I finished this Megan Garber’s Screen People last night and wanted to type up a quick review.
If you know the names Marshall McLuhan and Neil Postman then you can probably skip this one. If you don’t recognize those names then the first couple of chapters of Garber’s “Screen People” will feel like fresh air to you (and then skip to the last few).
The chapters of the book are named after parts of a tv show or movie and the metaphor doesn’t really carry through, the middle, very well. While I 100% agree with what the book asserts (tech issues, Trump, toxicity, media diets, etc.) it just lacked some clarity and AN INDEX, PLEASE! That was my biggest gripe – for all this effort and event citations and science paper quoting – we needed an index and bibliography. I did lots of underlining and I’m already on board with where Garber is writing from. I just want to be able to look up these bills, hearings, books, news events, and science papers to do more digging.
All the usual suspected are here with the politics, miopic tech leaders, QANON, etc. and Garber does a good job early on showing how our current networks and technology enable and help all those bad actors.
“Social media is a mini narcissism engine.”
“Americans often talk about ‘the algorithms’ in the same rough ways that ancient people used to describe their gods…”
Screen People mentions lots of bad things right alongside the word “platforms”, but never connects the dots & doesn’t offer much in the way of solutions either. I am bumping it up to a 3/5 because I absolutely agree with the subtitle How We Entertained Ourselves into a State of Emergency. That is indeed spot on.
BAM is an interesting company due to its larger size and regional approach to operations. They have stores in 32 states and have recently opened a large and well laid out shop in Bloomington, MN. The Twin Cities are an amazingly bookish part of the country and I’m excited to see how this new store shapes up.
The front of BAM in Bloomington, MN
Here are a few more photos I took, inside their new store, on a recent visit this year. The aisle layout was fun and added to the book discovery journey. There are so many books there!
A couple of the interview questions I found really interesting shine a spotlight on how Books-A-Million approaches books vs. entertainment vs. lifestyle items, as well as how Dungeon Crawler Carl (published in August 2024; these covers are great fun!) became their 2025 Book of the Year. I’m also really curious about the in-store AI Search tools as I have not seen that in action yet. I may have to go to BAM with a question for an associate to see how and how well that works.
I recently read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, and I was blown away. This book came out in 1993, and I know that makes me really late to the party, as I’ve seen this recommended quite a few times, but I’ve never stopped to read. Joe Crawford threw this title out as the November 2025 IndieWeb Book Club read, and I’m so glad I joined in (both because I enjoyed the book and I am thankful for the chance to try out webmentions, which is also new to me).
McCloud does a masterful job of explaining how and why comics work so well when it comes to storytelling.
He dives into the way our brains work, how culture affects what we perceive, and the physical restraints of the medium. He spends time explaining the difference between a cartoon, comics, icons, illustrative art, etc. He shows how commercial and artistic interests sometimes push and sometimes hinder development.
He dedicates whole chapters to time, color, and spatial perception.
All of this is so well done, there were times I was wondering if this book needed to be on my books about books shelf or my media philosophy shelf.
While there are many takeaways that will stay with you and are worth ruminating on, it was Chapter Three – Blood in the Gutter, when he explains the concept of ‘Closure’, that I knew I was hooked. He boils down some big ideas and simplifies things so you understand the complexity of what happens in your brain when you read a panel of a comic and then read the following rectangle panel next to it, essentially skipping the small white space (called the gutter) separating the two.
A great way to illustrate and explain the idea of “closure”.
So much can happen in the gutter between two panels. McCloud breaks down the six most common.
McCloud then goes on to demonstrate how storytellers can use that gutter to connect action and get your brain involved in the storytelling. It’s so well done.
His explanations of why different levels of detail/realism in a comic directly influence how much the reader will immerse themselves into a story were amazing and something I haven’t quit thinking about.
I now see that I’ve only looked at the surface of comics and not considered the other layers involved, which just makes one appreciate the form even more.
McCloud also excels at plotting different ideas and formulas when it comes to types of comics and illustrated storytelling. While I don’t know enough to call this book a masterclass, it is certainly one of the best any casual reader could pick up. His book Understanding Comics is to comics as baking shows are to cakes. You really start to understand the vocabulary, see how all the pieces work together, and why. And you have a blast while learning all this.
I highly recommend this one to almost everybody. It’s one of the few 5-star reads I had this year. Contrary to what I’ve always thought, this is not just folks who get comics and “are into it”, but anyone who likes books and thinks about storytelling in any form (even reports at work where you have to present things sequentially). This book really does open things up.
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As I stated at the top, the fact that I read this book is a celebration of the cool parts of the IndieWeb. I am posting this using something called webmentions, which is new to me, and I am anxious to see how these notifications, pings, and conversations happen.
This week’s Nonfiction November 2025 festivities are being hosted over on Deb Nance’s site, ReaderBuzz, with the prompt being:
“New To My TBR: It’s been a month full of amazing nonfiction books! Which ones have made it onto your TBR?”
What a great month it’s been, and I feel exhausted! So many great new reads, conversations, and fun new blogs to follow.
November is always a good time of year to have this event, as it gives us all a little time to add a few new titles to our wish lists. I’m already excited about next year’s reading. Over the 4 weeks of the event, I collected a list of 23 titles that sound like really good reads. I cut that down a bit and am sharing an “up first for me” list of ten titles, with links to the blogs where I read about them. These are all books that I hope to read sooner rather than later:
I was encouraged by some of the recurring themes and books folks, from across the globe, were reading. There were lots of books on the history of fascism/resistance/current affairs as well as nature. While not an official count, I did track the titles I saw pop up most often, and these had the most ticks on my notepad:
Thank you to all the hosts this year. It really was fun. I hope you found some good reads this November, and I hope you have a fun place online to share your thoughts and reading. Thank you for stopping by and reading my posts during Nonfiction November 2025!
Here are the links to my earlier Nonfiction November 2025 posts:
