June was a good month of reading.  I read four fantastic and varied books.  I’d recommend all of them highly!  Check them out!

• Thunder & Lightning: Weather Past, Present, Future by Lauren Redniss is an extraordinary art book about the science and stories of weather.  Melding her skills as an artist with her ability to present research in an interesting way, Redniss has created a unique and fascinating book.  Chapters range from the history of lighthouses and fog off Cape Spear in Newfoundland to the shipping of ice from New England to warmer climes all over the world to forest fires in Australia and the American West to the science of weather prognostication especially as practiced by the Old Farmer’s Almanac.  Redniss does it all: she created her own font for the text.  The prints that accompanied the stories and interviews were made either by copper plate photogravure or photopolymer process.  The art is impressive and draws attention before even reading the words.  It’s hard to categorize a book as beautiful and interesting as this one.  It’s not merely a science book, though it is that, too.  In the chapter on wind, there’s the story of Diana Nyad, an endurance swimmer attempting to swim from Cuba to Florida but needing a period with little wind so the waves wouldn’t be too large.  Interspersed in her story are pages with types of winds or mythology and an interlude on the attempt to introduce wind at Mecca during the hajj when millions of Muslims gather for pilgrimage because the site has been so built up to accommodate all of the visitors and cuts off the natural flow of wind.  It’s a one of a kind book.  I’d highly recommend it.

• Kindred by Octavia E. Butler is a visceral novel about slavery in America.  It’s 1976, and the narrator Dana, an African American, is somehow transported back to antebellum Maryland where she is confronted with a drowning white child.  She travels back and forth, seemingly at whim, until she realizes that she is connected to the child.  It’s dangerous for her when she is in 1800s, even though she is herself not a slave, she has no rights that anyone needs to uphold.  Her education and knowledge of history is a two-edged sword: sometimes she can use it to her advantage and other times it makes the whites of the time, and the slaves too, fearful of her.  While it is a science fiction story because of the time travel element, it doesn’t focus on the particulars of how it is happening.  The story takes the jumps in time as a given.  One of the strengths of this device is that it puts our modern sensibilities back into the past so that we can better imagine what life was like for slaves and their owners.  It’s so easy for me as a white person today to think that I would have of course been an abolitionist if I had lived back then.  But what if I had lived in the south where slavery was an institution interwoven into the fabric of everyday life?  What if my own family had owned slaves?  Would I have really held beliefs that would be to the detriment of my own welfare?  It’s a tough question.  The book makes us consider that it was the times that made the person.  In describing the slave owner, Dana says this, “He wasn’t a monster at all.  Just an ordinary man who sometimes did the monstrous things his society said were legal and proper” (134).  And she describes many monstrous things that he does.  It’s enough to make us weep.  It’s an extremely powerful book and I highly recommend it.

• The Sandman: Overture, written by Neil Gaiman with art by J.H. Williams III, is a lovely prequel to an essential comics story.  First, let me say, that prequels are tricky and often doomed to fail.  When a story begins in the middle of events, it can be difficult to go back and tell the earlier backstory in a compelling way.  But Gaiman has done it beautifully.  When the original Sandman story began, he is imprisoned by a secret society for 72 years after being weakened by some adventure.  Overture tells the story of that adventure when Morpheus (the embodiment of Dream) travels across the universe in order to save it from destruction that he himself inadvertently caused.  Throughout the story, Gaiman weaves elements and characters from the original story in new and interesting ways that add to the mythos instead of merely explaining origins or anything mundane as that.  I was enjoying the story for the first few issues, happy to be back in the world of Sandman, but I wasn’t astounded either.  But upon finishing it, I can say that Gaiman sticks the landing and elevates the entire story, making it a truly worthy prequel.  Though it takes place chronologically before the main Sandman story, I think it still best to read it afterwards.  This was a deluxe edition, so it included a lot of supplementary material in the back.  Remarkably, I found it pretty illuminating, at least more than I usually do with material like this.  The artist, colorist, and letterer all explain their craft and artistic decision making process in a way that helped me understand better the collaborative process of making a comic.  J.H. Williams III’s artwork in particular is gorgeous and makes the book stunning.  If you like Sandman, definitely check this out.  If you haven’t read the original ten collected volumes of Sandman, get on it!

• Love Medicine by Louise Erdrich is a beautiful novel spanning several generations of two families on and off the reservation in North Dakota.  Through a series of interconnected stories that span at least 50 years, Erdrich introduces the reader to marvelous characters who remain alive long after closing the book. A few of the stories are told by a third person narrator, but most of them are narrated by the characters themselves, so we get to see how they see events, often the same events from multiple perspectives.  It’s a wonderful way to show the intricate nature of perspective.  One of the voices is Lipsha Morrissey, a young boy taken in by the Kashpaws, possibly his relatives, though the mystery of his ancestry is one that he tries to untangle.  His is a humorous and earnest voice.  He describes another woman who his grandfather had a love affair with: “There was this one time that Lulu Lamartine’s little blue tweety bird, a paraclete, I guess you’d call it, flown up inside her dress and got lost within there” (243).  The unwitting joke is that instead of naming the bird he has used the Greek word  for advocate, usually meaning the Holy Spirit in Christian theology. Earlier in his story, he had described his grandmother’s memory as “like them video games that don’t forget your score.  One reason she remembers so many details about the trouble I gave her in early life is so she can flash back her total when she needs to” (240).  Lipsha is only one of the many fully realized people that we empathize with and come to understand.  Many others love, grieve, connive, cope, and live.  It’s a world of characters that Erdrich returned to for a number of other books, but this is the first.  In fact, it’s her first novel, which is amazing.  It’s such a great book.  I read the 1993 expanded edition, which includes more stories than either the 1984 original or the more recent 2009 revision.  But it’s hard to see how one can go wrong with any version of the book (one of the stories taken out of the 2009 version appears in the backmatter, so it isn’t wholly lost).