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Highly Recommended.
I wish I could give Big Questions by Anders Nilsen so many more stars than five or ten or one million. It is an incredible read.
The main characters are mostly birds who talking to one another, goof off, and figure stuff out. It’s equal parts surreal/philosophical and birds-being-weird funny stuff. They all have names, so it’s not as hard as I thought it would be to tell the different finches apart.
Since the book is a compilation of the whole Big Questions series, it’s episodic but it has a cohesiveness that I feel many serialized comics lack. It’s funny though because each episode is made up of a bunch of weird vignettes, making the individual episodes perhaps a little scattered but keeps the entire work together.
The art is truly incredible. Nilsen goes from really simple to staggeringly detailed throughout. The line quality is so sensitive which results in incredibly nuanced drawings regardless of simplicity or complexity. Compositionally, he explores the comic form more often and more interestingly than most other graphic novels and graphic non-fiction I’ve read. There are boxed panels and unboxed panels, small framed close-ups inside larger scenes, characters progressing through a single wide view, etc.. In the afterward, he mentions how he was figuring it out as he went along — very much to the benefit of the reader.
There is so much ambiguity, but it’s really beautiful, productive, satisfying ambiguity.
I read another of his works, Monologues for the Coming Plague, and it definitely wasn’t as interesting or engaging as Big Questions. BUT Nilsen also has a blog, the Monologuist, where he posts a lot of images from his sketchbooks and that is top shelf. He also has an official website too.
This is a memoir about breast cancer, drawn in simple cartoons by self-taught cartoonist Miriam Engelberg. She was diagnosed with breast cancer when she was 43 and, sadly, died at the age of 48.
The good: I LOVED that she wore a blue wig, and that was the wig that was most “her” despite being nothing like how she looked before she had cancer. I loved her observations about support groups and people’s varied and ridiculous reactions to her diagnosis. I love that she watched a lot of TV, did a lot of crosswords, and read a lot of tabloids. She seemed like a really rad lady.
The not so good: I really wanted to like this more, but so much about it fell flat. I really really support people drawing comics just because, even if you aren’t super good at it. But I also feel like the more you draw the better you get at it, even if it’s just a teeny tiny bit! You don’t even have to try! You draw a lot, you get better at what you’re doing, even if what you’re doing is speech bubbles or repeated patterns or aliens or oncologists. I love atypical drawing/cartooning styles (like Lauren Redniss, Esther Pearl Watson, and sometimes even Maira Kalman falls into that category); drawings that aren’t your typical comic style, nor are they necessarily realistic or strictly representational. I think it’s weird that Engelberg read a lot of comics (she referenced my favorite person, Lynda Barry!) and drew so often, and this is her final product.
There were parts that I liked because she is relatable, but when she tried for jokes it was a lot like watching a multicam sitcom with a laugh track (really asking for the laugh), except it’s a book and there’s no laugh track! I loved when she approached the subject with humor not with comedy. Those observations were poignant and interesting, not gunning for a laugh.
I was just generally disappointed with this book. I wanted to like it so much more, but it just didn’t quite do it for me.
Highly Recommended.
I started reading Decoded because I heard the re-broadcast of Jay-Z’s Fresh Air interview from last year. I also kept seeing Austin Kleon keep mentioning how good it is and I just had to read it.
There are so many reasons why this is better than a conventional memoir. This book is really good. Like overwhelmingly good. Jay-Z’s prose feels like a really intelligent, easy, affecting conversation. That is most incredible about the book is his respect. He writes with such tremendous respect for the readers, his influences, his friends, his generation, and culture and that makes it really easy and captivating. I love his music but there’s no way I could ever grasp all the layers of meaning. To that end, the footnotes are great. They’re appropriately explanatory without sounding patronizing or condescending — the pervasive tone of the book.
Throughout the book he talks about his influences. That, for me, is really wonderful. Hearing people talk about things they love is such a great pleasure. One of my favorite parts of his Fresh Air interview is when they discuss his sampling of a song from Annie. It’s funny to hear a rapper and big-time mogul talk about a broadway musical, especially the only one to which I feel connected (on account of the redhead thing). The book is filled with references to artists and works I have never heard of and ones I have, always speaking from a place of respect.
My love of this book does not end. Not only is the prose stellar and illuminating but is also perfectly visual. In the hands of someone else (I am referring to Jay-Z as the art director, and the team of artists and designers who worked on it) this could have turned out like a collage, but here it’s done with near-perfect execution and great style. In fact I would place it more in league with artists’ books because of how effectively the medium of the book is used. Often in memoirs pictures serve a purely expository purpose. In Decoded, the images, which are certainly not limited to photographs, are integral and are part of the structure and purpose of the book. It is meant to be a different kind of experience. There are the written and visual components but since it’s about music, about rhymes and lyrics, the prose is aural as well. It is so different and so stunning compared to a conventional memoir, and an astonishing success.
I think it’s really perfect that I read this as/after I read The Pun Also Rises by John Pollack. There is so much really elegant wordplay, but the nonlinear structure reflects a lot of the connections made when developing those linguistic connections. Before I started, I had read and heard reviews talking about how the book is part memoir and part explanation of his lyrics. From that I was picturing a linear memoir and lyrical explanation. The book jumps around between time periods and there is no timeline. He’ll talk about his childhood and then a story from when he was CEO of Def Jam — it’s not about the sequence of events, it’s about similarities in what actually happened and how that shaped his life and music. That constant movement, between times, between meanings of words, between ideas, is what keeps his music and this book interesting.
One last thought that was so very perfect for me, an obsessive pop culture lover. There is a section where he talks about the 2008 Glastonbury Music Festival controversy, addressing it in a wonderful, modern, pup-culture-loving way. He says, “But kids today have a mix of songs from all over the place on their iPods, and they take pride in it. There is no rock music with walls around it. It’s one of the great shifts that’s happened over my lifetime, popular culture has managed to shake free of the constraints that still limit us in so many other parts of life. It’s an open field.”
Panel from "Fun Home". Image from salon.com
I have been reading a lot lately. This might not be unusual for most people, but it’s quite rare for me. In addition to my Novel challenge (ha), I read Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A family tragicomic. I am most familiar with the Bechdel move test, where in order to pass the movie has to have 1. two named female charcters, 2. who talk to one another, and 3. about something other than men. I am also acquainted with her series Dykes to watch out for. We have a ton of the books in the GSC library.
After I finished it, I talked a little bit with Scott (known for his love of all things comic). He said that he liked it, but thought it didn’t quite succeed as a graphic novel. That you could have taken out all the pictures and it would have been just as successful. I can’t say I disagree, though I think the subject matter is far more compelling than any other graphic novels I have read. I found the book so affecting. I love reading about how she finally put a name to her sexuality in her college library, and the insatiable desire to read all things queer after that. She reads Collette, Rubyfruit Jungle, The Well of Loneliness, all books I read in the past four years, and all books in the GSC library that I worked so hard to wrangle and organize. I think I’ll donate my copy to the library, because we don’t as yet have one but I definitely think we should.
Father-daughter relationships are always interesting to me. Bechdel’s experience with her father was so unlike my own, but there were aspects of that relationship that I identified with. It is odd to think of our parents as people unto themselves, and she seems to have had some extreme revelations about who her father really was. It is heartbreaking both that she only started to know who her father was so close to his death and that he had lived so much of his life in secret.
Late last week my computer punked out and the hard drive failed, leading me to the student computing center. There I picked up the
most beautiful copy of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View. The book is number 27 in the Borzoi Pocket Books series, published by Alfred A. Knopf in the twenties. The book, originally published in 1908, is about Lucy Honeychurch being way to awesome for stifling Edwardian England. The first part of the book takes place while she is on vacation with her cousin and chaperon in Florence, and the second when she returns home to her family and friends.
I was really surprised by how much I liked it. Forster’s style is definitely harder to follow than I expected. Despite being tricky, the story and characters were so captivating. In addition to Forster’s involved writing style, there are also a lot of contextual social things that eluded me. Forster will describe some small social gesture and I have no idea whether someone just got snubbed or flattered. I also had to constantly look up words I didn’t know. For example “pension” refers not only to money you get after you retire from years of thankless government service but also to boarding houses in Europe. I mean, I caught on really quick seeing as how you can’t really stay in a sum of money, but that is just one of many zany, outdated words Forster throws in the mix.
While there were a lot of little things I didn’t pick up on, but I did glean from the book was how much of a colossal ass Cecil Vyse is. Forster certainly made that clear as day. He was so cruel to Lucy’s friends, super bossy, and not terribly interesting. I was so happy when she finally gave him what for. All he could do was accept, because he hadn’t realized until then how awful he was and how wonderful Lucy is. Duh, Cecil. Girls rule, boys drool.
E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View: 4 stars.
Next up: Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop.
