Books to Pass Along: On Jenny Lawson

Specifically, this is about "Let's Pretend This Never Happened (A Mostly True Memoir)"

I had never heard of Jenny Lawson, but I read her new book in 2016 after reading the reviews on Amazon and thinking that I should read her work. So I bought that one and read it quickly, and I laughed and laughed much much more than I normally do for books, even humor books.

So of course I had to buy her other book that predated that one. And so I did, and I read it and I laughed and laughed, but not quite as much as I did with the other one. I’m not sure if that is chalked up to laughing fatigue or if the newer one is really better.

I think it comes down to a couple of things. This one is more real. Where Furiousley Happy is a bit more light-hearted, this speaks directly to the author’s mental illness(s), and it makes it a bit harder to laugh with/at her. The second is that there is a good chance that she found her voice and is more confident with it.

Neither of which is to denigrate this book. It is still funny and fun to read and I am going to pass it on to my friends. But when I do, I’ll just have to say how much the other one is better when they give this back to me with a smile on their face.

Bill Griffith's "Invisible Ink": Compelling Story Well Told

I have moved around a lot, but there was only a little bit of time in my life when I came across zippy the Pinhead. I never really liked it. Maybe I came around to it too late or too soon in my life. But that doesn’t matter. This book isn’t about that character. It’s about another character, this a different comic artist who I had never heard of.

It’s actually a compelling story, and well told by Griffith. I mean, If I were to write a whole book about my mom stepping out on my dad for years and years, I’d want to makes sure I did it really well. Because that’s the thing. The impetus for this book is that the artist’s mom had an longstanding affair with the cartoonist and the cartoonist of the book is writing about it. And I just realied how Oedipal that is. Ew ew ew ew.

Birth of a Nation(s): "Democracy" by Papadatos et al.

I picked this up off the shelf because I liked the previous work by the authors, “Logicomix”. I liked that one so much I went out and bought a book of Wittgenstein and then also of Bertrand Russel. I actually read the Russel, maybe I’ll get to the Ludwig.

So reading this was basically in comparison to that book, and in comparison, this one suffers a bit. The authors’ thing is graphic history, and it works to a point. My guess is that this one is not as effective because though there is an interesting story to tell, there are fewer points of reference for me as a modern reader and there are fewer primary texts for the authors to draw on. They also insert a fictional character as the vehicle for they story they are telling, so that the both of democracy has some eyes looking at it and the reader can relate to that person.

I’m not sure if it works and it implies a linearity to the development of democracy that might not be true. Overall, the book could compliment a high school civics class as a way to lighten the mood and engage the students, but it isn’t history in the terms of this is what happened (if even that is history at all either).