As adventures in reading go, I would put The Complete Peanuts (Fantagraphics, 26 volumes) right up there with Don Quijote. Maybe someday, I will feel impelled to memorialize the journey in an essay or a book, but for now, let me just share two remarkable examples of the prescience of Charles M. ("Sparky") Schulz, both from 1988, well into the fourth decade of the strip's 50-year run.
The first, merely delightful, anticipates by three years the memoirs of Katharine Hepburn.
Hepburn gilded the lily with a subtitle, Stories of My Life.
The second, quietly devastating, wraps up Charlie Brown's oddly Byzantine errand to renew Snoopy's dog license.
In retrospect, does this not read like a critique District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570? Heller, you will recall, was the landmark case in which the Supreme Court ruled, with baleful consequences, that the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution protects an individual right to gun ownership for lawful purposes. Will the tally of killings and mass murders carried out under this protection ever end? For the record, the decision came down in 2008. A full decade before, Sparky could tell which way the wind was blowing.