Books. I Read Them.

I read.  Books.  It's sad, I know, but this is what happens when you don't have a television or a home internet connection or an X-Box (or a wife or kids, etc...).  Right now, I'm in between two books.

I don't own either of these books.  I got One More Thing:  Stories and Other Stories by BJ Novak from the library and I borrowed The Gold Bug Variations (by Richard Powers) from an erudite acquaintance.

I don't own that many books, but the best way to determine whether or not a book is mine is to open it up and take a look at the first few pages.  If you see a quick little Creek-flavored doodle, it was probably part of my library at one point.  Want to see some examples..?

Franny and Zooey, by JD Salinger, opens with a scene wherein the titular Franny sits down for food and drinks with her boyfriend.  They are not a great couple.

Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction is another one of Salinger's books that I own.  The short story Seymour taught me the joy of parentheses and the short story Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters features, in the supporting cast, a diminutive fellow that I sketched on the title page.

John Gardner's Freddy's Book is about king makers and strong men and the Devil.  Here's a drawing that was supposed to look like Bishop Brask, one of the book's main characters:

One the most disturbing characters in all of (the) literature (that I've read) is Judge Holden, from Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian.  I probably should've drawn him on the title page, but instead I did a drawing of the scene wherein one man (named Jackson) decapitates another man (also named Jackson) while everyone is sitting around a fire.

George Orwell's 1984 is one of those books that is constantly referenced in conversation, in the news, and in wider popular culture.  Here's my quick take on the scene in which the protagonist reads a note he's been given.

I like to read about early church history and Chadwick's The Early Church is probably the best book I've encountered on the subject.  I've always liked Simeon Stylites (390-459AD, Syria), an early Christian who decided that the best way to follow Jesus was to climb up on top of a pillar and sit there for nearly 40 years...

The Christians As The Romans Saw Them is another good book about the early church.  It gives you some idea of how Christians and their practices appeared in the context of larger Roman society.

There's a chance that I'll never be able to check Go To Rome And See Michelangelo's La Pieta off of my List of Things to Eventually Get Around To Somehow Doing, but I've got this travel guide book, Rome Day By Day, just in case...

CS Lewis' The Screwtape Letters is a book I've read again and again.  At some point, I attempted to depict the narrator on the title page and ended up making him look like a buffoonish, obese goblin...

Confederacy of Dunces.  I cannot recommend this book strongly enough.  It is far and away the funniest book anyone is ever likely to encounter.  Here's my take on the protagonist, Ignatius J. Reilly...

The Souls of Mixed Folk, a book that discusses depictions of mixed-race people in popular culture, has an entire section dedicated to my now-defunct comic strip Maintaining.  I've drawn Marcus, the strip's protagonist, on the title page.

My favorite artist is a cartoonist named Juanjo Guarnido.  He can draw anything.  Every few years, he teams up with a writer named Diaz Canales and puts out another book about an anthropomorphic cat detective named Blacksad.  This story, Amarillo, is in Spanish, so I can't quite tell what's going on.  But the artwork is beautiful.  My doodle, somewhat less than beautiful...

Invisible Man is just behind Job and the Gospel According to John (and right next to Moby Dick) on my list of favorite books.  Here's a quick drawing based on that scene in The Golden Day (a kind of brothel/bar) where Supercargo is kicking men down a flight of stairs:

...speaking of Moby Dick, I attempted to sketch a whaling vessel on the title page of that book.

Have you read Grendel?  I read it because someone told me not to read it and I've been a fan ever since.  It's a retelling of the Beowulf story from the perspective of an existentialist, debatably psychotic creature named Grendel.  Here's the scene where Grendel encounters an old blind priest and pretends to be a god...

Lone Wolf and Cub, the story of a travelling assassin and his infant son, is about as transcendent as a comic can get.  The black and white artwork is calligraphic and melancholy and the story(and stories) is(are) tragic from start to finish.

Peter de Seve is an illustrator I admire.  He's great with watercolors and is probably best known for his occasional New Yorker magazine covers.  I drew a frog in A Sketchy Past:  The Art Of Peter De Seve.

I bought the collected hardcover editions of Calvin and Hobbes back in 2007 when I was still a working cartoonist.  Bill Watterson is the Michael Jordan of cartooning.

Some of you might be saying, "What?!  You drew pictures in a Bill Watterson book?!!?  Sacrilegious!!!  You might as well just go ahead and draw in the Bible!!!"  I'm way ahead of you...

My Bible has about 5 or 6 thick blank pages in the front, pages so well suited for ink that I went ahead and did fully-rendered ink wash drawings on the pages.  I've only done three thus far.  You can see Jonah above.  There's also Job...

...and Shamgar...

I'm not sure what I'll do on the remaining pages.  Probably the death of Absalom and then St. Paul amongst the Athenians...

I have more books with doodles, but I think I'll save them for one of those weeks when I don't have anything else to post on my blog for all of you fine people.

Cheers.