Reviewing the Mail: Week of 2/27/21

This week, a few books arrived from the library -- I'd ordered another big batch because my shelf of graphic novels to read has dwindled to practically nothing. (Literally: there's barely half a shelf right now, including several books that are "comics" by courtesy and are mostly text.) So these were the first round of stuff that the mighty SirsiDynix was able to provide me:

Snapdragon by Kat Leyh -- I can't remember where I first heard of this, so it's probably a good example of that old saw, that you don't read a book until you've heard about it ten times. I do know Leyh's work from Lumberjanes (which I think I have stopped reading at this point, since it kept feeling like it really was Not For Me and I always felt like I was intruding on something). It's a YA story about a girl and an old woman -- at least one of whom is a witch -- and seems to be one of those stories in which stuff now has to untangle a whole lot of events from the past.

Cannabis by Box Brown is subtitled "The Illegalization of Weed in America," and take another look to make sure you didn't miss the IL there. It's a nonfiction graphic novel roughly tracing the history of what I want to call marihuana in the best old-timey manner, starting off with some prehistoric fellow on a beach and jumping to the ancient Hindus pretty quickly. From the subtitle, I imagine it settles down to the New World not too much later. Brown has made a bunch of nonfiction books like this before: I've seen Tetris and Andre the Giant, and his career, I think, is roughly in that space: pop-culture stuff of interest to people around my generation and his.

Solutions and Other Problems by Allie Brosh -- You may have heard of this one; Brosh is kind of a big deal. Her first collection, Hyperbole and a Half, was a major bestseller and critical success nearly a decade ago; this book has been announced several times since then and finally came out this past September. Brosh's work is often painfully personal: pseudo-comics essays about how she interacts with the world (or, far too often, avoids doing so). I think a lot of us are worried about her, in a low-key way: she's good enough at making her stories that we almost understand her pain and that makes us want to be able to fix it. Of course, there are millions of other people we should be worrying about at least as much, who haven't written bestsellers. I don't have a good solution for that problem. But caring more, for whoever, is a good start. Anyway, Brosh's work is deep and resonant and powerful in its quirky MS Paint way, and makes you think about important things even before you read it.

Slaughterhouse-Five is a novel by Kurt Vonnegut that you may have heard of; Ryan North (of Dinosaur Comics and Squirrel Girl) adapted it into a graphic novel drawn by Albert Monteys. I re-read the novel about a year and a half ago, and keep thinking I should re-read more Vonnegut -- but this is here and this is short and I remember this story well, so I can compare it in my head and write possibly interesting stuff here. And it's one of the most important novels of the 20th century, in my mind, so new versions of it for new audiences are a good thing. There are a lot of people who haven't read Slaughterhouse-Five even once yet.

Paying the Land is the new book by Joe Sacco. As usual for him, it's reportage in comics form, but he's been slowly moving away from warzones over the last decade or so. He's still concerned with the downtrodden, with ethnic groups displaced and disenfranchised, and with systemic inequities, of course: he is still Joe Sacco. But he's less often writing about places where bullets are currently or recently flying. This time out, he's looking at the Dene people of Canada's Mackenzie River Valley, and how well their traditions and lives are holding up in a land that was always cold and dangerous and now is deeply appealing to quick-buck resource-extraction operations who would be happy to ruin mountains and meadows and rivers just to yank out a few tons of valuable minerals. I suspect the answer is "not all that well."