The Tree Collectors

 The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession by Amy Stewart, 336 pages.

This collection follows fifty individuals who are, in some way or another, obsessed with trees. Some of them are obsessed with having a wide and diverse collection, others with a single species of tree. Amy Stewart breaks this collection down into approximate categories of collecting motivations, although as she notes people's reasons for collecting trees are nearly as diverse as the collectors themselves. This book is beautifully illustrated, and presents an engrossing global record of collectors.

When I first picked this up I was expecting more of a historical record of naturalists, but this is instead (mostly) a collection of people the author actually managed to interview, with a few historical naturalists thrown in. I also really wasn't expecting how lovely and plentiful the illustrations are. This is a book of bite-sized little vignettes that nevertheless managed to pull me in entirely and create just a touch of arboreal obsession in me as well. I would definitely recommend this as a casual read and a peak into a world most people are completely unaware of. 

Boundless

Boundless by Jillian Tamaki, 248 pages.
The extraordinary Canadian graphic artist and storyteller gives us a collection of short stories that are quite different in tone and texture from her previous works and collaborations, Skim, This One Summer, and Supermutant Magic Academy.
Where those (the first two done in collaboration with her cousin, Mariko) were aimed more at a YA audience, these stories are marketed towards adults. And where earlier works had characters with some hopefulness about their futures, the stories here have characters who look back, if not with regret, then with a sense that some of their earlier optimism had been misplaced, whether it's a woman who finds herself growing smaller every day, the producer of a once popular pornographic sit-com looking back on the show's heyday, or the members of an odd collective / cult who had initially bonded over a shared obsession with a strange music file, the characters tell their tales with hints of melancholy and nostalgia. Very engaging and a very good read.

This is a Book

This is a Book by Demetri Martin  268 pp.

Stand-up comedian, Martin (of Comedy Central's Important Things with Demetri Martin) presents a collection of drawings, musings, essays, short stories and random weirdness aka "conceptual pieces." Parts are laugh-out-loud funny, others mildly amusing, and a few are just odd. This is a quick, fun to read book. I admit I wasn't familiar with the author at all and selected this book on the basis of a review. I close with this tidbit from the book:

I wish
This poem
Were longer.

There,
That's better.