On the Pile

Finished: A Dirty Job by Christopher Moore. Typical Moore---absurd, clever, imaginative, dark, irreverent, and highly addictive.

Currently Reading: Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. My first graphic novel. And it is excellent. I started it yesterday and zoomed right through the first hundred pages; I could not put it down. At turns wildly funny and heartbreakingly sad, it’s an autobiographical account of the author’s childhood during the Islamic revolution in Iran. The artwork is beautiful, and I’m constantly torn between turning the page to keep the story going and staying on the page to admire the art (the story usually wins, so I’ll have to go back to look at the art again when I’m finished). My only complaint is that as someone who doesn’t know Iranian history, I keep getting a little lost with the sequence of events and confused about who is good and who is bad and who is on what side of what. But that could be intentional---the author could be making the point that we in the West don’t know and understand Iran’s history and it isn’t as simple as we’d like it to be (America good, Iran bad).

Also reading Who Moved My Blackberry? by Lucy Kellaway and dipping into Jesus and Buddha: The Parallel Sayings by Marcus Borg and Ray Riegert. Borg and Riegert are Christian and Buddhist scholars, respectively, and they’ve juxtaposed the teachings of Christ and Buddha to demonstrate how nearly identical they are.

On Deck: Maus by Art Spiegelman; The Quakers in America by Thomas Hamm; and The Dead Fish Museum and Other Stories by Charles D’Ambrosio.

Added to the Pile: Another week of nothing new. Hopefully the May review books will start arriving soon. And I have a full request list at the library.