Incoming Books: Birthday Edition!

I was away from home on my actual birthday, and for some time afterward, so the family caught up with me today, holding me down and forcing me to celebrate. (I may perhaps slightly exaggerate my grumpiness about the situation.)

And I got a bunch of stuff, not all books, a list of which I'm going to inflict on you now:

• All Eternals Deck, the new Mountain Goats album
• I Am Very Far, exactly the same except by Okkervil River

(Both of those are bands I've been listening to a lot over the past few months -- my current obsessions, I guess -- so this was an excellent present.)

• Lego Pirates of the Carribbean, after several months of heavy hints to my sons and an elliptical conversation with The Wife yesterday in which she essentially asked me if they really knew what I wanted and I told her they did.

And now we get into the book portion of the list, so those of you averting your eyes can stop now. (Bonus Disney geek reference: I'll read your mind while you tell the audience the number you just picked, but I won't hear you say it because I closed my eyes.)

• 13, rue Therese, an epistolary novel by Elena Mauli Shapiro that's been getting good reviews. It's very much a novel-as-object -- with photos and handwritten letters and so on -- a style which I've always liked anyway (my college thesis was essentially about textual versions of that), and which is doubly interesting as a strategy for making a work difficult to replicate in an electronic edition.
• Four -- count them, four -- books that I didn't have in the Sfar-Trondheim Dungeon series: The Night Shirt, The Barbarian Princess, Dragon Cemetery, and Armageddon. I'm now vastly closer to my plan of reading the whole series straight through, and have only two problems. One, what order to read them in? And, two, my older son (Thing One) wants to read all of these -- and has read many of them -- but the series now breaks (because of subject matter) uneasily into all-ages and mature-readers volumes. Eventually, I'll let him read them -- and, let's be honest, he now knows they're in the house and will be home all summer while I'm at work -- but I don't know if now is the right time.
• And Pearls Blows Up, the latest treasury-sized collection of Stephan Pastis's Pearls Before Swine newspaper strip, complete with commentary on most strips.

Here's hoping your birthday celebrations, whenever they were or will be, were as fruitful as mine.