February's Book Haul

Books I Read and Loved in 2014, Part 1

Hello wonderful readers, I'm on the cusp of the second half of the year, and I realise I haven't posted in months (I am pretty active on Instagram if anyone wants to follow me in my day to day life. Lots of pictures of my fur babies). So, I thought I'd talk about the books that I've read and loved in the first half of 2014. Currently, I'm sitting at 77 books read, but quite a few of them didn't really move me all that much.

January Book Haul

So... books. I got a lot of them this month. Christmas, birthday, and just a total irresponsibility when it comes to money results in this tonne of books.

Books read in January

This was a difficult month for me. I didn't get many books read, only 10, 3 of which were graphic novels.
It being the middle of summer, we've had weeks where doing anything but lying comatose in front of the air con was unbearable, with temperatures exceeding 40 degrees (Celsius, for all you American readers. You have the polar vortex, and we have Summerpocalypse.). And at the same time, depression got in the way, making it difficult to want to pick up books, even if they're wonderful and  make me feel good. I just felt so apathetic about it all.

But whatever, we're here to talk about books, aren't we?

Are Comics Real Books?

Ah, the great question. When I was in school, teachers would always tell off anyone who brought comics or graphic novels to silent reading time. "They're not books!" they would exclaim.
Aren't they?
They have words. They have a story, characters, conflict. They inflict a painful amount of feels at times. They discuss issues.
Is it that they have pictures that makes them not worthy of being called books?

To me, it seems snobby to claim that graphic novels don't count in literature.

Becky Cloonan has written a trilogy of sorts, The Ink and Thunder series, and each issue is a one-shot. They're carefully crafted, written, illustrated and inked by Becky herself. And I would call them literary-fantasy crossovers. There's a lot of hidden things in her work, imagery, symbolism, everything you'd find in a regular book.
I dare you to check them out. Each issue is only 99 cents on comixology.

So, what do you think about comics as books? Goodreads thankfully counts comics as books towards my yearly reading goal, since I've slowly started reading more comics than books lately.

A quick post to let you know that I'm not dead, and what I've been obsessing with lately

Apologies for not posting in several months. Especially after that last post wherein I talked in verbatim about my depression. I hope no one thought I'd pulled an Allie Brosh (her several months-long hiatus on Hyperbole and a Half, with no warning, after her own post on depression was an extremely worrying time for me.)
But I've been getting better. I think. My feelings have been going up and down, as to be expected with mental illnesses. But I've been dealing with it. I've made a new friend in my course, who quickly turned into my best friend. And this best friend introduced me to superheroes.

Now, I've read some comics before. I'd read the first 100-something issues of Fables, before getting sick of the convoluted, meandering plot. Ditto with The Walking Dead. But I'd found it difficult to get into superhero comics, mainly because, well, I found the Batman universe uninteresting and too male-angsty for me (Oh, Chris Nolan, please tone down the angst), just to name one example, and the comic community is severely anti-woman, as I've encountered.
But after reading some comics that he forced onto me (I completely recommend Loeb's Hush, Tomasi's Batman and Robin run (up until Damian dies), Simone's Brids of Prey run, and Dini's Gotham City Sirens run), I've become so in love with the feels that the superheroes give me.

So, I've decided, since I can't think about anything else, that I'll post a few things on various topics regarding comics.
Next post, which should be up within a few days, will be all about the disdain some people have for comics, and how they sometimes don't see comics and graphic novels as real literature, and how they're not real books.
I'll also be discussing feminism in comics (with a lot of vitriol at the New 52 Wonder Woman, and just Wonder Woman's current situation).
After that, I'll talk about writing in comics, which, as a novelist, I've discovered is incredibly ruthlessly difficult to grasp, but super incredibly fun.

I hope that this will help me keep consistent in posting often, and that I can rant happily about my new passions, and maybe even educate people.