Future Reading List

1. Swamplandia! -- Karen Russell

I really enjoyed the other works we read by Karen Russell and so would definitely like to read more of her work.

2. Good Omens -- Neil Gaiman

Good Omens has been on my reading list forever. A copy of it sits in my car waiting for me to have a chance to actually read it. I've about a chapter in and I really want to read more, I just haven't.

3. Persepolis -- Marjane Satrapi

Persepolis was recommended by Catrina in one of her first blog posts and I actually ended up watching the movie this year for my Islam class, so I would really like to read the graphic novel.

4. Armada -- Ernest Cline

Ready Player One was a really fun read for me and so I would like to try Ernest Cline's other novel, Armada and see if I enjoy it just as much. 

5. Cat's Cradle -- Kurt Vonnegut

I love Vonnegut and I haven't read one of his books in a long time. Cat's Cradle is one of the books of his that I haven't read yet so I'd like to read that.

6. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle -- Haruki Murakami

I have a vivid memory of my older sister being recommended this book and I know that she read it and enjoyed it. I'm very curious about it.

7. Saga -- Brian K. Vaughan

I have been meaning to read this series for AGES. So many people have recommended it to me and I hear nothing but amazing things about it.

8. 10% Happier: How I Tamed the Voice in My Head, Reduced Stress Without Losing My Edge, and Found Self-Help That Actually Works -- Dan Harris

I heard about this one from kind of an odd source but upon investigation it sounds like something I would be very interested in reading.

9. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy -- Douglas Adams

Another one of those "always meant to read it but never did" kind of books

10. Mr. Penumbra's 24-Hour Bookstore -- Robin Sloan

I was suppose to read this book back in my senior year of high school with a friend of mine and our English teacher. They two of them read it and highly recommend it and I feel a weird sense of obligation to still read it.

The Film Auteur: Wes Anderson

Wes Anderson has one of the most recognizable styles to his films of any director I’ve seen, aside from maybe Quentin Tarantino. Most of Wes Anderson’s films are recognizable as his within the first few minutes of the film. He has very particular patterns in both his storytelling and how he constructs and composes his films that crop up in pretty much every movie he makes. Some might even argue that he has become a bit of a one-trick pony, making only the same kind of film every time, but despite a lot of the similarities that come as part of Wes Anderson’s personal voice, all of his films remain uniquely different.

There are two main stylistic things that I noticed while watching Wes Anderson’s films, Moonrise Kingdom, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Fantastic Mr. Fox. First was the highly saturated color or strong sense of color script for each film. Moonrise Kingdom is full of saturated yellows and greens throughout the whole film. Grand Budapest Hotel has a lot of reds, pinks, and oranges; still all warm spectrum and very saturated. Fantastic Mr. Fox is much like Moonrise Kingdom in its color scheme of neutrals and very saturated yellows. Wes Anderson seems to like to over saturate his films with warm colors, and that gives all of his films a very distinctive look.

The second stylistic choice that I know is very indicative of Wes Anderson’s films is how he films most, if not all of the shots in a film, in one-point perspective. It’s something that is not immediately noticeable, but when it’s pointed out, it becomes abundantly clear. It is pushed the most, perhaps, in Fantastic Mr. Fox, probably because as a stop motion film, Anderson had direct control over every shot and the position of everything in relation to the camera. He still is able to achieve one-point perspective in his live action films, and it gives all of his movies a very distinct feel to them. I think it makes them feel slightly more fantastical and strange, because we generally don’t see the world in perfect one-point perspective, and so putting films in that way separates us from that world a little bit. It also makes the films feel more like a storybook, somehow; as if we are watching a series of perfectly composed storybook images.

When it comes to themes, Wes Anderson’s films still have that telltale stamp of being a Wes Anderson film. Perhaps the most prevalent theme in his films is the theme of nostalgia. Wes Anderson seems to always glorify and live in the world of nostalgia, and all of his films feel very nostalgic as a result. Fantastic Mr. Fox was purposefully animated in a ‘messy and imperfect’ way so that it emulated a time when we didn’t have the stop motion technology that we have now to make stop motion behave how we want it to. The aesthetic of all three films in dress, time period, etc. is all very reminiscent of times past. He also never seems to tell his stories entirely chronologically. They jump all over the place, and are often stories within stories, where a character is recounting memories such as in Grand Budapest.

When it comes to actors, Wes Anderson certainly favors a handful of people to work with, but there is one actor who has been in every single one of his films (aside from Bottle Rocket) and that is Bill Murray. He is in every film, ready to deliver a deadpan line of dialogue. And speaking of dialogue, every actor in a Wes Anderson movie delivers dialogue in a very different way to how people generally talk. They speak quickly, and bluntly. Everyone is to the point without a whole lot of flourish to the words they are saying. They get out what they need to say and move on. Everything is also generally said with a air of seriousness to it that can sometimes be strange within the context of what’s being said. In general, Wes Anderson characters don’t really talk like real people.

Wes Anderson has some of the most prevalent and obvious autership of any director I am well acquainted with. You know when you’re watching a Wes Anderson film. He is the only one to make movies the way he does and although charming the first several times, I wonder if this strong sense of style might lead to his films becoming stale. I enjoy them for now, but some of them can feel a bit same-y.

Illuminated Manuscript

Autership: Voice in Graphic Novels

I read Britten and Brülightly by Hannah Berry for my exploration of Autership in graphic novels. Personally, my immediate instinct when looking at this was that I did not like the art style. Specifically I didn’t like the way the characters and their faces were drawn. They were very unappealing and the proportions felt off. However, in contrast to the style of the people, the renderings of the environments were gorgeous. The mix of ink line and watercolor and ink washes gave this who novel a very particular feel. Throughout the entirety of the story, it is raining, and the watercolor and ink adds to the wet, dreary, and melancholy feel of the whole thing.

The overall inspiration for this work is abundantly clear. It has a lot of noir elements to it, and is almost a stereotypical melodrama about a private investigator hired to solve what the client expects to be a murder case. There are tons of twists and turns and no one and nothing are as they seem. There are threats, there is death, there is deceit, there is mutilation, and there is a constant inner monologue narration. There is pretty much everything that comes standard in a noir-genre piece. The way Berry even stages all of her panels is very noir. The thick ink lines helps make the illustrations feel high contrast, as noir films tend to be. She adds more to the high contrast lighting to the piece with her watercolor painting, which usually as a technique is very soft, but she uses it to create very dark shadows while still maintaining that watery feel.

However heavily inspired by man noir and neo-noir this piece is, that does not mean that it is devoid of personal and original voice. It is not merely and emulation of man piece before it. In some ways, the things that happen in the story are so ridiculous and outrageous, that they feel as if they are parodying the noir style. The fact that Britten is accompanied by a talking tea bag as his partner is one such outlandish element that makes this feel slightly more whimsical and funny than the serious drama of a noir piece. That by no means makes this a light piece, however.

The main character of this story is deeply troubled by his job. Most PIs in noir mystery stories are the mysterious hero type. They are attractive and do their job well. Britten is depressed and haunted by past mistakes. He is not a hero, and in many ways is the cause of a lot of strife for a lot of people. The novel is mostly about the mystery, but it also heavily focuses on Britten’s inner turmoil and mental health. I assume that his ‘partner’ is a fragmented part of himself; perhaps it is how he use to be before his job got to him and he made so many mistakes. Now he constantly has darkened eyes and a sad look on his face. He does not smile once throughout the entire graphic novel. His numbness to his the situations around him is indicative of his depression and the style of the art, the wet, subdued way it is painted, adds to this depressive overall feel.

The tone of this work is serious. Despite how overly dramatic it feels at times, it is, at its core, tragic. It is melancholy and leaves the reader feeling a little sad and maybe even numb with its resolution. It is difficult to determine Berry’s voice generally as an author and artist without seeing more of her work, however, the personal nature of the issues dealt with by the main character makes me feel like that is something personal to Berry. The melancholy way in which she paints as well as how she draws characters are all specific to her art style, and by extension, he voice as an author. I imagine the rest of her works have a similar feel to them.

After reading the whole novel I really do appreciate the art style of it and I did get pretty engrossed in the story, however dramatic. It made me feel a bit bereft by the end, but I feel that was the author’s intension. This was a highly successful genre piece as well as an emotional one.

Karen Russell: Author's Voice

I personally really enjoyed Vampires in the Lemon Grove by Karen Russell. The style in which she writes is easy to read. It is casual and real feeling, but has the interest of concept in its inclusion of supernatural or fantastical elements. There is something super engaging about reading these kinds of fantastical situations thrust into a very realistic situation and style. Sleep Donation hits on a lot of those same notes, which makes it just as easy and enjoyable to read. It’s all very fantastical in concept and subject matter, but is told in such a way that it feels real and all the characters and their struggles feel real. It’s not too fantastical so that it is pushed out of the realm of the believable. I can easily suspend my disbelief when reading Karen Russell’s writing and become fully engaged in her world.

When we talk about a writer’s voice, it is comprised of many of the different elements that I have touched on above. Writer’s voice comes through in structure of exactly how the author writes, it comes through in tone, it comes through in what the author seems to like writing about, and it comes through in the feeling that the author’s writing creates in their readers. Karen Russell’s tone overall is casual. It’s not overly formal but it’s also not so casual that it’s irreverent or sounds like a teenager. The story is told through first person so we have to separate character voice from author voice, but I think that in this case, they match very closely. When I read Sleep Donation, even though the main character is completely different from Vampires in the Lemon Grove, they seem very similar. I sometimes forget that the story is being told in first person. All the other characters in Russell’s stories have distinct character and characterization. They all feel like real, different individuals; the narrators do too, but I think Russell’s voice comes through a lot more in them, just because of the nature of a first person narrative. The first person narrators become their own characters when their darker sides begin to be revealed.

Karen Russell’s writing is also saturated with emotion. Things happen around the characters, but the real story generally is about their own inner turmoil and what they are dealing with. Both of her narrator characters have a lot of anxiety, stress, and conflicting emotions about what they are and what they do. Her narrators question themselves and their own motives a lot. They question what they do in life. This question and feeling lost or disconnected from what one should be doing is something very tangible and relatable to many audiences and I would hazard a guess that this internal struggle and anxiety is something that Russell has personally experienced. When it comes to personal voice, at least for me, I tend to write characters that I can personally identify with; who have similar traits or similar insecurities to me. I think the fact that both of the focal characters in these two works have this internal moral battle is a good indicator of what Russell’s own experiences might have been.

Both stories feel very melancholy. They have resolutions and feel complete, but not in a ‘happy ending’ kind of way. They feel complete and satisfying in a real way, and real life isn’t always so happy. Russell doesn’t really seem to ascribe to that cynical tone that a lot of dystopian writers take, however, where “everyone is terrible and everything sucks”. Sleep Donation is in essence a dystopian work, however, it is not a commentary or declaration against society. It is a telling of a personal story, again, focused on internal struggle and emotion more than the actual events and corruption happening in the society.

I really did enjoy both of these stories. They were easy to read because of how engaging and different they were. I definitely would consider reading more by Karen Russell in the future.