This is actually the third weekly post listing things I got in various ways the last week of August; I was on vacation then and did a lot of book-accumulating. (And I'm stretching out the telling of it, because I can and to make it slightly more interesting.)
These are books I got from a local library, mostly because it was right after a trip to a used bookstore. I love used bookstores, and nearly always find interesting things in them - but I never find
just what I'm looking for. That's pretty much the deal with used bookstores, of course: you find what you find, and it is surprising and interesting. But, sometimes, you then need to go find the thing you just realized you really want to read next - or just do some more poking around serendipitously - and that was the reason for the library run.
Here's what I grabbed while I was there:
White Cat, Black Dog was Kelly Link's new short-story collection last year, her first in quite a while. (I want to say around a decade, but I think it's not quite that long; I read Get in Trouble in 2017, I think fairly soon after publication.) I wanted to get to it "soon" - like so many other things - but thought she was a slow, careful enough writer that I had some time...and then she dropped a long novel earlier this year. I'm thrilled to have more to read, but starting to get worried I'm falling behind - so it's time to read more Kelly Link stories.
Novelist as a Vocation is a collection of non-fictional writings about writing by the novelist Haruki Murakami; it's about two years old now. I've been reading his books since the mid-80s, and have mostly kept up - I still have his last big novel,
Killing Commendatore, on the to-be-read shelf, since I haven't been up to a book that length for a while - and I've also mentioned many times that I, for whatever odd reason, really enjoy reading the random nonfiction of fiction writers.
Fly By Night is a standalone graphic novel set in New Jersey by Tara O'Connor, whose work I've never seen before. I found it randomly browsing the YA graphic novel shelves, another big benefit of poking your head into a library now and then. This seems to have monsters in it - real monsters, the kind that live in Pine Barrens - but I bet it also has some of the human kind as well.
Haruki Murakami Manga Stories is, I think, the second book with that title - there might be a discrete "2" on the spine, covered with library stickers, but I'm not seeing any other indication in the book that there was a previous
Haruki Murakami Manga Stories (but there was). This one has three adaptations, by the same crew as last time (writer Jean-Christophe Deveney and artist PMGL), of Murakami short stories of various vintage.
And last was another random find:
Secret Passages: 1985-1986 by Axelle Lenoir, the book that makes me say "if your name has an unusual spelling, it would behoove you to make sure it's clear and easily readable on your book cover." (No one listens to me.) I think this might have been a webcomic or something, but I found it on the shelf as a book, noticed Top Shelf published it, and figured that was good enough to give it a whirl. It seems to be some kind of semi-autobio thing, but that's about all I know.
No comments:
Post a Comment