Incoming Books: July 26

Explaining the details is tedious and you certainly don't care -- so let's just say that I had a gift card I wanted to make sure I used up, since I'd already had it a long time. So I bought a bunch of stuff for myself online.

And, when I buy "stuff," nearly all of it will be books. (I also got Beth Orton's newish record Kidsticks, which I haven't yet pulled out of the plastic and ripped to this computer. But I hear this one is more electronic, which should be fun.)

One of those books will take some time to get here. But the rest are here, and they are:

Giant Days: Not on the Test Edition, Vol. 1 by John Allison, Lissa Treiman and Max Sarin -- How can you know if a comics series will be popular enough to spawn a hardcover reprint series? It's maddening. In some cases (like Hellboy) the hardcovers start up twenty years after the paperbacks, so at least it doesn't feel like buying the same thing immediately afterward. Look, I'm happy to have these stories in a nicer hardcover, and more happy to have the first of Allison's three self-published stories included here. But I'd rather have bought this instead of the two paperbacks, not afterward. And comics' backwards publishing schedule makes that difficult.

Dragons: The Modern Infestation by Pamela Wharton Blanpied -- I read and bought this for the SFBC back in the day (I think I bought it), but I lost my copy in the flood. I want to read it again to see if it's still as weird and sly as I remember.

White Noise by Don DeLillo -- We all seem to be living in the free-floating anxiety of a DeLillo novel these days, so I've been thinking about this book a lot. I haven't read it since my big run through DeLillo in the late '90s, and, as you know Bob, that was a long time ago.

Paul Up North by Michel Rabagliati -- The latest in the loose (and loosely autobiographical) series by a great Francophone Canadian cartoonist, translated by Helge Dascher (without whom, I'm coming to think, a good half of the comics I like would never make it to America). I looked for this in a store several times, but eventually the hegemonic online retailer got my money. You snooze, you lose, small retailers.

The Delirium Brief by Charles Stross -- The new "Laundry Files" book, and the first from a new publisher (Tor.com, which is not the same as plain vanilla Tor but is shown as just Tor on the spine, for maximum confusion among publishing folks). I'm a big fan of this series, and will keep saying so loudly until they're huge bestsellers.

All Systems Red by Martha Wells -- I've missed Wells's last few books -- pretty much the entire series about people with wings, which didn't entice me for some reason -- but I liked everything I read of hers before that. And this is both SF and short, which makes it intriguing. It's also about a robot that got self-awareness (or maybe self-direction) through a glitch and calls itself (secretly) Murderbot, which appeals to the John Sladek fan in me.