2017 Review: Books

| Paul Greer

These are the books I have read in the last 12 months:

Dubliners

author: James Joyce  published: 1914

Always love this. It’s more of a comfort read for me these days.

The Essays of Montaigne, Book 1

author: Michel de Montaigne  published: 1580 rating: 5

Jamilti and Other Stories

author: Rutu Modan  published: 2008 rating: 5

Great mixture of the everyday, the extraordinary and the fantastic. Stories beautifully told.

Billie Holiday

author: Carlos Sampayo  published: 1989 rating: 3

The Grapes of Wrath

Author: John Steinbeck  published: 1939 rating: 5

“I want to put a tag of shame on the greedy bastards who are responsible for this.”- John Steinbeck, 1936.  I have always known of this book but never read it or even knew very much about what is was about. I really wasn’t prepared by how relevant it was to so many situations occurring globally at the moment. The mass migration of populations due to climate changes, infrastructure collapse and economics, the refusal of a system to help and indeed the full demonisation of those in transit.The language is beautifully simple and yet says so much about strength, sadness, suffering, perseverance and dignity.

The Assassination of Margaret Thatcher

author: Hilary Mantel  published: 2014 rating: 5

The Fortune of the Rougons (Les Rougon-Macquart, #1)

author: Émile Zola  published: 1870 rating: 5

Worth having an idea of the background and circumstance of the coup d’etat of the Second French Empire (Wikipedia will do), as knowledge seems to be assumed.

Deadpool & the Mercs For Money, Volume 0: Merc Madness

author: Cullen Bunn  published: 2016 rating: 3

The Collected Stories Volume 4

author: Arthur C. Clarke published: 1956 rating: 4

Rabbit, Run (Rabbit Angstrom #1)

author: John Updike published: 1960 rating: 4

A really intense, gruelling book about a pretty loathsome wretch. Horrible thing is there’s a billion Rabbits in the actual world. Ahead of its time in many ways. This is my first Updike. His writing is profound. But yeah. Relentless.

Captain Marvel, Volume 3: Alis Volat Propriis

published: 2015 rating: 5

When the World Screamed (Professor Challenger, #4)

author: Arthur Conan Doyle published: 1928 rating: 4

Captain Marvel, Volume 2: Down

author: Kelly Sue DeConnick  published: 2013 rating: 4

The Iliad

author: Homer published: -750 rating: 5

Captain Marvel, Volume 1: In Pursuit of Flight

author: Kelly Sue DeConnick  published: 2011 rating: 4

The Schoolmaster and Other Stories

author: Anton Chekhov published: 1921 rating: 5

Batman: The Killing Joke

author: Alan Moore & Brian Bolland published: 1988 rating: 4

The Rough Guide to Berlin

author: Christian Williams rating: 4

Akira, Vol. 1

author: Katsuhiro Otomo  published: 1984 rating: 4

A Room with a View

author: E.M. Forster published: 1908 rating: 5

The Tenant of Wildfell Hall

author: Anne Brontë published: 1848 rating: 5

Whatcha Mean, What’s a Zine?

author: Mark Todd published: 2006 rating: 5

Inherent Vice

author: Thomas Pynchon published: 2009 rating: 5

Syllabus: Notes from an Accidental Professor

author: Lynda Barry published: 2014 rating: 5

Meditations

author: Marcus Aurelius  published: 180 rating: 4

The Shining

author: Stephen King  published: 1977 rating: 5

Better than the film.I do love the film, though.

The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism

author: Naomi Klein published: 2006 rating: 5

Heavy going and ten years old. But does help you understand this place where we are is a logical step from where we’ve been.

The Descent of Man, and Other Stories

author: Edith Wharton published: 1903 rating: 3

I’m Still on:

SPLIT: True Stories About The End of Marriage and What Happens Next

editor: Katie West published: 2017

A Clash of Kings (A Song of Ice and Fire, #2)

author: George R.R. Martin  published: 1998

Becoming a Writer

author: Dorothea Brande  published: 1934

Drawn & Quarterly: Twenty-five Years of Contemporary Cartooning, Comics, and Graphic Novels

author/editor: Tom Devlin  published: 2015

See also what I watched and listened to in 2017.

Ichabod Ending

Video | | Paul Greer

Notebook Ichabod is nearing the end. Serendipitously started on the 1st January 2017, it’s mostly filled with technical notes, stories, garbage, mind maps, schemes and some drawing, but not enough. I’m currently transitioning to two books next, standard and a smaller size in the hope I will carry the smaller one with me more often in an everyday carry type way and feel less inhibited about drawing in public.

Here’s to Notebooks Gilbert and Beto!

📓

“Style is the difference between a circle and how to draw it”

Image | | Paul Greer

Opening page of Notebook: Ethel

I’m going to be uploading notebooks in a more systematic fashion (with sensitive info deleted obvs). Notebook Ethel is a few years old.

This is before I started using the first page spread as an index for the rest of the book. So the lists here are largely inspirational items and ideas of content capture. There’s not much order and I tend to fill empty spaces with bits of ephemera stuck in and doodles.

Salvador

| Paul Greer

Testing of my beautiful new Gullor fountain pens and Waterman inks on a portrait of a young Salvador Dali.

Apparently the photograph was taken of Dali by Luis Buñuel around the time of the making of Un Chien Andalou.

One suggestion is that Dali’s father strongly opposed his relationship with his future wife, Gala, he banished him from the family home. Before leaving for Paris to join her, Dali shaved his head and buried the hair at Cadaqués beach.