Here is part 2 of the list of books that everyone should read. These were curated with the help of friends, so some of these, I haven’t read, but do intend to.

1. I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
   • This deeply personal novel follows the struggles of abandonment and sexual assault. It conveys the extreme struggles that a person can overcome, even when forced to deal with them at a young age. This novel also sheds light on societal issues, such as racism, that we should be actively learning more about. It is a strongly affecting novel that leaves the reader a different person after completing it. This slot also stands for other Maya Angelou works, such as her poetry or Letter to My Daughter.
2. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury
   • This novel constructs a narrative in which the protagonist stand on the wrong side until convinced his convictions are wrong, something that we all can learn from. Taking pages from both Nineteen Eighty-Four and Brave New World, we are introduced to a dystopia were comforts rules all, but a tyrranical government enforces the comfort. From this, we can learn what it means to change and how censorship can influence us all.
3. God of Small Things by Arhundati Roy
   • In this piece, we follow the lives and relationships of a single family as they struggle to grow into new people. This is the only novel by Arhundati Roy, but its universal themes catapulted her into literary history. Throughout the novel, we are wretched back and forth from present to past as we learn that family is the strongest influencer we have and how the past does truly affect who we are as people.
4. One Hundred of Solitude
   • This novel is based in a genre that is potentially alienating to most american audiences, magical realism. It follows the rise and fall of a single town. It has a great protrayal of love and how it can be corrupted. It also uses the cyclical nature of history to show us how mistakes can be repeated and how they can affect us. In addition, we can all learn from its use of literary devices and its amazing word play.
5. The Giver Lois Lowry
   • Seeing a theme with this list, this is yet another coming-of-age story. Also this is another one within the dystopia genre. We follow the protagonist as he comes to slowly learn that his society is not what is was always presented to him as. From this novel, we can learn that it can be beneficial to question our society and the rules that are set in place. We can grow and change and leave behind the places in the world that hold us back.

The world has become a scary place. Now, I do not know if the world recently underwent a major transformation that turned it from the safe bubble of general contentment that I knew as a child or if things have actually gotten worse, but I have never been so scared of listening to the news. I love politics, not the political nonsense and gridlock that has become synonymous with American democracy, but the intrigue of elections and the psychology of why people believe what they do. I enjoy being informed, reminding myself that the world is bigger than Ann Arbor, Michigan and that the United States is only a small part of collective whole. Yet, every time I turn on the news I am bombarded by story after story with a very clear message: terrorists, global warming, school shooters, Democrats, and Republicans are all coming to get you and there is nothing you or anyone else can do about it.

Being a worrier, I find myself thinking about everything that could go wrong all too often. I consider where I sit in the computer labs on campus and always know where my exits are, I am tricked by packaging that says “Natural” and “Organic” and I have found myself looking over my shoulder as I walk through a deserted parking lot after a long night in the lab at the slighted rustle of branches. Through all of the media hype, fear mongering and the concern that lingers in the back of my mind, there is one place where I have always felt that the trajectory of the world is not a downward spiral, and even if it is, that we can fix it.

There is something about the music school on North Campus which insulates it from the rest of the world. Perhaps it is that it is on North Campus – an entire bus ride away from classes graded on a curve – or that it is small enough that every music student at least vaguely recognizes another, or maybe it is the music itself. The idea that while music is performed in every language imaginable, at it’s core music is universal and greater than it’s sum of parts. The notion that a performance can provide a respite from a world on the brink of disaster, and the knowledge that performance has served that same purpose for the past 1,000 years.

There are days when the media gets to me, days when the stress of an upcoming exam is overpowered by the unpredictability of a world that I cannot control. Those are the days when I feel blessed to have found a home on North Campus because there is something about the pond sort of shaped like a piano, and a building that is supposed to look like piano keys that blocks out the uncertainty, gently reminding me that as long as we have music we can survive another 1,000 years on the brink of disaster.

Anthologies are a bit of an odd animal for me, especially comic book anthologies because the difference in visual style from story to story is glaring. In anthologies with just short stories for example, until you read each work, aesthetically, it feels as if it all blends together.

Although I’ve already spoken about Island, I recently discovered an older work of anthology with Popgun. Now the reason I struggle with this particular work despite absolutely adoring the first issue of Island, is the sheer length of it. The anthology is packed with short and long comics for a total of 450 pages.

When an anthology reaches a length of this magnitude…do you work around a central theme? I don’t think that works, simply because it can become dull over the great length, especially with the sporadic aesthetic and prose an anthology can offer. The Island was, for the most part, short, featuring no more than 4-5 stories. However, here, there are well over 40.

But the loss of a theme can leave a reader directionless, but perhaps that is the point of an anthology like Popgun – to bombard you with work from a large pool of artists and writers – most of whom were not famous yet.

As a reader, it is easy to forget about the opportunities available to the writers who are featured in works such as this. By having so many pages of content, the platform grows larger for aspiring comic book creators and it is a chance for them to be featured in a book edited by famed comic book creators and published under Image. Popgun is a mix tape of up-and-coming creators and should be considered as a bag of random goodies rather than a cohesive work. In other words, it’s not only a platform for new creators to get published, but it’s also a means of readers discovering new creators.

The Island magazine has the right idea, but maintain a smaller dosage of stories in order to maintain some sort of cohesion. However, although it may be a bit overwhelming, the need for expansive works like Popgun may need to return.