I'm reading these books so fast I can barely remember which parts of the plot happened in which volume but know that I am still having a great time! 

I devoured this book as quickly as book one. Our adventure party gets a bit deeper into the dungeon and begin to have more meaningful interactions with the beings who dwell there, including an Orc family just trying to get by, golems which grow vegetables on their backs, and living paintings which might reveal more of the buried castle's history. 

A flashback reveals more of the school friendship of Marcelle and Falin; a deep underground lake leads to many encounters with watery monsters of various types. I continue to have a very fun time with this series! 

Molly grew up in Peachtree, Georgia, in her lesbian moms' hardware store, in the shadow of the town's prestigious and expensive art college, PICA. Every since she can remember, she's wanted to attend PICA- despite the fact that her best friend dropped out last year and says the school chews people up and spits them out. But Molly got a full ride scholarship, so her first semester should be a breeze, right? No! Because when she shows up to orientation, no one can find her scholarship or even her registration. It turns Molly will have to pay for her first year after all; she takes out some dodgy loans and scours the financial aid booklets for any other scholarship she can apply for. It turns out, if she can scrape up a full team of softball players... and they compete against other college teams in the same division... and they win at least one game over the course of the semester... the whole team gets a free tuition! Is it possible to win one game with a bunch of big-ego, burned-out, athletically-challenged artists? I loved the energy of this story, with many well-informed digs at art school culture and hypocrisy. The team has great chemistry and the art style is full of action, physical humor, and delightfully expressive cartooning. 

I've been wanting to try another Toni Morrison, since the only one I had previously read in high school went completely over my head at age 15. Recitatif is Morrison's only short story, and this audiobook version is read by the wonderful Bahni Turpin (who you might recognize from Angie Thomas or Akwaeke Emezi's audiobooks). Also included in an excellent essay written and read by Zadie Smith. This comes first in the audio, but if you are new to the story as I was, skip the essay and listen to the story first! Then go back and listen to the essay afterwards. This way the cleverness and impact of the story can hit you fully. It is so smart, so well crafted, and such a master class in writing that both reveals and conceals so much about the complicated relationship of two damaged women. 

I've been hearing about this book for years as a writing guide, but it is almost equally a memoir or collection of anecdotes about the writing life. Parts of it worked for me and other parts didn't. The author has a very different type of brain than I have, and the chapters on working through the anxiety, neurosis, and depression she suffered from when trying to write didn't really speak to me at all. I also did not enjoy the handful of flippant jokes about killing yourself when the writing isn't going well. However. There are also some genuinely really moving pieces about writing books as gifts to loved ones, especially loved ones who are soon to leave us. I thought a lot of the advice in the middle about focusing on details, on recording memories, on research, and on character development was really solid, and I want to keep some of it in mind when I start developing my next book. There was also a set of lines in the introduction, about how writers are able to participate in public life while also working from home and without leaving the house which hit the nail on the head of why I entered this career! 

Sensual, at times tender, at times haunting, this beautiful little book is a collection of lesbian erotic comics from a poet artist at the top of her field. I am definitely biased, having been friends with the author for years, but I also deeply admire this work. The women, witches, and creatures in these stories yearn for pleasure and for freedom; they chase both through oceans, forests, broken suburban towns, and through dreams. The book is perfectly sized to hold close to your heart. 

I can immediately see why so many people are charmed by this world and these characters! This is the start of a really fun D&D infused adventure story, with a small group of down on their luck adventures deciding to cut their adventuring costs by eating the monsters they kill in the dungeon. The man behind this idea, Laos, is also searching for a missing sister who may or may not have already been eaten by a dragon. I already have books 2 and 3 on hold; I haven't been so captured by a manga series since starting Witch Hat Atelier. 

This volume was just as beautifully drawn as book 1; the cartooning is masterful, but I don't have a very good sense of where the larger plot is going. This book was mostly a long side quest in which Nyneve learned how to make a broom under an exiled gay broom making master. I enjoyed this! However it didn't particularly seem to move the story forward. I will keep reading, but the sense of drama and urgency from the beginning of the first book is slightly missing here. 

I've been following Ai Weiwei's work since about 2010, and was absolutely delighted to learn he was releasing a comic memoir. I managed to snag a signed copy though the <a href="https://www.comixexperience.com/graphic-novel-club">Comix Experience Graphic Novel of the Month Club</a> and I will treasure it. This book is organized into 12 chapters, each themed around one animal from the zodiac. It weaves together slice of life moments from Ai Weiwei's day to day life, stories of his father (the revolutionary poet Ai Qing), memories of Ai's time as an art student in New York, his incarceration, time spent with his mother, his partner, and his son, conversations with artist friends and some of his international exhibitions. It is not a tight narrative; it wanders, it indulges in myths and fairy tales, it is open ended and I enjoyed it so much. It was written along with Elettra Stamboulis, and draw in a delicate lose line art style by Gianluca Costantini. A few of the lines from the end of the book haven't left my head since I read them: "Freedom of speech and human rights are not given to anybody for free. They always come through fighting and struggle" (101); "Any artist who isn't an activist is a dead artist" (165) and "... the purpose of art, which is to fight for freedom."(166)