I splurged this week on Kate Beaton's new book Ducks. I haven't finished it yet: it's pretty long and quite heavy in its subject matter. But it's SO GOOD. She's so impressive as an artist and writer.
I also bought it and read it this last week. I agree with your assessment! It is soooo good. It's sort of a hard sell, especially if you're coming to it from Hark, A Vagrant. It's not funny with the Bronte jokes.
But it does completely immerse you into that world, and it's a world I do kind of know from memory (having lived in very northern Canada for 18 months of my childhood) and also experience doing construction work out of college. Those very masculine realms and the ingrained sexism (and racism) and culture.
It's just so rich and artfully done that it takes you to places you haven't been and makes you feel them. You will not just know but understand more about the world because she's so good at creating her experience. You can read about capitalism, or environmentalism or sexism but she parses all those complex liminal spaces and you understand the weight of things. Their context. Their human value and cost.
It's really masterful. It did remind me a bit of Alison Bechdel's Fun Home. Very different in subject but similarly adept at catching ambiguities.
On top of everything else, it’s just a gorgeously-made book: The dust jacket, the leafing, the paper stock. It was well worth the 40 bucks to me.
I got to her book launch last week. She gave a bit of a presentation, then did an interview. I didn't stay around to get my book signed because the line was long and I thought I might give my copy away. (And a friend who grew up with her said he could get it signed for me if I wanted)
And a friend who grew up with her said he could get it signed for me if I wanted
Oooh, the Haligonians were on my mind as I read it. Now I want to go to Cape Breton.
Now I want to go to Cape Breton.
You might want to wait until it dries out and turns itself upright again. Fiona hit it hard.
You might want to wait until it dries out and turns itself upright again. Fiona hit it hard.
I saw! Well, they can use my tourist dollars come spring, I guess.
Dracula Daily: IJWTS that it was a pretty clever move by Stoker having Mina figure out the connection goes two ways. Her Ideal Womanhood gets kind of tiresome, but she can be an interesting character. The adaptations where she ends up
a vampire
really irritate me
Has anyone here read the Troll Fell series by Katherine Langrish? They have the whole trilogy at my volunteer job and I was thinking of getting them.
So, I’m working my way through Josephine Tey and I am up to Daughter of Time and there’s a point early on where Alan Grant (the first time I read these books, as a teenager, I did not even notice that it was the same guy in most of them, that’s how little impression he made on me, but now I can see even the ones he doesn’t appear in are probably part of the Alan Grant Universe) mentions that he had seen
Richard of Bordeaux
four times in his youth. Josephine Tey wrote Richard of Bordeaux (under a different pen name) after she had written The Man in the Queue (originally published under that same pen name but later republished as Tey) which featured Grant as a mature detective who had been a soldier in WWI so my brain hurts from the continuity wormhole. It is meant, I am sure, as a jokey Easter egg but it’s bothering me!
