Book Love by Debbie Tung

I'm usually not a fan of the log-line format, but sometimes I read a book that is really obviously "this one book I read recently" mixed with "this other book I read recently." I'd still probably avoid saying so, unless it was clear that was the author's intention, and not just random stuff I'm reading into it.

Today is one of those days. I just read a short, pleasant, inoffensive book of comics about books, Book Love, all from Debbie Tung, whose Happily Ever After & Everything In Between I hit back in winter. And Book Love, as a "aren't reading and physical books and bookstores and libraries and curling up to read just totally awesome" book, will be a lot like similar books - such as Grant Snider's I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelves, which I also read toward the end of winter.

So, yeah: this is like A + B. Because it's on the same topic as B by the author of A. Not a huge stretch, I admit.

As I understand it, Tung started out making comics online. Those comics tended to run to some specific themes - like her relationship with the guy she married, or books, or being an introvert - and all of those themes became books collecting her comics. (Having been in the sausage factory myself, I know I'm hugely simplifying: I bet she created almost as many new comics for each book as she reprinted, for example.)

This was the second one; it came before Happily Ever After but after Quiet Girl in a Noisy World, in 2019.

And it is a whole bunch of comics, mostly four square panels to a small-format page, about how awesome books are. If you're my age, you can probably predict every beat, ever bit of joy, every wonderful thing Tung celebrates. That's not bad; it just shows that Book Love is in a particular genre - and it's a lovely, positive, warm & fuzzy entry in that genre, which has and will make a lot of people happy to read it.

I am not quite this uncritically "books are kewl" in my own life - partially because I'm not uncritical about anything and partially because I used to do books for a living. But even a grump like me can enjoy a sweet, fun book like this, so unless you are substantially grumpier than I am, I assume you will enjoy it, too.

I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelves by Grant Snider

Grant Snider is one of those rarest of things: the orthodontist-slash-cartoonist. Oh, sure, as far as I can tell he's never cartooned about orthodontia, but we can live in hope.

But, seriously, he has been making comics online, as Incidental Comics, for several years now. His work is generally positive stuff, usually creativity-inspired or at least creativity-adjacent, about books and ideas and doing good work and stuff like that. He's made at least one picture book, and there have been a couple of collections of his comics published.

This is one of them: I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf. The title is more judgmental and in-your-face than is really borne out by Snider's actual cartooning: his work presents him more as a person who will be fascinated by the things he learns, or assumes, about you from the books on your shelves.

And the focus is on "I," rather than "your bookshelves." Snider has a parade of author-stand-in characters in the comics here, of different ages and genders and races, but they're all the same essential person: bookish, positive, hardworking by preference but dreamy in practice, deeply in love with writing and stories, a writer as much as a reader.

Snider starts off with a page of things "I Confess," which turns out to be a hidden Table of Contents - each of those confessions turns into a half-title later, with a section of comics about that concern. I think most of the comics here originally appeared elsewhere - there's at least one obvious library poster, a lot of stuff from Incidental, and the copyright page lists a lot of other initial publications.

Snider's art is cozy and colorful: to my eye, he's more influenced by R.O. Blechman than anyone else; he has a similar cast of rubber-hose-limbed, happy, cavorting characters. It's lovely and inviting and very well suited for the positivity and energy of his comics.

And these are positive, sometimes energetic comics about books: this is not the world of literary feuds and authors dropped by their publishers, of banned books and school visits gone wrong and libraries closed by budget cuts, of books left on trains to be lost forever or of books that never were or could be written. It's all happy, positive, book-stuff: not exactly the sort of thing that would be embroidered on a pillow with a pictures of a cat, to be sold in that quaint shop on the main road in the nearest tourist-trap town, but not far away from that end of the literary world. If you like books that way, Snider will be a great guide.

A Meme Based on Someone's Choice of The Best Skiffy of the Past Quarter-Century

James Nicoll did this, and it's been ages since I did a proper list-of-books meme. I expect I will have notes (not least because my "I own it" is, in a whole lot of cases, "I haven't gotten around to buying a new copy since Hurricane Irene ate the last one").

Books read are in italics, books owned are in bold (with an asterisk if they were unwillingly deaccessioned), and books disagreed with are struck through, as is traditional for such lists.

• The Handmaid’s Tale (1985)
• Ender’s Game (1985)
• *Radio Free Albemuth (1985)
• *Always Coming Home (1985)
• *This Is the Way the World Ends (1985)
• Galápagos (1985)
• *The Falling Woman (1986)
• The Shore of Women (1986)
• A Door Into Ocean (1986)
• *Soldiers of Paradise (1987)
• *Life During Wartime (1987)
• *The Sea and Summer (1987)
• Cyteen (1988)
• Neverness (1988)
• The Steerswoman (1989)
• Grass (1989)
• *Use of Weapons (1990)
• *Queen of Angels (1990)
• Barrayar (1991)
• *Synners (1991)
• *Sarah Canary (1991)
• White Queen (1991)
• Eternal Light (1991)
• Stations of the Tide (1991)
• Timelike Infinity (1992)
• Dead Girls (1992)
• Jumper (1992)
• *China Mountain Zhang (1992)
• *Red Mars (1992)
• *A Fire Upon the Deep (1992)
• *Aristoi (1992)
• *Doomsday Book (1992)
• Parable of the Sower (1993)
• Ammonite (1993)
• Chimera (1993)
• *Nightside the Long Sun (1993)
• *Brittle Innings (1994)
• *Permutation City (1994)
• Blood (1994)
• *Mother of Storms (1995)
• Sailing Bright Eternity (1995)
• Galatea 2.2 (1995)
• *The Diamond Age (1995)
• The Transmigration of Souls (1996)
• The Fortunate Fall (1996)
• The Sparrow/Children of God (1996/1998)
• *Holy Fire (1996)
• *Night Lamp (1996)
• In the Garden of Iden (1997)
• Forever Peace (1997)
• Glimmering (1997)
• *As She Climbed Across the Table (1997)
• *The Cassini Division (1998)
• Bloom (1998)
• Vast (1998)
• *The Golden Globe (1998)
• Headlong (1999)
• Cave of Stars (1999)
• Genesis (2000)
• Super-Cannes (2000)
• Under the Skin (2000)
• *Perdido Street Station (2000)
• Distance Haze (2000)
• *Revelation Space trilogy (2000)
• Salt (2000)
• Ventus (2001)
• The Cassandra Complex (2001)
• *Light (2002)
• Altered Carbon (2002)
• *The Separation (2002)
• The Golden Age (2002)
• The Time Traveler’s Wife (2003)
• Natural History (2003)
• The Labyrinth Key / Spears of God
• River of Gods (2004)
• *The Plot Against America (2004)
• *Never Let Me Go (2005)
• *The House of Storms (2005)
• Counting Heads (2005)
• Air (Or, Have Not Have) (2005)
• *Accelerando (2005)
• Spin (2005)
• My Dirty Little Book of Stolen Time (2006)
• The Road (2006)
• Temeraire /His Majesty’s Dragon (2006)
• Blindsight (2006)
• *HARM (2007)
• *The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2007)
• The Secret City (2007)
• In War Times (2007)
• *Postsingular (2007)
• Shadow of the Scorpion (2008)
• The Hunger Games trilogy** (2008-2010)
• Little Brother (2008)
• The Alchemy of Stone (2008)
• The Windup Girl (2009)
• Steal Across the Sky (2009)
• Boneshaker (2009)
• Zoo City (2010)
• *Zero History (2010)
• *The Quantum Thief (2010)

So I've read 40 and have owned at least 43 -- I had a lot of unread SFF, some of which had gotten stuck in the back of a double-shelved bookcase, so that number could easily have been higher. (I can only disagree with books I've read, so that number is much lower.)

And I decided not to make any notes; this list most reminded me of people that I need to read. I will note that having a list without authors really tests one's memory for SF books one hasn't read and may not have even heard of more than glancingly.

How Green Is My E-Book?

The Millions investigates the claims that reading on a device is more friendly to the environment than those tacky ol' dead-tree books. As it turns out, like so many other jam-tomorrow claims, that's simply not true.

People Who Complain About Their Taxes Aren't Allowed To Enjoy These Buildings

The 25 Most Beautiful Public Libraries in the World -- well, according to one Flavorwire writer; I don't think there was an actual contest or defined judging mechanism.

I Am Drooling As I Type This

Jay Walker has a library I would kill for. And I don't mean just one person. No, I'd work my way through an entire Army platoon, with garrote and knife, to get a library like the one profiled in Wired last month.

(Actually, I've had a dream library in my head for about the last ten years, and this one only partially fits that model. But it's close enough for government work -- I'd be ecstatically happy with anything even remotely similar.)

Obscure Book Meme

What ten books do you own that you think no one else on your friends list does?

• Anthony Trollope, The Land-Leaguers
  His last, unfinished novel. I've got a lot of Trollope (most of it still unread), but this is about the least likely one.
• Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters
  From the shelf of poetry that I hope to get to someday.
• Matt Feazell, Ert!
  A collection of Cynicalman and other minicomics.
• Jeremy Pascal (the Holy Ghostwriter), God: The Ultimate Autobiography
  We sold a ton of these over many years at the SFBC, so they must exist somewhere in the wild, but I've never seen hide nor hair of them.
• S.J. Perelman, That Old Gang of Mine: The Early and Essential
  A collection of Perelman's very first (and not very good) magazine pieces.
• Wilson Sherman, illustrated by Newell Dean, Steering Locks!
  A bizarre little cartoon book that came into the bookclubs in the mid-90s, devoted to the cause of eliminating steering locks in cars -- it was published by the Automobile Safety Foundation of La Jolla. If I believed less in copyright, I'd scan the thing and post it; it's a marvel of its type.
• Benjamin R. Doolittle, The Grundilini
  Ben Doolittle is the son of one of my mother's oldest friends, and was one of those kids who was always doing something better than I was. (Nice guy, but that's still annoying.) Since then, he became both a doctor and a medical missionary. So I was surprised to see this book come in to the SFBC about six years ago...and even happier to see that it didn't seem to be all that good. (I still haven't read it, just in case it's wonderful.)
• A.J. Dunning, Extremes: Reflections on Human Behavior
  Essays about various historical topics by a Dutch cardiologist and polymath.
• Calvin Trillin, Barnet Frummer Is An Unbloomed Flower
  His first novel, assembled in 1969 from New Yorker stories that are now awfully late-60s.
• Bruce Thomas, The Big Wheel
  A rock 'n roll novel by Elvis Costello's bass player.

Via Nancy Leibovitz

Books: A Memoir by Larry McMurtry

I've never read anything else by McMurtry, which is sad, I know. These days, I am more likely to try new authors -- particularly famous older novelists -- by picking up a minor non-fictional work, particularly if it's related to books or publishing.

Books is McMurtry's memoirs of bookselling, with very occasional sidetrips into other parts of his bookish life. (He's been a novelist since the early '60s and a screenwriter since not long after that, but he seems to see himself essentially as an antiquarian bookseller.) McMurtry has the seasoned novelist's attitude towards research -- it's only for things that he doesn't already know about -- and so this book is his memories as they come, without any attempt to check them against records or other people's memories.

It has 109 chapters, some of which barely make it to the end of the first page and none of which stretch more than five pages. In them, McMurtry tracks backwards and forwards, covering aspects of the same booksale or different encounters with the same rich collector in discrete little bits. It probably is most cohesive and makes the most sense if you're already in Larry McMurtry's head and already know all of this stuff; he doesn't make any particular effort to organize the book or to carefully introduce readers to all of these characters.

McMurtry is getting on in years, and he has the grumpiness of a man from another era about change and new things, particularly electronic media and the Internet. So it's a bit ironic that Books reads a lot like a blog: it's a series of only thematically connected bits of writing, all of which seem dashed off and many of which don't end so much as stop. It doesn't have the same sense of being written in time as a blog does, the connectedness of a piece of prose written in a specific date-stamped time, but that doesn't make Books stronger -- rather the reverse, actually.

Books doesn't go into enough depth to satisfy real fans of old books, and no one who isn't a fan of old books will be terribly interested in Books to begin with. The final product is pleasant enough to read, but there's hardly any meat here; it feels like a book that Simon & Schuster let McMurtry get away with because he promised them that he's working on a big Western novel next. I'd avoid this book unless you're a McMurtry completist.

I Want What He's Got

I missed this New York Times article on Tom Stoppard's excellent traveling book-case on Monday, but caught up with it when PW's Book Maven blog covered it today.

When I travel, I tend to bring three or four books and at least half-a-dozen magazines (for a three- or four-day trip), so I love the idea of this book-box. On the other hand, I stash my reading material in my messenger bag, so I can carry it onto the plane -- that's one of the best places to read on a trip, and I want to have choices then. (Though I'm often reduced to making sure a New Yorker is accessible in an outside pocket and pulling out a current book as I scrunch into the tiny airline seats.)

If I was going anywhere for a week or more, and especially if I'd have reading time while there, I'd love to have a case like this. Pity that they haven't been made for twenty years...