Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth

Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth
by Chris Ware
read: 2017
Guardian 1000 Novels

It took me a while to get into Jimmy Corrigan. I was expecting something funnier, but it was more of an introspective, personal graphic novel; I'd probably liken it Daniel Clowes' David Boring. The most interesting element to me was the shifting between the perspective of Jimmy and his grandfather as a child, dealing with the same elements of abandonment, isolation, and depression amidst the backdrop of the 1893 World Fair in Chicago.

Notes of a Native Son

Notes of a Native Son
by James Baldwin
read: 2017

Notes of a Native Son was published in 1955, and yet ...

No one was interested in the facts. They preferred the invention because this invention expressed and corroborated their hates and fears so perfectly. It is just as well to remember that people are always doing this. Perhaps many of those legends, including Christianity, to which the world clings began their conquest of the world with just some such concerted surrender to distortion.

... so many of Baldwin's insights still ring true today.

The rage of disesteemed is personally fruitless, but it is also absolutely inevitable; this rage, so generally discounted, so little understood, even among the people whose daily bread it is, is one of the things that makes history.

Parable of the Talents

Parable of the Talents
by Octavia Butler
read: 2017

Jarret's supporters are more than a little seduced by Jarret's talk of making America great again. He seems to be unhappy with certain other countries. We could wind up in a war. Nothing like a war to rally people around flag, country, and great leader.

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