And to Think We Started as a Book Club... by Tom Toro

This is a book of single-panel cartoons by Tom Toro, who is good and funny, and (TL; DR) if you like such things you might as well check it out. I'll go into slightly more depth below, but - as I've said here many times - there's not a lot that's coherent and reasonable to say about single-panel cartoons. (Incoherent ramblings, though - I could whip you up a lot of that, but I'll try not to.)

And to Think We Started as a Book Club... is the first collection of Toro's cartoons; he's been appearing in The New Yorker for about fifteen years, and (I hope) found some other markets to sell his cartoons to, as well. (There still are other markets for cartoons, right? We're not down to just one now that Playboy is dead?)

In the usual way of modern cartoon collections, it's divided into a bunch of very vague sections, all titled "The Book of" something and with a new Toro drawing to lead off the grouping. Those include Life, Love, Family, Work, Beasts, Tech, and Weird, which are of course the universally-known seven aspects of life.

Otherwise, it's just under two hundred pages long, with a Toro cartoon on each page - so about a hundred and ninety of them in all. His work has a softness to it; I think he works in washes or pencils of some kind, so it's all shades of grey. His linework is solid but unobtrusive - mostly medium-weight, but often essentially buried underneath the tones. His people are just a bit cartoony - again, soft and somewhat rumpled, with big open faces and dot eyes.

I find his jokes are less "New Yorker-y" than some of his contemporaries - there are pirates and Midwesterners as well as the urbanites starting at their screens and surprisingly articulate children. With its Seven Canonical Sections, Book Club covers a wide range of joke topics - though they're all single panels with captions, so the rhythm and style is consistent.

Again: I think this is funny, and I think Toro is one of the top talents working in this form today. So I do recommend it, if you like this kind of thing.