- Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, Gregory Maguire. I love the original Oz books, and I've sampled a lot of the alternate Oz stories that put a modern face on the stories and characters. (My favorite of those being the Oz Squad comic series.) This book doesn't precisely follow the continuity of the books - the origin of the flying monkeys is changed, for example. But it's so damn close that pure Ozites can make the leap. And if you've only seen that obnoxious Judy Garland movie, you won't notice anything wrong at all. Overall, it's a dark, masterful story covering the life of the Wicked Witch, including sex, violence, revolution, magic, love and family.

- Lies My Teacher Told Me, James W. Loewen. The title is misleading. It's not so much about bad teachers (as the name implies), but about bad textbooks. In the wake of unrepentant patriotism we're experiencing, this book helps to soften that edge and explain why other cultures might have a fucking good reason to hate America. We're not all baseball and apple pie, and the common conception that the US is Wonderfully Good (as taught by history texts) does nothing to prepare citizens for shocking attacks like planes being aimed at buildings. That aside, the author's point isn't that America is Bad, but that America is Complex, and robbing the true complexity of history in favor of blind nationalism just makes history class boring, turns lies into facts, and creates students who just don't care how we got here... and thus can't comprehend modern events.

Also, if you're not already following the weekly updates on Penny Arcade, get over there now and check out the links to the interview with Dr. Henry Jenkins, especially Part 2. Dr. Jenkins has some amazing thoughts on the growing legitimacy of video games as a medium for expression. Part 2 contains an analogy to the failure of comics that is chilling for both comics fans and video gamers.