I just found it weird. There is no plot to speak of. Stuff happens, people do things, events occur. Characters appear, some part of their story gets told, then they exit again. Or, they appear again and again, connected to almost everybody else in the book, but none of what they do matters. Sometimes I am unsure whether the different events happen before or after each other, or whether they’re talking about the same thing.

At the same time the book does not appear surrealist. All the events are realistically rendered, all the people and places reasonably normal. It looks as if it should make sense.

I kept reading bits of it but never felt like any of it mattered. I picked it up less and less often, until I finally just let it lie. Unlike really bad books, which I give up on after 50 pages or so, I think I read over 80% of this one, until I couldn’t be bothered to open it again.

Amazon UK, Amazon US, Adlibris.

Then suddenly he finds out that magic is real, and he can learn to be a magician. Instead of going to a normal college, he goes to a magical one, and does indeed learn magic. But magic has no magical power to make him happy. Magic gives you power, but without anything meaningful to apply that power to, a magician’s life can feel as meaningless as anyone else’s.

Ordinary people given magic remain ordinary. They make stupid decisions, make messes of their lives, make nothing of the opportunities they’re given. They long for something, and when they achieve it, realize it’s made them no happier.

This may make a great truth but it does not make a great book. Or perhaps it makes a great book, in some literary sense, just not one that’s fun to read. In fact, despite all the magic, it was ultimately a depressing book. Or perhaps it was depressing because of the magic? We expect fantasy literature to show us something magical, something different from this world. And here’s a so-called fantasy book that tells you that you ain’t gonna get it. Because of this, I suspect that people who don’t normally read or like fantasy are more likely to enjoy this book than fantasy readers.

I also found the storytelling in The Magicians unsatisfying. There is a lot of “tell, not show”. The world, the characters, the action, all remain at a distance, and I never get that sense of being transported into a different reality. A charitable interpretation would be that Grossman makes the book mirror Quentin’s state of mind. Just like Quentin always feels that he’s never really part of the world, that surely there should be something more to life, the reader feels the same about the book. Unfortunately I don’t think this is the case: indulging in weak writing just to make a point would be going too far. So I think it’s just a case of slightly weak writing.

There are some great ideas and some excellent scenes, and I kept hoping (like Quentin) that something would turn the whole thing around, but it never happened. A promising but unsatisfying book.

Amazon UK, Amazon US, Adlibris.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

He first expressed this in Unhappy Meals, an essay in NY Times Magazine back in 2007. I found myself agreeing so strongly with everything in the essay that I bought the book. Then I read the book, and again I found myself vigorously agreeing with every single page. This is such a sensible book that I wish it was mandatory reading for everybody. In fact just skimming through the book now while reviewing it makes me want to re-read it.

Part 1 of the book talks about “the age of nutritionism”: how food was reduced by scientists to collection of nutrients, which we’re always told to eat more or less of. Great news for the producers of processed foods – and bad news for us, since instead of just enjoying our food, most people are confused, obsessed and worried about what they eat. Unfortunately all this advice rests on a very weak foundation – the last few decades’ prevailing advice to “eat less fat” was essentially a huge experiment, and is now looking like a failure.

Part 2 talks about “the Western diet”: how our relationship to our food has changed over the last 150 years. We’ve gone from whole foods to refined, from complex food chains of wide variety to simple monocultures, from quality to quantity, from leaves to seeds, and from food culture to food science.

Part 3, “Getting over nutritionism”, goes back to those seven words of advice and expands them into more tangible pointers. What does it mean to “eat food”? How can you help yourself not eat too much?

For a contrarian viewpoint, check out In Defense of Food Isn’t About Nutrition (a review), according to which Pollan’s book is mostly “the desire to show off beating out scientific thinking”.

Amazon US, Amazon UK, Adlibris, Adlibris (Swedish translation).

I did not like this book. I kept going through the first, familiar story, even though I didn’t think it worked as well as the movie. But I gave up in the middle of the second one: it was dull, ugly and depressing.

The title story is about a girl who becomes the fourth wife of a rich man, and her relationship with the other three wives. Scheming, adultery, cruelty, jockeying for position and manipulation. It ends, as Chinese stories often seem to do, in tragedy.

The second story, “Nineteen Thirty-Four Escapes” is about the wife (again) of a peasant who’s moved to town and left her behind to take care of the children and their plot of land. It’s all about poverty, tiredness, struggle and cruelty. Perhaps this is for ideological reasons (it’s a book about pre-Communist times written during the Communist times, after all) but whatever the reason, I want no more of it. I also found it confusing – Chinese literary conventions being different from Western ones – but I could have lived with that if it hadn’t been for the unpleasantness of it all.

The third story I can’t say anything about because I never read it.

Amazon US, Amazon UK, Adlibris.

You might perhaps expect this to end in romance of some sort, but Hoban is better than that. The two are so used to being lonely that they’re bothered by each other’s company. Neither does their adventure change their lives. The world doesn’t even notice; there are no news stories and no police investigations. But their little project does give each one a tiny little kick, launching them on what might become a new path in their lives.

The tone of the book very much reflects the lives of the two people. It is quiet and melancholy, through and through.

I have mixed feelings about the book. On the one hand, it is delicately written, and the two lives really come to life. But at the same time I couldn’t help finding these lonely lives depressing and dull. I didn’t exactly find it riveting, but I enjoyed reading it, yet I’m not sure I’d want to re-read it.

Amazon US, Amazon UK, Adlibris.

Due to the source of the material, it’s an uneven book. The editor’s work appears to have been limited to selection and cutting (and probably correcting spelling mistakes). Inevitably some contributors have spent more energy on trying to sound cool and above it all than on actual content – several parts of the book have a rather unpleasant tone. And some central topics are only briefly mentioned, while others get covered by multiple contributors. It all depends on who felt like writing what down. The same goes for the supporting photos: no one has bothered to visit an archive, it’s just whatever they had at hand.

The selection is slanted towards older memories: there is more material about the 1940s and 50s than about the 1980s. I guess older newspaper readers are more inclined (or have more time) to write down their memories.

Despite its shortcomings, it’s a valuable book to me, because it serves to remind of something that was everywhere but now is nowhere. And such things are so easy to forget.

No longer available in shops; try a second-hand book store.

The focus is on the social and business side of the story, rather than technical details. As the title indicates, the author views the telegraph as something similar to today’s Internet: a new way to connect people across the world and speed up communication, with all the attached hype, obsession, hacking, encryption, chatting, techno-stress, and talk about world peace that we got for the Internet. The comparison isn’t new or novel in any way, but many of the similarities and parallels were new to me. Interestingly the book was written in 1998, before the Internet boom got underway – but since the story it tells is 150 years old, none of it feels dated.

This was a diverting and enjoyable book. Read it and enjoy.

Amazon UK, Amazon US, Adlibris.

The boy, now called Nobody Owens, grows up among the ghosts. He learns their ways and their skills. He never leaves the graveyard, because the assassin is still looking to kill him.

This is The Jungle Book set in a graveyard, with ghouls instead of monkeys and a werewolf instead of a python. There is adventure, danger, learning, fun, and some appropriately scary scenes (it’s a children’s book after all). There are delightfully weird characters. And in the end, of course, there is the inevitable return to life among other humans.

The book is imaginative, well-written, fun and poetic – everything a good Neil Gaiman book usually is. The plot is a bit shallower and the tone a bit more charming than in his adult fiction, but nevertheless really enjoyable. The one downside, according to some reviewers, is that it is perhaps a bit too closely inspired by The Jungle Book, but since I don’t have any fresh memories of that book (having last read it over twenty years ago) it never bothered me.

Adlibris, Amazon UK, Amazon US.

The stories are funny and well-written. The thematic focus of the book gave it a strength it wouldn’t have otherwise, but at the same time I found it slightly repetitive. I enjoyed reading this, but wouldn’t have wanted any more of the same.

Adlibris, Amazon US, Amazon UK.

Eric and I both like books, so we own quite a lot of them. Many of them have lived in storage boxes for years now – a sizeable portion of our library stayed behind when we moved to London, and we were only reunited when we moved to this house a year and a half ago. Now, during those winter weekends when there’s nothing to be done in the garden and the weather doesn’t particularly encourage cycling or other activities, we’ve been slowly unpacking and sorting through them all. We’re finally almost through.

There will still be a few boxes for special cases, but most of the books have ended up in one of two places: the shelves, or the charity shop. This weekend we drove to the charity shop with 5 boxes full of books.

Store: Children’s literature that Ingrid’s too young for. Books in French that I read while living in Belgium (that I think I will someday re-read, even though I cannot envisage when or why I would do it). Books that we want to keep for nostalgic reasons. Books that we really don’t open often but like too much to give away.

Shelve: Books we haven’t read yet. Books that we would love to re-read if we had time. Books that are fun to browse. Books that bring back fond memories. Books with a historical meaning (remember dictionaries?).

Ditch: Many books about business and economics from our university days. Lots of mediocre fiction. Various lexicons and reference books: we use the internet instead.

Partway through this work a thought struck me: the entire decision process is founded on the premise that the world will go on functioning as it does today. In particular, we’re assuming that the Internet will go on existing, and that I can use it to look up anything I want.

But if one day we should have an apocalypse that wipes out our communications infrastructure – meteorite, collapse of civilization or whatever – we would probably really miss those reference works and rue our decision to not buy an encyclopedia. The people hoarding all their old books would be the heroes.

Is it worth keeping an encyclopedia packed away in the basement, as a sort of insurance policy? What is the probability of an apocalyptic event happening within my lifetime? A general collapse of civilization could probably be foreseen some way off, but the meteorite scenario is trickier.

Of course if anything like this did actually happen, we’d have bigger problems than lack of information and history. We should instead make sure to equip ourselves with books about basic medicine, growing your own food, and carpentry and metalworking and construction and so on.

See what kinds of thoughts books can lead one to!

Gardens of the Moon is a book of fantasy in the truest sense of the world. Erikson (and his co-creator Ian Cameron Esslemont) have put their fantasies to work and imagined a fantastical world.

The result is a complex, dense, sprawling, opaque book. There are lots of people and peoples, as well as gods, demi-gods, and other kinds of entities. There are varied, lively cities, hundreds of thousands of years of history, a system of magic not like anything else, and much more. It is clear that a great deal of work has gone into this world. (I found out afterwards that part of the explanation is that the world was created for an RPG and the books came later.)

The setting: The Malazan empire is at war, aiming to conquer a neighbouring continent. The war is not going well, but nevertheless the empire has conquered the next but last Free City on the continent, and is setting its sights on the last one. Meanwhile tension is growing within the empire and the army – the new empress doesn’t trust anyone from the old guard and tries to get rid of them all.

The plot is almost impossible to summarize. There are many threads, crossing and meeting and then separating again. Each one on its own is complex enough to be hard to describe in brief. There is the thread of a squad of elite soldiers sent out to sabotage Darujhistan, the last Free City, in preparation for conquest. There’s the thread of a young army captain trying to catch up with them to save them from the Empress’s plan to get them killed. There is an assassins’ war, there is a group of magicians chasing another, mad, magician, there are attempts to revive an ancient all-powerful monster, and attempts to hinder these attempts, and so on. Oh, and then there are the various gods, meddling in all these affairs: Greek style gods who take a close interest in the mortal world, and have a tendency to manifest physically and push events in their desired direction.

It’s intense, to say the least. And Erikson’s writing style underscores the intensity. The reader is thrown right in, in the middle of the story. It’s sink or swim. There are no info dumps: you either figure it out as the time and the pages pass, or you don’t. Refreshingly challenging.

After the first few chapters, just when I thought I wasn’t up to the challenge, the threads started coming together, and I felt I understood roughly what was going on. Then the story got more complex again, and then some things got their explanations again. The complexity stayed just this side of being unmanageable.

The complexity of the book is simultaneously its strength and its weakness. It makes for a thrilling read, an immersive world, a captivating story. But it also makes for work. This is a cult book rather than mass market fantasy.

This is not a book to be read in one sitting. I felt I had to put it down now and again so my brain could rest. But it was well worth it. I’d say that in order to get through the book without giving up in frustration, you have to go with the flow rather than trying to catch every last detail – but stay focused.

The book, its world and its plot are refreshingly non-tolkienesque. There are no clichés – no dwarves, no elves, no quests. Well, no clichés apart from a thieves’ guild and an assassins’ guild. Sigh.

It’s a dark book, of war, malice, manipulation, ambition and power. This is no war of heroes. There are no heroes, and barely any good guys. There isn’t even a good side and a bad side – it’s everyone against everyone else. In fact at times it’s hard to know who’s on whose side, or indeed how many sides there are. There are real people on each side of each conflict, and we see the conflict from all their points of view. Even though they aren’t good guys per se, they are all easy to sympathise with. And everybody has surprises in them.

While the characters have depth and, well, character, this is still a book driven mainly by plot rather than by character, by intellect rather than emotion. We never really get into the characters’ heads, and it is at times hard to know what moves them. They are instruments for moving the plot along. Erikson has no sentimentality for them: even important people are killed off when it suits him.

And – last but not least – while Gardens of the Moon is a part of a sequence, it is supposed to stand on its own, and I thought it succeeds at that. The story arc was completed, the various spying and assassinating factions mostly sorted out, and a phase of the war concluded. While I’m looking forward to reading more about this world, it’s not a necessity in order to enjoy this book.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

Gonzales has got some really interesting points. First of all, what leads people to make the – in hindsight – obviously stupid decisions, ignoring glaringly obvious warning signs, that lead to a possibly lethal accident? Among the answers:

• habit – it’s always worked before
• stress leading to confusion
• rigidly following an outdated plan, when reality changes
• holding on to an incorrect mental model of the world even when the map doesn’t seem to match reality
• taking shortcuts, being in a hurry
• group dynamics – not wanting to be the coward, or the one to slow everyone down
• underestimating the forces of nature, the weight of snow, the force of falling from a certain height, the power of ocean waves
• unwillingness to turn back, to give up – the uncertain but hopefully nearer goal is more tempting

And second, what does it take to survive one, after it’s happened? The right mindset.

• focusing, not give in to the shock and confusion of realizing that you’re lost
• have a reason to live, something or someone they want to survive for
• not giving up, even though surviving looks hopeless
• not expecting rescue, not counting on God to save you
• positive thinking: taking delight in small victories

Interesting fact: the youngest children often have very good survival rates, because they follow their instincts. They rest when they’re tired, crawl into a hollow tree when they’re cold. On the other hand, kids between 7 and 12 years of age have one of the worst survival rates, because they think more like adults (and less instinctively) but they cannot yet control their emotional responses, and panic.

On the minus side, the book is not very well organized. It sort of has a structure, but is mostly built out of case studies. The key points lost between anecdotes and quotes.

There’s too much talk about Gonzales’ father and what a cool survivor guy he is, and there are silly attempts to bring chaos theory and self-organizing systems into the picture.

Finally, the book was too narrow for my taste. There’s too much focus on risky adventure sports. (Although there were ordinary cases of getting lost in the woods, too.) I would have preferred something more varied – surviving PoW camp, or an ordinary fire.

Underlying it all is the view that you’re not living a full life unless you engage in activities that could lead to your death, and ideally survive a few accidents that almost do lead to it. This view that your own preferences are universal, that everyone should live life your way, is immature and annoying.

On the whole, it’s got its points but it’s not very well written, and I come away from it slightly disappointed.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

The stories are faery tales, i.e. tales about faeries. Faeries as powerful tricksters, who do things for their own reasons, and whom you cannot trust even if they seem to be helping you. For one reason or another, in most of these stories, humans come in contact with the world of faeries, and stuff happens.

“Kind of nice”, is the best I can say about this book. There’s nothing exactly wrong with it, but overall it felt a bit tame and repetitive. Most of the stories lacked that special spark. Looking back at it, I would probably have found the stories more entertaining if I had read each one on its own.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

Indeed, a rift has been opened between two worlds, by the magicians in the other world, in order to invade this one. This gives them a great tactical advantage. In order to figure out the nature and limitations of the rift, Pug and his master join a scouting foray. Unfortunately Pug is captured and taken to the other world. He stays there a long time, learns their magic and becomes a powerful magician.

Let me get it off my chest: Magician sucks. It is described as a “classic fantasy epic”, gets overwhelmingly positive reviews on Amazon and elsewhere. I found it boring and badly written. It isn’t awful. I actually finished the book (unlike some). But it is bad enough that I find it hard to come up with anything positive to say about it. Even Robert Jordan is better than this.

There is no originality. Pug’s world is a standard Tolkien-slash-medieval world: we’ve got humans (check), elves in the forests (check), dwarves in the mountains (check), and some killing robbing dark elves too (check). They have a standard feudal system, and that standard kind of magic where the magician mumbles a cantrip and waves his arms and stuff happens.

None of it comes to life. There is no depth to the world. I get no feeling of history, or life outside of the story line of this book. That other world is not described vividly enough to ever feel real. The characters are flat, all average and likeable and dull (except for one, who’s mad in a very standard way).

Even the magic feels fake. While magic, and the differences between the magics of the two worlds, are crucial to the plot, we only see very superficial examples of it, and with no understanding of how it works. It is all on the level of “he waved his arms and chanted and magically created some mist”.

The language is dull and plodding. The tone is monotonous. There is no sense of humour, no beauty, no power. The dialogue is embarrassingly bad, stilted and formal in an effort to make it sound medieval. It has no personality – even in the end I couldn’t keep some of the characters apart because they sounded exactly the same.

The pacing is weird, to say the least. At times, several years pass and you almost don’t notice. At other times, a single afternoon’s conversations are rendered in great detail. The siege of the keep takes 30 pages, and yet many more important and potentially more interesting events of the war are over in a few paragraphs. It seems that the expositions are only there to shine a spotlight on some particular person or relationship between persons. It is such painfully clumsy character-building that it’s embarrassing.

The story has no particularly interesting aspects or ideas. It’s hard to see what it’s about, what the point of it is. The plot just plods along, except for an occasional interruption from some very contrived scene. (For example: a commoner of no particular import, who’s barely learned to ride a horse, gets to accompany the princess on her daily rides – just so he gets an opportunity to rescue her.)

I wouldn’t recommend anyone to read this; there are much better examples of fantasy out there. And I have no intention of reading any other works by Feist.

Amazon UK. The book was published as two separate volumes in the US: Magician: Apprentice, Magician: Master.

Mack Megaton is a robot. Originally built for destruction , he has gained free will, given up his violent ways, and now earns a living as a taxi driver. In a city bustling with mutants and sentient robots (many of whom are even full citizens), he actually sort of almost blends in, even though he is huge, red, and almost indestructible.

One day his human neighbours are kidnapped. Mack gets mad. (He has issues with anger management.) He gets no real help from the police, so he decides to track them down and rescue them himself.

The rest of the book is full of what would be standard for a detective novel but comes across as funny in this setting. Confrontations with mob bosses, intimidating their underlings, exchanging macho but witty comments with sassy blonde girl, gunfights and sneaking around.

The Automatic Detective feels sort of like a what-if game by the author – “let’s see if I can make this work”. Since it is founded on a cliché, it feels worn at times, but the mixture as a whole is nevertheless distinctive enough to stand above cliché. Not an unforgettable work of great literature, but good light-hearted fun all the way through.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

Anathem is a book of ideas. It is intellectual, complex, and amazingly ambitious. It is not like anything else I have read. It is a science/philosophy thriller, which sounds really dry and serious, but is much more engrossing than that. Anathem is both funny and fun, if philosophy and quantum theory is your idea of fun. But reading it requires attention and almost feels like work. It is the kind of book that makes me feel dull, and 100 pages in I was already thinking that I should probably really start over, taking notes, and perhaps read up on some philosophy before I do that.

Brief plot summary: On the planet Arbre, scientists live segregated from ordinary people, in convent-like places. The flow of information in both directions is strictly controlled, as is the scholars’ use of technology. This separation was put in place a few thousand years ago after some vaguely described Terrible Events, in order to limit the power of scientists’ ideas, and the risk of dangerous technologies being developed and used.

The convent doors are opened only once per year (or once per 10, 100 or 1000 years, for different parts of the convent). So the scholars inside their walled communities think and theorize, and watch cities come and go outside their walls over thousands of years, and civilization rising and falling and rising again.

Around one of these door-opening times, something happens in the skies of Arbre that changes everything. Some scholars get busy speculating on what exactly happened, and figuring out how it will affect their world – using precious few observations, and their impressive deductive abilities. Events grow, some scientists are even called forth from their convents in order to work together, and finally grand things happen.

This is all told through many philosophical debates and entire chapters filled with theoretical discussions that are crucial to the plot – you can’t skip any of it and still be able to follow the action. It is a Socratic novel. Stephenson manages to cover several major strands of the history Western thought from the ancient Greeks onwards (the history of philosophy on Arbre is similar enough to Earth’s to be clearly recognizable, but obfuscated just enough to make it an effort to match up the two) as well as some interesting parts of quantum theory (and I do mean theory, there are no “quantum wormhole warp drives” in this book).

To quote another reviewer: Anathem is “a unique, impressive but fairly mad novel: one part hubris to one part taking the piss to one part gnarly geek awesomeness” (Strange Horizon Reviews). An Amazon reviewer said it felt like a novelization of Gödel, Escher, Bach, and I can sympathize with that, too.

It was a wonderful if somewhat daunting book. If you haven’t read any other books by Stephenson, don’t start with this one – it might be too big a shock. Which doesn’t in any way mean that it isn’t good – you just need a warm-up first. Stephenson’s scope and ambition have definitely grown over the years but luckily the page count has come down since the Baroque Cycle. (This book is a mere 900 pages, plus appendices with more science if you feel you didn’t get enough.)

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

On top of that, Flora is stuck with most of the housework since the butler is gone. She also has her Catorcena, the celebration of her adulthood, to prepare for – speech to write, dress to finish, invitations to sign.

When Flora stumbles upon the butler, she sees a chance to get rid of some of the housework, and for some excitement, too. She happily promises to restore him to his powers. Of course this is not as easy as it sounds, and meddling in magic can have dangerous consequences.

Both the girl and the book are spirited, colourful, outrageous, and keep confounding expectations. All characters are over-the-top but not so much as to become caricatures. At several points I thought I saw a cliched resolution coming up, and I am glad to say I was wrong every time. A fun read all the way through.

Amazon US, Amazon UK.

This is a pleasant diversion, a charming book. The style is very personal and chatty. This makes it an easy read but at the same time makes it hard to remember many details. There were so many disparate facts that I have already forgotten most of them, and the clouds all blur together again. But nevertheless, it was a pleasant read.

My one complaint is the lack of pictures. Each chapter starts with a nice woodcut-style illustration of a particular type of cloud, but apart from those ten images, and a few colour plates in the middle, there are mostly small black and white photos, flat and grainy – probably because of cost issues. This should be a glossy book with pictures all over the place. Not a coffee-table book, mind you: I rather liked reading it during my commute, and being able to look up from the book and gaze at the clouds above me.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.

Now I can understand the reason and rationale for the first two. Thieves and beggars could well want to prohibit outsiders from crowding onto their turf, divvy up the city, and impose other rules. But I really have trouble understanding how an Assassins’ Guild could possibly exist.

Quite apart from such mundane concerns as “wouldn’t it be rather dangerous for someone to be a registered assassin?”, there is the issue of volume and sustainability. Let’s think about the numbers.

How many members does a guild need to have in order to be called a guild and not just a bunch of guys? A few dozen at least, I’d think. Let’s say 30.

How often would an assassin need to kill someone in order to keep his skills sharp? Once a week seems like a reasonable minimum. That’s 52 kills per assassin and year, and 1560 kills for the entire guild.

How many people in a city? Most fantasy takes place in a late medieval or renaissance-equivalent era. The top 10 cities in this world in the year 1500 ranged from 150,000 inhabitants to 670,000 inhabitants (About.com). Let’s assume, generously, that the cities in the books are really grand ones, say 300,000 souls.

Assuming a life expectancy of 30 years (Wikipedia) and a stable population, there would be 10,000 births and 10,000 deaths every year. Of those 10,000 deaths, about 3,000 would be children in their first 5 years of life. That leaves 7,000 deaths of other causes.

1560 assassinations out of 7,000 deaths would mean that one death out of every 4 or 5 is an assassination. Or to put it another way, deaths from all other causes would need to be 20% fewer than in our average medieval city, or else the city will be emptied pretty quickly.

If we reduce the assassins’ activity level to one kill per month, that’s 360 kills per year or rougly 5% out of all non-infant deaths, which is rather more reasonable. But it means that, on the one hand, the guys wouldn’t get much practice, which means they would not be as skilled, so they would get lower pay, and they would need to have day jobs. And once you’re spending 90% of your time working as a messenger, thief, horse trainer, or whatever, and only killing someone once a month, can you really call yourself an assassin still?

PS: For more medieval demographic calculations, try Medieval Demographics Made Easy.

This is a documentary / autobiographic comic book about a year spent in Burma. Guy’s wife works for Médécins Sans Frontières. Guy takes care of baby Louis, draws cartoons, wanders around, and teaches cartooning to local students.

In short vignettes he shows us scenes from his experiences as a foreigner in Burma, and from life under a dictatorship. The focus is on daily life, show up-close, observed with humility and wry humour. The drawing style is simple – not the most stunning-looking comics, but it works well. New York Magazine has a sneak peek.

Skimming some reviews online I discovered the book was originally published in French, and I had read a translation. I never suspected – the translation was excellent.

Amazon UK, Amazon US.