Every week we ask an interesting figure what they're digging into. Have ideas who we should reach out to? Let it fly: info@seattlereviewofbooks.com. Want to read more? Check out the archives.

Laura Knetzger is a a Seattle-based illustrator, artist, author, and comics creator. Her ongoing comic series Bug Boys is being published in February of 2020 by Random House (yay!). On this very site you can read her review-by-comic of The Artist's Way, and a wonderful jaunt into Half-remembered stories. She's a great follow on Twitter, and if you want to support her work, she has a very reasonable Patreon ($3 a month!).

What are you reading now?

The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. It’s written very beautifully, which is great but sometimes out of place coming from the first-person narrator, who is a shit-head teen for a big part of the book, and I find it hard to believe he would really be thinking about the delicate play of morning light on a painting. This book is written in what I call “Novel Style,” where everything is described in very pretty language, even when it doesn’t really suit the scene or character’s voice. It’s kind of like calling a move “Oscar Bait.” I’m still really enjoying The Goldfinch, I’m about 500 pages in and barely noticed the pages turning.

What did you read last?

Fleishman is in Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner. I found it really engrossing and terrifying, but also cathartic. It’s about a divorcing couple, mostly told from the point of view of the husband, but it has this fascinating framing device of being narrated by a friend of the couple who is a frustrated writer. In some places there are multiple levels of unreliable narrators in play, in which characters are lying or minimizing their faults to the narrator, who’s telling it to the reader filtered through her own biases. The reader gradually gets the big picture of a husband with a martyr complex and a wife who has obscured her real self to the point of imploding. If this sounds overwhelming and stressful, it is. This book is practically an Ari Aster movie. I loved it.

What are you reading next?

Tokyo Tarareba Girls #6 by Akiko Higashimura. It’s on hold for me at the library and I’m excited to go pick it up. This comic series is about a trio of early-30s women who become obsessed with getting married before the 2020 Tokyo Olympics. It’s funny and incredibly ruthless. The characters are constantly stacking up their successes and failures and asking themselves: do I deserve to be loved? Did I do enough to get it? But there’s no judge who will tell them yes or no, they have to find it for themselves, but they can’t. The women lean on each other in times of distress but constantly blur the line between numbing their wounds and picking at them.