Tag: Fiona Staples

Reading 2015: September

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Another month of all comics. There will be novels again next month, though.

  1. More Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  2. New, Improved! Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  3. Dykes To Watch Out For The Sequel by Alison Bechdel
  4. Spawn Of Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  5. Unnatural Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  6. Hot, Throbbing Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  7. Split-Level Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  8. Post-Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  9. Dykes And Sundry Other Carbon-Based Life-Forms To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  10. Invasion Of The Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
  11. The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel – This was a full reread of Alison Bechdel’s Dykes To Watch Out For comic strip, with the exception of the non-narrative material that makes up the very first volume. Starting halfway through volume 2, the strip becomes a continuing soap opera about a group of politically aware lesbian friends that continues for over twenty years. And it isn’t temporally static, like most long-running comic strips; time passes in Dykes To Watch Out For at its actual rate. Characters age and face new challenges, children grow, pets die. It’s an astonishing document, capturing in amber two and a half decades of leftwing political trends and cultural concerns, all deftly humanized. The final book in this group, The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For, contains about 75% of the material in the individual collections, plus all the strips published after Invasion Of The Dykes To Watch Out For was collected and an introduction in which Bechdel draws herself musing on the notion of essentialism. If you’ve never read these strips, that’s probably the easiest way to do it.
  12. Saga, vol. 5 by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples – I’m still fully enjoying and invested in the lush SF depths of Saga, though I’d be lying if I said I felt as “Ohmigod this is great!” enthusiastic about it as I did at the start. The series has settled into its rhythms, no longer shocking me with every page turn, but just humming along with perfect confidence. That’s no bad thing. I look forward to the next volume.

Reading 2015: January

January books
Rather than record the books I read in groups of 20 as I did last year, I think this time I’m going to track my reading month by month.

  1. Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon – I read Last and First Men several years ago, and quite liked it. Star Maker is a companion work, and references Last and First Men (which I think I enjoyed a bit more) several times. They aren’t novels in the traditional sense; these are philosophical fabulations of different ways human life, nonhuman life, and the universe itself could exist, stitched together with thin threads of narrative. One particularly interesting thing about Star Maker is how much time Stapledon devotes to explaining in detail concepts that have become very familiar in the last 100 years. For example, he devotes many pages of imagistic text to the changing appearance of stars as one travels closer and closer to the speed of light. The writing clearly expects a readership that’s never seen such things visually depicted. It’s rare to read cosmologically rigorous science fiction from before the space age, when these things began to be tropified, then commonly visualized. (While I own the physical copy of this book pictured above, I actually read this on my phone as an ebook, using the excellent app Marvin.)
  2. Off Course by Michelle Huneven – I read this on the strength of her previous novel Blame, which was among my favorites I read last year. Off Course is a novel of much narrower scope, following a woman with mildly fraught family relationships and an incomplete dissertation who lets a few years of her life disappear into a rural affair with a married man. An enjoyable read, but it didn’t blow me away like Blame did.
  3. Saga vol. 4 by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples – I could easily just repeat what I said for volume 3. I don’t follow comics the way I used to, but Saga awakens my old fervor. Like science fiction or fantasy or gorgeous artwork? Read it.
  4. On Wings of Song by Thomas M. Disch – The third novel by Disch I’ve read, and longer than the other two combined. This is a 1979 Bildungsroman set in a fairly recognizable satire of the future United States dominated by ecological disaster, urban economic collapse, and rural religious fundamentalism. Also, in this world, some people who sing while hooked up to a particular device can leave their bodies and psychically fly around. I find Disch’s writing fascinating, though I haven’t  been able yet to exactly articulate why. Part of it just the manifest confidence and intelligence shining through the pages; Disch doesn’t apologize, doesn’t waste any time on bashfulness, and even his expository devices operate at a sprint. He was clearly among the most technically and verbally gifted writers of his era of science fiction, and yet his fall from the modern conversation is starting to make a kind of sense to me. Not because he isn’t worth being talked about, but because so far each of his novels have come to rest in my mind as somehow amorphous. Most books I’ve read sit in my memory as a sort of solid aesthetic crystal whose facets encompass the shape of my reading experience even as the textual details fade. Disch’s books, though, have blurry borders. The moments that sparkle in the mist are dazzling, but the formlessness is somehow mildly, naggingly dissatisfying. As is this description, even to me, because I nonetheless find his books fully compelling and intend to read more.
  5. Love Me Back by Merritt Tierce – Merritt left Iowa just before I arrived, and while we have many friends in common and were once both in the same reading, I don’t think we’ve ever actually met. But I thought the piece she read at our joint event was memorably great, and only ever heard good things said of her and her work during my years in Iowa City, so was excited to read her first novel. I consumed it in one go, mostly while sitting at a bar, which ended up feeling appropriate as this is a novel of sex and search for self definition set against a constant backdrop of the food service industry. This is a book that resists tidiness, moralizing, or resolution, and if you enter it expecting the glimmer of redemption to ever arc toward the horizon you will be disappointed. What’s on offer here instead is a sort of fierce snowfall, a four year blizzard of cutting fragments, each slice an attempt to figure out how to manage existing in the world.
  6. The Theory of Light and Matter by Andrew Porter – In my last year at Trinity University my attention began to swing away from physics and back toward fiction, and so I signed up for the undergraduate fiction writing workshop. My professor was Andrew Porter, a soft spoken and knowledgeable Iowa alumn who explained on the first day that he discouraged writing genre fiction in his classes, as genre fiction lacked the attention to character which he wished to cultivate. When I inevitably chose to try to prove him wrong, writing what would eventually turn into “Husbandry,” his enthusiastic reception of what I’d done completely won me over. Years later, when I wrote to let him know that one of his students had been accepted to Iowa, he could not have been more excited for me. Which is all to say: Andrew played a big role in shaping the path of my life, and I have been meaning to read this book for years. I’m kind of glad I didn’t get to it until now, though. These are quiet, unadorned stories of ordinary and largely suburban life, the conflicts mostly struggles of self definition. It is exactly the sort of writing I would have been least able to appreciate back in 2006, when I was indignantly launching zombies across the workshop table. Now though, post-MFA, I have a much greater understanding of space this kind of fiction occupies.
  7. Because They Wanted To by Mary Gaitskill – About halfway through reading this book I realized that I had unconsciously decided, without ever previously articulating it to myself, that I would read everything Mary Gaitskill has ever published. To borrow a phrase, her writing is like an exposed nerve. Her stories are twitching and lucid and sharply felt, unsanitized and unsentimental, full of analytical language and twisting images that knot around emotions I find achingly familiar but wouldn’t have known how to begin capturing with words. This collection is an unflinching look at how impossibly, fractally complex sex and relationships are, even in circumstances where we tell ourselves they are straightforward. I think my favorites from this volume were the four part novella “The Wrong Thing” and the short story “Blanket,” which seems to me almost like an opposite direction companion piece to “A Romantic Weekend,” my favorite story from her first collection.
  8. Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel – I was feelingly weirdly intimidated by long novels, as though, having decided I wanted to try to read 100 books this year, I feared I would only manage it by sticking to shorter works. That seemed like the kind of avoidant psychology which can spill from its container and paralyze you, so I decided the thing to do was commit to a giant brick of a novel. Wolf Hall turned out to be the perfect choice. It’s a historical novel focusing on Thomas Cromwell, a man who became a chief aide of King Henry VIII, but in my mind it’s Game of Thrones except all the people are real and instead of blood magic there’s clever banter. It’s easy to see why this won the Man Booker prize. I couldn’t put it down, and read it nearly straight through, stopping only to sleep, and that less than I should have. I was so absorbed, when I finished it I went immediately out and bought…
  9. Bring Up The Bodies by Hilary Mantel – The sequel to Wolf Hall, which also won the Man Booker award. This book picks up right where the previous one ends, and I continued my three day Mantel binge straight through to the end. Her writing is poised, layered, funny. I feel gluttonous reading these books, and moved to stay up until sunrise finishing them, which I discover my body doesn’t handle nearly as well at 31 as it used to. So thanks for making me feel old and busted, Hilary Mantel. Jerk.

The Next Twenty Books of 2014

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When I did my roundup of the first 20 books I read this year, I noticed that only three of them were written by women. I wanted to even up that ratio a bit, so made a point of bumping books by women to the top of the stack for this group.

  1. Technopriests: Supreme Collection by Alejandro Jodorowsky, Zoran Janjetov, and Fred Beltran. This was the last major branch of the Jodoverse that I hadn’t read. Jodorowsky remains one of my favorite writers, for his sheer bonkers extravagance, and having recently re-read the Jodoverse books added an extra layer of delight when I recently saw Jodorowsky’s Dune.
  2. Jagannath by Karin Tidbeck. For such a slim volume, I loved the tonal breadth of this collection. These were stories originally published in Swedish and translated by the author, and they are weird and wonderful. A brief, delightful read.
  3. Crash by J. G. Ballard. I found this difficult to finish. For about the first 80 pages I was engaged, but it became punishingly repetitive by the end. The fetishistic novelty wore off long before the book ended, and there was little else to recommend it. Many people whose opinions I respect are fans of Ballard, but I’m still trying to cultivate an appreciation for much of his work.
  4. Mechanique: A Tale of the Circus Tresaulti by Genevieve Valentine. I read this on an airplane and hardly noticed the time passing. It’s kaleidoscopic steampunk with gorgeous images on every page, fragmented into short chapters that build momentum like an avalanche. Genevieve’s second book is coming out tomorrow, and I can’t wait to read it.
  5. The Einstein Intersection by Samuel Delany. This book is… odd. Good, thought provoking. But very strange. It’s surprising to me–in a positive way, mind!–that it’s considered a classic of science fiction. I doubt though that I’m going to be revisiting this book as often as I will Nova.
  6. Saga, vol. 3 by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples. It’s been a long time since I’ve been as excited about an ongoing comic series as I am about Saga. Each new trade is an insta-buy.
  7. The Adventures of Alyx by Joanna Russ. I’m glad I read this, though on the whole I enjoyed it less than I thought I would. A couple of the pieces here I found compelling, but the majority was coldly intellectual with an efficiency of prose that I found tiring even as I thought it admirable. I liked We Who Are About To better, but will still be reading more Russ.
  8. The Girl in the Road by Monica Byrne. Monica is a Clarion classmate of mine and a dear friend, and so it is a delight to report that her first novel is an explosive debut. Ambitious and engrossing. I consumed it in two days and then spent the next week of my life thinking about it, wandering store aisles and taking unconscious inventory of the provisions I would need if I woke up in the future Monica created. It’s not so far away. We all might wake up there yet.
  9. We Have Always Lived in the Castle by Shirley Jackson. I’d been meaning to read Shirley Jackson’s novels for years, and decided to start here. Ho-lee shit. It’s as brilliant as everyone said it was.
  10. A Few Seconds of Radiant Filmstrip by Kevin Brockmeier. Kevin’s a teacher of mine and a friend, so it was a pleasurable but unusual experience to read his first foray into memoir. He has evoked the seventh grade so keenly that I felt my own bubble up as I read, which, as I later told him across a lunch table, put me in the weird position of feeling possessive of someone else’s childhood.
  11. Camp Concentration by Thomas Disch. I think, were it not for Flowers For Algernon exploring some of the same ground first and more accessibly, this would be considered a classic. I thought it an excellent book, though one for which I had to look up many words. I also felt unsure about the ending. It was convincingly rendered, but somehow didn’t fully satisfy. Still, I recommend the book. I think this is the most fully-imagined 1st person voice of increasing intelligence I’ve read.
  12. Unexpected Stories by Octavia Butler. I’d been waiting years to read these stories, and finally getting to do so was both thrilling and bittersweet. This was, so far as I know, my last unread Butler fiction. I wrote about it more here.
  13. Blame by Michelle Huneven. Though she was never one of my teachers, Michelle was on faculty at Iowa when I applied, and is I think one of the people responsible for me getting accepted there. This is the first of her books I’ve read, and I greatly enjoyed it. It’s a novel that sprawls decades and resists tidiness, catching something that feels very true in its tangles. On the strength of this book I’ll be picking up her new one soon.
  14. The Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. My first time reading Wyndham. He was clearly brilliant, and the book is good, but I’m not sure I approached it from the right frame of mind. As is sometimes the case with classic apocalyptica, Triffids belabors ideas that have, since it was published, become cliche. The combination of that and the antiquated, one-note masculinity of the main character kept me from enjoying the novel as much as I otherwise might have. There’s a lot to appreciate here, but I wish I’d gone in with a more historical literary curiosity.
  15. The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell. It’s a great book that I had problems with. I wrote about them at some length.
  16. Liar by Justine Larbalestier. After The Sparrow I was in the mood for some YA. This hit the spot. It’s like a young person’s introduction to the unreliable narrator. Great fun.
  17. The Alchemist by Paolo Bacigalupi. I got an ARC of this novella at the Tiptree auction a couple of years ago. When I read it, it was immediately obvious how I would want to use it pedagogically if I ever teach my Fantasy Writing class again.
  18. Osborn: Evil Incarcerated by Kelly-Sue DeConnick and Emma Rios. I enjoyed this, but suspect I would have liked it more had I been previously familiar with the characters. With the talent at Marvel these days, having been a DC kid is feeling more and more like having backed the wrong horse.
  19. The Freedom Maze by Delia Sherman. More YA, and more wonderful reading. This book is like Octavia Bulter’s Kindred, but for young readers.
  20. Self-Help by Lorrie Moore. I had read stories from this, but never the whole thing. As I recently wrote some fiction in the second person, I wanted to finally fix that. A deservingly famous collection.