Not to be missed.
A must read.

On the comics front, I'm working my way through Marvel Visionaries: Jack Kirby Vol. 2.

I also vaguely remember a Matlock episode with sisters who killed their guardian just to try to commit the perfect crime (didn't work). Ah, eight-year-old me loved Matlock!

I'm reading Michael Pollan's The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is a nice look at the current foodscape. I saw him on C-SPAN lecturing after In Defense of Food came out and thought his work would be interesting--it very much is!

Beverly Daniel Tatum's Why are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? is a book from which I previously read selections for a course on Social Inequality. It's a good look at racial identity from a psychological perspective, with an emphasis on formative years.

I picked up an anthology of articles published by the US Holocaust Museum that's proving enlightening, saddening, and infuriating: well worth it.

On the comics front, I just finished Art Spiegelman's Breakdowns, featuring a lot of stuff I'd heard of but never read. After reading it, I definitely see what all the hype is about! I was initially put off by the price, but it's worth every penny. It's only 72 pages, but they're big, content-packed pages that I'm planning on reading again and again.

I also tracked down Cement Shooz and The Tick: Karma Tornado, both written and drawn by Christopher McCulloch, AKA Jackson Publick of The Venture Bros. fame. Based on the first three pages of one issue, it looks like I'm heading for an unpolished but fun early work.

But right now I'm slowly but surely working my way through Kavalier & Clay. I'm determined to actually finish it this time!

Of course, reading that one set me off on a real true-crime binge (something like 10 books in 2 weeks) that I'm only now climbing out of. With any luck, you can avoid that. Not that there's anything wrong with true-crime binges, I'm sure, but the perspective one gains on humanity in general is ... not edifying (even less so than that gained from regular perusal of comics boards & such, if you can imagine that).

In the meantime, I just got a copy of the mammoth (784 pp) OUTBREAK! THE ENCYCLOPEDIA OF EXTRAORDINARY SOCIAL BEHAVIOR, by Hilary Evans & Robert E. Bartholomew, & I'll probably be dipping into that for the rest of the summer. Wait -- 784 pages. Make that "... for the rest of my life." And when I leave for lunch in a couple of minutes, I'll have with me a newly acquired copy of John Merriman's THE DYNAMITE CLUB ("How a Bombing in Fin-de-Siecle Paris Ignited the Age of Modern Terror"). Late-1800s propaganda by the deed is a subject near & dear to my historian's heart, for some reason.

Comics-wise, I finally got a copy (in the same order as OUTBREAK!) of LOST AT SEA & liked it a lot. I gather it has approximately nothing in common with O'Malley's Scott Pilgrim stuff, which I've never read. (I'm sure I'll try at least the first volume at some point, but everything I've heard about it makes me less than confident that I'll find it at all likable. Something tells me he's made lots more dough off the Pilgrim books than LOST AT SEA, which is probably unfortunate, but he sure as heck can't be blamed for going where the reward is, if indeed any sort of creative decision-making was involved.)

And I read the latest RUNAWAYS digest (vol. 8 -- Joss Whedon's time-travel arc) as well. I think this is the only series I trade-wait (actually, I digest-wait ... the trade per se has been out for a year or so, I guess) on, for whatever reasons. In any event, I know a lot of fans of the series think it made for a real falling off from Brian K. Vaughn's preceding issues, but ... I dunno. I liked it just fine. (I know a lot of fans are also saying the same about Terry Moore's issues these days, but something tells me I'll like them just fine, too, when digest-time rolls around. It's possible, of course, that I have no taste.)

Comics is mostly the most recent Essential Spider-Man and probably this week's latest Essential Dr. Strange if I can find the money for it. We're on a bit on an austerity campaign around here with Julie not working so my rule is the books/comics budget is derived strictly from the comics-writing income. Oddly enough, this is really pretty do-able now that the pull list got trimmed back. I'm becoming one of those awful wait-for-the-trade-used-on-Amazon guys that are killing comics, but now that we're up to four bucks a whack that's really our only option here. I find I'm okay with not catching up to the big Marvel events till a year or so after they appear in hardcover.