Hi Jenny --
I just last night remembered that I forgot to discuss what books you will be reading over Passover. I think I forgot last year as well, but for a while before that, I would take this opportunity, each spring, to sweep whatever was gathering dust on my bookshelf into an envelope and down to the post office, so you would have reading to occupy you during the holiday. I'm sorry I forgot this year -- I'm apologizing not just to you but to my brother and my friends M-- and S--, who helped me move, because I'm sure there are things nourishing silverfish in my new apartment that could just as easily be doing the same in yours.
So, even though you probably won't read this until after everyone has reached the Promised Land of May Sweeps, I'm going to write here about what I've been reading lately. Then I thought that you, in turn, could issue a similar report.
Stealing Home by Charlie Huston. This is a slightly gimicky but awfully entertaining noir. Huston has published a few novels and just crossed over to comics: he's reviving an obscure 1970s superhero called Moon Knight for Marvel. There's this whole uninteresting story about how I learned about Huston and then forgot everything I knew and then found him again, but I guess I'll talk about the book instead. It's really, really violent. The cover copy led me to believe that I was picking up a wacky Carl Hiassen-type caper. Wrong! Instead, people keep dying in really unpleasant ways. There's a cute cat, sure, but even it gets in trouble. This is what I'm reading right now.
Summer Blonde by Adrian Tomine. I'm reading this right now as well. It's got that Daniel Clowes self-loathing thing going on. The art is very good.
Box Office Poison by Alex Robinson. I recommend this very highly. I was putting off reading it, because it's a doorstop, but then once I started, I got completely obsessed. It's a quick read -- graphic novel, not a lot of text -- and epic in the way I like. It's mostly pretty loosely-structured and long enough that you always feel like there's a lot of story yet to go. Robinson pulls off some really clever tone shifts. For instance, it's mostly light to black-comic until the end, in which there's a slight shift in perspective and some additional information that makes the entire enterprise a great deal sadder.
Empire Star by Samuel R. Delany. Do people still read Samuel R. Delany? If not, why not? This novella is like really good Philip K. Dick, only no one would ever think of making a crappy movie out of it because it's got such an effed-up timeline. It was really hard to find. None of the local library systems have much of his stuff and you can't really find it in bookstores, either.
Love,
-- Pete
PS Charlie Huston is a blogger.
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