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harrietj's reviews
422 reviews
Ghost World by Daniel Clowes
4.0
Reading this as a 33 year old is very different from reading it as a fifteen year old.
Of course Clowes' art is as stylish and cold as ever. Of course his dialogue is as well-observed and cutting - but I found the characters much sadder and the ending hit a lot harder, too. Enid is so transparently desperately insecure and just edging into some real self awareness. She's the quintessential 'will come into her own the minute she leaves town and grows up a bit' girl. The incredibly devoted and yet deeply apathetic female friendship (of convenience?) that comes from living in a small town and the push-and-pull of needing each other and needing to get away from each other in equal measure is very well realised.
The one thing I will say is that I actually enjoyed the experience of reading this comic even less as an adult than I did as a slightly bemused teenager. The humour works, but it's cruel, and twisted up to a point where it's really difficult to tell who is the butt of the joke. The peripheral characters, or the girls themselves? Perhaps everyone?
I love Dan Clowes but Ghost World might not be my favourite book of his, even if I think it probably is one of his most acutely realised.
Of course Clowes' art is as stylish and cold as ever. Of course his dialogue is as well-observed and cutting - but I found the characters much sadder and the ending hit a lot harder, too. Enid is so transparently desperately insecure and just edging into some real self awareness. She's the quintessential 'will come into her own the minute she leaves town and grows up a bit' girl. The incredibly devoted and yet deeply apathetic female friendship (of convenience?) that comes from living in a small town and the push-and-pull of needing each other and needing to get away from each other in equal measure is very well realised.
The one thing I will say is that I actually enjoyed the experience of reading this comic even less as an adult than I did as a slightly bemused teenager. The humour works, but it's cruel, and twisted up to a point where it's really difficult to tell who is the butt of the joke. The peripheral characters, or the girls themselves? Perhaps everyone?
I love Dan Clowes but Ghost World might not be my favourite book of his, even if I think it probably is one of his most acutely realised.
A Line Above the Sky by Helen Mort
3.5
I felt like an interloper reading this book. I've never climbed mountains and I've never had children. I've never seen the appeal of hammering metal into a mountainside simply to haul myself up it; it's the antithesis of everything I hold close in my relationship with nature. I've never felt the madness of growing someone inside myself only to have to let them go. But I do love to be outside, and to smell heather and bracken, and I know the tug of needing two things at once, and I liked this book a lot for the way Helen Mort explored those things.
It was a little all over the place, and not entirely what I expected, but this book did hit well.
It was a little all over the place, and not entirely what I expected, but this book did hit well.
The Clearing by Tim Gautreaux
5.0
'For a long time he stared at the spot... and wondered if he would be punished by God for the deaths he caused or if the killing itself was the punishment'.
This was just a spectacular book. It's about tallying up and trading, like for like, life for life. The value of things. So many references to what a life is worth, and whether it's wrong to cash in a balance. What a forest is worth to a man, and to a woodpecker. How long it takes to create something - fifteen hundred years for a forest, a lifetime for a man - and how long it takes to destroy it. Whether it's worth it to shoot a white man in the shin if the doctor won't treat a black man. All against a beautifully well described backdrop of the adding up and summarising of the sale of lumber and machines, business done at a discreet distance, and in the boot-sucking mud of the swamp, or the battleground.
This book has so much to say about war, and business, and nature, and family, and the effects of all these things upon a man, that I cannot possibly put it all into this review, but it was an exquisite book, so well realised and so true. I loved it.
This was just a spectacular book. It's about tallying up and trading, like for like, life for life. The value of things. So many references to what a life is worth, and whether it's wrong to cash in a balance. What a forest is worth to a man, and to a woodpecker. How long it takes to create something - fifteen hundred years for a forest, a lifetime for a man - and how long it takes to destroy it. Whether it's worth it to shoot a white man in the shin if the doctor won't treat a black man. All against a beautifully well described backdrop of the adding up and summarising of the sale of lumber and machines, business done at a discreet distance, and in the boot-sucking mud of the swamp, or the battleground.
This book has so much to say about war, and business, and nature, and family, and the effects of all these things upon a man, that I cannot possibly put it all into this review, but it was an exquisite book, so well realised and so true. I loved it.