Graphic Novels...

This week is reading group! And the end of another lightening-fast month of Daly life...  My reading group and I are reading a very interesting non-fiction book about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch: Moby Duck: The true story of 28,800 bath toys that were lost at sea. But, more on that story another time.


This week's post is about another type of book the Daly family likes to read: graphic novels! I was so excited when our oldest son came home from school last Friday with a 'weekend read'. He had snagged Smile, by Raina Telgemeier from the middle school library.

This is the fictional story of an 11 year old girl who accidently knocks her two front teeth out and her journey to get her smile restored.  The librarian told him it was a hot-borrow, so he'd better get it while the getting was good. Of course, like me, when he has a good book  he stays up til all hours of the night reading and can't think about much else other than getting his nose back in the book.

One of my all time favorite reading group selections was Blankets, by Craig Thompson. This graphic novel was about the author's teenage years, his first love, and some experiences at church camp (where he meets his first love) that shaped his now-adult views toward organized religion. I thought the illustrations (comics) were amazing. I'd recommend it to anyone who has never read a graphic novel because the pictures are great and the story is very entertaining.

Another one of my favorites in the graphic novel genre is the Maus series: Maus: My father bleeds history. This was a story of the holocaust from a cat and mouse point of view (the Nazis were the cats and the Jews were the mice). Even though the illustrations were of these cats and mice, they were haunting and stuck with me long after I was done reading. The story was very touching and envoked a great sense of sadness for the Jewish survivors because even though they did survive, they could never forget the horrors they experienced and could never truly enjoy life. These books were very good. I'd recommend them to a mature reader.


I get to choose November's book, and I think I'll choose Persepolis: The story of a childhood, by Marjane Satrapi.

This is author's story of her life growing up (ages 6 to 14) in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. This book takes place in the 1980's and 1990's in Tehran. Hopefully we will all be able to get a copy; we borrow our books through inter-library loan, so sometimes books aren't available, sometimes they don't arrive on time, and sometimes crazy life gets in the way and the books just never get read...

What are you reading right now?