Books: quick, quick, slooooooooooooow
May. 29th, 2009 06:05 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
slowfoxTwo very quick reads, yesterday: Slow Storm by Danica Novgorodoff and the final instalment of Y: The Last Man by Brian K. Vaughan and Pia Guerra, both tomes being graphic novels.
Slow Storm is a short tale about an illegal Mexican immigrant named Rafi and a firefighter called Ursa set in Oldham County. A tornado hits, and starts a far in the stables where Rafi lives (he looks after the farmer's horses). The story is sort of concerned with the friendship that develops between Rafi and Ursa, when she rescues him from the fire's remains. I say 'sort of', because it also dwells on Ursa's relationship with her colleagues (or lack thereof), and Rafi's memories of Mexico, and because the ending is somewhat open, leaving you to suspect that this short tale is an interlude in darker story. Beautifully illustrated in watercolours, with sparse, but well-observed text, where Novgorodoff tries to catch the local accents, it has a definite 'short film' feel to it. Pretty good.
The final volume of Y: The Last Man has eluded me at the library for a while. I don't think I've read all the other nine instalments, but I've definitely read most of 'em. I've said elsewhere that I'm torn on this one: on the one hand, it's easy to knock Y as particularly puerile adolescent fantasy (not only is Yorick (the 'Y' of the title) the last man on planet Earth, but the only surviving females just happen to be slim, beautiful and generally scantily clad (disclaimer: I read it for the dialogue. Honest ;-P). On the other hand, there's a definite story being told, and every now and again something about the tale grabs me.
Those were the quick reads. The slow read is proving to be The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby, which is trying to explain what the author describes as the rise of anti-rationalism in the US, through the context of the nation's development from its declaration of Independence onward. This is proving to be a tough read, with lots of big words in dense sentences, with the occasionally sloppy proof-reading adding to the burden (words out of order, words substituted and so on). Jacobs also goes for the cheap trick of quoting survey results (legit), and then tacking on her own unsupported assertions in the same paragraph, in the hope, I cynically suspect, that the proximity of hard data lends her opinion greater substance in the mind of the reader.
However, that's not to suggest that I don't like the book, more just to say that I'm finding it hard-going, and I feel, reading it, that I need to be in questioning mode (read each sentence, then ask 'why?').
Slow Storm is a short tale about an illegal Mexican immigrant named Rafi and a firefighter called Ursa set in Oldham County. A tornado hits, and starts a far in the stables where Rafi lives (he looks after the farmer's horses). The story is sort of concerned with the friendship that develops between Rafi and Ursa, when she rescues him from the fire's remains. I say 'sort of', because it also dwells on Ursa's relationship with her colleagues (or lack thereof), and Rafi's memories of Mexico, and because the ending is somewhat open, leaving you to suspect that this short tale is an interlude in darker story. Beautifully illustrated in watercolours, with sparse, but well-observed text, where Novgorodoff tries to catch the local accents, it has a definite 'short film' feel to it. Pretty good.
The final volume of Y: The Last Man has eluded me at the library for a while. I don't think I've read all the other nine instalments, but I've definitely read most of 'em. I've said elsewhere that I'm torn on this one: on the one hand, it's easy to knock Y as particularly puerile adolescent fantasy (not only is Yorick (the 'Y' of the title) the last man on planet Earth, but the only surviving females just happen to be slim, beautiful and generally scantily clad (disclaimer: I read it for the dialogue. Honest ;-P). On the other hand, there's a definite story being told, and every now and again something about the tale grabs me.
Those were the quick reads. The slow read is proving to be The Age of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby, which is trying to explain what the author describes as the rise of anti-rationalism in the US, through the context of the nation's development from its declaration of Independence onward. This is proving to be a tough read, with lots of big words in dense sentences, with the occasionally sloppy proof-reading adding to the burden (words out of order, words substituted and so on). Jacobs also goes for the cheap trick of quoting survey results (legit), and then tacking on her own unsupported assertions in the same paragraph, in the hope, I cynically suspect, that the proximity of hard data lends her opinion greater substance in the mind of the reader.
However, that's not to suggest that I don't like the book, more just to say that I'm finding it hard-going, and I feel, reading it, that I need to be in questioning mode (read each sentence, then ask 'why?').
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Date: 2009-05-30 03:40 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2009-05-30 07:13 am (UTC)