For Love of Books: Batman – A Reading Guide

A few months ago, I picked up a free item at B & N called DC Essential Graphic Novels 2017.  Essentially it’s a checklist of things currently available from DC and that’s what I’m using it as.  In the back, where it gives the lists, it lists, first Batman Backlist and Suggested Reading Order, then Batman Compilation Graphic Novels, Batman: From Page to Screen (although the reverse would be more accurate) then Batman Graphic Novels.  The number of books on the list, in order are 152, 19, 37 and 41 and they don’t even include all the Batman books that I actually own.  So this will not, I emphasize not be a completely guide to all of Batman on the page.  This is a guide to the books I do have (though the links are to the current available editions and may not be what I own), why I have them and which ones are on my “to-get” list and why.  I will also mention some others I have that also have Batman in them but aren’t considered “Batman” books, per se (at least for the DC published list, because they’re on other lists in the book).  To keep it consistent with how it’s organized in the DC guide, I’ll follow their printed list until I reach things that aren’t on their list.

 

For Love of Books: The Adventures of Tintin

Introduction:

A Note on the Order of the Books:

The Tintin books are listed here in the order in which they were originally written and published in French.  That is very different from the order in which they became available in America and the order in which I first read them.  Because my family collected Tintin books as Atlantic-Little, Brown originally published them in the States, I can give an idea of when they were published in America, although there is at least a little confusion with that.  My (now falling apart) original copy of The Crab with the Golden Claws lists four titles on the back.  Yet, one of those titles is King Ottokar’s Sceptre.  My (now falling apart) copy of King Ottokar’s Sceptre is a “First American Edition” and lists eight titles, the same eight titles listed on the back of my (now falling apart) original copy of Cigars of the Pharoah, which is a “First American Edition” and is from 1975.  In Tintin in America (“Third American Edition”) it lists 20 books on the back – all except Soviets, Congo, Blue Lotus and Alph-Art.  Tintin in America was in fact, the twentieth published in the United States (it says so on the back of the book).
One of the oddities is that two of the books that were among the original four, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure, were published during the decade as serials in Children’s Digest.  I still have the cover for the January 1977 issue of Children’s Digest with The Secret of the Unicorn on the cover.  Odd, that they would only at that point be publishing a story that was already available in book form.

 

For Love of Books: William Faulkner

The cream of the crop of my collection, as it sits on a shelf in the dining room.

“”When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant – a combined gardener and cook – had seen in at least ten years.”  –  “A Rose for Emily”

I can blame the Tolkien obsession on my brothers.  But my Faulkner obsession has the blame laid squarely on Carol Mooney, my high school English teacher (both for Freshman and AP).  In AP English we read The Sound and the Fury and I was hooked for life.  And as for the collection, you can actually blame that on Veronica.  It was when she bought the Signet copy of Sanctuary because of how awesome the cover was, in spite of the fact that I already had it, that I started opening myself to collecting various editions of books.  Before I met her I owned precisely 1 copy of Lord of the Rings and 1 copy of The Sound and the Fury.

There is a competition going.  Looking in my Book Register (of course I have a spreadsheet that has all this information – read this and stop asking silly questions), the Faulkner collection currently encompasses 314 books for a total of 114273 pages.  The Tolkien collection only has 188 books for 88201 pages.  Of course, Tolkien only wrote two novels while Faulkner wrote 20.  And the Faulkner collection has probably only grown by about a shelf since we came to Boston, whereas the Tolkien collection has probably doubled in size.  Clearly they are the two collecting passions in my life (if by the two, you don’t count Star Wars, the Modern Library, the Viking Portable Library, Harry Potter or Lego).

 

For Love of Books: J.R.R. Tolkien

“In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit.”

Reading J.R.R. Tolkien didn’t teach me a love of reading.  Even at the age of 5, I already had that.  But, in the summer of 1980, after I had made it through the Chronicles of Narnia, my brothers decided to hand me The Hobbit and then The Lord of the Rings and see what would happen.  What happened, of course, is 33 consecutive years of reading both (sometimes more than once a year).

For a long time, this was a love that I had, but it wasn’t necessarily an overwhelming passion.  I had The Lord of the Rings, The Hobbit, The Silmarillion and a few reference books (The Complete Guide to Middle-earth and The Atlas of Middle-earth).  And I knew a lot about Middle-earth.  But it could all easily fit in a shelf.  Now it can’t even fit in a single bookcase.

“This tale grew in the telling . . .”

What happened?  Well, a passion for collecting that began to focus happened.  And the films happened, at a time when I was working at the world’s largest bookstore.  There was suddenly a lot of Tolkien books (and Tolkien related books) around and suddenly I had more money than I had before for this kind of collecting.  So, this took off, slower than Faulkner, but at a good pace.

And what has happened in the years since I left Powell’s?  It has only continued to grow.  In fact, I now own more copies of Lord of the Rings than I own of The Sound and the Fury.  And it continues to grow because they continue to release new editions of the books and I just can’t resist.

 

For Love of Books: Gabriel García Márquez

The Avon / Bard mass market editions of the first several García Márquez books.

“Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”  (One Hundred Years of Solitude)

It was the spring of my junior year of college when I first heard of him.  My friend Jake had been taking more Spanish classes and I asked him why.  He wanted to read Cien años de soledad, the original Spanish language version of One Hundred Years of Solitude.  “It’s my new barometer for people,” he said.  “If they don’t like it, I can’t listen to them anymore.”  As one of my oldest and closest friends, this seemed like a direct challenge.  I needed to find this book and read it and like it.  Preferably, from the tone of his voice, think it brilliant.

I found an old Avon paperback in Chapter II, the same little used bookstore in Forest Grove (now long gone) where, browsing in the fall, I had found Portnoy’s Complaint and Ragtime and embarked on reading odysseys through Philip Roth and E.L. Doctorow.  It took me little more than a day to get it read (why bother reading stuff for school when I can be reading this, I kept thinking).

I called him back the next day.  “It was brilliant,” I told him.  “Especially that last sentence.  That was amazing.”  And so it began, my odyssey into this, the greatest of all the writers from Latin America, one of the few people who was won the Nobel Prize and absolutely deserved it.

 

For Love of Books: The Pevear / Volokhonsky Translations

My collection of Pevear / Volokhonsky translations.

When I began these For Love of Books posts, I began them with a specific purpose.  Because I love books.  Not just the words inside, but books themselves.  And I hate the Kindle.  I don’t hate all E-readers, and I can understand why people flock to them on some level.  But for me, they will never replace books.  My specific hatred of the Kindle stems partially from the concept, but mostly from the fact that Amazon has replaced Microsoft in my Holy Trinity of Wrong (it now sits alongside Walmart and the Yankees).

I bring this all up here, because this specific post deals with books that you can buy as opposed to e-books that you can get for free.  My guess is that it is relatively easy to get the great Russian novels – the works of Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov – for free.  They were almost all written in the nineteenth century and even the English language translations have long since passed out of copyright protection.

But, those free novels that you’re getting aren’t the whole piece of the puzzle.  Certainly they are worthy of reading and you will experience, through one literary vision, the great Russian works.  My guess is that that vision is the vision of Constance Garnett.  Garnett translated 71 Russian works over the course of her career and we should be thankful for how much we can read in English thanks to her.

But, they are no longer the last word.  They are no longer the best translations out there, as is made obvious with every new release.  Granted, I have no knowledge of the Russian language.  But I know the English language and I know literature.  And there’s a magical world available to us now, thanks to the work in the last 25 years of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.  They are the husband and wife team that has brought out new translations of the best works in Russian literature (excepting Fathers and Sons).

 

For Love of Books: Philip Roth

A young Philip Roth in 1968 about to set everyone alight with Portnoy's Complaint.

“I write fiction and I’m told it’s autobiography, I write autobiography and I’m told it’s fiction, so since I’m so dim and they’re so smart, let them decide what it is or it isn’t.”  (Deception)

My 1st Edition Philip Roth collection.

Philip Roth has not won the Nobel Prize.  But it seems like he’s won everything else.  And if the Nobel Committee were to realize that there are countries outside of Europe (hell, outside of Sweden – nine Swedes have now won the Nobel Prize in Literature – I know it’s your country, but that’s ridiculous), they would look at Roth again.  He has written award winning books, award winning short stories, he has written on the art of writing and on his contemporaries.  He has helped to build the knowledge of European Literature in the United States, being the editor of Writers from the Other Europe Series from Penguin that brought, among others, Milan Kundera to the forefront in the States.  With John Updike and Saul Bellow now gone, he is the last of that breed, those writers who were obsessed with sex, obsessed with life, who gave us great novels that were cultural as well as literary milestones.

He is one of my favorites.  You might not want to shake his hand, or even know him.  But you should definitely read him.

 

For Love of Books: Hunter S. Thompson

for Terry and John

“We can’t stop here.  This is bat country.”  (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, p 18)

It’s Nixon who started all of this and I can’t help but think that would make Hunter smile.  When I was first getting into a serious love of film, one of the first great films I watched was All the President’s Men.  Then I read the book, and I was just hooked.  I could do a whole For Love of Books post on books about Nixon and the Nixon administration.  And I already had the makings of a serious political junkie, having been apparently the only fifth grader at Taft Elementary willing to offer up support of Walter Mondale.  I followed the trail through the primaries in 88 and less than four years later, had a serious conversation with my best friend, John, and we decided that of all the candidates, it was Bill Clinton that was the best chance – both for the country, and for getting elected.  I couldn’t get enough of it.  And through it all, I was reading books about Nixon.  So, somewhere along the line, not long after Nixon died, I bought a book called Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail ’72.

 

For Love of Books: Harry Potter

The British Deluxe (first 5), the U.S. Hardcover (all 7), the Time Magazine that announced the craze in September of 1999 and my favorite cover – the British adult Deathly Hallows

“You should read these,” the good looking manager at work said.  I had just started working at Barnes and Noble – my first bookstore job – and it was the third week of September in 1999.  She was pointing at the three Harry Potter books, which were the top sellers in the store.  The title character was about to make the cover of Time Magazine as the sales of the third book were sparking a craze.

Since I could check out hardcovers for free, I took the first one home.  The next day, having read the whole thing, I brought it back.  When she asked about it, my initial reaction was that they weren’t as good as the Narnia books.  For all the fun ways it which it combined a boarding school novel with classic fantasy, I felt the book lacked depth in its characters – they were all too clearly black or white, with the only possible exception being Professor Snape, but he was so demonized by the main characters that it was hard to tell how much gray he had.  So when she asked, I said “There’s no character in the book as good as Edmund in the Narnia books.”

She encouraged me to keep reading them.  That was easy enough and the first one was enjoyable enough, so that night I brought home the second book.  The next day, that came back and I brought home the third one.  The second one had been about equal to the first, but the third one was a big step up.  The characters had definitely begun to develop various shades of gray and the back story of the characters was beginning to fill in.  So, there I was, now anxiously awaiting the fourth one, right at the head of the wave that was beginning to build.

Oh, and the good looking manager who insisted that I read them, told me how wonderful they were and defended their quality against the Narnia books?  We got married in between books four and five and had Thomas before book six.

 

For Love of Books: 10 Picture Book Classics

Chicka Chicka Boom Boom and Mike Mulligan - two absolute classics

I had these 10 and I couldn’t figure out how else to write about them.  But I couldn’t not write about them.  They are 10 of the great picture books of all-time.  Not all of them were books I read as a child.  But some absolutely were a vital part of my childhood.  Others have become a vital part of my interactions with my son.

They all relate directly to the whole notion I created with my For Love of Books posts.  How will you read to your children?  I can understand people flocking to e-books who just go through disposable books.  If what you read is the monthly Harlequin or the latest James Patterson as soon as it released, why bother with buying an actual book.  Will you ever read it again?  Is it something to treasure or a pleasure to be gotten through once and then move on to the next one?

Great pictures book are definitely the former.  Will you try to stretch out your Kindle to make the screen larger so your child can sink into the illustrations?  Will you hand over your piece of (expensive) electronic equipment to your two year old so they can flip through the pages?

I will stand on the side of the books themselves, physical objects I can pull off the shelf and curl up with my son to read in his little reading corner.  Or he can grab them off the shelf anytime he chooses and look at them himself.  There is always that option.