Reading List for 2021 (Updated!)

A new year has begun just a few days back (wow!). Though I'm sure it doesn't feel any different, yet, the world is still dealing with the dilemma of COVID-19. The vaccine is out now, and it is being distributed around, with the elderly, the first line medical personnel, and the immunocompromise patients being the current priority.

With that being said, all we can do is just keep still with a watching eye and good book on our side :)

During 2020 I had the advantage of all the free time on my hands, and that was invested in breaking a (2020 reading challenge) record after so many years!

Check out the previous post for my list of favourite books in 2020.

With a new year comes a new reading list! I have so many books on my to-read list, but I think I want to pour my focus more on the classics (yay!). I own some of these books and was hoping to read them in 2020.... no harm is done there ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Update (Feb 13th, 2021):

- Now that I actually have a lot of the books listed below, I believe it would be easier to complete this list.

- I noticed that my reading interests have been deviating from the list selections here... but hey, the year has just begun!

Update (April 24th, 2021)

- Alrighty then! I have completed a good chunk of the books I've listed here *pats self on the back*

- As you will notice, there have been some changes (some books have been removed, new ones listed... I've done some digging and discovered why I wouldn't enjoy reading those books, to begin with)

- Hope it all goes well then XD

Update (October 5th, 2021)

- Wow... *more pats on back* I somehow managed to finish my reading goals for this year... what to do now?!

- I couldn't read all of the books on my list here (mainly it's my mood, you see... or disappointment with the author or... simply can't bother with it tbh).

- But hey, I have something to look forward to reading next year! (yeah, enough reading for now^^" I can focus on other things until the end of the year!

Colour guide:

Read
Currently reading
Owned book
Dropped
Don't own/Haven't read yet

Classics:

Dracula

by Bram Stoker, Maurice Hindle (Introduction), Christopher Frayling (Preface)

The vampire novel that started it all, Bram Stoker's Dracula probes deeply into human identity, sanity, and the dark corners of Victorian sexuality and desire. When Jonathan Harker visits Transylvania to help Count Dracula purchase a London house, he makes horrifying discoveries about his client. Soon afterwards, disturbing incidents unfold in England—an unmanned ship is wrecked at Whitby, strange puncture marks appear on a young woman's neck, and a lunatic asylum inmate raves about the imminent arrival of his "Master"—culminating in a battle of wits between the sinister Count and a determined group of adversaries.

Anna Karenina

By Leo Tolstoy

Richard Pevear (Translator),

Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)

Anna Karenina seems to have everything - beauty, wealth, popularity and an adored son. But she feels that her life is empty until the moment she encounters the impetuous officer Count Vronsky. Their subsequent affair scandalizes society and family alike and soon brings jealously and bitterness in its wake. Contrasting with this tale of love and self-destruction is the vividly observed story of Levin, a man striving to find contentment and a meaning to his life - and also a self-portrait of Tolstoy himself.

The Complete Short Novels

by Anton Chekhov, Richard Pevear (Translator), Larissa Volokhonsky (Translator)

Anton Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels–here brought together in one volume for the first time, in a masterly new translation by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The Steppe—the most lyrical of the five—is an account of a nine-year-old boy’s frightening journey by wagon train across the steppe of southern Russia. The Duel sets two decadent figures—a fanatical rationalist and a man of literary sensibility—on a collision course that ends in a series of surprising reversals. In The Story of an Unknown Man, a political radical spying on an important official by serving as valet to his son gradually discovers that his own terminal illness has changed his long-held priorities in startling ways. Three Years recounts a complex series of ironies in the personal life of a rich but passive Moscow merchant. In My Life, a man renounces wealth and social position for a life of manual labor. The resulting conflict between the moral simplicity of his ideals and the complex realities of human nature culminates in a brief apocalyptic vision that is unique in Chekhov’s work.

The Count of Monte Cristo

by Alexandre Dumas

Robin Buss (Translator)

Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantès is confined to the grim fortress of the Château d’If. There he learns of a great hoard of treasure hidden on the Isle of Monte Cristo and becomes determined not only to escape but to unearth the treasure and use it to plot the destruction of the three men responsible for his incarceration.

A huge popular success when it was first serialized in the 1840s, Dumas was inspired by a real-life case of wrongful imprisonment when writing his epic tale of suffering and retribution.

The Man Who Was Thursday

by G.K. Chesterton, Jonathan Lethem (Introduction)

G. K. Chesterton's surreal masterpiece is a psychological thriller that centres on seven anarchists in turn-of-the-century London who call themselves by the names of the days of the week. Chesterton explores the meanings of their disguised identities in what is a fascinating mystery and, ultimately, a spellbinding allegory. As Jonathan Lethem remarks in his Introduction, The real characters are the ideas. Chesterton's nutty agenda is really quite simple: to expose moral relativism and parlor nihilism for the devils he believes them to be. This wouldn't be interesting at all, though, if he didn't also show such passion for giving the devil his due. He animates the forces of chaos and anarchy with every ounce of imaginative verve and rhetorical force in his body.

Mrs Dalloway

by Virginia Woolf

Heralded as Virginia Woolf's greatest novel, this is a vivid portrait of a single day in a woman's life. When we meet her, Mrs. Clarissa Dalloway is preoccupied with the last-minute details of party preparation while in her mind she is something much more than a perfect society hostess. As she readies her house, she is flooded with remembrances of faraway times. And, met with the realities of the present, Clarissa reexamines the choices that brought her there, hesitantly looking ahead to the unfamiliar work of growing old.

Life's Little Ironies

by Thomas Hardy

The phrase `life's little ironies' is now proverbial, but it was coined by Hardy as the title for this, his third volume of short stories. While the tales and sketches reflect many of the strengths and themes of the great novels, they are powerful works in their own right. Unified by his quintessential irony, strong visual sense, and engaging characters, they deal with the tragic and the humorous, the metaphysical and the magical. The collection displays the whole range of Hardy's art as a writer of fiction, from fantasy to uncompromising realism, and from the loving re-creation of a vanished rural world to the repressions of fin-de-siecle bourgeois life.

Jude the Obscure

by Thomas Hardy

Jude Fawley, the stonemason excluded not by his wits but by poverty from the world of Christminster privilege, finds fulfilment in his relationship with Sue Bridehead. Both have left earlier marriages. Ironically, when tragedy tests their union it is Sue, the modern emancipated woman, who proves unequal to the challenge. Hardy's fearless exploration of sexual and social relationships and his prophetic critique of marriage scandalised the late Victorian establishment and marked the end of his career as a novelist

The Distance of the Moon

by Italo Calvino, Martin L. McLaughlin (Translator), Tim Parks (Goodreads Author) (Translator), William Weaver (Translator)

'Time is a catastrophe, perpetual and irreversible.'

Science and fiction interweave delightfully in these playful Cosmicomic short stories.

Penguin Modern: fifty new books celebrating the pioneering spirit of the iconic Penguin Modern Classics series, with each one offering a concentrated hit of its contemporary, international flavour. Here are authors ranging from Kathy Acker to James Baldwin, Truman Capote to Stanislaw Lem and George Orwell to Shirley Jackson; essays radical and inspiring; poems moving and disturbing; stories surreal and fabulous; taking us from the deep South to modern Japan, New York's underground scene to the farthest reaches of outer space.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller

by Italo Calvino, William Weaver (Translator)

Italo Calvino's masterpiece combines a love story and a detective story into an exhilarating allegory of reading, in which the reader of the book becomes the book's central character. Based on a witty analogy between the reader's desire to finish the story and the lover's desire to consummate his or her passion, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller is the tale of two bemused readers whose attempts to reach the end of the same book, If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino, of course, are constantly and comically frustrated. In between chasing missing chapters of the book, the hapless readers tangle with an international conspiracy, a rogue translator, an elusive novelist, a disintegrating publishing house, and several oppressive governments. The result is a literary labyrinth of storylines that interrupt one another - an Arabian Nights of the postmodern age.

War and Peace

by Leo Tolstoy

Anthony Briggs (Translator)

At a glittering society party in St Petersburg in 1805, conversations are dominated by the prospect of war. Terror swiftly engulfs the country as Napoleon's army marches on Russia, and the lives of three young people are changed forever. The stories of quixotic Pierre, cynical Andrey and impetuous Natasha interweave with a huge cast, from aristocrats and peasants to soldiers and Napoleon himself. In War and Peace, Tolstoy entwines grand themes - conflict and love, birth and death, free will and faith - with unforgettable scenes of nineteenth-century Russia, to create a magnificent epic of human life in all its imperfection and grandeur.

Poetry:

The Collected Poems of Stevie Smith

by Stevie Smith

This New Directions paperback presents Steve Smith's complete poetic works edited by her long-time friend James MacGibbon.' On gray days when most modern poetry seems one dull colorless voice speaking through a hundred rival styles, one turns to Stevie Smith and enjoys her unique and cheerfully gruesome voice. She is a charming and original poet, 'commented Robert Lowell.

The Pleasures Of The Damned: Poems, 1951-1993

by Charles Bukowski, John Martin (Editor)

The Pleasures of the Damned is a selection of the best poetry from America's most iconic and imitated poet, Charles Bukowski. Celebrating the full range of the poet's extraordinary sensibility and his uncompromising linguistic brilliance, these poems cover a lifetime of experience, from his renegade early work to never-before-collected poems penned during his final days. Selected by John Martin, Bukowski's long-time editor and the publisher of the legendary Black Sparrow Press, this collection stands as what Martin calls 'the best of the best of Bukowski'.

I Have More Souls Than One

by Fernando Pessoa, Jonathan Griffin (Translator)

'But no, she's abstract, is a bird Of sound in the air of air soaring, And her soul sings unencumbered Because the song's what makes her sing.' Dramatic, lyrical and ranging over four distinct personae, these poems by one of Portugal's greatest poets trace a mind shaken by intense suffering and a tireless search for meaning.

The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse

by Anthony Thwaite (editor), Geoffrey Bownas (Introduction)

Poetry remains a living part of the culture of Japan today. The clichés of everyday speech are often to be traced to famous ancient poems, and the traditional forms of poetry are widely known and loved. The congenial attitude comes from a poetical history of about a millennium and a half. This classic collection of verse, therefore, contains poetry from the earliest, primitive period, through the Nara, Heian, Kamakura, Muromachi and Edo periods, ending with modern poetry from 1868 onwards, including the rising poets Tamura Ryuichi and Tanikawa Shuntaro.

Rumi:

The Essential Rumi

by Rumi, Coleman Barks (Translator)

This revised and expanded edition of The Essential Rumi includes a new introduction by Coleman Barks and more than 80 never-before-published poems. Through his lyrical translations, Coleman Barks has been instrumental in bringing this exquisite literature to a remarkably wide range of readers, making the ecstatic, spiritual poetry of thirteenth-century Sufi Mystic Rumi more popular than ever.

The Soul of Rumi: A New Collection of Ecstatic Poems

by Rumi, Coleman Barks

Inside A Lover's Heart There's Another World, And Yet Another Rumi's masterpieces have inspired countless people throughout the centuries, and Coleman Barks's exquisite renderings of the thirteenth-century Persian mystic are widely considered the definitive versions for our time. Barks's translations capture the inward exploration and intensity that characterize Rumi's poetry, making this unique voice of mysticism and desire contemporary while remaining true to the original poems. In this volume readers will encounter the essence of Sufism's insights into the experience of divine love, wisdom, and the nature of both humanity and God.

Rumi's Little Book of Life: The Garden of the Soul, the Heart, and the Spirit

by Rumi, Maryam Mafi (Translator), Azima Melita Kolin (Translator)

From Madonna to Deepak Chopra, celebrities have been recording and embracing Rumi's poetry for the past two decades, creating a resurgence of interest in this 13th century Sufi mystic. Rumi's Little Book of Life is a beautiful collection of 196 poems by Rumi, previously unavailable in English. Translated by native Persian speakers, Maryam Mafi and Azima Melita Kolin, this collection will appeal to Rumi lovers everywhere. This collection of mystical poetry focuses on one of life's core issues: coming to grips with the inner life. During the course of life, each of us is engaged on an inner journey. Rumi's Little Book of Life is a guidebook for that journey. The poetry is a companion for those who consciously enter the inner world to explore the gardens within--out of the everyday "world of dust"--through an ascending hierarchy that restores one's soul to the heart; the heart of the spirit; and in finding spirit, transcending all.

A Year with Rumi: Daily Readings

by Rumi, Coleman Barks

Coleman Barks has played a central role in making the Sufi mystic Rumi the most popular poet in the world. A Year with Rumi brings together 365 of Barks's elegant and beautiful translations of Rumi's greatest poems, including fifteen never-before-published poems. Barks includes an Introduction that sets Rumi in his context and an Afterword musing on the poetry of the mysterious and the sacred. Join Coleman Barks and Rumi for a year-long journey into the mystical and sacred within and without. Join them in recognizing and embracing the divine in the sublime, in the ordinary, and in us all.

The Ruins of the Heart: Selected Lyric Poetry of Jelaluddin Rumi

by Rumi, Kabir Helminski (Translator), Edmund Helminski (Translator)

Western culture has no convenient category for Melvlana Jelaluddin Rumi. In the Islamic world, he is held in the highest esteem not only as a literary figure, but as a saint whose personal example inspired the founding of a major religious order, and as a philosopher whose elaboration of the cosmic sense of Love has had a significant cultural impact.

The Book of Rumi: 105 Stories and Fables that Illumine, Delight, and Inform

by Rumi, Narguess Farzad (Foreword), Maryam Mafi (Translator)

Philip Pullman, author of 'His Dark Materials' trilogy, has remarked that "after nourishment, shelter, and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world." This new collection of Rumi stories fills that need. This fresh prose translation of 105 short teaching stories by Rumi, which form the core of the six-volume Masnavi, explores the hidden spiritual aspects of everyday experience. Rumi transforms the seemingly mundane events of daily life into profound Sufi teaching moments. These prose gems open the mystical portal to the world of the ancient mystic.

Philosophy:

Beyond Good and Evil

by Friedrich Nietzsche, R.J. Hollingdale (Translator), Michael Tanner (Introduction)

Friedrich Nietzsche's Beyond Good and Evil is translated from the German by R.J. Hollingdale with an introduction by Michael Tanner in Penguin Classics. Beyond Good and Evil confirmed Nietzsche's position as the towering European philosopher of his age. The work dramatically rejects the tradition of Western thought with its notions of truth and God, good and evil. Nietzsche demonstrates that the Christian world is steeped in a false piety and infected with a 'slave morality'. With wit and energy, he turns from this critique to a philosophy that celebrates the present and demands that the individual imposes their own 'will to power' upon the world.

The Aleph and Other Stories

by Jorge Luis Borges, Andrew Hurley (Translator)

Full of philosophical puzzles and supernatural surprises, these stories contain some of Borges's most fully realized human characters. With uncanny insight, he takes us inside the minds of an unrepentant Nazi, an imprisoned Mayan priest, fanatical Christian theologians, a woman plotting vengeance on her father’s “killer,” and a man awaiting his assassin in a Buenos Aires guest house. This volume also contains the hauntingly brief vignettes about literary imagination and personal identity collected in The Maker, which Borges wrote as failing eyesight and public fame began to undermine his sense of self.

Ethics

by Baruch Spinoza, Edwin M. Curley (Translator),

Stuart Hampshire (Introduction), Edwin Curley (Translation)

Published shortly after his death, the Ethics is undoubtedly Spinoza's greatest work - an elegant, fully cohesive cosmology derived from first principles, providing a coherent picture of reality, and a guide to the meaning of an ethical life. Following a logical step-by-step format, it defines, in turn, the nature of God, the mind, the emotions, human bondage to the emotions, and the power of understanding - moving from a consideration of the eternal, to speculate upon humanity's place in the natural order, the nature of freedom and the path to attainable happiness. A powerful work of elegant simplicity, the Ethics is a brilliantly insightful consideration of the possibility of redemption through intense thought and philosophical reflection. The Ethics is presented in the standard translation of the work by Edwin Curley.

The Astonishing Power of Emotions

by Esther Hicks, Jerry Hicks

This Leading Edge book by Esther and Jerry Hicks, who present the teachings of the Non-Physical entity Abraham, will help you understand the emotions that you’ve been experiencing all of your life. Instead of the out-of-control, knee-jerk reactions that most people have to their ever-changing life experience, this work will put those responses into a broader context.

The Waste Books

by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

R.J. Hollingdale (Translator)

German scientist and man of letters Georg Christoph Lichtenberg was an 18th-century polymath: an experimental physicist, an astronomer, a mathematician, a practising critic of both art and literature. He is most celebrated, however, for the casual notes and aphorisms that he collected in what he called his Waste Books. With unflagging intelligence and encyclopedic curiosity, Lichtenberg wittily deflates the pretensions of learning and society, examines a range of philosophical questions, and tracks his own thoughts down hidden pathways to disconcerting and sometimes hilarious conclusions.

The Book of Disquiet

by Fernando Pessoa, Richard Zenith (Translator), Orhan Tuncel (Translator)

Fernando Pessoa was many writers in one. He attributed his prolific writings to a wide range of alternate selves, each of which had a distinct biography, ideology. and horoscope. When he died in 1935, Pessoa left behind a trunk filled with unfinished and unpublished writings, among which were the remarkable pages that make up his posthumous masterpiece, The Book of Disquiet, an astonishing work that, in George Steiner's words, "gives to Lisbon the haunting spell of Joyce's Dublin or Kafka's Prague."

Fiction:

The Secret History

by Donna Tartt

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last - inexorably - into evil

If We Were Villains

by M.L. Rio

Oliver Marks has just served ten years in jail - for a murder he may or may not have committed. On the day he's released, he's greeted by the man who put him in prison. Detective Colborne is retiring, but before he does, he wants to know what really happened a decade ago.

As one of seven young actors studying Shakespeare at an elite arts college, Oliver and his friends play the same roles onstage and off: hero, villain, tyrant, temptress, ingenue, extra. But when the casting changes and the secondary characters usurp the stars, the plays spill dangerously over into life, and one of them is found dead. The rest face their greatest acting challenge yet: convincing the police, and themselves, that they are blameless

The Song of Achilles

by Madeline Miller

Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the court of King Peleus and his perfect son Achilles. By all rights, their paths should never cross, but Achilles takes the shamed prince as his friend, and as they grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine their bond blossoms into something deeper - despite the displeasure of Achilles' mother Thetis, a cruel sea goddess. But then word comes that Helen of Sparta has been kidnapped. Torn between love and fear for his friend, Patroclus journeys with Achilles to Troy, little knowing that the years that follow will test everything they hold dear.

A Series of Unfortunate Events (9/13)

by Lemony Snicket Brett Helquist (Illustrator)

Dear Reader, I'm sorry to say that the book you are holding in your hands is extremely unpleasant. It tells an unhappy tale about three very unlucky children. Even though they are charming and clever, the Baudelaire siblings lead lives filled with misery and woe. From the very first page of this book when the children are at the beach and receive terrible news, continuing on through the entire story, disaster lurks at their heels. One might say they are magnets for misfortune. In this short book alone, the three youngsters encounter a greedy and repulsive villain, itchy clothing, a disastrous fire, a plot to steal their fortune, and cold porridge for breakfast. It is my sad duty to write down these unpleasant tales, but there is nothing stopping you from putting this book down at once and reading something happy, if you prefer that sort of thing. With all due respect, Lemony Snicket

Good Omens

by Terry Pratchett, Neil Gaiman

‘Armageddon only happens once, you know. They don’t let you go around again until you get it right.’ People have been predicting the end of the world almost from its very beginning, so it’s only natural to be sceptical when a new date is set for Judgement Day. But what if, for once, the predictions are right, and the apocalypse really is due to arrive next Saturday, just after tea? You could spend the time left drowning your sorrows, giving away all your possessions in preparation for the rapture, or laughing it off as (hopefully) just another hoax. Or you could just try to do something about it. It’s a predicament that Aziraphale, a somewhat fussy angel, and Crowley, a fast-living demon now finds themselves in. They’ve been living amongst Earth’s mortals since The Beginning and, truth be told, have grown rather fond of the lifestyle and, in all honesty, are not actually looking forward to the coming Apocalypse. And then there’s the small matter that someone appears to have misplaced the Antichrist…

His Dark Materials

(#1 - 3)

by Philip Pullman

Northern Lights introduces Lyra, an orphan, who lives in a parallel universe in which science, theology and magic are entwined. Lyra's search for a kidnapped friend uncovers a sinister plot involving stolen children and turns into a quest to understand a mysterious phenomenon called Dust. In The Subtle Knife she is joined on her journey by Will, a boy who possesses a knife that can cut windows between worlds. As Lyra learns the truth about her parents and her prophesied destiny, the two young people are caught up in a war against celestial powers that ranges across many worlds and leads to a thrilling conclusion in The Amber Spyglass.

The epic story Pullman tells is not only a spellbinding adventure featuring armoured polar bears, magical devices, witches and daemons, it is also an audacious and profound re-imagining of Milton's Paradise Lost. An utterly entrancing blend of metaphysical speculation and bravura storytelling, HIS DARK MATERIALS is a monumental and enduring achievement

The Hobbit + Lord of the Rings

by J. R. R. Tolkien

This four-volume, boxed set contains J.R.R. Tolkien's epic masterworks The Hobbit and the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings (The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers, and The Return of the King).

In The Hobbit, Bilbo Baggins is whisked away from his comfortable, unambitious life in Hobbiton by the wizard Gandalf and a company of dwarves. He finds himself caught up in a plot to raid the treasure hoard of Smaug the Magnificent, a large and very dangerous dragon.

The Lord of the Rings tells of the great quest undertaken by Frodo Baggins and the Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf the wizard; the hobbits Merry, Pippin, and Sam; Gimli the dwarf; Legolas the Elf; Boromir of Gondor; and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider. J.R.R. Tolkien's three-volume masterpiece is at once a classic myth and a modern fairy tale—a story of high and heroic adventure set in the unforgettable landscape of Middle-earth.

Graphic Novels/Humour:

DoroHeDoro (vol 23/23)

by Q. Hayashida

It tells the story of the amnesiac reptilian-headed Caiman, working together with his friend Nikaido to recover his memories and survive in a strange and violent world.

Tokyo Ghoul

by Sui Ishida

I mean... that's a good number of books to start with. Mind you this is just the English list. I should put up an update with the Arabic book list for 2021 soon...

If you have any ideas about any of the books listed or have any particular recommendations, do share whatever you have in mind!

Quiet Girl in a Noisy World: An Introvert's Story

by Debbie Tung

Sweet, funny, and quietly poignant, Debbie Tung’s comics reveal the ups and downs of coming of age as an introvert. This illustrated gift book of short comics illuminates author Debbie Tung's experience as an introvert in an extrovert’s world. Presented in a loose narrative style that can be read front to back or dipped into at one’s leisure, the book spans three years of Debbie's life, from the end of college to the present day. In these early years of adulthood, Debbie slowly but finally discovers there is a name for her lifelong need to be alone: she’s an introvert.

This Book Is Gray

by Lindsay Ward

Gray just wants to be included. But the other colours are always leaving him out. So he decides to create his own project: an all-grey book. Once upon a time, there lived a wolf, a kitten, and a hippo… Gray just knows it’s going to be perfect. But as he adds page after page, the Primary and Secondary colours show up…and they aren’t quite so complimentary. A book within a book, this colourful tale explores the ideas of fitting in, appreciating others, and looking at things from another perspective and also uses personality and wit to introduce basic colour concepts.

I Will Judge You by Your Bookshelf

by Grant Snider

A look at the culture and fanaticism of book lovers, from beloved New York Times illustrator Grant Snider It’s no secret, but we are judged by our bookshelves. We learn to read at an early age, and as we grow older we shed our beloved books for new ones. But some of us surround ourselves with books. We collect them, decorate with them, are inspired by them, and treat our books as sacred objects. In this lighthearted collection of one- and two-page comics, writer-artist Grant Snider explores bookishness in all its forms, and the love of writing and reading, building on the beloved literary comics featured on his website, Incidental Comics.

Strange Planet

(Strange Planet #1, #2)

by Nathan W. Pyle

I feel more attractive. Honestly, you are. It’s the star damage. I CRAVE STAR DAMAGE. Straight from the mind of New York Times bestselling author Nathan W. Pyle comes an adorable and profound universe in pink, blue, green, and purple. Based on the phenomenally popular Instagram of the same name, Strange Planet covers a full life cycle of the planet’s inhabitants, including milestones such as: The Emergence Day Being Gains a Sibling The Being Family Attains a Beast The Formal Education of a Being Celebration of Special Days Being Begins a Vocation The Beings at Home Health Status of a Being The Hobbies of a Being The Extended Family of the Being The Being Reflects on Life While Watching the Planet Rotate With dozens of never-before-seen illustrations in addition to old favourites, this book offers a sweet and hilarious look at a distant world not all that unlike our own.

Book Love

by Debbie Tung

Bookworms rejoice! These charming comics capture exactly what it feels like to be head-over-heels for hardcovers. And paperbacks! And ebooks! And bookstores! And libraries! Book Love is a gift book of comics tailor-made for tea-sipping, spine-sniffing, book-hoarding bibliophiles. Debbie Tung’s comics are humorous and instantly recognizable—making readers laugh while precisely conveying the thoughts and habits of book nerds. Book Love is the ideal gift to let a book-lover know they’re understood and appreciated.