Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. I am not a fan of comics in general; I did not grow up reading comic books or graphic novels. I usually find the storytelling confusing and the artwork hokey.

But Jeremy and I have been reading some of the ones we probably should have read in high school or college lately, and so far this is by far my favorite. I’m surprised, because I have not seen a Batman movie since they stopped starring Michael Keaton, and I mostly do not care about super heroes, and I’m fairly immune to the romanticizing of vigilantes in any kind of contemporary setting.

But I loved this. I want to read more. (I’m also reading Watchmen, and not liking it as much.)

You’re an Animal, Vikovitz!, translated by John Casey. I don’t read very much fiction at all these days, and what I have been reading has all been pretty straightforward, so this odd little book wins the title of “Weirdest Book I’ve Read Since Grad School.” The author is a biologist, and this is a collection of stories about a character named Viskovitz who is reincarnated (well, maybe; I think the last story tells us all we know about what’s happening to Viskovitz, but “reincarnated” is as good a word as any) over and over in the bodies of different animals. He is always surrounded by the same collection of souls — his nemeses, Zucotic, Petrovic, and Lopez, as well as his two loves, Ljuba and Jana. Jana is always the one he ought to love; Ljuba is the femme fatale, his mirror image (sometimes literally), the spark for their mutual destruction.

The stories are hilarious, raunchy, and sometimes stupefyingly weird. The reproductive drives of various animals are posited as metaphors for human behaviors and urges, but even though the imagery is far from subtle, the metaphors never annoyed me. Probably because the book is so funny.

An excerpt:

The situation was rendered still more equivocal due to the periodic sex changes that we hermaphroditic sponges have to undergo. It wasn’t easy for me to accept the fact that my father was the wife of his mother, that his daughter (my sister) was his grandfather and his grandmother was also his brother (my uncle). These relations were becoming even more morbid because of the way our bodies were piled together — it was difficult to figure out where you ended and where your immediate family began. And it wasn’t easy to develop a healthy personality when the canals of your flagellate chambers were held in common with an invaginated mother, incestuous sisters and a bisexual father. When the only anatomical features on which you could construct an identity were the gastral cavity and the aperture of your osculum.

The tragedy of being a vegetable was that you couldn’t commit suicide. The advantage of being a sponge was that you could drown your sorrows.

The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. The entire time I was reading this I kept thinking that it should really be taught in high school English classes, or possibly even junior high. Then after I finished it I read some reviews and it turns out that everybody younger than I am has already read this, because it was assigned in high school. So, uh, nice work, high schools of America!

I am out of the habit of talking about books so I don’t have a lot to say except that I really loved this collection. You’ve all read it anyway, and written your tenth grade research paper on the idea of memory as an index of social and individual identity, so why do you care what I think?

When We Were Orphans. This was my second Ishiguro novel and I liked this one much better than The Remains of the Day, although I concede that Remains is probably the better book. But detectives are more interesting than butlers, even when the detectives are just as lacking in self-awareness as the butlers are.

I really enjoyed watching the story unfold here, despite the fact that the protagonist and narrator creeped me out a bit from the outset. I got a whiff of Charles Kinbote from him from the very first pages, although it became clear after a while that he wasn’t quite as crazy as all that. Still, I am a sucker for a good detached and deluded narrator.

This was the first adult novel I finished in non-audio form in about a year, I think. That is a depressing statistic, particularly if I confess that I only finished one or two audio books in 2008. And possibly they were all written by Lemony Snicket.

I am going to try once again to resurrect this goddamned blog. I’m getting quite a bit of reading done right now, and I’ve undertaken a bit of a project: I am going through my pile of unread books, which numbers in the hundreds (seriously, there may be over a thousand books in this house that I have not read), in more or less alphabetical order. “More or less” because I don’t have to finish all of the As, I just have to read an A author, then move on to a B, etc. I have my books shelved in a way that makes this fairly easy: post-19th century fiction is all shelved together in alphabetical order, but there is nowhere near enough room on the shelves for all the books, so the ones I haven’t read are stacked in front of the shelved books. (Since I have too many books, possibly I should also undertake to ditch one or two every time I finish one.)

I am allowed to take breaks for pre-19th century fiction or even nonfiction, but I am not allowed to buy anything new except for book club. And then only if I can’t get it from the library.

We’ll see how this goes. Currently working on “Alexie, Sherman,” which was a great first choice.