Books, books, books

I am so not doing a good job of cutting down on the number of books I’ve got sitting around.

I didn’t feel like jumping right into Foucault’s Pendulum right after The Name of the Rose, so I picked up akawil’s copy of Iron Council. I’ve got a general rule against reading books in hardcover now, but I’ll make an exception for China Miéville if the book’s not too massive. Besides, it seems to have been partly inspired by the Paris Commune, and after my Steamboy complaint, how can I resist? I’m just one chapter in so far (my commute isn’t very long), and dude! He’s got a race of hedgehog people who ride around on giant war roosters! China comes up with the very best critters.

Comics were pretty meagre (first issue of the Zatanna miniseries that’s part of Grant Morrison’s Seven Soliders megaseries or whatever the heck it’s called — look, skip the Shinking Knight and the issue #0, but get the Zatanna ones and the The Guardian) and the 24-Hour Comics All-Stars book reprinting an early batch of 24-hour comics by Scott McCloud, Dave Sim, and other luminaries of the field. The Sim piece brings back memories of his early days, before he had Gerhard cross-hatching the heck out of all his panels and he felt compelled to use every square millimeter of page.

Then I stopped off at Barnes & Noble to see about a copy of Jack Lindsay’s translation of Apuleius’s The Golden Ass, which I didn’t see, but I got distracted by their new line of “Essential Reading” books (cheap public domain books, though not as cheap as their classics line), and bought copies of GK Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday (which I’ve been meaning to read forever) and Zane Grey’s Riders of the Purple Sage, which ought to make great background reading for Dogs in the Vineyard. And I had to hold myself back from getting another two or three books I’d been poking at online.