Incoming Books: January 14

Today was a big day for new books at La Casa Hornswoggler, with a package of books arriving from Edward R. Hamilton and my special order arriving at the Montclair Book Center. And, as always, I list these things to keep track for myself, here they are:

E.C. Segar's Popeye Vol. 2: "Well, Blow Me Down!" -- I read the first volume last year, and I already have the third, so now I'll have to find some time to sit down with two of these giant books. Segar's Popeye is one of the great American comic strips, and it's oddly mostly forgotten, even while the character (in enervated form) remains in the public consciousness.

Spy: The Funny Years by Kurt Andersen, Graydon Carter, and George Kalogerakis -- an anthology of the great funny magazine of the late '80s and early '90s. I read it most of that time -- from 1990, at least -- and remember it very fondly.

The Dog Dialed 911 -- A book of various odd and interesting documents, put together by the website The Smoking Gun. It was a remainder, and really cheap. The other reason I got it is that I remember poking through it in a bookstore several years ago, and it seemed to have interesting stuff. I expect it will be a bathroom book, one of these days.

Legion of Super-Heroes Archives, Vol. 11, mostly by Cary Bates and Mike Grell -- I got the first ten of these when they came out (mostly, I have to admit, for free through various contacts at DC), and somehow missed this and Vol. 12. The stories are from '74-'75, and I must admit there's a completest streak in me that wishes that the series would continue through the great Levitz/Giffen run of the '80s.

Ezra Pound: Poems and Translations -- I love the Library of America, but they keep kicking me out pretty quickly whenever I try to rejoin. (I suspect it's because I already have so many of their books that they can't think of anything else to send me, so they dump me because that's the only other thing to do.) This one's from 2003 -- I could have sworn it was more recent that that -- and I finally gave up on getting them to actually send it to me as part of a regular subscription.

A whole stack of the recent Penguin paperback editions of Ian Fleming's James Bond novels -- Goldfinger, For Your Eyes Only, Thunderball, The Spy Who Loved Me, and The Man With The Golden Gun -- since I am more and more thinking that I want to read them all straight through some time soon.

And then four more P.G. Wodehouse novels -- Psmith, Journalist, Bill the Conqueror, Nothing Serious, and Something Fishy -- from the lovely and wonderful Overlook Press series.

Calvin Trillin's Deciding the Next Decider -- the third collection of his "deadline poetry" on topical (generally political) themes from The Nation. I wish we were getting more substantial books out of Trillin, honestly -- these are very frivolous, essentially doggerel, and I can't entirely agree with all of the implied politics. But even thin Trillin is good to have.

And last is a book I bought from a third-party seller on Amazon, because it shows no sign of actually being published on this side of the pond -- J.G. Ballard's Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton: An Autobiography. It came yesterday, but I'll count it in today's list.