![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
spindizzy posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
ladybusinessMy local comic store does this comic book of the month thing, where they offer money off whatever they think the best new graphic novel is. I buy them as a way to try out new genres and creators that I might otherwise skip! ... And then I read the ones that are obviously relevant to my interests as soon as I get them, and everything else gets put on a bookcase and immediately forgotten. But my decluttering adventures mean that they've sifted back to the top of my TBR pile, so here's a few that I've tried recently.
1. Grimoire Noir by Vera Greentea and Yana Bogatch [Top]
Grimoire Noir is a fantasy pastiche of noir tropes: Bucky Orson investigates his sister's disappearance in a town where all of the girls are witches who can't leave. The noir tropes and plot beats are familiar and comfortable, with just enough of a twist from the setting and age of the characters to keep it interesting.
The art is absolutely gorgeous; I love the style itself, and it's mostly black-and-white tones with occasional splashes of colour for emphasis. The characters can be a little one-note; anyone outside of maybe the main two characters and their antagonists seem fairly flat, but those two main characters are great and have enough depth and relationship drama that I was invested! The horror aspects are suitably creepy when they're subtle and horrifying when they become overt! It's pretty cool, mostly fast-paced and enjoyable, except.
The thing that I find weird about Grimoire Noir is that it doesn't go into the gender stuff as much as a story with "x gender gets y" in its world-building should do. (Q: Are there any books with gendered magic that DO remember trans and non-binary people exist? A: Yes, but the only one I remember right now is Iron & Velvet by Alexis Hall.) In Grimoire Noir, every girl born in the town has some form of magic power (and are magically bound to never leave), and none of the boys do (but are free to leave whenever they want). Understandable cause of conflict, sure. There is acknowledgement that there are girls who'd trade their magic for being able to go to university, and boys who'd take that deal. There's even a character who tries to give a boy magic powers, which Bucky has such conflicted feelings about. But there is no acknowledgement that trans people exist. It's weird and frustrating and the longer the book went on, the more glaring that absence felt. Especially once it's explained how the girls of the town got their magic. (Protip: there's at least one canonical child murder in the backstory of Grimoire Noir.) I freely admit that this is probably just me being me about it, but I can't think why you'd bother with an explicitly gendered piece of world building if you weren't going to make it trans-inclusive.
... And that's without even getting into the imagery of a teenager locked in a room in a straightjacket for as far as I can tell purely the visual effect on the reader. What the hell is up with that.
So what I'm saying is that I have reservations about recommending Grimoire Noir. I liked the art, but the bits that annoyed me really annoyed me.
[Caution warning: witch hunts, historical death of a child, missing child, neglectful parents, child imprisonment]
2. The Great North Wood by Tim Bird [Top]
The Great North Wood is a fabulist history of – surprising, I know – the Great North Wood, an area of woodland that once covered a huge part of what is now South London. It feels weird and dreamy as it slides forwards and backwards in time, showing what the wood used to be like, and what it's like now. This dichotomy works especially when it's contrasting a dense forest with the single tree that's survived the encroaching city, or the sites of huge, dramatic events with how convenient the tube access is!
That said, I wasn't a massive fan of the art. The panelling and layout was interesting; I liked that they were used to highlight the comparisons through time, or break up one large picture into smaller ones so that it was easier to pick out details. The way that The Great North Wood uses the fox not necessarily as a character but as a focus point in the changing landscape worked to keep the story moving, and we all know that I'm here for limited colour pallets. But the art felt weirdly wobbly, which works fine for trees and less so for the humans and creatures that live with them. But the scenes where the book looks out towards a London reclaimed by the wilderness are very cool, even if they do tap into some of my existential dread.
This isn't necessarily something that I would pick up for myself; I like the ideas, but the art would be enough to put me off owning it. But I would definitely give to people who like slightly surreal narratives about place, because it's a great example of it.
[Caution warning: g**sy slur, but it's also a place name, so, thanks England.]
3. Something City by Ellice Weaver [Top]
Something City is a collection of short stories taking place in the same town, but the stories feel like a catalogue of miseries and unkindness, and I'm not here for it. I appreciate the ways that the stories interconnect and different sides of characters are shown in each story, but for the most part the stories felt either pointless or like they were about horrible people. It didn't help that the art style was too simplistic even for me. The page layouts were hard to follow, and there were really basic errors, like a character whose leg has been amputated having a different leg missing on different pages. I'd say give it a miss.
[Caution warnings: off-screen animal attack, online abuse, euthanasia, germophobia]
4. Livestock by Hannah Berry [Top]
Livestock is one of those books where I could see what it's doing, I just didn't care. It's set in a twenty-minutes-into-the-future Britain where politics is entirely about media manipulation to keep attention off the erosion of human rights and research into human cloning, to the point where celebrities have long-running storylines designed to bubble up at the perfect time to distract from whatever evil the government is doing now.
You see why I might not have been in the mood.
Like, yes yes it's very clever seeing the ways that the storylines are set up and adjusted for maximum drama, and the way that the Definitely Not Clones absorb information meaning that they absorb the messages of tv shows as much as anything they're supposed to learn is well done and shown in their reactions being slightly off. It's just that I don't see the point in doing a story about how openly manipulative and greedy the media and politicians are and not having anything change by the end? Like, good work, I did catch the reference to V for Vendetta there, bravo, but why in this timeline would we need a story about "And then we gathered together to try to change things, but were immediately distracted by manufactured drama"? Because if I wanted that, I could go on twitter and read through a thousand threads of "This is a distraction from the Real Issue!"
Maybe I would have given it a pass if I didn't think the art was quite ugly, but as it is... Nah mate, not for me.
[Caution warning: fake pregnancy and miscarriage, politics, fat-shaming]
5. Rosalie Lightning by Tom Hart [Top]
I'm going to be honest with you: I have no idea how to review Rosalie Lightning. How do you talk about imagery and narrative in the memoir of how a couple grieves the death of their toddler daughter? Like, I guess "I don't know how to review this because it's such an intimate and personal portrait of grief and the way that life continues on despite it that I feel uncomfortable trying to pick it apart or discussing the parents' responses" is a review on its own, but I genuinely don't know what I can tell you about it. It's very effective at bringing Rosalie to life, showing the hole in her parents' world after she died, and the way disasters seem to cluster! But I don't think I could recommend this to anyone! I can't imagine turning to anyone and going "Hi, do you want to read a profoundly uncomfortable memoir about the death of a toddler who loves Studio Ghibli and how much it destroys her parents?" okay, much as I can't imagine liking this book.
[Caution warning: Death of a child, discussions of death of adults and children, grief]
6. The Fade Out: Act One by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Elizabeth Breitweiser [Top]
I can't tell if The Fade Out is trying to subvert the "starlet dies in Hollywood sleaze" tropes or play them straight. A script writer with PTSD and writers' block – who specifically threw his ghost-writer under the McCarthyism bus – wakes up after a drunken party to find an actress dead next to him. He removes any evidence of his presence, only to find that the murder itself gets covered up, which means that someone else knows and he doesn't know who.
I'll be honest: it made me want to read Angel City again. The art here is fine, and the level of sleaze feels plausibly noir, but after the first chapter I was bored of white men having feelings about dead women. I appreciate that it's probably intended as commentary on how the film industry protects white men from consequences, but that didn't make it any less frustrating to read. It does introduce a female protagonist eventually (who a lot of men have feelings about!), but by that point I was already bored and not in the mood for more stories about gross men trying to take advantage.
Maybe it gets better later, but for me, it wasn't worth the effort.
[Caution warning: murder, abuse, PTSD, racism]
7. Why Art? by Eleanor Davis [Top]
I didn't really like Why Art? Parts of it are funny (talking about colour over black and white art is in fact about my level of humour), but it's very surreal in a way that rubbed me up the wrong way. I think part of it is that about halfway through, it starts to have a cast of characters and a plot, but by that point I was emotionally checked out. It felt tonally inconsistent in a way that meant that the wham line at the end didn't really land for me, and part of it is that I didn't like the art style. If you want a surreal comic about art, it might be your thing! It was not for me.
[Caution warning: stalking, "natural" disaster]
8. The Realist by Asaf Hanuka [Top]
The Realist is a collection of the autobiographical comics of an Israeli cartoonist documenting his flaws and struggles, interspersed with political commentary on things like child labour. The art is good, albeit sometimes surreal or metaphorical in that "Man draws comic judging social media users and posts it on social media" way. There's no original publication dates or extra information in the edition I read, despite the strips themselves being first published by a newspaper, so there's huge swathes of context missing for the political comics. And that's about as fair and balanced as I think I can be, because one of my best friends is Palestinian, so I'm not an unbiased reviewer here, and my response to the political commentary is always going to be #FreePalestine.
9. Supercrash by Darryl Cunningham [Top]
Supercrash is the first review that I have scheduled for next year, which is weird and exciting. It's graphic non-fiction ostensibly explaining the financial crash of 2008, although it turns out that there's two other sections about Ayn Rand and the ~psychology~ of Right and Left Wing voters. It was interesting and informative, but felt a lot like three books stapled together. The art for the crash section doesn't quite manage to illustrate it except in the most literal terms, and I definitely side-eye the pseudoscience in the last section. But the parts of it talking about the political fallout of the crash? Felt simultaneously horrible, and like looking at a different timeline, because Supercrash was published in 2014. It's wild.
10. The Motherless Oven by Rob Davis [Top]
You know that thing where a story just throws you in at the deep end with its strangeness and leaves you to sink or swim? The Motherless Oven is pretty much that the whole way through. Like, "the blurb contains a clearer summary of the world building than the narrative does" levels of in at the deep end. And it's a strange world! It can rain knives, children build their parents out of parts, and household gods live in egg timers and clocks and radios. Oh, and everyone's assigned a death day, where they are definitely going to die. And I don't mind that, particularly? I can let weird world building wash over me as long as I care about the characters (see also: Ninefox Gambit is great), the problem is that I don't care about the protagonist of The Motherless Oven. Scarper Lee is three weeks away from death, and I didn't care. The secondary characters are more interesting! I would love to know what is up with Vera! I'm side-eyeing how the neuroatypical POC who actually understands the plot is treated by both the narrative and the characters! I could live without having to go back into Scarper Lee's head again.
11. Cats of the Louvre by Taiyo Matsumoto, translated by Michael Arias [Top]
The Cats of the Louvre is a weird story that does, yes, involve cats living in the attic of the Louvre, but also involves a member of the night staff who's still looking for the sister that disappeared into the paintings fifty years ago, and the tour guide who believes they can find her. ... So yeah it's a bit weird and a bit fabulist, and very full of cats.
First off: I found all of the non-human characters to be really creepy when they're shown from their own perspective. The cats are cat-sized humans with cat ears, the spider is a spider with a human head (N O P E), there's a scene where there are flowers with cherub heads... Usually I'm okay with uncanny valley stuff, but I found the art for those scenes unnerving. Especially the hairless cat, because his human form is drawn with so much less detail than the others and it makes him stand out in a different way. As a specific warning, by the way: if you are an animal lover, there's a fair amount of cats in pain, attacking other animals, or dying, so brace yourself for that as it's more graphic than I was expecting. Those scenes switch between the human forms and the actual cat forms, and the cats are pretty well drawn, which can honestly make it worse.
Second though: I was way more invested in the human characters than any of the cats. The empathy Cécile shows and the way the three main humans caring for the cats are sweet, and I enjoyed those parts! The story of the missing sister sounded like something from Mushishi in its melancholy tone, and I liked that! I just didn't really care about the reveal, because the chapters with the sister are surreal. The flowers have faces, the sky has a giant eye that cries sometimes, the disconcerting spider with an Elton John head comes back... It's Weird, and I'm pretty sure parts of it were going over my head.
But the sections about the art, and the fact that the characters take different things out of being in the Louvre (one knowing a lot about art but hating the crowds, another not knowing anything about art but loving to see all of the different people and cultures coming through) were my favourites. The hardcopy has some full-colour replications of the art, and drawings of individual pieces in the Louvre as chapter breaks, and I definitely enjoyed those!
The Cats of the Louvre wasn't for me, and I honestly wouldn't be able to tell you who it was for. I think I'd like to read the opinions of people who do know art though, because they probably pick up on a lot of things that flew past me.
[Caution warning: references to animal abuse and harm; dead and dying cats; missing children.]
Reading goal: 131/200 (11 new this post) Prose: 39/100 (0 new this post)
Nonfiction: 9/12 (3 new this post; The Realist, Supercrash, and I think The Great North Wood counts?)
#ReadMyOwnDamnBooks: 48/100 (9 read this post)
#unofficialqueerafbookclub: 56/75 (0 new this post)
- Grimoire Noir by Vera Greentea and Yana Bogatch [Jump]
- The Great North Wood by Tim Bird [Jump]
- Something City by Ellice Weaver [Jump]
- Livestock by Hannah Berry [Jump]
- Rosalie Lightning by Tom Hart [Jump]
- The Fade Out: Act One by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Elizabeth Breitweiser [Jump]
- Why Art? by Eleanor Davis [Jump]
- The Realist by Asaf Hanuka [Jump]
- Supercrash by Darryl Cunningham [Jump]
- The Motherless Oven by Rob Davis [Jump]
- Cats of the Louvre by Taiyo Matsumoto, translated by Michael Arias [Jump]
1. Grimoire Noir by Vera Greentea and Yana Bogatch [Top]
Grimoire Noir is a fantasy pastiche of noir tropes: Bucky Orson investigates his sister's disappearance in a town where all of the girls are witches who can't leave. The noir tropes and plot beats are familiar and comfortable, with just enough of a twist from the setting and age of the characters to keep it interesting.
The art is absolutely gorgeous; I love the style itself, and it's mostly black-and-white tones with occasional splashes of colour for emphasis. The characters can be a little one-note; anyone outside of maybe the main two characters and their antagonists seem fairly flat, but those two main characters are great and have enough depth and relationship drama that I was invested! The horror aspects are suitably creepy when they're subtle and horrifying when they become overt! It's pretty cool, mostly fast-paced and enjoyable, except.
The thing that I find weird about Grimoire Noir is that it doesn't go into the gender stuff as much as a story with "x gender gets y" in its world-building should do. (Q: Are there any books with gendered magic that DO remember trans and non-binary people exist? A: Yes, but the only one I remember right now is Iron & Velvet by Alexis Hall.) In Grimoire Noir, every girl born in the town has some form of magic power (and are magically bound to never leave), and none of the boys do (but are free to leave whenever they want). Understandable cause of conflict, sure. There is acknowledgement that there are girls who'd trade their magic for being able to go to university, and boys who'd take that deal. There's even a character who tries to give a boy magic powers, which Bucky has such conflicted feelings about. But there is no acknowledgement that trans people exist. It's weird and frustrating and the longer the book went on, the more glaring that absence felt. Especially once it's explained how the girls of the town got their magic. (Protip: there's at least one canonical child murder in the backstory of Grimoire Noir.) I freely admit that this is probably just me being me about it, but I can't think why you'd bother with an explicitly gendered piece of world building if you weren't going to make it trans-inclusive.
... And that's without even getting into the imagery of a teenager locked in a room in a straightjacket for as far as I can tell purely the visual effect on the reader. What the hell is up with that.
So what I'm saying is that I have reservations about recommending Grimoire Noir. I liked the art, but the bits that annoyed me really annoyed me.
[Caution warning: witch hunts, historical death of a child, missing child, neglectful parents, child imprisonment]
2. The Great North Wood by Tim Bird [Top]
The Great North Wood is a fabulist history of – surprising, I know – the Great North Wood, an area of woodland that once covered a huge part of what is now South London. It feels weird and dreamy as it slides forwards and backwards in time, showing what the wood used to be like, and what it's like now. This dichotomy works especially when it's contrasting a dense forest with the single tree that's survived the encroaching city, or the sites of huge, dramatic events with how convenient the tube access is!
That said, I wasn't a massive fan of the art. The panelling and layout was interesting; I liked that they were used to highlight the comparisons through time, or break up one large picture into smaller ones so that it was easier to pick out details. The way that The Great North Wood uses the fox not necessarily as a character but as a focus point in the changing landscape worked to keep the story moving, and we all know that I'm here for limited colour pallets. But the art felt weirdly wobbly, which works fine for trees and less so for the humans and creatures that live with them. But the scenes where the book looks out towards a London reclaimed by the wilderness are very cool, even if they do tap into some of my existential dread.
This isn't necessarily something that I would pick up for myself; I like the ideas, but the art would be enough to put me off owning it. But I would definitely give to people who like slightly surreal narratives about place, because it's a great example of it.
[Caution warning: g**sy slur, but it's also a place name, so, thanks England.]
3. Something City by Ellice Weaver [Top]
Something City is a collection of short stories taking place in the same town, but the stories feel like a catalogue of miseries and unkindness, and I'm not here for it. I appreciate the ways that the stories interconnect and different sides of characters are shown in each story, but for the most part the stories felt either pointless or like they were about horrible people. It didn't help that the art style was too simplistic even for me. The page layouts were hard to follow, and there were really basic errors, like a character whose leg has been amputated having a different leg missing on different pages. I'd say give it a miss.
[Caution warnings: off-screen animal attack, online abuse, euthanasia, germophobia]
4. Livestock by Hannah Berry [Top]
Livestock is one of those books where I could see what it's doing, I just didn't care. It's set in a twenty-minutes-into-the-future Britain where politics is entirely about media manipulation to keep attention off the erosion of human rights and research into human cloning, to the point where celebrities have long-running storylines designed to bubble up at the perfect time to distract from whatever evil the government is doing now.
You see why I might not have been in the mood.
Like, yes yes it's very clever seeing the ways that the storylines are set up and adjusted for maximum drama, and the way that the Definitely Not Clones absorb information meaning that they absorb the messages of tv shows as much as anything they're supposed to learn is well done and shown in their reactions being slightly off. It's just that I don't see the point in doing a story about how openly manipulative and greedy the media and politicians are and not having anything change by the end? Like, good work, I did catch the reference to V for Vendetta there, bravo, but why in this timeline would we need a story about "And then we gathered together to try to change things, but were immediately distracted by manufactured drama"? Because if I wanted that, I could go on twitter and read through a thousand threads of "This is a distraction from the Real Issue!"
Maybe I would have given it a pass if I didn't think the art was quite ugly, but as it is... Nah mate, not for me.
[Caution warning: fake pregnancy and miscarriage, politics, fat-shaming]
5. Rosalie Lightning by Tom Hart [Top]
I'm going to be honest with you: I have no idea how to review Rosalie Lightning. How do you talk about imagery and narrative in the memoir of how a couple grieves the death of their toddler daughter? Like, I guess "I don't know how to review this because it's such an intimate and personal portrait of grief and the way that life continues on despite it that I feel uncomfortable trying to pick it apart or discussing the parents' responses" is a review on its own, but I genuinely don't know what I can tell you about it. It's very effective at bringing Rosalie to life, showing the hole in her parents' world after she died, and the way disasters seem to cluster! But I don't think I could recommend this to anyone! I can't imagine turning to anyone and going "Hi, do you want to read a profoundly uncomfortable memoir about the death of a toddler who loves Studio Ghibli and how much it destroys her parents?" okay, much as I can't imagine liking this book.
[Caution warning: Death of a child, discussions of death of adults and children, grief]
6. The Fade Out: Act One by Ed Brubaker, Sean Phillips, and Elizabeth Breitweiser [Top]
I can't tell if The Fade Out is trying to subvert the "starlet dies in Hollywood sleaze" tropes or play them straight. A script writer with PTSD and writers' block – who specifically threw his ghost-writer under the McCarthyism bus – wakes up after a drunken party to find an actress dead next to him. He removes any evidence of his presence, only to find that the murder itself gets covered up, which means that someone else knows and he doesn't know who.
I'll be honest: it made me want to read Angel City again. The art here is fine, and the level of sleaze feels plausibly noir, but after the first chapter I was bored of white men having feelings about dead women. I appreciate that it's probably intended as commentary on how the film industry protects white men from consequences, but that didn't make it any less frustrating to read. It does introduce a female protagonist eventually (who a lot of men have feelings about!), but by that point I was already bored and not in the mood for more stories about gross men trying to take advantage.
Maybe it gets better later, but for me, it wasn't worth the effort.
[Caution warning: murder, abuse, PTSD, racism]
7. Why Art? by Eleanor Davis [Top]
I didn't really like Why Art? Parts of it are funny (talking about colour over black and white art is in fact about my level of humour), but it's very surreal in a way that rubbed me up the wrong way. I think part of it is that about halfway through, it starts to have a cast of characters and a plot, but by that point I was emotionally checked out. It felt tonally inconsistent in a way that meant that the wham line at the end didn't really land for me, and part of it is that I didn't like the art style. If you want a surreal comic about art, it might be your thing! It was not for me.
[Caution warning: stalking, "natural" disaster]
8. The Realist by Asaf Hanuka [Top]
The Realist is a collection of the autobiographical comics of an Israeli cartoonist documenting his flaws and struggles, interspersed with political commentary on things like child labour. The art is good, albeit sometimes surreal or metaphorical in that "Man draws comic judging social media users and posts it on social media" way. There's no original publication dates or extra information in the edition I read, despite the strips themselves being first published by a newspaper, so there's huge swathes of context missing for the political comics. And that's about as fair and balanced as I think I can be, because one of my best friends is Palestinian, so I'm not an unbiased reviewer here, and my response to the political commentary is always going to be #FreePalestine.
9. Supercrash by Darryl Cunningham [Top]
Supercrash is the first review that I have scheduled for next year, which is weird and exciting. It's graphic non-fiction ostensibly explaining the financial crash of 2008, although it turns out that there's two other sections about Ayn Rand and the ~psychology~ of Right and Left Wing voters. It was interesting and informative, but felt a lot like three books stapled together. The art for the crash section doesn't quite manage to illustrate it except in the most literal terms, and I definitely side-eye the pseudoscience in the last section. But the parts of it talking about the political fallout of the crash? Felt simultaneously horrible, and like looking at a different timeline, because Supercrash was published in 2014. It's wild.
10. The Motherless Oven by Rob Davis [Top]
You know that thing where a story just throws you in at the deep end with its strangeness and leaves you to sink or swim? The Motherless Oven is pretty much that the whole way through. Like, "the blurb contains a clearer summary of the world building than the narrative does" levels of in at the deep end. And it's a strange world! It can rain knives, children build their parents out of parts, and household gods live in egg timers and clocks and radios. Oh, and everyone's assigned a death day, where they are definitely going to die. And I don't mind that, particularly? I can let weird world building wash over me as long as I care about the characters (see also: Ninefox Gambit is great), the problem is that I don't care about the protagonist of The Motherless Oven. Scarper Lee is three weeks away from death, and I didn't care. The secondary characters are more interesting! I would love to know what is up with Vera! I'm side-eyeing how the neuroatypical POC who actually understands the plot is treated by both the narrative and the characters! I could live without having to go back into Scarper Lee's head again.
11. Cats of the Louvre by Taiyo Matsumoto, translated by Michael Arias [Top]
The Cats of the Louvre is a weird story that does, yes, involve cats living in the attic of the Louvre, but also involves a member of the night staff who's still looking for the sister that disappeared into the paintings fifty years ago, and the tour guide who believes they can find her. ... So yeah it's a bit weird and a bit fabulist, and very full of cats.
First off: I found all of the non-human characters to be really creepy when they're shown from their own perspective. The cats are cat-sized humans with cat ears, the spider is a spider with a human head (N O P E), there's a scene where there are flowers with cherub heads... Usually I'm okay with uncanny valley stuff, but I found the art for those scenes unnerving. Especially the hairless cat, because his human form is drawn with so much less detail than the others and it makes him stand out in a different way. As a specific warning, by the way: if you are an animal lover, there's a fair amount of cats in pain, attacking other animals, or dying, so brace yourself for that as it's more graphic than I was expecting. Those scenes switch between the human forms and the actual cat forms, and the cats are pretty well drawn, which can honestly make it worse.
Second though: I was way more invested in the human characters than any of the cats. The empathy Cécile shows and the way the three main humans caring for the cats are sweet, and I enjoyed those parts! The story of the missing sister sounded like something from Mushishi in its melancholy tone, and I liked that! I just didn't really care about the reveal, because the chapters with the sister are surreal. The flowers have faces, the sky has a giant eye that cries sometimes, the disconcerting spider with an Elton John head comes back... It's Weird, and I'm pretty sure parts of it were going over my head.
But the sections about the art, and the fact that the characters take different things out of being in the Louvre (one knowing a lot about art but hating the crowds, another not knowing anything about art but loving to see all of the different people and cultures coming through) were my favourites. The hardcopy has some full-colour replications of the art, and drawings of individual pieces in the Louvre as chapter breaks, and I definitely enjoyed those!
The Cats of the Louvre wasn't for me, and I honestly wouldn't be able to tell you who it was for. I think I'd like to read the opinions of people who do know art though, because they probably pick up on a lot of things that flew past me.
[Caution warning: references to animal abuse and harm; dead and dying cats; missing children.]
Currently Reading
- Behind the Scenes!! Volume 7 by Bisco Hatori — I like Behind the Scenes a lot, because I intensely over-identified with Ranmaru's anxiety even before I got my diagnosis, and now I'm having a lot of feelings about how much he and the Art Squad have grown! ;_____;
- Love in Focus Volume 2 by Yoko Nigiri — I'm enjoying this series as a story about a girl with a passion for art, but I could do without the love triangle that's gearing up.
- Spark Joy by Mari Kondo — I am somewhat intimidated by how chunky this is compared to The Life-Changing Manga of Tidying Up but I'm gonna do it! I'm gonna try to read a whole prose non-fiction book on a subject that I care about!
Reading Goals
Reading goal: 131/200 (11 new this post) Prose: 39/100 (0 new this post)
Nonfiction: 9/12 (3 new this post; The Realist, Supercrash, and I think The Great North Wood counts?)
#ReadMyOwnDamnBooks: 48/100 (9 read this post)
#unofficialqueerafbookclub: 56/75 (0 new this post)
