I’ve been really busy exploring life opportunities, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been casually engaging with the book sphere in the meantime. Here’s some stuff I’ve tweeted about this month.
A Map to the Sun
In a lovely coincidence, I saw Ezra Claytan Daniel’s review of Sloane Leong’s A Map to the Sun on Silver Sprocket’s Twitter mere minutes after I finished reading it. As Daniels puts it,
…this book is about basketball as much as Leong’s Prism Stalker was about light refraction…It’s about friendship, and not the clear-cut, BFF bonds we see so often in fiction, but the kind of blurry, confusing, and frequently frustrating friendships that feel painfully true to life…
He is absolutely spot on about what makes this book so special. The only thing I had to add was what made it especially special to me:
With Luna’s introduction, my heart was immediately full, and it stayed that way through to the end.
It’sssss Gravitation
I revisited an early 2000s classic this month. I do plan on writing more in depth about it soon, but for now, here was my evaluation fifteen years after my first reading:
Manga Fashion
I also started MARS for the first time. Seeing some truly 90s high school outfits, along with Shuichi’s looks in Gravitation, inspired me to start a running thread of fashion I come across in manga. Follow along here.
A Capstone Throwback
This was a wild day. I woke up last Wednesday morning to this quote retweet from cartoonist and comics editor Steenz.
I quote retweeted to mention my capstone research and this little thread from almost year ago about GLAAD’s weird nomination guidelines:
That old thread was quote retweeted by Steenz, which started a full day of retweets and reactions. Cartoonist and designer Shivana Sookdeo eventually summarized everyone’s disgust with this very poignant thread about why awards matter in indie comics:
It was cool seeing my research spark a conversation a specific issue. Here are some other responses I found really interesting:
A Low-Key Pretty Book
Outside of Twitter, I’ve been thinking a lot about the book design of Catherine Lacey’s Pew. I didn’t look very closely at the cover on its Goodreads page, so I was very surprised when I picked it up from the library. It’s jacketless and cloth bound. All of its outside cover features — yes, even the blurbs — are gilded debosses. The synopsis and author profiles are printed on the inside covers. Not even FANGS went that far!
Anyway, if you, like me, are a design newbie slowly becoming more and more obsessed with book production, I would recommend you check out What the Font?! from Seven Seas Entertainment. It presents basic typeface information in a way that’s really easy to review and retain!
SpiderHouses 