Back to catch-up on books.

• Old Goriot by Honore de Balzac. I last read this in college and reread it for The Usual Suspects book club, but there hasn't been a lot of discussion about it. (Possibly we're all burnt out from the Faulkner.) (Checked out of the library.)
  
• Silly Daddy by Joe Chiapetta. (Library.)
  
• Runaways, vol. 2: Teenage Wasteland by Brian K. Vaughan, Adrian Alphona & Takeshi Miyazawa. I quite enjoy Vaughan's series Y: The Last Man and decided it was time to start looking at his other work.
  
• Dead Memory by Marc-Antoine Mathieu. (Library.)
  
• Captain Marvel, vol. 4: Odyssey by Peter David, Aaron Lopresti, Pat Quinn, & Keith Giffen. I enjoyed this comic & would have liked to have seen where David would have gone with it, but apparently sales weren't good enough to continue publishing it (although they were good enough to collect the final storyline).
  
• Mister Blank: Exhaustive Collection by Chris Hicks.
  
• I Don't Love You!: The Best of Migraine Boy by Greg Fiering. (Library.)
  
• Video Girl Ai, vol. 1: Preproduction by Masakazu Katsura. More manga. (Library.)
  
• The Essential Starchild, Book 1 by James Owen.
  
• The Remarkable Worlds of Professor Phineas B. Fuddle by Boaz Yakin & Erez Yakin. A rather fun steampunkish type adventure, but the art really didn't work for me. The pages are very busy, with lots of details, and the whole thing feels very flat. There's nothing that draws your eyes to what's important on the page, so you have to look around, figuring out what you should be paying attention to. In part I blame the colorist (Angus McKee), because there's no shading; it's all flat, and because pretty much all the colors are the same darkness. There isn't really anything to distinguish the foregrounds from the backgrounds, and it all blends together. This is odd, because McKee has done some wonderful color work in the past.
  
• Batman: Broken City by Brian Azzarello & Eduardo Risso. (Library.)
  
• American Elf: James Kochalka's Collected Sketchbook Diaries. Every day, Kochalka draws a cartoon (usually 4 panels) about some aspect of his day. The book collects 5 years' worth of these cartoons. When I've read Kochalka's work in the past, it never really grabbed me (although I did like it enough to keep checking his books out of the library), but I really enjoyed this. Each individual cartoon isn't much, but the accumulation of them works very well. As you read, you slowly build up a sense of what Kochalka and his life are like. Very good. (Library.)

Still not caught up, but I'm getting there.