Tagged: Graphic novel

re:View – The 2017 Bookshelf: May

After a not very bookish start to the year, May almost put me back on track – although I cheated a bit and read lots of graphic novels. So here we have a very strange collection of apes, lowlifes, cat-owl creatures and a good old-fashioned demon hunter.

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Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari
This is one of those books the universe just kept telling me to read – I don’t usually go for history books but recommendations kept coming in from all sides until I gave up and picked it up. It’s a fascinating and informative account of (as it says on the tin) the history of homo sapiens, charting our rise through the cognitive, agricultural and scientific revolution. The book takes a pretty general approach, and in terms of the hard facts I’d say you’ll probably know most of it if you’ve paid attention in biology and history class back in school. But Harari takes an interesting approach to interpreting the consequences of our evolution in light of the question: How did we benefit from it? As in, are we really better off in our civilised, industrial society than our ancestors were in their hunter-gatherer lives? In that regard the book really made me think and gave me a perspective on history that school didn’t really offer. Well written and engaging, Sapiens was certainly more enjoyable than I expected a history book to be.
Pens: 4 out of 5

Sin City, Volume 6: Booze, Broads, and Bullets by Frank Miller
It’s Sin City, I thought, so what could possibly go wrong? Well, this one’s more like a scrapbook of fragments and odd pieces, many of them recycled from other stories, that make for a bit of a lame “short story” collection. It was probably a money-making exercise: The franchise is selling, so lets stick whatever bits and pieces we’ve got left over into a collection and market that as a new book. It shows… This volume is distinctly lacking coherence, thrills and pretty much everything else that made Sin City what it is. I’m keeping it merely for the sake of having the full collection, but I doubt I’ll ever so much as glance over it again.
Pens: 2 out of 5

Sin City, Volume 7: Hell and Back
The final instalment offers us a proper story again, and a pretty good one at that. A troubled artist / hit man / war hero saves a girl from suicide only to see her kidnapped, and when he goes after her he accidentally blows up a massive conspiracy involving people trafficking, organ harvesting and other unsavoury activities. It’s dark, it’s brutal and it’s beautifully illustrated, featuring by far the biggest colour palette I’ve seen in any Sin City book. The style really has evolved over the seven volumes, and after a few low points in the middle Miller finishes strong with one hell of a graphic novel here.
Pens: 3 out of 5

Angel Catbird by Margaret Atwood
So I was really excited about this. A graphic novel. About cats. By Margaret Atwood. It’s bound to be AWESOME. Right? Wrong. I still don’t know what this is, but it reads like the deluded ramblings of your granny who’s trying to be down with the kids. Some scientist has an accident with a Secret Formula that mixes his genes up with his dead cat (and an owl, for good measure), turning him into some weird flying half cat. He promptly stumbles into a war between other half cats and some crazy professor who’s trying to take over the world with his army of rats. So far, so good – the whole thing is aimed at young readers, after all. What makes it really weird is the amount of incredibly cringe-worthy innuendo (boy half cat and girl half cat are so sex crazed for each other they can barely manage to keep their pants on), and the random informative foot notes about responsible cat-keeping that are sprinkled in among the action. Basically, the whole thing is so weird, cringe and embarrassing that I can only hope Atwood intended it as some elaborate practical joke. That, or she has decided she’s so famous she can write whatever the hell she fancies these days and get away with it. But seriously. WTF!
Pens: 1 out of 5

Hellblazer: Original Sins by Jamie Delano
Here’s a confession. I got sucked into watching the super cheesy US adaptation of the John Constantine graphic novels. When I commented on how gloriously bad it was in the office, a colleague brought the book in for me, attempting, I assume to further my education. This is certainly very different from the all-American TV show – darker, grittier, and (thankfully!) a whole lot more British. In loosely connected episodes we follow the demon hunter from Liverpool around the world as he tries to keep the unsavoury elements of the underworld from causing havoc with people’s lives above ground. Granted, he fails mostly, being the troubled and flawed character he is. But some of the demon-hunting is pretty epic. I’m not in love with the illustration style and colouring; it comes across very chaotic and the changing reading order of the panels adds confusion, to the point where some pages actively put me off wanting to read them. But the stories are great and John Constantine is a really well-made character, so overall a pretty decent graphic novel.
Pens: 3 out of 5

re:View – The 2015 Bookshelf
December: A life less ordinary

December came and went and I was so busy working ridiculous overtime that I just made my 2015 Goodreads reading challenge by squeezing in a couple of graphic novels and short reads. So here’s the final batch of the 2015 Bookshelf. More dystopia, more Sin City and more cats.

2015-bookshelf-december

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick
I love dystopia so of course I picked this one up. Set in the the what-if scenario of Germany and Japan winning the Second World War and splitting up the US between them as occupied territory, this book follows a cast of characters from each side of the fence. There’s the American art dealer living in oppression, the Jewish US citizen just trying to survive, a range of German political leaders locked in a bitter power struggle, a Japanese government official struggling to stomach the doctrine of his Nazi allies, and a few shady characters of dubious allegiance working their various plots to stir up the system. I enjoyed this in much the same way as I enjoyed Nineteen Eighty-Four, hooked by the story but impatiently skimming through the lengthy political and philosophical ramblings. It’s a good book with a very clever meta level; the eponymous man in the high castle and the outrage he causes with his book speculating on what had happened if America had won the war is endlessly delightful in its irony. Obviously a classic of modern literature.
Pens: 4 out of 5

The Heart Goes Last by Margaret Atwoood
Being a massive Atwood fan I almost feel like a traitor saying this, but I’m seriously underwhelmed by her latest novel. It starts out so promising: A young couple living in a post-financial crash landscape of unemployment and poverty gets a chance to improve its desperate circumstances by signing up to a social experiment. The twin city of Positron/Consilience works on the principle that every resident alternates each month between living and working in the community and doing time in the town’s prison. The promise is a life in comfort and security; the price is total commitment for life: the city is sealed off from the rest of the world, and surveillance is everywhere. This highly regulated life soon takes its toll on Charmaine and Stan’s relationship, and as they start breaking the rules they uncover a sinister underworld in their perfect town, where disruption is dealt with silently and absolutely, where life-like robots are created in secret labs and where their friends disappear and come back not quite the same…or quite human. So far, it has all the elements of a breathtaking Atwood dystopia, very much along the lines of The Handmaid’s Tale. The problem is, you just don’t care. Stan’s a bit of an arse, Charmaine’s a bit of a bitch, there’s not a single character I actually felt for in this book, which meant I really couldn’t care less what happened to them. And all the dystopian elements just feel a little bit sold under value – there are a lot of very good ideas in this book, they just aren’t developed to the point where they become really spectacular. Instead the plot just kind of fizzles out. I wanted it to strike me and leave my head spinning, like when I read Handmaid. Instead I closed the book and went: Meh.
Pens: 3 out of 5 (More like 2.5, and only because there are so many good ideas hidden in there! Argh!)

Sin City, Vol. 4: That Yellow Bastard by Frank Miller
This is by far my favourite Sin City story, probably because it features so prominently in the first movie (one of my absolute favourites) and also because John Hartigan is just the most heartbreaking character in the entire series. On the last day of his career in the police department, Hartigan saves Little Nancy Callahan from a deranged killer who operates under police immunity, and spends the rest of his life paying for it. And then, just because he cares for what’s become of her, he ends up paying a little more. So, there’s the heart-wrenching story of those tow and their fragile relationship, plus the artwork in this volume is the absolute highlight of the entire series – especially Nancy’s iconic dance routine. Seriously one of the most gorgeous graphic novels and one I keep coming back to again and again.
Pens: 5 out of 5

Sin City, Vol. 5: Family Values by Frank Miller
A very short volume of much smaller scale than the previous stories, this book basically follows Dwight and Miho on a revenge killing spree. It’s fast paced and full of delightfully choreographed and captured fights – but what else would you expect when Deadly Little Miho goes to battle. More of a snapshot than a story, this volume may lack the depth of the other books, but it’s a quick and entertaining read for when you’ve got an hour to kill and are feeling a bit noir.
Pens: 3 out of 5

The Guest Cat by Takashi Hiraide
I tried. I really tired! I love Japanese literature and I love cats, but I really struggled through this little book. It’s basically a story of a couple living in a little house and a neighbour’s cat who comes to visit. Now, while this sounds promising to a Japanophile cat lady, sadly the story stops there. Aside from endless, slightly repetitive descriptions of the house and its surroundings, and the progression of the cat from “peeking through the window” to “owning the place” there’s very little here in terms of story or character development, or anything actually happening. (Until the end, which is sad and then a little less sad.) This book is currently being hyped as “poetic” by the booksellers, so maybe it’s poetry and I’m just not getting it. But overall, I feel I would have been better off snoozing for two hours with the cats than spending my time on reading it.
Pens: 1 out of 5

re:View – The 2015 Bookshelf
June + July: It’s been a slow summer

Here’s a confession you won’t hear a lot from me: I haven’t been reading a lot lately.

The reasons are plenty – I’ve started some new workout classes, I’ve been busy with my food blog, I took in a pregnant cat that just had kittens…and somehow the books just didn’t pick themselves up. It may also have to do with the fact that I got stuck on Tom Holt’s J.W. Wells series, loving it at first and then getting bored very quickly. I hate to ditch books halfway through so I soldiered on through three volumes, but it took me an absolute age.

So here are the contents of this summer’s very slim (so far at least) bookshelf. I can’t wait for long autumn evenings on the sofa with a book and a tea…

2015-bookshelf-june-july

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re:View – The 2015 Bookshelf
April: From Sin City to Russia

Sinners, superheroes and comrades. It’s been another random month for the Bookshelf, filled with the kinds of books I don’t normally read but should definitely pick up more often.

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Sin City: The Hard Goodbye by Frank Miller
I loved the first Sin City adaptation for its stunning visuals and it’s in-your-face-ness and reading the novels has been at the back of my mind for years – and I kept pushing it further to the back because I’ve never been very keen on comics. But my surprisingly enjoyable experience of V for Vendetta last month made me take the plunge into graphic novels and of course this seemed the best place to start. I was thrilled to find that the visuals and story lines from the film were basically taken directly from the books, making this a very familiar reading experience, but adding a level of intensity that – I think – comes from the reading rhythm and that the film can’t match. I loved the film for being gorgeous from the first frame to the last, and loved the book more for allowing me to linger on my favourite frames for as long as I liked. It’s a brutally beautiful graphic novel all around.
Pens: 4 out of 5

Watchmen by Alan Moore
What a blockbuster of a graphic novel! And there I was, thinking that, being a comic book, it’ll be a quick read and put me back on track for this year’s reading challenge. And so, a week of intense reading later, I emerged having learned a new book lesson: that comic books can be just as complex as a normal novel made only from words. This epic story, which chronicles the rise and fall of a group of superheroes in an alternative past, asks important questions about what it means to be human and superhuman, about the moral rights and wrongs of trying to create a perfect world. The story gets very complex in time, especially as the various sub-plots jump back and forth in time to explore each character’s history and the various alliances that form and unravel between them over the decades – so definitely not a quick comic book, but a rich and hugely enjoyable piece of literature that you can really get lost in.
Pens: 4 out of 5

The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
This is Mikhail Bulgakov’s devastating satire of Soviet life, written during the darkest period of Stalin’s regime, according to Goodreads. I enjoyed the bits of satire that I understood, but overall I definitely know too little of Russian culture and history to really get this book. Which means it was a bit of a tough read and I probably missed out on a lot of the enjoyment a more educated person will get out of the book. It does have one of the coolest feline characters I’ve ever come across in literature, though.
Pens: 2 out of 5

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov
A bittersweet little satire from Ukraine, Kurkov’s first novel deals with isolation and the pointlessness of life in a political system that doesn’t really give you much in the way of choice. An obituary writer who lives with his pet penguin sleepwalks through life until it dawns on him that his newspaper work is nowhere near as harmless as it seemed, and that he’s been drawn into an elaborately manufactured political trap from which he may not escape with his life. By far the best element to this book is the penguin, a silent and yet strangely expressive character who at the same time lightens the mood and adds a heartbreaking kind of sadness to the story.
Pens: 3 out of 5

re:View – The 2015 Bookshelf
March: Worlds of (Mostly) Meh

Well, March wasn’t my best month for reading. I only (just) made it through four books, and one of them was a graphic novel so comparatively quick to read. That’s what happens when I pick up a book that doesn’t draw me in – I go into procrastinate mode and do everything else instead. (Although I did make a bunch of pretty DIY t-shirts in all that time I didn’t spend reading books.)

Anyway, with some delay here’s the Bookshelf for a rather meh-y March.

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