This week, I have one book that actually came in the mail: that will come first. And then I have a box of graphic novels and comics that came in just after I'd written last week's post (late last Saturday, I want to say).
The Midnight Circus came in the mail: it's a new collection of short stories from Jane Yolen, and I guess something of a dark companion to 2017's The Emerald Circus. Yolen's introduction, titled "Who Knew I Was a Writer of Dark Stories?" makes the point of this collection clear: it's her darker, creepier work, or the best of that, at least. (It's not what Yolen is known for, but in fifty years of writing, you can do many things.)
So Midnight contains sixteen stories, originally published between 1974 and 2013, plus story notes, some poetry, and introductions by Yolen herself and Theodora Goss. It's published by Tachyon, and available right now in trade paperback. Yolen has been writing good fantasy stories -- usually but not always for younger readers -- for as long as I've been alive. And I mean that entirely literally, as I realized when I looked at her extensive card page -- her first young-readers novel, The Wizard of Washington Square, was published in 1969.
And now we get into the comics I bought myself, but first a consumer note. I started shopping at the online store belonging to a certain large comics shop located centrally in the large city nearest to me, but didn't quite find enough to get to their free shipping level. So I abandoned that cart, as we say in the marketing biz. A couple of days later, an email arrived, offering an additional discount. Now, I'm not saying to do this all the time to see if you can save some money...but it's worth trying.
The Handbook to Lazy Parenting is the fourth in Guy Delisle's loose series of small, funny books about his foibles as a father. The first three are The Owner's Manual to Terrible Parenting, Even More Bad Parenting Advice, and A User's Guide to Neglectful Parenting, all of which I've written about here. And I'm wondering what the deal is: the first three books came out between 2013-2016 in English (and slightly earlier in French, since the author is French Canadian, married to a Frenchwoman, and living in southern France). This one was published in 2019, but looks to have his kids at exactly the same ages as the earlier books, which -- as you know, Bob -- is usually not the case for children in any real world. So I'm not sure if Delisle came back to the same material five years later, if this was a collection of "the rest of" these strips, finally turned into a matching book, or something even quirkier. However it happened, Delisle is a funny cartoonist, and I expect this will be a lot of fun.
is the new (well, Spring 2020, so new-
ish) collection of cartoons by Tom Gauld, generally on science-y topics. I believe most or all of these originally appeared in
New Scientist, where Gauld has a weekly slot. It's in the same basic format as Gauld's earlier books
Baking With Kafka (which had cartoons about literary figures, from
The Guardian) and
You're All Just Jealous of My Jetpack (both of the previous categories, plus more general work -- it was Gauld's first book of collected cartoons). Gauld is funny in a smart way -- probably the best science cartoonist since Sidney Harris -- and I expect this will be another excellent book, not the least because I've already seen a whole bunch of these go whizzing by on Gauld's Twitter feed every week.
Love and Other Weird Things is a book of single-panel cartoons by Rich Sparks, about whom I know very little. The cartoons here appeared in various places:
The New Yorker,
The Wall Street Journal,
American Bystander,
Weekly Humorist (the last two of which seem like fake names where the plucky rom-com heroine works in some movie, but I gather they are actually real and I shouldn't make fun of them) and probably others.
I'm kinda vamping here, since I don't have much to say, but I need to add some more text to balance out the image. Have I mentioned how annoying the new Blogger edit window is? It's another one of those late-web-era products that removes useful functionality for whatever reason, leading the users to conclude the product is either in a death spiral or just run by people who hate their users. Hey -- maybe both!
House of the Black Spot is a small graphic novel by Ben Sears, and I know even less about Sears than I do about Sparks. I got this for a few reasons: I want to read more new stuff, and I'm rarely in comic shops to actually browse books there. Sears has an interesting art style, which reminds me a little of Brandon Graham. It's published by Koyama Press, which has a great reputation for doing artsy comics, and I've never bought a book they published, as far as I can remember. And it was pretty cheap, too: list price is just twelve bucks. So all that added up to: might as well try it!
I recommend similar leaps in your own lives: find the next cheap thing over from stuff you like, and give it a try.
Next up is
The Bus 2 by Paul Kirchner, continuing the loose theme of odd little books that I don't know a whole lot about. This whole shopping trip was made up of things that were crazy inexpensive after the discount That Comic Shop gave me, which led to a what-the-hell! feeling on my end.
So...I'm not sure if there ever was The Bus 1. That might be part of the joke. If it did exist, it probably was forty years ago. This book has a bunch of wordless strips about The Commuter (the bald trenchcoated guy on the cover) riding a '70s-era city bus, where surreal things happen.
I know I heard about this somewhere, but I forget why or in what context. It was published in 2015, so I've probably been vaguely looking for it since then. And, again, I'm not really sure why: but it does look quirky and specific enough to make me happy.
The Brontes: Infernal Angria is the opposite: a book I found through random searching on That Comic Shop's website, which I would have bought at publication (in 2018? I think?) if I'd know it existed. It also seems to have had a long, convoluted timeline, since it's copyright 1998-present and refers to winning a 2004 Xeric grant. Anyway, this is written by Craig Hurd-McKenney and drawn by Rick Geary, and it's a fictionalized (I think) version of the lives of the young Brontes, complete with actual interdimensional travel to the fictional land of Angria that (in the real world) they created in their juvenalia.
It is not available on Big River Bookstore, where most of my book-buying links lead, but a digital version is available on their Comixology site, for those interested. This also does exist as a real physical book, since I'm holding it in my hands right now.
Royal City, Vol. 3: We All Float On is, I think, the ending of the series by Jeff Lemire, about a dysfunctional family in a hardscrabble blue-collar town that has seen better days. I'm coming to this slightly late -- I think this series wrapped up entirely in 2018, since Lemire is generally dependable and puts out his comics -- all of them, the seemingly millions of projects both indy and Big 2 that he juggles all the time -- on time. Anyway, I read the first two volumes --
Royal City and
Sonic Youth -- in 2018, when they were published, but lost track when a big change in my working life coincided with the end of Book-A-Day 2018 and my reading crashed for an extended period of time.
So this is another series where I'm hoping I remember it well enough to finish up. But I've got faith in Lemire: I'm pretty sure he can remind me.
And last is one more Jeff Lemire book, because (as I just mentioned) I need to catch up on a lot of things. As far as I know,
Frogcatchers is a standalone, so probably more in the vein of
Roughneck and
The Underwater Welder,
The Nobody and the three stories of the
Essex County trilogy. That Lemire is usually deeply dressive, all about men in left-behind parts of rural Canada and all of their troubles.
Frogcatchers looks to be more SFFnal than most of those stories -- maybe somewhere in the vein of
The Nobody, which had a fantastic element -- but I expect it will not be a terribly happy story. The stuff Lemire draws doesn't really lean towards happy.
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