Well, that's a whole year of doing this. It wasn't a New Year's resolution, just an impulse I had at the end of January after realizing I'd chonked through a lot of my Christmas stack. Still it feels cool to have stuck with it for a year. I'll probably keep doing it.
The Goon Library vol. 3 by Eric Powell - Halfway through the Library collection here. A lot of tension wound up in the first two volumes starts to release here, to the general misery of all involved. It's a story of greed and loss and pining, which isn't something I'm usually into, but it's so expertly constructed here that it's worth it.
I do have to call out that there's no favorable reading you can give to the encounter with the monstrous "tranny", though. Also when the characters are handed over to other artists/writers for filler content they're never nearly as strong - without the grounding of the City and Lonely Street, the "lol random baboons with razor boomerangs" just falls flat.
Powell can present some serious monsters though, both in behavior and appearance. Even with my huge Christmas stack of books, I'll probably read vol. 4 in January.
Bob the Angry Flower by Stephen Notley - I've been reading this strip online since college, and it recently celebrated its 30 anniversary, so I decided to pick up some print copies. Actually I decided to pick up one, but it's print on demand and flat shipping, so... I got four: "Pamplemousse", "X", "How to Operate a Chair", and "The Unthinkable".
Even the old ones still hold up. I have to admit I didn't read every annotation, but the ones I did were interesting additions and helped ground the comics in the time they were written. Which, we're revisiting the rogues' gallery of Bush II here a lot.
Two church community cookbooks - Specifically "St. Mary's Wrentham 75th Anniversary" and "Tasty Trinity Tidbits Wrentham, MA". I have stacks of these things, and two more got added at Christmas. I enjoy the similarities they all seem to share (you're always going to get at least one recipe for Impossible Cheeseburger Pie straight off the Bisquick box) while hunting for the one "wait, what" each one almost always has. In the former books' case, that was a curried banana desert, and in the latter, a reuben casserole which honestly sounds amazing.
Sometimes you get old-school diet recipes, too, which are always... intriguing. Finding penned-in stars or stained pages are hints the recipes there are worth trying. Always buy the most damaged second-hand cookbooks possible, I say. Throw in some outsider art and some folksy "recipe for a happy marriage" nonsense and what's a better way to blow 20 minutes and 25 cents.
The Life and Adventures of Santa Claus by L. Frank Baum - This is such a weird book. I've read it before but every time I'm struck by how bizarre it is, and that, given its age and the fame of its author, basically none of the entire Santa mythology it created has made it into the modern Christmas zeitgeist. I got enough of a bee in my bonnet about how weird it was that I had to write up a little RPG bestiary for the Awgwas, Knooks, Goozle-Goblins, and what-have-you.
I watched the 1985 Rankin & Bass animated special of this last year. Somehow that manages to be even weirder than the source material. There's apparently also an animated one from 2000 I haven't touched yet - maybe next year.
Hogfather by Terry Pratchett - Not sure how many years I've read this for Christmas now, or how many copies I've given away. Ten maybe? This is such a fantastic book on so many levels, and something I look forward to as part of the holiday season now. Every year I think I find a new joke (this year it was "All cisterns go!"), but the old ones still slide in there skillfully. Mr. Teatime is one of the few fictional characters I'm genuinely afraid of. The way all the incredibly disparate threads are woven together by the end is a mastercraft of storytelling. We'll see how long I manage to hold onto this copy, which I finished on Christmas Day this year, in the twilight glow of the tree.
