Angela Ambroz

Nah, not as good as anything else by Eisner that I've read. This one felt like Eisner was channeling Frank Miller: it was dark, cynical, political, tone-deaf to anything beyond white guy stuff (ALL of the 3-4 ladies were either sex objects or shrews), and feeling very dated. It was also very talky, which made it a slog to read. Consider Exhibit A:



SO TALKY.

It's weird that Eisner, who was such a force in advancing the medium of graphic novels/comics/comix/”sequential art” would have, well, not really used the medium well this time. Talk balloons clogged everything, gumming up the whole story and leaving no room for anything but the barest sketchiest art. It was busy, hard to read, a big jumbled mess (with a big jumbled plot).

The story starts like Carl Sagan's Contact: scientists in New Mexico, listening for alien life, hear it (finally!). The rest of the comix is about how this news throws ALL OF 1970s GEOPOLITICS into disarray. There's a Nixon caricature (“Mr. Milgate”), an Idi Amin stand-in (I forget his name, but his “fictional African country” is called Sidiami), there's lots of Cold War Tinker-Tailor-Soldier-Spy shit (which feels soooo moth-balled now), and there's some Age of Aquarius-style New Age hippie caricatures.

It's all, well, very cynical, but also very narrow-minded. This might appeal to your old white grandpa. For me, none of it made any sense to me, none of it felt remotely relatable or real, and I didn't really care.

Eh. Nobody's perfect, even Eisner!

Read this in English. Usually, writing in translations tends to suffer, as it's hard to translate authorial voice. But here it actually worked well: I loved the spare, present tense writing style. It reminded me a bit of Hilary Mantel or Michael Ondaatje: sharp, quick cuts, short scenes.

Unfortunately, the writing style was about the only thing I liked about this book. The plot is one-note: a year or two in the life of a bored, disaffected white expat teen, Sam, in Tanzania in the early 1980s.

The expat crowd (both colonial and post-colonial) can certainly be an interesting microcosm to explore, but usually I expect a bit more about the actual surrounding context to come into play. Here, we follow our protagonist around as she smokes, drinks, does some drugs, has sex, laments being neither here nor there (neither English nor Tanzanian) and fights with her semi-evil dad. Every so often, we get a short paragraph on Life in Tanzania; and these always ring very lecturey, such as “Here in Tanzania...” where you insert any African stereotype you can think of, such as “only poor people ride bicycles” or “white dudes hit on local prostitutes” or “people beat thieves to death via mob justice”. It's incredibly superficial, not at all nuanced, and usually left me rolling my eyes a bit. (I should mention I am a white expat in Tanzania.)

Good drama is usually defined by the protagonist encountering a conflict, resolving it one way or another, and then changing. Unfortunately, the narrative arc of this book is completely flat: Sam of page 1 is identical to Sam of page 100 to Sam of page N. Also, how many pages do I have to read of essentially the exact same action items: Sam smokes. Sam doesn't want to go to England. Sam gets in trouble at school. Sam has problems with boy X. Sam is horny. Sam swims. Seriously, this is EVERYTHING THAT HAPPENS. The same scenes get recycled endlessly.

The few plot pieces - which include a rape - feel more like they're in there for shock value. What are we supposed to learn about Sam? The other characters? The place? Post-colonialism? We don't learn much. Or, it seems, the book's only message is, “The world is a cruel, brutal place.” Literally all the characters (including Sam) are one-dimensionally hedonistic and amoral. It's... really boring. And that philosophy of simplistic, reductionist cynicism is... also really tedious. This book could have been half the length, and the point would have been made.

Apparently, this is book 1 of a trilogy about “Africa” (which I suppose means Tanzania). I'm still curious about the second book, as it apparently follows people OTHER than the bored and boring white expat crowd. I hope I can learn something about Tanzania next time. Though I'm a little worried I'll just get some poverty porn about people being cruel and evil in this brutal, unforgiving world we live in. Sigh.

Really good. Evocative, bare, deeply humanistic. A tiny bar and whorehouse in the middle of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. We mostly zoom in on the owner, Mama Nadi, and the women who work for her. A war rages outside. It gets scary but never too grim - quite the opposite, this was an optimistic, hopeful play.

The fun, strange, imaginative story continues.

You know the male gaze? Yeah, this manga is aaaalll about the female gaze. Or, more specifically, the fanfiction gaze (which I would argue is still basically the female gaze). I read through this with great nostalgia, after each fanfic trope was rolled out: strong male/male homoeroticism, angst and hurt/comfort, plots that center around STRONG EMOTIONS and not much else, ah yes. Ah, the fanfic ways, I had forgotten about these. How I miss you, fanfic! Someday I'll de-anonymize myself and share my most excellent Obi-Wan Kenobi fic.

I mean, I guess a more charitable interpretation of this is that it's all about fluid gender expression and fluid sexuality, and it's also super feminist. But hey: SO IS FANFIC! And given that the first line of Fumi Yoshinaga's wiki is that she's known for shōjo (manga aimed at teen girls) and yaoi (boy/boy manga), well, yeah. I stand by my thesis: if you fanfic, you will definitely love this.

So this manga picks up in the same time period as Ooku Vol. 1: it's 17th century Japan, a “red pox” has killed more than half the men of the land, and the Shogun is now (secretly) a woman with a (now reversed) male harem called the “inner chambers”. Like Vol. 1, our protagonist is a very pretty man indeed, called Arikoto - a traveling Buddhist monk who, because of his stunning good looks (remarked upon or the loving focus of every third panel or so), is forced to disrobe (pun semi-intended) and join the inner chambers, ostensibly as a “catamite” for the “male” shogun (actually as a stud for the female shogun). His young assistant monk (WHO LOVES HIM A LOT) also disrobes and joins him to be his valet in the castle.

Thus begineth the drama. And forsooth the awful Shakespearean translationeth. Oof.

Anyway, the shogun is a young lady (18 years old?) who is (1) kinda awful, (2) but she's had a tough life, ya know. There is a lot of drama around a kitten. Arikoto just basically emits waves and waves of golden compassion and good looks and something I like to call SOUL HONOR. Sexual and romantic tension is set to high: between Arikoto and his valet, between Arikoto and the shogun. A lot of bad stuff happens, but in the style of fanfic where it kinda feels earnest but also trivializing? Uh, trigger warning for sexual assault. (Also, fwiw “trigger warning” originated in the fanfic world, since that is actually, weirdly, also a fanfic trope: sexual assault scenes used as plot devices for additional angst/romantic tension.) Oh, here's some survey results of fanfic tropes.

A sweet, empathetic slice of life covering middle school and early high school, set in late 80s/early 90s San Francisco. Kind of like a kinder, gentler version of Eighth Grade (or maybe social media and YouTube made the toxic period of puberty even more chaotic).

Aw man. DNF @ 30%.

I held on for as long as I could, but I just could not suspend my disbelief. This is a historical fiction sci-fi mashup, where Galileo gets regularly abducted by far future human(oid)s who beam him up to Jupiter's moons (aka, the moons he famously discovered with his famous invention, the telescope).

I love KSR. He is very special to me, definitely one of my formative inspirations. I have read 6 of his books (and they are bricks, people), and DNFed 2 of them. That's kinda how it goes. I was hoping this would be like his alt history masterpiece, The Years of Rice and Salt, and it is indeed written with enormous intellectual brio - Galileo is FUN - but... like I said, I just could not get past the sci-fi elements. They were too wacky, even for me!

I also fwiw love Galileo, and ADORE, nay WORSHIP, this time and place in history. A sign of my commitment: I have a 8” tattoo of Brunelleschi's dome on my shoulder. I'M TELLING YOU, PEOPLE, I LOVE THIS STUFF.

So it was with extreme disappointment that I slogged through this, WILLING myself to like it, before finally giving up. sob. Maybe I'll try it again. :(

This is probably peak Oliver Sacks. And you need Oliver Sacks in your life. We lost a very special person when he died in 2015.

This book is Sacks's big-hearted portrayal of a bunch of neuro-atypical case studies, pulled from his experiences as a clinical neurologist working at a bunch of mental hospitals in NYC in the 70s and 80s. Like all of his books, he's a Romantic (big R) naturalist in love with the human mind, and his wide-ranging enthusiasm and respect for both the analytical and emotional/spiritual qualities of his work is always evident. His passion is contagious; his writing is often - dare I say it - divine.

Sacks wrote with enormous affection for the human spirit: I was regularly moved by each case, and not at all in a pitying way. He structures the book around the three (artificial?) categories doctors use for classifying neurological disorders: (1) having deficiencies (e.g. amnesia, agnosia (inability of recognizing things), aphasia (word salad)), (2) having too-much-nesses (e.g. Tourette's, other compulsive/tic behaviors), or (3) being “unintelligent”/mentally challenged. Each case study is both intrinsically fascinating (the titular “man who mistakes” things is amazing) and a moral lesson in how we often misjudge and miss a lot of the complexity behind seemingly intractable afflictions.

Sacks's introduction to the too-much-ness section was especially amazing; I loved hearing about the uneasiness we feel when things feel “too good” - i.e. when the human mind starts whirring too fast as we approach manic, hallucinatory experiences. And I loved Sacks's emphasis, early in the book, on covering maladies of the right hemisphere - since that's our big-R Romantic, mystical, hallucinatory side after all.

Anyway, Sacks is great. Highly recommended. Read his memoir next.

Well, this was terrifying. As expected. Heat is an insidious killer. AAAGHH.

Another book that motivates the hell outta me to climate change-adapt my home and life.

This book fills me with a righteous fire. I want to thrust it into the hands - or better yet, the hands of the children of - all those socially conservative traditionalists/bigots who say things like it's “not natural” to do X gender or Y sex thing. Remember Jordan Peterson and his lobster? And how he got basic biology wrong? That's how I feel when social conservatives talk about “nature” - I'm like, bro, do u even science? Do u even biology? Because dolphins are super gay. As are penguins, and albatrosses. “Natural” for women to be carers/nurturers loving their babies? Well, in seahorse world, it is indeed MISTER seahorse that carries the babies and births them. SO TAKE THAT.

Anyway, on top of this righteous fire, the book is immensely colorful (it is Eric Carle, after all), and interactive - there are trumpet fish hiding behind seaweed, and lionfish by coral. It is a feast. An underwater feast!

Might have missed the point of this (dystopian teen themes?), but I just found the characters unlikeable and the story gratingly dull. The art was good. But! BIG BUT. I really hate self-perceived “subversive” comix (which I presume this is) drawing intentionally ugly characters and then making them huge jerks. We already have a huge cultural ridiculousness, where beauty is equated with “good”, and ugliness “bad”. So “underground” art which purports to be gritty, realistic, pessimistic, etc, but just has ugly people being ugly and doing ugly things to each other makes me think, bah, so unimaginative.

OK, don't love doing this, but DNFing it pretty early, at 14%. I started it, was horrified - HORRIFIED - by the BLAM! footbinding! opener, and then kept reading and... something felt off. My antennae were vibrating. I looked up the author, and was surprised (and, okay, disappointed) to learn that Lisa See is 1/8th Chinese. I'm probably like 1/8th Serbo-croatian so I imagined myself writing about feudal Yugoslavia and... I felt weird.

But, okay, I also DON'T believe in policing identities - we may all contain multitudes! and our imaginations even more! - especially if it's written well, and with an eye for historical accuracy (which I was told this was!) - but, I decided to browse some of the negative Goodreads reviews. A couple Chinese speakers noticed that, for example, See literally translates the Chinese word for “uterus” as “child palace” - one review said this would be like translating the German word “Handschuhe” to “hand shoes”, instead of “gloves”. Like, yes, that's the literal translation (and, yes, that's kinda adorable) and even, YES, the etymology of words is super interesting and often enlightening BUT... also, yes, it's definitely exoticizing, maybe even romanticizing? By this point, I had lost trust in this book and the author. This review made me laugh and confirmed that I had ventured a little too much into, ahem, Concerned White Lady-ville (a land I know well!).

Very very very enjoyable. A passionate rant, written with enormous verve, about how everything we know about math is incorrect - and the way we teach it is just tortured. I loved it. I was already in the “maybe we should teach math different?” camp anyway. But this book took that little thread of thought I had, fed some pure electricity into it, and then shook it around like crazy. I was like WHOA.

Some notes:

I love, LOVE, how he not only compared math to a fine art, but SLAMMED THIS POINT INTO OUR HEAD OVER AND OVER AGAIN. It jibed with my recent feelings about teaching a kid to love math. Like, literacy is treated as a sacred part of our culture: we read books to our children at night. For many reasons: to build literacy skills, but also to cultivate just a pure love of story, to share culture, to give them a glimpse into this big wide world of ideas and books. We're not, like, drilling them on their letters. At least, not first thing.

Similarly, art class is about expressing ourselves - here are some tools, a general direction or prompt, and then students are set loose. We might share other artists' “solutions” or answers to that prompt, but we're not, like, trying to tell the students they are wrong and Jackson Pollock is right. We're just offering inspiration, and - again - welcoming them to the great human activity that is, in general, making art. Lockhart sees math in the same way. Like, the EXACT same way. He thinks it's just as absurd to memorize rules or get fussy over naming (rhombus, indeed!!!) as it would be to have art students memorize brush stroke patterns or get fussy over paintbrush types.

When I have had peak math moments - I remember a Calc I take-home final in college? - it feels like a game and, indeed, an act of creativity. A puzzle, but more open-ended. Of course, that was a blip in my life. The rest of the time, I just felt bad that I couldn't understand how to do a proof.

Anyway. I really loved this. Because it's like shockingly, clarifyingly TRUE. Like, he notes how most school math is almost COMPLETELY, ENTIRELY lost in adult minds - thus showing how both completely and utterly pointless a lot of it is, and how it ALSO misses the whole point. Two kinda distinct, related things. Like, not every adult is a great artist. But probably every adult understands what art IS (we can leave the caveat here about modern art and the whole “I could do that” bullshit critique - but that is for another review). But, Lockhart argues, we have many many many adults out there who have e.g. not only forgotten the quadratic formula (I know I have) but also entirely missed the point of WHY we were studying the quadratic formula in the first place (I definitely don't know why we learned it).

Going back to getting kids excited about math, I was reading through various cri de ceours by math teacher dads/moms with blogs talking about “math games” and “math books”. And these games and books were all about, basically: patterns. Symmetry. Bigness and smallness. Measurement. Like... THAT is the point of math. It's a creative, open-ended endeavor, like painting! There are many ways to paint the same tree. There are many ways to write the same Python program. There are many ways to math!! I remember when I told my co-parent this - “let's teach our kids to love math” - they were like, well, first we gotta them get to learn numbers. As Lockhart would say, AAAAAH. No!! Math is not about some Hindu-Arabic symbols!!!!

Anyway, v v v good. I loved it so much. It kinda reminded me of Rabbi Abraham Heschel's The Sabbath. Like, mind-expanding AND heart-expanding.

Fun, clever, refreshing. I had no idea what this was going to be about, and I was DELIGHTED when it was a strange, feminist, sci-fi alt history of 18th century Japan.

Similar to Y: The Last Man and that one short story by Ursula Le Guin about a planet with a super lopsided sex ratio leading to a weird medieval matriarchy - ARGH, WHAT IS THAT STORY CALLED, I'VE LOST IT - anyway: it's about a super lopsided sex ratio leading to a weird medieval matriarchy.

In Ooku, it happens due to a weird “pox” that kills many, many dudes in the early 18th century, and so we have a female shogun visiting her harem of pretty boys, and we follow one very pretty young man as he tries to make it and provide for his family. Just like in the (brilliant and argh what's it called!!) Ursula Le Guin story, having very, very few men turns the remaining men into studs who need to be farmed out to, ahem, spread their seed. Men are seen as fragile things, super important for procreation. Marriage is central to a man's life. Women take on all manual labor (lest men hurt themselves!), and the entire samurai and aristocratic structure is led by women. Interestingly, all women in leadership positions take male names - leading to, ahem, not a blip on the record keeping. And this matriarchy - it is just as oppressive!

In Vol. 1, we follow Mizuno, a handsome young buck who decides to join the shogun's “inner chambers” (male harem) to try to provide for his family. He is devastated to leave his girlfriend, O-Nobu, but understands that, for his poor-ish family, this is the best way. Once he's in the harem, he's confronted with the usual haremy stereotypes of eunuchs, gossip, cat fighting, and homosexuality - except it's all dudes, this time! Everyone is scrambling to get to the top and be seen by the new shogun, a tough, lusty, no-frills military lady named Yoshimune.

What I really loved about this was how deft the pacing and plot was. If you had no idea what it was about, as I did, the story orients you quickly and delightfully - from a child going into the forest and accidentally bringing the “red pox” back, to the visit by a Dutch traveller - these are wonderful little set-pieces which reveal this world without telling us. They show us! So that was masterful. I also really enjoyed how “real” the inner chambers felt; when I googled the author and saw that she's also know for manga slash fic (arghh what's that genre called; anyway I call it “slash fic” cuz I was once a fanfic person, and that just means m/m homoerotica written by women), I was like, “oh is this going to get silly”. (If you've read a lot of slash fic, you know that it can get oh so very silly - pregnant Harry Potter!) But the slashiness never felt indulgent; instead, it felt restrained (considering we're in a man harem!!!) and sweet and real. For example, Mizuno's servant - a young tailor - has a GIANT, adorable crush on him, and the way this is handled feels like the way, well, it COULD be handled.

Anyway, fun, different, LUSTY (ho ho), I'm definitely going to be reading Vol. 2.

Uggghhh. Reading through the other Goodreads reviews of this, I seem to be one of the only people that didn't love this book, but instead found it creepy and lame. Serves me right for not reading the sample before deciding!

This is near future sci-fi, where a gruff and beefy engineer man, Leo, is sent to work on a giant space station to teach the workers there about engineering stuff. Once he arrives, he learns that the station's Corporation, GalacTech, has created a workforce of four-armed/no-legged teenagers nicknamed “quaddies”. Let me reiterate here: the quaddies are frequently described as “kids”, “children”, innocent naifs and so on. Ahem.

Leo is immediately queasy about this weird genetically-engineered worker drones thing since, okay, they're basically slaves. And when a new technological advance in anti-gravity renders them obsolete, GalacTech decides to put them all in - ahem - a concentration camp (!). Leo then decides to save them all. Let my people go!

Yo, so I found this story all sorts of wrong. First, the writing style is pure 1950s pulp, which is weird - since it was written in the 1980s. But women sigh and faint, men are brawny, teenagers act like Ron Howard on Happy Days, and the villain is a one-dimensional ham. I'm surprised at how blunt and sexist this story was (the women in the story are all either wives/moms or sex objects), coming from the same lady (lady!) that wrote the much subtler, feminist Paladin of Souls (which featured that unicorn of narrative - the middle-aged lady protagonist). Here, we have a romance between gruff, 50ish Leo and one of the (they were called “kids”!) quaddies. The slutty one, but still. So wrong.

Also, I felt just as uneasy as Leo did with the whole way the quaddies were described; it felt like it was always just a hair's breadth away from getting creepy and ableist. Able-bodied older white dude saves bunch of genetically-modified, four-armed kids. Insert skeptical face.

One (maybe the only) pro is the love of engineering.

First, I need to pat myself on the back for my extremely precise triangulation of this book. I was in the mood for EXACTLY THIS, after re-watching some Lord of the Rings –> reading some trashy LOTR fanfiction –> and then wanting some more respectable high fantasy fanfiction. This delivered. In fact, it delivered too much!

This is book 1 in a high fantasy series Lois McMaster Bujold. I have apparently read the sequel to this, Paladin of Souls, which won both the Hugo and Nebula (double winner!!). I have largely forgotten that book, though I do remember it featured a middle-aged lady hero. And I will never forget when that happens. Now I think I should re-read it?

Anyway, the setting is a Renaissance southern Europe-feeling high fantasy world, infused with a strong religious fervor for either 4 (if you're Roknari) or 5 (if you're anybody else) gods. Our protagonist is Lord Cazaril, a lesser landed gentleman lord/courtier dude who has spent the last 20 years suffering various slings and arrows of outrageous misfortune. He is a galley slave at one point. This is all just part and parcel of living in this fantasy-Mediterranean (those damn Roknari!), and the story opens with a humbled, traumatized and ailing Cazaril dragging himself back to this one castle he used to be a page for. Since is a super noble, righteous dude - and smart! - the elderly “Provincara” (lady regent?) (played by Judi Dench in my head) enlists him to be the secretary/tutor/Chief of Staff for her daughter, a smart, sensible, 15-year-old princess named Iselle.

Then shit gets cray!

The great and ennobling

So I generally really enjoyed this book, it featured much pulpy entertainment. Some things I particularly regarded well were:

- The setting. I like LOTR but LORDDDDD am I tired of Anglo or Nordic high fantasies. Even though Bujold slips in some Celtic and Gaelic words here and there (according to my ebook dictionary), the tactile feel of this world - to me, at least - was very Mediterranean. All the various competing kingdoms - Chalion, Ibra, Roknar (KHAAAAAAAN), etc - felt like Italian city-states to me: Venice, Genoa, Rome. The Roknari, I assumed, were meant to be the Ottomans since they worshiped 4 gods instead of 5. And the whole kidnapping noblemen and making them row around the sea.

- The religion. This world is super-imbued with its religion; indeed, the religion becomes central to the plot and Cazaril's adventures. In short, there are 5 gods we hear about: the Mother, Father, Son, Daughter, and Bastard (this is the one the Roknari exclude, I guess?). The gods seem to be tied to the seasons? And to some activities? Like the Son is all about military stuff? And lots of the noblemen seem to be aligned with one or other god. Anyway, apart from the general interest of this pantheon, I really enjoyed how LMB portrayed religion both in practical terms (believers, skeptics, rituals, etc) and in its SUPER NIRVANA SPIRITUALITY moments (boy, I highlighted so many great passages - she had a great way of describing peak experiences!). So that was fun.

- The humane humor. The characters are almost all believable people, and there were some laugh-out-loud moments of wit. Cazaril, in particular, had many moments of wry observation that were fun. Likewise, LMB embraced the occasional absurdity of the human experience: there was awkwardness and clumsiness and (understandable) stupidity.

The trashy

This book, however, is kinda pulpy fanfiction-y. Namely, here are the things I didn't love:

- The hurt/comfort. OOOOH BOY. So there is a popular fanfic genre, hurt/comfort, which, like all things fandom, was pioneered by Trekkies and basically means your favorite character suffers a lot and is periodically comforted. In this case, that character is Cazaril. He spends about 90% of the book suffering various physical problems, with much noble righteousness and wry wit. He is tired, sore, wounded, sick, etc etc etc. And on and on. I mean, I can deal with a couple tablespoons of character angst, but this was gallons.

- The slapstick. While I admired LMB's handling of humor, things did edge into slapstick once or twice. Various crows peck at Cazaril's head. If that amuses you, well, that joke is repeated.

- Well, I guess that's it.

This book was fine. It was fun. It was a little ridiculous. But it also had some really inspired moments. I can see why it's popular!

A brilliant book. Written like a novel and based on the testimony of various North Korean defectors. Even though we know they'll all make it out, the narrative tension is sometimes insane - and, yeah, OK, I cried through the last 25% of the book (according to my Kindle).

I'm ashamed to say that I had no idea about the North Korean famine in the 1990s, where as many as 2 million people died. It was horrifying. And it's horrifying to read about what life can be like when not only is your country poor and underdeveloped, but your government is Orwellian, almost sociopathic.

Similar - in writing and tone - to Katherine Boo's Beyond the Beautiful Forevers (a book about life in a Bombay slum).

Brutal, but also sweet (?), graphic memoir about an elder Millennial navigating their late 90s/early 2000s teenage wasteland.

So I think Sarah Myer (they/them) and me must be the exact same age cuz BOY DID THIS HIT HARD. I had forgotten - and this book made me horrifyingly REMEMBER - how that 1999/2000 high school business was like. But especially: how damningly socially retrogade we all were? Good Lord.

Myer was born in Korea, adopted by white parents in suburban/rural Maryland, and grows up to be super nerdy, quirky, anime-loving and gender non-conforming. They love drawing and are HUGE DORKS. Boy, did that hit hard too! Unfortunately, their surroundings are... well, middle America in 1999. AKA there's racism, homophobia, transphobia, just a bunch of toxic sludge sloshing around all over the place. Identity politics was just gaining steam, I would say, around those issues, and so it was, indeed, very normal to sling around “gay” as an insult. Confession: I remember one of my bffs, who was gay, once stopped me in my tracks in 2001 by being like, “you know, that's very hurtful”. Teenage me was like [Pikachu surprised face] IT IS???? Gawd, I'm so embarrassed, still, about that. Thank you, [redacted], for tolerating my ignorance!!!

So Myer had, unfortunately, some very awful instances of bullying - and this memoir does a good job of both contextualizing that bullying, as well as reflecting on it with compassionate, adult distance. This memoir was also such a sweet, inspiring portrayal of (transracial) adoption gone RIGHT; something I really needed, after the horrors of We Were Once a Family. I really appreciated how Myer's parents ALWAYS had their back - the scene where they go to Otakon with their dad, just SINGLE TEAR.

So I heard (and this may be inaccurate) that this was written by a disgruntled editor tired with the infantilization/white-washing of adolescence in YA fantasy. His response: Harry Potter + cocaine + sex + depression + Narnia, too.

Overall, it's an interesting-enough idea that you do keep reading. But I think the whole conceit would have worked better if it had had some wry wit and levity sprinkled in. As it stands, the story strives so hard to be sordid - our anti-Potter, Quentin, is self-pitying, self-loathing and a heavy drinker - that it feels a bit one-note. (At least, I found myself shaking my head with, “Oh, shut up already with the drama.”) Admittedly, Quentin goes through some pretty sick shit. Or, as Harry of Potter Puppet Pals laments, “I still dream of Dobby ripping my skin clean off!” Yes, this fantasy stuff is the stuff of PTSD, when you really think about it. But the entire plot seemed so constructed, so perfectly symmetrical, and so consistent in grinding Quentin down, that I never forgot about the author behind the curtain. I think the author, Grossman, would have made some better gains if he had lightened up a bit - allowed some three-dimensionality creep in, especially when he was establishing the college mates' matesiness. (A lot of that stuff was relegated to exposition-exposition-exposition.) That said, the mixture of overly-self-aware, overly-naturalistic young adultness with Lofty “Renaissance Faire” (Grossman's description, not mine) ACTING did feel strange at times - I wasn't sure how to react to anything that happened. It felt a little like if you dropped Ellen Page/Diablo Cody into Middle-earth and had them react. Hilarious!? Not really. Just jarring, and neither wondrous/Middle-earthy nor witty/Cody-y.

Grossman's writing, on the other hand, was pretty consistently good. I enjoyed his embellishments, even as they teetered into purple territory, if only because they often were quite witty. He relied pretty heavily on straight-up “telling”/exposition (long stretches of that), and his pacing was somewhat jerky (years fly by, then afternoons drag), and this may have kept me from falling into the story completely, but I always enjoyed it - at least, from a clinical perspective. The loose string of Penny, though - argh!

Mother of God. A massive tome, historical fiction, present tense, ambiguous pronouns (which “he”? WHICH “HE”?). 10 pages in, I thought it would never work. Also, who gives a f about done-to-death Henry VIII/Tudor drama?! Apparently me, thanks to this book. Hilary Mantel makes magic. Humanistic, stylistic magic.

Kinda like Sapiens. A book that BLASTED my brain for the first quarter, enraged me for the middle bits, and then kinda fizzled in the end. Overall, very decent though. (And better than Sapiens!)

On the stuff I liked:
- The first 25%-33% of the book is like a giant blast of gender revolution and I AM HERE FOR IT. Namely: it highlights the ways in which Men Are Struggling - specifically: cratering academic achievement, degrading job prospects, and a bunch of social policy programs that seem to have no effect.
- The author, Reeves, makes his first excellent point, not necessarily original to him, that the patriarchy sucks for both men, women, all genders! Namely: with the modern women's lib movement in the 1970s-now, women's roles have expanded - now women have jobs! Careers! In STEM! Good for them. Now we have hand-wringing about women “having it all”: family AND career?! Preposterous. Can it be done. Etc. Meanwhile, men's roles have NOT similarly expanded: they WERE the breadwinners but now... not so much. (Some huge % of households are dual earners where the female partner earns more.) There has NOT been a similar push to get men into childcare (both amateurly - as dads - and professionally).
- This has particularly impacted low-skilled male workers, whose (manual labor-heavy) jobs were outsourced during globalization - and whose skills risk being automated away anyway.
- Reeves also interestingly talks about the intersectionality of racism + sexism for Black men - who need to jump through all sorts of ridiculous hoops (wearing fake glasses, whistling Vivaldi) to de-stress anxious white people, the police, etc.
- Reeves makes an excellent point about how we need a progressive, post-feminism re-imagining of gender roles for men AND women - but all the attention and money is on the latter. He mentions how the push to get girls into STEM (oooh and don't you get me started on math anxiety in girls, etc etc) needs to have a parallel push to get boys into “HEAL” jobs (healthcare, education, admin, literacy).
- Another interesting data point: all the trends for girls/women are improving since the 70s, while all the trends for boys/men are getting worse.
- Oh yeah, and we should redshirt boys (i.e. delay school for them until they're ~6-7), because male brains develop more slowly? Something something prefrontal cortex? Boys definitely do under-perform girls in school (worse grades, lower graduation rates, lower college enrollment), and apparently this is a global phenom.

So that was all great. My brain was buzzing. I was like, YES REDSHIRT THEM ALL. It opened my (feminist) eyes to the Plight of Men.

But then he annoyed me, specifically:
- There's a loooong middle tract about the “biological differences between men and women”. And he literally cites a bunch of cognitive studies finding lots of correlations, noting once that “oh yeah, correlation does not equal causation”. Dude, your entire remaining arguments rest on the assumption that these studies ARE causal. Yes, you can't randomize gender (YET!). But I still think, until we get a better causal identification strategy (and e.g. Claude Steele's work on randomizing gender prompts in math tests approaches this!), I remain to be convinced about how much is socialization vs. hormones and genitalia. I refer to Cordelia Fine's book as well - scientists are human! And, for a lot of our literature, they were men! So they might be finding what they're looking for, you know what I mean.
- The other kinda annoying bit was the two chapters on “what's wrong with the political [left/right] re: boys/men”. This can be boiled down to: the left don't respect men's suffering (seeing it as a threat to the women's movement) and they either ridicule or ignore it (fair) vs. the right exploit men's suffering while offering no solutions (or bad solutions: “let's all go back to the 1950s”). I agree with both of these points, but I found his portrayal of the left's use of “toxic masculinity” to be a caricature - an incorrect caricature, even! Namely, he criticizes the term “toxic masculinity” as an overloaded catch-all term that individualizes a man's failings. I agree it's probably an overloaded term, but I've always interpreted it as exactly NOT individualizing - but rather situating a specific man's behavior in the larger (sometimes toxic!) gender roles that the patriarchy puts on us all. E.g. Men struggling to find friendship and make meaningful intimate connections because of a (socialized!) caution around being vulnerable/soft and squishy goobers.

So, midway through the book, I was like “oh no - he keeps saying he's NOT a Men's Rights Activist but oh God”.

By the end of the book, I was reassured. Even though Reeves holds onto “biological sex is an important thing!!!” with both hands, and I really do still disagree here (as a Basic Leftist, I guess), he has so many other great insights and really got me thinking. And his heart is also definitely in the right place (aka the progressive place, HA HA).

Oh, also - I gotta say: the scope of his research was impressive. He touched on a number of authors and economists I looooove (Ta-Nehisi Coates, David Autour, Claudia Goldin), but even managed to mention the awful red-pill incel world AND that hilarious and sad SNL skit about “man parks” (to help your boyfriend make friends).

So, overall, definitely recommend.

Unexpectedly lovely. A portrait and memoir of a friendship over 40+ years.

Someone somewhere called it a deep look into male friendship. Ah yes, male friendship, that thorny beast. Don't men struggle to make and keep friends? That's what Richard Reeves and Bowling Alone and that Kurzgesagt video make me believe. Isn't there a loneliness epidemic?

Anyway. I didn't really see this book in such a gendered, macro way. I saw it in a very intimate, micro way - a celebration of, indeed, our ape-y need to have close friends. A shoulder to cry on!

The author, Will Schwalbe, describes himself as a nerdy, bookish, unathletic, gay man who “should not” be friends with, the friend-love of his life, Chris Maxey, described as a big, strapping jock with a heart o' gold. This book is really a loving paean to “Maxey” - as he is called by loved ones. Schwalbe often comes across as peevish and rigid, I even started getting annoyed with him. Until I remembered he was the author. But he really sings the praises of Maxey, and what his friendship with Maxey has brought into his life. It's touching. Deeply sweet. I found myself with tears in my eyes at the end - and recommitted to keeping the flames of my friendships alive and burning sweetly! MAYBE EVEN I SHALL CALL YOU PEOPLE, AND YOU KNOW HOW MUCH I HATE TALKING ON THE PHONE.

Incidentally, Maxey founded a school in the Bahamas - The Island School - which Schwalbe also sings the praises of. I wonder how much of an applications bump they'll get because of this.

An unexpected FEAST. I really, REALLY loved this one.

This is a historical fiction graphic novel about Hipparchia, a rare FEMALE Ancient Greek philosopher. This shows her daily life in ye olde Athens (circa 400BCE?). She is a dorky bookworm who likes to ponder the big questions - why is there anything, etc - and who constantly gets shut down by the well-meaning, but very basic, men in her life. Oh, also there are a lot of lecherous idiotic men, because the Patriarchy be patriarching super hard in this time and place.

This book really tickled me pink. I 100% related to Hipparchia - I was that nerdy bookworm back in my teen years. I also enjoy, still now, re-imagining my daily life in the garb of 19th century Victorian England, or 14th century Renaissance Florence, or whatever. I love to look at the people passing me on the street and imagine us all in some historical point in time: what would map onto what? Instead of worrying about ChatGPT, would we be worrying about those damn Guelphs and Ghibellines? I love it.

Oh yeah. I also realized this book is basically Disney's Beauty and the Beast, only much much purer and better. (And I like Beauty and the Beast, don't get me wrong.)

Hmm, given how much I loved this and how much I loved Kaoru Mori's A Bride's Story, I think I'm just 100% desperate for historical fiction, slice of life comix featuring relatable women and tons of anthropological detail.

A striking and moving YA novel about a historical event I knew nothing about: the Holodomor, aka the Ukraine Famine of 1932-1933. The novel takes three perspectives - all of 13 year olds: a boy stuck at home during the 2020 Covid quarantines; a middle-class Ukrainian girl growing up in Brooklyn; and a well-to-do Ukrainian girl in Kyiv, the daughter of a Soviet official.

I appreciate very much Katherine Marsh's work: she weaves together highly personal, relatable stories - told from a young person's perspective - about difficult and nuanced historical events. I thought she did a fantastic job in Nowhere Boy, about the 2015 refugee crisis. This book is likewise expertly done: all three kids are relatable (though 2020 Matthew feels SO CODDLED compared to the girls - mamma mia, it really was uphill both ways in the olden times).

Much as you would expect, if you've read other things by Will Eisner. And you should definitely read other Eisner comix before this one. My recommendation: New York: The Big City.

Essentially fanfic that tries to correct some of the blatantly anti-Semitic stereotyping in Dickens.

This is my third Eisner (after this and this), and I think I like this one least so far. The writing risks teetering into heavy-handedness a few times, and I found the pacing a bit whirlwind. We follow Moses Fagin - who would become the infamous “Fagin the Jew” of Oliver Twist - from his birth, through various misfortunes, until he gets to his present position. It's incredibly interesting from the historical perspective: I didn't know, for example, that the British Jewish community - at least of the 19th century - was made up of established, wealthier Sephardic Jews who had immigrated in the 15th century (?), and poorer Ashkenazi Jews who had emigrated from eastern Europe following the 19th century pogroms. Industrial Revolution-era London is also always fascinating from a development economist's perspective.

But! In addition to the writing and pacing, I also preferred Eisner's art in the New York City stories: the lines are sharper, cleaner, bolder. Here, everything is watery and blurred: sometimes this is evocative and nice, such as the panels of Fagin at the docks (with the monochrome watercolors fading with the perspective, as look over bobbing ships, seagulls, and the water - v nice), or the panel of Fagin with the locket portrait of his younger self (this panel also dripped with schmaltz, though).