It's that time again, when I've read five-ish books and relate my thoughts. Here we go.
So this is the third volume in the on-going comic Rat queens about a
band of four women, a witch, a demon, a dwarf and a smidgen. They’re bounty
hunters and spend their days fighting, drinking and carousing. In this
instalment they go back to the University of Hannah, who is a demon who dropped
out of Mage University. She finds out her dad is trapped somewhere, and she
wants to know what he’s done to end up like that. And meanwhile they battle
their inner demons, obviously. It was fun. They have a new artist again, and I
liked her style, I thought she was really good, the art is badass. I liked the
story. I found Hannah a bit whiny and self-indulgent in this one, but I loved
the others. I realize Hannah has gone through a lot of crap with the whole,
being a demon thing, but she never really talked to her friends, or to anyone
else. She was just very woe-is-me, no-one-can-understand-my-awful-pain. The others
were smashing. It was a lot of fun and I like it so much.
March book 1 and book 2 by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell
John Lewis is currently a congressman for Georgia in the US. In the 60s
he was very involved in the civil right’s movement. He staged sit-ins at lunch
counters and did the freedom rides where black men and women, and their white
collaborators would go on desegregated buses from the north to the segregated
South. They were usually beaten, shot at, or run over. These books are graphic novels
recounting John Lewis’ experience in the civil right’s movement, leading to the
march in Selma. It’s interspersed with little scenes from John Lewis’ life
today as a congressman, specifically the inauguration of Barack Obama, where
Lewis is on the stage with Obama. It was done in black and white and it was
very stark, but sort of beautiful. It features people like Martin Luther King,
Malcolm X and Diane Nash. It’s also fascinating. Because the civil right’s
movement isn’t very broadly covered in the Norwegian school system, so I don’t
know that I learned about the freedom rides in school. And it’s so violent and
painful. And it was excellent.
This is Caitlin Moran’s manifesto, sort of. It’s basically made up of
quite a few of her newspaper columns. She talks about sex, and music, feminism,
TV, film, parenthood and everything else. I thought it was funny. I think
Caitlin Moran was my sort of introduction to feminism. I like to think I’ve
moved past it. I feel like she’s not necessarily as intersectional as I would
like, but we can’t all be everything. I sound like a pretentious ass. I like
Caitlin Moran. Something Moran talks about a lot, and a group of women she
talks about a lot is the working class. And I feel like a lot of other people
don’t really talk about the working class in the UK, and she is very serious
about it. Moran grew up in Wolverhampton in a huge family, I think they’re 8
kids or something. They lived on Benefits, on a council estate, and her dad
didn’t have a job. And the working class is sort of beleaguered in the UK. And
if you’ve sort of worked hard enough to be seen as middle class, like Moran
arguably has, then you’re almost not allowed to talk about it anymore. And she
doesn’t care and talks about it anyway. And I really like that about her. She
is unapologetically strident about the working class and working class women,
and I think she’s a badass for that. And she’s clever and funny and smart.
The Magicians is about a young man named Quentin Coldwater. He is 17 at
the beginning of the novel, and he is clever and going to an old man’s house to
get interview prep for going to an interview at Princeton. He is sort of lost
and on the brink of serious depression and he’s really into these books about
Fillory, which take place in a magical place named Fillory, and are basically the
Narnia books. On the day of his interview he gets a book, which seems to be the
final book in the series and he steps through a hedge and ends up at a magical
school, Brakebills. And he goes to this magical school and has adventures. It
was really interesting. It’s very much a campus novel for the first half.
Quentin and his friends learn magic and how to be in the magical world. The
school is a college so the kids drink and have sex and do drugs. They’re also
usually very clever, ambitious kids who went to AP classes, so they’re sort of
high-powered and nerdy and invested. I liked it, a lot of people seem to
dislike it because Quentin is insufferable and awful, and he is. He feels very
sorry for himself a lot of the time, and he doesn’t seem to take much charge of
his own life, and he doesn’t try to live the life he has to the max, always
looking for the next thing, which he’s sure will make him happy. I really like
unlikeable characters if they’re done well, and Quentin is done well. There are
however other things that I didn’t like, like the relationship between Quentin
and Penny. It just didn’t make sense to me. One second they’re fighting, then Penny
decides that he can only tell Quentin about his discovery. So I felt like Penny
wasn’t a very good character, which annoyed me. But it was fine. And I am
curious, so I might read the second and third book
This is Kate Bornstein’s sort of follow up to her 1991 book Gender
Outlaw. This is a collection of essays, stories, poems and comics about gender.
It is written by people who identify as gender queer, gender non-conforming,
trans or in some way non-binary. It’s about lots of things that you have to
deal with then you don’t identify as the gender you were assigned at birth. And
it was fascinating. Since I am a cis woman it talks about a lot of things that
I have never thought about, ever. And I feel this thing inside of me that wants
to categorize people, because it’s what I’ve been taught to do my whole life,
and I have to grab a stick and hit that thing inside me and say: “no, shut up,
let people be what they want.” There are people who relate little love stories
with their significant others, there are people who write about the way they
express their gender and how that has changed, and how they aren’t sure, and
how that doesn’t really matter. Like, they can be what they want, and that can
change, because gender is fluid, and that is awesome. It was so beautiful and
weird, and wonderful, and it made me think. And that was great.
Rat queens, volume 3: Demons by Kurtis J. Wiebe, Tamra Bonvillain and
Tess Fowler
Moranifesto by Caitlin Moran
The Magicians is about a young man named Quentin Coldwater. He is 17 at
the beginning of the novel, and he is clever and going to an old man’s house to
get interview prep for going to an interview at Princeton. He is sort of lost
and on the brink of serious depression and he’s really into these books about
Fillory, which take place in a magical place named Fillory, and are basically the
Narnia books. On the day of his interview he gets a book, which seems to be the
final book in the series and he steps through a hedge and ends up at a magical
school, Brakebills. And he goes to this magical school and has adventures. It
was really interesting. It’s very much a campus novel for the first half.
Quentin and his friends learn magic and how to be in the magical world. The
school is a college so the kids drink and have sex and do drugs. They’re also
usually very clever, ambitious kids who went to AP classes, so they’re sort of
high-powered and nerdy and invested. I liked it, a lot of people seem to
dislike it because Quentin is insufferable and awful, and he is. He feels very
sorry for himself a lot of the time, and he doesn’t seem to take much charge of
his own life, and he doesn’t try to live the life he has to the max, always
looking for the next thing, which he’s sure will make him happy. I really like
unlikeable characters if they’re done well, and Quentin is done well. There are
however other things that I didn’t like, like the relationship between Quentin
and Penny. It just didn’t make sense to me. One second they’re fighting, then Penny
decides that he can only tell Quentin about his discovery. So I felt like Penny
wasn’t a very good character, which annoyed me. But it was fine. And I am
curious, so I might read the second and third book
Gender outlaws: The Next Generation edited by Kate Bornstein and S. Bear
Bergman
