My sister and I were engrossed in a cider list, yesterday evening, when our server interrupted by asking “Are you St. John’s students?” We both blinked at her in confusion for a moment.
St. John’s College has been around in some form since 1784 (and some would tack another hundred years on that), with the Santa Fe campus coming into existence in 1964. It’s a place where folks go to read – the Santa Fe campus is well known for it’s Master of Arts in Eastern Classics. I know people who have gotten that degree, as well as people who love to hate on the college.
“I just saw the books, and I wondered,” our server added, and I remembered that I was sitting next to a couple of used books I’d picked up earlier that day. Kurt Vonnegut’s Hocus Pocus was sitting on top.
“Oh no, no,” my sister and I admitted with bemused grins. “We just like reading.”
“And real books, too,” our server said. “Are you ready to order?”
Wait…real books? As opposed to…?
As we were walking home later, I was still puzzling a little over being mistaken for a “Serious Reader”, ah la St. John’s student, based on the fact that I appeared in proximity to Vonnegut. My sister hastened to remind me that she’d only ever read Vonnegut for a class assignment.
Which is when this whole scenario made my forehead crinkle. I read Hellboy comics and Andrei Bely’s Petersburg in the same week. I read Vonnegut for giggles and ideas (for fun, basically). My appetite for story can be (temporarily) satiated in the Literature section of Powell’s City of Books as well as on the stationary aisle at the corner Rite Aid. I can claim to read widely, and sometimes well, but you won’t catch me with a “real book” in my hands.
It annoys me that the myth of the “real book” is endlessly used as a way to build walls around folks, break connections, or feed ego at the expense of others. There are far more important things to do than make such illusory distinctions. The fact that we let folks nitpick such (usually) minor details as what type of books we read, is part of why we let folks get away with making other profound (but equally illusory) distinctions.
They’re all REAL books, folks. Let’s move on.
It can be overwhelming at times. One Soul is overwhelming. It tells 18 tales at once. Fawkes used an 18 panel grid, spread across two pages, and devoted one panel to each of his 18 souls (or perhaps they are the same one, being reincarnated over centuries?) They are born at the same time, each in their panel, and then their lives spool out. You could follow one life across the pages, reading just the 5th panels for instance, and get to know a Chinese silk-worker, or a priestess in a Greek temple, or a Revolutionary War soldier, or a British punk kid – or you can read all the lives at once.
Lilli Carré likes to experiment too. Her collection of short stories – 
Then there’s Emily Carroll and her collection 
Nimona is a web comic by one of the creators of Lumberjanes, and although it will be released as a graphic novel in May, it’s still available online for you to read for free. So you should go do that. Now. Here’s the link again: 
In Vol. 1 the Queens avoid an assassination attempt, try to solve a local mystery, and take on an army of trolls, all while drinking hard, doing mushrooms, getting badly injured, and trying to stay on top of their romantic entanglements. They accomplish all these things with plenty of swearing, high spirits, friendship (to the max!), and heart. And they look incredible doing it.
‘Later in the evening Misabel went for a solitary stroll by the sea. She saw the moon rise and start his lonesome journey through the night.
Even when Little My also wakes up, Moomintroll isn’t much comforted. He remains disconcerted, while she takes to winter like a fish to water, immediately embracing all of the snow sports and befriending the other winter wakers. But gradually, with the help of Too-ticky, who lives in the Moomin’s bathhouse during the cold months, Moomintroll starts to warm up to winter and with his usual resilience he finds things to admire and adventures to embrace.
what we have here is a failure to communicate 