ASRC 2022 Week 4 (7/11-7/17/22)

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Week 4 Board

Here are our staff reviews for the week:

Elias: Some times you land on every space, sometimes you avoid them all. I seem to be doing the latter because I rolled snake eyes and landed on Leave a Review. I read a few comics last week but the novel I worked through was Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett. I've been reading his Discworld series for a while and with Moving Pictures have finally read 1/4 of the series. Woo!

I've enjoyed all the Discworld novels to varying degrees. Pratchett's trademarked humor

only gets sharper with each novel and his plotting too is getting tighter. I didn't laugh quite as hard here as I did in Guards! Guards! or Wyrd Sisters but Moving Pictures has a charm all its own. It's basically "what if the invention of film was a farce" and also playing by the loose rules of Discworld...and by exploring what the phrase "magic of the silver screen" could mean if taken literally in a world bursting magic.

I think it was a bit longer than it needed to be, however. The story doesn't quite have enough to support the 330 page length and the double climax was quite frustrating. That said, the creativity in this novel remains a highlight and I can forgive having a fake-out ending because 1) it's the Moving Pictures TM way and 2) it's such a satisfying application of the logic of the novel. I had fun and anyone who's looking for a good satire of films & its industry or just a nice novel to while away some time will find this a good read too.

4/5 stars

Deborah P.: On my (very exciting!) inaugural roll, I landed on comic books & graphic novels, so let me tell you a bit about The Magic Fish by Trung Le Nguyen – a lyrical, beautiful book I absolutely loved and think would be a great pick if, like me, you appreciate the art form but usually have trouble getting into them the way you might reading text-only books.

Le Nguyen’s debut is a gorgeous love letter to the power of stories that bridge generations and cultures. Helen (Hie’n) and her son Tie’n have been reading together since his early childhood, a ritual that began as a way of improving their English literacy skills—Tien’s as a child learning to read, and Helen as a newly-arrived immigrant from Vietnam.

Now Tie’n is 13: the ritual continues, but with fairy tales replacing the picture books he long ago outgrew. The family leads full lives in their adopted home—Helen is working, their immigration papers are finally in order, and for Tie’n, US culture is far more familiar than the Vietnam of his parents’ youth. But they each harbor their own set of heartaches, made heavier by their lack of a common language with which to share them.

With hauntingly beautiful illustrations that make clever use of color to guide readers through multiple storylines, I found this book inventive, emotionally stirring and, although marketed as a work for teens, I think it holds immense appeal for adult readers of all ages. It would make an excellent book club pick–for adult groups, ELL class, or even a parent-teen group. My grad school class read it as a book club, and it was a hit with pretty much everyone, across a broad range of reading tastes and even generations.

5/5 stars.

We'll see you back on the 18th for the start of week 5!