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 …
Category: books
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 …
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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 …
Robotech Archives: Robotech II: The Sentinels, Volume One
I was excited and nervous about reading this, to be honest. I'd read through all three of the reprints of the Comico Macross series and knew what to expect, but this book reprints the first portion of the Eternity Comics sequel series, of which I've heard mixed things. My experience with The Sentinels as a …
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Essential X-Men Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, Phoenix: The Untold Story, What If …? (Vol. 1) #27
I guess the most obvious thing to say is that the Chris Claremont/John Byrne run is probably the most celebrated run on Uncanny X-Men. Not that there aren't others that are held up in high esteem by readers who are more more experienced X-fans than myself, but the run that encompasses both the Dark Phoenix …
DC Graphic Novel #1: Star Raiders
Graphic novels are ubiquitous these days but back in the early 1980s were a fairly new concept, and something you could only get at one of the few comic book stores that had begun popping up as the direct market began to take hold. Later in the decade and the early 1990s, stores like Waldenbooks …
Shrill
For episode 10 of Required Reading, Stella and I covered biography, autobiography, and memoir as a genre. Had I read Lindy West's Shrill back then, I would have heartily recommended it on that episode. If you're not familiar with Lindy West, she is a writer who was a longtime columnist for Jezebel and currently contributes …
Thor by Walt Simonson vols 1 and 2
About a year ago, Amazon was having one of those massive Kindle graphic novel sales that was all Marvel books (it may have been because Infinity War was coming out) and I think I bought what had to be a couple of hundred dollars' worth of digital trade paperbacks for $.99-$2.99. Among them were the …
Breaking Rules on and Reaping the Benefits of FCBD 2019
Free Comic Book Day was last Saturday. I've gone just about every year for the past six or seven years, and I have the same M.O. every year. I go in completely blind to what is available (i.e., I don't look at the solicits in Previews) and plan on dropping at least a little money …
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The Worst Team Money Could Buy
I am a long-suffering New York Mets fan who is part of a specific generation where the "suffering" part of that compound adjective took a while to come along. I began following the team in the 1985 season and was nine years old when they won their second (and to date last) World Series in …
