It amuses me that I seem to have made a big deal out of deciding what book to bring on the trip. The earliest contenders were the remaining chapters of C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy-- I recently finished Out of the Silent Planet, enjoyed it, but don't have Perelandra or That Hideous Strength. Then it fell out of favor because it's two books. A good candidate was Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon, which at 700 pages will probably hold me for the whole trip. But now I can't find the edition I like. Maybe the copies were brought to the book fair. Another good candidate was my big-ass hardcover collecting all of Douglas Adams's Hitchhiker's Guide books. Especially since I finally saw the teaser trailer, I figured I should get to reading it already. But it, too, got axed when I realized I don't want to be carrying around a big-ass hardcover everywhere I go. And it won't fit snugly in my bag. So am I back to Necronomicon? What is most likely is I will shrug, say "Fuck it," and just read one of the Iain Banks books Erwin gave me to get autographed.

Now that I'm about to leave I suddenly notice all these books I want to buy. There's 2 Guardino Blacksad albums at PowerBooks. A Gahan Wilson graphic novel that looks interesting. At Fully Booked, the new edition of Paul Karasik and Dave Mazzuchelli's adaptation of Paul Auster's City of Glass. New copies of Paul Auster's City of Glass, as well as Oracle Night, which I never even heard of. Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. Joe Sacco's Notes from a Defeatist. Posy Simmonds's Literary Life. Peter Kuper's adaptation of Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis. Neil Jordan's first novel in 10 years, Shade. The Collected Fiction of Neil Jordan, collecting 3 of his 5 novels. By Chuck Palahniuk: Fugitives & Refugees, and Non-Fiction. Michael Chabon's A Modern World & Other Stories. The new Steve Martin novel. Grrah!

By the way, they also have new copies of Chris Ware's Quimby the Mouse and the McSweeney's 13, the comics issue.

Did you know that Jude Law has a tattoo of Rorschach from Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons' Watchmen? Just a little geek factoid for ya. He wants in on Darren Aronofsky's film adaptation.