Incoming Books: 8 April

Borders sent me a particularly impressive coupon earlier this week -- buy 1 book, get another at 50% off, for up to five offers -- so I got the boys up to our local store to fill up their pile of manga "treats." (The current deal is, for both of them, if one of my boys reads a work of prose, and then tells me what happens in it, he can get a manga volume. I think it's a great deal, though it hasn't motivated quite as much reading as I hoped it would.)

And, while I was there and doing my bit to shore up their shaky finances, I got some books for myself:

The Sad Tale of the Brothers Grossbart by Jesse Bullington -- this profane medieval fantasy novel has gotten wildly divergent reviews, with some raves and some snarls. And that intrigues me, so I'm hoping to get to it soon. At the very least, I'll give Bullington my half-dollar (or whatever) as encouragement to keep doing that.

Ghost Train to the Eastern Star by Paul Theroux -- My sudden reading enthusiasms are much slower and more clotted in the post-children era; I discovered Theroux's marvelous travel books close to a decade ago and I still haven't managed to catch up with him. But I will keep trying, particularly when he writes about traveling by train (as in this book).

Your Hate Mail Will Be Graded by John Scalzi -- I couldn't see my way clear to buying the fancy-schmancy hardcover, no matter how nice Subterranean's books are. (I mean, this book is entirely made up of Internet postings, which can still be read for free. I'm not that much of a lunatic, yet.) But as a trade paperback, what the heck? I still seriously prefer to read long stretches of prose on paper, anyway.

And last was The Cartoon History of the Modern World, Part 2 by the incomparable Larry Gonick, which I've been vaguely looking for since last fall. I can't believe that he's actually come to the end of the "Cartoon History of the World" project, which I've been reading nearly as long as I can remember -- I bought most of it twice, as individual comics issues and then as the eventual collections, and did it happily. Gonick is one of the great treasures of comics, all the more so because there's no one else who does anything even remotely comparable.
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Listening to: The Kinks - This Time Tomorrow
via FoxyTunes