I’ve received my copies of the new gift books Good Grief, It’s Your Birthday! and Cheer Up, Charlie Brown!, both of which are full-color mixtures of relevant quotes and strips. They’re fairly smoothly made, and should serve their purposes as much-more-than-a-card for someone going through something. The Birthday book focuses on quotes about life and aging. The Cheer Up book has quotes both of the things-get-better variety and of the things-being-bad-are-par-for-the-course variety. Plenty of the quotes are taken from Peanuts (and cited to Schulz, rather than to the character), but other sources range from Oscar Wilde to Lily Tomlin to Dale Earnhardt (that last is actually of questionable taste; “you win some, you lose some, you wreck some” may have been inspirational when the stock car racing great said it, but lost any uplifting that’s-the-way-it-go-ness when Dale died from a wreck.)

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