Today’s stack features three reprints of older books—well, some older than others! There’s an old picture book that’s actually new to me, and then two lovely editions of some favorites.
Disclosure: I received review copies of these titles. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent booksellers!
Who Needs Donuts? by Mark Alan Stamaty
I don’t typically write about picture books these days, but every so often I get sent a book that I just feel like I need to share. Who Needs Donuts? was originally published in 1973, but I actually had never heard of it—in fact, I confess that I wasn’t even familiar with the author/illustrator either—so I’m glad this new reprint came across my desk.
It’s a truly bizarre story: Sam’s a little kid who has a good life, but what he really wants is donuts, “not just a few but hundreds and thousands and millions.” So, he hops on his tricycle and goes to the city, and meets a guy with a wagon full of donuts. Honestly, this guy is pretty creepy looking and I don’t think the takeaway is that you should trust smiling men when they tell you they have a warehouse full of donuts, but that’s exactly what happens at first. The story doesn’t end there, though: there’s true love, a daring rescue, and a valuable lesson learned by the end of it. I mean, sort of.
The black-and-white illustrations remind me a little of Gahan Wilson, a little of Shel Silverstein, but they’re jam-packed with details. The city scenes in particular are almost overwhelming, and you could spend hours just reading all the tiny signs everywhere, along with the serpentine dialogue bubbles that appear with some of the characters. It’s weird and a little disturbing and oddly compelling, and I don’t know how I never heard of it—so now I’ve told you, so you can go look it up!
The Hobbit by J.R.R. Tolkien, illustrated by Tove Jansson
Okay, presumably I don’t need to explain to you what The Hobbit is since you’re reading a site called GeekDad. Plus, The Lord of the Rings has become a media juggernaut in the past couple decades thanks to the film versions, TV series, and games, so it’s hard to imagine anyone not having at least some passing knowledge of it.
What you might not have known is that in 1962 there was a Swedish edition of The Hobbit illustrated by Tove Jansson, the creator of the Moomins. Now, there’s finally an English edition of Bilbo’s adventures featuring her illustrations! While there aren’t any Moomins in the book, it’s a lot of fun to see Jansson’s take on Gandalf, Bilbo, trolls turning to stone, and—of course—Gollum (who is a lot larger than the versions we usually see). The endpapers include Tolkien’s own familiar map, and a color illustration of Smaug the dragon terrorizing the city. The rest of the book includes a lot of small spot drawings and sketches, and the occasional full-page illustration.
The book itself is a large hardcover with a library binding and no dustjacket, and is quite lovely. It also has a bookmark ribbon. If you’re looking for a gift for a Tolkien fan in your life, this might be an excellent option.
Scythe Collector’s Edition by Neal Shusterman
This year is the 10th anniversary of the first Scythe book, and with it comes a special collector’s edition of the book. I first wrote about the series in 2020 (yeah, I was a little late to the party) but I was impressed with the world Shusterman created. A superintelligent AI called the Thunderhead had been given the reins to control pretty much everything, and with it came that utopia that tech bros are always promising us now: immortality, world peace, the elimination of poverty, the solution to climate change. But with that new reality comes a new problem: if nobody ever dies of natural causes (and can be rescued from nearly anything else), what do you do about unbounded population growth? That’s where the Scythes come in: people who have been given the authority to determine who should die and when. The Thunderhead decided that decisions about death required a human touch, and the Scythes have nearly absolute power because of it. And, of course, you know what they say about power.
The later books in the series have a lot of parallels to America politics circa 2020—and, as we’re all seeing, a lot of that is getting a reprise now. Just as in the real world, the people who work the hardest to attain power are often the very people who shouldn’t have it, and the books explore the consequences. When the books were first published, the world of AI was quite different, and Shusterman explains in the new introduction that his books have actually helped to “steer the course of AI ethics.” If real AI were more like the Thunderhead, I think we’d be in a better position than we currently are, given recent headlines.
The collector’s edition is a gorgeous hardcover, a library-bound edition without a dustjacket, and some foil details on the cover. Instead of the person in silhouette, it just has the scythe itself, which looks elegant, but loses that cool optical illusion of the Scythe’s face as part of the handle. Inside there’s a reproduction of a stained glass piece that Shusterman made of the original cover design. There’s also a bookmark ribbon, and a new short story called “The Black Knight’s Tango.” Finally, the book has red sprayed edges, a feature that seems to be quite popular these days: the top and bottom have crossed scythes, and the side says “Thou Shalt Kill,” the first rule of the Scythes.
It’s a slick-looking new edition for fans of the series, and I would hope there are plans to reissue the rest of the series in this style as well (because I hate when I have non-matching editions of a series!). Also: if you’re a Scythe fan, keep an eye out for Rising Thunder, a prequel to the series, due out in December—I’ll share more about that one later on!
My Current Stack
I’ve returned to my AI-related stack so hopefully within the next month or so I’ll have a column about those. Several of these aren’t exactly AI, but they’re at least AI-adjacent. My current read is Dead But Dreaming of Electric Sheep by Paul Tremblay; it has a strange premise and I’ll need to think about how to talk about it without spoilers. Another one includes a graphic novel version of Be More Chill by Ned Vizzini, about a high schooler who takes a weird supercomputer pill to see if it can help him attract the girl of his dreams.
Jonathan H. Liu
Jonathan H. Liu is a stay-at-home dad in Portland, Oregon, who loves to read, is always up for a board game, and has a bit of a Kickstarter habit. I can be reached at jonathan at geekdad dot com.
