Your summer reading list

As a book lover and a fan of quirky little diagrams, this particularly appealed to me:

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My neglected bachelor thesis and I or Motivation for procrastinators

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I am an aspiring bachelorette. This doesn’t mean that I want to get rid of my boyfriend as soon as possible, but rather that I really want a piece of paper that will prove to everyone that I didn’t just spend my student years picking my nose and getting drunk. I want a degree so someday in the remote future a so far unknown employer will consider me employment material.   

Fair enough, Jule wants a degree, who doesn’t. I know my roommate does because she slaved away on her laptop and before you could say Jack Robinson, she had produced 15 pages of “American Gothic” analysis (seemingly out of thin air) before she had even signed up for the final exam. Me, I’m more a last-minute person. Not that I actually like getting completely stressed out toward the end but I just can’t seem to help it. So I was basically late with everything, right from the start of signing up to today where I haven’t written a single page but played around with reading material like a retarded sloth. My environment somehow prevents me from starting the essential work: writing. It’s not writer’s block, because I haven’t even tried typing a single word. It’s more like the universe has an evil plan to stop me from getting my highly anticipated bachelorette status. When I sit on my bed trying to read, I fall asleep. I took up running again, even though I detest it and started knitting out of season. I am quite frankly the queen of procrastination and maybe I should just give in and accept that title instead of a bachelor’s degree. Unfortunately, my family would probably disown me and send me off to live under some bridge (aka. The Majestic Kingdom of Procastination), so that is out of the question. 

Taking all these problems into account, how does the queen of procrastination motivate herself and trick her lazy ass into thinking that taking on this humongous heap of a thesis is her dream come true? I have discovered that in order to work effectively, I have to avoid all sorts of distraction or temptation to do anything else (i.e. sleeping, knitting, watching Game of Thrones). To make matters worse, I can only work effectively from around 10 am to 2 pm but HATE (loathe, despise, feel contempt for) getting up early. The trick that I use to overcome my hatred of early morning work seems almost worse than just sitting at your desk at 7 am. I go for a run. I probably hate running even more than getting up, but it works as an amazing bottom-up kick. I run for around half an hour, shower and have breakfast and then flop onto a lawn chair on my balcony to start working. I you feel the same aversion to working early in the morning and can’t seem to shake your sluggishness, go for a run. Do it early, too. It is amazing what you can actually accomplish before noon, if you drag yourself out of bed at 8 am. You can stop working at 2 pm and be proud of yourself and still have the entire day left to do stuff you actually enjoy. PLUS the workout will compensate for the crap stressed out students with a deadline tend to gorge. If you don’t want to miss out on the sunshine, then don’t! Take your work outside, meet up with similarly afflicted friends in someone’s garden, on a balcony, in a café or the park. Maybe meet up for pre-thesis runs in the morning. I know it sounds crazy, but the energy from your morning exercise lasts throughout the day and will definitely boost your spirits. That’s enough positive thinking for today. I am now going to get sunburnt and drunk (it’s the weekend after all) as is my duty as her majesty of procrastination.

Graphic Novel: Vietnamerica

The rise of the graphic memoir or autographic is undeniable. Starting back in the 70s with Justin Green’s Binky Brown and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, the formerly belittled comics genre produced some of the most intense and critically acclaimed memoirs of the past century. With Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a graphic novel even won a Pulitzer Prize (admittedly the only one to date) and comics arrived in the mainstream. It’s become virtually impossible to maintain an overview over  all the remarkable memoirs being published each year, so we greatly rely on our fellow comic friends’ recommendations. I am recommending a book to you that is not only the story of a single person or family but at the same time that of a whole country: Vietnamerica. Gia Bao (GB) Tran’s graphic memoir is bristling with current topics that can be found especially in American immigrant literature: The feeling of being uprooted after having to flee your home country, barely coping and trying desperately to survive, coming to another country that only very hesitantly includes you in their community. Leaving family members behind whom you don’t hear from for years and worry about constantly. These are only some of the feelings of Tran’s parents who had to flee Vietnam to escape from the terror of war and the communist regime. 

 The novel tells the story from the perspective of Tran himself who was born in the US one year after his parents had arrived there and who at first felt alienated from his Vietnamese roots and for the most part not too eager to reconnect with his family in a country he had never visited. It was a tough choice revisiting the pain of his family and in some way accepting the legacy. Even though Tran didn’t experience the stories he shows and tells himself, he has a way of drawing and writing that resonate deeply with the reader. The portrayal of his Vietnamese family is so loving and intimate as though he knew them all his life. At the same time he manages to maintain a certain distance from Vietnamese customs and cultural aspects that he as an American finds unusual. His passion for the topic and the two years of hard work that he put into it are almost pouring out from the page. Reading about the fate of not only his parents bus grand- and great-grand parents, about families that were torn apart in the war, about killed relatives and abandoned children, almost breaks your heart. On the other hand he presents incredibly strong and positive characters like an uncle who was sent to work in a camp and still managed to preserve his humour through all of it. The different plot knots and swirls will confuse you at times and you will have a hard time remembering the names of all the family members, but the story will never let you out if its grip. 

 The sheer beauty of his rich and detailed artwork almost betrays the horrid scenes it depicts but still manages to connect  to something bigger and more layered and meaningful than a sheer written account ever could. Every panel (the box that frames every picture) and even the gutter (the blank space between panels) are laden with meaning and significance, some splash pages hit you like a hammer. GB Tran is most definitely and unusual talent who also has a breathtaking story to tell: the best combination possible in a graphic novelist. The Washington Post even went there and put Vietnamerica right next to Spiegelman’s masterpiece:  “This will be called the MAUS for the Vietnam War, and for good reason.“