Currently reading
Madame Bovary
Siddhartha
Civil Disobedience and Other Essays (Collected Essays)
The Children Star
Manstealing for Fat Girls
Undersong: Chosen Poems Old and New
Radio Crackling, Radio Gone
Radiant Days
Mythmakers and Lawbreakers: Anarchist Writers on Fiction
Footnotes in Gaza
Berlin: City of Stones: Book One (Part 1)
It’s Berlin, in the years before World War II. We follow a group of characters—including the young art student Marthe, her friends, and a journalist named Kurt Severing—as they live their ordinary lives on what we now know is the brink of a horror. The story sprawls throughout the city, focusing on seemingly unrelated events that we come to see as connected. Nazis are just coming to power, Communists are protesting, American jazz is being played in cabarets, Marthe and Kurt are falling in love, and a mother leaves her Nazi husband to protect her kids. And there’s so much more! Berlin may be the best graphic novel of the last ten years. Jason Lutes uses words and pictures together to tell a story that can’t be told in any other way. He’s at work on a sequel right now, which you can read in installments once you finish Berlin. Like Bechdel (and most of my own favorite cartoonists), Lutes is heavily influenced by Herge (of TIN TIN fame).
