Incoming Books: August 14

Yeah, it's been another bad week for blogging, and I won't bother to give a specious excuse. But I did run over to the library on Tuesday to pick up some books I'd inter-library-loaned, and found two paperbacks (at a quarter each!) from the library sale while I was there.

And, since lists of books seems to be the only content I can consistently post here, I'll present those books, starting with the cheapies I get to keep:

The Leftovers, the 2011 novel by Tom Perrotta, in a fancy bound-galley form. I've read all of Perrotta's previous books -- and reviewed The Abstinence Teacher, in a style that seems overly laudatory to me now -- and enjoyed them, partially because he's a good writer and partially because he's of an age and geographic persuasion to push an awful lot of my buttons.

Adam Gopnik's Paris to the Moon, his bestselling and hugely popular memoir of moving to France to write about it for an American audience. I avoid bestselling books somewhat reflexively, from working in the business so long, and I am hugely jealous of people who get to do things like this. Buy, hey, it was a quarter, and it's supposed to be really good.

Fodor's Disneyland & Southern California with Kids, 10th Edition is by Michael and Trisa Knight, and there are no points awarded for guessing why I'm reading it. (Though my guys -- who will be 14-and-a-half and just shy of 12 during that trip -- are probably not well described as "kids" these days.)

My Friend Dahmer by Derf Backderf. Derf has been an alt-weekly cartoonist for some time -- from back when that was a reasonable career for an adult, since there were plenty of alt-weeklies and they all carried a bunch of cartoonists -- and this is an expansion/reworking of autobiographical material that he originally published more than a decade ago. And, yes, Derf did go to high school with, and was in the same circles with, Jeffrey Dahmer. (I reviewed Derf's last book, Punk Rock and Trailer Parks, in a round-up during my Eisner deathmarch a few years back.)

Freeway is a big fat graphic novel by Mark Kalesniko, whom I don't know. But it's semi-autobiographical, was published by Fantagraphics (who ain't no dummies), and looks interesting.

David Malki!'s Dapper Caps & Pedal-Copters is the third collection of his Victorian clip-art webcomic Wondermark, which I've been reading and enjoying since I discovered the first collection during that same Eisner push I mentioned a couple of paragraphs back.

And last is Dante's Divine Comedy, as adapted into comics by Seymour Chwast. I reviewed Chwast's second classic-work-into-comics item, The Canterbury Tales, a couple of months ago, and I clearly liked it well enough to go back for another dose.