Troy’s Book Club: hopefulness/ominousness

This Fall, I read a pair of books that were quite the contrast between each other. One was a warning, and depressing, while still being quite a work of art. The other was hopeful, or rather, about the journey to maintain hopefulness while the world keeps pressing down on you.

THE HANDMAID’S TALE by Margaret Atwood is a very impressive bit of world-imagining and fleshing out. It’s obvious in the reading of it that she has thoroughly imagined this horrible “what if?” world, and knows so many details about it. She has thought it through quite extensively! It’s not just “what” she writes that brings this world to life, but “how” she writes it, too. The “voice” of the book is so well-conceived…it’s a challenging book to read, but one that IS important, and is one heck of a cautionary tale.

It was interesting reading Michael J. Fox’s fourth book, NO TIME LIKE THE FUTURE, while reading HANDMAID’S at the same time. Fox’s book has the sub-title of “An Optimist Considers Mortality”, which is interesting as the first of his books that I read was “Always Looking Up: The Adventures of an Incurable Optimist“. In this book, which is VERY current (at the end, he spends some time talking about the coronavirus pandemic), Fox tells the story of a rough couple years that really cause him to question his generally indefatigable optimism. I won’t spoil what he all went through, but suffice to say that his sense of optimism was sorely tested, and he learned some lessons about it that helped him to be “realistic” AND “optimistic”.

I also managed to read a number of comics in the past month, including two related books, featuring black-dressed defenders of the downtrodden – BATMAN and ZORRO! And, if you know your Bat-mythology, you know that Bruce Wayne had been to a showing of THE MARK OF ZORRO, the night that his parents were murdered. I read BATMAN: DEATH BY DESIGN, by Chip Kidd and Dave Taylor, and ZORRO RIDES AGAIN, by Matt Wagner and Esteve Polls.

ZORRO was a pretty standard re-telling of an early Zorro tale. It was solid, in both writing and art, and was a nice change of pace from the regular superhero stories I read.

BATMAN: DEATH BY DESIGN is a near-masterpiece of art, mood, and script. It’s SO well put-together, really is exceptional. I had minor quibbles with some of the plot, but they were easy to overlook because the book is SO beautiful! Chip Kidd is mostly known as a book-designer, not as a writer, so it caught me eye to see this book that be designed AND wrote. In most comicbooks and graphic novels, the design of it is kinda perfunctory, but in this instance, the design was very clearly an important and considered part of the book. It’s beautiful.