Read in January

Every month, I do this index-style post of what I've read in the past month, mostly for my own purposes. Nearly every book is linked to my review of it, either here or at ComicMix, and the books without a short note or a link are the ones I've haven't gotten to yet, so they should come in the near future.

Anyway, this was January:

• Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers (1/4)
  
• Atsuko Asano & Hizuru Imai, The Manzai Comics, Vol. 1 (1/5)
  
• Walter Mosley, Killing Johnny Fry (1/5)
  
• Idumi Kirihara, Hitohira, Vol. 2 (1/6)
  
• KwangHyun Seo & JinHo Ko, Croquis Pop, Vol. 3 (1/7)
  
• Chris Ewan, The Good Thief's Guide to Amsterdam (1/7)
  
• Jonathan Ames & Dean Haspiel, The Alcoholic (1/8)
  
• Jason McNamara & Paige Braddock, The Martian Confederacy, Vol. 1 (1/9)
  
• Stewart O'Nan, A Prayer for the Dying (1/9)
  
• Guy Delisle, Albert and the Others (1/10)
  
• Emmanuel Guibert, Alan's War (1/11)
  
• Miriam Libicki, Jobnik!: An American Girl's Adventures in the Israeli Army (1/12)
  
• Liza Donelly & Michael Maslin, Cartoon Marriage (1/13)
  
• Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima, Path of the Assassin, Vol. 12: Three Foot Battle (1/14)
  Sex and death in medieval Japan, as the tide toward bloody unification continues. The number of players has been radically reduced by this point, which means I can now keep track of all of them. (Many of the earlier books, being more-or-less historically accurate, had a dozen or so warlords on-page or in the background, and their shifting alliances were important -- even when I couldn't follow them.)
  
• Charlie Huston, The Mystic Arts of Erasing All Signs of Death (1/14)
  
• Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima, Path of the Assassin, Vol. 13: Hateful Burden (1/15)
  And here's more medieval ninja action from the creative team behind Lone Wolf and Cub. If Lone Wolf was their Fistful of Dollars, this is their Once Upon a Time in the West.
  
• James Morrow, Shambling Towards Hiroshima (1/16)
  
• J. Kevin Graffagnino, Only in Books (1/16)
  Graffagnino was the director of the library at the State Historical Society of Wisconsin in 1995, when this book was published -- he's probably elsewhere by now. (You know those academic librarians! Always jetting around the country for newer and more glamorous jobs!) Only in Books is a collection of quotes about books, reading, and libraries -- it tends a bit to the stuffy and self-important, but then again I already said that it was compiled by an academic librarian. (I kid the librarians, I do.) I pulled a fair number of quotes from it, which will show up here on Fridays as "Quotes of the Week" assuming I don't get hit by a bus first. Hm, maybe I should just schedule them now, like I did the sex quotes? Then Antick Musings could continue, in quote form, even after I get hit by a bus...
  
• Calvin Trillin, Deciding the Next Decider (1/17)
  
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 28 (1/19)
  This was the first volume of "Part Two," after the big two-year interregnum where Naruto and his buds all fanned out to train intensively. I think this one was mostly getting-back-in-touch stuff, with an attack by the bad guys on the creepy Gaara near the end.
  
• Daniel Clowes with Terry Zwigoff, Ghost World: The Special Edition (1/20)
  
• Chris Staros, ed., Top Shelf 2008 Seasonal Sampler (1/22)
  I had two copies of this sitting on my pile, and waiting until 2009 to read it in the first place was getting silly, so I finally got to it. It was probably mostly made for convention giveaways, since it collected previews of all of the new Top Shelf titles for last year, plus details on a lot of their backlist and some even further-out previews of projects coming this year. I like the kinds of publishing Top Shelf does; they manage to put out some impressive comics on what seems to be a shoestring budget. (Nate Powell's Swallow Me Whole was probably their best book of 2008, and one of my top ten comics of 2008.)
  
• Felix Tannenbaum, Chronicles of Some Made (1/22)
  
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 29 (1/23)
  This one was mostly running and chasing, as I recall, with just a side order of fighting. I'm not sure if the bad guys have been explained clearly -- it's entirely possible that I just wasn't paying attention -- but they're nasty and powerful and stylish, which is what really matters in a story like this.
  
• Matthew Kneale, When We Were Romans (1/23)
  
• Carol Lay, The Big Skinny: How I Changed My Fattitude (1/26)
  
• Masashi Kishimoto, Naruto, Vol. 30 (1/27)
  And this one gets into the fighting, mostly with Sakura (the Hermione to Naruto's Harry Potter) battling a puppet-master ninja with the aid of an old woman. (And anyone who knows anything about Japanese culture knows that the old ones are the ones you have to watch out for -- the spindly old men are usually the worst, but slow-moving, stooped old women are also surprisingly deadly a lot of the time.)
  
• Calvin Trillin, Travels With Alice (1/27)
  
• Hideo Azumu, Disappearance Diary (1/28)
  
• Philip Gelatt & Rick Lacy, Labor Days (1/29)
  
• Yuichi Yokoyama, Travel (1/30)
  

And that's what I read last month. And, from the lack of links, you can now see exactly how far behind I am on writing up some of these books I've read. (And that's not even counting things like Terry Pratchett's Nation, which I read just over two months ago but haven't quite figured out how to say what I want to say about it.)