I love books about books. You know the ones I mean—The Western Canon, Books of the Century—those indispensable tools for bluffing my way through dinner conversations with other English majors who paid more attention and probably more money during their education than I did.

These metabooks are so authoritative, so full of imperatives: Here are the greatest novels ever written! The poems you must read before you die! The short stories that changed life for every person on the planet! If these PhD holding gentlemen—they are almost always gentlemen—are to be believed, it’s unlikely that any of the world’s civilizations would have endured without Hamlet.

1001 Books for Every Mood blows a big raspberry in the face of every other book-on-books I’ve encountered. Author Hallie Ephron has taken the unusual approach of assuming that rather than being told what to read her audience might appreciate a bit of choice in the matter. And, furthermore, sometimes her audience likes reading crap.

Ephron’s is a goofy guide to one woman’s egalitarian library, where The Da Vinci Code is just as valid a selection as Lolita. The pages are smattered, too, with occasional “quizzes” to match fictional lovers or literary siblings. From its cerise color scheme to its convoluted symbol system, the whole endeavor is a bit of a mess, albeit a well-meaning one.

Still, some of Ephron’s choices and selections leave more than a bit to be desired. One thousand and one titles was not enough space to acknowledge works by Dostoyevsky, Edith Wharton or—ouch—Shakespeare. I don’t know quite what to make of Oscar Wilde’s exclusion, especially in light of a “Revel in Wit” section. (Mark Twain isn’t in that one, either.)

For those who want to rub salt in these wounds, know that Paul Coelho gets three out of four stars for literary merit, the same as Kafka and Orwell. Poor Henry James, who only gets two, could apparently could learn a few things from Dave Eggers’ “virtuoso performance” in A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

With that kind of table talk, no English major will have the appetite for a meal. 

—Monica Shores

From the well-traversed urban centers of Venice and Rome to out of the way and rarely visited vineyards producing incredibly robust wines in the northwest Le Langhe region, every reader will come away with a new destination atop their travel list.

As with Unexpected France, the reader is quickly drawn into this fascinating collection of articles from Travel + Leisure magazine. Useful maps, suggestions for lodging, dining, and occasionally, reading material (such as poetry from a famous writer native to the Le Marche region on the northeast coast, or world-class literature inspired by visits to Naples) accompany each section. The focus of each traveling journalist is different, from experiences centering around a single city to the wearying journey around an entire region in search of the boldest Borolo.

Michael Gross describes his quest to find an island getaway more satisfying than touristy Capri, and encounters the Madonna sott’acqua off Lampedusa, an island so far south as to be nearly in Africa. He writers, “We dive down to the ghostly yet benevolent Virgin, who is gazing up from her silent blue sanctuary.” The statue is set in a stone arch nearly fifty feet below the surface of the water.

A journey through “hidden Rome” reveals more than any vegetarian (and possibly most carnivores) would ever want to know about the old slaughterhouse district of the city. True epicureans will revel in the descriptions of various traditional and modern recipes for the “fifth quarter” of certain farm animals.

I noted with curiosity that the entire “Places to Stay” section was contributed by the same Christopher Petkanas, but quickly became enamored of his quick-witted observations and inclusion of unusual elements, not to mention his willingness to be rather critical of service if warranted. Observing historical villas with an artist’s eye, both flaws and impeccable details are pointed out.

And for those wishing to truly commune with great art, a section on Florence details how it is possible not just to observe, but to sign up for amateur figure sketching classes and draw (so to speak) on the inspiration of centuries of painters. The hands on style of this entire book helps it stand out from the normal rank and file of travel guides. Turning a mundane trip into the experience of a lifetime just got a bit easier for those not totally comfortable with venturing into totally undocumented territory, yet wanting to avoid the well-worn pathways of major cultural centers.

With such a promising start to this series of books in Unexpected France and Italy, the first ever compiled and released by the magazine, I definitely hope to see more of these country-specific collections of inspirational articles and stunning photographs. 

—Lara Killian

Maybe it’s true that Canadians are just simply nicer. While American graphic novels of late have been concerning themselves with abject self hatred (Adrian Tomine), vampire slackers (Jessica Abel), and the like, Michel Rabagliati just goes on creating work that’s just as inherently decent as ever. In Paul Goes Fishing, his third graphic novel—Paul Moves Out and Paul Gets a Summer Job being the previous installments—Rabagliati continues his penchant for crafting delicately hued graphic autobiographies that are just as winning as any of the grimmer and self-lacerating work being produced in the lower 48 states, but often just as psychologically astute. Nice doesn’t have to mean clueless.

A Montreal-based illustrator and family man with practically no experience in the outdoors, Rabagliati spends the first part of his newest volume learning how to go fishing, of course. Using the structure of a summer vacation at a lakeside cabin with some friends, Rabagliati spins off from that basic conceit to explore his relationship with his father, his childhood (sparked by his re-reading in the cabin of Catcher in the Rye, a favorite from his moody youth), and the painful process he and his wife endure in a series of difficult pregnancies. He also finds the time to provide a short history of the graphic arts industry’s transition from hand-work to personal computers that beautifully skewers the designers’ cult of the Macintosh (“between 1987 and 1995, I handed over more than $40,000 to Apple & Co. for equipment that was practically obsolete before I’d even unpacked it.”)

Through all this, Rabagliati keeps a basically upbeat mood, with his freshly energetic black-and-white illustrations and cast of characters who are pretty much always (with a few obvious exceptions) smiling. Rabagliati’s approach verges on Archie comics simplicity at times (when characters cry, it’s actually rendered as “boo hoo”), but it somehow never seems fake, and that’s the beauty of this book. For all their troubles and occasional emotional outbursts, Rabagliati’s cast seems a supremely decent and nice group who anybody would consider themselves lucky to know. To create that kind of world, and to do it in a way that is far from insulting to one’s intelligence, takes a rare kind of talent, something that Rabagliati has in spades. Must be the Canadian in him.

You can view a preview (in .pdf form) of Paul Goes Fishing over at Drawn & Quarterly’s website here.

—Chris Barsanti

Let’s get the obligatory mention of the duct tape corset out of the way straight off.

With the small sacrifice of an old tee and possibly the help of a close friend you can craft your own perfectly fitted and ‘slightly sinister’ corset. Besides this project, there are several other excellent features in Anticraft: Knitting, Beading and Stitching for the Slightly Sinister. The photography is sensational, even when the showcased project isn’t overly exciting. Black and white backgrounds provide a fabulous contrast to colorful (think ebony, blood red, and “ichor green") projects frequently adorned with skull motifs. The settings are invariably dungeon-inspired hangouts with antiqued decorations. Just flipping through and looking at the great pictures might keep you from noticing that a simple skull-accented hat is edged with faux FunFur. Which I didn’t realize came in black. I can’t actually picture this one on any self-respecting goth-chick, but the appeal of The Anticraft is not limited to those with yarn stashes exclusively containing various shades of black and red. All the better for the book sales, really.

A couple of favorite patterns of mine include ‘The Whilameenas,’ a crocheted two-headed rat, and ‘Three Owls,’ a mini-parliament of felted and embroidered feathered friends. There are many goth-leaning crafters out there (witness the success of The Anticraft website, now on issue number nine), and each of them can find something fascinating among the collection’s 25 projects.

The extra material in the book is a big plus. One feature is the ‘mood enhancer’ paragraph the accompanies each project, in the usual manner of listing materials and tools needed to complete it. Here the authors recommend music, movies, or books to match the mood of the project. Themed recipes and comic strips featuring the authors are also great touches. And the whole book is illustrated like an art project, with vine-like doodles, Victorian-style wood-block prints, and explanations of pagan symbols. At the back there is the customary crafting techniques section, although this one contains illustrated instructions on creating your own chain mail. On the whole, the book is a pleasure to flip through, but most of the projects are either too intricate or too impractical to really bother making.

The point is more about the inspiration and finding a place in the community of Anticrafters.

—Lara Killian

While 2007 was a busy year for new graphic novelists and cartoon artists of all kinds, particularly now that they’re getting some long overdue respect, one of the real treats for the genre came late in the year when W.W. Norton (in their infinite wisdom) re-released a pleasingly hefty pile of books by the late, great Will Eisner. As in father of the graphic novel, as in the churning vortex of industrious creativity during the bastard art form’s early formative years, as in mentor and inspiration to a generation of artists from Michael Chabon to Frank Miller, as in the reason that the greatest creative award in graphic novels and comics is named the Eisner Award. Yes, that Will Eisner.

Norton secured the rights to the Eisner back in 2004 (he passed away in 2005) and have been steadily releasing nicely presented trade paperback and hardcover editions since then. The trilogy that made up A Contract with God came out in 2005, while a quarter of Gotham-centric titles were bundled into the hefty Will Eisner’s New York a year later. Those four titles—City People Notebook, New York the Big City, Invisible People, and The Building; all originally published between the early-1980s and early-1990s—were then released last December as individual paperbacks.

As groundbreaking as Eisner was in pushing the idea that comics could be not just serious but also art, in a sense, there remains an overwhelming sense of the past around his work, even the material drawn only a couple decades ago. The rubbery-faced goons who galumph through these books, all exaggerated features and shabby clothes, seem at first like caricatures out of some Depression-era vaudeville. Eisner’s faces are rarely just there, instead registering Dickensian pathos or Broadway musical-style joy, without a lot of shading in between. The style is right out there and populist in the great early-to-mid 20th century style, located visually somewhere between Mad and Playboy. These stories of love and loss in the great big city of New York range from the two-page character vignettes of New York the Big City (all true then as they are now and fifty years hence) to the fairy-tale tragedy of The Building, many of them moral fables anchored around a particularly concrete piece of real estate, whether it’s a subway grate or office building.

Being the fantasist at heart, these books seem almost a truer expression of Eisner’s heart than the three weighty “autobiographical stories” bundled together in Life in Pictures (also released late in 2007 and reviewed in full by PopMatters‘ Erik Hinton here). Although the trilogy—To the Heart of the Storm, The Name of the Game, and The Dreamer—contain a number of sharply drawn portraits that limn the corners of the Jewish-American experience, whether in high society or a comics sweatshop, they seem more forced and less organic than the self-contained fables of the New York novels. Some things just beg to be made up.

—Chris Barsanti

As 2007 was coming to a close, time, and the allocation thereof, took a runner, and left many of us in the critical appraisal business with too much to opine upon and a shortage of waking hours in which to do so. The problem was, that once you make your existence and potential usefulness known to publishers, they don’t exactly take holidays. In other words, whether or not time existed in which to appraise them, the books just kept coming in. They piled up on the desk, in dark corners, dust beginning to gather on their perky press releases, and waited in passive aggressive accusation to have their pages turned.  Eventually, in between the usual year-end wrapping-up and holiday commitments, they are dragged out and opened up—particularly the graphic novels because, let’s face it, they’re shorter and the covers are always better.

Herewith, a miscellany of opinion on some items that came across the transom over the past couple months.

Super Spy by Matt Kindt (Top Shelf)

The setting is never quite clear but it seems to be your basic World War II-era Europe, all long shadows, nice suits, trains, and fedoras. But in Matt Kindt’s odd, haunting novel, the details are merely backdrop to a more existential tale about the moral blankness and enervating suspicion that must form the life of the spy. In taut, sepia-toned panels, we follow spy after spy as they struggle through Byzantine codes and indecipherable instructions, parsing enemy from lover, and more often than not meet death, bleakly and pointlessly. Kindt’s book appreciates the romantic trappings of fictional espionage, but undercuts it at every possible opportunity with cynical humor and an understanding of the tragedy of lives wasted in the shadows.

Shortcomings by Adrian Tomine (Drawn & Quarterly)

This slim little volume of racial and sexual self-loathing has already been roundly and rightly praised elsewhere, but let’s give it another pat on the back. Tomine is a queasy chronicler of the bad relationship, as he so acutely showed in 2003’s Summer Blonde, but he outdoes himself here in a scenario about a Japanese-American slacker in his late-twenties who’s doing his level best to suffocate any chance at success (particularly romantic) in his life. Like Chasing Amy without the groin jokes.

Sentences: The Life of M.F. Grimm by Percy Carey (Vertigo)

Given the deep love given comics by so many rappers, it’s a strange oversight how so few graphic novels even come close to depicting their world. Sentences is a half-successful attempt to try and make up that disparity, and in the meantime try to also add an entry to another woefully underused graphic genre: the memoir. It’s the life story of Percy Carey, aka M.F. Grimm, who grew up on the Upper West Side back when it still had some grit, and later got into rapping at the same time that he was also hustling, ending up in a wheelchair for his troubles. Though Ronald Wimberly’s manga-inspired art has a welcome edge to it (recalling a reality-based The Boondocks at times), and Carey’s voice is refreshingly straight-ahead and no-excuses, the overall effect is somewhat less than exciting.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Black Dossier by Alan Moore (DC Comics)

In the League books, Alan Moore has pretty much had a grand old time pressing into service his frightening knowledge of literature for a cracking good series of superhero adventures that thrill as much as they make you want to stock up on Penguin Classics. This newest mini-classic—in which the League enters the postwar era in somewhat ragged fashion after the police state of Orwell’s 1984 goes on the wane— is as rollicking a ride as any. Moore’s imagination works overtime on spot-on literary pastiches (everyone from Evelyn Waugh to H.P. Lovecraft, Virginia Woolf and Victorian-era erotica) that are interleaved in between story episodes containing the expected lashings of fights, escapes, and skullduggery. Too clever by far, but by the time James Bond shows up (as the villain) and you’re using the helpfully included 3-D glasses, it hardly matters.

—Chris Barsanti