Books I Read in April: Favorite and Least Favorite

This year, I decided to read only books with pictures. In April, I read six books. (You can find all my short book reviews here.) My favorite book was Chantal Montellier’s Social Fiction, “a feminist 1984, a dark vision of the search for love in the midst of a dystopia, a collection of comics in which being human is a crime and death lurks around every corner.” My least favorite book was Tina Horn’s SFSX (Safe Sex) Volume 1: “The story lacked a central character with depth and nuance with which I could connect.”

Books I Read

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Books I Read: City of Glass

I’ve read the graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass many times. Every time, I marvel at its simplicity, its willingness to take the narrative in daring directions, the way it makes storytelling meta.

Books I Read

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Books I Read: SFSX (Safe Sex) Volume 1

I hoped I’d like SFSX (Safe Sex) Volume 1 by Tina Horn because there was a lot to like here: the San Francisco Bay Area where I grew up, an exploration of a futuristic world in which kink is pathologized, a peek at what’s behind the walls of Kink.com. But the enterprise fell flat. The story lacked a central character with depth and nuance with which I could connect. I also felt like the attempts to psychoanalyze the whys behind kink were underdeveloped, as if declaring oneself pro-kink was enough. A comic should be more than a political statement; it should be a narrative into which one can get swept up. So not a hit for me.

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Books I Read: Social Fiction

I loved Chantal Montellier’s Social Fiction. It’s a feminist 1984, a dark vision of the search for love in the midst of a dystopia, a collection of comics in which being human is a crime and death lurks around every corner. Despite the bleak subject matter, Montellier’s dynamic art rockets through time and captures the beauty of what perseverance looks like when independent thought and freedom have been criminalized.

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Books I Read: Fun Home

I loved Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic the first time I read it, and probably more so this time. There’s a lot to which to relate: being raised by parents better at intellectualizing than parenting, growing up in a house with a chilly atmosphere due to faulty marital underpinnings, discovering the lone way with which to connect to a parent is through books. One thing Bechdel does particularly well is refusing neat characterizations: of people, of motives, of the truth. Over and over again, she insists upon putting the contradictions on the page, of interrogating her own narrative. This book is brilliant. I love it.

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Books I Read: Reinventing Comics

It’s probably been 25 years since I first read Scott McCloud’s Reinventing Comics. Having recently reread his Understanding Comics, I was curious to see how the sequel read all these years later. While some of the technical references are stuck in 2000, the fundamental ideas are as invigorating and stimulating as ever. What surprised me was how little comics have evolved in the way McCloud suggested they might—at least to this point. In fact, the opposite seems to have happened. Mostly, the dynamic picturescape McCloud foresaw has been the dominion of gaming. Meanwhile, comics have been born again in a new upcropping of brick-and-mortar stores that folks like me enjoy frequenting to buy printed comics over which we pore to be transported into interactive worlds that exist only in our own minds. A thought-provoking read!

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Books I Read in March: Favorite and Least Favorite

This year, I decided to read only books with pictures. In March, I read three books. (You can find all my short book reviews here.) My favorite book was Fido Nesti’s graphic novel adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984. I loved the arresting art, the faithfulness to the source material, and the moving exploration of the individual’s insistent quest for self-hood and self-actualization through love. My least favorite book was Kate Beaton’s Ducks, which I found to be flat, visually uninteresting, and underdeveloped in plot and interiority.

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Books I Read: 1984: The Graphic Novel

Fido Nesti’s graphic novel adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984 is an absolute dazzler. Having recently read Manu Larcenet’s very disappointing graphic novel adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road that did a disservice to the source material, I wasn’t sure what to expect. But Nesti’s masterful rendering of Orwell’s chillingly accurate foretelling of the nothink era in which we live is a brilliant homage that highlights the important ideas against a backdrop of terror, beauty, and struggle. If you don’t like to think or if you support fascism, you won’t like this book. If you have a brain and want to face the truth of today’s 1984, read it.

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Books I Read: Ducks

Ducks by Kate Beaton is a graphic memoir about the author’s experiences working in the Canadian oil sands. The art is simple, the dialogue is spare, and the story follows a straightforward track as Beaton moves through various work locations and circumstances. I wanted to like this book and respect all Beaton went through, but the images, tone, and delivery fell flat. Maybe it’s a Canadian thing? The most harrowing parts—in which Beaton is sexually assaulted—were underdeveloped. For me, this was a miss.

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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: 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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Books I Read: The Road - A Graphic Novel Adaptation

I was really looking forward to reading this graphic novel adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road by Manu Larcenet, and I was equally disappointed. The book looks impressive: Hardback! Generously sized! Nicely printed! But the contents amount to a grim, underwhelming, forced march (ha!) through a hellscape that reduces McCarthy’s brilliant novel into snatches of dialogue that amount to nothing. Where is the literary-ness? Where is the lyricism? Where is the new thing ideally produced when a work is adapted into another form? Not here. I’m not fundamentally opposed to graphic adaptations of literary works—I loved Brad Ricca and Courtney Sieh’s artful adaptation of Nellie Bly’s Ten Days in a Mad-House—but this ain’t it.

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Books I Read in 2024: Eventually Everything Connects

I adored this book. It’s such an exciting mix of genres, prose and images, the political and the personal. I can’t recall having read a book quite like this. She fearlessly ranges from her sexual experiences to her politically ideologies and relentlessly sticks to the truth that any and all binary positions are false. I would hope some young adults get to read this book, as it serves as a timely, relevant guidepost for those figuring it out.

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: My Friend Dahmer

I really enjoyed Derf Backderf’s graphic novel, My Friend Dahmer. It’s about the author’s high school relationship with the guy who would become America’s most notorious serial killer. Creepy, suspenseful, voyeuristic, savage, and peculiar, it raises interesting questions about how things might have turned out differently if you’d lived your life another way and didn’t end up murdering and eating other people.

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: Victory Parade

Last year I realized I’d read, like, no books, so I thought maybe this year I would read a few. To start, I read the incredible Victory Parade by Leela Corman. You should buy it and read it. Here’s my Amazon review:

This book is an absolute masterpiece. It's an electric, searing, beyond Spiegelman's Maus anatomical and artistic investigation of the twin traumas of war and violence, the nightmares that haunt survivors' waking and sleeping lives, and the banality of evil's horrifying consequences to the human soul. I read about this book in the Washington Post and read it in one day (i had to take a few breaks because it's so powerful). I can't recommend Victory Parade enough. It should win all the prizes and praises. Congrats to Leela.

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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For Creative Types

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11 Likes, 1 Comments - Susannah Breslin (@susannahbreslin) on Instagram: "✍🏻"

If you're a creator, you should own a copy of Lynda Barry's What It Is. It's an amazing exploration of the creative process. This is one of my favorite panels, which explains what to do when you don't know what to do. It's inspiring.