Read in December

I expect this will get posted more-or-less on time, since I always have time off at the end of the year and get to clean up the blog then. (Of course, now that I've said that, something else will happen.)

So I'm assuming this is going live when it's supposed to, just after midnight on New Year's Day. If not, I'll probably have some kind of apologetic note after the list of books.

Speaking of which, the point of this post is to list books, so here they are:

Jeff Lemire and Dustin Nguyen, Descender, Vol. 2: Machine Moon (12/2)

Dean Motter, Mister X: Razed (12/5)

Jason Lutes, Jar of Fools (12/6)

Taiyo Matsumoto, Sunny, Vol. 4 (12/7)

Kazuo Ishiguro, The Buried Giant (12/7)

Alan Moore and various artists, DC Universe by Alan Moore (12/9)

Stephan Pastis, Pearls Gets Sacrificed (12/11)

There's not a whole hell of a lot to write about yet another treasury-sized collection of a currently-running newspaper strip; you can't really put something into historical or artistic context while it's still going. And Stephan Pastis is mostly just going for jokes here: he's having a lot of fun, but not trying to be deep or meaningful (and, in fact, often satirizes attempts to do so).

So maybe I just need to say that Pearls Gets Sacrificed is yet another collection along the same lines as the previous books -- Sgt. Piggy's Lonely Hearts Club Comic; Lions and Tigers and Crocs, Oh My!; The Crass Menagerie; Pearls Sells Out; Pearls Blows Up; Pearls Freaks the #*%# Out; and Pearls Falls Fast -- and leave it at that?

That seems like a cop-out, somehow. Let's see if I amend this squib here before I let this post go live.

(Spoiler Alert! I didn't.)

Roger Langridge et. al., Popeye, Vol. 2 (12/12)

Roger Langridge et. al., Popeye, Vol. 3 (12/13)

Mike Mignola et. al., Hellboy and the BPRD: 1953 (12/14)

Mike Mignola et. al., Abe Sapien, Vol. 7: The Secret Fire (12/16)

Evelyn Waugh, Decline and Fall (12/16)

John Allison, Bad Machinery, Vol. 6: The Case of the Unwelcome Visitor (12/19)

Gahan Wilson's Out There (12/20)

Dupuy and Berberian, Monsieur Jean: From Bachelor to Father (12/21)

Richard Thompson, The Complete Cul de Sac, Vol. 2 (12/25)


And that's what I was reading at the end of 2016. I expect to read more things next year, and to intermittently write about them here. Good luck keeping up with your own expectations in the new year.