Incoming Books: July 20th

Hey! That box I was complaining about yesterday actually arrived! (In fact, it made have been at my house at the very time I was complaining about it, which either means my complaints bent the fabric of the very universe, or that they were pointless to begin with.)

In that box were a number of things, including some comics and manga for my sons (issues of Sonic the Hedgehog, Sonic Universe and Tiny Titans; the new 5th volume of Matthew Loux's Salty Water Taffy, which I need to read first; another volume of Mardock Scramble, a manga I haven't even looked at but which both my sons like; and the second volume of Ray Fawkes's deeply awesome Possessions series, which I finally broke down and bought because I've spent three months trying to get a local library copy with no luck) and some books for me as well:

Costume Not Included, the second novel in the "To Hell and Back" series by Matthew Hughes, whom I will keep writing about until you all break down and buy & love all of his books. (I reviewed the first book when it was published.) It's a measure of how much I've slipped on paying attention to the skiffy world that this was published in March and I only noticed it now -- please, someone, find a way to pay me to do SFnal stuff again!

Dungeon Quest: Book Three by Joe Daly, which is of course the third book in that series. I reviewed the second volume for Realms of Fantasy (on paper only, so there's no link), and then dropped back to review the first book -- both of which I got for free to review -- so it is a serious seal of approval that I paid my own money to get this one; it's a loose, amiable post-modern dungeon crawl series with a very skewed viewpoint, unlike anything else out there.

There's a second volume of Jacob Chabot's The Mighty Skullboy Army, almost a decade after the first one, which surprised me. (Happily; I liked the first one, and I think my sons liked it too after I passed it on to them. Parenthetically, I found it deeply ironic that the comics/graphic novels that I'd given them all survived our flood last year, while the stuff I still had and thought about sharing with them eventually, like thousands of '70s and '80s comics, were all destroyed -- one could take an afterschool-special-ish message from that, if one wanted.)

Eddie Campbell's new book is about money, and it is called The Lovely Horrible Stuff, and I will keep reading Eddie Campbell's stuff as long as he keeps making it.

I'm trying to rebuild my Love and Rockets library -- with the vague thought of a full re-read once I have it all -- so I got High Soft Lisp, by Gilbert Hernandez, to help hurry that along.

The finale of the current League of Extraordinary Gentlemen trilogy -- complicatedly titled Century #3: "2009" -- from the estimable due of Alan Moore and Kevin O'Neill is now out, and (despite my grumblings about previous LoEG stories) I'm back to see what the old Northampton wizard does.

And I actually bought a floppy comic for myself for the first time in several years, because Andi Watson had a Skeleton Key one-shot, and I have to start rebuilding my Andi Watson shelf.

For anyone who doesn't believe that buying books is one of the great pleasure of life: I pity you.  But you probably stopped reading this post several paragraphs back anyway.