Jex
Very different from its predecessor in both tone and form, but still very good. A much slower read and a very different voice. There comes a point when it becomes a different book than the one you've been reading, and for a moment you wonder if that was the right choice for the author to make, but you stick with it, and are grateful for doing so.
I found the format of the first two sections less impactful than the previous volumes. I think I understand why it was written with a sort of distancing effect, but I'm not sure if was the right call. The third part, with the big family dinner, was very good (and satisfying – I am a Tori fan forever)
This is an interesting series. Imperfect but ambitious, The Woods feels a bit like a story from another era of comics. A lot of it feels to me as being of a piece with something like Y: The Last Man, which was important for its time but didn't age well in many ways. A big part of it is the protagonist, or at least who's introduced to us as the protagonist, an utterly unlikable kid who's cooler and smarter than everyone around him. It's the kind of protagonist who was all the rage in the late 90s and early 2000s, and I found The Woods really difficult to get into because for much of the book, it seems that he's who we're supposed to relate to and root for. It almost feels too late by the time we are certain that he's the villain, but by then we've come to care about the rest of the cast of characters, and Tynion pulls his biggest trick – making us actually see the humanity in our villain for just long enough to make it heartbreaking when it's sniffed out.
I didn't find the act of reading this particularly enjoyable for great portions of it, but the way it all comes together at the end is actually quite remarkable.
A bit more, I don't know. Intellectual? Academic? Heady? Than something like the Happiness Trap, but still a worthwhile introduction to ACT and an effective transformation into a self-help book (though I'd recommend working through it with your therapist). I'm still not convinced that understanding relational frame theory is necessary to understand ACT but this book is a pretty good job of explaining it in a fairly accessible manner.
