THE FIRST EVER YEAR-LONG SCAVENGER HUNT!

The animal sidekick in question is North’s beloved and, sadly, only just recently departed doggo Noam Chompsky, and if you find yourself asking “Can an author’s real-life pet really count as an ‘animal sidekick’ for the purposes of a scavenger hunt?”, I will rebut:
-1. What are you, a cop, and
-2. At one point in the book, Chompsky appears and has a Socratic dialogue with another speaker about whether water wheels are superior to windmills as a source of steady, renewable energy. The winner gets belly-rubs, and you’ll have to read it to find out.
This book is rad and I recommend it for anyone who, like myself, loves to learn but doesn’t actively read a lot of nonfiction, because it’s laid out very intuitively, the explanations are detailed and chunky enough to leave you satisfied and pulling bits out of your teeth later but not enough to overwhelm or bore (and extensive further reading notes are included), and it is hilarious, in case the bit where the author’s dog–who once stole a live fish out of a fisherman’s bucket and fucking hightailed it for Ottowa–engages in one of the oldest forms of rhetorical education didn’t clue you in. This book taught me that my pinky finger is just about six centimeters long! And also how to make lye, set a broken bone in what seems like the most painful way possible, and eventually build a computer!

There are three instances in which my long practice with words has failed me completely, leaving me only vague but emphatic winking and interpretive karate with which to express myself:
1. My wedding-day, when my vows–carefully written in my head during hundreds of showers across many years–escaped me, and I could only say “OOGA BOOGA BIG, OOGA BOOGA STRONG, IF YOU MARRY ME, LOVE YOU WHOLE LIFE LONG”.
2. When a caller at my job tried to convince me, with complete confidence, that he “carried the germ that causes bacterial vaginosis in women” (not a thing), was “capable of passing it on to them” (even less of a thing), and required a “female UTI test” (somehow the opposite of a thing).
3. Anytime I attempt to express the depths of my love for Dog Man.

This second volume really sets the path for the series by veering away from the unconnected-vignettes format of the first and really giving the story and characters room to move around, resulting in an evil fish, Petey being one of the most genuinely terrifying villains I’ve encountered recently in any medium, and I shit the gentle reader not, a Billy Don’t Be A Hero joke that also manages to settle once and for all the pronunciation of one of the most contentious and delicious offerings found in Mediterranean cuisine.
The series continues to be one of the most wholesome, sincerely hilarious, goodhearted works for any age group I’ve ever read, and manages to play with the ‘graphic novel’ framework in a refreshingly inventive and exploratory way that leaves the reader–me, hi–genuinely unable to figure out whether these are comics or heavily-illustrated novels and at what point that distinction becomes both academic and an impediment to appreciating whatever they hell they actually are, which is AWESOME and honest and belligerently kind. I’ve been buying them not only for me but for the small human children in my life and they’re an instant hit, sinking the reading-hooks deep into their tender young mindmeats and ensuring that they calcify there.

Dog Man is GO.

I’ll be honest, figuring out which category Nona should go under has been the most challenging part of my day by a significant margin, and I think Tamsyn would and could only nod in approval if ever she heard me say that, like Neil deGrasse Tyson when he hears something that’s technically correct in a way that sucks the joy out of it.
Found Family is the absolute simplest way to describe the social configuration in Nona; there is what you could describe as a family unit, comprised of two people who each have two souls (of various genders) and rotate wearing the body (having conversations with each other/themselves via notes and a tape recorder), and a young woman who doesn’t have two souls, but might be two people’s souls somehow.
Anyone who enjoys them will tell you that the Locked Tomb books don’t make any sense until you finish and re-read them (and even then, woof), but that the relationships are so delightful and well-fleshed-out that the actual plot takes a significant backseat, and that remains true with Nona; she loves [CENSORED] and [REDACTED] and Camilla and [FOR THIRD-HOUSE EYES ONLY] so damn much that you can’t help but do likewise, to say NOTHING of her loyal gangmates like Born In The Morning, Noodle, Beautiful Ruby, and Hot Sauce. Nona sees everyone and everything with the eyes of a child (not a metaphor, kinda?) and carefully slots every person in her life into a special and very particular place around her, aggressively nesting and surrounding herself with love, it’s amazing and heartbreaking.

Alright, TVTropes assures me that while “YA” is a relatively recent term and that not everything matches up exactly, I can use “Shonen” as a replacement due to the overlap in the younger and older halves of their respective age-ranges. THOUGH YOU HAD ME THERE, DIDN’T YOU RULES LAWYERS. THOUGHT YOU WRONG. BAHHHH NO THINK-RIGHTER, YOU.

Okay my lawscoffery and joie de vivre and cordon bleu aside, I wanna be serious for a second, because this book is sincerely incredible, it is extremely special and I want to give myself every chance of actually encouraging you to read it. If you want someone you can take more seriously than you can take me, 1. Fuck you, 2. I don’t blame you, 3. Same, and 4. Give this episode of Mangasplaining a listen and hear actual manga-industry insiders and also Chip Zdarsky discuss why they couldn’t get enough of this story of two houses both alike in shop-ownership, spaghetti Napolitan, and bases-ball.

These two kids, Ko and Wakaba? They love two things in this world: baseball, and each other, though admittedly only Wakaba knows that part yet; being eleven-year-olds, Ko hasn’t been able to expand his emotional inventory-screen enough to accommodate both Stickball and Girls. They’re perfect for each other! One’s family runs a small sporting-goods store, the other a batting cages and snackbar, and they even have the same birthday! SURELY, ‘TIS THE FEATHERED FINGER OF FATE. SURELY, NOTHING HORRIFYING WILL HAPPEN THAT WILL CHANGE BOTH OF THEIR LIVES FOREVER.

This is about many things, several of which are baseball, and is simply one of the best things I’ve read in years. The art is subtly realistic and thematically deft while remaining pleasantly cartoonish with adorable character-models, the slow-burn characterization is masterful, and I have never encountered anything else with such a grasp of pacing, of knowing when to let moments breathe and let the world of the story be a character; man, I live for those rainy-day shots. Let me put it this way: I don’t give two hoots in West Heck for baseball, but I’ve read over a thousand pages of this very baseball-centric manga; it’s like how even people who hate gangster movies love The Godfather because it’s an incredible movie about family, a signed confession-note from toxic masculinity and patriarchy, dressed in gangster-movie pants. If you ever take one of my recommen–well, if you ever take thr–if you take five of my reading recommendations, make this one of them. (And bonus, the english release is only available in triple-volumes, so you’ll be getting three for the price of one!)

This has been the talk of the bookosphere since it hit like a light, fluffy muffin-meteor in November, studded with pecans and iridium deposits, and RIGHTLY SO. Not since The Kaiju Preservation Society has a book said so clearly “Hey, come on in and relax for a bit, just enjoy at your own p–oh you’ve already completely devoured half of my pages, neat!”; it is exactly what we needed as the reading public and what I needed as a very tired man who just wanted a nice book where nice things happen to nice people and ohohohoho BOY does the one asshole get what’s coming to them.
Know who Viv is? She’s a big tall burly Orc. Know what she’s sick of? The Adventuring Life, especially what it has to offer her people. Know what she’d rather do? Move to the City and open the first coffee shop the continent has ever seen. AND THEN SHE DOES, with the help of a grumpy Gnommish carpenter whom she befriends, a Succubus barista whom she MIGHT end up smooching, and A SOFT-SPOKEN WEE MOUSEFOLK NAMED THIMBLE whom she hires to bake them delicious, impossible treats because he is a pastry genius. This is a Thimble-appreciation site now. ALL HAIL THIMBLE.
If you’ve been alive more than seventeen seconds, I don’t need to tell you about the relationship humankind has with coffee–the things it represents, the feelings it evokes, the ways it brings people together–and this story shows what it would be like to see those things developing in real-time, and to know the feeling of being a person who abandons a thankless life of conflict and brings that small but profound goodness into the lives of the people who gather under her roof. These were so relatable and engaging that a prequel has already been announced centering on a bookshop, and holy SHIT is that gonna be cozy. Book fuckin’ rules, it’s sweet and comfy as hell with just a dusting of romance, and citizen you ARE gonna want a beverage and maybe a cinnamon roll while you read it.

(A note on the Succubarista: the…tendencies inherent to her heritage are handled in a really interesting, mature, non-gross way; there is nothing gross in this book except the pieces driving the narrative conflict.)

This is not a “true story” in that it didn’t, how you say, “happen”, but it’s a true story in that “shut up”, it “made me cry”.
Set in 1950’s Japan, AJOMF deals with a barber and his family in the waning days of the post-WWII American occupation of Japan–oh, were you not taught about that in school? Me neither!–and how a man struggles to provide for his family, who in turn feel distanced from and ignored by him for it, not in an ungrateful way, but in the way that it’s hard to love and appreciate someone you never see, and as his son grows older throughout the story he has to deal with that and its consequences.
The son–now a grown Tokyo salaryman–returns home for the first time in more than a decade when his father dies, and in handling the funeral learns that his father was much more than the workaholic he remembered, as he is loved and eulogized by people who knew him in the life he had before and after his son.
This was an extremely rough read for me, just because I found it very relatable and guilt-inducing not because it’s a mean book interested in guilting you, but because I am also a bad son whose relationship with his father could be best described as ‘complicated’ unless you’ve got three fucking hours for me to map out my very biased, one-sided perspective on it.