Three books this week, all of them from the library. I've already read one of them, so let's get right into it:
Banned Book Club is a graphic novel written by Kim Hyun Sook and Ryan Estrada and drawn by Ko Hyung-Ju, about a young woman named Kim Hyun Sook who goes to college in her native South Korea in 1983. There, she gets caught up in protests against the oppressive government, almost without realizing it, by joining the title group. It's not exactly the real Kim Hyun Sook's story - all of the other characters are composites - but it's broadly true, and closer than a work of fiction about the same years would have been.
Asadora! Vol. 1 is the first in a series by Naoki Urasawa, who is one of the big names in manga. (I've only read the first two volumes of
Pluto myself, and maybe some
Pineapple Army way back in the mists of time.) The book itself says nothing about the story, but it has a cute girl posing on the front cover and what looks like an apocalypse in the opening pages, so I have no idea what it's about. I'm sure I saw a recommendation of it somewhere.
Sports Is Hell is a short graphic novel by Ben Passmore about, as I understand it, the US fascination with the violence of sports and what that means culturally. Passmore is, how do I say this politely?,
not a shrinking violet about his political ideas, which tend to be on the leftist end of things. So I expect a lot of opinions, strongly held - which is the point of a book like this. Passmore is also the author of
Your Black Friend; that's probably where most people would know him from.
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