Robot-mel London, United Kingdom

I borrowed a copy of this from the library as due to the popularity of the tv series and the out-of-printness of this book copies on amazon start around £50! I have to say I would NOT pay £50 for this. It was an enjoyable enough story. It felt more like generic fantasy rather than GOT. The similarity being the names of the places the characters came from, and even in a comic being too many to easily keep track of. But it was much more a generic story about a would-be-knight than anything else. It also highlighted the lack of roles for women in that world as there was only one female character who had two conversations in the whole story. The art really isn't all that great though. Standard Marvel/DC type and looks kinda cartoony and not very interesting. The story was quite enjoyable though and I found myself getting caught up in it and wanting to finish it all in one go. I have reserved the second volume from the library. Not a brilliant graphic novel by any streach of the imagination but alright to read.

I enjoyed this queer pulp novel an awful lot. It was such a wonderful mixture of realism and fantasy. The main character Paula was living poor in New York with an alcholic father and a soon-to-be-proposing boyfriend. At 18 she was working a dead end job as a secretary and looking forward to being married. But then she met her fiance's aunt and all that changed. Paula's relationship with Byrne definitely bored on the fantasy part of the story. She met a lesbian instantly fell in love and changed her whole world. It was like there was a story of this ordinary girl trapped in this world of poverty and alcholism who practically invented this perfect rich lesbian who'd be able to take her away from it all. The mixture of the reality and the fantasy was odd but made for interesting reading.

Part two where you learned of Bryne and Greta's relationship felt much more realistic. Here were two girls who fell in love and started having sex. Not realising there was anything wrong Greta told her mother how WONDERFUL it all was and her mother freaked out. The resulting breakdown Greta suffered was realistic and terribly sad. One thing that bothered me about the book was how Greta was then portrayed as a horrible monster. She was violent, an alcoholic and had sever mental health issues but you couldn't help feel sympathy for her anyway. It also raised the question of responsibility and happiness in relationships and how much you should sacrifice yourself and feel responsible for another's behaviour.

While the book was flawed it was still very enjoyable and I will definitely track down more books by this author.

So when we were in Paris in March I found a french copy of this but decided not to buy it as Paris was full of lovely French comics that hadn't been translated from English ones. So I was able to borrow this from a friend. It was really great to have a 40K story where the main character was female. It didn't make any difference to the story that she was a woman, she behaved like all the male characters in 40K stories but I kinda liked that.

The book is a collection of comics, done by different artists and I'm guessing writers and as such the story isn't nearly as cohesive as you'd expect a single graphic novel to be. The story seemed to go off in several different directions but it was still enjoyable. My only complaint was the version I read was novel sized which made it too small to see all the art well and sometimes had trouble reading things. The French version was a large hardback (And I'm pretty sure it was colored) which I think would be a much better to read it.

I started reading this book over a decade ago. My friend and I had gone on a long weekend trip to San Fransisco to hang out with the queer dyke culture there. My friend bought the book and I read the first couple pages while coming back on the plan, but I hadn't slept from the night out before where many drinks had been consumed and I had succesfully managed to pick up a girl in a nightclub. It was all very decedant and the book seemed a perfect mirror for life in San Fransisco and hanging out in the queer clubs in Seattle. Though of course I was too fucked up at the time to read much and I forgot about it for years until I found another copy at the library.

The book is a series of chapters about lives of punk dykes in San Fransisco in the mid 90s. More memoir than fiction, not even the names are changed, but that sense of reality and glimpse it give you are intense. I totally loved it to start with but there is just a series of women one after the other, drunken nights and there is no arc or destination or coherance to it so after awhile it just seems a bit repatative. I think it probably would have been better if the stories of the girls had been balanced with more stories about life outside of the sex. There were some moments of pure brilliance though, visiting her girlfriend's family in the South was pretty horrible and striking as were the stories about prostitution, the mushroom trip was really descriptive and told so very well. I got this from the library and have already ordered another book by the author. Having read so many older queer books it's nice to read one more recent.

So I read Fun Home which was Bechdel's book about her dad where every chapter got more complicated and showed a deeper insight into his life and their relationship and it was all very interesting and tragic. I was interested to read her book about her mother having had one or two issues with my own. But I have to say overall there really wasn't much here. While Fun Home gave you a really good sense of the complexity of the dad, the mom was treated much more superficially, she was a teacher, she wrote poetry, she liked to act in local theatre. You'd eavesdrop on her converstations with Alison but really there wasn't much there. Likewise there didn't seem to be much in their relationship. Alison felt unwanted and not as valued as her brothers but really her mum didn't seem that bad at all and it seemed like they had a fairly normal relationship. There were hints of more trauma beneath the surface about her mom's homophobia but that was hardly touched on. Likewise while fun home was all layers this book felt very flat and didn't really get any deeper. I'm afraid that despite having a psychology degree, and courses in child development I just wasn't that interested in her favourite child psychologist that she kept quoting. The best bits for me were about Virginia Wolf which made me convinced I really should read more of her books. This book was good it just wasn't fantastic like her last one. I think you'd probably get more out of it if you have more of a typical relationship with your mother as it seemed to be aiming at finding some general truth about mothers and daughters which I'm afraid because of my personal circumstances I just couldn't identify with at all.

I must admit i was expecting a bit more from the first cyberman adventure. I liked the artic base and the astronaunts (ironic that they considered there should be black astronauts in 2000 but that they still referred to him as a negro). I liked the old and sick pre-regeneration doctor and the way Polly and Ben tried to compensate for him. It seemed like a good start but then it all kinda fell apart. The arrival of the other planet and the cyberman's lack of a plan seemed rather silly. Of course the biggest problem was the sexism in this story. Polly, being a woman, wasn't considered a big enough threat to even be locked up with the Doctor and Ben and all she had to do was make cups of tea and coffee!!! Which she got yelled at for doing wrong! It's only a few years away from Zoe defeating the entire invasion fleet and sending missles into orbit with the power of her brains! But what a big difference those few years make. I love Polly and Anneke Wills but this was just too sad.

This book was mentioned in the queer pulp book I read. It was originally published in the 19th century as a true account of a woman who lived in the "Wild West" dressed as a man. This version was published by the University of Oklamhoma Press and contains several different versions of Charley's story.

The "autobiography" reads to start with like a novel, it tells the story of her parents who had her out of wedlock, the mother thinking her father was dead and marrying a man she didn't love because she was already pregnant. It was all very dramatic. When Charley was born she spent time living with servants before being sent to school. She seemed to have gotten married about 12 or 13 then when her husband was murdered she decided to seek revenge on the killer by dressing as a man and hunting him down. Her life as a man to start with seems very unrealistic. She claims to have made 1000s of dollars working on boats which seems rather unlikely. But parts of the story definitely sound more plausible, running a bar and on the trail west which were excerpts taken from her diary. It seems impossible reading this how much was factual but that doesn't really matter as it is an entertaining story anyway.

The next part is the account of Mountain Charley written by a newspaper man. The woman he describes has a totally different background and different adventures. Dressing as a solider and joining the army. I found his section much less interesting.

I'm not really very interested in the US in the 19th century or cowboys but nonetheless this was an interesting story of someone living the life of another gender. So I would recommend it.

The edition of this book that I read had a very 70s looking threesome on the cover. The books starts with a young Jewish girl on a train fleeing for her life with her family in 1940. They are all heading to Portugal to escape the war. The story is the tale of this group of refugees. Most of the characters are Jewish but others are fleeing France for other reasons. Some want to flee the war completly traveling to the US or Brasil. Others want to go and join the fight in the UK. In the meantime they are waiting in this beautiful beach resort where it is sunny and they are untouched by the war. The characters are all very interesting and the book gives a nice insight into their lives before the war and the different ways they are dealing with their trauma.

There is a bit of sex in the book as the characters have affairs and try out different diversions to keep their mind off what is happening. One of the things that I love most of Tereska Torres is that her books always (or at least all the ones I've read so far) have queer characters. It's just very normal and a part of life. It's so nice to see, particularly in a world war II setting where the reality of queer people is often missing. Here there is a married woman who had a brief flirtation with lesbianism in her youth but fled it and got married. There is a beautiful young girl who falls desperately in love with her even though she has no idea what she's doing, until she reads Radclyff Hall and suddenly the wool is lifted from her eyes, so to speak.

I really enjoyed this. Torres is rapidly becoming one of my favourite authors and I am trying to track down and read everything she's written.

I bought this book in Paris. It was throughly gorgeous the art was just amazing, not really a manga style but sort of comic meets East Asian ink painting. The book was about a young girl in Korea fighting robots who belonged to a Japanese occupational force in an alternate universe. While set in an alternate universe it had a LOT of interesting things to say about Korea in our world and cultural imperialism and freedom and was all around fantastic. It is one of the best and most unique comics I've read in a long time.

The third book of the Hungar Games was quite possibly the grimest book I've ever read. While not quite as good as the first one I did enjoy it much better than the second one. I loved the fact that the "hidden" society that showed up to rescue everyone was just as corrupt and horrible as the one that people had been fighting against. It all felt so horribly pessimistic and realistic. The way they used Katnis and the way everything was centered around propaganda was quite depressing. One thing that would have been nice would have seen how people actually took a more active role in the rebellion and how they were able to break such strong control by the central government. So much of that happening "off screen" made it seem less realistic than it should have been. The last 100 pages or so though more than made up for it. Things just kept happening one after the other each more unbelievable than the last. I can't believe how good this series was. I would recommend it very highly. I think it is probably the best fiction I've read all year