Needed to kill time in a Barnes & Noble today - first time in such a bookstore in years - and discovered worlds beyond my imagining. Just beyond several aisles of manga (like in Japan!), under a huge wall of graphic novels (like the BD in France!), came an American original: "Self-Transformation." (On another wall, under "Religion," are as many boxed versions of the Bible as this one offered of the Tarot.) Interesting to consider what still needs to be a physical book...
And what pleasures of discovery are offered by an IRL bookshop! I found a charmer, pleasing to hand and eye, featured on the end between manga and LGBTQ+ young adult novels: 高宇洋 Laura Gao's Messy Roots: A Graphic Memoir of a Wuhanese American. Raised first by grandparents in the countryside outside Wuhan, then with parents in Texas, and navigating and somehow integrating American schools, stereotypes of Asians and much more... this is self-transformation!
