From shame to silence

.

Don't worry, though. In between shame and silence we'll find plenty of joy.

.

022) So You've Been Publicly Shamed by Jon Ronson, finished April 15

This has been my read-during-fire-alarm-evacuations-and-related-phenomenon and it's been a terrific read. The book's a decade old now but the world is largely the same. Not identical, but the same.

He explores the ways in which shaming happens (with an emphasis on Twitter) and the various kinds of destruction wreaked  by shame. But also how shame can have positive outcomes. Also there's stuff about prisons (real prisons but also this book completely defamiliarized the Stanford Prison Experiment for me). I was reminded about Jonah Lehrer and introduces to some very online scandals I have no memory of.

 
The book is of that delightful genre of nonfiction in which vignette after vignette builds into a solid whole. And while it's easy to take away a useful lesson about what I, a person, should do, it's not easy at all to know what we should do regarding shame as a society. What role does it play within a civilization healthy? This book softly suggests some questions to ask but it's nothing like a policy guide. And in that sense, this is popnonfiction at its purest. You feel smarter at the end because you have fun party anecdotes lined up and because you know what right and wrong and can judge others accordingly, but has anything been changed on a larger scale? No. Will it? Unlikely.

But maybe it's unfair to expect that of this book. Perhaps just getting us to consider the question is the first good thing.

about eight months

 

023) Keeping Two by Jordan Crane, finished April 16

I suppose I wasn't paying quite close enough attention to this graphic novel as I began it because it took longer than it should have for the book to teach me how to read it. It's the story of a young couple, but with only a change in the panel edges, it can become memory or fantasy or a novel being read. Once that discover it made, the story is much less mystifying. Although I could tell some of this was happening before I deciphered the visual vocabulary, breaking the code made the whole thing much better.

At first, I thought no way this couple will make it. But by the end, I think they will. Anyway, I'm rooting for them. But they really should take a trip to the ER.

Sadly, the only image I could find online of both kinds of panels is this one. In French.

Click for more.

across an evening

 

024) Everything Is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection by John Green, finished April 18

Ironic that this book, a passionate call for humans to just conquer TB already, arrives just as the US government throws up its hand on fighting any diseases out there in the world. Ugh.

Anyway, I learned a lot here. I suspect I know a lot more about TB than the average person, and yet so much of what I knew was incomplete or even wrong. For instance, I had been led to believe that getting the TB test so many times had led to false positives. No. I had TB. Years passed before my doctor decided I should get antibiotics before it went active (the story of how TB hangs out in the body is WILD) and now I don't have TB anymore. But I never even knew I had TB until reading this book.

(I like my doctor, but I'm constantly realizing I'm not getting the most accurate information from him. I think he knows it but just doesn't want to correct me when I get the wrong idea? I . . . don't love that.)

I also knew a lot about how TB was a sexy disease of poets but the borders of my knowledge are both larger and more accurate now. And I like using New Mexico's statehood as a nice microcosm of some issues we have today, but knowing the relevance of TB to this tale makes it all the more useful.

I hate to say this. Although I liked The Fault in our Stars fine, I found Everything a superior work. The author's using the skills he developed in YA lit and applying them to a spot of nonfiction he's devoted to. It helps him get away with some structuring that I often find frustrating, viz, he's telling the story of one kid with tuberculosis in Sierra Leone and cutting it up with chapterlong incursions into history and science. But the interweaving here is so natural it doesn't feel like a cheap to trick us into learning something until the pathos returns.

Also, how depressing that TB is still kicking our butts. No disease we know how to cure should be killing 1.25 million people a year.

What a millstone we're building for ourselves.

a couple weeks

 

025) The Cartoonists Club by Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud, finished April 18

This book is brilliant. One chapter is kind of a mini–Understanding Comics for kids and the rest of the book is largely modeling how to be an artist. Which really means how to find likeminded people and how to stick to the work. Two vital lessons that aren't obvious when you're just looking at pros' finished work.

The book does a lot of modeling. To get jargony, how to  have a growth mindset, how to have grit—all the popular education phrasing. It has a super-inclusive cast and normalizes some things like swapping pronouns. Most of this is very natural, though there are a couple moments that feel forced.

After the story ends (perfect ending, btw), there's some more helpful stuff like a glossary and a breakdown of how they split up the work. I was glad to see I was spot-on. But then, I'm big fans of both Scott and Raina and while they meshed styles and sensibilities well on this project, Scott's still Scott and Raina's still Raina.

I feel extremely lucky to have read this already. Apparently, Lady Steed told me about this a while back but I didn't understand that it was Raina AND Scott and that they'd made a book together that they were touring in support of. Very bummed not to have gotten tickets!

So I wasn't really even away of the book until this earlier today (and then reading many more). I went straight to my library and somehow they weren't all checked out already. From the data I can see on the public side of my library's website, I think the first copies were put on shelves three days ago. Perhaps not all branches on the same day. My local branch still had theirs and by the time I got there after school, it was waiting in my name.

I'm excited to push this into the 8yrold's hands.

afternoon and nighttime

 

026) Silence by Shūsaku Endō, finished April 19

For my Easter read this year, I decided to tackle Silence. It's not long but I had some reticence about the translation. (Incidentally, I read the words discussed in that article as the BYU professor says they should be read. So either I had a better experience reading the available translation than he did or I have been swayed by the professor's version as seen in the Scorsese adaptation which I love.

I did not expect this novel to be so peculiarly structured. Postmodern, I suppose. It starts as a presentation of historical document, letters sent by Father Rodrigues, letters that could not possibly have survived. They it moved into third-person (mostly limited). At one moment, at the climax, it slipped into present tense. Then it's back to docs (this time from a Dutchman) then a sudden, neckjerking leap back to narration then back to docs of another type.

One of the controversial things about the movie as an adaptation that people complain about is  Rodrigues's wife giving him a tawdry crucifix to hold as he is cremated. I agree this does not happen in the book and, moreover, is unlikely, but it works as a visual representation of what we see in his mind during the last bit of narration. And it's a much more elegant representation than, I don't know, voiceover or something. I agree with the choice.

The weird way this book ranges from faux historiana to straightup novel gave me regular whiplash, yet the novel as a whole—and specific moments in particular—are powerful all the same.

It is moving and provocative work. Consider it a bucketlist read.

perhaps a month

 

= = = = = = = = = = = = =

 

Bro! Tell me we still know how to speak of kings!

001) Beowulf translated by Maria Dahvana Headley, finished January 1
002) Cthulhu Is Hard to Spell: Volume Three, finished January 1
003) Fever Dream by Samanta Schweblin (translated by Megan McDowell), finished January 8
004) My Favorite Thing Is Monsters by Emil Ferris, finished January 11
005) You're a Good Sport, Charlie Brown, finished January 12
005) Into the Headwinds: Why Belief Has Always Been Hard—and Still Is by Terryl Givens and Nathaniel Givens, finished January 24
006) My Favorite Thing Is Monsters: Book Two by Emil Ferris, finished January 25

Maybe we should just pretend this set begins and ends with Wednesday Addams

007) Chas. Addams Half-Baked Cookbook, finished January 29
008) Monica by Daniel Clowes, finished February 3
009) The Unexpurgated French Edition of Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure by John Cleland, finished February 19
010) Peach and the Isle of Monsters by Franco Aureliani and Agnes Garbowska, finished February 20
011) Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro, finished February 28
012) Comic Poems edited by Peter Washington, finished March 7

Love, Beauty, and a complete lack of sasquatch

013) Love that Dog by Sharon Creech, finished March 11
014) Beauty by Sheri S. Tepper, finished March 21
015) Antelope Spring by John Bennion, finished March 24
016) Shelley Frankenstein by Colleen Madden, finished March 28
017) Nancy Drew and the Clue Crew #21: Double Take, finished April 5
018) The Wood at Midwinter by Susanna Clark, finshed April 8
019) Rave by Jessica Campbell, finished April 13
020) The Creeps: A Deep Dark Fears Collection by Fran Krause, finished April 14

 

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