Unfinished Lives

1. The Rebel Sell: Why the culture can't be jammed, Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter
2. The Complete Grimm's Fairy Tales, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm
3. Rabbit, Run, John Updike
4. Everything is Illuminated, Jonathan Safran Foer
5. Fast Food Nation, Eric Schlosser
6. Middlemarch, George Eliot
7. The Code of the Woosters, P. G. Wodehouse
8. The Alchemist, Paulo Coelho
9. Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy
10. Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World, Jack Weatherford
11. Let Us Compare Mythologies, Leonard Cohen
12. The Sandman: The Wake, Neil Gaiman
13. The Sandman: Season of Mists, Neil Gaiman
14. The Dark Knight Returns, Frank Miller
15. The Sandman: The Doll's House, Neil Gaiman
16. The Sandman: The Kindly Ones, Neil Gaiman
17. Underworld, Don Delillo
18. The Sandman: Fables and Reflections, Neil Gaiman
19. The Sandman: Brief Lives, Neil Gaiman
20. Robert Kennedy and His Times, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr

There's 5 other Sandman books which I haven't picked up yet, but which I'm sure I will sometime over the next month.

It's really an incredible achievement, though one wonders if it might have been better or worse with a more consistent art crew. Sandman is the only major comic from this period that I can think of with a rotating cast of artists; many of the others were both written and drawn by the same individual (Maus, Love and Rockets, Cerebus, Sin City), and while Alan Moore worked with different artists, his stand-alone works (Watchmen and V for Vendetta) are drawn by the same artist from beginning to end. I suppose, though, that as Sandman concerns itself with the Lord of Dreams, and dreams are always in flux, the rotating cast of artists could be taken as another commentary on the world that Gaiman created.

I mean, I'm sure he just happened to use different artists for each storyline, but it's possible that he might have thought it out a bit more explicitly like that.

The RFK book I'm really looking forward to. Early on, Schlesinger (who actually passed away a day or two ago) makes the point that what is so poignant about RFK's death is that he was still in the process of becoming, a process which he had been going through his whole life. There are glimmers of the man he was at the time and whom he was becoming, perhaps most famously in the Indianapolis speech (and if you don't know what I'm taking about, I demand that you watch the linked video, and promise you will not regret it), but we will never know whether or not he would have faltered in the years to come, what mistakes he might have made and how he might have responded to them. In some ways, perhaps he was too good, too earnest, too honest of a man to live; the perfect symbol of an era which started with such promise and somehow, some way, lost its focus, as its leaders dropped by the wayside, one by one.