I feel badly calling a true crime book forgettable. There’s an implication that the victim, in this case, Brigitte Scholl, was forgettable, which seems a heartless assertion. But, really, The Scholl Case is not much more than a newspaper article run long. It’s interesting in a mildly benign way, somewhat infuriating in that Brigitte Scholl is definitely presented more in a bitches be crazy style than her husband Heinrich, who frequents sex-workers, cheats on his wife, abandons a child born out of wedlock — so it’s hardly like he’s an upstanding gentleman either. But while Brigitte’s flaws are hammered home almost to the point of inanity, Heinrich’s get side aside with a shrug. Oh well the book seems to say Product of his upbringing. Because, clearly, Brigitte just sprung up fully formed in the GDR fully formed with no outside influences whatsoever *rolls eyes*.

So there’s no grand reveal here. No new evidence. Even Reich-Osang’s interactions with Heinrich are bland, polite letters and visits where nothing much happens. The Scholl Case is refreshingly un-lurid for a true crime book, but that makes it seem more academic than anything else, and, in a sense, a bit purposeless.

The Scholl Case by Anja Reich-Osang went on sale December 29, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Are you sure this doesn’t look too scary? I asked Tesfa.

No. Just read it.

And in the end, Tesfa was right. It wasn’t too scary. The stories are a bit creepy, probably a good creep-factor for my eight year old, and far less frightening than I remember Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark being. There’s nothing too gory, nothing to terrifying, nothing too NSFW. Tesfa liked guessing what was going to happen. I liked that the vocabulary was varied, full of multi-syllabic words and the assumption that kids reading/being read to were intelligent beings. So it was all right, Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror; enjoyed at our house.

Uncle Montague’s Tales of Terror by Chris Priestley went on sale October 6, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I woke up at five this morning, and couldn’t trick myself into sleeping again, so I grabbed my iPad and read Inspired! because if you can’t have beautiful dreams, you might as well stare at beautiful things instead.

Inspired! is a collection of better-written-than-wikipedia-although-containing-the-same-superficial-information entries about twenty different inspired people (actually, one of them is a dog and some chapters are about a partnership, so actually twenty-five people and one dog). I’m not sure how a dog is inspired. It’s a cute story though — Hachikō. My impression is that Inspired! is supposed to be a sort of glossy, flipping-through-it book you find in museum gift shops. Or maybe it’s for tweens/teens to learn about inspired people (and dogs). I could picture myself reading it at the dentist to pass the time. I doubt I’d purchase it though.

Ultimately, it’s an icing book — you aren’t going to feel very full after reading it. Plus, and I am assuming because of copyright issues, art that is referenced in the text isn’t always reproduced (it’s like the book didn’t even know that it was going to be my looking-at-beautiful-things-while-insomnia’d book 😉 ). It’s a bit like a listicle made into a book with a sort of random application of the word inspired (Alexandre Dumas père vs Hachikō vs Bonnie and Clyde vs Suzanne Valadon vs Picasso, etc.)

Inspired! by Maria Bukhonina went on sale December 1, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

Way back in my last year of high school, when I had to choose what programs to apply to at which universities, I considered studying geology for about eighteen seconds until I realized, looking at the courses I would have to take to get a degree, that I have absolutely zero interest in rocks and rock accessories. Like zero. Maybe even less than zero.

And there’s a lot of rock-talk in The Origins of Everything in 100 Pages (More or Less), which is good to get me reading outside my comfort zone. Plate tectonics and astro-geology formation of planets and the like. But every page, my eyes glazed over. Every single page I had to tell myself to focus and not go off and play Tiny Tower. I don’t know whether it was my aforementioned disinterest in geology or that the writing style, while sort of chummy, is also a bit dry, or that maybe, with my background in science (a non-geological science, but a science none-the-less), reading a pop-science book just doesn’t cut it for me anymore, but almost none of the information from this book penetrated my brain. I’d like to imagine that, in an amorphous, don’t-ask-me-to-describe-the-details sort of way, I now have a better idea of planetary formation after the big bang all the way to appearance of Homo Sapiens; maybe holistically I am more well-informed after reading The Origins of Everything in 100 Pages (More or Less). Or maybe not. It’s so frustrating to read a book and have all its ideas float away like smoke.

In short, I still only abstractly think of geology as interesting. When I have to actually learn about it, it’s all Charlie Brown teacher noises inside my head.

And The Origins of Everything in 100 Pages (More or Less) is not 100 pages. My copy is 137 (including unnumbered and small roman numeraled ones) or 124 numbered ones, so somewhere between 124% and 137% of the suggested 100 page length. Man, scientists sure are wishy-washy when it comes to precision with numbers 😉

The Origins of Everything in 100 Pages (More or Less) by David Bercovici went on sale November 22, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

If a novella is a short novel, what’s a short memoir called: a memella? Sure. Let’s go with that.

I read Avalanche, a memella by Julia Leigh about her attempts to fall pregnant and have a child. It’s an odd piece of writing, veering unevenly from emotion to clinicality (I’m just going to be making up all the words today), sometimes with nary a word between the shifts. A good first third details her marriage, which falls apart, and whose relevance to the rest of the tale could be shrunk to a single sentence (After we divorced and my ex-husband no longer wanted me to use his frozen sperm …), which would eliminate the aren’t-we-so-in-love-more-than-you-could-ever-be bits that read like two seventeen year olds lecturing their elders about how incandescent their love is. Oh, how easy it is to be in love at the start. Then you divorce and your ex-husband rescinds his frozen sperm and what are you to do then? You try with donors and write a memella about the process.

Wanting a child hurts. You could tell that. Leigh’s yearning came through in the writing. Maybe it helped her to write it. It has the feeling of being personal, intimate, without artifice or performance for an audience. Leigh wrote it, she shared it, but it doesn’t seem like she wrote it for the purpose of sharing, like for click-bait or to emotionally blackmail readers. She wrote it and put it out to the world, like a parent has a child and puts her out to the world. Avalanche isn’t a child, but maybe it can be like the shadow of a child for Leigh. Not really shadow but like a hazy, dream image just before waking, from a daytime nap suspicion of a child. Those dreams where you find a secret door in your house and when you wake, for just a second, you think maybe there is a door there before realizing no, there isn’t. There’s no door. Like that, but for a child.

This memella uses the word childling more than once. I appreciate the use of this word probably more than I appreciate the memella. But I do appreciate giving literary space to women‘s issues. Flipping what’s often said: I read the book I want to (at least spiritually) write.

Avalanche by Julia Leigh went on sale October 6, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I keep requesting comics from Netgalley. Don’t know why since I’m pretty ambivalent towards comics. This comic is based on a Lovecraft story. Not a huge fan of Lovecraft (mainly because I can’t get past the racism). So why C21st Gods #1? Because I like reading horror and comics are quick reads and I crossed my fingers that Tallerman and Summey would leave out Lovecraft’s racist undertones (there’s a WOC background character in the comic, which is an improvement from Lovecraft’s belief that Of the complete biological inferiority of the negro there can be no question. Still, I feel icky about the source material and a background POC character of two is hardly going to fix that.)

So, twenty-four pages in a retelling of The Call of Cthulhu. Basically, twenty-four pages that reads like those movie previews that are disjoint images flashed on the screen separated by a few seconds of darkness meant to make you think Wow, what a moody dark film this is going to be but instead just gives me a headache. A few shots of gore. A gloomy house. A run down precinct. People humping a statue. There you go — that’s pretty much the twenty-four pages right there.

Probably good for fans of Lovecraft. Meh for me.

C21st Gods #1 by David Tallerman and Anthony Summey went on sale November 9, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I find comics hard to review. I know they can have depth and I know they can be meaningful, but so many of them I read and can only think of them as slight. So, does Rendez-vous in Phoenix have a bit more heft than others? I suppose I could be convinced, but if I need to be convinced of the merit, doesn’t that say something as well?

I think my problem is two-fold:

1. I either get distracted by the pictures or I ignore them entirely, missing out on that entire aspect of the medium; and
2. to get any internal character depth, it ends up like voice over and pretty much the only thing I remember from Adaptation is voice over = lazy. And really, I like character depth more than anything else in fiction.

Everyone has a right to tell their story, ergo Sandoval has every right to write about his attempts to cross the Mexican-American border illegally in the nineties. Everyone has a right to use whatever medium they want to tell their stories, ergo, again, Sandoval can choose comics. But comics as a medium to tell deep stories — I know Maus managed it somehow; but whatever Maus had, that unknowingable, intangible whatever isn’t there in Rendez-vous in Phoenix.

It’s not bad, Rendez-vous in Phoenix. I feel super dismissive saying it’s just a comic when I don’t want that to be dismissive at all. But it is just what it is. And that’s fine, but it’s hardly transcendent.

Rendez-vous in Phoenix by Tony Sandoval went on sale November 8, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

On a dull and damp day, sitting in a chair by the heating vent and looking at pretty Art Nouveau posters is an a-okay thing to do. Obviously, the optimal way to do so would be in a big, glossy, coffee-table book, with thick sheets that take both hands to turn and smooth down, but on my iPad works too. Click-click-click, pretty poster after pretty poster. I’d decorate my walls with the ones I liked best if I could.

It’s Dover, so bare-bones as Dover often is. Having the translation of the posters in a completely different section than the posters themselves, rather than on the same page as the poster itself, may work better in a print book than the e-book, where one can flip with more impunity. But if you’re just in it for the pretty pictures, typography, and graphic design, then really, what do the words matter?

Off to find out which ones are in the public domain for me to print off.

The Complete “Masters of the Poster” All 256 Color Plates from “Les Maitres de l’Affiche” went on sale July 20, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

A short comic-vérité about an artist who moves to San Francisco and enters the pit that is the service industry. People suck, we all know it. If only our artist could just draw rather than falling asleep…

There isn’t anything really new here. Since it’s only twenty pages, I read it quickly, then struggled to remember what happened the next morning. Still, there’s nothing wrong with stories that are well-trod and a little forgettable. Life is well-trod, forgettable stories anyway.

I couldn’t see myself buying issue after issue, eager for the next Bread and Butter to come out, but I think I would pick up, in a few years, a compilation and read through it all then.

Bread and Butter #1 by Liz Mayorga went on sale October 5, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.

I had problems with this book, but I still want to give it four out of five stars. It’s strange. I could give you a list of things about this book that I just didn’t like: there were sentences I read and read and read again and still my brain couldn’t compute what these sentences were trying to say; the narrative voice seemed so distant from the reader, just like in some other books written by poets (I’m talking about you The Sentamentalists); the philosophical interludes do nothing for me; it’s real, so there’s no true resolution because real life is messy and uncomfortable and nothing ever works out the way it should, so in the end, one finishes the book feeling unsatisfied.

But then, while reading it, Geoff and I sat up in bed and tried to remember the names and locations of baseball teams. I haven’t watched baseball in years, since they went on strike in the early 1990s. But I sat in bed and just listed off team after team while Geoff said How do you know all this? Because it’s from my childhood. It isn’t even knowing so much as just thereing: it is there in my brain and I did nothing on purpose to put it there.

Maybe that’s why, for all its faults, I give Bandit four stars. It’s the thereing in Brodak’s brain that comes across in the prose. She didn’t chose this, but it’s all there. One after another, laid out, for the reader. That’s really all I can think of to say, to justify my ranking, because everything else I can think of to say is negative.

I don’t know.

Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir by Molly Brodak went on sale October 4, 2016.

I received a copy free from Netgalley in exchange for an honest review.