Incoming Books: 30 June

This was my first big book-shopping trip in three months or so; I've been avoiding buying books while the WFA packages were coming in. But, since that reading project will be ending soon, it's time to start buying again!

I went to my favorite store, the Montclair Book Center, and this is what I found:

• Dilbert: What Would Wally Do? by Scott Adams
• La Perdida by Jessica Abel
  A comics story (or a "graphic novel," if you want to be snooty about it) that's gotten a lot of good reviews. I almost bought it yesterday at the comics store, and I gave in today.
• The Closed Circle by Jonathan Coe
  This is the sequel to The Rotter's Club, which I still haven't read. I was vaguely thinking of reading them both together, so now I have no excuse...
• Scotch and Toilet Water? by Leo Cullum
  Cartoons by a guy who's in the New Yorker a lot
• Adverbs by Daniel Handler
  More-or-less the third novel by the guy who also writes "A Series of Unfortunate Events" as Lemony Snicket -- or, more importantly, the new book by the guy who wrote The Basic Eight, one of the best novels of the last decade. This has a good shot at being the first work of fiction I read for fun after all the WFA stuff is done.
• The Treehorn Trilogy by Florence Parry Heide, illustrated by Edward Gorey
  Hey! Gorey books I didn't have!
• The Greedy Bastard Diary by Eric Idle
  I don't automatically buy every book connected with Monty Python, really. But I like travel books (this is the diary of a tour of the USA), and I like humor books, so what the hell.
• Quality Time by Edward Koren
  Koren is the New Yorker cartoonist who draws those really hairy creatures -- you know the ones. And I went to the comics/cartooning section of the store first and grabbed a bunch of things there (as you might have noticed).
• Billy Hazelnuts by Tony Millionaire
  I love the way Millionaire draws, but his stories don't always do much for me. This book has gotten good reviews in the comics press, so I'll give it a try.
• The New Yorker Book of Business Cartoons edited by Robert Mankoff
  I used to devour books like this, and justify it by putting up a "Cartoon of the Week" on my door at work. But last April my company moved into a building with wooden doors, which looks more chic, but makes it harder to put temporary things up than a metal door did. So the "Cartoon of the Week" has been off-line for about fifteen months now. Perhaps I need to figure out how to do it on a wooden door, since I'm buying so many books of cartoons...
• Pearls Before Swine: Nighthogs by Stephan Pastis
  One of the SFBC's sister clubs, QPB, sold the first two "Pearls Before Swine" collections, so I got them free at the office. And that hooked me on the strip, so it annoyed me when QPB didn't continue, since I then had to dig the books up on my own. (Now I need to go back and find the third collection, since I see this is #4.)
• It's a Bird... by Steven T. Seagle and Teddy Kristiansen
  Since I do everything sideways, instead of actually seeing the big snazzy new Superman movie, I bought instead a small, literary Superman comic and will read it sometime later. (I also read Tom DeHaven's novel It's Superman! last week -- maybe that counts, too.)
• A Heckuva Job by Calvin Trillin
  More poetry making fun of public figures, from the writer I used to wish was my father-in-law. (Remind me to explain that someday.)
• 361 by Donald E. Westlake
  One of the few Westlake books I haven't read yet, in a gritty new edition from Hard Case Crime. (Big shot-out to Charles Ardai here.)
• You Can Never Find a Rickshaw When It Monsoons by Mo Willems
  A cartoon diary of the year-long around-the-world trip Willems took right after graduating from college in 1990. (Coincidentally, the same time I graduated college, and immediately went to look for a badly-paying, only-mildly-unpleasant entry-level editorial job. The world is utterly unfair.)

Now I'm just going to put those over on the side, and go do what I should be doing already -- reading short fiction for World Fantasy.