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juushikaSo many long titles! Makes for messy review posting!
My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness was the first book I read at the Wilsonville library. I prefer to read most things in digital, but 1) graphic novels etc. are short enough to avoid most of the eye strain that makes digital preferable and 2) graphic novels etc. sometimes can't be read or aren't available digitally; so while access to a 10-min-walk-away library means unlocking things like semi-obscure novels that the Portland library doesn't have on ebook, it also means comics! kids' books! some of which I can even read in-house without checking out! As part of my goal this year is to read so many books that I wildly overinflate my statistics such that this year is an ignorable outlier and I can return to reading longer works without feeling like I'm being less """productive,"" there's no better time to read graphic novels etc.
Title: How Long 'Til Black Future Month?
Author: N.K. Jemisin
Narrator: Shayna Small, Gail Nelson-Holgate, Robin Ray Eller, Ron Butler
Published: Orbit and Hachette Audio, 2018
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 400
Total Page Count: 304,890
Text Number: 1022
Read Because: fan of the author, ebook and audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: 22 stories of speculative fiction—of alien cultures and sleeping magic and supernatural beasts who accompany floods. I love how critically Jemisin approaches power in her novels, and much of that is present there; what's sometimes missing is the intimate, thorny character dynamics. I miss those when they're absent; without them, the social criticism and/or themes feel bare and weighted to the end of the story. But the better balanced pieces, like "Red Dirt Witch," are strong, the diversity of the speculative concepts is commendable, and the stylistic variation is usually engaging without feeling gimmicky. This peaked too early for me, with "The Evaluators" (reminds me of Russell's The Sparrow) and "Walking Awake" (reminds me of Octavia Butler), but I'd call that an issue of personal taste—I'm a sucker for fridge and body horror as a premise for speculative worldbuilding—and there are only one or two duds.
(My holds for each format came it at the same time, so I alternated formats. I only regretted this in a few stories—"The You Train" in particular reads poorly on audio.)
Title: Becoming Unbecoming
Author: Una
Published: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016 (2015)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 215
Total Page Count: 305,105
Text Number: 1023
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A woman processes her own history of sexual assault through the concurrent Yorkshire Ripper investigation. This combination of elements is hugely successful, each piece finding context in the other to explore gendered violence as a personal experience that exists within a national and worldwide social structure. It's intimate, critical, and complex, and I wish the book restrained itself to this powerful premise. Instead the middle third falls apart, growing into broader, abstracted, more familiar arguments, and the meta aspects of the final third are similarly weak, losing the narrative thread. The art is a neutral midpoint—doodle-y with heavyhanded imagery and ineffective abstract/photographed panels, but the disambiguated, fluid intimacy of a graphic memoir works well with this content.
Title: My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness
Author: Kabi Nagata
Translator: Jocelyne Allen
Published: Seven Seas, 2017 (2016)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 145
Total Page Count: 305,250
Text Number: 1024
Read Because: personal enjoyment, paperback borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library
Review: After long struggles with mental illness and sexuality, a woman hires a female escort for her first sexual experience. This has a perfect oneshot/one-sitting length, and while the individual elements may be too slight or navel-gazey on their own, they work beautifully in concert. If anything, things are left unresolved, which I love—I appreciate the feeling that the narrative process is ongoing even at time of reading. Nagata has an incredible ability to talk frankly about profound social awkwardness; it rides a strong balance of intimate and relatable. It feels strange to call a book of this type "charming," but it really is, with emotive stylized art and self-aware humor.
My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness was the first book I read at the Wilsonville library. I prefer to read most things in digital, but 1) graphic novels etc. are short enough to avoid most of the eye strain that makes digital preferable and 2) graphic novels etc. sometimes can't be read or aren't available digitally; so while access to a 10-min-walk-away library means unlocking things like semi-obscure novels that the Portland library doesn't have on ebook, it also means comics! kids' books! some of which I can even read in-house without checking out! As part of my goal this year is to read so many books that I wildly overinflate my statistics such that this year is an ignorable outlier and I can return to reading longer works without feeling like I'm being less """productive,"" there's no better time to read graphic novels etc.
Title: How Long 'Til Black Future Month?
Author: N.K. Jemisin
Narrator: Shayna Small, Gail Nelson-Holgate, Robin Ray Eller, Ron Butler
Published: Orbit and Hachette Audio, 2018
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 400
Total Page Count: 304,890
Text Number: 1022
Read Because: fan of the author, ebook and audiobook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: 22 stories of speculative fiction—of alien cultures and sleeping magic and supernatural beasts who accompany floods. I love how critically Jemisin approaches power in her novels, and much of that is present there; what's sometimes missing is the intimate, thorny character dynamics. I miss those when they're absent; without them, the social criticism and/or themes feel bare and weighted to the end of the story. But the better balanced pieces, like "Red Dirt Witch," are strong, the diversity of the speculative concepts is commendable, and the stylistic variation is usually engaging without feeling gimmicky. This peaked too early for me, with "The Evaluators" (reminds me of Russell's The Sparrow) and "Walking Awake" (reminds me of Octavia Butler), but I'd call that an issue of personal taste—I'm a sucker for fridge and body horror as a premise for speculative worldbuilding—and there are only one or two duds.
(My holds for each format came it at the same time, so I alternated formats. I only regretted this in a few stories—"The You Train" in particular reads poorly on audio.)
Title: Becoming Unbecoming
Author: Una
Published: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2016 (2015)
Rating: 3 of 5
Page Count: 215
Total Page Count: 305,105
Text Number: 1023
Read Because: personal enjoyment, ebook borrowed from the Multnomah County Library
Review: A woman processes her own history of sexual assault through the concurrent Yorkshire Ripper investigation. This combination of elements is hugely successful, each piece finding context in the other to explore gendered violence as a personal experience that exists within a national and worldwide social structure. It's intimate, critical, and complex, and I wish the book restrained itself to this powerful premise. Instead the middle third falls apart, growing into broader, abstracted, more familiar arguments, and the meta aspects of the final third are similarly weak, losing the narrative thread. The art is a neutral midpoint—doodle-y with heavyhanded imagery and ineffective abstract/photographed panels, but the disambiguated, fluid intimacy of a graphic memoir works well with this content.
Title: My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness
Author: Kabi Nagata
Translator: Jocelyne Allen
Published: Seven Seas, 2017 (2016)
Rating: 4 of 5
Page Count: 145
Total Page Count: 305,250
Text Number: 1024
Read Because: personal enjoyment, paperback borrowed from the Wilsonville Public Library
Review: After long struggles with mental illness and sexuality, a woman hires a female escort for her first sexual experience. This has a perfect oneshot/one-sitting length, and while the individual elements may be too slight or navel-gazey on their own, they work beautifully in concert. If anything, things are left unresolved, which I love—I appreciate the feeling that the narrative process is ongoing even at time of reading. Nagata has an incredible ability to talk frankly about profound social awkwardness; it rides a strong balance of intimate and relatable. It feels strange to call a book of this type "charming," but it really is, with emotive stylized art and self-aware humor.
