I've been such a busy reader lately. I think all the books I drunk-ordered are in now, from both Amazon and Alibris, and after I gave away some of them (such as "Rex Barks," a modern guide to sentence diagramming) and filed away some books I bought in order to have duplicates to give away (such as F.V. Irish's 1883 book on sentence diagramming), I have been reading the ones I'm keeping. The first one I read and finished was "Locas," of course, and it was all I could do not to leave work early the day it arrived. I'm almost ready to read it again. Then I found a replacement copy of the monograph by Ralph Eugene Meatyard from Aperture, with the hot-pink cover. It is a completely engrossing book, which is odd since it's mainly photographs and that's not usually something I get engrossed in. There's an appreciation by Guy Davenport and some other text by another writer I don't know, and an arrangement of photos that is different from the museum-related anthologies of his work. I had this book when I was 12 and read it to bits, then lent it to Paul Kimura, whose house and I assume the book were both destroyed in the Oakland fire.

I also got an anthology of war stories by science fiction writers. This is because of how much the book "Starship Troopers" blew my mind, and my general fascination with war stories. This was a neat idea for a book, and I would honestly read an anthology of war stories by almost any genre of writers, including romance. The highlight of this anthology, which I am not reading straight through and have not finished, is a tossup between "Ender's Game" by Orson Scott Card and "The Nuptial Flight of the Warbirds" by Algis Budrys, who write the very great HR novel "Rogue Moon." I would also read an anthology of HR stories by science fiction writers, and what "Ender's Game" shares with "Warbirds" is that they are both mainly parables of HR.

Then what else am I reading? I just looked into my Amazon account for the past six months, and realized I have given away every single other thing I ordered, including An Illustrated Guide to Lace, the soundtrack to Sabrina the Teenage Witch (on which Matthew Sweet sings "Magnet & Steel"; it was a penny), and many other things. So what, exactly, in my busy life, am I reading?

I was on Amazon, drunk-shopping as I do, and I clicked on and bought "Locas," a giant hardcover book with all the Maggie and Hopey stories from Love & Rockets. It's been about the best thing I've read in a long time. I can't even express what a wonderful book this is. I remember getting some of these same comics in the mail, back in 1985. Then I stopped following it for a while, and then the series ended. I was a little nervous to read the old stories again because they were such a part of my late teens. But it was as good as I remember and then it got better as the characters got older and did things I wasn't familiar with. I stayed up last night to finish it because it's too heavy to take on our trip this weekend. The physical experience of reading it is so transfixing. You have to not touch the black parts of the images, because your hand leaves a blue mark. I'm so happy to have this book.

Reading it also unearthed memories of when I first read these, in 1984 or 1985, and I had one of those dreams where someone who is dead now comes to you so vividly, with details you wouldn't remember if you tried consciously to remember them. You wake up with a nice feeling of having really spent time with them.