--William Styron

I spent much of last night and today catching up with this journal, writing five entries from last Monday through last Friday.

Not having much else to say about that just now, let's take a look at what I read over the weekend.

• The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Hunt Emerson

  This was the find of the weekend. This is a book I wish I owned, and, for that matter, wish I'd had back when I was in ninth grade.

  See, ninth grade is when I first had Coleridge's best-known poem inflicted on me. As is fairly well known, Coleridge was on opium when he wrote the thing, and you need to be on opium if you want to have a prayer of understanding it.

  Emerson... Emerson illustrates it. Wonderfully. With utterly ridiculous images, which bounce right off the all-too-dull text. "The Wedding-Guest sat on a stone," writes Coleridge, and, in the illustration, he collapses back onto a kneeling Keith Richards. "The ice was all around," it says later, and a signpost has arrows pointing all around, to "Ice here," "Ice there," "Ice this way," "More ice," "Ice over here," and "You want ice? Step this way."

  Those are two minor, almost insignificant details. The two-page spread devoted to the killing of the albatross is just classic... and that's all I'm going to say. I'm not doing this justice. Find this book and check it out for yourself. It's worth it.

• The Cartoon History of the Universe (Volumes 1-7), by Larry Gonick

  Yawn.

  The difference between this and the previous book is that, in the other one, the text is supposed to be boring, and the illustrations play off that, going for the most bizarrly dissonant associations possible, ultimately getting the reader to follow the text at the same time, without even noticing. Whereas over here, the author tries to present the text and pictures as a unified, interesting whole. And it's just not very interesting, because, well, it's a history book.

  Perhaps it's just me, but I have yet to meet a history book I've liked. (Granting a somewhat narrow definition of the term "history book," I suppose, perhaps unfairly tarring an entire discipline as a result. Sorry about that.) I ended up skipping around, and skimming through bits of this. As I did with the next book on the list:

• The Big Book of Conspiracies, by Doug Moench

  Zzzzzzz.....

  Boring, and not even remotely convincing. Next!

• "There Goes My Baby!" by Lynn Johnston
  (A For Better or For Worse® Collection)

  Yes.

  Lynn Johnston is one of only three comic-strip writers to win the Pulitzer Prize for editorial cartooning. The other two, Doonesbury and Bloom County, were largely political in focus. Hers is not, which makes the achievement all the greater. It was well deserved.

  There are a small handful of reasons why I continue to buy Newsday, rather than The New York Times. For Better or For Worse is chief among them.

  I'd read most of the strips in this book when they appeared in the paper about six years ago, but it was nice reading through them all again. I found myself laughing at loud at some points, thinking about things in a new light at other points, and wiping away tears at still other points. I can't say the same for most of the books I read, of any sort.

• Baby Blues®, by Rick Kirkman & Jerry Scott

  The first year's worth of the Baby Blues comic strip, published back in 1991. Alas, Newsday only runs the strip on Sundays, except when one of their usual strips is on hiatus, when it's the designated filler. I wish they'd get rid of, say, Garfield, and run this strip full-time. (For that matter, I just wish they'd get rid of Garfield.)

  An interesting look at those wonderful first few months after one's first baby is born, with 3 AM feedings, colic, the sudden lack of a social life, and so on. Very little effort seems to have been made to keep the various strips consistent with each other, which is noticable when you read them all at once, but not a terribly big problem, on the whole.

• The Complete Maus, by Art Spiegelman

  I'm not sure how to take this one. It's gotten all sorts of great reviews, and even won the Pulitzer, but I can't really say why. As a Holocaust narrative, it's not terribly effective; there seems to be no actual purpose to the animal metaphor, if that's what it is; and, well, on the whole, the parts I like best are those in which the author questions the value of the whole work.

  On the whole, it was a nice bit of light reading, with a couple of good literary moments. Which isn't exactly what I'd expected.