Koji Suzuki - Dark Water
You may have seen the movie made from the first story in here - a very good recent Japanese horror movie, and Suzuki also wrote the novel on which the Ring movies were based. The story stops at sinister and creepy, rather than going on to the full-on horror ending, and that's rather the mood of the others - he's clearly more interested in fear than in horror, and he handles it well. This collection is all themed around water, with lots of fresh uses, most but not all with a supernatural element. He's very good, too, though it is all very muted, as close to a straighter Murakami as a horror writer, in a lot of ways. I think I'll try Ring too.

Austin Grossman - Soon I Will Be Invincible
I enjoyed this, but it's sloppy in places that wouldn't matter if this were the first arc of a new superteam title, say Ultimate JLA since the team was founded by obvious (very good) analogues of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman and we have cover art by Bryan Hitch (artist on The Ultimates). If this is the first of a series, maybe sequels will achieve the same things - for instance, justifying two of the team members, who could easily be edited out of this, or explaining an end scene with my favourite character, a superbeing type who seemed entirely fresh to me. Without the excuse of setting things up for later stories, I can only see this as having been in need of better editing.

Still, you'll know I'm a fan of superhero stories, and although he leans heavily on existing types and specific characters (there's lots of Luthor and a good twist on Lois Lane) and occasional other modes (Narnia, for instance), he does juggle them well, and serves up all the classic memes, secret identities and doomsday devices and world-conquering plots and all that. I kept expecting a bit more Watchmen in the approach, but it is much closer to a good modern mainline superteam comic.

Oh, one other note: I'd seen heavy promotion for this, and when I saw it in my library I turned away. I think I was harbouring a petty grudge over the fact that a superhero novel can get advertised on bus stops in the centre of London, where it's unimaginable to see a comic advertised the same way. Stupid, I know, but it took my friend lastmonday telling me she enjoyed it to make me try it.

Edward Hopper by Rolf G. Renner
You take a gamble when you buy a very cheap art book - I've bought some reputable-looking art books in remaindered stores that are appalling, full of error and ignorance. However, you are on safe ground with Taschen (with the bizarre and unspeakably awful extreme exception of their abomination of a book on manga) - you'd generally have to search hard to find more authoritative monographs combined with excellent repros (actually I admire Thames & Hudson's World Of Art books even more, but they are smaller, with concomitantly smaller pics, and rarely found as cheaply).

(Note: I'm going to take opportunities with art books to talk about my thoughts around the artist/school/whatever first, I think, before reading the book.)

Hopper is someone who intrigues me, though I'm not a particularly huge fan. I am a huge Tom Waits fan, and the contrast found with his 'Nighthawks At The Diner' (surely inspired by Hopper) track is strong - Waits gives us character and a touch of narrative, a scene somewhere between Runyon and Carver perhaps, an enthusiasm for his seedy subject. The painting is a 20th Century classic, but what is so special about it? It's technically nothing special, certainly, and there is no real narrative content, but there is a totally compelling mood or sensibility, a bleak loneliness perhaps, a banal alienation. I think its sense of a societal failure is what distances it from older genre painting, what makes it ideologically or psychologically modernist, even without being formally so to any great degree.

The book doesn't help me out all that much, to be honest, but the prevalence of images of women, which I hadn't really been conscious of in my limited knowledge of his work, adds an element of unease for me - they seem as emphatic embodiments of the 'male gaze' problem as anything in his most obvious forebear, Degas.