Recipe for Disaster: 40 Superstar Stories of Sustenance and Survival

by Anna

Collected by Alison Riley

I thought this looked like an intriguing gift for any of my cooking-minded friends, so checked it out of the library to preview it (after a number of astonishing failures, I’m trying to do better about reading books before giving them as gifts). I figured I could flip through it at the very least, but I was shocked how quickly I was thoroughly immersed!

First, it is a beautiful book, with full-page photos to illustrate each story/recipe, and would make an excellent gift I think. This also makes it go by fast: I had casually opened the book just to flip through it, and two hours later, I was halfway through and already eager for the next story. Secondly, it covers so many different foods and so many different situations, including some very timely ones of isolation and illness during the pandemic.

It opens with Samantha Irby’s recipe for Rejection Chicken, a perfect author of brilliant, very human (i.e. often humiliating) stories to set the tone for an anthology about comfort foods in tough times. All the stories were so interesting and varied, with only one dud in my opinion. The final story, too, closed the book with such a humorous disaster that I gasped.

Appalachian Elegy

by Anna

By bell hooks

First, let me apologize for the spam post(s?) that have appeared on this blog (I was honestly mortified). I’m not sure how it happened; I’ve been working with WordPress to bolster the security, but I’m not fully confident it won’t happen again. I guess the only assurance I can offer is that it was probably fairly obvious that we are not trying to advertise Romanian casinos to you?

But also, I’ve been in a bad case of reader’s block lately. I’ve started three different books, and stopped less than halfway through each one, losing interest just to doomscroll twitter, tumblr, and reddit instead. I wasn’t sleeping all that well either, and it felt like part of the same thing: just a little too nervy to really relax.

In desperation to actually finish anything, I picked up the copy of bell hook’s Appalachian Elegy that a friend had given me for Christmas, hopefully last year though I can’t swear to it. I don’t really understand the vast majority of poetry but figured it might work as a palette cleanser of sorts for my brain. It is a very short volume: only 66 one-page poems total, but I took my time with it.

She covers the natural beauty of the Appalachians, and ties it into the people there, both past and present, and the opportunities and oppressions that those people have faced. It is a lot to cover, and yet the poems feel airy and lyrical at the same time. I only read 5 or 6 poems each night, stopping when I felt myself either zoning out or trying to rush through the words, and slowly felt like I was starting to unwind. I still struggled with feeling like I was missing the deeper meaning, and I very likely am, but just the words and rhythms became enough for me. I am still struggling to concentrate on anything longer, but this has certainly helped and I hope to remember to turn to poetry in the future as well.

The Body Factory by Héloïse Chochois

by Rebecca

The Body Factory: from the first prosthetics to the augmented human
by Héloïse Chochois
translated by Kendra Boileau
2021

This is another book I bought from Graphic Mundi at the Small Press Expo and it feels a bit like a Mary Roach book, in that it looks at the history and development of a fascinating but somewhat disturbing topic, in this case amputation and prosthetics. This being a graphic novel* came with some pros and cons in that the illustrations were extremely helpful in following the topic, but also kind of disturbing as the topic started with dismemberment. But it covers a lot of ground very quickly, using a framing story of a young man who loses his arm in a motorcycle accident and is getting through the recovery process.

The book is divided into four main chapters:

  1. Amputation
  2. Phantom Limb
  3. Prostheses
  4. Transhumanism

This book is very much a basic introduction to the topic and concepts that can give you a foundation from which to look into more details, and I found this fascinating and sufficient for the first three chapters discussing history and anatomy but less so for the final chapter which seems a more niche philosophical perspective than a mainstream overview. The mention of how “Eugenics is a matter of great debate among transhumanists who recognize that there are negatives but also positive aspects to eugenics” was a major red flag for me.

So this book is fiction (framing story), nonfiction (first three chapters), and philosophy (fourth chapter.) In some ways this reminds me of Sophie’s World by Jostein Gaarder (a book I only read once, decades ago, so take with a grain of salt) in the way it’s framed, but I didn’t care for that book and I did enjoy this one. Although upon reflection, Sophie’s World was all about philosophy and the one section I didn’t care for in this book was the philosophy chapter.

I did enjoy this book, and I do recommend it, but with some caveats: be prepared for some casual medical gore and expect the fourth chapter to be the author’s take on philosophy rather than the nonfiction of the previous chapters.

* I’ll reiterate a pet peeve of mine that this type of book gets called either a “graphic novel” or a “comic book” and both of those are misleading terms when it comes to books like this one. But I don’t have a better term for it. Sigh.

Power Born of Dreams by Mohammad Sabaaneh

by Rebecca

Power Born of Dreams: My story is Palestine
written and illustrated by Mohammad Sabaaneh
2021

This reads more like prose poetry than a standard graphic novel, and it’s gorgeous and also devastating. Sabaaneh is an artist, journalist, and political cartoonist who lives in the West Bank but wrote this book while getting his masters degree in London and reflecting back on his time as a political prisoner in Israel and his life in general as a Palestinian. It’s about his life and the life of his community in tiny snippets and stories about oppression and holding onto hope because there’s no other recourse than to hope and dream for better.

I bought this book from the Street Noise Books publisher stall at the Small Press Expo before the most recent series of attacks from Hamas on Israel and from Israel on all of Palestine, but only read it after that was already in the news. The two sets of stories, from reading this book and hearing the news, gave each other context and break my heart. This book is not fictional, for all that it’s structured around a man hearing news from a bird who’s flying through his prison window, and the headlines in the news are not just statistics but real people living and dying and struggling to be free.

The main book is about Sabaaneh’s experience in prison and the small amount of news he was able to hear about what was happening with everyone else, but the afterwards are six single pages with basic introductions to significant historical events, locations, and laws effecting Palestine from 1967 to 2020.

The illustrations are all linocuts (images carved in linoleum and then printed), which are both beautiful and increasingly rare because they’re so time consuming to make. I’m pretty sure the only other book I have that’s similar are the wood cuts in Gods’ Man which was written in 1929.

This book is beautiful and heart-breaking but important, about a current political topic (which is rare for me) and I highly recommend it. Just be prepared to take the emotional hit.

Dirty Biology by Léo & Colas Grasset

by Rebecca

Dirty Biology: The X-Rated Story of the Science of Sex
written by Léo Grasset
illustrated by Colas Grasset
2021

This is a fabulous and hilarious non-fiction graphic novel* about the biology of procreation through time and across species, on both theoretical and practical levels, and gives a really good basic introduction to the topics and peculiarities, with lots of great examples. The book is narrated by a small cast of cartoon figures that keep the discussion very conversational, and the cartoon nature of the illustrations keep the discussion amusingly raunchy without being unpleasantly graphic (in my humble opinion.)

I bought it at the Graphic Mundi stall at the Small Press Expo and the woman there said that it was frequently used in biology classes, and I believe it. This made biology really accessible. At the same time as reading this, I was also reading Evolution’s Rainbow by Joan Roughgarden (I haven’t finished that yet) but reading Dirty Biology was helpful in giving me some context to understand Roughgarden. And in a time when trans issues and gender identity are controversial political topics, I find it useful to have an understanding of what “sex” means in biology jargon, which, as it turns out, is completely unrelated to any political talking point I’ve heard.

For the most part, I find graphic novels much quicker reads than the equivalent books, and this was no different, but it still took some time to get through, to properly follow the discussion even with extremely helpful illustrations. I was even slower in the occasional sections delving into topics that weren’t easily illustrated, such as the pros and cons of sexual reproduction versus cloning and the effects of genetic recombination.

Anyway, I highly recommend this as a fun introduction to a complex topic.

*I really wish that there was a term for this kind of book that wasn’t “graphic novel” or “comic book” because those terms just seem really misleading when it comes to nonfiction.

The Appeal

by Anna

By Janice Hallett

Ooh, this book is so good, I started recommending it when I was only halfway through — and I was already halfway through after staying up far too late on the first day of reading. Told entirely through emails, texts, and memos, I never thought I would audibly gasp (and giggle) so many times at the contents of an email!

The communication is primarily among a small community theater group, who become increasingly unhinged under the stress of trying to raise money for an experimental cancer cure for the director’s grandchild. Nothing is quite as it seems, and my speculations and allegiances shifted with each new message. There’s not much more to say without getting into spoilers, and so much of the fun of the book is watching it all unfold, so I’ll keep this short.

One reassurance: though the tagline says “One Murder. Fifteen Suspects. Can You Uncover the Truth?” it does not in fact make you, the reader, solve the mystery, which had been a slight concern of  mine — the book ties up all loose ends very nicely (that said, Kinsey and I had slightly different interpretations of the final ending).

Nonfiction Graphic Novels

by Anna

For several months this summer, my local library ran a reading rewards program for both children and adults, and I should definitely be too old for this, but I was thrilled to be able to read a book and get a little treat for filling out a quick review. After the first few times, I tried to maximize my treats by checking out a bunch of graphic novels, and then didn’t get to them until after the program ended. Even though I didn’t get a chocolate for either of these, I still recommend them quite a bit (and also strongly recommend public libraries)!

The Magical Life of Long Tack Sam

By Ann Marie Fleming

This book, called an “illustrated memoir” caught my eye because it is a really interesting mix of comics panels, photographs, and printed copy, all from the author’s research into her great grandfather. Long Tack Sam was the most famous Chinese acrobat and magician in the US vaudeville circuit in the early 1900s, but he’s basically unheard of today. Fleming pieces together what she can from archival records around the world, and the story she puts together is fascinating.

What is almost as interesting, though, is what she isn’t able to find: Long Tack Sam had told at least three distinct “origin” stories of his upbringing and introduction to acrobatics, all of them about equally likely or unlikely, and with no evidence anymore to substantiate any of them.

In addition to being the story of her great grandfather, it is also the story of Fleming’s search for her ancestry, and also a look at what is preserved and what is lost in history and documents. I occasionally wished the book had explored that last more deeply, but Fleming is already packing a lot into a relatively short book.

The Great American Dust Bowl

By Don Brown

My brother was telling me about the Saharan dust hitting Texas over the summer, and I asked whether that had contributed to the 1930s Dust Bowl. Upon being assured it wasn’t, I realized that I was woefully ignorant of any real knowledge about it and jumped on this very short graphic novel when I saw it at the library. Only 77 pages, and many of them sprawling full-page illustrations, this book is still chock full of facts that seemed to me to give a concise but comprehensive overview of the causes and effects.

The illustrations really captured the horror and scope of it better than the verbal descriptions or numbers. Whole pages of deep brown watercolor splashes enveloping tiny cars in the bottom corner, tall vertical panels with the dust hovering high above the minuscule Washington monument, and 14 panels of storm after storm really give you a sense of how badly the farmers of the plains were pummeled.

Don Brown stays very factual and almost entirely limited to the historical events of the 30s, but still ends the comic ambivalently, that such crises (or worse) could definitely be on the horizon today.

The Fervor

by Anna

By Alma Katsu

I thought the premise of this horror novel was so innovative—weaving traditional Japanese mythos into the historical blight of the US Japanese internment camps—until Rebecca told me it had been done before and by the TV show Teen Wolf, no less. Regardless, this novel does an excellent job with both the mundane and supernatural horrors. In fact, author Alma Katsu covers all her horror bases with spiders, ghosts, contagious illness, war, and my personal bugaboo, man as the true monster.

Some of the horror tropes are more effective than others, but for me, the most gripping was the different perspectives from the disparate and disconnected people all facing the same phenomena, with varying levels of knowledge and culpability. The multiple perspectives allow for personal insights into a fairly sprawling narrative. Our central and most sympathetic narrators are a Japanese-American mother and daughter who are interned in a camp in Idaho. They are making the best of the bad situation until a mysterious illness breaks out in the camps, leading to increased aggression and the arrival of mysterious “scientists.”

This illness ramps up the already paranoid public, and we follow another character lured into the mob mentality, as well as an intrepid reporter trying to get ahead of the government cover-ups. The Fervor was published in 2022, and the relevance to the varied reactions to the covid pandemic is clear. Katsu does a particularly good job, I thought, of maintaining the setting of the 1940s while also teasing out timeless human characteristics.

Miss Aldridge Regrets

by Anna

By Louise Hare

I have very mixed feelings about this book. The central mystery is fiendishly clever, slowly revealed with each chapter and interspersed with short narratives from the unnamed murderer, which tease the identity and motive. Having witnessed the murder by poison of her boss in a London nightclub, Miss Lena Aldridge jumps on the offer of a role in a Broadway musical, accompanied by a first class ticket on an ocean liner to New York. She is reluctantly pushed into companionship with a wealthy family shortly before the patriarch dies by poison, and (minor spoiler) she seems perfectly positioned to take the fall for it.

For much of the book, I was on the edge of my seat, since it seemed impossible that Lena would be able to extricate herself from such a clever trap, especially since, as the murderer describes her on the first page, “She may have possessed both common sense and ambition, but from what I’d learned about her, she rarely used the two together.”

As the book went on, I wasn’t that confident that Lena possessed much common sense, actually. She is sympathetic but not particularly likeable. She sort of drifts through life, drinking far too much, thinking of herself when she should be thinking of others, and thinking of others when she should be most concerned with herself. She is caught completely off guard by the end reveal, and unfortunately so was I, since it was a solution that I’d already dismissed as being both too obvious and nonsensical.

Basically, the end fell so flat that it soured the rest of the book for me. Because I’d been previously so engrossed in the events, the finale was even more of a disappointment. There were also themes of racism, colorism, sexism, and classism woven throughout, but they became so heavy handed in the ending that they reminded me of, not even freshman 101 classes, but the dorm discussions in afterhours that we thought were so deep. Perhaps I’m just getting jaded as I get older.

The Secret Life of Albert Entwistle

by Anna

By Matt Cain

The quoted praise for this book all included words like heartfelt, heartwarming, and heartbreaking, and they aren’t wrong—I laughed, cried, and aww’ed—but it all felt a little heavy handed. Not emotionally manipulative exactly, but not as effortlessly immersive as I’d hoped.

The novel follows Albert Entwistle, a postman nearing mandatory retirement, who is finding himself faced with how narrow his life has become. Intertwined with flashbacks to his youth, Albert’s early experiences with homophobia was so painful and traumatic for him that it turns into pretty severe social anxiety in general. The novel emphasizes how if you can’t be yourself in one way, it tends to bleed into closing off any sort of real relationships with people. That said, Albert’s early experiences are in no way uncommon or extraordinarily brutal, so no content warning needed for those. I get the impression that Matt Cain was more concerned with filling the lack in literature of stories with happy ending for older gay people, so understandably uninterested in delving deep into trauma, which I appreciated.

At times the book feels a little simplistic, in a sort of Forest Gump kind of way. Albert’s search for his secret high school boyfriend from 50 years ago follows a linear step-by-step trail that stretched my suspension of disbelief. On an individual level, though, Albert follows the same path that greater society has taken over the last five decades, his own self-acceptance mirroring the wider cultural progress. Cain is very purposefully walking the reader through an easily accessible guide to LGBTQ+ history.

In fact, he ends the book with some short interviews with gay men in their 60s from small Northern British towns like Albert’s, explicitly because he worried that the history was getting lost. So much has changed in such a relatively quick time, due to the very hard work of activists, that younger generations might not realize how much had to be fought for over the last few decades. Seeing Albert as a stand-in to personify a movement helped make sense of parts of his personality that seemed a little too flat or smoothed over.