Truth: Red, White & Black by Robert Morales and Kyle Baker

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Robert Morales and Kyle Baker "Truth: Red, White & Black" - 5/5

I wish I could give this more than five stars. This is such an amazing story. Wow. Really, just...wow.

What this is is a retcon history of Captain America. The story of Captain America is that he was a guy who didn't qualify for the army in WWII, and volunteered for a government experiment that would turn him into a super soldier and allow him to fight. This comic comes up with a backstory for that. What if Captain America was not actually the first Captain America? What if others were experimented on first? And who, in actuality, did the government like to experiment on? Based on the reality of things like the Tuskeegee Experiment, it makes sense that the government would test their super soldier serum on black men (though I also agree with one reviewer I read, who said, but would the government really want to take the risk of having black super soldiers around?). This is the story of those men, especially the one survivor, Isaiah Bradley.

The story is very powerful and I highly recommend this even if you never read comics and know nothing about Captain America. I haven't read American comics since I was a kid, and never knew anything about Captain America before this. It's unnecessary. The comic gives you all the info you need to know, and believe me, you will not regret reading this, though it is a very hard story to read.

My one complaint would be the art, which is very, very cartoony and doesn't really fit the tone of the story that well (as well as not really being to my taste, but American superhero comic art is not to my taste, period; I actually think I prefer this cartooniness slightly to the usual superhero style).

Also, personally, it was hard to get used to reading the right way, as I'm used to reading manga and thus my default for comics is top right to bottom left.

#7: Ronald Takaki, A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America

[gwyneira.livejournal.com]

Takaki brings together a multitude of voices to tell the rich, complex story of the non-Anglo peoples of the United States: African Americans, Asian Americans, Indians, Jews, Latinos, and more. He begins with the colonization of North America by the Europeans and "the racialization of savagery", whereby the Europeans came to believe that the Indians were different from and inferior to them, and that this difference was based on race and skin color. Then he goes on to examine the experiences of other peoples, taking a roughly chronological approach and devoting each chapter to a specific group and their experiences in a particular period. Takaki lets his subjects speak for themselves constantly; the text is full of quotations from songs, poems, prose, and interviews. Like Lies My Teacher Told Me, this is one of those books which opens your eyes to the history you're not necessarily taught in schools and to many overlooked aspects of the rich cultural and ethnic heritage of the United States.

I think I'd also like to read Takaki's Strangers from a Different Shore, which is a history of Asian Americans. Can anyone recommend other books on American history written by PoC? I'm especially interested in the 18th and 19th centuries.

'Does My Head Look Big In This?' by Randa Abdel-Fattah/'Hostage to Pleasure' by Nalini Singh

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Two books, both of which I read yesterday in an orgy of self indulgence. My package from amazon arrived in the morning, and I then proceeded to hog the sofa until the late evening. I'm sure there were things I was meant to be doing...

Anyway, on with the reviews!

'Does My Head Look Big In This?' by Randa Abdel-Fattah

This is a fantastic novel by someone who really badly needs a good editor! It's a great story; Amal Mohamed Nasrullah Abdel-Hakim is a Palestinian-Australian Muslim teenager who decides that she wants to go 'full time', and wear the veil any time she is in the presence of males who aren't in her immediate family. The impact of her decision upon her family, her friends, her life at school and those around her is the subject of the novel, along with all the normal woes of growing up - bullies, boys and getting through high school.

( Review with some spoilers )

'Hostage to Pleasure' by Nalini Singh

Another of the Nalini Singh Psy/Changeling paranormal romance series. It's actually the last I'll be reviewing for a bit as the next one isn't due out for a while.

This one is the story of Dorian, another of the Dark River Sentinels, but a much more interesting one, in my opinion, than either Vaughn or Clay. And his heroine is another Psy, but a much tougher case than Faith. I view this novel as a welcome return to form for Ms Singh.

( Review, very light spoilage )

So, two reviews from me today. I'll now pause for a bit, as the next two books in my reading pile are both White authored (I couldn't resist a Russian vampire novel), but hopefully will return soon when my next Octavia Butler novel arrives.

Finally, does anyone use BookMooch or anything similar? I use BookMooch, and do tend to add a fair few books that I've read for this challenge on there.

#1-#5(?)

[sairaali.livejournal.com]

After months of lurking and reading reviews, I decided to actually start keeping track of my reads. My first four (possibly five?) reviews are here.

The list and just the list:

1. An African Prayer Book Desmond Tutu
2. Anatopsis Chris Abouzeid (although I'm not sure how the author identifies so I'm not sure whether to count it)
3. The Sinner Tess Gerritsen
4. Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits Laila Lailami
5. Radical Welcome Stephanie Spellers

3. The Seven Wise Princesses, retold by Wafa Tarnowska

[kitsuchi.livejournal.com]

The Seven Wise Princesses is a retelling of a Persian epic by Nizami Ganjavi; this version is told by Wafa Tarnowska, with illustrations by Nilesh Mistry. It reads to me a bit like an ancient self-help book – the shah in the framing story learns about love through the princesses' stories, which are heavy with symbolism. Luckily there is an appendix, or who knows if I would ever have realised, apart from the obvious colour symbolism – each of the seven princesses that the shah has gathered has chosen a different coloured pavilion to live in, and their stories are told in order to explain that choice.

I was more interested in the stories being told – which weren't even the princesses' own stories, but one's they themselves had heard – than in the framing story. I was more interested in the princesses than the shah. As a result, I found the book as a whole somewhat disappointing – though it hardly seems fair to castigate a 12th century poem for not being what I wanted!

It was sold to us as a children's book, I guess, but I'm not sure how interested most children would be in it – the original poem wasn't intended for children, and even this retelling seems more of adult interest to me, for all the lavish illustrations.

the tags say it all, really

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

Beacon Press will publish a graphic adaptation of Octavia Butler’s novel Kindred, according to PW Comics Week.

Toni Morrison's 1993 Nobel lecture

[esmeraldus-neo.livejournal.com]

Toni Morrison's Nobel lecture is available as a very small book from Knopf.  I highly recommend it. Although it may be read quickly, that only means that you can read it again.

The lecture is very much about the power of language and narrative.

I can't match Morrison, so I'm going to quote a little of it to let her words speak for themselves.

Morrison has said that stories are the most effective way to preserve and pass on knowledge. Her acceptance speech for the 1993 Nobel Prize for literature began, “Narrative has never been merely entertainment for me. It is, I believe, one of the principal ways in which we absorb knowledge."

She tells the story of an old blind woman who talks with a group of young people who come to her door one day. They say they have a bird, and they test her, asking her to tell them whether it is alive or dead. She won't give them a simple answer.

Morrison says of her, “Being a writer, she thinks of language partly as a system, partly as a living thing over which one has control, but mostly as agency—as an act with consequences."

Morrison talks of the beating heart of language, and tells us that “the vitality of language lies in its ability to limn the actual, imagined and possible lives of its speakers, readers, and writers. Although its poise is sometimes in displacing experience, it is not a substitute for it. It arcs toward the place where meaning may lie."

Nonfiction often attempts to explain human events finally, what Morrison calls “monumentalizing”. “Language,” she says, “can never live up to life once and for all. Nor should it. Language can never ‘pin down’ slavery, genocide, war. Nor should it yearn for the arrogance to be able to do so. Its force, its felicity, is in its reach toward the ineffable."

So I just joined

[billies-blues.livejournal.com]

I'm excited about this community and this challenge. I hope I can do it in a month. I'm going to start by counting the book I read last month.

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz. Much like everyone else, I fell in love with this book. It was hard for me to put down. Even the characters I found hard to take, were made a little relatable as I continued reading. 
The Third Life of Copeland Grange by Alice Walker...I have read this book already. I believe it was her first novel.

I am looking forward to finding book ideas through this community and am glad to have joined.

Edit: I also meant to add Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson. This story is amazing, dark, funny. It's mystical, futuristic and yet has an old feeling to it.

So two read, one current.