Saw lots and lots of friends, including Jill Thompson and Brian Azzarello (we ate at Katsu, which is still, I'm happy to say, one of the very best Sushi restaurants in the US, and where the owner showed us lots of Geoff Darrow drawings) and I got to give a housewarming present to Audrey Niffenegger. I did the drive to Chicago in the Mini with ease, the drive back, er, less so. But very glad that I did.
Right. Much writing to do today, but Google tells me of many new reviews, and just so they're linked to...
Dave Itzkoff reviews Absolute Sandman and Fragile Things in the New York Times. This has a delightful Yuko Shimizu illustration of me upside down being caressed by strange spotted things coming out of a book (tentacles of jam, I suspect), and contains the marvellous sentence,
In the first 20 issues of the series collected in this lavish hardcover edition,
one can already see an author with a voracious appetite for literature and an
accompanying taste for the occult, prone to frequent references to high and low
culture, capable of rendering truly brutal acts of sadism, and fond of cats.
It's good to live in a world in which SF and comics get full page reviews in the New York Times Book Review. We've come a long way.
(And I loved discovering Yuko Shimizu's website, from the dancing pandas to the Letters of Desire book)
There's a lovely John Burns review of Fragile Things in the Globe and Mail. (Nice to see someone reading "Bitter Grounds" properly, too.) Steve Bolhafner reviews Fragile Things in Saint Louis, and Michael Berry reviews it in San Francisco. And there's a review of it at Bookreporter.com http://bookreporter.com/reviews2/0060515228.asp.