaptation
Ten Days in a Mad-House: A Graphic Adaptation, written by Brad Ricca, illustrated by Courtney Sieh, and based on the book by Nellie Bly, is an absolutely astonishing work that brings to life the terror, shame, and seemingly inescapable horror of being trapped in an abusive system. I’ve read the original Ten Days and I’m an investigative journalist, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. This book is a masterful adaptation of an original work as imaginative and evocative as the graphic adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass. Sieh’s illustrations are especially moving, as she conjures up the faces of the women trapped in the asylum’s hell.
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Reading Goals for 2025 and a Return to Erotic Comics Art
A panel from an erotic comic I created some years ago: “My, My American Bukkake Too”
2024 is over. Thank god. 2025 has begun. It just has a better ring to it, doesn’t it? In any case, when I was promoting my memoir in late 2023, I was asked what my favorite book I had read that year was and I realized the answer was: none. Yes, in fact, in 2023, I read exactly zero books. That was in part on purpose because I was finishing writing my own book, and I didn’t want some other author’s voice in my head. That said, it was a little embarrassing. I was a writer, an author. Shouldn’t I be reading books?
So in 2024, I decided to read some books and track my progress. In all I read a total of 21 books, which was a lot more than the no books I’d read the year before. So a win in that regard. But the reality is that I didn’t like most of the books I read in 2024. I’d chosen them mostly at random and for who knows what reason. There was fiction, nonfiction, memoir, self-help, one photo book, and graphic novels.
But my favorite book was what could be described as a picture book: Leela Corman’s Victory Parade. It was stunning and inventive and startling and arresting and wildly creative. In a way, I felt a little silly. I write words. Wasn’t I supposed to prefer one of the other books I’d read, with a lot of words, like, you know, Pynchon or Marlowe or someone like that? No, I liked the one with the pictures.
In any case, I decided I’d do another reading challenge this year and chart my progress publicly again, but in 2025 I’m going to attempt to only read books that are picture books. For example, my first book of the year, which is a reread and which I’ve already started, is Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics.
That title selection may hold a clue. The truth is: I want to create a new comic strip, which is something I haven’t done in some time. Quite a few years ago, I created two erotic comics about the times I went to go see bukkake-themed adult movies being filmed. Those comics are called “My, My American Bukkake” and “My, My American Bukkake Too.” And I’ve long wanted to do a third bukkake comic strip. So I think perhaps this re-interest in pictures and words is laying the groundwork for that.
All of which is to say, you can follow my picture book reading progress at BOOKS I READ.
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Books I Read in 2024: Confessions of a Serial Killer
If you’re looking to get into the mind of the serial killer BTK, aka Dennis Rader, Confession of a Serial Killer: The Untold Story of Dennis Rader, the BTK Killer by Katherine Ramsland is one way to do it. Filled with communications between Rader and Ramsland, this book delivers an avalanche of detail about Rader’s crimes, offers hypotheses about what drove him to murder, and reveals what the layman and law enforcement can learn about people like him so as to better avoid/hunt them. This book is grim! You may have nightmares.
Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life, The Big Sleep, Eventually Everything Connects, Smutcutter, Shine Shine Shine, A Serial Killer’s Daughter, Confessions of a Serial Killer
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Books I Read in 2024: A Serial Killer's Daughter
A Serial Killer's Daughter: My Story of Faith, Love, and Overcoming by Kerry Rawson is not a good book. Written by the daughter of serial killer BTK, its greatest achievement is its title. Beyond that, it’s 135 pages of irrelevant backstory of the author’s life followed by her engagements with her father post-capture. The prison letters between the two are moderately interesting, but it’s like watching two people pretend a terrible thing didn’t happen with a few exceptions. Poorly written, badly edited, and only glancingly illuminating. Hard pass.
Books I Read in 2024: Victory Parade, I Hate Men, My Friend Dahmer, The Crying of Lot 49, Machines in the Head, Big Magic, The Valley, End of Active Service, An Honest Woman, The Money Shot, Atomic Habits, Finding Your Own North Star, Crazy Cock, Sigrid Rides, Your Money Or Your Life, The Big Sleep, Eventually Everything Connects, Smutcutter, Shine Shine Shine, A Serial Killer’s Daughter, Confessions of a Serial Killer
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