85.
Title: [Dark Night]
Author: Paul Dini
Genre: Graphic memoir
Medium: Hardback
Acquisition: purchased
Date Completed: October 2016
Rating: **

To call this a "True Batman Story" is figurative, and does the job of disguising the genre through the application of the author's profession. The book describes, as promised, a dark night, and the author's brutal and violent beating that left him physically devastated and emotionally crippled. The author, it happens, was a writer for the then-running Batman cartoon, and in his ennui he struggles with why his favorite fictional property "wasn't there." In his own mind, the author retreats to a society of cartoon and comic characters, using dialogue to try to work through his own psychological trauma and depression. The characters appear, but are not themselves, looming familiarly but unfamiliarity, as they are imagined by one of their authors, but represented for his sole purpose.

His experience is a terrible one, and the therapeutic power of the creation of the book is undeniable. He writes that he hopes his story may give others hope, who may identify with his life or experience. As a reader who does not, I felt badly for his experience, but found the book as a whole indulgent and of little personal value.

86.
Title: [Fashioning Gothic Bodies]
Author: Catherine Spooner
Genre: Fashion and Literary Theory
Medium: Hardback
Acquisition: Library
Date Completed: October 2016
Rating: *****

As amazing as I find this book, I won't be able to properly review it until long after my comprehensive exam (in which it features heavily) ... which begins tomorrow.

87.
Title: [Dress Culture in Late Victorian Women's Fiction]
Author: Christine Bayles Kortsch
Genre: Fashion, Gender, and Literary Theory
Medium: Hardback
Acquisition: Library
Date Completed: October 2016
Rating: *****

Equally as amazing as Spooner, equally as important, with the same looming deadline that leaves me unable to write anything but my exam answers.

88.
Title: [Hidden Destiny]
Author: Carrie Ann Ryan
Genre: Supernatural Romance
Medium: Kindle E-book
Acquisition: Purchased
Date Completed: November 2, 2016
Rating: ***

Still in social and intellectual recovery from October, I said to a friend on Wednesday that "what I really need is a smutty novel and a bath bomb."  And then I immediately looked up a series I had read once-upon-a-time, and had a relaxing soak.

 
89.
Title: [Tattered Loyalties]
Author: Carrie Ann Ryan
Genre: Supernatural Romance
Medium: Kindle E-book
Acquisition: Purchased
Date Completed: November 3, 2016
Rating: ***

And then, even though the last one wasn't really that great, I downloaded another, which kept me occupied while I stood in line for early voting.


Tonight I'm working on the introduction of my dissertation prospectus, and then plan to treat myself to [Bodies], which arrived today, and looks to be very promising.