They Called Us Enemy George Takei1/2020Serious and solemn, sparsely drawn in black-and-white, this is the true story of George Takai's rememberances of four years in Japanese-American internment camps when he was young. It is a story told with some jumping-around in time, bookended by a talk George gave about his time in the camps. This is an important historical work and educates without too much moralising. |
How To Absurd Scientific Advice for Common Real-World ProblemsRandall Munroe2/2020Totally silly in a very serious way. Randall is the author of the webcomic XKCD and this book is pretty much what it says: crazy to-the-limit hypothetical, but very science-based, answers to simple questions like "How to Dig a Hole" and "How to Throw Things." But also "How to Dig a Lava Moat" and "How to Power Your House (on Mars)." |
Hilo Book 6: All the Pieces FitJudd Winick2/2020I love when a great story arc ends in such a way that you cry from love. Friends are lost, sacrifices made, but the irrepressible joy of these characters is infectious. Outstanding! |
Ruins Peter Kuper3/2020Peter Kuper's works are always stunning in their storytelling and visuals. This is a large volume that follows the interactions of a not-meant-for-each-other couple on sabbatical in Oaxaca, Mexico, set against a teacher's strike in the town. In beautiful wordless pages, there's a parallel story of a single Monarch butterfly that travels from upper New York state all the way down to Oaxaca. I've been impressed with Peter's work ever since stumbling on his three-comic series "System." |
Grass Kings Volumes Two and ThreeMatt Kindt / Tyler Jenkins / Hilary Jenkins3/2020Volumes 2 and 3 of this trilogy (i read Volume One in 2018) deal with the residents uncovering a serial killer. The rough watercolors lend just the right feel to the story, which hits on the quirky personalities of the characters in the "Grass Kingdom," a semi-outlaw survivalist community out on the plains of America. |
The Fire Never Goes Out A Memoir in PicturesNoelle Stevenson3/2020This is a year-by-year look at Noelle Stevenson's budding career and life, from the end of college to 2019. She recaps each year in text but also with a lot of little very introspective cartoons. Her writing is so evocative of feeling that it makes me hate my own writing. Very cool. For those who don't know, Noelle is the author of the fantastic graphic novel Nimona and was the showrunner for the new version of She-Ra. |
Dragon Hoops From Small Steps to Great LeapsGene Luen Yang4/2020All of Gene Yang's graphic novels are great, and this one is engaging and well-crafted, but the number of times it drops into depicting the author and his part of the story i found to be a detriment to the storyline. But the book is about Gene's learning to appreciate sports, so it has to be there. I dunno, it was good, but not as awe-inspiring as some of his other works. |
Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Ian Fleming4/2020I thought that i'd read this as a child but upon reading it this time i realized that, 1) i hadn't, 2) it's not that great of a book, and 3) it has almost nothing in common with the movie except for the car. This book is, weirdly, three chapters and is about a family who goes on a trip to the beach in their newly-restored magic car and winds up flying and boating (in the car) to France and discovering a gang of bandits, who kidnap the kids but then they're saved in the end, sortof by the car. |
Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator Roald Dahl4/2020I read this book when i was a kid and vaguely remembered some parts of it. It's not as good as Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, but i guess it was still fun. Well, fun enough. I guess i wasn't that thrilled by the story this time around. |
Ultimate Glory Frisbee, Obsession and my Wild YouthDavid Gessner5/2020This book had been sitting in my "to read" pile for a year or two and i finally dug into it. It was an interesting mix of ultimate history—focused on the Boston/New York rivalries of the 80s and 90s—and David's personal life as he navigated his post-college aspirations to be a writer. I found it to be almost too personal at times, but an honest look at life and ultimate and how they intertwine. And it turns out that we've played against each other many times, as he played both with New York, New York once at the Boulder tournament when Albuquerque Anarchy played them, then he played with the Boulder Stains, who Anarchy played every year. I don't remember him and have no idea if i ever covered him, but it seems likely. I always find it weird to read about other people's attitude toward ultimate. It seems that the norm is for people to work really hard at training and party even harder. This was David Gessner's approach, which seems so foreign to me. I've always played this game because i love to play the game—i don't train, i don't party, i just like playing. And i still don’t understand the desire to “retire” from playing, as David has done. I'm an outlier, apparently. |
Superman Smashes the Klan Gene Luen Yang & Gurihiru6/2020I bought this because i like Gene Luen Yang's books, even though i'm not a fan of the traditional superhero comics, especially Superman. But the book has a retro charm and compelling storyline. It takes place in 1946, focusing on a Chinese family who've just moved to Metropolis. They are targeted by the "Clan of the Fiery Cross" and are saved by Superman, even while he is coming to terms with his own "alien-ness" and discovering some of his powers. It was pretty neat to read about Superman in his "early years" before he became such an icon. I'm not going to go out and buy any new Superman comics now, but this was a good read. |
The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes Suzanne Collins6/2020What a delicious return to The Hunger Games. Ms. Collins does a fantastic job of humanizing the young Coriolanus Snow (President Snow from the original trilogy) while filling in some back story of the early days of the Hunger Games. I was drawn into this book, rooting for the characters, even while knowing in the back of my mind that Snow would become who he became. The suspense was in wondering how it would play out. And oh, Lucy Gray! Sigh.... |
Ultimate: The First Five Decades Volume IIVarious authors7/2020This book was a bit of a slog. Lots of words about a lot of things going on in ultimate. Volume I (back when it was called The First Four Decades) held my interest becase it was about the foundation and building of the sport. This volume was all about teams and athletes that have shined in the era when it was all written about on Ultiworld, so much of it was covering things that i remember seeing or reading about already. I did get an oblique mention in the book though. A brief profile on Charlie Eisenhood, founder of Ultiworld, notes that he was introduced to ultimate "through his uncle." That's me. |
Have Dog, Will Travel A Poet’s JourneyStephen Kuusisto8/2020Another book about a dog that my father gave me. This one was interesting because it dealt with a guide-dog for the blind, but once again, most of the narrative was about the author learning to use and live with a guide dog, not really about the dog herself. The subtitle is a little misleading, as there's no poetry in the book, but apparently the author identifies himself as a poet. Overall it was fine, although it dragged in a few places. I did learn some things about guide-dog schools though. |
The Wild Robot The Wild Robot Escapes Peter Brown8/2020These books popped up somewhere via some algorithm and i thought that they'd be a great gift for my 11-year-old snowboarder pal Annabel since she loves robots. But i read them first. The writing is simple and aimed at a lower reading level, with lots of very short chapters, but the story, arcing over the two books, is charming and explores what it means to be human and have feelings. |
Essential Ultimate Teaching, Coaching, PlayingMichael Baccarini and Tiina Booth9/2020I'm friends with Tiina and have had this book sitting on my shelf for a long time. Finally read it, although, i have to admit, i skimmed through some parts. Unlike Ultimate: Techniques and Tactics, which focuses on skillsets once a player already knows the game, this book is all about teaching ultimate to kids who've never played before. But even for old hands like me, there's interesting tios throughout. It's most valuable, though, as an aid to coaches or wannabe coaches—lots of team-building and skills-building information. |
Neverwhere Neil Gaiman9/2020I'd heard so much about Neil Gaiman and had seen a movie that he wrote, but had never read anything by him. I decided to start with this one, as it looked fantasy-ish. It's about an uninteresting man who's pulled into "London Below," a place below London that operates slightly out of space and time with a society of people on the fringes. It turns out to be a long quest, and the descriptions and characters are good. The ending was a little as-expected, but the twists and turns to get there were riveting. On reflection, most of the characters don't change much, but it was still a good read. |
Down & Out in the Magic Kingdom Cory Doctorow9/2020The second author that i've followed for a bit but never read anything by is Cory Doctorow. He's got a three-book series out right now but i went back to his first novel. It lived in a sci-fi-ish future but the main character was pretty unlikeable and the supporting cast was pretty one-note. I can see where the idea of the plot was, but it was a bit of a grind to get to the end. The most annoying part, though, was that there were a fair number of buzz words in the book which were never defined—you just had to divine their meanings by the context. But for the amount of times that they were used, i still don't have a satisfactory definition of some of them. Overall, it didn't make me want to read any of his other books. Also, i'm tired of male protagonists. |
Rocket Men The Daring Odyssey of Apollo 8 and the Astronauts Who Made Man's First Journey to the MoonRobert Kurson10/2020Mr. Kurson tells a compelling story of the first men to leave earth and orbit the moon. It was fascinating to read about through the lens of these astronauts who were seeing both the earth and the moon from space for the first time. One forgets how commonplace images of both of these orbs are in our daily lives now, but in 1968, seeing an entire planet out one small window was extraordinary. |
When Stars are Scattered Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed10/2020This is a very powerful read. It's an eye-opening look at what life is really like in an African refugee camp. It's based on the true story of Omar and his disabled brother Hassan who fled Somalia as young kids and lived in a camp in Kenya until their late teens. What kept them going was the knowledge that education would get them ahead and the overhanging longing to be resettled to America. The drawings (it's a graphic novel) are simple but tell the story where words can't. The book really brings into sharp relief how priveleged those of us in developed countries really are. |
Slaughterhouse Five Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.10/2020Ugh. What a slog. I do not understand the desire for authors to write main characters who are completely unlikeable. Billy Pilgrim has no passions about anything and is bland and uninteresting. Plus, the first and last chapters of the book are irrelevant ramblings about the "author" and how or why or... ???? he's writing the book. Not funny, no plot, pointless. I'd never read any Vonnegut and perhaps i shouldn't have started with this one, but i found it at our summer house and felt i should dig back into classic books that i'd never read. Poor choice. Bleah. |
The Penderwicks A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting BoyJeanne Birdsall11/2020Another book that i picked up at our summer house. I thought it was one of those old classic books from the 60s or 70s but it turns out that it was published in the mid 2000s. Also it's the first book of five. It was a decent read and reminded me a lot of my book, The Clues to Kusachuma—family on vacation, meeting new people, focus on the kids not the parents. The children are smart and determined and mostly believable, but the gooey-eyed lovesickness of the 12-year-old daughter for the 19-year-old gardener felt unneccessary to the plot. Maybe young girls like that? I dunno. |
Redshirts John Scalzi11/2020The third book by an author that i follow but have never read anything by. John Scalzi has tons of books and a lot of them are series, so i wanted to find one that was a standalone. This one looked interesting and it was a cool premise—that the crewmembers in red shirts in Star Trek are always the ones that get killed. It was a funnish read, but got a little hokey in the solution to the problem of redshirt deaths, then had three codas filling in the post-narrative life of three characters related to the story. My biggest problem with the story is that the main characters were really hard to distinguish—i kept forgetting which one was which and who the woman was (they're all referred to in the text by their last names). It made me think about how characters are introduced in stories and how one needs to give each one a chance to settle in before introducing more. So, overall, it was an okay book. |
7 Good Reasons Not to Grow Up Jimmy Gownley11/2020I love all of Jimmy Gownley's graphic novels (his Amelia Rules! series is fantastic) and this one certainly had the depth of story and visual beauty that is typical of all of his work, but there were a number of places in the narrative where there were odd jumps of scene. I would have liked to have seen this polished out a little more, with some added pages to concretely move the plot along. It was still very good, just a bit jarring in places. |
