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.

Saha

by Anna

By Cho Nam-Joo

I’m not even sure what genre to give Saha: novel seems too bland, and while it is certainly dystopian, it is neither futuristic scifi or magical fantasy. It is nominally a mystery as the protagonist searches for her missing brother after his girlfriend is found dead, but there’s little hope of a pat solution for either Jin-kyung or the reader. It is also a searing indictment of capitalism and the corporatization of society.

The novel mostly takes place in Saha, a block of decaying apartments that are the only home permitted to those not granted citizenship in the corporate-owned Town. Though Jin-kyung and her brother kick off the novel, it jumps around between different characters and time-periods at breakneck speed. Many of the scenes reflect bits and pieces of real news stories in haunting detail: a ship full of refugees/deportees ‘disappearing’ into the sea and being forgotten as the news cycle changed; ‘free’ medical treatment but with insurance premiums so high they bankrupt people; the non-citizens only permitted to scrabble for the most difficult and dangerous jobs:

“A life of doing repetitive menial labor without any assurance of compensation was like walking down a path backward. Life was terrifying and tedious. Every time they paused to take stock of their lives, they found themselves unfailingly worse off than before; Saha residents thus grew more childish, petty, and simpleminded.”

I think I’ve mentioned before that I’m not particularly affected by horror novels, but Saha’s scenes were so gripping that I struggled to put the book down and then carried the tension of the book with me through several restless nights. It is not a comfortable book, but it is an excellent one.

About two-thirds through the book, I had an inkling of the thesis: the majority of the society of trapped into these strict castes, and the people are either uninterested or unable to combat the systemic structure. A few people try, though: one of which, without spoilers, is a do-gooder upper caste Citizen who tries to help the lowest caste of illegal Saha, but through her own inexperience and ignorance of their life, oversteps and makes things worse for herself and those around her. At the same time, scenes from the book that seemed to jump around time and place all start to circle around how the Saha slowly built up their society for themselves, based on mutual aid between what each needed and could offer.

It’s such a difficult theme to discuss and dissect, that outsiders often can’t help at all, no matter how well-intentioned, while those inside the oppressed group are prevented as much as possible from helping themselves—that this is how systemic oppression works, and it is very, very hard to deconstruct. It is perhaps more accessible to read about in an allegorical novel set in a fictional setting than to try to delve into the many real-world examples. On a more hopeful note, it does also portray that those who fight the oppression from within, even if they don’t manage to accomplish all that they’d hoped, can push progress forward in ways they wouldn’t have imagined.

By The Book

by Anna

By Jasmine Guillory

I had known that this was a modern day retelling of Beauty and the Beast, but hadn’t realized that it was explicitly Disney, like from a Disney imprint. I’m not a Disney adult (I wasn’t even that much of a Disney kid), so even the relatively subtle allusions to Mrs. Potts and Lumière made me roll my eyes. Despite myself, though, I found myself charmed—Guillory’s skill with characters kept me wanting to know what happened next.

Protagonist Isabelle (goes by Izzy, not Belle) is working in her first career job as an editorial assistant at Tale as Old as Time publishing house (sigh), and facing the disillusionment with her dreams that I assume most of us do in our mid-20s. In a somewhat desperate (and tipsy) attempt to gain favor with her harsh boss and to rekindle her passion for publishing, she offers to coax a much belated manuscript out of child-actor-turned-messy-adult, Beau.

Beau, of course, lives in a beautiful, huge house with extended gardens (and essential large library) in semi-isolation as he struggles with severe writer’s block. He is rude and somewhat mocking to Izzy at first, but nothing egregious. It’s a tricky thing to write a “beast” who is sufficiently off-putting but not abusive, and I don’t have any solutions to that, but Beau felt mild enough that I struggled to fully empathize with Izzy’s antagonism. He seemed like kind of a dick, Izzy on her last thread of patience, and I would have shrugged them both off.

However, once they found a level of friendship working on Beau’s manuscript, I was much more interested in the process by which Izzy talks Beau into overcoming his fear of the blank page, something I assume Guillory has her own vast experience with. Of course, the end got more romantic (though stayed pretty solidly PG with all sex happening off page) and less about the publishing world, so I was less into it, but it did all wrap up very satisfyingly, maybe even a little too pat, though that is to be expected with fairy tales, right?

Slumdog Millionaire by Vikas Swarup

by Rebecca

Slumdog Millionaire
by Vikas Swarup
2005

This is a difficult review to write because I did enjoy the book a lot, but also have so many warnings to give before actually recommending it. For example: there is a lot of sexual violence. And also a distinct current of poverty porn (sort of on the level of Oliver Twist). And the dog dies. Also a lot of people die. There’s racism, sexism, classism, homophobia, and general normalized corruption. But it’s also really fun?

The book reminds me of the movies Being There and Forest Gump. Our main character, Ram Mohammad Thomas, is not simple-minded like Gardner or Gump, but he is uneducated, and the premise of all three stories is that the main characters live these wild lives that fit together perfectly by pure providence.

The premise of this book is that Ram has just won a game show by correctly answering thirteen increasingly difficult trivia questions in a row. The game show accuses him of cheating because there’s no way for him to have the level of education to know the answers. The over-all structure of the book is divided into a chapter per question, with Ram telling his lawyer about the portion of his life that led to him knowing the answer to the specific question even if he didn’t know the subject in general. He’s only eighteen, but his life is just this wild ride of being an orphan raised by a priest, sent to an orphanage, acquired by a beggar gang, working as a servant, working as a waiter, running from the police, and meeting all these different people with their own wild stories. 

There’s this huge cast of idiosyncratic characters and while many of the experiences are either traumatic or end in tragedy or both, Ram rolls with it all in a “this might as well happen” way. There’s also a strong thread of situational humor to go along with the horror that makes for a delightful if somewhat boggling experience.

Plus, there are some amazing plot twists, both in the individual chapters and in the overall book plot arc.

I really enjoyed this book, and it covered rough ground extremely lightly, but any potential reader should decide for themselves if they’re up for trying it.

I did wonder if I needed to watch the movie, if only to see how they dealt with all the trauma and also how they would cover so many stories without being at least ten hours long. Since I’d just read the book, I went ahead and read a summary of the movie and the movie solved both problems by sharing only the premise and structure of the book while changing the character and life history completely to something a lot more generic. Which, in my opinion, really misses the point.

Ink by Angela Woodward

by Rebecca

Ink: a novel
by Angela Woodward
2023

Every so often I try reading a literary work and relearn why I don’t read that genre. Woodward is a skilled wordsmith and her writing is lyrical, but her worldview is distasteful and her world-building is poor. Both the characters and the narration are unpleasant in an undeserving way.

I was reminded of a time when I went on a walk with a work friend: we were having a good time mostly window-shopping and chatting in a walking district, when I tripped: stumbled over my own feet, fell to my hands and knees. A few passersby paused but I was fine, I got back up and we continued to walk. The only reason I remember the instance at all is that my work friend said that if that had happened to him, it would have ruined his whole day. He lived in a world where tiny meaningless mistakes could overwrite hours of enjoyment, and the attention of strangers meant critical judgment and inspired shame.

That was his lived experience and I imagine something similar is also Woodward’s experience, and it is certainly her characters’ experience, and it’s such a miserable world to live in: constant judgment both internal and external and no freedom to just enjoy what you can. As Anna pointed out when I complained to her about it: there’s also the meta aspect of Woodward and her characters expecting to be criticized for everything and here I was criticizing them. So it’s not necessarily wrong, but just overly weighted in that direction.

This book is trying to do something interesting, with three different threads: the expected thread of the novel with it’s characters and events, a series of digressions into the history of ink as a substance, and a first-person account of the author discussing her life and writing process for this book.

I found the history of ink fascinating, but untrustworthy. I wish I had read it in a nonfiction book. The first-person accounts I found mostly confusing as to it’s purpose. Perhaps to differentiate Woodward from her even more unhappy characters?

The novel section is what had inspired me to read the book (and not just because that’s the only part that’s in the blurb): it’s about two women who are transcribing the Abu Ghraib detainee statements in the early 2000s. That was around the same time I was doing freelance transcription for various studies in academia: nothing as terrible as first-person torture accounts but enough difficult subjects that I understand some of the impact it can have.

Unfortunately, the book treats the subject as a simple conceit and doesn’t otherwise address it. There are a few short recurring excerpts from those interviews interspersed for shock value, but that was it. At the beginning I thought it was an interesting demonstration of how the mind can shy away from horror by considering more minor aspects: Here’s a single sentence about torture, let us now read several pages on the history of ink. But by the end of the book, as the few repeated excerpts came up, they were treated more like intrusive thoughts to be entirely disregarded, rather than parts of stories that the women were spending days, weeks, months, listening to.

The experience of listening to stories of trauma for hours on end, or even the experience of straining your ears to hear exactly what is said, the click-whirr of the machine, the delight in slow speakers and the difficulty of quick speakers, or the shear physicality of typing all day… None of it was addressed. The characters’ experience was so completely different from mine that it seemed unlikely that Woodward had ever tried transcribing. Or maybe her body, ears and hands all work as differently from mine as her worldview does. 

Woodward explicitly states that she was imaging what these people who must have existed would be like, but increasingly it frustrated me that this isn’t at all what they would be like, starting with being English-speaking only. Woodward wrote a novel about two women in an office environment who both have various levels of unpleasantness in their home lives, but the details of their job appeared to have no impact on them whatsoever.

This book had so much potential: a fascinating premise by a talented wordsmith, and it’s really irritating how poor the results were.