Birth of a Nation by Aaron McGruder, Reginald Hudlin, and Kyle Baker

[kyuuketsukirui.livejournal.com]

Title: Birth of a Nation
Author: Aaron McGruder, Reginald Hudlin, and Kyle Baker
Number of Pages: 137 pages
My Rating: 4/5

When the mostly-black residents of East St. Louis are prevented from voting due to a "glitch" that lists them all as felons, they demand a recount. When all they get is an apology, they do the unthinkable: secede from the United States.

This was recommended to me when I posted about Truth: Red, White & Black, also illustrated by Kyle Baker. To be honest, the summary didn't grab me all that much, but I figured what the hell, why not? and put it on my wishlist. Not like graphic novels take long to read anyway.

I ended up enjoying it a lot more than I anticipated. The writing's great and I was laughing at something on practically every page. And Baker's art works a lot better here than it did in Truth, where his cartoony artwork felt a little out of place.

One thing I didn't really like was the format. It's not a comic book, or even a series of comic strips. Neither is it a text story with illustrations. It's kind of a weird hybrid, with panels laid out like a comic, but with the narration and dialogue (mostly dialogue) underneath each panel, and I found it kind of hard to follow sometimes.

Mooch on BookMooch.

'The Wind Done Gone' by Alice Randall/'Ten Things I Hate About Me' by Randa Abdel-Fattah

[annwfyn.livejournal.com]

Gods, I've been awful. I don't think I've written a review in months, probably because I've not been reading much. Anyway, just to make up for my long silence, here are two reviews together.

The Wind Done Gone

I bought 'The Wind Done Gone' because I thought it was a re-telling of 'Gone With The Wind' from the point of view of Cynara, Scarlett's biracial half sister. In fact, it is more of a sequal - the book starts after Rhett Butler (referred to as 'R' throughout the novel) has left Scarlett, and most of the novel takes place after the Civil War, through Reconstruction, with flashbacks to earlier events.

( Read more... )

Overall, a really good and emotional read. Highly recommended.

Ten Things I Hate About Me

This is a novel by the same writer of 'Does My Head Look Big In This', and is another novel about being a Muslim and a teenage girl in Australia.

( Read more... )

Another really good book. Definitely recommended.

21-23: Oscar Wao, Zahrah the Windseeker, The Art of Living

[vass]

21. Junot Diaz, The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
I liked this a lot. The family curse appealed to me, as did geeky, fat, Nice Guy, wannabe-writer Oscar. I hated what happened to Oscar, but it was believably told. I loved the explanation of Trujillo's dictatorship in terms of the Silmarillion.

22. Nnedi Okorafor Mbachu, Zahrah the Windseeker
I was excited when I saw this because it's young enough that I could think about giving it to my niece. I'm always looking for good books for her, and the more strong, nontraditional female characters and characters of colour, the better. Sadly, Zahrah the Windseeker is a bit too old for my niece, who's seven. I'll try her on it when she's nine or ten. This book is wonderful. I wasn't too grabbed at first, but Zahrah's character development pulled me in. She's very different at the end of the book to how she was at the beginning. And what a likeable character! I also love the concept of dadi, and the plant-computers. And, I am not surprised at all to say, it passes Bechdel.

23. Tenzin Gyatso, Dalai Lama XIV, The Art of Living (translated by Geshe Thupten Jinpa, photographs by Ian Cumming)
This is not what I expected when I put a book by the Dalai Lama on reserve at the library. It's a coffee table book. Full of lush and rather objectifying pictures of Tibetan people participating in religious ceremonies. I was hoping for some solid information on Tibetan liberation and Buddhism. Instead I got... well, there was lots of entry-level information on Buddhism, packaged so as to be as non-threatening to non-Buddhists as possible, and lots of glossy photographs. Definitely a case where I should have chosen the book much more carefully.

Request: Can anyone recommend a good book on the PRC's occupation of Tibet? Written by a Tibetan author would be ideal, but I'll take whatever's good and factual. And if it's not a complete hagiography of the Dalai Lama, so much the better.