Reviewing the Mail: Week of 1/8

It's another week, and here are the books I saw. Mail is still slow in these parts, for whatever reasons (snow? the fact that we're barely past the holidays? that publishers have finally realized that minor bloggers don't sell books?), so I'll be typing here for a shorter span that I do some weeks, which is no bad thing. [1]

Anyway, here's what I saw that first full week of 2011 -- two books that I haven't read yet and probably won't get too soon, but which you may love:

Vampire Federation: Uprising is the first book of a new series by Sean McCabe, in which there is a secret government of the vampire world (the federation of the series title), that clashes with "rogue vampires who threaten to destroy the world." Signet is publishing it in mass-market at the beginning of February.

And then there's Shojo Manga: Pop & Romance, a guide to drawing in the style of the Japanese comics genre for young women. It was put together by the leading anime school Kamikaze Factory Studio, and covers both traditional and digital tools. My drawing skills are pathetic at best, so I won't be trying this out, but those of you who do want to draw like Natsuki Takaya, this is the book you want. Collins Design is publishing it as a large trade paperback on January 18th.


[1] One of the tricks to having an interesting life is to set up your happiness bench-marks to be negatively correlated with each other: if you get a lot of mail, it means spending more time writing about it. If you have a lot of free time, that means that you're forgotten or unimportant. Try it for yourself!