Back from the Dead, It's the Book List!

Hey, guess what? I can read! Youth wants to know why it is so hard to read the good books, and so easy to be tempted by the bad ones, or worse yet, TV. Must have something to do with a tired, lazy brain! In any case, Youth just managed to read not one, but two, really good books in a row:

Lord of Misrule--Jaimy Gordon
No dialogue punctuation, wacky semi-southern dialect, multiple narrators, and racetrack jargon. And yet, and yet, a great story with great characters.

Cloud Atlas--David Mitchell
What can I say? Took me over half the book to see where it was going, and it was completely worth it. Mysterious, a bit fantastical, a bit virtuosic, but he has something very serious to say. Couldn't put it down; still recovering from having my mind blown.

Biblioburros

Youth is totally entranced with the bookmobile concept, especially the four-legged kind. Bibliomulas, meet Biblioburros! Don't miss the gorgeous pix of Alfa and Beto and their awesome librarian.

June Book List (part 2)

I'm telling you, comic books are a great way to beef up the old book list numbers...

Exit Wounds--Rutu Modan
A Tel Aviv taxi cab driver looks for his lost father--did he die in a terrorist bombing? Ok story, ok drawing.

Shortcomings--Adrian Tomine
A Japanese American jerk sort of coming to terms with his jerkiness. Good drawings, good story (at least until the very end).

Aya--Marguerite Abouet & Clément Oubrerie
A few months in the life of a teenage girl in a working-class neighborhood of Abidjan. The slice-of-life story was only moderately compelling but that might have been because I was very sleepy when I read it.

June Book List

Some seriously good comics (oh, excuse me, graphic novels):

Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China--Guy Delisle
Great drawings, humorous memoir of a brief period spent living and working in Shenzhen, by a French Canadian comic book/animation artist.

We Are on Our Own: A Memoir--Miriam Katin
The story of a very young girl and her mother escaping Nazis in Hungary at the very end of WWII. Another great use of the comic form to tell a serious story.

Cancer Vixen: A True Story--Marisa Acocella Marchetto
Very funny account of a NY fashonista's fight against breast cancer--great drawings, great use of color.

April Book List

This month's selections are on the macabre side:

The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death--Corinne May Botz
The Nutshell Studies are handmade miniature crime-scene dioramas created in the mid-1900s by Frances Glessner Lee, eccentric daughter of the founder of International Harvester, to help police detective trainees learn the art of crime-scene detection. The dioramas are based on actual crimes, and the best part is that the solutions are included for only 4 of the crimes because they are still being used today.

Mütter Museum: Historic Medical Photographs--edited by Laura Lindgren; introduction by Gretchen Worden
A visit to the Mutter Museum was the highlight of a recent trip to Philadelphia, even if Youth left the building a bit green about the gills. This book is beautiful and very grim. Amputated feet, giant distended breasts, babies with two heads, enormous cysts, and captions that are informative and yet cryptic. A feast for the imagination.

March Book List

Well, I started with such high hopes, but here it is, March 29, and I've only read one and a half books. What can I say? It has been stressful and busy at work and that makes it hard for me to concentrate on anything when I get home.


Architecture without Architects: A Short Introduction to Non-Pedigreed Architecture--Bernard Rudofsky
Fantastic book. Published in the mid-60s to go with a MOMA show, this book is filled with pictures of vernacular architecture from around the world, and the introductory essay is pretty interesting too. Some of the pictures are from long before the 60s and I can only imagine how much many of these places have changed. A great book for a person who likes to sit and daydream (i.e. me).

Game Theory: A Very Short Introduction--Ken Binmore
I was inspired to pick this up by a student I work with who just won a NSF thingy to work on a physics project this summer that involves game theory. What is game theory? I thought this book would help me understand. It did, sort of, but either I am not the target audience, or the author didn't do a very good job of starting with the basics for those who really had no idea about the subject before picking up the book. (This is the half a book I read in March.)

Feb. Book List (part 3)

Freaky Deaky--Elmore Leonard
I guess when you write as many books as he does, they can't all be great.

The Great Gatsby--F. Scott Fitzgerald
Somehow I managed to be the only person in America who did not read this book in high school, so getting this one out of the library fell under the "filling in the gaps" category. I never felt any emotional attachment to the characters, so that when all the sad things happen, I felt nothing. Perhaps I wasn't supposed to, but that is not what I am looking for in a book. I want to care about what happens.

Here's hoping I my next choice will be more to my liking: Jude the Obscure.