Grant Snider’s I Will Judge You By Your Bookshelf is another collection of newspaper strips with a bookish flavour, in the vein of Debbie Tung’s Book Love and Tom Gauld’s strips - except it’s not as good as either.
Snider’s art style is a blend of Dr Seuss and Quentin Blake so I can see why it gets published in places like The New Yorker and The New York Times Book Review - it’s appealingly mainstream.
The pieces are about books and writing. Snider likes books - and says so multiple times in multiple strips! Snider says literary creation is tough - and says so multiple times in multiple strips!
Some stand out like the splash page visuals of Stages of the Reader and The Writer’s Block (an imaginative representation of a street with literary features). Pig Latin is a clever strip, as is A Writer’s Routine (presented in A-Z form), and Haruki Murakami Bingo is on point, as any Murakami fan will spot.
The strips might work just fine in the corner of an article/page but reading them in sequence in a book gets tiring as you notice that the vast majority are banal, repetitive, unmemorable and dull. Maybe if you enjoyed Tung/Gauld’s cartoons and want more, this might be for you, but I wouldn’t expect much if you’re gonna pick this one up.
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