Read in March

Yes, we're all another month older and closer to death. But let's not dwell on that...let's obsess about books instead!

Here's what obsessed me this past month:
Michael Maslin, The More the Merrier (3/1)
A mid-80s collection by a New Yorker cartoonist, which I grabbed and read because it was on the shelf at my local library. (Decent libraries all have the same list of central, important books, but they also each have their own idiosyncratic other stuff in and around those books, like this -- why would they have this collection, by this artist?) It's all very New Yorker-y, with lots of couples in living rooms and talking about the relationship (sometimes both at the same time). But much of it was amusing, and Maslin has, or had, a loose, energetic style that contrasted well with the buttoned-up subject matter.

• Grant Morrison & various artists, Doom Patrol, Vol. 6: Planet Love (3/2)
• Dall-Young Lim & Sung-Woo Park, Black God, Vol. 2 (3/3)
• Shiro Ihara, Alice on Deadlines, Vol. 2 (3/4)
• Peach-Pit, Zombie-Loan, Vol. 2 (3/5)
• Iain M. Banks, Matter (3/6)
• Nicole Hollander, Skip Morrow, & Ron Wolin, editors, Drawn Together (3/8)
  Wolin was head of the Cartoonist Guild, for which this seemed to be a fund-raiser. (And it wasn't entirely clear if he had any other connection to this book, besides his introduction.) Hollander and Morrow seem to have done most of the heavy lifting for this 1983 anthology, which has a very wide array of recent and older cartoons about relationships. (Mostly of the boyfriend-girlfriend type, though the book opened up towards the end. The take is very '70s -- just past the first flush of feminism and the sexual revolution, and not entirely sure where things would go from there.
• Mitchell Symons, Where Do Nudists Keep Their Hankies? (3/9)
• Keiko Tobe, With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child, Vol. 1 (3/10)
• Bill Bryson, Shakespeare: The World As Stage (3/11)
• Keiko Tobe, With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child, Vol. 2 (3/12)
• Kyle Baker, The Bakers: Babies and Kittens (3/14)
• Lewis Trondheim, Little Nothings, Vol. 1: The Curse of the Umbrella (3/15)
• Hiro Mashima, Fairy Tail, Vol. 1 (3/17)
• Hiro Mashima, Fairy Tail, Vol. 2 (3/18)
• Florence King, Deja Reviews (3/20)
• Terry Brooks, et. al., Dark Wraith of Shannara (3/20)
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 4 (3/22)
  The library finally had the next volume while I was there, so I read two of these quickly. I'm still twenty-five books behind, but I can catch up quickly once I get out of the first half-dozen, which are never on the library shelf.
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 5 (3/23)
  And so I read two of these in two days; Kishimoto is really quite good at action scenes and has a spiky style I like. (And he's managed to keep the character of Naruto himself an interesting mix of bombastic teenager and all-thumbs failure, though I expect he'll become superpowerful eventually, since all boys' manga heroes have to.)
• Min-Woo Hyung, Priest, Vol. 1 (3/24)
• Moyoco Anno, Sugar Sugar Rune, Vol. 1 (3/25)
• Walter Jon Williams, Implied Spaces (3/25)
• Kazu Kibuishi, editor, Flight Explorer, Vol. 1 (3/25)
• Masatsugu Iwase, et. al., Mobile Suit Gundam Seed, Vol. 1 (3/26)
• John Lloyd & John Mitchinson, The Book of General Ignorance (3/27)
• Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima, Path of the Assassin, Vol. 9: Battle for Power, Part One (3/27)
  More sex, violence and political maneuvering in feudal Japan; the civil war is about to heat up again, so the names are flying more quickly than I can keep track of them. Reading this series is a bit like wading through a big Russian novel: there's a lot of good stuff, but you have to admit that you don't really know precisely who a lot of the secondary characters are.
• Cyril Pedrosa, Three Shadows (3/28)
• Tim Sievert, That Salty Air (3/29)
• Ben Karlin, ed., Things I've Learned From Women Who've Dumped Me (3/29)
• Lars Martinson, Tonoharu (3/30)
• Joann Sfar & Lewis Trondheim, Dungeon: Zenith, Vol. 1: Duck Heart (3/31)

And that was the month of March -- thirty-one books in thirty-one days; which, happily, is what I usually shoot for. So now I can only be unhappy about the fact that so many of them were comics, so I didn't get through as many "real" books as I wanted to...