Friday, May 8, 2020

Stay-at-home shelfie #42


Yes, it makes me itchy that this photograph is slightly cockeyed. But we'll have to live with that. The hardcover on the left is Habibi, a hefty graphic novel by Craig Thompson. Patrick LaForge, who has had a long career at The New York Times1 but before that was at the York Daily Record (though we never overlapped), calls Habibi "a beautiful, strange and savage graphic novel, exploring the shared myths of judeo-christian-islamic tradition." And author Nnedi Okorafor raved that it was "THE Best Book of 2011." Joan gave it 4 out 5 stars in 2017.

I've read all nine volumes of Saga by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples, and now we just miss it, because nobody knows when it will return from its hiatus. Mister Miracle was Tom King's storytelling-in-12-issues followup to Vision. There's a graphic novel by Mari Naomi, who was mentioned two posts ago. The brownish graphic novel near the middle with no title on the spine is Minna Sundberg's Stand Still, Stay Silent, aptly described as "a light-hearted journey of friendship and camaraderie, with elements of Nordic mythology and some horror." Stand Still, Stay Silent started as a webcomic in 2013.

I read Thi Bui's autobiographical The Best We Could Do, about a family's escape from Vietnam to the United States, last year and found it wonderful, sad, hopeful, enlightening. Five stars. Also excellent is Sarah Glidden's Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches from Turkey, Syria, and Iraq, about 21st century journalism.

To the right are a bunch of fun Marvel characters: Doctor Strange, Sub-Mariner, Luke Cage, Mockingbird. Somebody should consider making some movies or TV shows about these superheroes. I bet they'd be popular.

Footnotes
1. Trivia: LaForge was essentially the originator of the phrase "Retweets are not endorsements" on Twitter.
2. I also highly recommend Naomi's Turning Japanese.

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