311. A Day at the Beach by Jim Toomey. Another Sherman's Lagoon collection. (Teena's book.)
     
312. Finder, vol. 7: The Rescuers by Carla Speed McNeil. Amazing science fiction comics here. But the extrapolation is from sociology & anthropology rather than physics & chemistry. McNeil calls it "aboriginal sf." I am constantly amazed by this series. So much so that, while I would normally grouse about the fact that this collection came out so soon after the last issue that is collected in the book (the next issue has not yet been published), I am just so happy to have the story all in one place that it doesn't bother me at all. (Also, Lightspeed Press is {as far as I can tell} a one-woman show, so I'm willing to cut her a lot more slack than I am Marvel.) This collection has been reviewed at Salon, so check it out.
     
313. The Probability Broach: The Graphic Novel by L. Neil Smith & Scott Bieser. This is libertarian propaganda; there's really no other way of describing it. It could have been an interesting little alternate history story, but I found the periodic lectures (on the evilness of government, on the necessity of arming anybody & everybody down to age 6 or 7, etc.) to be distracting. While the phrase "enlightened self-interest" never appears in the book, that does appear to be the operating principle behind the philosophy presented. Unfortunately, the author doesn't seem to realize that the former part is a lot harder to achieve than the latter. Also, he doesn't appear to acknowledge that people don't always act rationally. Children and adolescents with guns do not make for a stable society. The trouble with utopias is that the people who create them tend to forget about aspects of human nature that don't fit convienently into their plan. (Checked out of the library.)
     
314. YuYu Hakusho, vol. 6: The Dark Tournament by Yoshihiro Togashi. Time once again to complain about Amazon's crappy sorting for manga titles. What happened to "advanced search"? I'd really like to be able to weed out manga translations in languages other than English. Hell, I'd be happy to sort through the French & German versions if I thought I'd find more than a couple English volumes of the title I'm looking for. And it seems to be a crap shoot as to which titles are fully represented in English and which aren't.

That's all for now.