Sunday, March 01, 2009

Read in February

I do these posts every month, mostly as an index to my posts about books -- though partly also to serve as a backup to my handwritten booklog. (And also, not to forget, because I find the making of lists to be very soothing.) There are usually a few things scattered in the middle that didn't get their own posts, but those are pretty rare.

Posy Simmonds, Tamara Drewe (2/16)
I've been informed that this is a loose adaptation of Hardy's Far From the Madding Crowd, but I've never read that novel, so don't take my word for it. It's a very assured, novelistic graphic novel that relies much more heavily on extensive text sections than I'm entirely comfortable with; it doesn't quite manage to integrate the story it wants to tell into comics, but lets the most important parts of that story (the internal monologues in particular, and, a few times, important scenes) happen, much of the time, in prose which is then illustrated by comics. This may be a format quibble, but I think it's about something more fundamental: what kind of text a particular work actually is. Tamara Drewe is somewhere between a fine novel and a fine graphic novel, but doesn't come down solidly on either side.
That's what I read last month; not bad for twenty-eight days, I think.

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