I need to catch my ass up with all the book posts from last year and February is nearly over. Last October I read 14 books. Four were collections of comics and two were collections of art.

Samuel Blink And The Forbidden Forest by Matt Haig was something I found at Half Price Books. I liked the cover and the book sounded interesting. It was. Samuel and his sister Martha go live with with their aunt Edna after their parents die. She lives in a house on the edge of a small town in Norway. Edna's house in at the edge of a forest and Edna tells the kids to stay out ot the woods. Uncle Henrik disappeared there 10 years ago. Magical things happen before Martha enters the forest, Samuel follows, they find out what happened to their Uncle. It turns out to be a pretty good story and well told. I'm keeping it.
Walt Kelly's Our Gang 3 & 4 are the last two of the series that Frantagraphics has, so far, failed to finish. These 2 volumes collects the stories that appeared from 1945 to 1947. The 4th collection came out May 2010 and so far no new ones and there's nothing on the Frantragraphics website. It was supposed to be part of a 7 volume set. Still a good couple of books for the Kelly fan and I'm glad to have them especially since I got the 15 dollar books for a ten spot each. The unfinished set thing seems to have happened to me before. Several times. You start buying the reprints of some series and it stops being issued before they finish the series. It's always a risk, if it isn't all released already. Mind you there aren't any shortages of finished sets. It would be nice if they finished the Our Gang series though.

The King Fisher Treasury Of Monster Stories chosen by Jane Oliver was a nice little collection of short stories about monsters. I got it in the clearance section at HPB for about a buck. It was a quick read and well worth it.
The Troll Witch And Others - Hellboy 7 by Mike Mignola collects several mini-series and one shot comics. The Hydra and the Lion, The Troll Witch, Dr. Carp's Experiment, The Ghoul, The Vampire of Prague and Makoma. The first 4 stories were illustrated by Mignola and were first published in the 4 The Dark Horse Books of... that were published between 2003 and 2006. The Vampire Of Prague was illustrated by P Craig Russell and Makoma was illustrated by Richard Corben. A nice collection of stories. Other people illustrating Mignola stories would get more common place as time past.
Hellboy Junior is a collection of Hellboy parody comics that were originally published as a couple of single issue comics. There are some pretty silly things in there and I enjoyed reading it. It's only 64 pages so it's barely a book but there you go.

How To Cheat A Dragon's Curse - Hiccup 4 by Cressida Cowell is another story with Hiccup the Viking and all the other Viking kids. There's some villians and a great Pirate girl. A still enjoyable series. I keep looking for the later volumes but so far no luck.
The Entropy Effect by Vonda McIntyre was a pretty poor book. Not a keeper. Wish I hadn't spent that 50 cents on it.
Heroes Of The Valley by Jonathan Stroud on the other hand was a much better book. A young teen guy lives in a medieval type society in a valley that is their whole world. Really, all the people live in this huge valley and they never travel anywhere and no one ever comes to visit them. They never travel past ihe ridges that surround the valley. There are legends of monsters. They don't go there. There's murder and our hero is right in the thick of it. There was usually something happening of interest. I'll keep this one but not the next.
Buried Fire by Jonathan Stroud just wasn't of interest to me. I did read it and then put it on the going away from here stack. I would recommend Stroud's later Bartimaeus Trilogy. Those were really much better in every way.

The Art Of Harvey Kurtzman by Dennis Kitchen and Paul Buhle is a nice big book I got for about 8 bucks at Half Price Books with a 50% off coupon. It's still 45 bucks on Amazon. It's a nice large book with plenty of art to look at and a fairly nice overview of Harvey's life and career. He was sure talented but he had a hard time with his career, at least until he started doing Little Annie Fanny for Playboy. It's pretty entertaining.
Norman Saunders by David Saunders is another huge art book with lots of color painting by Saunders. It too was cheap, 10 smackers, at HPB. Saunders was a pulp guy who painted lots of magazine covers and paperbacks. He later worked at Topps painting the images for the Mars Attacks cards and Wacky Packages stickers. His son wrote the book and he puts in lots of family pictures and history. Nice.

Star Trek - The Vulcan Academy Murders by Jean Lorrah was a much better Star Trek book than the one I had tackled before. It was well worth the 50 cents I paid for it. Kirk, McCoy and Spock are on Vulcan. There's murder at the VA. Kirk sets out to solve the crime. It's harder on Vulcan. They are so logical they don't understand why anyone would murder. Some people are doopy, huh. It was one of the better ST books that I read. I didn't keep it but that's ok.
FableHaven 1 by Brandon Mull is the first of a series of 5 novels. Seth and Kendra are a 10 and 16. They go visit their grandparents and discover that there's one of those secret universe's out there. Lucky for them, it's one that will kill them. The grandparents are the caretakers at a large, super secret preserve that is home to lot of mythical creatures. It's a place for them to be hidden from the humans. Some of the creatures are fairly harmless and some would kill you for a bit of amusement. There are even some in magical prisons on the preserve. Seth is a bit of a jerk who keeps butting into things. His sister is more level headed. The book was fairly good and I thought I would like to read the rest.
Fourteen books. Not a bad month with some ok reads.