by Kelsey Capps

An idea must be honed by counterargument and speculation for it to advance in sophistication, a process that often requires shedding facets of the original premise as logic and preference begin to tamp down the intellectual ash. Topics of Conversation, Miranda Popkey’s debut novel, takes up this time-honored mantle with a gritty re-examination of modern feminism. Throughout the work Popkey interrogates convention with uncomfortable, but salient questions: Can independence be its own form of prison?; Is objectification sexier than respect?; Are women permitted to feel disgust at the products of their own enlightenment?

Popkey’s protagonist, who…

by Kelsey Capps

In December 9th, 2019, The Washington Post published a damning expose called The Afghanistan Papers. Their reportage was the result of years of legwork and legal battles, and revealed what most sentient Americans suspected already — the war in Afghanistan is a failure, not only as a war, but as state-building. It demonstrated unequivocally that the American public, not to mention the Afghan people and our allies, have been lied to about the nature of the war as well as its results.

Though the American government instigated and spear-headed the conflict, we drafted plenty of other…

by Kelsey Capps

Gay women don’t get works of literary fiction. Andre Aciman, James Baldwin, Christopher Isherwood — the list of men who write about gay men and get published is not only substantial, it’s luminary, award-winning even if it’s not, say, the book club’s cup of tea. Queer women don’t get the press, particularly not fiction that goes beyond mere representation and into the realm of reality. Novels about queer women rarely ring with authenticity, that ache of being nearly nowhere, caught between privileges and stories, the eeking out an existence through the forbearance of others.

This profound literary…

by Kelsey Capps

You won’t be able to say this book is boring. Johannes Anyuru, Swedish author and winner of the August Prize (for this book in fact), is thriller master, and the first page of this fast-paced dystopian novel puts you right in the middle of the action — a terrorist attack on a comic book store, which is holding an event featuring an artist known for lampooning Muhammad. Sound familiar?

The en media res approach hooks you immediately, and keeps you glued to the page as you’re introduced to the narrator and her perspective of the attack, which…

by Kelsey Capps

Some life stories are not for the faint of heart. We often dig into memoirs searching for stories of inspiration, tales of grand adventures or political maneuvers that changed history, but in The Light Years greatness is not so simple. Christopher Rush presents his reader with a winding story of struggle, redemption, and loss that alters the interior landscape of both author and reader, an intimate exchange that dives right to the heart of what it means to be worthy and loved.

Rush begins his story right before the internal implosion that is puberty. Though it might…

by Kelsey Capps

There’s no better novel to read in the middle of winter than one in which gloom transforms itself into an emotional Spring. Guadalupe Nettel’s After the Winter cuts through the fog by splitting her narrative into intimate, alternating perspectives which cross paths as the novel progresses.

t the start of the story loneliness and inertia hover over the lives of Nettel’s central characters, Claudio and Cecilia, eventually driving them into one another’s arms and back out again as they search for a cure to their individual pain. Through their journeys across cities and countries into one another’s…

And so it ends, our friends. We’ve been producing READING QUIRKS every Wednesday, week by week, for 18 months and we couldn’t be happier about the result. The whole experience has been amazing.

Thanks to everybody involved in the project. And thanks to all of you, bookish nerds, who gave us an instant of your attention. We hope we made you smile.

Keep an eye out this year, Reading Quirks might be coming to your local bookstore as a proper print book. We’ll keep you updated. In the meantime, you can see all of our comics here.

ReadingQuirks
Script: The Wild Detectives
lllustrations: Laura Pacheco

Keep reading!

Thanks so much for reading our comic. We hope you enjoyed it. If that’s the case, please hit that heart button below so other people could enjoy them too. ♥ ♥ ♥

More Reading Quirks here.

We publish a comic page every Wednesday on our social outlets; just look for #ReadingQuirks on Facebook, Twitter or Instagram. You can also check our monthly compilations on our website. Hope you enjoy them. And please, join the conversation and let us know your own reading quirks. We’d love to feature them in the series.

Thanks so much for reading our comic. We hope you enjoyed it. If that’s the case, please hit that heart button below so other people could enjoy them too. ♥ ♥ ♥