Transcript / LoLT: Graphic Novels for Newbies and Two Great Books — 13 December 2024

This is a transcription of [LoLT: Graphic Novels for Newbies and Two Great Books — 13 December 2024/)

[cheerful music]

Melissa: Coming up, a backlist cookbook packed with festive holiday treats.

David: A deep dive into Christmas.

Melissa: Plus, our Distraction of the Week. I’m Mel.

David: I’m Dave. This is The Library of Lost Time.

David: Before we get started, a programming note! We’re going to get lazy for the next few weeks. We hope you will join us in whatever that means to you. We will not be talking to you next week on the 20th, or the week after, on the 27th, or even the week after that, the 3rd.

David: We will be talking with you in early January when we will be announcing the details of a super-secret project we have been working on for months now. We hope you will be a part of it. We are very excited about it. And we’ll have all the details in that first full week of January. Probably.

Melissa: This is probably going to sound like a weird thing for a cookbook author to say, but here we go: I don’t enjoy cooking that much. I love coming up with new recipes and daydreaming about how they might taste. [DAVE - foodgination]. And I love eating. Oh, I love eating so much! But everyday meals honestly just steal from reading time. However, the one time I do kind of enjoy playing in the kitchen is at Christmas time — because I like to make special treats.

Melissa: Back in the ’90s, one of our first Christmases together, I got my hands on the book ‘Gifts from the Kitchen’ by Williams-Sonoma, and I went a little crazy. I made LIST recipes. Then I bought brown paper bags and a snowflake stamp and silver metallic ink and all manner of silver ribbons and bows — and I made Christmas gift packs for, like, everyone we knew. It was glorious.

Melissa: So, let’s talk about the book. It’s a little retro at this point — turns out cookbook style has changed in the last 30 years — but the recipes are legit. We still make the spice nuts from this book at least once a year. They’re salty-sweet with a whisper of cumin, which I thik we an all agree is the best spice. They’re awesome on their own and also delicious in other things like salad or cookies.

David: I’m a big fan of the pine nut brittle from that book.

Melissa: It’s only five ingredients and tastes like Christmas love. If you need last-minute gifts for your favorite people, there are lots of other great ideas in here.

Melissa: Vanilla bean caramels, which were were a revelation because they proved that caramels are super easy to make and don’t require any special equipment or skills. Two kinds of marinated olives and infused oils. Small scones and a panettone with apricots and cherries. A capuccino fudge sauce to drizzle over ice cream or pound cake.

Melissa: The recipes are really nice because they all look special, even though they’re easy to make. And there are great ideas for how to package them so they look super fancy. But are so easy for those of us who are not super crafty.

Melissa: Your library probably has a copy of this book. YOu can buy it on Amazon. And if you’re really down to the wire with your holiday prep, it’s on the Internet Archive, so you can pop in, grab a few recipes, and move on. Easy peasy.

Melissa: It’s ‘Gifts from the Kitchen’ by Kristine Kidd, and it’s been making our Christmas merrier since 1994.

David: I’m going backlist this week. But it’s for a reason. My book is ‘A Christmas Cornucopia - The Hidden Stories Behind Our Yuletide Traditions’ by Mark Forsyth. If you have ever wondered why Christmas falls on December the 25th, why we celebrate with a tree, or how Santa evolved into the jolly old elf we know today – this is your book. It’s a collection of essays about the history of what makes Christmas Christmas.

David: The author has two qualities that I find endearing. First, he’s done a lot of research. He’s spent many hours in libraries chasing down the history of Christmas traditions. And second, he’s what the British call cheeky. He’s a touch disrespectful, seems very doubtful of religion, and he’s not afraid to throw a punch or two at the reader, either. I’m going to read you a couple of paragraphs. These are from his essay on Santa:

‘America was founded on the principle that Christmas doesn’t exist. You may hear other theories about religious freedom or colonial idealism or liberty or exploration, or other airy-fairy codswallop. But these fail to look at the cold, hard facts of the cold, hard Pilgrim Fathers who landed at Plymouth Rock. They were Puritans and Puritans hated Christmas. So they spent Christmas Day 1620 building the first houses of their new colony. Just to be utterly clear, they didn’t do this for luck or love of Christmas, they did it because they didn’t believe in Christmas at all and believed it should be an ordinary workday like any other. You can theorize all you like about colonialism and capitalism and the great unmapped continent, but when it comes to nails in wood, America was founded on the principle that Christmas doesn’t exist.’

‘It did next year. A little. A bunch of new, less puritan settlers arrived in early December on a ship called the Fortune. And when Christmas Day came round they told Governor Bradford that they couldn’t, in all conscience, work on a holy day. The governor reluctantly agreed that they could have the day off. The original Mayflower pilgrims went out to work in the fields as usual, but when they got home for dinner they discovered the newcomers playing at stool-ball (an early form of cricket) and actually having fun. In public. This was too much for Governor Bradford and he confiscated their toys and ordered them indoors. He later noted with satisfaction that, since then, ‘nothing hath been attempted that way, at least openly.’

‘But the new pilgrims kept coming, and many of them couldn’t wait to celebrate. On one ship, the Ark, that came over to Maryland in 1633, Christmas Day fell while they were still at sea, and they got so drunk that ‘about a dozen died.’

David: He goes on to visit with early Americans like Washington Irving and Clement Moore and how they influenced the Santa story. He tells us that nobody really knows how the reindeer myth got started. It just showed up one day and everybody rolled with it. The book is informative, laced with references you might want to follow up, and presented with that dry wit you just heard.

David: If you’re up for having your Christmas traditions walked all over, this is a delightful book. It would be a great stocking-stuffer for the cynic or non-fiction reader in your life. It’s ‘A Christmas Cornucopia’ by Mark Forsyth.

David: And now, our Distraction of the Week.

David: Let’s talk about graphic novels! I wanted to mention a few graphic novels that have come out in the last couple of years that I think are worth your time. I would qualify these books as being good for people who don’t read comics very often.

David: I think that’s an important distinction. If you go to, say, The New York Times and look at their ‘best graphic novels of the year’ list, you will get graphic novels that are pushing the form. This character expresses himself with the head of an octopus and the body of my 5th-grade teacher. Notice how I am delineating the passage of time with the subtle use of sepia and advanced hatching techniques.

David: And there’s room for that, but these books are not that. These are three graphic novels that are good for people who might be graphic-curious.

Melissa: Before you get into the books, maybe make the case for why someone who reads text should read graphic novels.

David: That’s a broad question. But the short answer is: if you are of certain kind of mind, they’re delightful. A good graphic novel combines graphics and text to tell a story faster than a novel can. It’s like a movie in that regard. At the same time, the comic form has its own strengths. It can play with time or visuals or the juxtaposition of image and text in a way that no other form can. So, for instance, if you have a picture of a cat. Just a typical cat. And you put the text, ‘princess’ on top of that cat, you get one vibe. But if you have the exact same picture, and you put the text, ‘destroyer of worlds, harbringer of despair’ you’ve got a completely different setup. And then if you have the next frame be the same, but with the cat smiling just a bit, maybe their head titled up, now you’ve got a relationship. Could you express that same relationship in just text? Sure. Would it read that quickly? Probably not.

David: A good graphic novel can hit you right between the eyes. A graphic novel can express different emotional states much faster than a novel. A graphic novel can also explain concepts faster than a wall of text. A good artist will bring visuals and text that work together to tell a rich and compelling story. And if you’re sleeping on that, you might be missing out.

David: So. Let’s start with the hardest sell. Because it does everything I just talked about really well.

David: It’s called ‘Polar Vortex: A Family Memoir,’ and it’s by Denise Dorrance. It’s an autobiography. The author is an illustrator who grew up in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She’s middle-aged now. She lives in London. She’s got a husband and a son there. The story is mostly about her relationship with her mother, who still lives in Iowa. At the time of the story, Mom is descending into dementia. There’s an emergency in Iowa, and the author goes home to take care of her. And, boy, this book offers the whole emotional ride of that. There’s fear and love and anxiety and doubt and humor. There’s being back in a place where you grew up, and the awkwardness and richness of that. There are tense family relationships with decades of momentum. There’s digging through the past while you’re just trying to make a cup of coffee in your family home. And the author is brilliant in the form. She does things like when someone in Iowa says she sounds British – she draws herself with a crown and scepter and changes the text to over-enunciate her accent. It punches up how she’s of there and not of there. Very comic-sy. But she’ll also go to the dark places. This book is a couple hundred pages long and I read it one afternoon because it’s just so well told. It feels like letters from a friend.

David: It’s ‘Polar Vortex: A Family Memoir’ by Denise Dorrance. If you are up for an emotionally charged trip back to Iowa, this is a great read.

David: Next up, let’s talk about a non-fiction work with way less crying. This is ‘Hidden Systems: Water, Electricity, the Internet, and the Secrets Behind the Systems We Use Every Day.’ There’s something really compelling about a great non-fiction graphic novel. For me, it can make it easier to visualize things that would take pages and pages of text. In this particular case, the author is talking about these enormous systems. Like: water. All of water. How it got here on Earth, how it works in nature, what we do with it, how that’s evolved over time with different cultures. Or, you know, electricity. In the hands of another author, this might be dismally dry. But here, it’s fascinating and insightful and the ideas just zoom from the page. If you’re the kind of person who wonders how things work, or if you know somebody like that, this book is brilliant. Particularly if you enjoyed David Macaulay’s ‘The Way Things Work,’ you’ll love this. That’s Dan Nott’s ‘Hidden Systems.’

David: Finally, let’s talk about a graphic novel from a friend of ours. It’s ‘How It All Ends’ by Emma Hunsinger. This is a story about a girl who’s placed out of eighth grade, and is now entering high school. I suspect it’s intended for people of that age, but don’t let that stop you from enjoying it. Like “Polar Vortex,” this frames up all of the feelings of that age from feeling lost in the halls of high school to being in a room of misbehaving 9th-grade boys to trying to figure out relationships. Betrayal and jealousy and young love. There’s a whole lot of humor in this book. I’ll give you an example. There’s a discussion early in the book between the lead character, Tara, who’s a 13-year old girl, and her mother. It’s the night before she’s about to head off to high school for the first time.

David: Tara says, ‘I think I should have asked to stay in middle school.’

David: And mom says, ‘Oh yeah?’

David: Tara says, ‘High school sounds really confusing and, um, maybe I’d get it if I was older.’

David: Mom says, ‘How’s being older gonna help?’

David: Tara. ‘Um. I’d be, like, wiser.’

David: Wiser how?

David: ‘I’ll have been to Six Flags?’

David: Mom says, ‘Listen to me. You’d be nervous to go to high school no matter what. Even if you had all the wisdom of someone who’d been to Six Flags. Trust me. I know there are things you’re not ready for. But you’ll figure out high school.’

David: The relationship between Tara and her mother is lovely, but her relationship with her sister is even better. I would absolutely read a book of those two just hanging out one afternoon.

David: If you are interested in anything I’ve just said, please go get this book. It’s ‘How It All Ends’ by Emma Hunsinger.

David: And that’s it! Those are three graphic novels that came out in the last year or two that would be great for people who don’t read graphic novels. We’ll put links in the show notes if you want to hunt any of those down.

David: Before we go: Thanks for listening! It means the world to us. We’ll talk to you in January with the announcement of our super-secret project that we hope you’ll be a part of. Have a great holiday! We will talk to you soon.

Melissa: Visit strongsenseofplace.com/library for more on all the books we talked about today.

David: Thanks for joining us on the library of last time. Remember to visit your local library and your independent bookstore to lose some time yourself.

Melissa: Stay curious. We’ll talk to you soon.

[cheerful music]

Top image courtesy of Getty Images/Unsplash+.