Fun and witty...a little more about the writer than the reader. ( )

BOOKSHELF is a lot of fun, notably when the early focus is on Readers and Books.

Writers will welcome the change of pace.

Illustrations brilliant! ( )

Started off very strong as an ode to books and reading, then trailed into a "writing is hard" complaint. Good enough, though, that I'll look into his other stuff.

(Side note to all writers: yes, writing is hard. But so are many, many, many other jobs, most of them harder than writing. Nobody cares about how hard writing is, except maybe other writers who write about how hard writing is.) ( )

This is a delightful and insightful collection of comics about books, reading, and writing. Almost every page contains a well-illustrated and cleverly worded gem that will resonate with and appeal to anyone who has found themselves up too late reading, or pulled into an interesting bookstore or library, despite the teetering pile already on the nightstand, or pulling out their hair, looking for the best word. ( )

The sequential art in this book is sort of structured around a preliminary "confession," which supplies its lines as subject titles for the sections of the volume, like "I confuse fiction with reality" and "I care about punctuation -- a lot." Most of it is expressed in pages of nine to sixteen panels, with each page detailing or iterating a distinct idea in the general space of reading, writing, and book husbandry. Less often, but more enjoyably to me, a page bears a single Scarry-esque drawing with a host of minutely annotated features, such as "The National Department of Poetry" (89). The art is stylized and dynamic, with a naïve air, but obvious skill at efficient communication.

The "humor" of the affair is chiefly created through wordplay and relatably-depicted states of bibliophilia. I don't think I had a laugh-out-loud moment in reading the book, but I was often smiling.