Notes from a bibliophile

Creativity confounds me. I wish I could be creative and sometimes I trick myself into believing I am, only to get bitch-slapped by reality soon after attempting anything. So this graphic novel is truly confounding to me. I chose it because it is currently a musical on Broadway, and considering I will probably never get to see a show on Broadway, I thought this might be a way to experience it vicariously. First off, I can't imagine how anyone could possibly turn this into a musical. That right there is a creative leap I could never even dream of. But this is a graphic novel/autobiography of an incredibly creative woman and her family, so translating it to the stage is just the most recent creative leap in a long line. Obviously I'm out of my league here. It's the story of Bechdel's childhood through her young adulthood. Her father is an English teacher and her mother an actress. Creativity permeates the entire family and, like a magnet, both binds and repulses Bechde...

Since I've been watching TV more than reading lately, I thought graphic novels might be a bridge to getting me back into reading mode. There will be a lot of graphic novels on here soon. This is the first one that's created just as a stand-alone graphic novel, as opposed to a serialized comic that's had several issues combined into graphic novel-ish format. Scott McCloud wrote the book on comics. Literally. Two books, actually, Understanding Comics and Making Comics . I think I read the former many years ago, but I'm not sure I understand comics any better. Or maybe I forgot what I understood. Anyway, since he is an admired student of the art of the comic, I thought this really needs to be one for the list. Here's the synopsis: David Smith is a New York City artist who's down on his luck. Like really down. When we meet him, he's just lost his job, he's recently lost his patron, he's close to getting evicted, and he's getting absolutely slos...

This was recommended to me by my friend Dario Suarez many, many years ago. Something about the story of the last man on earth and, more specifically, his monkey gave me pause. A monkey? Riiight. I'll get right on that one. But the recommendation has stuck with me. Since I was going to delve into comics/graphic novels anyway, I thought I'd give it a try. The first thing I saw was the blurb right on the cover: "The best graphic novel I've ever read." - Stephen King. Well, damn! Way to bury the lede, Dario! I would have read this a whole lot soon if I'd known that. So for those of you unfamiliar with the story and perhaps as reluctant as I was to give this a try, here's the gist: Some as-yet-unknown event has caused every male on the planet to die. That's people, cows, giraffes, everything with a Y chromosome. We are given two relatively unlikely causal factors - a woman giving birth to a clone, and the removal of an amulet from Jordan. The only two m...

I've written on here before about having lulls in my reading habits. I'm having a doozy right now. I honestly can't remember the last book I read. So instead I'm going to write about what I have been doing. I love Netflix. It's just the most amazing thing. So many TV shows and movies just at my fingertips. If I could have chocolate or pizza constantly at the ready in the same way, I would be a happy girl. It's getting to the network's summer hiatus, so I'll be re-joining the DVD side of Netflix for a few months to get EVEN MORE movies coming to me. So awesome. So I just recently got drawn into The Walking Dead. I'm kind of reluctant to jump onto pop cultural bandwagons, and, having worked at Borders, I felt like zombies were just another bandwagon that people were clamoring to willy-nilly. That and vampires. And werewolves. I didn't even start reading Harry Potter until Prisoner of Azkaban was released. So I thought, "Great. More zombies...