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PaperclipPerfector  23d ago (text post)   3163 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for April 7, 2024

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So, what are you reading?

I'm on Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Burglar. The writing is smooth and the character is great, though still hoping it will be more than just entertaining.

I just read a good chunk of The Mystery of the Kibbutz. I'm not reading more because it got to be an awfully repetitive book, but the first few chapters were pretty interesting about how Jewish communes were relatively successful despite how one might expect a society without free markets to fail.

I read one of each of the gentleman burglar character books (Fantomas, Arsene Lupin and Raffles) and from what I remember Arsene was the best of the bunch.

Just finished Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness but I think I may have hit the limits of my audiobook comprehension because I was left thinking "wait, when does stuff start happening?". Maybe it's just not that type of book, there have been enough potent lines that it may be a book you just have to enjoy the language of.

The Brother's Karamazov was much more comprehensible. I did have some confusion with the names, not just because of the Russian naming conventions but because apparently none of the readers could agree on a single pronunciation of 'Ivan'.

Just finished Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness but I think I may have hit the limits of my audiobook comprehension because I was left thinking "wait, when does stuff start happening?". Maybe it's just not that type of book, there have been enough potent lines that it may be a book you just have to enjoy the language of.

Were you listening to the Kenneth Branagh version? I think his reading is amazing but I haven't heard any others.

I'm only listening to what I can find for free on Spotify, mostly librevox recordings. A good reader can make a difference so maybe that explains it.

Just finished Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness but I think I may have hit the limits of my audiobook comprehension because I was left thinking "wait, when does stuff start happening?". Maybe it's just not that type of book, there have been enough potent lines that it may be a book you just have to enjoy the language of.

That's a book I truly never got. I read it and just zero percent got the point.

Finished When We Cease to Understand the World the other day. Fascinating, absorbing and concise. Well worth checking out if you have any interest in the luminaries of quantum mechanics (Schrodinger and Heisenberg in particular).

Still reading Life Worth Living. I found the chapter "Who do we answer to?" very interesting — it gets at something I've often found myself gesturing toward when arguing with more liberal or relativist people on the topic of values.

I just finished The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I have to say it is nearly perfect as a book, for me. It's the perfect mix of literary, philosophical, enough action to keep moving, enough sex to be fun without becoming grating or disgusting. The length is perfect, it doesn't drag beyond the material, and at no point was I reading just to get the book over with, but it's a sufficient length to explore a lot of ideas and really dig into the characters. It's obviously political, but not overbearing. It's about a time and a place but it is timeless, it neither holds your hand explaining things nor requires so much background that you need a history degree to get it.

I'm probably going to go back to Tolstoy for a few hundred more pages. Get at least to the start of the second war.

REQUEST: What are great graphic novels I should read? I've read and enjoyed Watchmen and V for Vendetta in the past, and read Tezuka's Buddha last year and found it to be as such a book goes very fun. I read some manga as a tween, but never got really into it, kinda feel like it's something I should explore, now that I live in a world where I could get that from a library or get it off LibGen.

Here's a few more ideas, not really "classics", but not quite as fluffy as they might seem.

Scott Pilgrim by Bryan Lee O'Malley. You probably already know if you're going to like it. The comic is deeper and more layered than the movie (and show), but still very much the same feel.

Zot! by Scott McCloud. There's collections of the original series, and a sort of encore called Hearts and Minds that I think works best on the web. You can read that first to see if you like it - there aren't any real spoilers.

ElfQuest by Wendy and Richard Pini. I recommend the first 8 books, up through the end of "Kings of the Broken Wheel". After that the quality becomes variable, and I don't remember what's any good, and I haven't read the later stuff. But those first 8 volumes tell a sprawling epic, from cave-men to star travel, and bring it to a good-enough stopping point.

Thieves and Kings by Mark Oakley. It stumbles around just short of being transcendently good, but never quite comes together, at least IMO. But I'm fond of it anyway. There was a decade-long hiatus, but apparently he's started up again.

Lost Girls is a fun bit of erotica from Alan Moore you could finish in an afternoon. The Sandman is another good Alan Moore piece but as far as I know it's a full length comic series rather than a self-contained graphic novel, but maybe there's a compendium.

For something not involving Alan Moore Transmetroplitan was good fun and from what I remember would probably appeal to the Motte crowd for it's cyberpunk / absurd culture war aspects (sexy Sesame Street!) but it's another full series.

I will caution you that if you buy a hard copy of Lost Girls, do not read it on the bus. People will assume that you're reading child pornography, and with good reason.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being

One of my handful of 10/10s. Absolute aesthetic perfection. Kundera's other pretty-good book is Immortality, which also explores the self as an experience versus the self as others project values onto. But this is the novel he lived his life to write, so the rest of his work ends up disappointing.

What are great graphic novels I should read? I read some manga as a tween, but never got really into it

Berserk. Koe no Katachi if you feel like a good cry.

I've read and enjoyed Watchmen and V for Vendetta in the past

I recently re-read Moore's From Hell (a fictionalised account of the Jack the Ripper murders) and think it's superior to both (if admittedly a lot slower), so check that out next. As noted by @fishtwanger below, try to find the edition with all the notes in the back. The notes offer interesting insights into Moore's creative process and demonstrates just what an exhaustively researched work From Hell is.

  • With the exception of his earlier Optic Nerve comics (which are "promising" rather than "good"), I cannot recommend anything by Adrian Tomine highly enough. Marvellously funny and sad slice-of-life stories about modern America, which often provide a penetrating insight into the Asian-American experience. Particularly recommend Shortcomings.
  • Charles Burns's Black Hole (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Hole_(comics)) is so absorbing that I read it in one sitting. A wholly unique blend of 70s nostalgia, teen angst and Cronenbergian body horror.
  • Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persepolis_(comics)) is a fascinating memoir about growing up in Iran after the Ayatollah came to power (later adapted into an animated film by Satrapi herself, also well worth checking out).
  • Blankets by Craig Thompson. Read it years ago and can't remember it in detail, but remember thoroughly enjoying it. A memoir about the author's first love as an adolescent, while wrestling with his repressive Christian faith.
  • The Sculptor by Scott McCloud. An engaging story about the sacrifices artists make in pursuit of their muse (kind of like a comic book Whiplash). Moving and powerful.
  • Hyperbole and a Half. Not strictly a graphic novel: these originated as blog posts by Allie Brosh posted on the eponymous blog, in which Brosh recounts amusing anecdotes about her life interspersed with impossibly crude, Rage Comic-esque illustrations rendered in an MS Paint knockoff (one such illustration was actually memed to death in the early 2010s). The best of these posts were compiled into a paperback collection in 2013; I'm not exaggerating when I say this book made me laugh so hard that I was often struggling to breathe. In spite of the presentation, the book contains a two-parter about Brosh's struggles with clinical depression which is moving and profound. Brosh later followed it up with Solutions and Other Problems in 2020, which is worth checking out even if it doesn't quite reach the heights of the previous volume.

Finder by Carla Speed McNeil is a distant-future graphic novel series. It features gorgeous black and white line art, transhumanism, and cultural commentary on a possible future of race, gender, and wealth. It has a focus on personal relationships within a society, and comes at anything political from oblique angles. The character art would make Walt Disney swoon with McNeil’s action lines and liveliness.

The eponymous Finder is a young man named Jaeger, of a lower caste ethnicity whose tribe has become involved with a lower upper-class household in one of the domed cities. He has a talent for finding what’s needed, but whether that’s a gift or a curse is left grey.

Cerebus the Aardvark by Dave Sim was a monumental undertaking, one of the first independent comics to hit 300 issues, contemporary in the 80’s with the TMNT and The Tick. It features insanely amazing black and white crosshatched backgrounds by Gerhard, and the character work by Sim is top notch with a caricaturist’s eye. His comic lettering is a phenomenon.

Cerebus himself starts as a funny-animal parody of Conan the Barbarian in the lost civilizations of ancient Europe, but things shift into a high gear when Cerebus gets involved with a mayor who looks a lot like Groucho Marx. It evolves into a poignant and piercing examination of second-wave feminism, the effects of church on society and vice versa, the nature of civilization, the ephemerality of sober and drugged spiritual experiences, alcoholism, masculinity, rapey incels before we had a name for it, being bros, and failed dreams. By the end we’ve met caricatures of dozens of twentieth-century celebrities and parodies of superheroes and sword-and-sorcery fantasy heroes, each one shaping how Cerebus is (or plays) the hero. Skip the text sections from issues 200-300 if you find them weird or boring, the author has something to say in them but most people won’t grok it.

In many ways, these series are diametric opposites, and visions of the future and the past respectively which will haunt you. To see if you want to read the whole series, read volume 3 of each: Finder, King of the Cats, and Cerebus, Church and State.

Seconding all of fishtwanger's recs.

Astro City is very much a comic fan's comic book, but it (and to a lesser extent, Common Grounds) are great not just by the low standards of superhero works, but more broadly as explorations of the human spirit. Nextwave takes things the other direction, and despite that is the only Warren Ellis work I can stand -- hilariously zany, completely shredding the ideas of superheroic human spirit, absolutely all the more enjoyable for it.

If you like Moore, Promethea isn't perfect in a lot of ways, but it's generally underappreciated work.

Ursula Vernon's Digger is a weirder work, but fun.

For Eastern works, Kino's Journey is better-known for its anime (good) and light novel (outstanding), but the manga iterations are still pretty strong.

I enjoyed Scott McCloud's The Sculptor quite a lot. Maybe not everyone's cup of tea but it made me feel things.

Seconded.

Sandman, of course. Nausicaa, The Dark Knight Returns, Kingdom Come, and Red Son are all classics. From Hell might be worth reading, especially if you can find a collected edition with all the notes in the back where he explains his process. Astro City (intermittently ongoing) is a favorite of mine, but some people don't get into it.

Sandman, if you haven't already. The other graphic novel I would recommend is Batgirl (2000—2006). It stands on its own and is quite beautiful.

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