Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice by Ivan Brunetti was one of the two books I read for a Comics Pedagogy class in my MFA program over the summer. It took me a while to get into Brunetti's sometimes unnecessarily familiar tone but it's a very good outline for a 15 week comics class and by the conclusion it's downright inspirational. Probably one of the best books on teaching and making comics available. Also very short! I'd highly recommend it.

This picture book follows a penniless prince named Tim and his only friend, a black horse, who must fall under the spell of the horrible Sea King. The Sea King demands that they bring him a princess from the mountains to be his unwilling bride. The princess has some of her own ideas however. At her wish Tim and the black horse are sent on three quests to delay her marriage, and hopefully defeat the Sea King. The illustrations in this book are eerie, beautiful in a slightly bizarre way. One of the images of the black horse leaping towards a mountain of fire stuck with me through my childhood long after I had forgotten the book's title. I was very please to re-discover it.

Aesthetics collects illustrations, comics, doodles and ephemera from Ivan Brunetti's long career. Brunetti's captions are unfailingly pessimistic and self-deprecating but his work has a lightness that keeps it above a Chris Ware level of depression. This is a fairly slight book, but the photos of Brunetti's sculptures and vintage art collections as well as the curated drawings definitely deepened my understanding of his work.

I had a hard time with this book. It has an interesting premise- the main character is a ghost who does not remember who she is and must throughout the book search for clues to her identity and to her death- but the ghost's constant state of confusion means the reader is often confused as well. The ghost ends up haunting a melancholic English boys school, which seems to be where her three surviving sisters live. Even the strangeness of her bizarre family doesn't do much to lighten what was clearly a dreary life, and it makes for dreary reading.

Newt's Emerald is a sparkling gem of a book, a Regency romance with an added dash of fantasy. The main character is Lady Truthful Newtington, whose magical inheritance- the Emerald- is stolen on her eighteenth birthday. She travels to London to stay with her great-aunt, a feisty sorceress, who comes up with a plot. Since Truthful cannot possibly search for the Emerald on her own, she will dress as a man to search London for clues to the lost jewel. Naturally, while in disguise, she runs into a handsome and intelligent man who offers to help her search- though he has some secrets of his own. This book reminded me very favorably of A Brief History of Montmaray and also of Sorcery and Celia, two other fantasy historical fiction books that I greatly enjoyed.

Set in Istanbul in the 1500s, this book wanders between fact and fiction. The main character is Jahan, a kidnapped child who arrives in Istanbul on board a ship with a greedy captain and a sick elephant. He bluffs his way into becoming the elephant's trainer in the menagerie of the Sultan Suleiman. When he and the elephant are on a military campaign the pair catch the eye of the Royal Architect, Sinan, who takes the boy on as an apprentice. This is a fairly long book that reads like a series of related vignettes, in which Jahan witnesses battles, befriends the only daughter of the Sultan, and helps with the construction of some of the era's greatest buildings including the Suleymaniye Mosque, the Sehzade Mosque and the Mihriman Mosque. There is an overarching plot surrounding a hidden enemy of the great architect, which wasn't very well developed and which I didn't find myself particularly engaged in. The lack of cohesion in this narrative thread gave the book a meandering feel, as events took place one after the other, often unrelated, as they are in life. However, I loved just reading about the daily life of Istanbul enough that I still enjoyed the book as a whole.

This long and detailed biography of Jim Henson, expressively read by Kirby Heyborne in the audiobook version, gave me a much deeper appreciation both of Henson's lasting legacy and whimsical passing silliness. What a man with a head full of stories, creator and co-creator of so many lasting characters. If you enjoy stories of artistic people growing into their own abilities and succeeding beyond what anyone would have expected, you will enjoy this book.

This is the final book in C.S. Pacat's wonderfully sexy and deviously clever trilogy of gay fantasy political dramas and wow, does it deliver. Damen's identity has been revealed and he now openly heads an army with the intent of taking back Akielos from his traitorous half-brother. Riding at his side is Prince Laurent, his enemy, his lover, and his strongest ally. The soldiers of Vere and Akielos are with them but the Regent has taken the capital and has deeper schemes than even Laurent knows. This book had me by turns frustrated as hell and giggling with delight. The final confrontation had double agents, admissions of treason, betrayal, murder, revenge, leaps of faith- everything I wanted.