February 26, 2016February 26, 2016 by Sharlene

Comics for young readers

2016, Comics February, Comics Sunday, Reading
comics, Comics February, kid lit
10 Comments

My four-year-old and I read our first real comic together the other day in celebration of Comics February!. He can’t quite read on his own yet but we have been working hard on sight words and I’ve noticed that every day since our first comic he has been going back to the book, picking it up and looking at the book on his own. I of course was just thrilled.

But wait, you might thought-bubble, aren’t picture books already like comics? Yes a little, but comics for young kids often have several panels on one page that depict the action of the story, whereas most picture books often have just one big picture per page. There are some picture book exceptions, which are styled more like comics. For instance, The Gingerbread Man series by Laura Murray, illustrated by Mike Lowery.

And Extraordinary Warren by Sarah Dillard

The next step up from picture books are beginning and emerging reader books, which have simple text and pictures but somehow these books aren’t as exciting and innovative as some picture books can be (and picture books these days are so wonderfully imaginative!). We are not venturing into chapter books yet, although I sometimes read aloud from kid classics like Roald Dahl’s works.

My aim in all this is to continue to nurture my two boys’ love for reading. They may only be two and four at the moment but there’s always a nagging feeling at the back of my mind, that one day they may only care for iPad games, sports and TV, and never open a book other than those for school.

All kinds of studies tell us what we already know.

Boys are slower to learn to read than girls.
Boys are less likely to read for pleasure than girls.
Girls do better than boys in reading tests*

So in the hope that they will continue to love reading, whether it’s picture books, chapter books or comic books, I’ve been looking up some comics suitable for younger readers.

The one that we read together was Zita the Spacegirl by Ben Hatke. It may be aimed at those aged 7 and up, but my four-year-old (five next month!) enjoyed it. He did say that some parts were a bit scary, but seeing how he looked at the comic several times on his own, he must have liked it. There are two other books in the Zita series so far.

Toon Books has a great-looking collection of easy comics for young readers. The comics are marked from Level 1 (Grades K-1), Level 2 (Grades 1-2), Level 3 (Grades 2-3), then Toon Graphics (Grades 3+). And some big names have written these books, like Jeff Smith (Bone), Art Spiegelman (Maus, also he and his wife are the ones responsible for the existence of Toon Books) and Renee French (Micrographica).

The Owly books by Andy Runton would make my two-year-old’s eyes grow as big as, well, an owl. He LOVES owls, and there are so many owl picture books that he adores. This series is perfect for his age group as well because it’s a largely wordless graphic novel.

lunchlady

The Lunch Lady series by Jarrett J. Krosoczka looks like a delightful comic book series for elementary kids. I may pick one up to give it a try but I don’t think he’s quite ready for that yet.

I wish I had thought about looking up comics for preschoolers (or kindergarteners) sooner as Finnian and I could do mini reviews of these books together for Comics February! But maybe we will still do that when we get our hands on these books. Now off to the library to put some holds on comics for kids!

Do you know of any great comics for emerging readers and kindergarteners?

*Sources include:

Why Women Read More than Men: NPR
Boys’ Reading Commission – National Literacy Trust; UK
Boys and reading – Services to Schools; New Zealand
Some fantastic ideas and more comic books, especially for those seven and up, can be found at The Graphic Classroom

February 17, 2015February 16, 2015 by Sharlene

Picture books and comics this Library Loot

2015, Comics February, library loot, Reading
kid lit, library, library loot
1 Comment

Library Loot is a weekly event co-hosted by Claire from The Captive Reader and Linda from Silly Little Mischief that encourages bloggers to share the books they’ve checked out from the library.

A real quick grab-and-go from the library on Sunday. It was nearing nap time and someone was getting cranky…

More comics for me. And just a few new books for the kids.

Ethel and Ernest – Raymond Briggs

Poignant, funny, and utterly original, Ethel & Ernest is Raymond Briggs’s loving depiction of his parents’ lives from their first chance encounter in the 1920s until their deaths in the 1970s.Ethel and Ernest are solid members of the working class, part of the generation (Brokaw’s “Greatest Generation”) that lived through the tumultuous era of the twentieth century. They meet during the Depression — she working as a chambermaid, he as a milkman — and we follow them as they encounter, and cope with, World War II, the advent of radio and t.v., telephones and cars, the atomic bomb, the moon landing. Briggs’s portrayal of his parents as they succeed, or fail, in coming to terms with their rapidly shifting world is irresistably engaging — full of sympathy and affection, yet clear-eyed and unsentimental.

The book’s strip-cartoon format is deceptively simple; it possesses a wealth of detail and an emotional depth that are remarkable in such a short volume. Briggs’s marvelous illustrations and succinct, true-to-life dialogue create a real sense of time and place, of what it was like to experience such enormous changes. Almost as much a social history as it is a personal account, Ethel & Ernest is a moving tribute to ordinary people living in an extraordinary time.

Showa: A History of Japan, 1926-1939 (Showa: A History of Japan #1) – Shigeru Mizuki

“Showa 1926”-“1939: A History of Japan” is the first volume of Shigeru Mizuki’s meticulously researched historical portrait of twentieth-century Japan. This volume deals with the period leading up to World War II, a time of high unemployment and other economic hardships caused by the Great Depression. Mizuki’s photo-realist style effortlessly brings to life the Japan of the 1920s and 1930s, depicting bustling city streets and abandoned graveyards with equal ease. When the Showa era began, Mizuki himself was just a few years old, so his earliest memories coincide with the earliest events of the time. With his trusty narrator Rat Man, Mizuki brings history into the realm of the personal, making it palatable, and indeed compelling, for young audiences as well as more mature readers. As he describes the militarization that leads up to World War II, Mizuki’s stance toward war is thoughtful and often downright critical–his portrayal of the Nanjing Massacre clearly paints the incident (a disputed topic within Japan) as an atrocity. Mizuki’s “Showa 1926”-“1939” is a beautifully told history that tracks how technological developments and the country’s shifting economic stability had a role in shaping Japan’s foreign policy in the early twentieth century.

Showa 1939-1944: A History of Japan (Showa: A History of Japan #2) – Shigeru Mizuki, Zack Davisson (Translation)

Showa 1939–1944: A History of Japan continues the award-winning author Shigeru Mizuki’s autobiographical and historical account of Showa-era Japan. This volume covers the final moments of the lead-up to World War II and the first few years of the Pacific War, and is a chilling reminder of the harshness of life in Japan during this highly militarized epoch.
Mizuki writes affectingly about the impact on the Japanese populace of world-changing moments, including the devastating Second Sino-Japanese War, the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the first half of the Pacific War. On a personal level, these years mark a dramatic transformation in Mizuki’s life, too. His idyllic childhood in the countryside comes to a definitive end when he’s drafted into the army and shipped off to the tiny island of Rabaul in Papua New Guinea. His life becomes a constant struggle for survival, not only against the constant Allied attacks but against the harsh discipline of the Japanese army officers. During his time in Rabaul, Mizuki comes to understand the misery and beauty of the island itself, a place that will permanently mark him and haunt him for the rest of his life.

E-book:

Redeployment – Phil Klay

My hold came in! Hooray!

In Redeployment, a soldier who has had to shoot dogs because they were eating human corpses must learn what it is like to return to domestic life in suburbia, surrounded by people “who have no idea where Fallujah is, where three members of your platoon died.” In “After Action Report”, a Lance Corporal seeks expiation for a killing he didn’t commit, in order that his best friend will be unburdened. A Mortuary Affairs Marine tells about his experiences collecting remains — of U.S. and Iraqi soldiers both. A chaplain sees his understanding of Christianity, and his ability to provide solace through religion, tested by the actions of a ferocious Colonel. And in the darkly comic “Money as a Weapons System”, a young Foreign Service Officer is given the absurd task of helping Iraqis improve their lives by teaching them to play baseball. These stories reveal the intricate combination of monotony, bureaucracy, comradeship and violence that make up a soldier’s daily life at war, and the isolation, remorse, and despair that can accompany a soldier’s homecoming.

Redeployment is poised to become a classic in the tradition of war writing. Across nations and continents, Klay sets in devastating relief the two worlds a soldier inhabits: one of extremes and one of loss. Written with a hard-eyed realism and stunning emotional depth, this work marks Phil Klay as one of the most talented new voices of his generation.

Kids’ loot:

January 17, 2015January 17, 2015 by Sharlene

My biggest Library Loot in months!

So if you follow me on Instagram (I’m @olduvaireads how about you?), you might have seen that Wee Reader has the flu! Poor thing. He’s on antibiotics and Tamiflu. Both look equally unpleasant. But they’re working! He’s doing a lot better today. Far less tired and no more fever. But still, I wanted to keep him at home, so we left him with grandma and the rare chance to play iPad games, and while the Husband ran errands with Wee-er Reader, I went to the library for a glorious child-free 40 minutes!! So I had to make the most of it. I grabbed books for the kids, some of my holds, and spent some time upstairs amid the graphic novel shelves where I pulled a load of books! And then because I still had some time, I wandered the scifi/fantasy and mystery shelves. And found some gems which I have to save for another day because my bags were stuffed and my shoulders aching.

An Untamed State – Roxane Gay

Whee! My hold came in! This month I’m attempting to read from the Tournament of Books shortlist

Roxane Gay is a powerful new literary voice whose short stories and essays have already earned her an enthusiastic audience. In An Untamed State, she delivers an assured debut about a woman kidnapped for ransom, her captivity as her father refuses to pay and her husband fights for her release over thirteen days, and her struggle to come to terms with the ordeal in its aftermath.

Mireille Duval Jameson is living a fairy tale. The strong-willed youngest daughter of one of Haiti’s richest sons, she has an adoring husband, a precocious infant son, by all appearances a perfect life. The fairy tale ends one day when Mireille is kidnapped in broad daylight by a gang of heavily armed men, in front of her father’s Port au Prince estate. Held captive by a man who calls himself The Commander, Mireille waits for her father to pay her ransom. As it becomes clear her father intends to resist the kidnappers, Mireille must endure the torments of a man who resents everything she represents.

An Untamed State is a novel of privilege in the face of crushing poverty, and of the lawless anger that corrupt governments produce. It is the story of a willful woman attempting to find her way back to the person she once was, and of how redemption is found in the most unexpected of places. An Untamed State establishes Roxane Gay as a writer of prodigious, arresting talent.

Silence Once Begun – Jesse Ball

It’s on the Tournament of Books shortlist

From the celebrated author of The Curfew, Jesse Ball’s Silence Once Begun is an astonishing novel of unjust conviction, lost love, and a journalist’s obsession.

Over the course of several months, eight people vanish from their homes in the same Japanese town, a single playing card found on each door. Known as the “Narito Disappearances,” the crime has authorities baffled—until a confession appears on the police’s doorstep, signed by Oda Sotatsu, a thread salesman. Sotatsu is arrested, jailed, and interrogated—but he refuses to speak. Even as his parents, brother, and sister come to visit him, even as his execution looms, and even as a young woman named Jito Joo enters his cell, he maintains his vow of silence. Our narrator, a journalist named Jesse Ball, is grappling with mysteries of his own when he becomes fascinated by the case. Why did Sotatsu confess? Why won’t he speak? Who is Jito Joo? As Ball interviews Sotatsu’s family, friends, and jailers, he uncovers a complex story of heartbreak, deceit, honor, and chance.

Wildly inventive and emotionally powerful, Silence Once Begun is a devastating portrayal of a justice system compromised, and evidence that Jesse Ball is a voraciously gifted novelist working at the height of his powers.

The New York Five – Brian Wood, Ryan Kelly (Illustrator)

The first of many graphic novels for Comics February

The long-awaited sequel to THE NEW YORK FOUR! There’s nothing more exciting than college life in the big city. But complications can follow you from dark places – and not just from your boring hometown. In THE NEW YORK FIVE, Riley’s sister Angie is making a name in the Lower East Side with her new band, and now Riley is the black sheep of the family. Lona’s murky past appears to have been hiding an alarming proficiency for stalkerism, and Merissa and Ren will confront uncomfortable situations involving older men. But who is the “five” in THE NEW YORK FIVE?

The Last Unicorn – Peter S. Beagle, Peter Gillis (Adaptor), Renae De Liz (illustrator), Ray Dillon (illustrator)

Whimsical. Lyrical. Poignant. Adapted for the first time from the acclaimed and beloved novel by Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn is a tale for any age about the wonders of magic, the power of love, and the tragedy of loss. The unicorn, alone in her enchanted wood, discovers that she may be the last of her kind. Reluctant at first, she sets out on a journey to find her fellow unicorns, even if it means facing the terrifying anger of the Red Bull and malignant evil of the king who wields his power. Adapted by Peter B. Gillis and lushly illustrated by Renae De Liz and Ray Dillon

Dancer – Nathan Edmondson (Writer), Nic Klein (Artist)

The multiple sell-out miniseries from the writer of WHO IS JAKE ELLIS? and the artist of VIKING, DANCER is the story of a retired assassin who must protect his ballerina love from a sniper stalking them both through the back alleys of a wintry Europe.

Fairest: In All the Land – Bill Willingham, Chris Sprouse, Fiona Meng, Renae De Liz, Adam Hughes, Phil Noto

FAIREST has explored the secret histories of the most stunning beauties in Fabletown: Cinderella, Snow White, Briar Rose, Rapunzel, and the list goes on and on. In FAIREST IN ALL THE LAND, the best names in comics take their turns fleshing out the pasts of the loveliest Fables in existence. For all those wanting to dive into FAIREST or FABLES, this original graphic novel is a fantastic entry point, as well as a great new chapter for those that have been following Bill Willingham’s fairy tale epic for years.

Pretty Deadly Volume One: The Shrike – Kelly Sue Deconnick; Emma Rios

KELLY SUE DeCONNICK (Avengers Assemble, Captain Marvel) and EMMA RÍOS (Dr. Strange, Osborn) present the collected opening arc of their surprise-hit series that marries the magical realism of Sandman with the western brutality of Preacher. Death’s daughter rides the wind on a horse made of smoke and her face bears the skull marks of her father. Her origin story is a tale of retribution as beautifully lush as it is unflinchingly savage.

Rose and Isabel – Ted Mathot

Bizarrely, Goodreads hardly has any information on this book! Not even a synopsis!

Here’s a review on Part-time Fanboy in case you’re interested!

The year is 1864.
In the ravaged and violent landscape of the American Civil War, two sisters from the Callaghan family of Virginia search to find their three brothers, soldiers who have gone missing while fighting for the Union army.

The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude – Carol Lay

Here’s the skinny: After a lifetime of yo-yo dieting with pills, hypnosis, and ill-informed half-measures, Carol Lay finally shed her excess pounds and kept them off. Now this California cartoonist shares her experiences in a funny, genuine, and eye-popping graphic memoir that tells Carol’s story and shows you how you can do it, too.

E-books:

Of course when it rains it pours, a few of my library e-book holds came in too!

Dept. of Speculation – Jenny Offill
Also on the Tournament of Books shortlist. This one I’m really looking forward to! And just realized that it’s a rather short book at just 182 pages!

Dept. of Speculation is a portrait of a marriage. It is also a beguiling rumination on the mysteries of intimacy, trust, faith, knowledge, and the condition of universal shipwreck that unites us all.

Jenny Offill’s heroine, referred to in these pages as simply “the wife,” once exchanged love letters with her husband, postmarked Dept. of Speculation, their code name for all the uncertainty that inheres in life and in the strangely fluid confines of a long relationship. As they confront an array of common catastrophes—a colicky baby, bedbugs, a faltering marriage, stalled ambitions—the wife analyzes her predicament, invoking everything from Keats and Kafka to the thought experiments of the Stoics to the lessons of doomed Russian cosmonauts. She muses on the consuming, capacious experience of maternal love, and the near total destruction of the self that ensues from it, as she confronts the friction between domestic life and the seductions and demands of art.

With cool precision, in language that shimmers with rage and wit and fierce longing, Jenny Offill has crafted an exquisitely suspenseful love story that has the velocity of a train hurtling through the night at top speed. Exceptionally lean and compact, Dept. of Speculation can be read in a single sitting, but there are enough bracing emotional insights in these pages to fill a much longer novel.

The Book of Strange New Things – Michel Faber

It begins with Peter, a devoted man of faith, as he is called to the mission of a lifetime, one that takes him galaxies away from his wife, Bea. Peter becomes immersed in the mysteries of an astonishing new environment, overseen by an enigmatic corporation known only as USIC. His work introduces him to a seemingly friendly native population struggling with a dangerous illness and hungry for Peter’s teachings—his Bible is their “book of strange new things.” But Peter is rattled when Bea’s letters from home become increasingly desperate: typhoons and earthquakes are devastating whole countries, and governments are crumbling. Bea’s faith, once the guiding light of their lives, begins to falter.

Suddenly, a separation measured by an otherworldly distance, and defined both by one newly discovered world and another in a state of collapse, is threatened by an ever-widening gulf that is much less quantifiable. While Peter is reconciling the needs of his congregation with the desires of his strange employer, Bea is struggling for survival. Their trials lay bare a profound meditation on faith, love tested beyond endurance, and our responsibility to those closest to us.

Marked by the same bravura storytelling and precise language that made The Crimson Petal and the White such an international success, The Book of Strange New Things is extraordinary, mesmerizing, and replete with emotional complexity and genuine pathos

Kids’ loot:

Have you read any of these books?? What did you get from your library this week?

January 2, 2015 by Sharlene

My first Library Loot of 2015!

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these. We have been using the library, really!

Anyway here’s what I got on this chilly but sunny morning.

Through the woods – Emily Carroll

I don’t remember where I first heard of this from, as I had requested it a few weeks ago. Maybe from Vasilly?

‘It came from the woods. Most strange things do.’

Five mysterious, spine-tingling stories follow journeys into (and out of?) the eerie abyss.

These chilling tales spring from the macabre imagination of acclaimed and award-winning comic creator Emily Carroll.

Come take a walk in the woods and see what awaits you there…

One book on the Tournament of Books long list that I really want to read is Elena Ferrante’s Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay. But that’s book three in the trilogy (?), after My Brilliant Friend (loved it! Please read it if you haven’t!) and this one:

The Story of a New Name – Elena Ferrante

The second book, following 2012’s acclaimed My Brilliant Friend, featuring the two friends Lila and Elena. The two protagonists are now in their twenties. Marriage appears to have imprisoned Lila. Meanwhile, Elena continues her journey of self-discovery. The two young women share a complex and evolving bond that brings them close at times, and drives them apart at others. Each vacillates between hurtful disregard and profound love for the other. With this complicated and meticulously portrayed friendship at the center of their emotional lives, the two girls mature into women, paying the sometimes cruel price that this passage exacts.

E-books:

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot – David Shafer

For my own Tournament of Books reading in January

The Committee, an international cabal of industrialists and media barons, is on the verge of privatizing all information. Dear Diary, an idealistic online Underground, stands in the way of that takeover, using radical politics, classic spycraft, and technology that makes Big Data look like dial-up. Into this secret battle stumbles an unlikely trio: Leila Majnoun, a disillusioned non-profit worker; Leo Crane, an unhinged trustafarian; and Mark Deveraux, a phony self-betterment guru who works for the Committee.

Leo and Mark were best friends in college, but early adulthood has set them on diverging paths. Growing increasingly disdainful of Mark’s platitudes, Leo publishes a withering takedown of his ideas online. But the Committee is reading–and erasing–Leo’s words. On the other side of the world, Leila’s discoveries about the Committee’s far-reaching ambitions threaten to ruin those who are closest to her.

In the spirit of William Gibson and Chuck Palahniuk,Whiskey Tango Foxtrot is both a suspenseful global thriller and an emotionally truthful novel about the struggle to change the world in- and outside your head.

Who Ate Up All the Shinga?: An Autobiographical Novel – Yu Young-nan (translated from the Korean by Stephen Epstein and Wan-suh Park)

For the Books in Translation Reading Challenge

Park Wan-suh is a best-selling and award-winning writer whose work has been widely translated and published throughout the world. “Who Ate Up All the Shinga?” is an extraordinary account of her experiences growing up during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War, a time of great oppression, deprivation, and social and political instability.

Park Wan-suh was born in 1931 in a small village near Kaesong, a protected hamlet of no more than twenty families. Park was raised believing that “no matter how many hills and brooks you crossed, the whole world was Korea and everyone in it was Korean.” But then the tendrils of the Japanese occupation, which had already worked their way through much of Korean society before her birth, began to encroach on Park’s idyll, complicating her day-to-day life.

With acerbic wit and brilliant insight, Park describes the characters and events that came to shape her young life, portraying the pervasive ways in which collaboration, assimilation, and resistance intertwined within the Korean social fabric before the outbreak of war. Most absorbing is Park’s portrait of her mother, a sharp and resourceful widow who both resisted and conformed to stricture, becoming an enigmatic role model for her struggling daughter. Balancing period detail with universal themes, Park weaves a captivating tale that charms, moves, and wholly engrosses

Kids’ loot:

What did you get from your library this week?

Real Life Reading

"I have always imagined that Paradise will be some kind of library" – Jorge Luis Borges

Tag / kid lit

Comics for young readers

Picture books and comics this Library Loot

My biggest Library Loot in months!

My first Library Loot of 2015!