Goodness me, I’ve let it happen again: I’ve waited far too long into the next month to post one of these, but I feel like I’ve got a decent excuse this time. You see, the first week of July I was fairly busy with work, and then all of last week I was on vacation. So, this was left to languish, but I was at a cottage! Surely you can understand. I’ve had some last minute remembrances of what I bought, so it’s one of those months, but I believe I’ve got them all remembered properly now.

Let’s see what I picked up.

New Books

Ew, It’s Beautiful by Joshua Barkman is the latest False Knees comic collection. It feels like it was announced only a short while ago, but I quickly preordered it and happily received my copy toward the end of last month. Though I try to support most of the comic artists online if they get a book out, Barkman’s work is easily my favourite.

Strange Houses by Uketsu I picked up on a whim during an excursion to a nearby town to pick up a hard-to-find gift for a friend’s birthday. Turns out, the mall in that town had an intact Chapters, which was nice to see because they’re actually furnished like bookstores, unlike typical stores in the Indigo chain. I featured one of this author’s books in Novel Discoveries last month, but it turns out this one came out first, and I’ve heard more about it before. I’m looking forward to checking it out, perhaps this October.

My local Indigo restocked the 3 for $10 Arcturus paperbacks, and I had a hard time resisting picking up a few the last time I was there waiting on something or other. So, I decided to grab Pride & Prejudice, Carmilla, and The Ghost Stories of M. R. James. I’ve felt an itch to read more classics lately, and while I certainly own a few already, I satisfied that itch by buying some more. I really like how colourful these editions are and I appreciate how they make literature accessible cost-wise. Though it probably would’ve been wiser to just get them from a library, I am a sucker for book buying. Though the latter two are more typical to my interests, I actually think I’m going to try reading Pride & Prejudice sometime this year—maybe this summer but perhaps in the fall.

Novel Discoveries

With one exception, I believe I learned about all of these books on TikTok.

The Pillowman by Martin McDonagh is a play about a writer in a totalitarian state who starts being investigated after the grisly contents of his short stories start bearing disturbing similarities to a string of child murders in his community. I don’t normally read plays, but this just sounded too enticing to pass up. My library rejected my suggestion to add it to their catalogue, so I’ll have to pick it up another way.

The Wall by Marlen Haushofer is an Austrian novel from the 1960s about a middle-aged woman alone on a retreat in the mountains who wakes up one morning to find she has been separated from the rest of the world by an invisible wall. With only a few animals as company, she must learn to survive on her own, as well as cope with the isolation. I’m not sure I’ve read anything by an Austrian author before, so that’ll be nice for broadening my horizons more too.

Ice by Anna Kavan is yet another novel from the 1960s; it’s post-apocalyptic story about a world devastated by ever-encroaching ice and one man who journey’s in pursuit of a mysterious silver-haired girl. I wish I could say more, I’m sure I was told more when I first heard about it, but I prefer to be enticed by vaguery, if it sounds interesting enough.

Star Wars: Master of Evil by Adam Christopher is an upcoming novel set in the Star Wars franchise, so I heard about it from somewhere or other because I’m a fan. I’ve somewhat fallen off of keeping up with the expanded media the last few years, and goodness knows we don’t really need yet another Darth Vader story, but this promise of delving into the Dark Side of the Force and what arcane secrets Vader has actually tried to learn as a Sith Lord is pretty tantalizing, so I’ll likely be picking it up.

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Until next time, thank you for reading!