The me of today would like to believe that the me of 10 years ago, i.e. the perpetually single me, would have felt kinship with Keiko Furukara, the protagonist of this book. She’s happily unattached, and bristles against all of the people around her who disapprove of her menial job and lack of relationship status.
On the other hand, if the me of 10 years ago had taken a different path, had not found a partner, who would the me of today be? I fear I might have ended up like the angry and deeply unpleasant Shiraha, Keiko’s foil. He is basically what we would call an incel, although I’m not sure if that label is meaningful in Japanese culture.
It’s a fine line between accepting yourself despite not fitting in, and blaming the world for not accepting you. I commend this book for putting me on both sides of that line.
I’m introducing a new type of blog post under the label of quick reviews. My goal is to write down brief thoughts about the media that I consume, short enough that the entire contents of each post can appear on the main blog page. Keeping it short incentivizes me to do it more often, because I don’t have the pressure to write a lot.
The contents are what I would post on my Storygraph and Letterboxd profiles, but as I become increasingly disillusioned against the world of tech capitalism, I’m trying to own my data as much as I can. I’ll still use those platforms, but I want my words to belong to me and not live on someone else’s servers.
I’ve always preferred the more “mainstream” parts of the MCU over the offbeat energy of the Guardians series. This third one is my favourite of the trilogy. Rocket’s backstory is effectively dark and tragic, and especially hard to watch if you’re an animal lover, like me.
A collection filled with the type of true crime article that I regularly save to Pocket. I probably wouldn’t recommend reading the book cover-to-cover, but I had to because it was a library loan. In my opinion, it would be better enjoyed by cherry-picking an article from time to time, when you’re in the mood for some moral indignation.
But beyond the morbid point-and-judge tone that’s typical of true crime, I do appreciate that Keefe offers empathy and compassion towards his so-called “rogues.” This is especially evident in my favourite article.
“Loaded Gun” explores the past of a mass shooter. Twenty years before the crime, she shot and killed her brother, in what may or may not have been an accident. I especially liked this article because Keefe inserts his first-person ruminations on the ambiguity of what happened, and what the ambiguity means.
The Star Trek vision of time travel usually involved restoring the “correct” timeline after some mishap, and preserving the way that things are “supposed” to be. In the time travel story of Paper Girls, the forces that support timeline preservation are painted as villains, and the act of changing history is seen as a charitable act, a sort of temporal wealth redistribution where the advances of the future are shared with the past. I don’t think I agree with the ethics of this position, but it was an interesting inversion of what I’ve seen before.
My favourite parts of the story involved the teenage girls meeting adult versions of themselves. Because of my age, I identified more with the “guest stars” than the main cast, and found myself wondering what I would say to my younger self. I kind of wish that Paper Girls had offered more answers to this question, beyond “Keep in touch with your friends.”
I was a fan of the TV show The Good Place, and this book dives deeper into the philosophical concepts behind that show’s exploration of morality. The subject matter is pretty dry and basic (I was familiar with much of it from taking a 100-level philosophy course in university), but the author, who also created and ran the TV show, imbues his sitcom-honed sense of humour into it. A bonus if you’re listening to the audiobook: the Good Place cast comes along for the ride; a highlight is Ted Danson’s dramatic reading of chapter titles.
Is it bad form to criticize a novel for its font?1 Don’t answer that, because I’m going to do it anyway. If you open and flip through Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, you’ll see that the entire book is set in a Courier-like typewriter font. This choice supposedly makes the text appear like a screenplay, because the story is about a character, Willis Wu, who is… uh… a character in a TV show? Let me come back to that.
As you continue to flip through the pages of the book, you will next see that there are indeed sections of dialogue which are formatted like a screenplay, where the character name (in uppercase), and the lines that they speak (in lowercase), are centred on the page.
SPECIAL GUEST STAR
Right. I do.
LEE
Well, what are we waiting for? Let's go.
Footnotes
One of my favourite series of recent years, the Outline trilogy by Rachel Cusk, is typeset in Optima, a sans-serif which, while unusual and frankly not my favourite, did not detract from the experience of reading the prose. ↩
