week three: what I read post-Quimby's.

I picked up the zine anthology Invincible Summer Volume II by Nicole J. Georges when we were at Quimby's. It's a perfect-bound book, not really a zine, because it collects years worth of this girl's zine by the same name. I had read Volume I several years ago and had been meaning to read the second one since I knew it existed, but hadn't gotten around to buying it. It may have been more interesting for me to get something I'd never heard of before, for the sake of the assignment, but I hadn't read this zine in so long that it was like reading it for the first time.

And it was weird. It made me realize how much my sensibilities have changed over the past few years. I know that going to school for writing has really widened the scope of what I read and how I read it, but every now and then I have these moments where I pick up something that I thought was incredible years ago and realize that it doesn't hold my interest anymore, that I read things more critically and need more from writing than I ever have before. Or at least I'm more aware of what I'm feeling about what I'm reading--what elements of it I'm enjoying, what I know it lacks. Reading personal zines is always hit-or-miss and as a reader, you have to have different expectations going in. It's not as though I was expecting The Great Gatsby.

Invincible Summer is a personal zine told in comics and drawings about Nicole's day-to-day life, which mostly revolves around her band, her pets, vegan baked goods, the queer scene of Portland, Oregon and vintage dresses paired with knee socks. It's very...precious. I remember that when I first read it, I was more fixated on this exact type of "alternative culture" in small ways. I couldn't relate to a lot of it, necessarily, but I've always been fascinated with the minutiae of people's daily lives, and I loved reading about her and the lifestyle of her friends, when it was still new to me. Now, she seems very much a stereotype of lots of young women I've encountered the past few years. Which I don't necessarily mean in a bad way. I don't dislike her as a writer or character, but nothing about the zine surprises me, and I think I'm reading it more from the perspective of many critics of personal zines, which is to say that I've found myself thinking "who cares?"

That said-- some of it I do still love, just different parts of it. I like her drawing style and there are certain full-page drawings mixed into the book, unrelated to the storyline, drawn carefully and in great detail and I like those a lot. There are also occasional moments that hit what I love about reading personal zines (and other forms of creative nonfiction, be it blogs or memoirs or whatever.) Moments that feel both unique and universal, that seem true and sincere and not narcissistic and overwrought. I do like reading about what people eat and how they spend their days, but my interests have shifted some and Invincible Summer doesn't quite capture my attention the way it used to, when zines, knee socks and seitan sandwiches were all new ideas to me. I have a feeling a lot of zines would feel a lot more self-indulgent to me now, because of how I read differently and because of how I think differently.