Body Music by Julie Maroh

This is an amazing book. It's a series of vignettes about love, mostly romantic and sexual love, told in 'graphic novel' format. Most of the vignettes are unrelated, most of the characters are (relatively) young, and all of the vignettes take place in Montreal. There are vignettes showing post-first date anxiety, the revelation of true love, one night stands, spicing up a long term relationship, first meetings, post-fights.

What makes the book extraordinary are the drawings. They are so evocative. Faces twist with emotion, darkness lowers over wintry Montreal, anger rages silently across pages of panels, ghostly figures reconstruct memories.

"In the heat of the club. Saint Catherine Street East" is largely wordless. We see flashes of heated bodies as they dance. A single dancer in the crowd catches the undivided attention of a man at the bar. Perspective shifts: we watch the dancer circle close to the watcher on the dance floor. The dancer's face, torso, back, lips rivet the watcher's attention -- in sequence? We see the dancer as dynamic fragments surrounding the still watcher. Words finally appear as the two begin to interact, but it is through the drawings that their relationship has been created and evolves.

This book is not a comic. It's storytelling in pictures and words, with so much more said by the drawings than by the words.

"Are you my mother?" by Alison Bechdel is more typical of the graphic novels I've read in the past. In Bechdel's books the drawings emphasize and illustrate the words. It's relatively easy to re-imagine them as conventional written memoirs or as conventional narrative movies.

In Body Music drawings create character, atmosphere, and emotion. Words simply explain, clarify, or contradict.

Maroh's work is a more elusive, allusive beast.

Blah Blah Blah: What to do when words don't work by Dan Roam

Started: Dec. 18, 2012
Finished: Jan. 28, 2013
Pages: 331

This book has two characters:  the hummingbird and the fox, who we met in the recent past when we read Thinking, Fast and Slow by David Kahneman.  But in that book the quick-thinking, visual, and reactive hummingbird was called "System 1", while the verbose and analytic fox was called "System 2".

Why a hummingbird and a fox?  Because Dan Roam has a different aim than Kahneman.  Roam isn't explaining how brains work.  He simply wants to help us convey our ideas more effectively, and the fact that he switches the non-informative terms   "System 1" and "System 2"to something more immediately graspable is a perfect illustration of the kind of thing that Blah blah blah is trying to teach you to do.

This book was recommended to me by a "Visual Literacy" initiative at work that is intended to encourage us to include more graphical content in our writing.  The book is a perfect tool for that purpose.  It talks a little bit about why doing so is useful, but mostly focuses on describing a variety of heuristics that can help you transform your blah blah blah to combinations of graphics and text that will have a greater impact.

I'm planning to photocopy a few summary pages so that I can keep them handy while others on my team read the book.

Are you my mother? A comic drama by Alison Bechdel

Started: 26 December, 2012

Finished: 8 January, 2013

Pages: 290

First things first:  this is not a picture book about a baby bird searching for its mother and finding a SNERT.  

Or, maybe it is....kind of.

Have you heard of graphic novels?  Well, this is a graphic memoir:  that is, a memoir written in the form of a comic.  And this version of Are you my mother? is about the author's struggle to make sense of her relationship with her mother. It's by Alison Bechdel,  the creator of  Dykes to Watch Out For, a long-running serial comic that you could hardly have missed if you read feminist newspapers in the late 80s and 90s.  

 I started it at the inlaws over Christmas and puzzled my partner's mom.  She wanted to know why I wasn't chuckling while I was reading.  Wasn't it comics?   Well, yes.  But it's a natural question.  Although there are now"serious" comics, our collective default assumption is that stories told with pictures are stories for children. (Which doesn't make a huge amount of sense, really.  After all:  movies.)

So why don't we think of pictorial stories written on paper as serious?

I don't have an answer to that.  Constant advances in printing technology throughout the 20th century made printed pictures ubiquitous.  And other than a few 19th century political cartoons, comics really began in the 20th century.  But for the most part using pictures as well as text to tell a story was only done when the subject matter of the story was something that was hard to imagine otherwise:  when the characters in the stories were talking mice, say, or the story was about a extra-strong flying man.

Which brings us to the book at hand. What is added by telling Bechdel's story in comic form?

Well, I guess the most obvious thing that the pictures add is emotional impact and immediacy.  Being told that her mother stopped kissing her goodnight when she was 7 years old is different than watching a small and vulnerable girl pretend not to mind that her mother is walking away from her bed.

Using drawings also permits Bechdel to use compression and inference to tell parts of her story. There is a sequence of frames that recounts a year that she spent in therapy by showing her and her therapist facing each other across a room, while a tree visible in the window behind them cycles through the seasons.

Drawings also allow her to give information that would be difficult to convey otherwise.  Being told that Bechdel has been in therapy for her entire adult life is different seeing a timeline that simultaneously shows both the duration of every love relationship she's ever had and the duration of every therapist she's ever had. (wow:  I can't even imagine therapy playing that kind of role in my life.)

So....Bechdel could likely have told her story in text alone.  But telling it as a comic definitely gives her additional tools.

Great Houses of England and Wales by Hugh Montgomery-Massingberd and Christopher Simon Sykes

Started: Feb. 25th
Finished: April 20th, 2012
Pages: 235

 I bought this book back in 2002 on a trip to Britain and I found it on my shelf while I was looking for some bedtime reading.  It's published by the National Trust and features photos and a brief history of  25 of the most splendid historic houses in their collection.

Between classic British mysteries and classic British fiction, I've spent a lot of literary time in English Country houses. This book helps put a face to those bland mentions of East Wings, libraries, withdrawing rooms, and drafty Great Halls.  So this is what"classic" wealth looks like.