Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/6/2024

I got four books from the library this week, all things I requested and then picked up when they came in. Here's what they were:

Murakami T is a book of essays by Hauki Murkami about his favorite T-shirts, accompanied by photos of those shirts. It is a completely bizarre idea, and I love that about it. I would have been thrilled to be in the editorial meeting where someone proposed it, just to hear if other editors jumped in with "Well, Morrison has a bunch of cool scarves - can that be next?" or "What about DeLillo's favorite pieces of broken machinery?" (Note: this is probably meanly inaccurate, since the essays first appeared as a series in a Japanese magazine. But still!) It is a book I would have a hard time spending money on, but am very happy to read for free.

Roaming is the new (relatively; it's about six months old) graphic novel by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki, renowned for Skim and This One Summer and possibly other books in between that I missed, since I realize those two are a decade old now. It's another YAish story - the flap copy calls it "a deft foray into adult fiction," but I'm not sure a story about nineteen-year-olds unsure about their lives is all that different from one about fifteen-year-olds unsure of their lives - about a trip to NYC by a group of young Torontonians, possibly lightly based on the creators, in 2009 at the age of nineteen.

The Divided Earth is the third - and maybe final? - book in Faith Erin Hicks' "Nameless City" series. It came out in 2018; I somehow missed it then and only realized that now when I saw Hicks had a new book out. The first two books in the series are The Nameless City itself, and then The Stone Heart.

And then there's Amulet, Book Nine: Waverider, the end of the long-running and best-selling YA fantasy graphic novel series by Kazu Kibuishi. The first Amulet book, Stonekeeper, came out about fifteen years ago, so I feel sorry for anyone who was a middle-grader then and thought they'd see the end of the series before they got out of grad school.