This is the second of Geary’s books on Victorian murders that I’ve read. I don’t necessarily seek them out, but there always seems to be a different one in stock at the library, so why not? Like the last one, this was well done and enjoyable. I had been arguing about Lincoln at a party shortly before reading this, and the quotes from his second inauguration just served to reinforce the argument I was making that Lincoln didn’t really seem to appreciate the moral violation of slavery and seemed fairly interested in forgiving the South as soon as possible. I tend to fall pretty strongly on the Reconstruction side of things, so I’m always glad to have more quotes handy to illustrate Lincoln’s softness towards the South.

I always have a hard time deciding what to say about anthologies. Curses leads off with a fairly obtuse story (“Green Tea”) that isn’t particularly engaging, but then has “28th Street” which is excellent. Aside from the closing piece (which is somewhere in the middle as far as quality goes), the rest are short little pieces of varying quality. I think this is all coming out harsher than I want it to. I really like Huizenga’s art. Aside from one piece, it’s very reminiscent of Herge, which is always a good thing. His storytelling skills are excellent, but he does tend to choose materials that don’t really lend themselves to graphic storytelling (a history of starlings in North America, long chunks of 19th century writing), which is, I guess, ambitious, but not necessarily compelling. Still, an enjoyable collection, and one I’ve recommended to others.

After Reading Comics, I figured I should probably read all the items he reviews. Somehow, I never really got around to reading Maus, so I figured that was a pretty glaring hole in my comics literacy and set about correcting that one first. It’s certainly better than I expected, given the lousy other stuff I’ve read of Spiegelman’s, and, if nothing else, helped me out with some of the awareness of the Holocaust timeline questions I’d been trying to sort out after watching To Be or Not To Be (would seem that if Spiegelman’s family didn’t really know how bad the camps were in late ‘41, Lubitsch probably didn’t either). I guess my only real criticism of the story is that Art’s storyline is significantly less interesting than Vladek’s. I understand this is supposed to foreground the author’s presence in the storytelling so as to avoid claims of objectivity and give the story a more accessible entry point for those who wouldn’t relate as well to a directly told story of Vladek and his family, but it ends up just sort of feeling like an ongoing fit of egomania. I don’t particularly feel any need to get to know Art, so he ends up feeling like an impediment to the more interesting and moving story.

I really didn’t expect I’d enjoy a comic history of a town I’ve never been to as much as I did. It certainly helps that the Sunderland history aspect of the story is really only part of it; nearly as much time is spent discussing Lewis Carroll and his creations or comics as a medium or British history on the whole. Really, it’s nice to see someone other than Scott McCloud make use of the graphic novel as essay. This is a significantly less focused work than McCloud’s, but it’s got the same sort of density of information combined with a highly engaging, conversational quality that makes it much easier to take. I’m not sure I buy Talbot’s assertion that Sunderland’s exclusion from Carroll’s history is a deliberate, anti-Mackem plot, but perhaps that’s supposed to be a little tongue-in-cheek.

Buddha is broken up into eight volumes, which I’ve been getting out, in sequence, from the library for months now, so it feels like I’ve been reading this book forever. All told, it’s actually a pretty nice primer into Buddhism, though I’m not sure how I feel about the introduction of fictional characters into the biographical aspects of Buddha’s life (though, I suppose it’s good not to take the life story of your religious founder too literally – Christianity would be a much more palatable religion in my mind if the average Christian was willing to at least entertain the idea that the Gospels are fictional). There are a lot of weird recurring aspects (Princes imprisoning fathers, people who can turn into animals, etc.) that made it kind of hard to keep track of who all the characters were, but, overall, it is a pretty enjoyable read and certainly has me more interested in learning more about Buddhism.