On my nightstand...

I'm a reader.  Love it.  I love to read before I go to bed or on a rainy/snowy crappy day with a cup of hot coffee and a comfortable chair.  I thank my mother for instilling in me my love of the written word and my 6th grade homeroom/English teacher, Mr. Neale, who let us/made us read for 20 minutes everyday whatever we wanted.  I tended to read comic books that I'd picked up from the local flee markets.  I still have a lot of them and you know what? After 25 years those comics are actually worth something, actually some of them are worth quite a bit.

 Dayf over at the Cardboard Junkie is quite a reader too.  He's been asking his readers to help pick his next book out of a list of choices.  The overwhelming majority chose Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.  It is a pretty awesome book.  I keep dropping my two cents in even though I'm sure he doesn't want to hear it.

Anyway, it got me thinking about what I'm reading and I decided that I'd drop my two cents on my current reads here on the old Crack pile.  You'll notice I added a new sidebar feature What's Cynicalbuddha Reading?

I've read some great books in the last few months and decided that I'd share a few reviews and takes and also share what I'm currently reading.

Right now I'm reading Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume by Jeff Smith (the brick).  If you've never heard of Bone where the hell have you been.  It was only one of the best independent comics of the late nineties and early two thousands.

The one volume is great because, well you get everything all at once and the black and white version is fairly cheap being about 26 bucks on amazon.  And I just saw that Jeff has released and all new color version in a slipcase that looks incredible and a 20th anniversary edition with all sorts of goodies and even an edition that comes with original art. Be forewarned though all those editions are pricey, especially the one with the original art.  You can find it all at Jeff Smiths we site boneville.com

First, a little review of the comic itself and then the edition I'm reading.  I remember picking up a few issues of Bone here and there, especially when I would find them in quarter boxes or during special sales at the comic book store, but to be honest it's a terrible comic to come into midway through the story, so after reading a few and realizing I was totally lost I decided to wait.  I was too cheap to pick up the earlier collected graphic novels but when Bone ended in 2004 and this edition came out and was so cheap I scooped it up.  And there it sat in my to read pile for close to 7 years.  But I pulled it out and finally started reading and it's addictive.  The one volume is huge and heavy.  The listed shipping weight on Amazon is 4 pounds (that's like 9 kilos to my foreign metric using friends) and is almost 3 inches thick.

not me

  It has over 1300 pages and contains all 55 issues of the original series.  The series follows three cousins through a year long adventure and has dragons, talking animals, explosions and cow races!  I won't give any details away, but if you like comics and adventure you'll love Bone. Plus Jeff Smith has such great art to accompany the story.  Interesting side note that Jeff self published the first 20 issues under his Cartoon Books, then published 7 issues with Image in 1995, and then went back to his own imprint.  Terry Moore did the same thing with Strangers in Paradise, also highly recommended. You can get the whole history here at Jeff's website.

Alright this is getting long.  Anywho Bone highly recommend no matter how you read it.  I will say you have to start at the beginning though or you're lost.

As always thoughts and comments are welcome.