Weekly Comics Discussion – July 27, 2005

This
week’s shipping list
has a few items of note that
I’ll be taking home, including Exiles Vol. 10: Age
of Apocalypse
, Fantastic Four #529,
Pulse #10, Pules: House of M Special
Edition
(which was solicited with a cover price
of $0.50), and Ultimate Spider-Man Vol. 13:
Hobgoblin
. Also, those of you who have noticed
that the Essential reviews aren’t coming on the most
recently promised schedule may be happy to know that
that’s because I’m working through 40
Years of the Amazing Spider-Man
on CD-ROM, which
will take some time. (It’s an 11 CD-ROM set including
Amazing Fantasy #15 and Amazing
Spider-Man #1-500
, scanned from the original
comics, so it includes all the ads, letters columns,
and so on. The issue of Previews that ships today
includes a 40 Years of the Uncanny X-Men
DVD-ROM with similar offerings which I didn’t mention
this
weekend
as I hadn’t noticed it yet.)

Cat’s Cradle

The first sentence of The Books of Bokonon is this:
“All of the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”

My Bokonist warning is this:
Anyone unable to understand how a useful religion can be founded on lies will not understand this book, either.

For July, my ongoing reviews of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.’s best novels features Cat’s Cradle, a very funny book about the end of the world. As it’s divided into many very short chapters, it also makes good summer reading—- despite the fact that it may induce actual thinking.

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