#book post

[kebbuck]

Finally got my hands on Sir Cameron!!! I’m literally so excited to read this book. Johnathan Battlepass is also excited for me to read it you can see it in his eyes.

[yourfavouritebookseller]

Finished my book about half and hour ago and I'm ready to pick something else. I'm the sort of reader that can't stop; sometimes I'm able to bask in the aftermath of a good book, let the experience sink in but if I'm not reading all the time I feel lost. If I'm not constantly reading or thinking about books I don't know what to do with myself.

[queenlua]

[gorybomb]

… as well as the usual tension between survival and near-annihilation, ensuring that what remains is a sensation of triumph over agony, it should be noted that most practitioners of this kind of art tend to be white. This is perhaps because Caucasian people do not have the same historical relationship with pain as other racial groups — it is easier to be self-indulgently, showily careless with one's body if it is already the specific shade of body favoured by a white supremacist society, rather than one that is more likely to be subject to abuse, injustice and imprisonment by virtue of the colour of its skin.

- Which As You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment, Philippa Snow

[tiredthanatologist]

Book 6- Drawing Anatomy by Barrington Barber

Before I say anything else, I would like to say that the parents out there who named their newborn baby son Barrington Barber are completely crazy.

This book is going to be my first skip in the challenge. I went through my bookshelf two months ago and got rid of some books I was never going to read again and I debated giving it away then. Now, faced with sitting down and reading it, I've decided it's not something I need in my collection.

I bought this book in 2019 when I spent a lot more time drawing than I have in the past 5 years. 2019 was also before I went to mortuary school and took an in depth medical anatomy class, and before I started my embalming apprenticeship, where I get to see and work on real human bodies.

This is a reference book, and I do think it's a good one. I flipped through it a little bit before deciding to donate it, and I like how it uses anatomy studies by famous artists as examples alongside the anatomical diagrams. I also like how it focuses on just the anatomy an artist would need to know, and teaches anatomy from a complete beginner's perspective, unlike a medical anatomy textbook. However, I really don't need to own an artist's anatomy reference book anymore, and I'd like to pass it on to someone who will actually use it rather than having it gathering dust on my shelf.

One last thing: in the introduction of this book Barber states that he is leaving out the details of the penis because "the differences in size and shape are too variable." However, this book is absolutely packed with titties, the sizes and shapes of which are incredibly variable. I think Barber just didn't want to draw dicks and was too cowardly to admit it.

[tiredthanatologist]

Book 5- Manga in Theory and Practice by Hirohiko Araki

This is the first book on my shelf that isn't a comic of some sort, and also the first nonfiction book. I purchased it at the MFA in Boston in the gift shop for an exhibition of a very different artist, Takashi Murakami. I'm not sure why this book was being sold at that exhibition, as Murakami isn't a manga artist and his style is completely different from Araki's. I bought it almost immediately though, as I was already a huge Jojo fan at the time, and I had no idea Araki had published a book about his process before stumbling onto it in the wild.

This book is written as a guide for a reader looking to succeed as a mangaka, but as someone with absolutely no interest in ever doing that, I still enjoyed it as a fan of Araki's work. I think even if you took out every reference to Jojo and handed me this book without telling me who had written it, I could still guess it was written by Araki. He comes at manga in an incredibly analytical way. You can tell that he thinks about every choice he makes a lot, and tries to explore every possibility before deciding how to move forward. It feels very similar to the intensely specific and detailed ways that stories and battles play out in Jojo.

Parts of the book were more interesting than others. I enjoyed (although didn't necessarily agree with) the second chapter, which was about manga structure and themes. The way Araki writes characters is so deeply thought out. A lot of the advice he gave about writing sounds deceptively simple on paper, but I can imagine would take a lot of practice to master in real life. Unfortunately, the chapter on art was less interesting. I think making good art is harder to teach than writing a good story, especially in a context like shonen manga. Most shonen manga follows general story tropes that Araki can instruct on, like maintaining momentum or writing a compelling protagonist that the audience wants to root for. Art is a lot more subjective, so aside from giving common art advice like "make sure to study anatomy even if your art is stylized" and giving some descriptions of the pens he uses, there isn't much Araki can say about how to improve your art.

The biggest highlight for me was the last chapter of the book, where Araki walks the reader through an actual oneshot he wrote, and breaks it down. It was really satisfying to see everything he had gone over in the book put into practice. I also just generally think listening to a master like Araki analyze his own work and process is fascinating. If that sounds appealing to you, if you're a fan of Araki's work, or if you're generally interested in the process of how manga is made, this was a light and engaging read.

[gorybomb]

The men of Jackass were frequently, nakedly homoerotic; they were dorky, skinny, more like boys who would be bullied than the alpha males most often seen meting out punishment […] none of them leading men or heartthrobs, all of them cheerfully, grungily fatalistic. These men loved each other madly and fraternally, occasionally kissing, their desire for proximity appearing to arise from the muddling of terror and eroticism inherent in being made aware of one's mortality — what the art critic Leo Steinberg described as "the condition of being both deathbound and sexed."

- Which As You Know Means Violence: On Self-Injury as Art and Entertainment, Philippa Snow