Book Review...and well books in general
Aug. 27th, 2019 09:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shadowkatGot suckered by SmartBitches into purchasing A Curious Beginning (Veronica Speedwell Mysteries #1) by Deanna Rayburn which is on sale for .99 cents at Amazon Kindle.
After burying her spinster aunt, orphaned Veronica Speedwell is free to resume her world travels in pursuit of scientific inquiry—and the occasional romantic dalliance. As familiar with hunting butterflies as with fending off admirers, Veronica intends to embark upon the journey of a lifetime.
But fate has other plans when Veronica thwarts her own attempted abduction with the help of an enigmatic German baron, who offers her sanctuary in the care of his friend Stoker, a reclusive and bad-tempered natural historian. But before the baron can reveal what he knows of the plot against her, he is found murdered—leaving Veronica and Stoker on the run from an elusive assailant as wary partners in search of the villainous truth.
I can use my credits -- for the items I've returned. I returned "In Her Defense by Juliana Keyes" today after giving up on it, I'd made it through three-four chapters or approximately forty pages, when I realized, I hate this book. Good bye.
So back it went. You can do this with Amazon -- but alas, you have to be quick about it. They will not allow you to return books that you've had for several weeks. Or over a week or several days. So, I can't return the Twitty book, although I may go back to it at some point. I didn't hate that book -- just wasn't in the mood.
(In Her Defense is the book I was whinging about in last night's post.)
In other book news, I just finished the Neil Gaiman/Colleen Doran graphic novel Snow, Glass, Apples -- which is graphic novel adaptation of Gaiman's chapbook short story retelling of the Snow White fairy tale. The art takes center stage in this one and it is brilliant, also Gaiman's tale is haunting and horrifying/witty in Gaiman's signature style.
In this version, the Queen is the hero, Snow White is the monster -- although the book raises many unanswered questions at the end. What I found rather innovative and also, when I thought about it - of course, that makes total sense, why hasn't anyone else come up with this? Snow White is a vampire. Yes, this explains so much. Lips as red as blood. Eyes black as night. Skin white as snow. Apparently Gaiman found something else to say about vampirism.
The narrative is completely in the Queen's point of view. And it is just a narrative, no dialogue.
Illustrator and comic book artist Colleen Doran's art is beautiful and different. She applies the techniques of Harry Clark.
You talk about this a little in the afterward of the book but who was Harry Clarke, and how did you originally discover his work?
He was the center of the Irish Arts and Crafts movement. He’s best known today for his work in stained glass, but he was an illustrator who was heavily influenced by Aubrey Beardsley. I first discovered his work having mistaken it for Beardsley, and did art in the style when I was a teenager.
His work is weird, much weirder than I went with on Snow, Glass Apples, his figures tubercular and grotesque. His line art ranges from very controlled and decorative, to kind of scratchy and heavily rendered. It’s a fever dream approach, which probably reflected his mental state as he was ill and died young. But he was immensely productive.
It was hard to find work by him when I first discovered it, but I was able to get Harry Clarke: His Graphic Art in the 1983 edition and I held on to it for dear life. His work is becoming more well-known though. There are some attractive new books. For awhile, he wasn’t as well-regarded as one would think. Modernism ate it. I was at a museum in Dublin last year. They described having found one of his stained glass panels by fishing it out of the trash.
What made Snow, Glass, Apples a good fit for this kind of style and what was the conversations around working on this adaptation and the process of it?
I’d always wanted to do a comic in this style, but most publishers didn’t seem very keen on the look, and any time I tried to push something like it in the past, I was blown off. I did a short story back in the 1980’s called Eugenie which was more Beardsley-esque, and it didn’t seem to make much of an impact, though in general, my work wasn’t well-regarded back in the day so maybe it wasn’t very good or maybe people just ignored it. Regardless, Neil Gaiman loves Harry Clarke’s work and owns an original. I told him I was aching to do something in this style, and sent him the art I’d done based on Clarke’s work years ago as proof of concept. He loved the idea of going full Harry on Snow.
It took me a few weeks to get into the mindset. To understand the use of black and white, negative space, his decorative sense, I just had to read and read and read. I did one sketch, which didn’t really fit the mood, Neil correctly decided it was too YA-looking, but I nailed the style by the second sketch.
I struggled a bit with how to approach the figures. As I said, Clarke’s figures are often kind of grotesque and I didn’t want to go that far. The body language he uses is also quite melodramatic and staged. I think people are going to assume the faces and figures in Snow are influenced by manga, but they are quite close to Clarke’s approach when his work was at its most decorative. I threw out pages where I thought I might be slipping into manga looks. Clarke developed those large eyes and stylized faces decades before the style was seen in manga.
Artists influence each other, as my brother used to tell me, art is in the interaction with the material and what others bring to it and take away from it. The biggest compliment you can pay any artist is when you borrow their techniques, or characters or world to play with on your own -- it means on some level they hit you at your core.
I'm very visual -- I think in pictures. And when I hear music or sounds, I see them visually. I can see a word often before I can pronounce it. And will spell it or write it out -- because saying it is almost impossible at times. Also, I often find reading comics and graphic novels easier than reading text. Because I think in spatially, in patterns and in images. When I discovered that graphic novels existed (ones outside of Tin-Tin, comics in the newspaper, and the lackluster comics my brother read, with the rudimentary art that he'd copy in tiny detail) -- I went nuts. It was in college, freshman year, a friend had a box of them -- X-men comics. Then I found a store, and there it was -- Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, Sandman,
The Dreaming...and I was hooked for life. But alas, I got bullied for having them, so I hid them and only discussed them with fellow comic-collecting souls. We all hid them in our closets in the dorm, in boxes, and didn't speak of it aloud.
Years later, I feel the need to shame those for bullying people for loving comics.
But alas, I've seen myself do it -- with the Twilight books and the Bachelor series.
So, none of us, appear to be immune. Oh, well, now that I'm aware of this? I will try to do better. That's I guess, all anyone can do. And forgive. I need to work on the forgiving part. My Grandmother was right -- I have the memory of an elephant, and know all to well how to hold a grudge, and often hold it too long. OTOH. I don't seek vengeance. I just tend to remove myself.
After burying her spinster aunt, orphaned Veronica Speedwell is free to resume her world travels in pursuit of scientific inquiry—and the occasional romantic dalliance. As familiar with hunting butterflies as with fending off admirers, Veronica intends to embark upon the journey of a lifetime.
But fate has other plans when Veronica thwarts her own attempted abduction with the help of an enigmatic German baron, who offers her sanctuary in the care of his friend Stoker, a reclusive and bad-tempered natural historian. But before the baron can reveal what he knows of the plot against her, he is found murdered—leaving Veronica and Stoker on the run from an elusive assailant as wary partners in search of the villainous truth.
I can use my credits -- for the items I've returned. I returned "In Her Defense by Juliana Keyes" today after giving up on it, I'd made it through three-four chapters or approximately forty pages, when I realized, I hate this book. Good bye.
So back it went. You can do this with Amazon -- but alas, you have to be quick about it. They will not allow you to return books that you've had for several weeks. Or over a week or several days. So, I can't return the Twitty book, although I may go back to it at some point. I didn't hate that book -- just wasn't in the mood.
(In Her Defense is the book I was whinging about in last night's post.)
In other book news, I just finished the Neil Gaiman/Colleen Doran graphic novel Snow, Glass, Apples -- which is graphic novel adaptation of Gaiman's chapbook short story retelling of the Snow White fairy tale. The art takes center stage in this one and it is brilliant, also Gaiman's tale is haunting and horrifying/witty in Gaiman's signature style.
In this version, the Queen is the hero, Snow White is the monster -- although the book raises many unanswered questions at the end. What I found rather innovative and also, when I thought about it - of course, that makes total sense, why hasn't anyone else come up with this? Snow White is a vampire. Yes, this explains so much. Lips as red as blood. Eyes black as night. Skin white as snow. Apparently Gaiman found something else to say about vampirism.
The narrative is completely in the Queen's point of view. And it is just a narrative, no dialogue.
Illustrator and comic book artist Colleen Doran's art is beautiful and different. She applies the techniques of Harry Clark.
You talk about this a little in the afterward of the book but who was Harry Clarke, and how did you originally discover his work?
He was the center of the Irish Arts and Crafts movement. He’s best known today for his work in stained glass, but he was an illustrator who was heavily influenced by Aubrey Beardsley. I first discovered his work having mistaken it for Beardsley, and did art in the style when I was a teenager.
His work is weird, much weirder than I went with on Snow, Glass Apples, his figures tubercular and grotesque. His line art ranges from very controlled and decorative, to kind of scratchy and heavily rendered. It’s a fever dream approach, which probably reflected his mental state as he was ill and died young. But he was immensely productive.
It was hard to find work by him when I first discovered it, but I was able to get Harry Clarke: His Graphic Art in the 1983 edition and I held on to it for dear life. His work is becoming more well-known though. There are some attractive new books. For awhile, he wasn’t as well-regarded as one would think. Modernism ate it. I was at a museum in Dublin last year. They described having found one of his stained glass panels by fishing it out of the trash.
What made Snow, Glass, Apples a good fit for this kind of style and what was the conversations around working on this adaptation and the process of it?
I’d always wanted to do a comic in this style, but most publishers didn’t seem very keen on the look, and any time I tried to push something like it in the past, I was blown off. I did a short story back in the 1980’s called Eugenie which was more Beardsley-esque, and it didn’t seem to make much of an impact, though in general, my work wasn’t well-regarded back in the day so maybe it wasn’t very good or maybe people just ignored it. Regardless, Neil Gaiman loves Harry Clarke’s work and owns an original. I told him I was aching to do something in this style, and sent him the art I’d done based on Clarke’s work years ago as proof of concept. He loved the idea of going full Harry on Snow.
It took me a few weeks to get into the mindset. To understand the use of black and white, negative space, his decorative sense, I just had to read and read and read. I did one sketch, which didn’t really fit the mood, Neil correctly decided it was too YA-looking, but I nailed the style by the second sketch.
I struggled a bit with how to approach the figures. As I said, Clarke’s figures are often kind of grotesque and I didn’t want to go that far. The body language he uses is also quite melodramatic and staged. I think people are going to assume the faces and figures in Snow are influenced by manga, but they are quite close to Clarke’s approach when his work was at its most decorative. I threw out pages where I thought I might be slipping into manga looks. Clarke developed those large eyes and stylized faces decades before the style was seen in manga.
Artists influence each other, as my brother used to tell me, art is in the interaction with the material and what others bring to it and take away from it. The biggest compliment you can pay any artist is when you borrow their techniques, or characters or world to play with on your own -- it means on some level they hit you at your core.
I'm very visual -- I think in pictures. And when I hear music or sounds, I see them visually. I can see a word often before I can pronounce it. And will spell it or write it out -- because saying it is almost impossible at times. Also, I often find reading comics and graphic novels easier than reading text. Because I think in spatially, in patterns and in images. When I discovered that graphic novels existed (ones outside of Tin-Tin, comics in the newspaper, and the lackluster comics my brother read, with the rudimentary art that he'd copy in tiny detail) -- I went nuts. It was in college, freshman year, a friend had a box of them -- X-men comics. Then I found a store, and there it was -- Watchmen, Dark Knight Returns, Sandman,
The Dreaming...and I was hooked for life. But alas, I got bullied for having them, so I hid them and only discussed them with fellow comic-collecting souls. We all hid them in our closets in the dorm, in boxes, and didn't speak of it aloud.
Years later, I feel the need to shame those for bullying people for loving comics.
But alas, I've seen myself do it -- with the Twilight books and the Bachelor series.
So, none of us, appear to be immune. Oh, well, now that I'm aware of this? I will try to do better. That's I guess, all anyone can do. And forgive. I need to work on the forgiving part. My Grandmother was right -- I have the memory of an elephant, and know all to well how to hold a grudge, and often hold it too long. OTOH. I don't seek vengeance. I just tend to remove myself.