Fun Home

TOP TEN TUESDAY: Purple, Yellow, and/or Green Book Covers

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly feature hosted by The Artsy Reader Girl. In honour of Mardis Gras today, this week’s theme is to share book covers that are purple, yellow, green or a combination of the three. Turns out I don’t have many purple books but yellow and green ones are more common on my shelves.

Allah is Not Obliged by Ahmadou Kourouma
Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel
La Bastarda by Trifonia Melibea Obono
To Best the Boys by Mary Weber
Thirteen Months of Sunrise by Rania Mamoun

Notes of a Crocodile by Qiu Miaojin
Dangerous Remedy by Kat Dunn
Trout, Belly Up by Rodrigo Fuentes
The Garden of Evening Mists by Tan Twan Eng
Black Moses by Alain Mabanckou

Are there some really obvious purple, green or yellow books that I’ve completely forgotten about?

MINI COMIC REVIEWS: Fun Home, Power Man and Iron Fist Vol. 1 and Filmish

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel

This is a graphic novel memoir from Alison Bechdel (yes, she’s the woman who the Bechdel test is named after) about her childhood and adolescence living in her family’s Victorian home with her rather eccentric family. The memoir is mostly about Bechdel and her relationship with her father, which was both very distant and unusual, neither of them understanding one another until she came out as a lesbian, and learning from her mother that her father was a closeted homosexual.

Fun Home isn’t a linear story, with scenes being revisited when you have been given new information. It’s also both funny and farcical at types when Bechdel recounts her dysfunctional family life. I liked the moments when Bechdel looked back on different events with hindsight, you got to see what the teenage her thought at the time and her own ideas of what really happened now she’s older.

Fun Home features a lot of themes including sexuality, gender roles (Alison preferred to wear “men’s clothes” from a young age) suicide and emotional abuse. It’s an interesting and quick read but I never really felled compelled to keep reading. 3/5.

(more…)

Get Graphic Readathon TBR

Guess what? There’s another readathon I’m going to try and take part in! This one is the Get Graphic Readathon and it’s a weekend-long readathon that’s focused on reading things like comics, graphic novels and manga – basically anything that’s illustrated. The readathon is the brainchild of BOOKadoodles, Whatskappening and PerpetualPages on YouTube and you can follow all the fun of the readathon on the #GetGraphic Twitter account. The Get Graphic Readathon starts Friday 6th October at 5pm wherever you are in the world and ends at midnight on Sunday 8th October in your time zone.

Like many a readathon there’s some challenges you can try and complete while you read as many illustrated books as possible.

Challenges:
1. Read from a new-to-you series
2. Read two instalments of the same series
3. Read a work over 300 pages
4. Read a work with black and white art
5. Read a work picked out by a friend
6. Read at least 5 works

I always base my TBR on the challenges so here we go.

For a new-to-me series I’ve chosen Power Man and Iron Fist Vol. 1: The Boys are Back in Town by David Walker and Sanford Greene. After binge-watching The Defenders the day it was released, I fell in love with the dynamic between Luke Cage and Danny Rand and its got so much potential in the Netflix series. So, I went to Twitter and asked where I should start reading when it comes to the comics and this is what was recommended to me – I’m looking forward to learning more about these characters.

The two instalments of the same series will be Runaways The Complete Collection Volume Three and Four by Brian K. Vaughn and many, many others. These will also work for the work over 300 pages as they are both around 400-500 pages. If I think I’m only going to read one of The Runaways volumes during the weekend, I’ve also got Saga Volume Six and Seven by Brian K. Vaughn and Fiona Staples for the read two instalments of the same series challenge.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel will be my read for the “work with black and white art” challenge and I’m currently running a Twitter poll to decide what I’ll read for the “work picked out by a friend” challenge so feel free to go and vote on that.

Potentially I could complete all six challenges and read at least five works, will it happen though? Who knows! On Saturday I am busy, travelling up to London and back to see a couple of films at the London Film Festival, but Sunday I could spend a lot of time reading.

Are you going to take part in the Get Graphic readathon? I think it’s a great way to get some books off my TBR and I haven’t read my comics for a while.

TOP TEN TUESDAY: Top Ten Books on my Autumn TBR

Top Ten Tuesday is a feature run by BrokeAndBookish each week. This week the topic is, as the title suggests, the ten books we want to read this Autumn. For me this is not just going to be my Autumn TBR, but it’s more like my Books-I-Want-To-Read-Before-The-End-Of-2017-TBR as these are the books I’ve been meaning to get to for ages and it’s about time I just read them.

Flame in the Mist by Renée Ahdieh
I got this in a subscription box earlier this year and there was so much hype around it before it came out. I like that it’s got a Mulan-esque angle to it and the lead sounds great and I like stuff with assassins so this sounds like a book for me.

Uprooted by Naomi Novik
I think I got this for either my birthday or Christmas last year so it’s definitely about time I read it. I’ve heard nothing but great things and the cover’s gorgeous so I really don’t know what’s taken me so long.

When Dimple Met Rishi by Sandhya Menon
This is another book that there’s been so much hype over so when I saw it was cheap on kindle I bought it but I just haven’t read it yet. Admitedlly I have phases of reading my kindle and it’s about time I had another kindle reading binge.    (more…)