I was just in Carmichael Books in the Crescent Hill section of Louisville. It is one of those quaint and very bookish stores where I lose myself in the smell, feel, and taste of the books. In fact, I am becoming a collector of independent bookstores.

Visiting places like this does three things to me: it gets me to a place of calm, a place where my mind can wander through the minds of others who have the talent to put their experiences and thoughts in written form, and depending on the author, they can reduce the complex to the simple or they can introduce you to the much more complex and make it understandable.  The second thing it does is to cause my bibliophilia to escalate, every book seems to be beckoning, every subject seems plausibly fascinating.  Every work of a fiction a work of existential bliss.

Finally, the bookstore visits makes me feel like a sloth because I get the feeling that life is passing me by, that there are knowledge out there that I should be studying. This feeling oftentimes turn into a sense of urgency, which in turn makes me a basket case.  The sense that life is outpacing my ponderous intellectual moves make me hang my head in shame.  The feeling is abated after some coffee and some nice pastry, but it never goes away.

I live for that feeling.  This is what Amazon can not replace.

Imagination and Meaning in Calvin and Hobbes by Jamey Heit

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This is definitely not Calvin and Hobbes the comic strip. This is a very dense and very academic work of philosophical analysis of a comic strip. Definitely not for the feint of heart. Jamey Heit does a very interesting and freewheeling analys si of the meaning and structure of the humor behind Calvin and Hobbes, one of the more cerebral and delightful comic strips in recent years.

The analysis gets very complicated very quickly, Jacque Derrida gets mentioned in the second page of the first essay. So this is not for the casual fan, this is for the fan of the strip that also has a good grounding in modern philosophy.

It is very interesting and very very intellectually stimulating, but I can see where people who bought the book for some lighthearted reading about their favorite strip can get turned off.



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