Briefly Noted Book Reviews

Disrupted City, by Manan Ahmed Asif (New Press). In this engaging book, a professor of South Asian history invites readers to take a walk with him through Lahore, the city of his birth. As he winds past monuments and bazaars—evoking a rich cast of characters who have called Lahore home for more than a millennium—he contemplates how this ancient city has changed since Partition, in 1947. Muslim families like his settled into the homes of displaced Sikhs and Hindus as part of a calamity that remade the population by forcing people “to move without much, to put down shallow roots, to remember even less.” But, as Asif demonstrates, walking through a city can be an act of remembering its past.

Q&A, by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly). Structured as a series of answers to questions from readers, this book, by a noted graphic novelist, is part advice manual for aspiring cartoonists, part memoir. Tomine, who taught himself to draw as a “defense against chaos and loneliness,” started self-publishing at sixteen, and he has worked steadily for nearly thirty years now. He reflects candidly and wittily on topics including the solitary nature of cartooning, writing to artist idols, parenthood’s influence on his art, and adapting a graphic novel into a screenplay (“Shortcomings”). His writing, by turns encouraging and nostalgic, is interspersed with life-drawing sketches and with panels from his graphic novels.

Illustration by Rose Wong

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