gwynnega

I spent much of the weekend working on the Jo book, getting ready for WFC, reading the first half of The Wild Girls by Pat Murphy (loving it), re-watching Dark Shadows (John Karlen as freaked-out Willie Loomis is a joy to behold), and catching up on episodes of Revenge. (While ABC is hell-bent on destroying the last vestiges of their daytime serial dramas, they seem equally committed to fostering their nighttime ones, and Revenge is a very good one.)

This afternoon I went to Skylight Books for Kate Beaton's book signing. I was late to the event because I was endlessly circling, looking for parking, and when I finally got there, the place was way more packed than I'd expected. beatonna gave a great talk and showed slides (though I couldn't see 'em too well because of the crowd). I did manage to purchase Skylight's last copy of the Hark! A Vagrant book. I didn't try to get it signed, what with the crowd, but I did stop by Skylight's annex and bought Alice Bag's new memoir, Violence Girl.

I only have to go the office two days this week, what with WFC coming up!

Before dinnertime last night I picked up the copy of Alison Bechdel's graphic novel Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic that I'd recently purchased at Neighborhood Comic Book Shop--and the book would not let me go. I read it cover to cover, with breaks for dinner/Ryan's Hope and for chapter four revision. I finished reading around 1:30 a.m., and wow.

From the jacket blurb: "Distant and exacting, Bruce Bechdel was an English teacher and director of the town funeral home, which Alison and her family referred to as the 'Fun Home.' It was not until college that Alison, who had recently come out as a lesbian, discovered that her father was gay. A few weeks after this revelation, he was dead, leaving a legacy of mystery for his daughter to resolve."

Why did no one tell me about this book? I mean, I've been a fan of Bechdel's Dykes to Watch Out For since the late 80s, and I knew Fun Home had won awards and stuff. But this is the best book I've read in a long while, and I think pretty much everyone on my FL would love it. It's about family and love and death and sex and literature and truth and lies, it's funny and moving, and it packs quite a wallop in its deft, light way. Read this book, FL!!!

Bechdel side note: I have this very happy memory of reading Dykes to Watch Out For in Washington DC, circa 1989, when I was there for a gigantic pro-choice March on Washington. I wrote a poem about it at the time (when I was in my most rabidly ultrafeminist phase), and I looked it up last night. ( basically heterosexual girls engrossed in lesbian comics... )

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A cool link some of you may be interested in (I sure am): Africa Reading Challenge. "Participants commit to read - in the course of 2008 - six books that either were written by African writers, take place in Africa, or deal significantly with Africans and African issues."