Book shelves series #41, forty-first Sunday of 2012
Lots of lovely books and mags with pictures.
Several years worth of subscription to The Believer, with an unsorted stack setting up front:
I suppose I could write a whole post about The Believer, which I think is an excellent mag but no longer subscribe to, but instead, here’s a cover from Charles Burns:
Charles Burns also shows up in this section, which includes stuff by R. Crumb, Daniel Clowes, Art Spiegelman, and more:
The wife got me a subscription to The Paris Review last year; then, some unsorted books, and then the Nausicaä collection (also courtesy the wife):
Nausicaä spread out on my couch. (My son and I ended up looking through them for an hour):
Biblioklept 
I don’t think I ever saw you review Black Hole. What’s your take on it? How does it compare to X’ed Out?
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Yeeesh . . . I dunno. I’m zapped from a long weekend out of town right now, but —-
Black Hole is aesthetically sublime, but its narrative ultimately fails to deliver (let alone thematically cohere). I’m guessing that we’re 50/50 on ever seeing more to X’ed Out. Still—-I’d rather spend time in Charles Burns’s weird world than pretty much any other cartoonist working today.
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More so than Chris Ware? Interesting.
Speaking of Ware: did they send you a review copy of Building Stories? I’m dying to read that.
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You know what? Burns’s sequel comes out tomorrow. I just requested copies of both books, so, we’ll see.
Yeah, I dunno, I was zapped and not really thinking — Ware and Burns are so different that it’s not really either/or. I’d say Ware’s a better novelist, but his work can be especially taxing. Burns’s visions are so strange and surreal that they tend to resonate more with my own taste. Both are excellent. I’d put both above, say, Tomine, who’s represented in one of the shots above. He’s a competent illustrator but his stories do nothing for me. I like Clowes very much. I dunno.
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