Van Lente, Fred & Ryan Dunlavey. Action Philosophers.

Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Comics, 2014.

This graphic introduction to the entire history of philosophy was originally published in (I think) ten parts starting in 2005, and this is the all-in-one Tenth Anniversary Edition. I remember reading a couple of the installments randomly when it first came out and I wasn’t terribly impressed. I hoped reading the whole series in order would improve the experience, but it didn’t, really. The thing is, philosophy was one of my minors in college in the early 1960s (it sort of fitted in with my history and political science double-major), so I tried to imagine learning about the subject from this book at anything like the level of my introductory courses, and the comparison was not encouraging.

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Ginder, Grant. Let’s Not Do That Again.

NY: Henry Holt, 2022.

I had read one of Ginder’s earlier novels and I have to say, I wasn’t very impressed. For one thing, absolutely none of the principal characters was likable, and if there’s no one you care to root for, you won’t enjoy the story very much. This one is considerably better, though. There are three main players, Democratic Congressman Nancy Harrison of Manhattan and her two grown children, Nick and Greta. Nancy was already a successful lawyer and when her husband, who previously held the seat in the House, was killed, and she stood for election to replace him.

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Bowring, Sam. Scharlette Desn’t Matter and Goes Time Travelling.

Sydney, Australia: Flitterstix Press, 2019.

My attention was drawn to this slightly bizarre and highly original science fiction novel partly by the title but mostly by the reviews. Most of the reviewers admitted to being a bit bewildered by the whole thing, in between a good deal of snorting laughter. The author has done several fantasy trilogies that seem rather dark, but he’s also a stand-up comic in Australia. (So there’s that.) The heroine owes her peculiar name to her parents, who compromised when they couldn’t decide between “Scarlett” and “Charlotte,” and no one can pronounce it properly — not eve Scharlette, much of the time. She’s thirty years old and leading an extremely boring life running a security metal detector at the Sydney airport, she has no boyfriend, almost no friends, and she can’t seem to lose weight.

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Benjamin, Ali. The Thing About Jellyfish.

NY: Little, Brown, 2017.

My junior high, many years ago, was two years, 7th and 8th Grade, but these days a lot of middle schools (as they are mostly known) start with 6th Grade. That’s the case in Massachusetts with Suzy Swanson and her best friend since Kindergarten, Franny Jackson. They’ve been looking forward to having lockers with combinations instead o just cubbies for their stuff, and to being on the cusp of teenagedom. But then things change unexpectedly. Franny used to be the more babyish of the two, more prone to crying, not especially pretty or especially smart, and she tended to lean on Suzy to help get her through the world. Suzy was a “constant-talker,” very bright and well read, brimming over with facts about everything. Now, suddenly, Franny is interested in boys, and in sitting with the popular girls at lunch, and joins them in laughing at Suzy’s frizzy hair and cluelessness about fashion. They don’t seem to be best friends anymore.

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Galbraith, Robert. The Ink Black Heart.

NY: Little Brown. 2022.

We all know by now that J. K. Rowling is perfectly capable of writing novels without a single wizard or dragon in them, and this is the sixth book (under the nom de plume of Robert Galbraith) featuring private detective Cormoran Strike of London. It’s also longer than any three of the others put together, at just under 1,50 pages, but it’s well worth reading every single word.

(Thoth I will note that more than a few reviewers in the national media attacked the book savagely, mostly because they didn’t like the author’s recent public transphobic comments. I don’t agree with her opinions on that score either — I have a trans grandson — but they are completely irrelevant to her skills as an author of fiction.)

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Korelitz, Jean Hanff. The Undoing.

NY: Grand Central Publishing, 2014.

I greatly enjoyed Korelitz’s Admission, so I went looking for her other books. This more recent one is quite different in its themes, characters, and settings, and it’s also pretty good. The protagonist is Grace Reinhart Sachs, thirty-year-old native New Yorker and marriage counselor/therapist, now living in the same Manhattan apartment in which she grew up herself. Her husband, Jonathan, is a talented and hard-working pediatric oncologist at Sloan-Kettering and their twelve-year-old son, Henry, attends the same expensive private school Grace did. Grace’s life is, in her mind, pretty close to perfect.

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O’Neal, Barbara. The Art of Inheriting Secrets.

Seattle: Lake Union, 2018.

This author specializes in what gets marketed as “women’s fiction,” but she’s a pretty decent writer despite that limiting label and she has a dozen earlier novels to her credit. So, Olivia Shaw is a native San Franciscan and editor of a highly respected food magazine, but her mother was born in England. She never talked to her daughter about that earlier life, though, so Olivia always assumed she had come from a working class family and had escaped to the New World from an hard and unpleasant life.

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Knisley, Lucy. Apple Crush.

NY: RH Graphic, 2022.

I’ve been one of Lucy’s biggest fans since her first graphical memoir, French Milk, and she just keeps getting better. This one (her sixteenth, I think) is a sequel/companion to Stepping Stones, in which we met twelve-year-old Jen McInnes, recently moved from NYC to live full-time with her divorced Mom (and Walter, Mom’s fellow ex-urbanite boyfriend) on a small farm upstate. Cleaning out the chicken coop every morning is a lot different from walking down the block for bagels, but she discovers she kind of likes living in the country, even with all the work there is to do.

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Sussman, Elissa. Funny You Should Ask.

NY: Dell, 2022.

This is Sussman’s fourth novel (the first three consisting of two fairy tales and a “feminist romance”), but it’s the first I’ve read and it’s pretty good. The female protagonist is Chani Horowitz, who was once a struggling young proto-journalist in Los Angeles writing what her serious novelist boyfriend insisted on calling “puff pieces” for an online celebrity news magazine. Then she landed a plum assignment: An extended interview with hot action star Gabe Parker who had just been cast for the lead in the next James Bond film. This had upset a lot of people because he was from Montana, not the UK, and because he had once appeared in a university stage play in which he had kissed another man on the mouth.

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