Four books this week, from the library, for complicated-but-silly reasons. (Those reasons, in more detail than you want: my twentysomething kids and I watch a movie together every Wednesday, while The Wife is off at Bingo. I'm basically the one who picks the movies. I get them from the library a lot. This week, it was
Die Hard for obvious seasonal reasons. Since I was placing one hold, I also put holds on some books I wanted to read, and these are them.)
I'm already halfway through Oliver Darkshire's Once Upon a Tome, the 2022 memoir of bookselling by the guy who runs the Twitter feed for Sotheran's, a venerable London antiquarian bookshop. (Well, I think he still runs it, and I think it still exists after the X-odus, but I'm petty enough not to give Musk any traffic right this second by checking.) Darkshire has a great smart-but-not-fussy, self-deprecating style that always feels quintessentially British to me, and it comes through in the book as it did in shorter Internet posts.
Everything Is Fine, Volume 1 is the first collection of
a Webtoon by Mike Birchall, who is also coincidentally British. I thought it was somewhat more of a complete story than it turns out to be - it has the first sixteen (says the back cover; though it has nine chapters inside) episodes of what I see already has ninety episodes in three seasons and is not done yet. (Webtoons seems to have something of a manga model: shortish episodes weekly for as long as the audience can stand it.) This is some manner of horror comic, set in a neighborhood of people who all wear giant cat-head masks, are subject to continuous surveillance, and must stay resolutely positive at all times, even though
<something creepy that's not clear yet> has already happened and/or is still happening.
Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy is a teen romance comic by Faith Erin Hicks from 2023. She always does good stuff, even if most of it seems to be aimed at teens these days. (No serious complaints there: it's a big audience, especially for graphic stories, and I like creators to have careers that let them eat and live indoors and all that stuff. And I usually find those stories fun, even if I am very far from being a teenager these days.) I think the title gives all of the important details, but I'll see if I agree after I read it.
And last is
Norse Mythology, Vol. 1, which is a comics adaptation of the first half (I think) of Neil Gaiman's
book of that name. P. Craig Russell did the adapting, and several of the sections, with other artists joining in: Mike Mignola, Jerry Ordway, David Rubín, Jill Thompson, and several more.
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