James Charlton (2) (1939–2022)

Huh, who would ever have guessed I would like a book of cartoons about books? I had to reread it, when I accidentally pulled it off the shelf along with the cat humor, before I could reshelve it. Fortitude reading is one of my favorite cartoons ever.

Personal copy

A 1988 collection of cartoons about books, reading, writing, publishing, and literature. A lot of these are New Yorker cartoons. I must confess, I've never been a huge fan of New Yorker cartoons. They often seem to... kind of forget to be funny. But there are enough cartoons in here that gave me a smile or a chuckle to make it well worth the brief amount of time it took me to flip through it, and certainly enough to make it worth the dollar I paid for it at the last Friends of the Library sale.

Pretty funny collection of insults from one writer about another. Some of them are sharply on point, others just mean-spirited. Ezra Pound comes across as a boor, which I guess he was. Oscar Wilde features prominently. Not enough from Gore Vidal, but to be fair, most of those quoted are long since dead.

I purchased this book for graduate school class called Boy Readers, Boy Writers, and found it to be quite appealing. I shared it with both children and adults, and both enjoyed reading about the obscure, quirky, forgotten or little-known facts of the baseball world of the past. The author brings in outdated and modern baseball vocabulary on the outskirts of the pages, and offers information and stories about famous players, making it as educational as it is entertaining. The illustrations show more almost made it feel as though it were a graphic novel, which would make it especially appealing to those children who tend to favor that genre. I think this would be an ideal book for middle or upper level elementary students, in particular boys, who may be hesitant to read lengthy novels, but would like the meatiness and easy-to-read format of this informational text. show less