Two short reviews

I recently read Acme Novelty Library #20 by Chris Ware, a graphic story about "Jason Lint." Ware's style is amazing. It starts off in Jason's baby eyes very blocky, with big halftone dots, then gradually becomes more realistic and flowing as he grows up, though there's always a squared-off quality to his drawing. Lint is not a likeable character but the way Ware tells his story is.

One big problem, though, is that the repro is just too small. Even with my +1 reading glasses, some of the writing was teeny tiny. This is a problem I've had before with Drawn + Quarterly Press, who I love for publishing great comic artists like Ware and Lynda Barry, but who I want to shake for making them too small to read!

I also read The Swerve: How the World Became Modern by Stephen Greenblatt. It's a highly praised Pulitzer Prize-winner, about how Lucretius' poem On the Nature of Things was rediscovered by Poggio in the 15th century. The poem sums up ideas like atomism and atheism that seem very modern today, and were fresh air to a culture still caught up in orthodoxy and inquisition.

After reading the book I know much more about Poggio, the state of Renaissance book-collecting, the history of libraries, how manuscripts were copied, along with Renaissance politics and especially Epicurean philosophy. But of course the world didn't become modern in one swerve or with one book, so it's irritating that Greenblatt sets the expectation he'll be able to make that argument.

As for the poem itself, he sums it up, but it was frustrating to keep hearing how elegant and gorgeous it was with maybe one little example to go by. He says several times that it was the poem's literary qualities that excited the book collectors as much or more than its content--so why not discuss those qualities in depth? That might be hard to do for a poem in classical Latin, but then one wonders, why keep bringing it up.