Friday, June 2, 2017

What Are You Reading? May 2017 Edition

Comics and Graphic Novels
Superman, Volume 1: Son of Superman     Peter J. Tomasi, Patrick Gleason, Doug Mahnke, Jorge Jiminez, Mick Gray
Green Arrow, Volume 1: The Death and Life of Oliver Queen   Benjamin Percy, Otto Schmidt, Juan Ferreyra
Batman, Volume 1: I Am Gotham    Tom King, David Finch
Hostage (FCBD 2017) Guy Delisle, Brigitte Findakly, Lewis Trondheim
Extraordinary X-Men, Volume 1: X-Haven   Jeff Lemire, Humberto Ramos
Extraordinary X-Men, Volume 2: Apocalypse Wars Jeff Lemire, Humberto Ramos, Victor Ibañez
The Vision, Volume 1: Little Worse Than A Man  Tom King, Gabriel Hernandez Walta

The Divine    Asaf Hanuka, Tomer Hanuka, Boaz Lavie
Han Solo  Marjorie Liu, Mark Brooks
The Plain Janes  Cecil  Castellucci, Jim Rugg
The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl Beats Up the Marvel Universe   Ryan North, Erica Henderson
Civil War: Black Panther     Reginald Hudlin, Scot Eaton, Manuel García, Koi Turnbull
Habitat     Simon Roy
Legion of Dope-itude Featuring Lazy Boy (FCBD 2017)   Gene Luen Yang, Jorge Corona
The Night Bookmobile  Audrey Niffenegger
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court  Seymour Chwast
X-O Manowar Special (FCBD 2017) Matt Kindt, Jeff Lemire, Doug Braithwaite, Ryan Bodenheim, Mico Suayan
Tex Patagonia (FCBD 2017)   Mauro Boselli, Pasquale Frisenda
Time Shifters (FCBD 2017) Chris Grine
Boom Studios 2017 Summer Blast (FCBD 2017) David Petersen, Sam Sykes, Liz Prince, Selina Espiritu, Amanda Kirk, Kyla Vanderklugt
Atomic Robo and the Dogs of War   Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener, Scott Wegener
Atomic Robo and the Shadow from Beyond Time    Brian Clevinger, Scott Wegener
Mockingbird, Vol. 1: I Can Explain    Chelsea Cain, Kate Niemczyk
Superman: American Alien   Max Landis, Nick Dragotta, Tommy Lee Edwards, Joelle Jones, Jae Lee, Francis Manapul, Jonathan Case, Jock
August Moon   Diana Thung
The Adventures of Dr. McNinja: King Radical  Christopher Hastings
The Arab of the Future 2   Riad Sattouf
Here   Richard McGuire


Nonfiction
Between the World and Me Ta-Nehisi Coates
Nothing New Under the Sun: A Blunt Paraphrase of Ecclesiastes   Adam S. Miller
Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?   Mindy Kaling
Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis   J.D. Vance
The Book of My Lives  Aleksandar Hemon


Picture Book
Suzuki Beane   Sandra Scoppettone, Louise Fitzhugh


Short Stories
Wandering Realities: Mormonish Short Fiction  Steven L. Peck

Quick Takes
Free Comic Book Day 2017 was May 6th. This is the first time I've actually gone to a comics store on FCBD, and I ended up stopping by 2 shops and picking up a few comics (as well as buying a new board game). FCBD titles are single issues and a lot of them are samplers with multiple tiny stories or excerpts of a few pages each. I enjoyed the Legion of Dope-itude in spite of its obvious TV tie-in, and was also pleasantly surprised by the sample of Hostage (I am not a Delisle fan, but this was really good.)

As much fun as Free Comic Book Day was, the FCBD samples were definitely not the most important book I read this month. That honor goes to Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me, rightly heralded as a lyrical and moving examination of the challenge of being black in the United States of America. I've read multiple criticisms that claim it's too lyrical, and not clear enough, but the poetry of its prose spoke strongly to me. I've also read criticisms (from both the right and the left) that it is too pessimistic and fatalistic, that the picture it paints is bleak and that it focuses too much on what remains undone. But we need books that clearly show what remains undone, that map the architecture of structural oppression. And to me, this book was all about recognizing the flaws in the stories which we tell ourselves.

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis is in many ways the book that I think some readers of Coates wanted and expected. Where Coates unapologetically addresses himself to his son rather than to white Americans who are unconvinced of the impact of racism, J. D. Vance makes significant efforts to make an audience of American elites comfortable with the story he is telling: His audience is not Appalachians, but everyone else, and tells the story of his own childhood from an outsider's perspective, fully aware of how strange it will appear to those who inhabit the world he has escaped into, a world of law schools and high finance. And yet its ability to inhabit multiple perspectives is one of his books strengths as a call to empathy for all of America's citizens.

The Book of My Lives rounds out my insightful social-issues memoirs collection for the month. It recounts the experiences of refugee and author Aleksandr Hemon as a young man in Communist Yugoslavia, then as a witness to the resurgence of ethnic nationalisms and the genocidal violence of cowards, then as an expatriate and refugee in a foreign land, and finally as a successful author, husband, and father in his newly adopted home, Chicago. At a time when we are heavily debating the role of refugees and immigrants in the United States, I think it's worth it to look at the experience of refugees themselves, and Hemon's journeys are haunting and powerful.

Everyone is talking about The Vision, Volume 1: Little Worse Than A Man. It's an audacious, riveting story that's well outside normal for a superhero comic. It leans in heavily to the paradox of an android, programmed to be evil, who decides instead to be good, an android, programmed to be perfectly logical, who strives instead to be human. In the process, it tells a deeply meaningful story for everyone who has ever just wanted to fit in and be normal, and found that to be painful and impossible. Highly philosophical and tragic, and eminently readable, this is the first issue of a two-book arc. As soon as the second volume is in at my local library, I'll be reading it.

If The Vision is made great by leaning in to the Vision's contradictions, Superman: American Alien succeeds by largely collapsing Superman's. Most Superman stories draw a sharp line between Superman as Kryptonian hero and Clark Kent, the bumbling cover-story. Yet why should Kent be a cover-story? After all, Clark Kent is the boy who grew up in Kansas-- the boy with powers, and with the all-American upbringing at the heart of Superman's mythic narrative. Landis tells a Superman story that takes Clark Kent seriously, and makes the Man of Steel's heroics a natural outgrowth of his optimistic, can-do childhood. Here Clark Kent has friends of his own and skills of his own, even when he's not in the costume. And if some people don't recognize that, he's fine with it.

I was introduced to Suzuki Beane by Betsy Bird, children's library blogger extraordinaire and editor of the anthology Funny Girl. She mentioned it offhand in a blog post about funny female authors, and it is a hoot. Suzuki is an Eloise parody that also captures the tone of all the best Greenwich Village children's literature. You can read it digitally here.


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