It's been a long time -- reacquainting myself with the crew of My Jet Now Air 🛫
Drew this a few months ago as an ode to the flavors of mulled wine! Now I want to make some 🤔
Book 35, 2023
It's not my go-to genre, but reading "The Girl on the Train" I can see how mystery buffs would get annoyed at the intermingling of soapy thrillers with their detective fiction.
I didn't pick up Paula Hawkins' debut novel for myself. It was one of many cheap paperbacks I picked up from the used bookstore at the end of 2018 where I wasn't really looking for quality, I was looking for mysteries that were thin enough or well-worn enough that they'd be easy to hold and easy to follow for my mother. She was in the end stage of colon cancer and chemo and her illness combined to really destroy her fine motor control, the strength in her arms, the length of time she could stay awake, and her general ability to focus. I was just desperate to find something that might give her a bit of distraction. "The Girl on the Train" was one of those books (so was a Murder She Wrote tie-in novel). I don't think she read it. I hope she didn't because it's not really a mystery novel.
After she died, my father went through a period of just leaving bags of her things in my house, without warning or explanation. Once it was a bag of assorted books, including "The Girl on the Train" (but not the Murder She Wrote novel). Eventually, they were taken from their bag in my guest room and put on my bookshelves. Leaving these books that had been in my mother's possession, even if they were used, unread seemed wrong and wasteful. So I read "The Girl on the Train" and it will not be returning to my bookshelf because it is not a keeper.
I've become like those recipe bloggers who give you paragraphs of backstory no one will read that have nothing to do with what they're ostensibly presenting, but for books.
The dearly departed and much loved podcast "I Don't Even Own a Television" read several books that they talked about feeling less like novels and more like a movie script or television show reworked to press into a novel, or a novel written for the purpose of being optioned. "The Girl on the Train" feels like one of those, despite multiple points of view approaching a point of revelation several months apart.
"The Girl on the Train" is a murder mystery, inasmuch as a woman dies mysteriously and another character is trying to figure out whodunnit. But having the main character in your mystery-adjacent novel being an unreliable narrator and immediately establishing that she is an unreliable narrator and she knows it defeats the purpose of an unreliable narrator in a proper mystery novel. It makes the mystery element a muddle narratively, but not from a mystery solving angle.
There are only four named characters who aren't point of view characters.
Hawkins is clearly more interested in the thriller aspect, with our protagonist's uncertainty in what happened and what she knows and how she might be involved intersecting with her depression, alcoholism, and general deteriorating mental state since her divorce and a general poor understanding of personal boundaries. Which is ... fine. It's fine.
But the reason GASLIGHT works is because it begins by establishing a safe and happy normalcy.
There's an interesting premise here, a take on "Rear Window" that gets lost in the soapy drama of the dead woman's life and the protagonist's life and a misguided, poorly attempted twist setup.
Every character except the One (1) person of colour have the most generic, interchangeable white names possible, the sort where I kept having to check which of the two shitty white men were which. One of them was a Tom.
I think.
I hope you didn't read this, Mum. You wouldn't have liked it and it's not really a mystery novel. If you did: I'm sorry.
he had a dream that five strangers silently entered his home and gently helped him pull on a pair of high waisted jeans, which caused him to wake up with a feeling of “indescribable dread”
The Kickstarter is live!
Unicorns: Their Life and Habits is a celebration of unicorns in all their many forms. Not the wispy, white-clad unicorns of mere legend, but the humble, salt-of-the-earth, occasionally flea-bitten (don't tell them I said that) ungulates that caper through our fields and woodlands.
(Seriously, please don't let on that I mentioned the fleas)
This 48 page art book will include illustrations I created in the years 2019-2022, as well as sketches and related lore. Pictures shown are of a mock-up, not the final product
Check out the Kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/625829517/unicorns-their-life-and-habits-art-book
My best friend and I are trying to decide which manga to read together (previously enjoyed: Kuroko no Basuke, Banana Fish, Teppu!, Yasha, Happy!, and Eve no Nemuri: Yasha Next Generation). This is one of the titles we’re considering: Shimizu Reiko’s Moon Child.
Moon Child is the story of a ballet asshole and the amnesiac twink he hits with a car and assumes responsibility for under the strict aegis of car law. He has an ex-girlfriend who will cut you if you remind her she used to date him. He is failing to live up to his adolescent promise. There are at least two identical twinks who appear to the amnesiac twink after the ballet asshole gives him absinthe. The twink has telekinetic powers. This is in the first chapter.
Also in the running is Eyeshield 21 by Inagaki Riichiro and Murata Yuusuke. It's the story of the world's most bullyable child who is tied up in a shed by a demon allowed to attend high school until he agrees to join the demon's American football club.
[ID: Three screencaps from Taskmaster. Sarah Kendall says, “I mean, I don’t want to… I don’t want to boast, but I’ve got pretty good upper-body strength at the moment.” Smiling, Greg Davies replies, “Cool.” End ID.]
[ID: Three screencaps from Taskmaster. Lee Mack stands outside a house, reading from a piece of paper, “Make that balloon hover untethered for 20 seconds.” He looks around, unaware of the red balloon tied to a string about a foot above his head. He asks, “What balloon?” End ID.]
[ID: Five screencaps from Taskmaster. John Kearns says, “Picture it, yeah. You’re driving along. You see a car beside you. You look over at the driver, he’s wearing that.” The studio screen shows a white sailor’s hat decorated with the word “AHOY” in blue letters, as John continues happily, “Everyone’s honking. Everyone loves him.” End ID.]
Ousmane Sembene was a Senegalese author, actor, screenwriter, director, producer, historian, poet, communist organizer and philosopher. He was the first person to ever make a film in an indigenous african language (he often wrote in Senegalese and Lebu Wolof), and he spent much of his life working to dismantle French imperialism, capitalist resource hoarding, and patriarchal violence against women. He’s one of those historical figures whose biography reads as too cool to be true but he truly was that kind of guy.
Unfortunately, most of his films, especially his later work, are hard to access or purchase in western/anglophone markets- I think the criterion collection carries a few of his older films? That being said, a lot of his books were translated into English and are particularly good- God’s Bits of Wood and Xala are definitely the most beginner friendly works from his collection and are pretty easy to find second hand. If you enjoy Western authors and artists like Albert Camus, Emile Zola, or Zora Neale Hurston you’ll definitely appreciate his writing. His work is also influenced by socialist realism, the Harlem renaissance, and Senegalese oral tradition. Compared to other famous west african writers (like Chinua Achebe, or Ngugi wa Thiong’o) Sembene works a lot of satire, irony, and humor into his writings, and his work really strives towards describing African joy, hardship, and community.
He’s such a cool artist and deserves to be more commonly known in the West, especially in Anglophone and Francophone cultures :)
[ID: Two screencaps from Taskmaster. Munya Chawawa says, “Gotta keep my biceps contracted. Like a constipated eagle.” He has a six-pint bottle of milk in each hand and is holding them up at either side of him. End ID.]
Book 34, 2023
Kindaichi, the detective solving "The Honjin Murders" as well as other mysteries by Seishi Yokomizo (most famously "The Inugami Clan"), is the perfect scruffy weirdo for people who love Columbo but want a traditional technically solvable (Yokomizo namedrops "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" in-novel) mystery novel. Tight, no fluff, under 200 pages, just a weird little guy wandering into a crime and some family drama partway through events. Love a little weirdo.
[ID: Five screencaps from Taskmaster. Fern Brady says, “I remember thinking I’d come up with quite a good system, the system of endless plates and that kept us going.” Dara Ó Briain frowns with puzzlement. Fern asks with a confused shrug, “What?” Alex Horne says, “It wasn’t a system of endless plates, there were 12 plates.” End ID.]
Columbo + his basset hound named “Dog”
He doesn’t look like a police dog. Well, he isn’t. He’s a policeman’s dog. Believe me, there’s a big difference.
COLUMBO (1968 - 2003)
I think at this point, my Crow Time comic is a fantasy comic.
It’s the Velveteen Rabbit but stabby.