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Fairy tale retellings aren’t typically my bag. They often topple over into cutesy-poo productions that wind up being nothing but stories about stories. So ordinarily, I would have left the YA graphic novel

Wolf’s Belly on the shelf. After all, I have seen, read, and heard more variations of the Little Red Riding Hood story than I can count.

But I took Wolf’s Belly out from the Seattle Public Library because it’s written by screenwriter John August, who co-hosts the Scriptnotes podcast that is a regular part of my Saturday walking practice. I was interested to see how his lifetime of screenwriting would translate into a first-time graphic novel project.

The answer to that question is, pretty darn well. Wolf’s Belly is a little heavy on the dialogue, but it’s nothing like the flood of molasses that usually escapes captivity when a novelist writes their first comic book. Simon Estrada, the artist, has plenty of room to charm readers with his character designs and painterly color palette.

On the whole, I liked Wolf’s Belly a lot. The story proposes to tell the true story of Little Red Riding Hood—one of the least original propositions in all of literature—but it also mashes up a bunch of fairy tales about wolves and experiments with various children’s storytelling formats in intriguing ways. It is a story about storytelling, but it actually has something to say.

My biggest complaint about the technical artistry of Wolf’s Belly is the lettering. The word balloons are presented as rectangles, and the text is all the exact same weight, which gives the sense of an audiobook being read by a monotonous narrator. Good lettering accompanies and enhances comics art. The lettering in Wolf’s Belly is more or less just slapped onto the art.

But I’m pleasantly surprised to report that I really dug Wolf’s Belly overall and I’m planning to buy multiple copies for the kids in my life who like fairy tales and/or comics.

I finally read Caro Claire Burke’s blockbuster novel Yesteryear, a buzzy book about a tradwife influencer who finds herself transported back in time to those “simpler days” that tradwife culture is so nostalgic for—when women were women and men were men and families lived off the land.

Credit where it’s due: Burke knows how to write a goddamned page-turner. I hated setting Yesteryear down and when I finally cracked it open again I gulped paragraphs down like a drowning man gasping for air. Unlike most writers who have a formula for page-turning thrillers—I’m thinking of Dan Brown and his neverending series of cascading cliffhangers—I don’t exactly understand how Burke pulled this off. That is to say, I don’t know how she made the book as propulsive as it is.

But with all that said, I do have a Hot Take about Yesteryear. Are you ready? I think the book would be better without the time travel element.

But Paul, I can hear you say, that’s the whole reason the book is popular!

Sure, fine. But I think there’s a very slender little novel hiding inside this book that is just a vicious satire of tradwives and influencers, and I think I would enjoy that book even more than I enjoyed Yesteryear. The time travel makes the book a little too obvious, a little too heavy. But I defy you to read the first chapter, when we follow the main character through an ordinary day in her life, and show me a single line that could be edited out.

It is taut as a motherfucker, a thrilling highwire act from a writer who is supremely confident about where she’s going and what she has to say. If the whole book carried that searing tone, you would have had to surgically remove Yesteryear from my fingertips. As it is, I “merely” lost a couple of hours of sleep staying up with the book until I finished it.

My friend Clinton gave me some old paperback curiosities a while back and I finally read the first in the stack: Big Mac: The Unauthorized Story of McDonald’s, written by Max Boas and Steve Chain. I went through a period where I read everything I possibly could about McDonald’s because I found the scale of the business to be so mind-boggling that I couldn’t fathom how it worked. Ray Kroc’s autobiography, Grinding It Out, was not very helpful in that regard, but it was pretty entertaining.

Somehow during that McDonald’s-obsessed period I never came upon a used copy of Big Mac, and I wished that I had—it’s a book that was published in 1976, back when McDonald’s was still a relatively new phenomenon and Ray Kroc was still alive and giving interviews. It’s written in that shaggy pseudo-gonzo style that was in fashion at the time—a little bit of Hunter Thompson, a little bit of Tom Wolfe, a lot of machismo. And it is very entertaining.

The thing that struck me most about reading Big Mac is that at the time the book was written, the general reading public could be expected to be more or less horrified by giant corporations—the way McDonald’s controls the experience to a level that the interior of a restaurant in Vermont is more or less the same as the interior of a restaurant in Arizona was a disgusting and off-putting thought to pre-globalization America. The authors also recount a speech by Lloyd Bentsen—the Democratic Senator from Texas, if you can imagine such a thing—giving a speech disparaging the fact that McDonald’s was becoming a bigger profit center in the American economy than steel manufacturers.

Overall, Big Mac is an entertaining and outdated guide to the history of McDonald’s as it was 50 years ago. I wouldn’t recommend that everyone rush out and read it, but if you’re looking for a record of the history of our tolerance of corporate power and reach, it’s a very interesting document.

Amy Bloom is not an author who I ever would have predicted would pivot to writing mysteries. And I am especially surprised by the kind of mystery novel Bloom wound up writing—Blunt Instrument is a mystery about a failed academic-turned-private-eye who is investigating a campus murder. Even more surprising, it’s a funny, shaggy story about a horny burnout who is in way over her head—more Big Lebowksi than Big Sleep.

But once you start digging into Blunt Instrument, it becomes obvious that Bloom is in love with her protagonist—a fuckup whose biography is so toxic nobody will willingly touch her in a professional context—and she’s especially in love with the permission that her protagonist gives her to satire, skewer, and slam academia.

To be clear, this isn’t a respected literary author using genre to smuggle in some greater artistic theme. Bloom has clearly read a lot of mysteries and she’s enjoying exercising those muscles. The book is published by The Mysterious Press, for crying out loud. I suspect that Bloom’s devotion to the conventions of the genre might turn off some longtime fans, but I loved the thrill of watching a talented and intelligent author cracking her knuckles and getting down to the serious business of just having some damn fun.

I’ve enjoyed lots of Cory Doctorow‘s novels, but my favorite Doctorow is the cultural critic, the passionate believer in technology who is continually disappointed by the ways that the greed and egos of the Big Tech company have corrupted all that boundless possibility.

That’s why I loved Doctorow’s latest, The Reverse Centaur’s Guide to Life After AI. Doctorow applies his decades of experience on the cutting edge of technology to the problem of artificial intelligence, and he comes away with a more nuanced take than, say, the more passionate opponents like Ed Zitron. He finds things to like about AI—I agree with him that AI transcription is a godsend for writers on a budget and a godsend—even as he discards the hype that AI hucksters have been forcing down our throats for the past two years.

Doctorow also provides a roadmap through the future, guiding us through the AI financial bubble that he is confident will eventually burst, and offering us some ideas about what life might be like on the other side. It’s a remarkably level-headed and thoughtful argument, and even if the future doesn’t unfold exactly the way he predicts, you can respect his arguments for why he made those specific predictions.

The audiobook version of of Centaur’s is a breezy five hours long, and Doctorow happens to write in exactly the same voice that he speaks in, making it an enjoyable listen—it’s essentially the same listening experience as a handful of tech podcasts, only without the insufferable AI ads stitched throughout and with a much more intelligent host.

I can’t say that I feel 100 percent better about AI after reading this book, but I can say that I feel better about the future, now that I’ve seen Doctorow’s vision of it. And in these times, an author who can relieve you of a little bit of anxiety is worth their weight in gold.

I adore the premise of John Lanchester’s latest novel Look What You Made Me Do. It’s about a grieving widow, one half of a formerly happily married elderly couple, who one day discovers that all of her marital secrets—the in-jokes and private sexual activities—have been written into a wildly popular Netflix series.

That’s catchy, right? And Lanchester really sets the trap beautifully, describing the happy marriage and the widow’s grief—and then languishing in her torment when her entire marriage seems to be exploited and wholesale transformed into an appointment-television entertainment.

But without posting spoilers, I have to say that I’m disappointed with one of the many twists and turns in this very twisty and turny book, to the point where it feels like Lanchester is letting himself off a little bit easy.

And there’s one very obvious error in the book that I can’t believe made it through editing. The Netflix series that everyone is watching is for some reason released in weekly installments, like a linear television show. If Lanchester felt it so important to dole the TV show out on a weekly basis, you’d think someone would have suggested that the show be released on one of the streaming services that actually releases shows on a weekly basis, like Apple or HBO Max, rather than Netflix, which is famous for its binge-release model.

That sounds like picking nits, but I think it gets to a problem of Look What You Made Me Do: The book never feels quite willing to bathe in the gorgeous pool of slop that it meticulously sets up for itself. It’s a nasty little dark thriller with literary airs, and so in that way it never manages to give the reader the satisfaction of living up to its glorious, tawdry title.

When I was reading Emil Wilson’s debut graphic memoir, The Nightingales, I kept wondering about Wilson’s experience as a cartoonist. I ultimately finished the book with two assumptions, either of which could be equally true: Either Emil Wilson was a voracious reader of comics and graphic novels and had a mile-deep understanding of the history of the medium, or Emil Wilson had never read a graphic novel before in his life.

I say this because The Nightingales violates multiple rules of the comics medium—especially the forms of American comics. Rather than boxing actions out sequentially in a series of panels, Wilson presents the story in a series of sketchbook pages. And while actions are the propulsive energy in most of the comics we read, the emotions are the verb that pull our eyes across the page in the Nightingales.

There’s one page early in the book when our protagonist meets a new houseguest, and Wilson portrays their faces as a jumble of rough sketches spread across the page, layered on top of each other with no panels to get in the way. The characters make eye contact and look away. They eye each other skeptically and they smirk before smiling warmly at each other and then shyly averting their eyes. I’d never seen such a nuanced, wordless encounter portrayed so honestly and so clearly on a comics page.

Wilson, I decided, was either someone who deeply understood all the rules of comics and chose to break them in an inventive way, or he was someone who never became accustomed to the rules of comics—and so wasn’t imprisoned by that knowledge.

Last week, I interviewed Wilson onstage at the Elliott Bay Book Company and the first thing I asked him was his experience with cartooning and comics. His answer was clarifying: “None,” he said immediately. Aside from thumbing through a couple of Peanuts paperbacks in an extended family member’s bathroom, Wilson had never felt drawn to the medium at all.

So how did Wilson wind up deciding to tell a deeply personal story in the form of comics? After a career in advertising, Wilson gathered with some friends of roughly the same age to contemplate turning fifty and the loss of someone in their friend group. He decided that he wanted to take his skills with words and pictures that he had learned in advertising and turn it into a different kind of storytelling career.

So Wilson got into the Center for Cartoon Studies

in Vermont and took a crash course in comics. (During our talk, he bragged that he was the second-oldest enrollee the institution ever accepted.) Eventually, he decided to adapt a family story into comics form. And I call it a memoir, but Wilson actually writes himself out of the book within the first ten pages—the story is told by and stars Wilson’s sister, Lou.

Talking with Wilson was an illuminating and inspiring experience. It’s the only author interview I’ve ever done that made me want to immediately open the book and read it all over again, armed with the understanding I’d just gained.

One of my big complaints about modern comics is that some of the biggest and most popular creators are only familiar with comics. It’s hard to picture some of the most popular graphic novelists of our time reading a prose novel, or attending a play and absorbing lessons from the experience that they then incorporate into their work. The field has gotten incestuous in a dangerous way.

Wilson’s total lack of familiarity with the medium has paid off for all of us. The Nightingales is a touching, tender, and inventive graphic memoir that’s unlike anything else I’ve read. I’m so glad Wilson upended his life and launched into this bold second act.