Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi. 42.

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

A memoir in graphic novel form about growing up in Iran during the revolution.

I avoided reading this for a long time because I had the impression that it was one of those worthy, educational, depressing books which are read more for their medicinal benefit than for enjoyment. (Perhaps because reviews often began "This is a very important book.") Those are certainly valuable and necessary, but not often to my personal taste.

I had somehow missed any mention of the fact that Persepolis is extremely funny as well as dark, and not earnestly improving at all. It’s actually in a completely different tradition, that of the memoir of two brutal experiences – war and the less-than-happy childhood – which often inspire black comedy. The other thing I didn’t expect was an odd bit of personal resonance: both Satrapi and I come from Communist families. I only wish that, like her, I had been given comic books on dialectical materialism.

The deceptively simple art meshes with the deceptively simple writing to create a perfect recreation of her child’s eye view, to which she and we bring our own adult perspective. Very funny, very dark, precisely observed, poignant, and witty. I couldn’t stop reading this, and I highly recommend it.

Last Few Books of My Year

[sanguinity]

63. Steven Barnes, Zulu Heart.

Very much of a pair with Lion's Blood. This one focuses on the political environment around Kai, and the impending world war between the Abyssian and Egyptian empires, with periodic forays into Aidan's quest to find and rescue his sister.

The idealization of the close, close friendship between Kai and Aidan makes me raise an eyebrow even more in this book than the first, which continues to be the reason that I find Kai and Aidan so shippable: I have no other explanation for the deep, abiding trust that Aidan places in Kai.

(And I note completely randomly: there are many nods to the martial arts and functional strength geeks: at one point I was reading a description of one Aidan's training sessions, and thought, "Wait, that sounds like pentjak silat?" It totally was. I have never run across an Indonesian style in fiction before.)


64. Cindy Pon, Silver Phoenix.

And to think that before I hit this comm, YA fantasy was a subgenre that I had all but written off.

I loved this. I loved the settings. I loved the relationships. I loved the side trip into the alternate place with the, um, SF-nal feeling scientists. I loved the traveling that felt like traveling. I loved the refusal to get all good-guy/bad-guy. I loved the I'm-not-going-to-pamper-you ending.

I want more, please.


65. Shaun Tan, The Haunted Playground.

I wasn't at all sure that this was the same Shaun Tan, this is such a departure from the picture books. (BTW, it is the same Shaun Tan. Or, at worst, another Shaun Tan in Perth who is doing work for Pixar.)

Haunted Playground is a chapter book tightly designed for middle-schoolers-or-thereabouts who read at the 2nd or 3rd grade level. Without such a reader at hand, it's fairly impossible for me to give it any sort of meaningful review, other than to note that hey, it moved fast enough to keep me interested (despite my being distracted by the simplified prose), and hey, a number of the images had a way of popping back into my head at odd times, weeks after I first read it.

If you've got a reluctant reader, give it a go. Otherwise, recommended only for Shaun Tan completists.


66. Lisa Delpit, Other People's Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom.

Every once in a while I run across a book that I want to put big shiny hearts and stickers all over, I love it so much. This is one of them.

Nine discrete essays discussing institutional and systemic racism in schools. Lots of stories here, lots of examples, and lots of places that made me nod that yes, that is exactly the way it is/was. This book gave me chills sometimes, and led me to immediately change some of the ways I teach.

As the book continues, reading it becomes more frustrating -- the book's scope keeps spiraling outward, describing more and more of the self-perpetuating factors in education that make these problems so resistant to solutions. I spent a little while at the end feeling thoroughly demoralized -- it's obvious that the solution isn't in the hands of individual teachers. But that's always the trap, isn't it? Thinking that you alone can go off and do something to make it all better.

I've got Radical Equations (about the Algebra Project and its community-organizing civil rights approach to math education) on the tbr stack, but does anyone have any other recommendations about teaching and education?

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...and unless I've forgotten something that's my count for the year.