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!

I know I say this kind of thing all the time, but Old Head really is a tale as old as the hills: a man travels to his mother’s home in Maine to settle her estate following her death, and learns that she had serious beef with her neighbor in the mysterious nearby castle. He heads over to introduce himself and hopefully settle this unfinished business, only to find that the castle is occupied by a bunch of sleazy pick-up artist types who, as if you hadn’t guessed yet, say they’ve come here to learn from the greatest, most legendary pick-up artist of them all: Dracula. (DRACULA IS EASTERN EUROPE, IT COUNTS)

Kyle Starks is one of the most genuinely berserk, 100% original, absolutely true-to-self creators I’ve ever encountered, and this story of legacy and closure, basketball-to-the-death and a man named “Li’l Menopause” is one of the most completely bonkers things I’ve ever read; I cannot recommend it enough for anyone who has unresolved issues with their parents or is intrigued by a situation where the stakes are “woodchipper”.

Wyatt Kennedy’s comics premier is simply astonishing: he combines the universally relatable themes of identity and the path not taken, proves that a story can have an entirely and belligerently LGBTQ+ cast without making it unrelatable to the squares (duh), and manages to straight up, shamelessly steal half of the visual language of Neon Genesis Evangelion and make it all completely his own; it is just one of the wildest, most ambitious, most heartfelt stories about love and loss and self and smoochin’ and also a magic cat that you’ll ever read.
If you could jump timelines–make so many quantum leaps, if you like–and live the lives where you took all the chances and made all the choices and chased all the Ones That Got Away, how many do you think it would take to find one that made you happy? Or would those fail to bring you any closure or satisfaction because you hadn’t built them yourself? Also, magic or not, cats don’t have thumbs, how does he handle that key to the doors between worlds? And what is that darkness creeping from the edges of your vision that seems to be closer every time you see it? You’ll have to read to find out!

I THINK WE CAN ALL AGREE: ACTUAL MERLIN™️ COUNTS AS A ‘MERLIN CHARACTER’. This Merlin, however, is not the stern-but-fair Yen Sid or the dotty proto-scientist archetype; this Merlin is a dark prophet of the wilderness, stained with blood and woad, the kind that appears in Simon R. Green’s Nightside books, described as having been born to be the antichrist but ‘declined the honor’.

Once & Future is an extremely English book, in that it’s written by an Englishman, is largely about what it means to be and what counts as ‘English’, and is almost entirely for English majors. If you wanna read a whole bunch about the Gauls and the Saxons and the Normans, and the various Lancelots and Grail legends, and then Grendel shows up and eats the main characters from Hot Fuzz and also an entire retirement home, this is the book for you, citizen.

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.

You can see my full review of this volume for more detailed thoughts! Also, I’m very glad I quit doing these because fuck these books and the guy who wrote them!

But credit where it’s due: Goldilocks (spoiler) is actually a really complex, effective villain whose villainy is completely separate from her being a woman, which distinction I wouldn’t have imagined Willingman was capable of making. Admittedly, he doesn’t make the points with her that he thinks he does, but still.

Like Ryan’s How To Invent Everything above, this is a practical, layman-level scientific text within a fictional framing device, in this case that the world is a mess and you just need to rule it already, and how you would go about doing that; it covers everything from starting your own country to building underground bunkers to sea-borne self-sustaining flotillæ, building superweapopns, ensuring your own immortality (for various definitions of the term), creating your own custom computer viruses, AND YES, even time travel, about which there is a surprising amount of real science.
In terms of enjoyment and reading experience this was a step down for me from How To Invent Everything, not due to any flaw in Ryan’s writing or the quality of the science, but because of the inherently sinister uses to which the science is being put; there’s a lot of faffing around about how citizens would be better off under your rule, etc., but at the end of the day practical villainy as a perspective is just less interested in discovery and creation than it is in control and destruction, and that’s just less fun to read about in the context of “you could do this in the real human world we live in”. Still a great read and I still learned a lot; I particularly enjoyed the section about the Biosphere experiments and what the day-to-day practicalities of that fascinating nightmare adventure was like. (Spoiler: turns out people in isolation get weird and cliquey fast (HAHA WHO WOULD HAVE GUESSED), and several members of the team went the entire year-long experiment without speaking to each other and still haven’t.)

It is a crime that this is the final volume, which ends on a cliffhanger. The studio has to rush to fix a catastrophic error in the final cut of the film they struggled and bled to make, and the director has to make a tremendous sacrifice to pull it off; and after all that, their oldest enemy appears, bearing an offer that our heroine would be a fool to decline…

But as I mentioned, we’ll never know if she accepts or not, because the series was somehow canceled after this volume. It’s a bummer! I enjoyed learning about how an animation studio works and seeing passionate (if fictional) people working together to make the thing they love.

Listen, there’s only so much I’m going to be able to meaningfully convey about the third 1,200-page book in a series to someone who hasn’t read the other two and/or the interstitial novella¹ that takes place between Book 2 and this one. I don’t know that I could even really explain why the thing Jasnah Kholin is holding on the cover is a sword²; all I can tell you is that this is the book where The Stormlight Archive stops being just High Fantasy bullshit and starts getting weird; you’ve got your eldritch abominations, you’ve got people exploring a haunted house the size of a city that might be a giant computer and also a prison for said abominations, you’ve got people back from the dead and people going to the dead and one girl with more damn personalities than you can shake a stick at³, and I recommend all of it.

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.

Just a nice comic about two kids who CAN’T DANG SLEEP and are also kind of socially awkward, although I imagine the insomnia can’t help with that; it doesn’t help with much, in my experience. Anyway, they realize that somehow, being together makes it easier for them to be sleepy li’l guys, and they reestablish their school’s derelict astronomy club for the explicit purpose of takin’ hella naps in its disused observatory. I’m sure it’ll catch a case of Plot at some point, but if you’re in the mood for a nice little slice-of-life comic with low-to-no stakes and a couple of weirdos sleeping in refrigerator boxes, you could do a LOT worse.

Readers: I must confess that I have never, as a growed-big-style, read A Tale of Two Cities, and I somehow doubt that the Great Illustrated Classics adaptation managed to capture the nuance and historical and sociopolitical commentary. (No shade, I loved those books, I read that Journey to the Center of the Earth more than thirty times, but they were 200 pages max and fully half of those were the titular illustrations) All of which to say, I trust that this volume is a whole-plot reference to the source text, because Dav Pilkey is terrifyingly intelligent and good at what he does, but fortunately for us all he also has a heart like a shining beacon of compassion and grace, here expressed in the introduction of who I sincerely believe is one of the most important literary characters of the new millennium: Petey’s clone/son, Li’l Petey.

The first few Dog Man books are, and I say this with no disrespect, re-treads of the Captain Underpants formula but in Dog Man-shaped pants; extremely smart and funny, but also essentially long strings of gags with plenty of fart jokes. But this is where the series starts finding both its voice and its central mission: to tell absolutely fearless stories about pain, mercy, and the redemptive power of love, carried like a star in a bottle by Li’l Petey.

A lot of this book is very sad, and Petey treats Li’l Petey very poorly, emphasizing that he is not his son, he is a clone, and the utter brutality and self-hatred of a man/cat inflicting every possible cruelty upon his younger self is crystal clear. Petey becomes a fantastic dad in the later books, even dealing with the trauma (with help from LP) that his dad inflicted on him, and this is the beginning of all of it.

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!)

I’m relatively new to non-fantastical crime-style fictions, but am swiftly coming to appreciate that while witches, draculas, the Goon, and kaiju do improve almost any caper, heist, or escapade, their absence doesn’t necessarily detract from them either; big ups to Chip Zdarsky and Jacob Phillips’ Newburn for being extremely accessible and also kicking ass.

Ethan Reckless is the man you call when you’ve got an extralegal problem and you don’t really care how it gets solved; he’ll get most of your money back, or make sure your ex never uses his remaining leg to get anywhere near you again, that kinda thing, a regular Joe Fixit. Unfortunately for him, it looks like he’s taken the Gospel According to Taytay a little too literally, because this time it’s him, hi, he’s the problem, it’s him.

It’s hard to call this a fun book exactly—it’s about an ex-CIA narc who got the non-sociopath exploded out of him and made it a career path—but it’s gripping, and entertaining, and the art and writing are stellar; the next time you feel like having a good time about a bad time, you’d do very well to pick it up and see what’s playing down at Ethan’s Movies And Also Dirty Deeds Done Pretty Expensively Actually.

I WILL BE HONEST: I picked this because I needed a Hugo Winner for this list, it seemed relatively short, and I’ve previously really enjoyed Max Gladstone’s work, and citizens I am GLAD(STONE) I DID.

It is about TWO DAMES, both alike in skulduggery and love of the epistolary format, acting on opposite sides of the titular war. They begin to catch glimpses of each other across battlefields, and then to trade the letters that make up the bulk of the book. It’s not overly worried about the war itself, or the time-travel, instead treating the entire tableau as one big playing-field on which they can leave each other adorable notes amid incredible set-pieces like the fall of several Atlantises; every letter is hidden behind increasingly, hilariously arcane mechanisms, like boiling a glass of water in an MRI machine until the steam forms words, or encoding a message in the rings of a tree by carefully tending it over the course of 500 years.

The first half of the book goes by like a rocket, but the second half ran out of steam for me, trading out cool sequences and cryptographia for increasingly florid laments about how time is running out and their respective higher-ups are closing in on them, etc. etc. It was still a fantastic read and I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys any of the nonsense I’ve listed here, I just wish there had been a few more momentum-spikes in the second half to goose it along.

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.)

If you look up this book, anywhere–even accursed Bing! Spit!–you’re gonna see two things about it pop up prominently over and over again: that it’s got a very sad history due to its author being unable to get it published and subsequently excusing himself from the Big Stage, and that it’s one of the smartest, funniest books ever written in the English language, to the extent that you can say that’s what they speak in New Orleans.
ACOD is the story of one man out of time, Ignatius J. Reilly, and his crusade against the many perversions of the modern age, including but not limited to: color television (especially that teen dance show he never misses), canned food, democracy, optimism, communism, his mother’s new boyfriend, his own girlfriend, and Greyhound Scenicruiser buses, the last of which he believes move at speeds injurious to both body and soul.
ALL HE WANTS is to be left alone in his room to write his polemic plea for geometry and theology, but NO, he’s gotta go get a JOB AT A PANTS FACTORY and ACCIDENTALLY STEAL FROM A NAZI PORNOGRAPHESS and MAYBE, if there’s time, HELP ALL OF HIS GAY PALS FROM THE FRENCH QUARTER INFILTRATE THE MILITARY. It’s incredible, stop what you’re doing and invest in a copy immediately, you’ll thank me, the Bageler, and then have to explain to people who that is. I re-read this to She Who Is My Wife at least once every couple of years, and we discover new layers and clockwork brilliances every single time.
Fair warning, considering that it was written in the early 60’s ACOD is shockingly progressive but does still use almost entirely outdated and mostly offensive language for almost everyone, although pointedly only by bad guys.

This is just a nice, low-pressure, easy read about a couple of misfit youths who can’t friggin’ sleep, and find comfort and solace in one another by hiding and dozing together in their school’s mothballed astronomy club observatory; eventually of course they get found out, and in order to stay in their snooze-station they have to actually re-found the astronomy club, and in the process they learn about the stars, each other, and themselves. There’s no real drama or danger, and everything is nicely grounded with enough dumb little touches of weirdness to add some flavor.
I find that Western comics rarely–not never, mind you, but rarely–have an equivalent to this kind of series, where nothing much happens but it’s nice, and you can just pick up the next chapter or volume and see what these characters are up to without the fate of the friggin’ world being in the balance, and ever since I finished Cross Game (see above) I’ve been in dire need of a replacement for my low-stakes hangout-comic jones.
My comic buying habits have changed since the loss of my job, but if I were still in a position to purchase things frivolously without an immediate plan to read them, I would absolutely have hit ‘buy now’ on Vol. 2 of IAS.

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.

What if the British Empire–famously the exploitingest, colonizingest motherfuckers around–found a way to physically enslave the very languages of “lesser” peoples in service of the Crown? What if that resource became what drove their wars, conquest and murder across the globe in search of new languages to pillage? Such is the premise! Such is the horror.
Robin Swift was born in Canton, China, maybe-rescued from a Cholera plague by a British Professor, and now spends his days at the Oxford Translation Institute, doing language-magics for the Empire. So why does he always feel excluded, and burdened with a guilt he can’t place? (Hint: it’s because Whitey will never consider him English, but participation in English society demands he renounce his Chinese heritage, so he’s kind of nothing and is selling his remaining self by the word.) Is there anything he can do about this? Can an empire be convinced of the error of its ways and repent (hint: no) or will more drastic action become necessary to ensure the freedom of people who don’t look like Dumbledore? (Hint: the book’s subtitle is The Necessity of Violence)
Set in an alternate 1840’s London powered by stolen words and the stolen children who translate them,  Babel is perhaps most primarily an examination of the ways in which Whitey wants to have his cake and eat it too, in this case by keeping people of color captive with the intellectual trappings and opportunities offered to those who will help him suck the marrow from their identities and use it to fuel his war machines. It’s maybe one of the most important books I’ve ever read; to my shame, I must admit that as a white guy I could never have imagined the ending, but I imagine most readers of color won’t have been able to imagine anything else. This book rules so much that every time I go to the Albertson’s for a French loaf and see they’ve got copies of it on their shelves, I pull a page from my notepad, write “Read this, it rules!” on it, and slide it between the pages so it sticks out over the top. Albertson’s has asked me repeatedly to stop doing this, and every time they do I remind them: Albert ain’t my dad.

This series is a beautiful cycle; when it started, it was about cooking ambulatory mushrooms and farming on the backs of soil-golems, then worked its way up to freeing the enslaved inhabitants of an immortal kingdom and resuing the main character’s sister from the bowels of a dragon, only to find that she’s been transmuted into a monstro and was being used by the ruler of the dungeon…and now they’re figuring out how to cook for his sister-monstro because she still has a human face and has trouble physically eating enough food to sustain her horrifying monstro-bod. All great stories come back to the beginning, and this is no exception; I love this book, and the new show on Netflix is FANTASTIC, hard recommend.

Listen here’s the thing about manga: it’s serialized (usually weekly) in anthology magazines the size of phone books, and only then bound into volumes; as a result, that format and the restraints it puts on storytelling aren’t the first consideration a mangaka has to make with regards to this week’s chapter, and anyone who reads manga will tell you that shit starts to blend together, because the volumes CAN but don’t necessarily break at natural narrative end-points. All of that to say: I don’t know what friggin’ volume of WHA this comes from, but I dare you to look at this and tell me it doesn’t count: