Incoming Books: 22 December

In the midst of a flurry of Christmas-shopping today, I dropped into a bookstore (to pick up a book as a present, of course), and, while I was there, I, oh, just happened to drop a lot of money on books for myself.

It was mostly comics stuff:

• the new Dilbert collection, Try Rebooting Yourself
• a Foxtrot treasury, Jam-Packed Foxtrot
• the big Ivan Burnetti-edited An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, & True Stories, the book with the most boring title in existence
• Will Elder's Chicken Fat
• Abandon the Old in Tokyo, a collection of Japanese comics by Yoshihiro Tatsumi, who seems to have vaguely the same cultural place to them as R. Crumb did in America
• and the first volume of Alias, which I remember hearing good things about when it was new, and which was half-price.

There were just a few "real" books:

• the new Richard Stark Novel, Ask the Parrot
• Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, to continue my Chuck Klosterman fixation,
• and Diamonds Are Forever by Ian Fleming, since I think I will continue through the Bond books in order, and I already have Live and Let Die and the store didn't have a copy of Moonraker.

That last one might sit for a few months until I get to it, but I'm pretty sure I'll run through the other books pretty quickly. (I do tend to read immediately, or almost immediately, the books I get in stores and pay actual money for. My shelves are mostly groaning because I keep picking up books at work because I'd like to own them, or think I might want to read them someday, or aspire to being the kind of person who would read them.)