Reading Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. It, and couple of others, were recommended here recently, and is somewhat of a new genre for me, memoir / biography in graphic novel format, graphic memoir?

Got the omnibus edition, "The Complete Persepolis", it's a pretty interesting read. It's about young girl in Iran during the Islamic Revolution of 1979, at least the first volume, after that it's about her life after that.

What about all of you? What have you been reading or listening to lately?

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[–] calliope@retrolemmy.com 6 points 4 days ago

I read the first seven stories of The End of the World As We Know It, the short story collection based on the world of Stephen King’s The Stand.

I realize I don’t like the varying quality of short story collections, so I won’t be reading much more of this one. I have other things to read and apparently my “bar” is too high.

I enjoyed the first four stories, but to me the quality started to drop significantly. Stories 4, 5, 6, and 7 all felt more like reading Stephen King short story contest entries instead of a book I paid for.

Many of the stories tactlessly insert references to The Stand’s time period, references to Stephen King, or intentional gross-out scenes. Story seven literally starts with the protagonist watching a VHS of Creepshow just to shoe-horn a Stephen King reference in there.

There are somewhat specific references to the 2020 pandemic (CDC says a vaccine in one week, running out of toilet paper as a joke) in a couple stories, which broke suspension of disbelief for me.

The antagonist of story 7 is a criminal so tough that the law just “ceased trying to rehabilitate him.” That is, when someone went missing from the town pre-flu, they assume it was this killer walking around town that the law just didn’t care about. In 1990.

I would have probably really enjoyed the top 12 stories but it’s hard to want to sift through the many other stories that to me seem to be included unnecessarily.