a reader

an eudæmonist › reading

2007

December

P.G. Wodehouse. Very Good, Jeeves!. Woodstock, NY: Overlook, 2005 (1930). [111]
The short story is a highly underrated art form, because it is too seldom artful. But these are. Very.
Matt Briggs. Misplaced Alice. Spokane: Stringtown Press, 2002. [110]
Families and couples dissolve and confuse and disappear.
Elizabeth Bishop. The Collected Prose. New York: FSG, 1984. [109]
Some essays and stories; memoir of Marianne Moore very interesting, moveable feast-ish.
Haruki Murakami. Sputnik Sweetheart. trans. Philip Gabriel. New York: Knopf, 2001. [108]
Confused persons muddle through.
Harry Mulisch. The Assault. trans. New York: Pantheon, 1986. [107]
Crimes in wartime, terrorism, perspectives, etc.
Natsume Soseki. Botchan. trans. J. Cohn. —: Kodansha, . [106]
Sort of leaves one wondering.
Anna Mockler. Burning Salt. Spokane: Stringtown Press, 2004 . [105]
Short stories a trifle to saturated for my taste.
Goce Smilevski. Conversation with Spinoza. trans. Filip Korzenski. Evanston: NWUP, 2006 (2002). [104]
Charming and thoughtful, but too much masturbation.
P.G. Wodehouse. My Man Jeeves. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 2006 (19–). [103]
Masterful humorous stories.
Melody Beattie. Codependent No More.Center City, MN: Hazelden, 1992. [102]
About how you can’t control other people and you can only take care of yourself, but you need to take care of yourself and not let your hunger to control others prevent you from controlling yourself. Etc.
Jules Verne. Journey to the Center of the Earth. trans. Anon. New York: Random House, 2003 (1864, 1876). [101]
Wow – it involves Iceland! Much better than I had imagined it would be.
Linda Cockburn. Living the Good Life. Prahran: Hardie Grant, 2006. [100]
Family gets off the grid as much as possible in Australia, trying not to spend a buck.
Freeman Dyson. Imagined Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1997. [99]
Short essay/lectures about technological innovation, the past, and the future. Thoughtful, but for an audience that wants their thinking done for them.
Oliver Sacks. An Anthropologist on Mars. New York: Vintage, 1995. [98]
Seven ‘case-studies’ of various mental oddities.

November

Kay Redfield Jamison. An Unquiet Mind. New York: Vintage, 1997/ [97]
Interesting account of manic-depressive illness, but the narrator raises questions of reliability which remain unanswered.
Gail A. Eisnitz. Slaughterhouse. Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1997. [96]
Biased and journalistic as this type of thing usually is, Slaughterhouse nonetheless provides a bleak view of the cost of meat, in terms of human and animal suffering. Oh, and, by the way, feces on meat in slaughterhouses is not a contaminant, it is a ‘cosmetic defect’, per your friends at the USDA. Nice.
Haruki Murakami. Underground. trans. J.P. Gabriel & A. Birnbaum. New York: Vintage, 2001. [95]
Interviews with people involved in the 1995 sarin gas attacks in the Tokyo underground. Under the acknowledged influence of Studs Terkel.
Georgi Gospodinov. And Other Stories. trans. A. Levitin & M. Levy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 2007 (2001). [94]
Short short stories, very nice.
Pete Jordan. Dishwasher. New York: Harper, 2007. [93]
Well revised.

Ocotober

Evany Thomas. The Secret Language of Sleep. San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2006. [92]
Cute.
Robertson Davies. High Spirits. London: Penguin, 1982. [91]
Indeed.
Henry James. The Other House, in Novels: 1896–1899. New York: Library of America, 2003. [90]
Spoiler.
Jason. I Killed Adolf Hitler. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2007. [89]
Time travel is strange, especially when it takes fifty years for the machine to charge up.
H.W. Leggett. The Idea in Fiction. London: Allen & Unwin, 1934. [88]
Limits of author’s powers of observation, impressions of the world; fiction shaped by preconceptions, axes to grind, notions to muddle and so on and so forth. A simple book, clear and easy to read and understand, which is rare, but also leads to the temptation to underrate. Not sure.
Sergei Aksakov. A Russian Gentleman. trans. J.D. Duff. Oxford: OUP, 1923 (1856). [87]
Charming account of eighteenth century Russian country life, with Tatars and Bashkirs and strawberry wine.
Yevgeny Yevtushenko. Yevtushenko’s Reader. trans. various. New York: Avon, 1972. [86]
Roads have their middles and this fellow seems to find that comforting.
Haruki Murakami. The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. trans. Jay Rubin. New York: Vintage, 1997. [85]
Wow. How did that novel about infidelity and ennui end up there?
Osamu Tezuka. Phoenix. vol. 11. San Francisco, CA : Viz Communications, various. [84]
Eternity, morality, love, religion, in the past and in the future. Struggle for existence, dominance, etc. Enjoyable.
David Garnett. Lady into Fox. New York: Norton, 1966. [83]
Foxy.
E.M. Forster. A Room with a View. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955 (1908). [82]
Robert Pippin. Henry James and Modern Moral Life. Cambridge: CUP, 2000. [81]
Requires some digestions. Won’t necessary change how I’ll read Henry James, but it provides an interesting filter to choose from.
Graham Greene. A World of My Own: A Dream Diary. New York: Viking, 1992. [80]
Yup, those are dreams.

September

Paul Schmidtberger. Design Flaws of the Human Condition. New York: Broadway Books, 2007. [79]
About anger, revenge, frustration, acceptance, forgiveness, and friendship.
Anya Ulinich. Petropolis. New York: Viking, 2007. [78]
Dunno. Ticks some boxes, ticks me off. Not my cup of tea, really.
Bryan Lee O’Malley. Lost At Sea. Portland: Oni Press, 2005. [77]
Canadian girl goes on road trip, fights cats, finds self, etc.
Fyodor Dostoevsky. A Gentle Creature and Other Stories. trans. Alan Myers. Oxford: OUP, 1995 (1848, 1876, 1877). [76]
‘White Nights’. That is all.
Clifford Geertz. Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1988. [75]
Stefano Benni. Margherita Dolce Vita. trans. Antony Shugaar. New York: Europa, 2006 (2005). [74]
Sits someplace between Mon Oncle and Playtime.

August

Boris Fishman, ed. Wild East: Stories from the Last Frontier. Boston: Justin Charles, 2003. [73]
Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. Yarn Harlot: The Secret Life of a Knitter. Kansas City: Andrews McMeel, 2005. [72]
Rolf Potts. Vagabonding. New York: Villard, 2003. [71]
Advice about traveling. It seems impossible to offer advice about traveling without sounding like a smarmy know-it-all. The role of ‘experienced traveler’ is not to be recommended to anyone under the age of 65.
Osamu Tezuka. Apollo’s Song. New York: Vertical, 2007 (1970). [70]
A little book about love.
Haruki Murakami. Norwegian Wood. trans. Jay Rubin. New York: Vintage, 2000 (1986). [69]
Death, insanity, reading, music.
Banana Yoshimoto. N.P.. trans. Ann Sherif. London: Faber & Faber, 1994 (1990). [68]
Leaves a vague and aimless feeling.
Georges Simenon. Red Lights. trans. Norman Denny. New York: NYRB Classics, 2006 (1953). [67]
Tangled and twisted and troubled.
Studs Terkel. Working. New York: Avon, 1972. [66]
Interviews with people about the work they do and how that work makes them feel; about their lives and what they wished they had done or had, etc.
Christopher Alexander. The Timeless Way of Building. New York: OUP, 1979. [65]
About making things – especially buildings – that are in some way alive, that feel good to be around.
Jason Shiga. Bookhunter. Sparkplug Comics, 2007. [64]
About the library police who track down the wicked criminals who steal library books.
Helen Fielding. Cause Celeb. New York: Penguin, 2002. [63]
Silly.

July

Benjamin Tammuz. Minotaur. trans. K. Parfitt & Mildred Budny. New York: Europa, 1989. [62]
Robertson Davies. The Deptford Trilogy. 3 vols. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970, 1972, 1975. [61]
Joan Didion. The Year of Magical Thinking. New York: Knopf, 2005. [60]
Banana Yoshimoto. Goodbye Tsugumi. trans. Michael Emmerich. New York: Grove, 2002 (1989). [59]
Mean sickly cousins go crazy by the seashore.
Anne Mustoe. A Bike Ride: 12,000 Miles Around the World. London: Virgin Books, 1991. [58]
Middle-aged English headmistress cycles more or less around the world (with some excursions on trains and planes and trucks) with some historical interludes. Very much the sort of book I would have liked a few years ago, but I missed my chance.
Banana Yoshimoto. Kitchen. trans. M. Backus. New York: Grove, 1993 (1988). [57]
Sweet stories of grief.
Geoff Dyer. Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence. New York : North Point Press, 1998. [56]
A book about how to not write a book. Heard about on the radio.
W. Somerset Maugham. The Razor’s Edge. London: Penguin, 1978 (1944). [55]
Enjoyable. Minor. Lightly flavored with Henry James, Graham Greene, Evelyn Waugh, & Ford Maddox Ford.

June

Ezra Pound. Guide to Kulchur. New York: New Directions, 1970 (1939). [54]
Odd & eclectic criticism of usury and the evils of modern civilization. If I were unkind I would call it whimsical, but that would be a misunderstanding.
Muhammad Yunus. Banker to the Poor. New York: Public Affairs, 2003 (1999). [53]
Charles Simic. Dime-Store Alchemy: the Art of Joseph Cornell. Hopewell, NJ: Ecco, 1992. [52]
A whimsical short ‘appreciation’. Makes one want to know more about those boxes.
Julia Cameron. The Artist’s Way. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1995. [51]
I like how it contains pretty much the same advice as Getting Things Done, except for a different audience.
Paul Jordan Smith. A Key to the Ulysses of James Joyce. San Francisco: City Lights, 1970 (1927, 1934). [50]
Surprisingly amusing and helpful little book, especially the essay ‘Agenbite of Inwit’ which boils down to: why I like Ulysses even when I thought I wouldn’t. ‘Vulgar it is, certainly, – vulgar as a bed pan, as vulgar as life itself. But it is relieved by moods of singular beauty; it swings one from the stinks of the lavatory to teh realms of luminous ether. It is everything: realism and romanticism, wisdom and nonsense, scatalogic hideousness and transcendental aspiration’ (89).

May

Haruki Murakami. Blind willow, Sleeping woman . trans. Philip Gabriel and Jay Rubin. New York: Knopf, 2006. [49]
24 short stories some of which are pretty good. And one of which, as near as I can remember, reminds me of another story, by a different author. But mostly Murakami.
David Allen. Getting Things Done. New York: Viking, 2001. [48]
So you think about what all you need to do you and you write it down. And then you look at what you’ve written down and this is where people split off: some people do what they’ve written down and everybody else tries to find some new widget to make what they’ve written down look cooler and more organized. And the people who’ve done what they’ve written down (and have written down more stuff and done that, too) live in poverty and obscurity while the folks with the color-coordinated widget (matches their shoes, you know) take the credit.
Sebastian Brant. Ship of Fools. trans. Edwin H. Zeydel. Mineola, NY: Dover, 1988 (1494). [47]
We are all fools. Most of the time.
Ayun Holliday. Job Hopper. Emeryville, CA: Seal Press, 2005. [46]
It is difficult not to take this book as it isn’t meant, viz., as a lament that employers everywhere have not realized how brilliant/talented/creative the author is with nothing to back up the assertion that the author is, in fact, as brilliant/talented, etc. as claimed. But that’t not what it’s about. It’s about how most jobs suck, especially if you don’t care about them, and I think that is probably very true. Especially if you wish you could care about said sucky jobs.
Haruki Murakami. Hard Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World. trans. Alfred Birnbaum. New York: Vintage, 1993. [45]
Wow.
Lydia Chukovskaya. Sofia Petrovna. trans. Aline Werth. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988 (1939–1940). [44]
About a woman who loses her son to Stalin; the transparency of her character, the clarity of her misunderstanding of what’s going on around her make the novella more compelling than it would otherwise be.
Scott McCloud. Making comics: storytelling secrets of comics, manga and graphic novels. New York: Harper, 2006. [43]
A clean overview of what goes into making comics/graphic novels. Makes one pay attention to things one might not otherwise notice, which is as much as can be expected.
Osamu Tezuka. Phoenix (Hi no Tori). 10 vols. San Francisco, CA : Viz Communications, various. [42]
When I read the first volume, I wasn’t impressed, but after reading Adolf and seven volumes of Astroboy, Tezuka’s quirks made more sense to me. And Phoenix is really quite good.

April

Jean-Jacques Rousseau. The Confessions. tr. J.M. Cohen. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1953 (1781). [41]
Very like a gothic novel. Especially in the not-very-well-justified suspicions of anyone and everyone.
Ilyas Halil. Unregulated Chicken Butts and other stories. trans. Joseph S. Jacobson. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1990. [40]
Okay. So I don’t read Turkish. I don’t even speak Turkish. But I’m going to complain about the translation. My evidence (for which I am unable to remember the page number) is (setting aside the general awkwardness) that the phrase ‘since many years’ is used in the sense of ‘for a long time’. I don’t know if that is a particularly Turkish locution, but it is a generous mind which gives it the name of English or even American. Not that I could read the original, or anything.
Miss Lasko-Gross. Escape from ‘Special’. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2006. [39]
About a girl with the usual social difficulties: hello, I’m smart and talented, but nobody likes me, so I’ll hang out with the skaters instead of the ‘popular’ kids. Has a nice moody style to it. Also makes me wonder about the ‘popular’ kids – I’ve never met anyone who has actually been or liked them. But then I don’t hang out with mid-level management, so that’t probably why.
Yoshiro Tatsumi. Abandon the Old in Tokyo. Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2006 (1969). [38]
Evolution from the The Push Man, both in graphic style and narrative complexity. Still emphatic supinity.
Eva Hoffman. Lost in Translation: Life in a New Language. London: Penguin, 1989. [37]
It’s difficult to be an immigrant; it fills your life with lacunae.
Yoshihiro Tatsumi. The Push Man and Other Stories.Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly, 2005 (1969). [36]
A book for the supine.
Osamu Tezuka. Adolf. 5 vols. San Francisco: Cadence, 1996 (1983–5). [35]
Unexpectedly gripping. Goes with Grave of the Fireflies for graphic history.
Sarah Leavitt. From Catharine Beecher to Martha Stewart : a cultural history of domestic advice. Chapel Hill: UNCP, 2002. [34]
The unhappy love child of Martha Stewart and a doctoral dissertation. Long on gush, short on cultural history. Not that bad, really; but it could use more ideas and less summarizing.
Paula Jhung. Cleaning and the Meaning of Life. Dearfield Beach, FL: Health Communications, 2005. [33]
How the other half lives. Not the tenement house half, either. Not that minute fraction that owns over 80% of the world’s goods, but the middle half that spends as if it does. Except they’d rather not, of course. But everyone should have large closests.
Joseph Dominguez & Vicki Robin. Your Money or Your Life: transforming your relationship with money and achieving financial independence. London: Penguin, 1999. [32]
Buy less stuff! Buy more bonds! You’d think there was a war on or something.
Lydia Maria Child. The American Frugal Housewife. Sandwich, MA: Chapman Billies, 1990 (1832). [31]
Lots of recipes, but also advice to the poor. The main part of which is: don’t spend money you don’t have to put on a show for the neighbors. Because you will put on a show, but not the kind you were hoping for.
Michael Harrington. The Other America: Poverty in the United States. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981 (1962). [30]
Not especially rigorous examination of poverty in America. The jist being that J. K. Galbraith is both a better writer and better economist than this guy. Oh. And it ain’t no fun to be poor.
Samuel Smiles. Self-Help. Oxford: OUP, 2002 (1859). [29]
Simple premise, that by reading about the lives of exemplary people who have made themselves from the ground up (or had sufficient character to do so) one can improve oneself – not least because one has a model to work from. I found the stories rather dull and the righteous people rather boring, but I very much liked the earnestness of Smiles’s commentary, and would, if I felt like a bout of self-improvement, do so out of gratitude for his good humor. But I don’t and so shall remain botched and unformed.
Adrian Tomine. 32 Stories: The Complete Optic Nerve Mini-Comics. Montreal : Drawn and Quarterly Publications, c1995. [28]
It is comforting to see the development of graphic works I like. For the same reason I like zines so much – they make me think: hey! I could do that.
Jeffrey Brown. Unlikely. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf, 2005. [29]
About a first relationship, ill-fated of course. Has blurbs from Daniel Clowes and Ira Glass on the inside of the cover.

March

Alison Bechdel. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 2006. [26]
A memoir in graphic format (to call it a ‘graphic memoir’ would be imprecise) about growing up in rural Pennsylvania. About homosexuality, the funeral business, and intergenerational relations, seasoned with some literary allusions. Also one of the best book-length comics I’ve ever read.
Peter Ho Davies. Equal Love. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2000. [25]
The epigraph to the book is from E.M. Forster: ‘A wonderful physical tie binds the parents to the children; and – by some sad, strange irony – it does not bind us children to our parents. For if it did, if we could answer their love not with gratitude but with equal love, life would lose much of its pathos and much of its squalor, and we might be wonderfully happy.’ And that’s about as happy as these stories get.
T. Livy. Ab Urbe Condita. (vols. 1–2 of 14) B.O. Foster. Cambridge, MA: Loeb, 1919 – 1924 (1st C. BCE). [24]
I think I like Diodorus Siculus better. It’s a low moment for me, realizing that. (For numbering purposes, I will count two of these little volumes as ‘one’ book.)
Willie Weir. Spokesongs. Seattle: Pineleaf, 1997. [23]
Little notes about his experiences biking in India, South Africa and ‘the Balkans’.
Jeffrey Brown. AEIOU (Any Easy Intimacy). Marietta, GA: Top Shelf, 2005. [22]
About a muddle and a long-distance relationship.
Will Eisner. The Contract With God Trilogy. New York: Norton, 2006. [21]
Makes one wish to know more about urban planning.

February

Jeffrey Brown. Miniature Sulk. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf, 2005. [20]
As it sounds.
Gerald of Wales. The History and Topography of Ireland. trans. John O’Meara. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982 (1185). [19]
Odd and amusing stories.
Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff. History of Classical Scholarship. trans. Alan Harris. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1982 (1921). [18]
Concise history, all major names mentioned. Gossipy, but not too juicy (sadly).
Osamu Tezuka. Metropolis. trans. Kumar Sivasubramanian. Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse, 2003 (1948).
Big-eyed people (and not quite people).
John Hoffman.The Art and Science of Dumpster Diving. Port Townsend, WA: Breakout, 1993. [17]
Some crank rattles on about how folks throw too much stuff away, but that’s okay because it means he gets a lot of things free. And you’re 1) bad or 2) stupid if you don’t. Gross oversimplification, of course.
Joseph Roth. Flight Without End. trans. [unknown]. Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1977 (1927). [16]
Man travels; makes connections, loses. Lost generation, lost empire, lost self.
Robertson Davies. Samuel Marchbanks’ Almanack. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1967. [15]
Comfortably knowledgeable. Not something one sees a great deal of nowadays, when everyone is very anxious about their intellect, about their theories, and about appearing ignorant or old fashioned in mixed company. Also charmingly second-rate, which is the best way to do it. Admittedly, the conceit of this book wears very thin indeed less than halfway through, but it was a promising start.
Paul Hornschemeier. Let Us Be Perfectly Clear. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2006. [14]
Odd, morbid, depressing little comics. Very good. Pervasive influence of Chris Ware, or the other way around, or finger to the pulse of taste. Much of a muchness.
Lorrie Moore. Self-Help. New York: Penguin, 1985. [13]
Short stories about women, relationships, and insanity. ‘How to Be an Other Woman’, ‘What is Seized’, and ‘How to Become a Write’ struck me as the most satisfying, and least modern MFA-ish of the lot.
Kurt Vonnegut. God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater. New York: Vintage, 2006 (1965). [12]
‘All persons, living and dead, are purely coincidental, and should not be construed.’

January

Géza Csáth. Opium and Other Stories. trans. J. Kessler & C. Rogers. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980 (1909). [11]
Odd little short stories in a fantastical opium haze. Sort of James Branch Cabell meets Saki in eastern Europe in 1910.
Peter Ho Davies. The Ugliest House in the World. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997. [10]
Chilling short stories about Wales, and Colonies, and British Emergencies.
A.J. Michel, ed. Practice Apartment. Lansdowne, PA: Low Hug Productions, 2005. [9½]
Bits and bobs about doing laundry, shopping for groceries, and cooking. No message, no sustained narrative, just some mini-essays about home economics.
Wendy and Richard Pini. Elfquest Archives: Volume One. New York: CD Comics, 2003 (1978). [9]
Classic fantasy/adventure comic. A bit silly for my taste.
Marcel Bénabou. Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books. trans. D. Kornacker. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996 (1986). [8]
‘Thus, writing that one would like to write is already writing. Writing that one cannot write is still writing. One way as good as another of accomplishing the reversal that is at the origin of so many audacious undertakings: making of the peripheral the center, of the incidental the essential, of the scrap rock the cornerstone’ (105).
Michael Levy. Selecting and Using Classic Cameras. Buffalo, NY: Amherst Media, 2002. [7]
Not quite what I was hoping for; I guess I was expecting more at the Argus level, but this was all about how everyone should use a Leica, or a Hasselblad, or a Rollei – which may be true, but is unreasonable for those with budgetary constraints.
A.M. Homes. The Safety of Objects. New York: Norton, 1990. [6]
Short stories about unhappy relationships, miscommunication, and (pre-)adolescent sex.
Lucy Grealy. As Seen on TV: Provocations. New York: Bloomsbury, 2000. [5]
A collection of essays on appearances, self-perception, suffering, and the media. (Grealy was the author of a ‘New York Times Notable’ memoir, Autobiography of a Face (UK title: In the Mind’s Eye.)
William McDonough & Michael Braungart. Cradle to Cradle. New York: FSG, 2002. [4]
Their main point seems to be that things should be reusable, that things should be designed with their ultimate disposal, decomposition, and reconstitution as other objects in view. That most of what the modern consumer consumes is toxic both at the moment of consumption and beyond. Which is probably true. But what are the alternatives? So I don’t like that my books are off-gassing all sorts of nastiness into the air I breathe? What am I to do? Forget about reading? Hardly. Read only books printed on plastic waterproof paper-substitute? Hardly. These guys bash ‘Reduce, reuse, recycle’ but they offer nothing beyond the main tenant of that creed: think about what you’re buying, think about what you ’re using. Very good. But not something any person should have to shell out money for – especially because it would be inconsistant with the logic of the whole thing. Good thing I borrowed the book from the library.
Robyn Chapman. Matching Jackets. White River, VT: Unpopular Comics, 2006. [3¾]
Short comic about sex and boyfriends. By one of the editors of True Porn.
Andy Runton. Owly: The Way Home & The Bittersweet Summer. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf, 2004. [3½]
‘For all ages…’ (The numbering for this one – 3½ – is a result of the guilt I feel in inflating my numbers of ‘books read’ by including very short things and graphic novels. I figure if it doesn’t take me more than a half hour to read, and if I don’t think about for at least that long after finishing it, then whatever it was that I read can’t really stand on its own in a count. This is discriminatory, but too bad.)
Kevin Sampsell. A Common Pornography. Portland: Future Tense Books, 2002. [3]
‘memoir/art/marginalia’
Harvey Pekar, ed. The Best American Comics 2006. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. [2]
Not sure if these were the ‘best’ comics of 2006, but they were pretty okay. But who’s going to buy ‘The Pretty Okay American Comics of 2006’? Lots of people, I bet – but it’s not something publishers are likely to get behind unless they feel they can market it as whimsical, which defeats the whole purpose.
H.H. Munro (Saki). The Square Egg and Other Sketches with Three Plays. New York: Viking, 1929. [1]
Includes a biographical notice written by his sister, Ethel. More books should include biographical notices written by the author’s sister, Ethel: of course, I also think all authors should have a sister called Ethel, but that’s another story. These are minor works.

(last revised: 19 January 2018)

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