The 12 Books I Read This Summer, Part I: Indulging in my graphic novels

One of the greatest ironies of my life as an English teacher is that I have no time to read for myself. I mean, I've read Shakespeare's The Tempest five or six times in the past four years, I've read Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird about the same and I've read Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson slightly fewer times only because I'm not using it this year. In fact, many of the books I'm about to share with you I read because I was looking for a worthy replacement for Speak. Some of these books were duds (I read them until I determined that they wouldn't work in class with my students) but some of them I was reading purely for my own enjoyment.

Now, a quick note about this post and the series that follows it: I began writing this as one continuous post and, before I got to #5, it was already much bigger and ungainly than I anticipated. So for the sake of brevity and theme, I've broken the list into parts (and you can find part ii here, part iii here, and part iv here). Please don't feel like you need to read all of them; you're more than welcome to use the tags in the right-hand column or at the bottom of the post to just read about recommendations you may already like.

Without further ado, here are (the first 3 of) the 12 books I cracked open during summer 2015:

1) Watchmen by Alan Moore
     "Who watches the Watchmen?" Is the question emblemized on the back cover of this graphic novel, which is commonly thought to be one of Alan Moore's greatest. I started the summer with this book purely because I thought it was time to go back and re-read this cornerstone. I don't know how many of you, dear readers, are graphic novel buffs or enthusiasts, but those of you who do think of yourselves as such are probably aware that Alan Moore is a giant in our world. For those of you who aren't so interested, you'll at least know that Watchmen was made into a movie, directed by Zack Snyder, in 2009.
     While I definitely enjoyed the movie (it held all the dark social commentary of its source material), I thought it was lacking some in terms of storytelling. I don't usually compare movie adaptations to their original books because I learned long ago that I would be disappointed, but in the case of Watchmen, the movie was incredible, but the graphic novel was moreso because it was able to tell multiple stories at once in a way that a movie can't, since it needs to be more focused. In the graphic novel, there is the story of heroes (read: government-sanctioned, masked vigilantes) helping to keep the street free from crime, which was illustrated on the big screen, but there is also subtle commentary and nuance that come from two additional, concurrent stories: one is excerpts from Under the Hood (itself a "memoir" written by Hollis Mason, whose character is a retired hero in the story), and the other is Tales of the Black Freighter, itself a comic book being read by one of the character in the Watchmen story.
     As much as I would love to dive into an in-depth analysis of this landmark graphic novel, I will leave it there in hopes that maybe I will be able to write a blog post with my analysis in the future.

2) Star Wars Omnibus: Jango Fett - Open Seasons by Ramon Bachs and Raul Fernandez
     I found it immensely satisfying to find a compilation of this four-volume story about the selection of Jango Fett as the genetic patriarch of the clone troopers of the Star Wars universe. This series was actually one that I had partially read in junior high, soon after it came out. Unfortunately, at that time, it was such a challenge for me to find all four issues in one place that I ended up only ever reading the second and third. Each of those were stand-alone enough that I was able to read them out of order, although it was not as satisfying.
     Most of the Open Seasons series is told in flashback and it centers around Jango Fett, although not from his point of view. The premise that serves as a backdrop to these flashbacks is that Count Dooku is looking for someone on whom he can model his clone army. The most promising candidate is this mercenary from Mandalore. However, before he can be officially selected, Dooku must find out more about Fett's background, by whatever means possible.


3) Star Wars Omnibus: Outlander by Ken Kelly
     You may be noticing by this point that I started out my summer reading a lot of comic books... I admit that I found myself in a time when I could read whatever I wanted. Therefor, I read the stories that I found most entertaining first. Outlander was no different. Since it was in the same binding with Open Season, I found myself gravitating towards it quickly after I finished the story about Jango Fett.
    Outlander was a story that took me back to Tatooine, for which I enjoyed it. But what held my attention was that this was a story about the Tusken Raiders, the Sand People, who only appeared briefly in Episode IV. This story, specifically, was about a Jedi who left the order, deliberately crash-landed on Tatooine, and then found himself adopted into a band of Tuskens, ultimately becoming a warrior and their leader. The story itself wasn't a landmark by any means, but it's definitely worth a read if you find a copy of this Star Wars Omnibus in your hands.

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Are you a fellow comic enthusiast? Or do you like comics but feel like you need to hide your affinity? Let me know in the comments below (I totally understand if you need to be anonymous)!

This post is the first in a series of four that describe what I read this past summer in hopes of finding a new book to use in my class. If you're interested in reading more, here are parts ii, iii and iv. Otherwise, you can use the tags in the right sidebar to search through topics that you're interested in. Thanks!