For the first two weeks of April, my local library holds a "Friends of the Library" sale. This is a huge flea market/ thrift store-type sale in an old store (it's actually the former library of my library branch) where they sell books, records, games, and moveis that people have donated throughout the previous years. …
Category: books
Our Artists At War
It's #WarComicsMonth and I have a stack of books that I've been saving since last year that I'll be working my way through and hopefully remembering to review on this site (you know how these things go). They are from various eras and ages of comics as well as companies, ranging from Sgt. Fury and …
Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression
About a year and a half ago, I read Studs Terkel's Working, which was an "oral history" of occupations in the mid-1970s. I reviewed it in this post, and if you read that, you'll get a sense of how I came to know Terkel's work. Working is kind of a snapshot of a time as …
Continue reading Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression
JLA: Riddle of the Beast
Elseworlds books were fascinating to me when they first appeared in the early 1990s, and while I didn't get all of them (mostly because the $4.95 price tag was a bit too much at the time), I got my hands on a fair share, especially a number of the Batman ones (of which there were …
If I Disappear
I'm not a huge mystery novel reader. Now, I have nothing against the genre and enjoy it when I do read it, it's just not my go-to. But last year, I was bumming around my local Barnes & Noble and saw the rather striking cover to Eliza Jane Brazier's novel about a woman who goes …
The Week in Uncollecting, 11/1/21-11/14/21
This is really a multi-week update because I've been "compiling" reviews in my notebook for a few weeks now. Plus, my most recent "weeks in ..." have been horror-themed and war-themed multi-review posts instead of one of my usual ones, so this is making up for that. Despite this piling up, there's not too much …
Books, Trades, and Graphic Novels in Brief, 9/1/21-10/1/21
Aliens: Hive: One of the original Dark Horse series that came out after Earth War, which was the final one I bought. I probably had every intention of keeping Aliens going but didn't have the money, to be honest, because Dark Horse's comics were $2.50 in the early 1990s. Anyway, this was enjoyable but I …
Continue reading Books, Trades, and Graphic Novels in Brief, 9/1/21-10/1/21
Working
I suppose there is something appropriate about my finishing Studs Terkel's Working on the last day of the school year when I usually spend my day getting ready to not work for an eight-week stretch. Of course, this could be total coincidence and the bigger factor in my finishing the book is that it's due …
Personal Archaeology 15: The Book of Questions
By the time I was old enough to register who my great Aunt Frances was, she was an "old Italian woman" the way that many of my fellow "Italian-by-way-of-Brooklyn" connazionales would recognize from their own families. Short, bearing and incredible resemblance to both her sister Mimi and my grandfather John, Aunt Frances lived int he …
Continue reading Personal Archaeology 15: The Book of Questions
The Essential X-Men Vol. 3 and Vol. 4
With John Byrne off the title after the "Days of Future Past" storyline, Chris Claremont begins what will be a long continuous run of writing the X-Men with a rotating lineup of artists with these two volumes featuring the return of Dave Cockrum as well as Paul Smith's short tenure as artist and the first …
The Uncollecting 