Carol Lay

OMG. I'm a Carol Lay fan from way back, and this effort is like a treatise about how living in Los Angeles can warp a person's mind into thinking that seeing a woman's ribs between her collarbones and her breasts is sexy. This is one of those horrible books where more than half the content is naught but tedious recipes and pages of calorie charts.

Now, one of the reasons I like Carol's art is the roundness of her characters: everybody has beady little eyes and a sideways grimace and a show more sweeping sense of motion beautifully delineated in a flowing black and white comic style with little shading. Her depictions of her dieted self seem at odds with her style, since she really seems to like drawing how Skinny Carol's waist goes straight down into her square, boney jutting hips. It's as unnatural as trout pout and bronzer and people who can't blink any more since they've had so much plastic surgery.

I thought the story about the woman whose secret sin was lying in bed eating crackers read like we were supposed to think it was as horrible as those sensationalistic dark noir tales of madness, addiction and murder. I thought her fat parents looked like normal people. And I thought that I will remember this book as "How I Obsessed Over Every Calorie And Lost Not Only My Weight, But The Sense of Humor Katie Previously Enjoyed."

I did get a laugh about the slamming-the-door on George Clooney's face, though. Try "Joy Ride" instead, okay? show less

In this sequel to H.G. Wells' The Time Machine, a woman in her seventies inherits the plans to the original time machine in 2016 and her ex-husband, a physicist, is able to turn them into a working craft. After debating whether to kill Hitler, survey the long-term effects of climate change, or see if the Morlocks and Eloi are real, she sets off on the voyage of a lifetime . . . humanity's lifetime.

It's a melancholy and subdued tale about people tending more toward toward contemplation and show more dithering rather than exploration and adventure. I mean, the cover pretty much captures the tone of the whole book.

I've been following Carol Lay's comic strips and short stories for decades, and it is good to see her branch out into graphic novels, but I wish she had brought along more of her quirky humor instead of taking this foray into bleakness. show less

The Big Skinny might initially look like a memoir. I mean, it *does* say memoir on the cover, people. But it's a lie. A small lie. But a lie nonetheless. The Big Skinny's only memoir-ish contribution is maybe the first twenty or so pages where Lay briefly talks about her weight issue (and I say briefly because she's fifty and how can you not be brief if you're writing about your overweigh existence for fifty years in twenty pages or so).

show more target="_top">http://annotatedreading.blogspot.com/2010/02/big-skinny.html show less

This is a book worth reading, but it's also one that is annoying at times. The author seems to go overboard at times with counting calories and understanding the difference between a normal weight and truly overweight.

However, the advice she gives to those wanting to have an eating lifestyle that will result in weight loss then weight maintenance is sound. This advice basically boils down to count calories, stay fairly low in calories, and exercise. But the important part is to stick with show more it and understand that for overweight people, this is probably a lifestyle change, not something temporary.

It's nice to have a weight-loss book disguised as a graphic novel, but the content can get repetitive and the last portion of the book consists of calorie counts for various foods. I've read elsewhere that the author is 5'9" tall, and her ideal weight is 125. That is quite a low weight for someone of that height, so it's important to not get carried away like the author apparently is. But, if you read the book for an understanding of her main ideas, it can serve you well. show less