Tag Archives: #FridayReads

Being the good reader that I am every holiday season I make sure to include books on my gift list. (Yes, my family still does Christmas lists but that’s a story for another time.) Sometimes I’ll ask for the latest hot fiction title, or I might want a larger coffee table book that I’ve had my eye on but couldn’t justify the price. This year though I went with something small enough to fit in my stocking.

The Little Book of Big Feelings is authored and illustrated by Marzi Wilson, creator of “Introvert Doodles”. If you’ve ever wondered about the care and feeding of your fellow introvert, or are one yourself, I highly recommend checking her out. She has a lovely little Instagram page, perfect material to scroll through when that party gets to be a bit to much and you’re taking a moment to yourself behind a potted plant. She has three other books, as well, including an activity book!

This latest book takes a look at those big feelings we all get, joy, sadness, anger and so on, how they may look different to an introvert and, greatest of all, how to deal with them. Reading this book is a great way to get perspective on those emotions and even to start processing and accepting them. Each section deals with one particular emotion in small cartoons as well as meatier parts dealing with they psychology behind them. This is a fun and easy to grasp little book that, while slightly geared towards adults, would totally be useful for those fun balls of emotions that are teens.

A black and white manga, set to read from back to front, as is done in Japan, this is the first book in a new series. Komi is the ultimate student at the high school and others are afraid to talk to her because she is aloof and extraordinary. Tadano is just happy he is now going to Itan Private High School, and he is planning to blend in and not be noticed. When asked to introduce herself, as all the students in class were asked to do on the first day, she walked to the front of the room, picked up the chalk, and wrote Shoko Komi on the board, walked back to her desk and sat down without saying a word.

At the end of the class, Tadano finds himself alone in the classroom with Komi after all the students and teacher have left. There he discovers Komi is not aloof, she freezes whenever she tries to speak to someone. She writes what she feels on the chalkboard, letting him know that she wants to make friends and hopes he will help her. Tadano finds he has promised to help her make 100 friends, starting with him. Tadano is in trouble now because he doesn’t have any friends yet, aside from Komi, and so has no one to introduce to her. Then he encounters Osana, an old friend from junior high, and she knows everyone in the school. Maybe they are on the way to making 99 more friends for Komi.

The artwork showing Komi with huge eyes or frozen and trembling does a great job of conveying her level of discomfort and social anxiety.

There are three volumes out now, and volume four will be published in December. The entry on Amazon says there will be six volumes in this series, and I definitely want to read the titles that are available now.

Oda, Tomohito. Komi Can’t Communicate, Volume 1. VIZ Media, 2019.

We’re back to the age old question: which was better, the book or the movie?

In the case of Mortal Engines, I would have to say they were both good! But, they are also quite different from each other. Like many books that have been made into films, the movie version of Mortal Engines, by Philip Reeve, is not an entirely faithful adaptation of the book.

The general storyline is the same in both. In a post-apocalypic future, war has devastated most of the world. In order to survive, many cities have been put on wheels, driven by huge engines. Larger cities chase down smaller ones to capture them, tearing them apart to take their resources and citizens. London has become one of the largest Traction Cities, and some of its leadership are determined to destroy anyone who doesn’t believe that this is how the world should be run. Because there are still cities that work the old way, without wheels, staying in one place.

The book is a Young Adult novel, and it definitely has more of that feel to it than the movie. In the movie, the main characters are not teenagers, so it may appeal more to a different audience.

The endings of the book and the movie are also very different. I won’t give either of them away. But, I will say that they both ended on a hopeful note, looking forward to a potentially better future.

I enjoyed Mortal Engines, both as a book and as a movie. If you read and watch them, don’t expect the same experience. I’d recommend that you consider them two separate stories, based in the same universe. Don’t worry about the fact that the movie isn’t an exact copy of the book. They’re each good in their own way!

It’s a well known fact that sisters have complicated relationships, possibly none more so than Korede and her younger sister Ayoola. Nurse Korede is hardworking, practical, and reliable, while her beautiful little sister is anything but. Charming and sweet, but ultimately selfish and unmotivated, Ayoola surrounds herself with those that will take care of her: men, friends, and Korede.

While she resents Ayoola’s easy and fun-filled life, Korede nevertheless continues to bail her sister out of every mess she gets into… including murder. Ayoola has killed the last 3 men she dated, calling her big sister to help her hide the evidence. Now, Ayoola has attracted the attention of Korede’s boss (and crush), head doctor Tade. Korede must decide if blood really is thicker than water (or just harder to clean up).

Braitwaite, Oyinkan. My Sister the Serial Killer. Doubleday, 2018.

Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country by Chavisa Woods is a collection of short fiction. Weird Stories. Liminal Stories. Queer Stories.

In the first, “How to Stop Smoking in Nineteen Thousand Two Hundred and Eighty-Seven Seconds, Usama,” a young New York lesbian returns to her rural hometown and strange things start happening: eerie lights in the woods, and a terrifying sense that everything is connected. In “Revelations,” a grieving widow’s friends tip her world upside down in an attempt to save the church she founded. And in the titular story, the narrator provides a sample menu of what they recommend one ought to do when one is Goth and living in the country: including, but not limited to, “a nonconsensual, surprise Southern Baptist exorcism. There’s just nothing else that can compete” (215).

At their cores, these eight stories are about two things: Being, and Doing, and all the contradictions and complications and messes that comes with all of that. To be both stuck and free. To be Goth – to be Queer – to be Outsider – to be of a place, born and raised; simultaneously claimed and unclaimed, known and unknown, liminal and with one foot always lifted and pointed and stepping somewhere else. But the other foot – the other foot, the one we love and hate in equal measure ­– is still rooted down and planted in the homesoil from which we grew. Woods tells these stories not with melancholy, and not even really with nostalgia, but with a casual shrug of honesty, an unflinching bluntness, and a dry snap of humor. Importantly, her characters don’t just exist, they act — in human, sad, rough-edged, transgressive and get-by ways. And what unfolds is a commentary on the larger nowhere places and strange spaces between friends, strangers, lovers and enemies in the Middle of Nowhere; where the corn rustles in the haunting thick of dark and the bone-thin coyotes laugh as you double-guess the shiver-trick question of movement in your rearview and press the gas a littler harder.

“This is where you belong. There is much to be done” (221).

This book is for mature audiences.

Looking for other unsettling books like this in the chilly prelude to Halloween this season? Here is what this author recommends: https://electricliterature.com/10-books-for-country-goths/

Woods, Chavisa. Things to Do When You’re Goth in the Country. Seven Stories Press, 2017.