Not every year brings two new books from Haruki Murakami. This summer saw the release of Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage, a novel that I thought displayed a real sense of emotional growth from Murakami. This fall, Knopf published The Strange Library, a novella written by Murakami and designed by Chip Kidd. Although to be honest, "novella" is a gracious way to describe the book. It's more like a short story, though full-page illustrations and a large font spread it out to almost a hundred pages. While Tazaki felt to me like a step forward for Murakami, Library is Murakami reveling in his Murakami-ness. The story involves a cast of typical Murakamian characters: an ordinary boy who gets sucked into a bizarre plot, a mysterious girl who the boy becomes obsessed with, and a guy in a sheep costume. My complaints shouldn't be misinterpreted as a pan of the book, though: It's an entertaining fairy-tale-like story about a mysterious library and an evil curse. And Kidd's design is beautiful—you have to open the cover vertically before you can start flipping through the story, and elements of the graphic design, like a photograph of a wolf's open mouth that gives way to a smiling pair of human lips, pay off in the story. But at eighteen dollars, it's a bit much to ask of anyone but the biggest Murakami completists. I'd recommend borrowing a copy of this one from the library so you can enjoy the print layout and the diverting story in a single afternoon.

Rather than pestering your acquaintances with questions about the meanings of their tattoos, Pen & Ink: Tattoos & the Stories Behind Them allows you to enjoy your voyeuristic thrills without any of the social anxiety that comes with asking very personal questions of relative strangers. One the left side page, you'll see the tattoo in question and on the right side, in the person's own words, is the explanation of what the tattoo means to them. Rather than using photographs of the tattoos to illustrate the text, Wendy McNaughton illustrates each of the tattoos in delicate lines, giving us another step's worth of distance from the person. This allows the reader to focus on the idea of the tattoo, rather than the overload of context a photograph would provide us. Some of the tattoos represent involved personal narratives or mark intense transformative moments in a person's lives. Others are much simpler: A woman with the letters "PIZZA PARTY" tattooed onto her toes explains, "I really fucking love pizza." It's a beautiful book that will sate your curiosity without making you feel like a nosy ghoul.

Bob Odenkirk's collection of essays A Load of Hooey is not laugh-til-you-fall-on-the-ground funny. But it is repeatedly make-you-smile funny, and that's a pretty great reading experience, too. The pieces in the book are mostly a series of brief sketches of misguided or self-important characters. The narrator of "My Manifesto" helpfully explains "All CAPITALIZED words are meant to have greater significance than the other words that gather at their feet. Please read the CAPITALIZED words in a slightly louder voice inside your head to get the full effect" before beginning with the manifesto: "TECHNOLOGY must be DESTROYED or at least LOOKED UPON WITH SKEPTICISM. The TURNING POINT was the manufacture of the MOST RECENT iPHONE. Everything up until then was PERFECT..." The book's gentle humor stretches far and wide, from scripts involving Hitler and the Beatles to a parody of Todd Akin's comments on "legitimate rape" to an ode to abs. Odenkirk never tries too hard with this book; he's out to develop a single funny concept in each piece, and his craftsmanship shows. While I can't describe this as the sort of book that will make other people on the bus roll their eyes at your unashamed public laughter, I can describe it as a smart collection of good writing. Sometimes in the comedy-writing world, that sort of book can be seriously undervalued.