Love, Volume 1: The Tiger by Frederic Brremaud; No, this isn’t some erotic shifter paranormal romance.  It’s a graphic novel about literal tigers in the Southern Asian jungle.  I wasn’t sure what it was going to be about actually.  The front cover has a tiger attacking a panther.  And it is titled “Love”.  So I figured maybe it was going to show that love in the jungle was vicious and ultimately didn’t exist.  I was wrong. Basically tiger wakes up.  Tiger spots Tapir.  Tiger spends […]

There’s been a lot of talk about Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel.  It was a finalist for the National Book Award and a bestseller.  It’s been on display at bookstores and libraries.  So it just so happened to be my book club’s latest pick.  I had high hopes for this book.  I like dystopian/apocalyptic novels, whether they be young adult based or adult based.  But I’m always interested in novels that aren’t made-for-film type young adult novels. Launching into the book, I brought […]

Wow.  So things just got dark for Green Arrow.  In Hunter’s Moon by Mike Grell, Green Arrow is in Seattle in the late 1980’s.  The crimes that he fights are a HUGE shift from the petty crimes he tackled in the collection from the 50’s and 60’s I’ve read previously.  In this collection it spans, kidnapping, bioterrorism, and gay-bashing.  But what I appreciate about the crimes and the way Green Arrow handles them is that the superhero becomes the vehicle for the reader to “fight […]

Continuing my quest to read more Spanish literature, La Dama del Alba (The Lady of Dawn) by Alejandro Casona is my second read.  I had a third one but I had to abandon it because it just wasn’t grabbing my attention.  This time, however, I was into the book from page one.  I should clarify, this is a play, but it was still interesting. So the gist of the plot is that there’s this family in provincial Asturias (Northern Spain, along the Atlantic coast), who’s […]

This was a tough read.  Partly because it was a collection of comics spanning several decades, authors, and traditions, and partly because it’s comic books written in a very elementary style.  It felt like reading Dick and Jane but substituting Green Arrow and Speedy.  After finishing the collection, I realized that this just proves the important distinction between comic books and graphic novels.  Comic books, at least these, are all about telling not showing and wrapping everything up in a nice candy coated four page […]