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This is a list of the books I've read this year, with a few of my thoughts on each.
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2/6/12 |
Bill Willingham
Fables: Volume 2 |
This one had a little less of the annoying factor compared to the first volume because it wasn't constantly smacking you over the head with exposition, but more information about the premise filtered in during this volume and it rubbed me the wrong way. It's insinuated that the Fables--people from alternate worlds who got chased from their fictional worlds to hide among the "mundanes" (ugh) in our world--have a definite understanding of themselves being story characters and that it matters to them how often the so-called mundanes tell their stories. (For instance, Rose Red is jealous of Snow White for being more well-known, and it's suggested that the better-known you are, the easier it is for you to survive, say, a gunshot wound to the head. Gee.) Yet, when the various Three Little Pigs die, it doesn't matter that they replaced them with three more little pigs for the normal people to believe in without knowing the originals got killed. I don't get it, especially since that whole switch-a-roo was played like the audience was gonna go "oooh, deep." (I felt the same about several "reveals" throughout the story.) The whole civil war plot and the way Snow White and Rose Red ended up at the Animal Farm seemed really contrived to me, too. Though I must say Goldilocks having a consummate relationship with one of the Three Bears made me chuckle.
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2/1/12 |
Bill Willingham
Fables: Volume 1 |
My friend Eric thought I'd like this because I guess it has some common threads with Sandman (which I adore), but so far it has yet to be anywhere near as dramatic, innovative, and authentic as Neil Gaiman's masterpiece. So a bunch of fictional characters from the various stories we know and love have been exiled from their fairytale homelands (by a mysterious adversary, motives unknown), and now they live secretly among regular people, with their own place for people like them called Fabletown. (They refer to themselves as "Fables.") A detective story featuring the murder of Rose Red is the motivating force in the action, and various reinvented characters play suspects, victims, and sleuths. This graphic novel pushed about a dozen of my pet peeve buttons immediately.
- Severe overuse of characters lighting a cigarette to show off how hard-boiled they are.
- Cameo nonsense. Some people might find the repeated references to fairy tales enjoyable, but I definitely felt beaten over the head. "Hi Jack. Climbed any beanstalks lately?" You know, so we'll know which Jack this is. "Never mention the dwarves" being a warning about what you just don't say to Snow White. Etc.
- Overuse of emphasis with bold lettering. I'm thinking this might be a comic thing that I'm just oversensitive to since I tend not to read a whole lot of American graphic novels, but anytime something was either stressed or significant, it was bolded. It got tiring.
- For some reason I get really annoyed when regular people, whatever "regular" people are in some fantastical reality, are called "mundanes." In this series, not only are normal people called mundanes, but they're called "mundys" for short. Just something I'm tired of.
- Critical levels of as-you-know-Bob. Characters' pasts are filled in with awkward dialogue. "You remember when you did such and such?" / "Shut up, you can't hold that against me, that was before the amnesty!" Or Snow White feels prompted to explain exactly how the balance of power works between the "actual" mayor of Fabletown (King Cole) and herself (second-in-command) because someone she's talking to points out that she's not the mayor. Occasionally this is lampshaded ("Your sister, Rose Red." "I'm not entirely an idiot. I actually know my own sister's name."--that sort of thing), but I had shoehorned-in exposition squirting out my ears before the first chapter was over.
Add in the fact that I'm not a fan of detective stories anyway--especially "and this is how I figured it all out" endings--and you get to conclude I didn't care for this. The art itself was fine, though sometimes the emotion seemed detached from the dialogue. I'm still going to read the second one because a) sometimes comics get better as they relax into their world, and b) Eric lent me both, so I'll read both.
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1/17/12 |
Sharon M. Draper
Out of My Mind |
There was so much that was good about this book. I appreciated that Melody, a girl with cerebral palsy who can't speak, had her own imperfections (beyond her disability) and wasn't written as a complete saint--that's a pitfall many authors can't seem to avoid when trying to write a book like this from the perspective of a disabled child. Melody is smart as a whip but needs help to communicate and has almost no control over her body, and yet many of the people responsible for her education weren't willing to accept her abilities for what they really are. I liked that there were so many varieties of reactions to her--that many of her classmates may have been outright rude and cruel to her, but many of them were in gray areas . . . meaning they said and did a lot of the right things but did so out of apparent feelings of obligation, not because they wanted to. I liked how realistic the mainstreaming experience was for Melody, and I liked that her time in the disabled class was clearly just babysitting (because that totally happens in school all the time). And I liked that sometimes when bad things happened, the story didn't swoop in and pull out a miracle solution to make everything okay again. The author let disaster strike and then let the characters further show their colors by dealing with it.
There were a few things I didn't like, but most of it was just delivery. There were a couple places where I thought Melody made some insensitive comments about fat people (commenting mentally that someone's belly was "gross" or suggesting people's large size as automatically unflattering). The narration flipped from past tense to present tense pretty much arbitrarily, though it did it in chunks or between chapters so it wasn't particularly distracting. I thought the children sometimes spoke too maturely--for instance, a fifth grader is quoted as saying "It never occurred to me that Melody had thoughts in her head." I taught elementary school and even though obviously some of the children had advanced vocabulary, they didn't tend to talk like this; sometimes it just didn't sound natural. There was one bit that felt planted: when Melody's sister is pointed out to have a tendency to run out the door to try to get in the car, I knew it would be important and I knew however it would be important would be dangerous, so I just kept waiting for it to happen. But except for these small things, I found it an enjoyable read and I thought Melody was a fascinating character, and the storytelling style was innovative.
I cried a little when one of the first things Melody did when she got her talking machine was tell her parents she loved them. |
See the list of books I read last year!
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