This is such a fun book to read aloud. It's a very slim fairy tale (just over 100 pages, with a lot of illustrations in my edition) but it's full of amazingly silly word play. This is my favorite paragraph:

"The brambles and the thorns grew thick and thicker in a ticking thicket of bickering crickets. Farther along and stronger, bonged the gongs of a throng of frogs, green and vivid on their lily pads. From the sky came the crying of flies, and pilgrims leaped over a bleating sheep creeping knee-deep in a stream, in which swift and slipper snakes slid and slithered silkily, whispering sinful secrets."

This is a very sweet story set in the Lumberjanes world, but which can be read out of sequence of the single issues, or possibly even as a stand alone. A cursed magical compass separates the Lumberjanes in the woods, making one after another lose their way. But sometimes you have to lose your way before you can find it.

I decided I wanted to read through all of Lucy Knisley's books, and went back to this first one, which I had never read before. If she had never published another work, I think this one would largely have been forgotten- especially in today's era of indulgently abundant free diary comics online. This book stands up, and is remarkable partly because so many of the relationships, thoughts, and themes of her later books can already be seen brewing here. It's impossible not to read this one with the later books in mind, and in that light it offers a satisfying peek into Lucy Knisley's beginnings. You can easily see how far she has developed, both as a writer and an artist- but she developed precisely because she spent time making this early work. No one skips ahead directly from novice to master. Sometimes it appears that artists do, because none of their early or student work is published. But Lucy's was, and I'm grateful that this public record of her learning curve is available for anyone to discover.

Joy Harjo was recently chosen as the United States Poet Laurent, the first Indigenous writer to be appointed to this position. I read a short news article on her a few weeks ago and decided to pick up some of her books, starting with this memoir. This book is divided into four sections (East, North, West, South) and covers her early life, from her ancestors, through her childhood and adolescence, into the mid 1970s around her time in university and the birth of her children. She would go on to be a major voice in the Native American Renaissance literary movement, but this book ends just as she is beginning to write poetry. It's a powerful and lyrical telling of a challenging youth. I am grateful to have her as a part of American history and future.

This book collects a batch of Pratchett's early short stories, some written when he was in his late teens, which were serialized in a local newspaper. It's fun to see the beginnings of themes that he would play around with in later Discworld books. There are three stories about very tiny protagonists (an ant, a fairy, and a gnome) which made me think of the Wee Free Men of the Tiffany Aching books. There were several stories all set in a fictional Welsh town with an intentionally unspellable name, parodies of wild west stories about "The Coal Rush", sheepboys, and clashes between the bicycle-riding town constable and local rascals. Another set of stories take place in the town of Blackberry, which was prone unusual events such as outbreaks of time travel. None of these pieces is very long, but they showcase Sir Terry's growing strength at mixing the magical and the mundane.

Set in Paris in the 1950s, this gorgeous black and white comic is about an arrogant young man who aspires to poetry but resorts to theft. He recites a plagiarized poem at a literary gathering to impress a girl, then falls in with a band of house robbers. It's translated from French and contains numerous references to poetry movements and personalities (which I all took as true, knowing nothing personally about this literary period). It's enjoyable and strange.

A series of sweet diary comics about Philippa and her partner, Luke Pearson. Many of them are silent, and all of them are charming.