I had a short period of time recently where I was reading a lot but writing about it very little. So to catch everyone up on my reading quickly and succinctly, here are four books in four minutes:
Maus by Art Speigleman
A graphic novel in two parts about Spiegleman’s relationship with his father and a telling of his father’s experiences surviving the Holocaust. Mice depict Jews, cats depict the Germans, the story is both funny and horrifying at the same time. A really great read, I highly suggest it for anyone new to graphic novels as a good place to start.
The Beats- A Graphic History by Harvey Pekar and Ed Piskor and many other people
A brief history of the Beat Generation including Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and other less immediately recognizable writers and artists from that movement. The art is really appealing but the content is rather rushed and tries to boil a whole movement and life histories down too much. It touches on many aspects (including the women involved in the movement, and often completely ignored group) which makes it a good read for an overview, but it also comes across like illustrated bullet points.
Ten Little Indians by Sherman Alexie
This collection of short stories follows modern-day Native Americans living in Seattle. The characters in these stories are all very different- one is an alcoholic homeless man who sees his grandmother’s headdress in a pawn shop and decides to try and rescue it, another is a very intelligent college girl obsessed with poetry trying to hunt down a Native American poet she found by accident in her school library, another an unhappy housewife who dreams of surviving a terrorist attack in order to be presumed dead and escape her humdrum life. Alexie weaves all these stories with a humor and eloquence that is difficult to find, and his characters are people I have never met before in reality or fiction, which makes for a refreshing read.
Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: I LOVE Tom Robbins. I also loved this book. A young waitress/artist tries to make it in the big city while her artistically challenged new husband stumbles into success and fame, a can of beans, a spoon, a stick, a dirty sock, and a conch shell travel across the United States in search of the waitress and Jerusalem while giving us a history lesson on Israel and Palestine’s religious struggles, and a crazy preacher believes he has heard a message from God. Of course there are about a million things more to this book, so just read it already.
Bent Shelf Book Reviews 