Jean Harkin's Blog - Posts Tagged "birdpedia"
March--From Violence to Birdsong
In like a lion, out like a lamb, or vice versa, as they say about March. So my book discussion is full of contrasts too—from violence to birdsong.
There is nothing more horribly violent than genocide. I read the first volume of “Maus” by Art Spiegelman, a family’s personal account of the Holocaust. Written in comic book form for adults, the characters are imaged as cats and mice, plus a few pigs. This book was recently banned by a school board in Tennessee that picked up on “inappropriate words” and “nudity” (a tiny image of a bathtub suicide in human form.) But the censoring school board overlooked the vitally important lesson of a horror story that must be told so as to never be repeated.
See my full review of “Maus 1” on Goodreads.
Avoiding violence is the timely theme of a just-released anthology, “There I Was. . . When Nothing Happened.” Jason Brick, of Portland, has gathered stories from forty violence professionals and martial arts enthusiasts who detail a time they came close to, but avoided, violence through skills both physical and language-related.
Now for the birdsong: I enjoyed randomly skipping through the delightfully, artfully, and alphabetically informative pages of “Birdpedia: A Brief Compendium of Avian Lore” by Christopher W. Leahy. This little book nests at my bedside for nightly reading. See my Goodreads review.
And be sure to check out “Bed Stuy” by Portland author Jerry McGill. This novel was nominated for the 2022 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. See my Goodreads 5-star review.
I hope soon to be assigned an editor for my debut novel, “Promise Full of Thorns” under contract at Sunbury Press.
There is nothing more horribly violent than genocide. I read the first volume of “Maus” by Art Spiegelman, a family’s personal account of the Holocaust. Written in comic book form for adults, the characters are imaged as cats and mice, plus a few pigs. This book was recently banned by a school board in Tennessee that picked up on “inappropriate words” and “nudity” (a tiny image of a bathtub suicide in human form.) But the censoring school board overlooked the vitally important lesson of a horror story that must be told so as to never be repeated.
See my full review of “Maus 1” on Goodreads.
Avoiding violence is the timely theme of a just-released anthology, “There I Was. . . When Nothing Happened.” Jason Brick, of Portland, has gathered stories from forty violence professionals and martial arts enthusiasts who detail a time they came close to, but avoided, violence through skills both physical and language-related.
Now for the birdsong: I enjoyed randomly skipping through the delightfully, artfully, and alphabetically informative pages of “Birdpedia: A Brief Compendium of Avian Lore” by Christopher W. Leahy. This little book nests at my bedside for nightly reading. See my Goodreads review.
And be sure to check out “Bed Stuy” by Portland author Jerry McGill. This novel was nominated for the 2022 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. See my Goodreads 5-star review.
I hope soon to be assigned an editor for my debut novel, “Promise Full of Thorns” under contract at Sunbury Press.
