Reviewing the Mail: Week of 4/13/24

Three books arrived this week - two of them in the mail, through the usual publicity channels, and one from the library. I'll take them in that order.

The Runes of Engagement is a novel by Dave Klecha and Tobias S. Buckell, apparently an expansion of their story of the same name in the anthology Operation Arcana. It's military fantasy, of the "modern soldiers battle orcs" style - there was a popular series about a battle group (in an APC, I want to say?) around twenty years ago that this reminds me of, but I never read those books and now can't remember the author. Well, anyway: grunts fighting dragons. That kind of thing. Looks like this one leans into the dark-humor side of it, rather than staying a straight adventure, which sounds like fun.

Runes will be published June 18th in trade paperback and the usual arrangements of electrons by Tachyon Publications.

Also from Tachyon, but already published - since I have a finished paperback in my hands - is Samantha Mills's debut novel The Wings Upon Her Back. Mills won the Hugo, Nebula, and Sturgeon awards last year for her story "Rabbit Test." (And I now have to admit that I haven't read it, since I read essentially no short fiction these days, and keep thinking I should get back into it.) This is a fantasy novel, possibly with steampunky elements - the acolytes of the Mecha God have copper wings that it's implied actually work - about a middle-aged heroine who devoted her life to a cause and a deity that might not be as admirable as she originally thought, and from whose service she is now irrevocably severed.

And that library book - the last from the batch I requested about three weeks ago - is Lunar New Year Love Story, a graphic novel by Gene Luen Yang (creator of Boxers & Saints, among other things) and LeUyen Pham (who has been a celebrated illustrator of books for young readers for a couple of decades - I'm sure I've seen her work, since that heavily overlaps my kids' growing-up years, but I'm not sure of specifics - including a bunch of comics-formatted things mostly done with Shannon Hale). I'm not sure if this book is officially adult or YA - it might depend on whether there are any curses or on-page sex in it - but it's about a young woman, Val, who may be under a family curse to be unlucky in love and who may have a way to break that curse.

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.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 3/30/2024

Three books this week: one that actually did come in the mail (after I paid for it) and two that I found at the yearly library sale at the next town over.

The book in the mail was Thorn: The Complete Proto-Bone College Strips 1982-1986 by Jeff Smith, which I got because I (like what I think was several thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of people) backed the Kickstarter. The book has a real ISBN and price printed on it, and Smith has had a real publishing company, Cartoon Books, for a good thirty years now, so I think this is a "real" book that will also be available other places. (Update, thirty seconds later: Yes, since I was able to grab an Amazon link for it with a pub date of July 30, I'm pretty confident it will be widely available.)

As the subtitle says, these are really early work by Smith, from his college paper, featuring early versions of the characters he later used in Bone. I've never read any of this stuff before, so I have no expectations.

The two books from the library sale were both random non-fiction that looked vaguely interesting in a sea of David Baldacci and similar bestsellers:

How to Be a Victorian by the historian Ruth Goodman, a 2014 trade paperback that goes through everyday life in the Victorian age. I gather this focuses mostly on middle-class people, not the aristocracy, and "Victorian" is a pretty wide swath of time, too. I'm fascinated by books on small details, and this looks like one full of them.

Five-Finger Discount is a memoir from 2002 by reporter Helene Stapinski, who grew up (according to the blurb on this book) in an "unforgettable [Jersey City] family of swindlers, bookies, embezzlers, and mobster-wannabes." Hey, local color!  And I also like seeing reporters tell bigger and/or more personal stories.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of March 23, 2024

These books didn't come in the mail; I had an eye doctor appointment this last Monday, and my long-time doctor has an office on the fringes of the Village (or is 13th Street still Chelsea? I'm not dogmatic, or terribly well-informed, about the exact boundaries of Manhattan neighborhoods).

The office was convenient to work for a long time: first a quick subway ride from Times Square, and then a quick subway ride from Rockefeller Center, and then a quick walk from Madison Square Park, and then a quick PATH from Hoboken, and then a slightly more complicated subway ride from the UN area, and then again a quick PATH from Hoboken. But I went full-time work-from-home - somewhat sideways, and not by specific choice - just before or during the pandemic, so now she's not nearly as convenient as she was for almost twenty years. Still, a good doctor is worth a bit of fuss, so once a year I make the trek.

And, since I'm already on 13th Street between Fifth and Sixth, and The Strand is less than five minutes away...well, I have to make a stop, don't I?

I did; these are the books I got there (and one at Forbidden Planet down the block).

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by D.G. Compton - a book I've heard about for years, in a nice classy relatively recent edition with an introduction by Jeff Vandermeer. This is the one about a near-future world in which no one dies of random diseases, but one woman is dying, and is secretly recorded for the entertainment of the rest of the world. I get a '70s Ballard vibe from it - media landscapes, death, British pessimism, all that jazz - and that sounds just fine.

Ocean State is a novel by Stewart O'Nan that I didn't realize existed; it was published in 2022 and I got the trade paperback from a year later. (It's been about fifteen years since I obsessively read Publishers Weekly and related materials for work, cataloging every book of interest and maintaining massive lists - and I'm still weirdly surprised that I'm not plugged into every last book being published the way I was when I did all of that. Expectations are weird.) Anyway, I like O'Nan's work, and keep thinking I will catch up on him eventually. This one is about teenage murder, which gives me a vague Speed Queen sense.

Animal Vegetable Criminal was Mary Roach's new book for 2021; she's a fine writer of nonfiction who I've read intermittently. (Well, I say that, but doing a search here, I might not have read anything of hers since Stiff in 2009. OK, maybe I just have a couple of her books on my to-be-read shelves and/or lists, but I think that counts as reading, or at least planning to read.) This one is about animals that get into criminal mischief - or maybe just interfere with human activities. I'm not expecting this to be law-geeky as the wonderful The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance (which you all should read, and which I hope will develop a sequel one day), but I do live in hope, as always.

A Matter of Life is a small graphic novel by Jeffrey Brown, subtitled "An Autobiographical Meditation on Fatherhood and Faith." I've like several of Brown's previous autobio pieces and this is from Top Shelf, who have never steered me wrong before.

Hypercapitalism is a 2018 book that I feel like I've been looking for, every time I was in a book or comics store, since then. I finally saw it in person, so I guess I had to buy it. It's by Larry (Cartoon History of the Universe) Gonick and Tim Kasser, who I gather is the actual expert on economics here. It looks as dense and mixed serious/funny as the rest of Gonick's work, so I hope to get to it more quickly than the six years it took me to find it.

And last is another book I've ben vaguely looking for multiple years: Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell, a 2014 book collecting that entire webcomic by Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan. I probably read the whole strip, or most of it, when it ran, and I haven't checked to see if it's still online anywhere - it might well be. And I think I almost bought it when it was new, but maybe balked at full retail. Well, it's a decade later, and now it was very slightly cheaper, so yay for procratination.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 23, 2023

I have four books to mention this week - three that I found randomly on library shelves, while I was there for something else, and one that came in the mail. As always, I'll start with the mail.

The Corset and the Jellyfish is the new book from Nick Bantock, best known for the massively bestselling "Griffin & Sabine" books in the early '90s - those were clever and well-constructed, with physical letters nestled into envelopes in the books, using what I think of as pop-up book technology for different ends. My sense is that his career since then has been one part expanding upon that single massive success, with some subsequent Griffin & Sabine projects (a CD-ROM, a second trilogy, a stage play) and one part doing things that success enabled (lectures, painting, being part of the official committee selecting stamps for Canada).

This book may have vague links to the Griffin and Sabine series - the back cover mentions two loose touchpoints - but it's mostly its own thing, a self-declared "Conundrum of Drabbles." It contains one hundred very short stories with accompanying spot illustrations, in the style Bantock has used for Sabine's work. It looks like there is meant to be some kind of loose, or hidden, overall story or narrative. So quirky, but well within the space Bantock has worked before. It's a small hardcover from Tachyon Publications, publishing on November 7.

Now to the library books - I happened to be in the big library one two over last Sunday, grabbing a movie to watch with the family, and browsed the graphic novel stack while I was there. (Parenthetically: the libraries near me, and maybe those in the US somewhat consistently, shelve GNs in juvenile and YA sections, but not adult - I'm not sure why, but I was poking through the YA section.) These are books that looked vaguely interesting, but I know very little about any of them, obviously.

Tin Man was Justin Madison's debut; it came out in 2022 from Amulet, the books-for-new-people imprint of Abrams. It appears to be about two teens, sister and brother, who meet a Tin Woodsman - looking exactly like the one from The Wizard of Oz, though I think he has a different origin - and they affect each other's lives.

In Waves is a big book that attracted me with its cool green cover; it's by AJ Dungo and is something like a history of surfing and something like a personal story about how surfing has been part of his life. (Or probably both.) There also seems to be some kind of memoir of illness as part of it; I don't know whose illness.

And last is Irena, Book One: Wartime Ghetto, first in a series by a group of European creators (written by Jean-David Morvan and Séverine Tréfouël, drawn by David Evrard, colored by Walter) translated by Dan Christensen for this 2019 US publication. It's about Irena Sendlerowa, who I just randomly heard about the other week myself: she was a young Polish woman during WWII and personally smuggled 2500 Jewish children out of the Warsaw ghetto, saving their lives.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 2, 2023

I got three books from the library this week, and these are them:

I Was Their American Dream was the first comics memoir from Malaka Gharib, published in 2019. I missed it then, but read her second book, It Won't Always Be Like This, earlier this year. So I'm going back to see the first book.

The Man in the McIntosh Suit is a historical thriller in comics form - set in 1929 California - by Rina Ayuyang. I've never read Ayuyang's work, and I don't remember how I heard about this: I might have just been searching comics in the library database, and saw this was new and from Drawn & Quarterly, who have dependably good taste.

And then there's Amulet, Book 8: Supernova by Kazu Kibuishi. I missed it when it came out in 2018 - only two years after book 7, Firelight, which is entirely reasonable for big graphic novels - but recently saw an ad for the final book in the series, Waverider, coming early next year. So I figured I might as well catch up before then, though I'm not sure how much I remember after seven years.

Reviewing the Mail : Week of July 22, 2023

Three books this week, all upcoming titles from Tachyon. And here's what I can tell you about them.

A Stranger in the Citadel is a new novel by Tobias Buckell, who I haven't read in much longer than I thought. I believe this is SF, of the medium-future lowish-tech sort. The main character is "the youngest musketress of Ninetha," which implies some level of conflict between polities, and there's also an "outcast librarian," which I think is meant to echo that old post-apocalyptic strain of novels from Fahrenheit 451 and Long Tomorrow and Canticle for Leibowitz. The copy unsubtly declares that books are outlawed, for example, but I have hopes Buckell is doing something beyond the obvious here. This is publishing on October 17th.

The Circumference of the World is a new novel from the prolific Lavie Tidhar, publishing September 5th. As I think is pretty typical for him, it's deeply knowledgeable and playful about SF tropes and history - this one is about a mysterious pulp SF novel, Lode Stars, which may disappear on being read or may be a hoax - or, knowing Tidhar, possibly both.

And last is Things Get Ugly: The Best Crime Stories of Joe R. Lansdale, which, um, collects crime stories by Lansdale that he and his editors think are pretty darn good. (I am actually a fan of descriptive subtitles; the point of a book cover, and metadata in general, is to make it clear what a book is and who might like it.) This one comes out on August 15 and contains nineteen stories that originally appeared all sorts of places, mostly in anthologies, going as far back as 1983.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 15, 2023

So I seem to have, without doing it deliberately, changed the title of these occasional Sunday "hey! I got some new books!" posts from Reviewing the Mail to Incoming Books, which were previously separate things that I could probably explain if I had enough time and motivation.

I've now changed it back, and plan to stay Reviewing the Mail...until I forget again, or do something else. Hey: it's an imperfect system, man.

This week I have three books - two that I just bought myself, and one that came in the mail. As usual, the one in the mail gets priority and will come first.

Enlightened is a graphic novel by Sachi Ediriweera that retells the life of Prince Siddhartha, coming from  Atheneum Books for Young Readers on September 26th. Ediriweera is a Sri Lankan cartoonist and filmmaker - his previous graphic novel was Lionborn. And Siddhartha is the guy later and better known as the Gautama Buddha. This is subtitled "a fictionalized tale" which may just mean that Siddhartha's story is more myth than history, or may mean Ediriweera is making some changes of his own in this version. I suppose we will see!

Tsalmoth is the sixteenth book in the Vlad Taltos series by Steven Brust, which I've been reading with great pleasure since sometime in the mid-80s. (It started with Jhereg in 1983; I may have read that before the second book, Yendi, came out a year later.) I'm surprised to see that the most recent book in the series was Vallista, five years ago; I've also posted here about the novels Hawk, Tiassa, Iorich, Jhegaala, and Dzur. This is fantasy, of the far-future variety, where it may all be SF really far down under everything if the author ever gave those details, which he will not. Brust seems to have picked up the pace and be aiming for the end of this series - he famously said it would be nineteen books, one for each of the Great Houses of the aristocratic society of this world, plus two more, and this is number sixteen - so it will be interesting to see if that affects the book at all. Brust is an inventive and voice-driven writer; these books have been all quite different from each other and - aside from background details and a certain inevitable amount of backstory - they mostly each stand alone.

And last is Ralph Azham: You Can't Stop a River, the third of four volumes collecting the epic fantasy BD series by Lewis Trondheim. See my posts on the first two books, Black Are the Stars and The Land of the Blue Demons, for more details, but this series is set in a world much like the Donjon series which Trondheim co-writes.

Incoming Books: Week of July 8, 2023

These "Incoming Books" posts are the ones I do closest to deadline - I'm typing this the morning of July 8, after doing a "review" that will go live on August 23 - and so sometimes I think I can or should give last-minute dispatches from the trenches, if I had any breaking news.

Spoiler alert! There is no such thing as breaking news for a minor-league book-review blog. But I did just get two books from Tachyon this week, so I've got that going for me, which is nice.

The Legend of Charlie Fish is the first novel by Josh Rountree, some kind of fantasy Western that comes with quotes from Joe R. Lansdale, A.C. Wise, David Liss, and Brian Keene. From some hints on the back cover, I think the fantasy element is water-related, which is an interesting addition to the usually dusty desert of the standard Western. It also looks pleasingly short, so I might take a run at it soon.

Flight & Anchor is a similarly short novel - I say this admiringly, by the way, since I'm all about short books these days - by Nicole Kornher-Stace, who I am happy to see lives in New Paltz. (Someone has to! Badum-tissh. No, seriously, I actually know where that is and It's always fun to see an creator that lives in a real, smaller place you know something about.)

This is somewhat related to a series Kornher-Stace has running; the cover says it's "A Firebreak story," and she's had five previous books published, most of which I think are in that sequence. I think this is a somewhat near-future SF story, corporate dystopia division - our two main characters are fleeing a rapacious corporation, which seems to have made them both super-soldiers and celebrities. I suspect they are both still quite young; like teenager young, maybe. Anyway, clearly the rapacious corporation will not be happy these two have run away, and hence, I think, the plot of the book.

Incoming Books: Week of June 24, 2023

This is part three of the big box from Hamilton; see the last two weeks for more details. It's slightly cheaty to call this "incoming books" for "this week," but no one actually cares.

This time out: Other Stuff! Mostly fiction, mostly old and/or famous so you could call it "literature" if you want, with a couple of bits of non-fiction.

The outlier is Witty Comebacks, a quote book compiled by Tim Glynne-Jones (who is only credited at the end of his introduction) and published to be a small coffee-table book or otherwise read in small moments. I used to have a lot of books like these stacked up, but my supply has seriously dwindled - and I think books like this aren't published as much anyway; they've all turned into online listicles, which are better attuned to the attention span in question here.

I read a Matt Haig novel long ago - for the SFBC actually; it was The Dead Fathers Club and I think we offered it - and have looked at his other books since then, meaning to read more of them one of these days. Well, I got his non-fiction book Notes on a Nervous Planet, which seems to be partly the story of how he got over an anxiety disorder and partly his recommendations for how everyone should live in the modern, media-soaked world.

The Sun Also Rises is a 1926 novel by Ernest Hemingway that you may have heard of. I'm pretty sure the only Hemingway I hit during my academic career was A Moveable Feast - I got my English degree at about the nadir of his reputation - and every so often I think I should read something by him. Probably this, which is why I got it.

Goodbye to Berlin is the one book by Christopher Isherwood that anyone has ever heard of, because it inspired the musical Cabaret. Maybe I'll read it: it's short and now I have a copy on my shelves, close at hand.

The publishers of the next book don't seem to trust their audience - it's Jack London's 1913 memoir John Barleycorn, with the subtitle A Drinking Life much larger on the cover. Again, it's a book I think I'll want to read at some point, and now I can easily if "at some point" suddenly appears.

The Devil in the Flesh is a very short novel from 1923 by the very young Raymond Radiguet, about a teenager who has an affair with the wife of a soldier - apparently it's semi-autobiographical, was somewhat scandalous at the time, and that Radiguet died very young, soon afterward. That all sounds intriguing, so why not?

And last is Paul Theroux's 1982 novel The Mosquito Coast. I've been reading his nonfiction for a long time, and have a couple of his novels on the shelf, but have never actually read one. This is maybe his most famous/acclaimed book, so it's a good choice to have on hand if ever I decide to dive into fictional Theroux.

Incoming Books: Week of June 17, 2023

This is something of a cheat. As I said last week, I got a big box of remainders recently, and this is the middle third of them: the books that are SFF or something similar.

(I'm doing this in three batches because of two competing urges: I want to list all of my new books, but I also don't want to sit doing twenty-some books in a row. So I do a Caesar-in-Gaul act instead.)

And so here are:

Longer, a Michael Blumlein novel from 2019 that I think was his last work. This looks to be less...disturbing than most of his books, since it seems to be more-or-less straightforward serious SF about life-extension and such. (Blumlein was a doctor, and his work often came at SF from a horror slant - or maybe vice versa - with novels like The Movement of Mountains and X, Y and his great disturbing collection The Brains of Rats.)

Carmen Dog is a short novel by Carol Emshwiller, who I've read very little of. This one is about women who turn into animals and vice versa; I don't think it's officially a fable but it probably aims towards that territory.

I Am Providence is a novel by Nick Mamatas, a murder mystery set at a Lovecraftian convention. So maybe this generations Bimbos of the Death Sun, perhaps? Mamatas is suitably cruel and willing to burn bridges, so I have reasonably high hopes.

The Menace from Farside is a novella by Ian McDonald, apparently loosely related to a recent trilogy set on the moon. I haven't read the trilogy, and haven't read any McDonald for at least a decade, but I liked all his earlier books that I did read, so why not? I also like novellas these days, since my reading time is shorter and more fragmented.

By Force Alone is a big Arthurian novel - I think in the "grim & gritty" camp - by Lavie Tidhar, who I've generally seen working the SF side of the street. From my chair, it looks like it was supposed to be his big breakout book, but I don't think that succeeded - maybe it was too different from what he'd done before, or maybe the starts just weren't right.

Lent was Jo Walton's new novel for 2019, and some kind of historical fantasy in which Savonarola (maybe the historical figure, maybe some other guy; I'm not an expert on the period) can see and cast out demons. I'm a few books behind on Walton, but she always does distinctive and thoughtful books, and this one stands alone, so I might be able to find time for it.

And last is The Accidental War, another book in the "Praxis" series by Walter Jon Williams. I may be slightly confused, since there are some novellas in that series, and not all of them are available in printed form, but I think this series is mostly two trilogies, and this book is the beginning of the second one. I was a big Williams fan back in the day, but he's someone whose work I somewhat lost track of when I left the SFBC and was no longer reading SFF in bulk and having it delivered every day to my office.

Incoming Books: Week of June 10, 2023

For my birthday, which was last week, I ordered myself a big box of mostly remainders from the fine folks at Edward R. Hamilton.

Four points before I dive into the list:

Imprimus, Hamilton is a great source for people who like random books; I've been ordering from them for probably thirty years. You'll rarely get exactly the thing you want, but you can find lots of things that look vaguely enticing at great prices. 

Secundus, once you hit middle age, I strongly recommend buying yourself the presents you really want, on whatever occasions present-buying is appropriate. (Or just at random times: you're an adult, you can do what you want.) Don't wait for other people.

Tertius, I'm going to divide the box into three parts, because I got twenty-some books and I'm not going to spend all day today typing them out. (I'm going to spend some time today, and a similar amount of time over the next two Sundays doing so, because everything in moderation.)

Quartus, My links here, as always, are to that giant hegemonic retailer. But these books were all available much cheaper from Hamilton not long ago, and may be available still. I'd recommend checking there first, if anything looks enticing.

So, the first cluster of Hamilton books are Comics and Related Books, presented in roughly size order, since that's how they're currently stacked:

How to Be a Motorist is a 1939 book of humor "by" the British cartoonist Heath Robinson - I think his drawings came first, but I could be wrong - and "written by" K.R.G. Browne, who I think was a jobbing writer hired to turn a sheaf of funny Robinson drawings into a book. I've never seen much of Robinson, but he's always called the UK equivalent of Rube Goldberg, and that's enough to be worth diving into.

You Have Killed Me is some kind of noirish mystery/detective thing, by Jamie S. Rich and Joelle Jones - I think originally a miniseries and then collected in this book. I've read a bunch of things Rich wrote over the years without ever focusing on him as a writer with specific strengths and weaknesses, but I don't think I've ever read a book by Jones - which is odd, since she's been making comics for a while, and works around areas I usually enjoy. I can only shrug and point out it's a large, capacious world.

Anno Dracula: 1895: Seven Days in Mayhem is a comics extension of the novel series of the same name by Kim Newman. Newman wrote this, with art by Paul McCaffrey. I'm not sure if it adapts part of the first Anno-Dracula book, or is some kind of side-story; it seems to be set in the time period of that first book. (Later novels were set much later in time; I think Newman is commiting alternate history, though I'm a few books behind at this point.)

All's Fair in Love & War is a collection of single-panel cartoons about love, edited by Bob Eckstein. Eckstein has been doing a bunch of books like this for, oddly enough, the Princeton Architecture Press: I'd previously seen The Ultimate Cartoon Book of Book Cartoons, which was comprised of cartoons about books and the bookish. This is not officially related to The New Yorker, but it borrows a lot of design sense from that magazine and most of the contributors are closely associated with it as well. So it's not not a New Yorker book.

Love & Vermin is a collection of the cartoons of Will McPhail, who regularly appears in The New Yorker. McPhil has been busy recently: he also had the full-length graphic novel In., and it looks like both of those were published last year.

Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels is not what I thought it was. It's a study by David A. Berrona about the wordless, mostly woodcut, books made by people like Franz Masereel and Lynd Ward in the early years of the 20th century. I thought it was a collection of half-a dozen or so of those books, with annotations and commentary, but, no, it has excerpts from a couple of dozen but none in full, and it has a lot of text for a book called Wordless Books.

MacDoodle St. collects a late-70s strip by Mark Alan Stamaty (whose kids' book Who Needs Donuts? was a staple of my youth and whose long-running Washingtoon was also excellent) about, unsurprisingly, New York City. I've been vaguely looking for this book for a few years now - something about Stamaty's art imprinted on me very young - so I'm thrilled to have it in hand.

The P. Craig Russell Library of Opera Adaptations, Vol. 2 is just what the label says: adaptations of Parsifal, Ariane & Bluebeard, I Pagliacci and some Mahler songs, done in comics form by Russell. Russell has adapted a lot of operas into comics, as opposed to everyone else in the world, who have done approximately zero opera adaptations. I think I've read some parts of this, or maybe other Russell opera books, in the past, but that was a long time ago. This book is copyright 2003, but the work is mostly from the '80s, so I had a lot of opportunity to do so long enough ago that I don't remember clearly.