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Reading on a Wedsnesday
Jan. 26th, 2023 12:18 amShort one this week since real life things have been pretty up and down these past few weeks.
Read: I finally got my copy of Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands from the library (there were over a hundred holds on it already when I put mine in). I haven't read any of Beaton's other work besides a few strips I've seen linked around, but wow, she has an amazing sense of pacing, and while the character art occasionally got a little off-model, the detail and sense of scale in the images of the camps is stunning.
It's a very sad book - not in the sense that it made me cry, but more in that I wanted to stare at the wall for a few minutes after I finished, and I read all 400+ pages (it's not a small book, either) straight through without a break. Beaton faced absolutely relentless misogyny, was raped, and towards the end started to learn about the impact the camps that were temporary to her and a way to escape the student loans she otherwise couldn't pay off had on the First Nations people who live in the area. But while she's very frank about her rapes and how they traumatized her while being forgettable for the men who hurt her in the afterword, she still draws up sympathy for the men in general - there's one memorable strip where she receives a bare resume from an older man who never went to school past eighth grade - and wonders how the strange environment might have changed the men in her family if they were there instead of her.
Side note, but I find it interesting how people depict deeply traumatizing events visually when they aren't explicitly shown. Black pages seem to be a common choice in graphic novels, and Beaton does use them, but she also uses repetition in the art and repetitive, claustrophobic panel layouts to make those sections viscerally unpleasant; I could almost feel a sense of dissociation looking at them.
Reading this reminded me that I would like to read more non-Japanese graphic novels sometime. The selection on the shelf of my local library is mostly not very inspiring, but, well, it's a very small shelf.
Reading next: The last manga I read was even more depressing than Ducks (it was based on true stories of teenage girls in Okinawa at the end of WWII), so I really need to read something more cheerful next.
The other two books I got out from the library were Figure Skating: A History (published in 2006, so just around when IJS was coming out) and Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains (which, having only read the table of contents, does not exactly fulfill the promise of the title if you've taken a few psych/neuro classes but does look interesting). Unthinkable seems shorter and breezier, so I'll probably read that one first.
Read: I finally got my copy of Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands from the library (there were over a hundred holds on it already when I put mine in). I haven't read any of Beaton's other work besides a few strips I've seen linked around, but wow, she has an amazing sense of pacing, and while the character art occasionally got a little off-model, the detail and sense of scale in the images of the camps is stunning.
It's a very sad book - not in the sense that it made me cry, but more in that I wanted to stare at the wall for a few minutes after I finished, and I read all 400+ pages (it's not a small book, either) straight through without a break. Beaton faced absolutely relentless misogyny, was raped, and towards the end started to learn about the impact the camps that were temporary to her and a way to escape the student loans she otherwise couldn't pay off had on the First Nations people who live in the area. But while she's very frank about her rapes and how they traumatized her while being forgettable for the men who hurt her in the afterword, she still draws up sympathy for the men in general - there's one memorable strip where she receives a bare resume from an older man who never went to school past eighth grade - and wonders how the strange environment might have changed the men in her family if they were there instead of her.
Side note, but I find it interesting how people depict deeply traumatizing events visually when they aren't explicitly shown. Black pages seem to be a common choice in graphic novels, and Beaton does use them, but she also uses repetition in the art and repetitive, claustrophobic panel layouts to make those sections viscerally unpleasant; I could almost feel a sense of dissociation looking at them.
Reading this reminded me that I would like to read more non-Japanese graphic novels sometime. The selection on the shelf of my local library is mostly not very inspiring, but, well, it's a very small shelf.
Reading next: The last manga I read was even more depressing than Ducks (it was based on true stories of teenage girls in Okinawa at the end of WWII), so I really need to read something more cheerful next.
The other two books I got out from the library were Figure Skating: A History (published in 2006, so just around when IJS was coming out) and Unthinkable: An Extraordinary Journey Through the World's Strangest Brains (which, having only read the table of contents, does not exactly fulfill the promise of the title if you've taken a few psych/neuro classes but does look interesting). Unthinkable seems shorter and breezier, so I'll probably read that one first.
