The Joy of Snacking by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell

There were three major comics memoirs by women in the fall of 2025, all about the same cluster of topics: eating, cooking, family, and how those things are connected. I don't know if it's going to be surprising to anyone that many women have issues around both eating (their bodies are often policed by others) and cooking (they are generally assumed to be responsible for feeding the people around them), but the cluster is an interesting thing, and I hope someone better-qualified than me (an actual woman, at a minimum) digs in and looks at the three books together.

I first saw Jennifer Hayden's Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner, published in November, leaning towards the production side of food and making comic hay about Hayden's inability or unwillingness to do it well. Then I noticed My Perfectly Imperfect Body by Debbie Tung from September, which is more focused on the consumption side of food, and a bout of disordered eating in Tung's youth.

Published in between the two of those is The Joy of Snacking, from Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, whose work I've seen as a cartoonist in The New Yorker, but has also done a previous comics memoir, illustrated several other books, made a few documentary movies, and also works in burlesque.

Snacking is mostly about eating - young Hilary was what we call "a picky eater," and that's continued into her adult life. (She's now in her early thirties.) The spine of this book is, as the title implies, "snacking" - Campbell is one of those people who eats lots of little bits all day long, isn't terribly fond of big meals, and tends to focus on a few preferred, beloved, standard snacks. (She also says this is a youngest-kid thing, which made me realize my younger son is also a grazer - there's a kind of bowl that he uses to gather stuff to eat, and we see them pile up in the sink - so I tentatively think her theory has some merit and she should get a major research grant to investigate it.)

Campbell organizes Snacking into loose chapters, bouncing between two timelines: her childhood and young-adulthood, as she discovered new foods and mostly tried to avoid them, and the last few years and her tumultuous relationship with a man she calls E. Separating scenes or sections are cookbook-like pages, which are each about a food Campbell likes - apples and peanut butter, or "a baggie of goldfish," or "a bowl of potato chips," or Cool Ranch Doritos - with details on how to "prepare" them, when and where to eat them, and their significance to her.

It might be the fact that this isn't her first memoir, but I found Campbell to be harder on herself than other people - in particular, E comes across (maybe, though, because I am a man) as a fairly reasonable guy trying to live with Campbell's issues, as the two of them snipe at each other in that deeply nasty way some couples develop. I'm sure he had his flaws, but I felt that Campbell presented him in a mostly-positive light: he's a guy who is in many ways her opposite (a foodie who works selling wine to restaurants!), but they made it work, more or less, for a number of years.

This is not a how-I-changed book, or a I-fixed-my-problem book. Campbell likes snacking. She's going to continue doing it. On the other hand, this isn't entirely a celebration, since she's also clear that she had a weird, often unpleasant childhood because of her food issues, and that it's affected her adult life in ways she doesn't like. That tension plays out throughout the book - can she be herself, eat the stuff she likes (and maybe "normal" food, too, OK, sure, sometimes), and go through life with less stress and anxiety? Well, maybe. But how about some popcorn and white wine now, while she thinks about it?

This is a big book, with some aspects I've not even mentioned - Campbell traces the eating habits of her parents as well in flashback sections, so it's not just a book about her individually - and a warm open-heartedness I found deeply engaging. Campbell has a cartoony, dense style here: her people are loosely defined with thin lines, her panels are many and jammed together without gutters, her dialogue is long and rambling, like real people. This is a fun book about a distinctive person who's not afraid to show herself being odd and quirky - that's the whole point of the exercise. I don't know if anyone else eats quite like Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell does, but, then again, do any of us really eat like all of the rest of us? This book made me wonder that - and that's a good thing to wonder about.

All of This and Nothing: Jacqueline

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

You know this song, I expect: it's by Franz Ferdinand, the lead-off song on their 2004 self-titled record. Jacqueline.

Does anyone pick up a new record, put it on, and listen to it from the beginning anymore? Did they do that even twenty years ago?

I suppose some of us did - though most of us hear songs as one-offs, on the radio in 2004 or streaming in 2026 or beamed directly to our brains in 2038.

This is one of the greatest introductions to a band out there, starting slow and quiet, telling a story, and then kicking into the sound we've all become familiar with since, with that killer guitar line picking up at about the 0:45 mark.

That intro seems to have nothing to do with the lyrics in the loud part of the song, but the first verse is actually a true story - the other verse, as far as I know, is fictional, about a guy named Gregor who might be about to get into a major pub fight.

What do the two verses have to do with each other, or with the chorus? Like a lot of songs, a lot of good, quirky interesting songs, it's not anything obvious and straightforward - Jacqueline is a song to think about as well as a song to just experience.

And, for another piece of the song that also doesn't necessarily fit nicely like a puzzle piece with the verses and intro: the refrain has probably popped into your head over the past twenty years, now and then, its own little Zen koan. Because, no matter who we are, no matter how much we say we like what we do, and find meaning in our work, and all that, well...

It's always better on holiday
So much better on holiday
That's why we only work when
We need the money

Reviewing the Mail: Week of January 24, 2026

Two books came in the mail this week, from the fine folks at Tachyon:

Michael Swanwick's new story collection The Universe Box - which I think is his first major collection since The Dog Said Bow-Wow back in 2007 - is publishing very soon, on February 3rd. You can probably pre-order it, and copies of the final book (I have what I still call a "bound galley," since that's what we called them when I worked in the field) might even be wending their way through the system now. Universe Box collects seventeen stories from various places, mostly originally published from 2017 through 2023, but including one 2012 story and two original to this collection.

(Parenthetically, Swanwick has always been prolific in short fiction, so I suspect there's another collection between 2007 and now. Let me fire up ISFDB and investigate...ah, yes! there was a 2016 book, Not So Much Said the Cat, which I must have missed.)

Swanwick has been winning awards for his short fiction since before my SF career, so I recommend this even before reading it. Is it fantasy or SF? Knowing Swanwick, probably both - maybe both even in individual stories. But definitely at least one of them, each time.

The other book is already published: Theodora Goss's Letters from an Imaginary Country, which came out in November. This one is a themed collection, sixteen fantasy stories about storytelling, many of which seem to have a fabulistic or other-people's-stories background. Three of the stories here are original to the collection.

I have not read a book by Goss, though I think I've seen her stories in anthologies over the years. But this is a big interesting book with a connection that seems supple and intriguing, plus an introduction by Jo Walton, so it goes on the shelf and I'll see if I can manage to get to it.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: The Dogs of Sark

It is at the Colinette that the dogs of Sark can best be studied - supposing that anyone wished to study them - as they lounge in the white dust, or snap at flies, or molest one another or scratch their ears with the claws of one of their back legs, their muzzles pointing at the sky, or while they lie in the warm dust meditating on the vicissitudes of life, and how mean a fortune is theirs with never a bitch to woo, for none, by law, are allowed on the island.

 - Mervyn Peake, Mr. Pye, pp.8-9

Quote of the Week: First Impressions

I disliked him on sight, and as a rule I was prepared to like Mexicans. He was too studiedly humble, which is colossal arrogance of a kind. But I wouldn't place my life in the hands of a lawyer I liked.

 - Loren D. Estleman, Burning Midnight, p.146

The Non Sequitur Guide to Finance by Wiley Miller

I was going to say that Wiley Miller's strip Non Sequitur appears in my paper, and I've been reading it for a decade or two, but that I've never read a book of his collected cartoons.

I was going to say that, but then I searched the Antick Musings archives, and found a post way back in the depths, circa 2006, in which I was less than pleased with the then-new Color Treasury book. I see my opinion has somewhat shifted - or maybe I'm now resigned to the multi-panel Miller and find his continuity work at least less cloying than so many other daily cartoonists.

I've now read another collection of Non Sequitur, which is, quirkily enough, from only a few years after that Color Treasury. The Non Sequitur Guide to Finance is a digital-only short collection from 2012, featuring only the old-style single panels that I claimed in that 2006 post were massively superior to the longer multi-panel work Miller had been shifting to in the early Aughts.

As you can guess from the timing, this is largely comics about finance bros, the 2008 crash, and related topics. It's in no way a neutral look at finance; it's from a moment in time when that sector of the economy had just massively shit the bed and ruined the lives of many of the rest of us. On the other hand, many of us are cynical towards finance even in the best of times - I spent a number of years after that crash in a finance-adjacent space, and got my share of cynicism then.

Looking at this book, I think I do still really like Miller's black-and-white, single-panel work best. It gives him the opportunity to make stronger images, with a tighter focus. (I particularly like his very toothy dogs, of which he had a lot in this era.) His people are lumpy and grumpy, which is excellent for something editorial-cartoon-adjacent like the work in this book. And he's good at the stark, specific single image, which is required by the single-panel form.

So this is a short book, and possibly an outdated one - the next crash will be caused by the AI morons, and is chugging down the tracks right now - but its heart is in the right place, and it's saying things (in a cynical, humorous, not-entirely-fair way, like so many cartoons) that a lot of people have forgotten since 2008 or 2012.

Mr. Pye by Mervyn Peake

I probably am missing some vital portion of background to do a really good job of explicating this book. I was born two or three generations too late, on the wrong side of the Atlantic, for one thing. And, which I think is probably more important, I'm not Anglican.

(I come from an Episcopalian family, which is as close as Americans get, but we wandered off any vestige of High Churchiness very early in my life, and "as close as Americans get" is not actually that close.)

Mr. Pye is one of the other books by Mervyn Peake, famous in SFF circles for the massive, quirky, half-broken Gormenghast trilogy. (It's not really a trilogy. It's two big books that are basically what Peake wanted them to be, one short book written more-or-less while he was dying, and ideas for more that died with him, though his daughter Maeve Gilmore did expand a few of his notes into a fourth book.)

Unlike the Gormenghast books, Mr. Pye is set in our world. It is fantasy, of a type, but it doesn't look like fantasy for about the first half of the book. I'm afraid that any discussion of the book will "spoil" the fantasy element, so, if you are a purist about such things, stop reading now.

Mr. Pye was published in 1953. Looking at the list of Peake's works, I think it's his only other novel. So we can assume this story was important to him in some way. But it is quirky - even more so than the Gormenghast books, I think, though in a more traditional way.

Harold Pye is a small, round, middle-aged Englishman of unspecified background. As the novel opens, he's taking the boat from Guernsey to Sark, one of the smallest and most distant Channel Islands. He intends to settle in Sark and transform it: he is going to make its people good. Like so many reformers before and after him, he has an unassailable belief that he knows exactly what "good" is, and that he can mold an entire society into that shape.

More importantly, he's a compelling speaker. Even more importantly, Peake is firmly on his side, so when he talks vaguely about "the Great Pal" (his pet name for the Christian God, whom he claims to have long conversations with, though those conversations are not narrated in this book), none of his listeners scoff or laugh or raise any of the thousands of potential objections, many of which a reader will quickly call to mind and may even mutter under his breath while reading.

Instead, he first quickly enlists his landlady, Miss Dredger, who starts calling him "chief" as he calls her "sailor" and the two of them do call-and-response hymns and sea shanties to each other to show how matey they have become. Then, most of the people of the islands - Peake always divides them into natives and residents and visitors, and makes a big deal about the differences at the beginning of the novel in ways that have absolutely nothing to do with anything that happens in the novel - also come under his spell fairly quickly, all caught up in the thrill of the Great Pal.

The local prostitute, Tintagieu - this is the only name she gets; I'm not sure if it's a personal name or a surname or perhaps obscure identifier - for a while looks like she will be the center, or maybe the only resistance to Pye's domination, since she is willful and self-contained and not susceptible to his vague, bland statements. She might also not exactly be a prostitute: it's not clear if she regularly takes payment, but she does sleep with roughly the entire willing male population of the island on a regular basis and has no other obvious support.

Perhaps I should note here that Mr. Pye is not a tightly plotted book. It wanders about, as if it is ambling around the fields and cliffs of Sark on a sightseeing trip, and spends most of its time with Mr. Pye himself saying vague things about his faith and the concerns of his best buddy, the Great Pal. 

Anyway, Tintagieu and the local painter, Thorpe (bad as a painter, stammering, not otherwise characterized) - they're seen as something like a couple in this book, despite Tintagieu's profession (or pastime?) - talk about Pye and his influence, and look like she will do something to counter it, for much of the first half of the book, but nothing comes of it.

Instead, the fantasy element emerges. This is your second chance to stop reading to avoid being spoiled; at this point you only have yourself to blame if you continue.

Mr. Pye starts to grow wings. White-feathered, clearly angelic wings, from his shoulder-blades. At about this time, he also notes that the Great Pal is not talking to him - whether this is "any more" or if he was mistaken or lying before is left as decision for the reader; I know which way I fall.

The wings are weird, and a proper Englishman - even one aiming to convert the entire population of a small island to his quirky version of Christianity, in preparation for possibly doing the same to larger and larger regions of the world - must never do anything weird. If any other English people saw the wings, they would at best shun him, maybe give him the whole Wicker Man treatment, or, even worse: point and laugh and scoff. So, obviously, Pye must start doing evil acts to balance his clear moral purity, which will make the wings shrink and disappear.

Since the author says so, this does work, and Pye kicks over children's sand-castles and secretly lets out all of the contents of the water-cisterns on the island and, oh yes, sneaks out at night to worship Satan in the form of a local goat. These actions might seem to some readers - this one, for example - to be of such radically different levels of "evil" that they don't make any sense as a list, but Pye does them all, and tracks, along with the aid of the redoubtable Dredger, the size of his wings after each evil action.

But, woe! The wings do disappear, but then he gets an itching sensation in his brow, and devil's horns appear there. So he must, at the climax of the book, balance good (telling people about the Great Pal) and evil (hanging out with that goat) to keep both manifestations in check. They see-saw back and forth, and this exhausts Pye, physically and morally and mentally.

Eventually, the locals - I think mostly natives, if that matters - see the horns, make the obvious conclusion, and assemble with pitchforks and Frankenstein rakes to find and capture the now-fleeing Pye. They also call in the constables from Guernsey, because that's what English people do: they might be a mob and a rabble, but by God! they're a mob and rabble that will hand over a miscreant to the proper authorities!

Tintagieu hides Pye in the local jail - the last place they'd look! - until night, when he tries to flee in a way that would never, ever work. And, on the last page of the book, the horse-drawn cart he's fleeing in wrecks, killing the horse and throwing the once again be-winged Pye into the air.

He flies away, of course. And the novel ends.

I think Peake meant this as some kind of commentary about living in the modern world, living up to your own principles, that kind of thing. I think Pye is meant to be heroic, in his way. I also do not believe a single thing Pye says for one second. I find his Great Pal talk silly and infantile, and the concepts of good and evil in this book so cartoonish as to be practically useless. You might have had to have been English and living in 1953, preferably on Sark, to get it.

It's a pleasant, goofy read, though, even if you can't take it seriously. And if you're looking for weird Christian fantasy, I don't know how much else you have after you've read Lewis and Williams. 

Loki by George O'Connor

The surviving corpus of Norse mythology is very thin - the two Eddas, Prose and Poetic, from an era after most of the Norse peoples stopped believing these gods were real and started thinking of them more as stories or metaphors. So retellings often have notes to say "this background character is named, and it looks like he was a major god of something-or-other, but this is the only surviving reference to him" or "from the way it's told, this seems to be one of a long cycle of similar stories, but it's the only one we have." 

But the stories we do have are compelling, full of interesting characters, complex mythology, and great stories - or maybe, in some cases, fragments or pieces of stories. So modern storytellers keep trying to put those two Eddas into modern language, to frame what we do know in ways that attract and thrill present-day audiences.

George O'Connor is in the middle of a four-book series, which I think will retell most, if not roughly all, of the existing Norse stories in comics form, under the overall title Asgardians. Like his previous twelve-book series about the Greek gods, Olympians, so far the books have been titled after, and focused on, specific gods: first Odin and then Thor.

The third book is this one, Loki. The fourth, teased at the end here, will of course be Ragnarok. (If you do a four-book series retelling Norse mythology, you're pretty much required to make the fourth one Ragnarok. Same with a two- or three- book series; you might be able to avoid that title if you do just one.)

Since I've written about all fourteen of O'Connor's previous mythological books, I don't know if I have a lot to add here. This is just as good - compelling, well-told, strongly organized, drawn in an style influenced by classic adventure comics and colored in moody tones by SJ Miller.

In Loki, we do see again O'Connor's skill at weaving what were separate myths - how this happened, how Loki tricked that guy, and so on - into a fuller, linked story. It's still clearly a bunch of tales, but O'Connor organizes them, and narrates them, and foreshadows later events, to make this, like his other books, not just a collection of pieces, but a single integrated tale.

And, not to give it away, but he notes in his extensive backmatter that the story here is Loki's "heel turn" - how he went from an annoying but usually helpful (in the end, mostly, while having fun along the way) trickster god who was loosely allied with the Aesir to the guy who sparked that previously mentioned - and, in so much Norse mythology, foreshadowed repeatedly - apocalypse that will destroy most of the Nine Worlds and its peoples.

The stories here see him shifting in that direction - we start with the creation of Asgard's walls, by a mysterious stranger, and how Loki got the Aesir out of their agreement with that stranger when it looked like the stranger actually could live up to his outrageous promise and claim his even more outrageous prize. Then we see the story of Idunn's golden apples, which shows Loki's random, cruel, chaos-for-chaos's-sake style. In between, though, there are scenes of Baldr, and of his mother Frigg - who, O'Connor repeatedly notes "knows the fates of all, but makes no prophesies" - extracting promises from nearly all of the animals and plants and objects in the world not to harm him.

If we know anything of Norse mythology, we know the one item she will not get a promise from. And we know what will happen. That's the last story page of this book.

There are other Loki tales in the middle as well, particularly those about his children. We see a slimy worm, thoughtlessly thrown into a river that leads to the sea by Thor. We see a small wolf that grows very large, and how he is chained. We see a little girl, dead on one side and alive on the other side, and learn where she goes and what name she takes.

Before those, we see an eight-legged horse, and O'Connor does not tell us that horse's parentage - one of the few obvious nods in this book to its young-readers audience - but he hints as obviously and clearly as he can, so only the very most cossetted and innocent and dim young readers will fail to realize just how Loki saved Asgard from having to pay for its walls.

Most of O'Connor's mythological books stand alone; this one less so. It's partially "here's some stories about Loki, the great trickster," but also partially "here's how Loki helped to bring about The End of All Things, which we will see in the next and final book." But if you're reading a four-book retelling of Norse myth, you're expecting Ragnarok - it's not going to be a surprise.

And Ragnarok will be coming. The George O'Connor book, I mean, not the actual end of all the nine worlds. With luck, it will hit next fall. I'm looking forward to it, and wondering what myth sequence (The Kalevala? The Irish "cycles"? The Mahabharata? Something Egyptian?) he might be thinking about next.

Burning Midnight by Loren D. Estleman

This is the third of the Amos Walker books I've read this year [1] - I ran through a big clump of them eighteen years ago, under a tag with a silly title, and then let them accumulate on the shelf mostly annually since then - and, like the last clump, I seem to be finding patterns in the books that slowly make me enjoy them less and less.

Well, the 2007 batch was a slow process, even though I read ten books in less than a month. This batch seems to be running more quickly, which is unfortunate. There are six more on the shelf, and maybe two or three others I missed, and it would be nice to read them, and even nicer to want to read them.

I see that I noted, during the 2007 batch, that this was a solidly old-fashioned series, that series hero Amos Walker sometimes tends to the random hard-boiled comment mostly out of context, that women are people rather than plot tokens only intermittently, and that the plots tend to devolve into action sequences rather than detecting more often than I liked. All of that is still true. The thing about women, maybe even more so.

I might need to be bit elliptical here, since giving away the solution to a mystery is Not Done. But there's a major Misguided Liberal Lady in Left-Handed Dollar, and then the underlying villain of Infernal Angels was an EEEvil Dragon Lady who I don't really remember but had been a character in earlier books.

Burning Midnight, which was the new book back in 2012, features not only the surprising return (very late in the book) of that EEEvil Dragon Lady, but also another major Misguided Liberal Lady.

I had been worried that the series would have descended into some kind of racism in these Obama-era books - PI novels are inherently conservative in the small-c sense, and often in the big-C sense, too - but I didn't expect that much...I don't want to bluntly call it misogyny, but don't have a better word...on my bingo card so quickly. I don't know if author Loren D. Estleman did that on purpose, or if he or his editor even noticed it, but three books in a row with very similar shocking surprise endings - and the next book also seems, in its description, to strongly hint the EEEvil Dragon Lady will be the Big Bad - is a bit much.

And I'm deeply aware than, if I'm seeing some creping Tea Party influence now, in books written around 2010, that things could get much worse as I reach the books written in the later teens and afterward. I have a mostly positive opinion of Estleman that I would like to keep if at all possible, even as I keep repeating the mantra "the book is not the author."

(I was worried about racism, but, oddly, these three books feature very few Black people - other than one top-level cop friend of Walker's who's in every book - for a city like Detroit that is 78% Black. This one does have a bunch of Mexicans, though, he said brightly.)

Anyway, this book sees Walker hired by Inspector John Alderdyce - the aforementioned Black cop buddy - to investigate his estranged son's brother-in-law. The son, Jerry, changed his last name - I'm not sure we ever get what he changed it to - and married a Mexican-American woman, Conchata "Chata." Chata has a sixteen-year-old brother, Ernesto "Nesto" Pasada, who lives with them in a close-in Detroit suburb, but has been spending a lot of time recently in what I gather Detroiters actually call "Mexicantown."

So much time, that he's gotten a tattoo on his hand indicating he's joined the Maldado gang. And so much that he's not coming home as regularly as his sister would like.

Nesto has not quite disappeared as Walker takes the case, but he's in the middle of a slow fade. Alderdyce wants Walker to talk to Chata, find Nesto, and convince him to give up the gang stuff and go back to a relatively normal teen life.

This is a Walker novel, so it's not that simple. As Walker pokes around the barrio, he finds there are two feuding gangs in the neighborhood, the Maldados and Zapatistas - both new, and tentative, and offshoots of much more dangerous and violent Mexican border gangs, but possibly rapidly getting more serious and dangerous.

Walker talks with two major community figures there, the reformed gangbanger-turned-businessman Zorborón and the gringa who runs the local non-profit, Sister Delia, both of whom say they've had minor violence recently, seemingly to warn them away from Maldado affairs. And then, of course, the murders and arson starts.

Walker does solve it all - I hinted at the solution above, and won't do more than hint - and eventually finds Nesto and drags him home. In the very last chapter, the EEEvil Dragon Lady from previous books calls him and basically says "if I ever run into you again, I'm going to have you killed," with the usual "of course, I can't have you killed now, even though I really want to and know plenty of people who would do it, because this novel is over and I'm actually just setting up a plot hook for another novel" caveat.

I've said many times I prefer mysteries to thrillers. I don't know if mysteries, as I mean them, actually still exist - I read the NYTimes Top 100 books of the year list today, by chance, which had a section for Thrillers and even one for Horror but no Mysteries (or SF) - but this series has solidly moved towards thrillerdom in ways that annoy me, even aside from the lazy EEEvil Dragon Lady-isms and the "whiteys should keep out of Mexicantown and let the locals do whatever the hell they want - except cops, of course, who are pure and honest and wonderful" mindset here.

I still like Walker as a character, especially after his voice settled down from the early books. I like having PI novels in the hardboiled style to read, even if they're more thriller-y than mystery-esque. I don't think Estleman is actually grinding any specific ideological axes in this series; I think it's more the natural flow of hardboiled fiction and the pull of the renormative ending. But my patience for the same thing over and over again is getting thinner. I may read another one or two of these, but I'm beginning to wonder if I will be able to get through the six more on the shelf.

[1] "This year" being 2025; I wrote this in November.

All of This and Nothing: Dylan Thomas

"All of This and Nothing" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year, Portions For Foxes, or Better Things series. It alternates between Obscure and Famous songs; feel free to argue either way if you're so inclined. See the introduction for more.

This week's song is Dylan Thomas, by Better Oblivion Community Center - last week I had a big famous supergroup, so this week I have something that's a supergroup in its own way, a one-off project by Conor Oberst and Phoebe Bridgers that lasted a couple of years and produced one record. This one was the single, and I think it was moderately successful, five years or so ago.

I put this on the Obscure side, since I doubt anyone really remembers this project, but it was prominent enough that there are Wikipedia articles and the song lyrics are available online. (That was my trigger, during last year's project, to think something was really obscure - nobody put the lyrics online anywhere. So now I'm second-guessing myself about whether this one really counts as "Obscure" - oh well, too late to change the whole plan for the year now.)

This is a catchy, bouncy song, sung in harmony by those two singers most of the time, with occasional lines by just one or the other. And what's it about? It's one of those complex, allusive songs I love, full of quick wordplay and solid rhymes - it's about whatever you can figure out, about itself, about the world, about the experience of being this song at this moment in the world's life.

It's not really about Dylan Thomas, but he is namechecked in the middle. That's close enough for a title.

They say you've gotta fake it
At least until you make it
That ghost is just a kid in a sheet

Reviewing the Mail: Week of January 17, 2026

Four books from the library this week, which break neatly into two groups. First are two books of comics that I ordered to be put on hold for me at the same time as the movie I watched this week with my twenty-something kids. (Rocky Horror, on request from Thing One, who saw it once at midnight with me a decade ago and was confused then. That is a weird movie to watch a) in your living room, b) mostly without yelling at it, and c) with your children.)

The other two books I grabbed when I was there picking up the movie. See, I've been feeling ennui when looking at my to-be-read bookcases lately. You would think that three big bookcases, with what must be at least 500 books - maybe twice that; there's a lot of omnibuses - would give lots of scope for choice, but I guess not. My shelves weirdly seem to focus either on classics (however defined) or books from roughly the decade 2005-2015 (stuff I accumulated thinking I would keep reading like I did at the SFBC, until I finally gave that up). So, anyway, I thought "let's look for something unexpected and actually new" to see if that helps me read more stuff. And I found one non-fiction book by a writer I'd read for a million years and a novel in translation by a writer I'd never heard of before, which is nicely balanced.

The first book I ordered is This Country by Navied Mahdavian, a roughly decade-old memoir about the cartoonist (who has also done stuff for The New Yorker and other outlets) and his wife moving way out into the sticks to make a life there, work as artists, and maybe do some farming. I think they also discovered that their new neighbors were not perhaps as accepting of liberal city-slickers with non-Aryan names as they might have hoped, but I'm going on vibes and some hints in the back-cover copy there. I'll see when I read it, which is probably happening the same day this post goes live.

Speaking of The New Yorker, Lawrence Wood edited a book called Your Caption Has Been Selected about that magazine's famous Caption Contest. As I understand it, it contains all of the weekly cartoons up to the point the book was published, with the winning caption and maybe some runners-up, plus an explanation of how the contest works (I don't think this is complicated or controversial, but the NYer overcomplicated everything, so I may be wrong), and some related material.

The non-fiction book is Dave Barry's recent memoir Class Clown, which makes me feel old. Not as old as Barry, who is called out as being 77 in his subtitle, but I remember buying Dave Barry Hits 50 when that was new, and having read Barry in the newspaper and in book form for at least a decade before then, so plenty old. This is a "how I got to be me" book, covering his whole life, with an emphasis on his career writing humor (unsurprisingly).

And last is the novel: The Man Who Died Seven Times by Yasuhiko Nishizawa, translated by Jesse Kirkwood. The cover describes it as "the classic time-loop murder mystery," and the tone seems to have some humor to it, so it looks to have a lot of elements I like. I saw it randomly on a shelf; I'm going to read it. I used to do that more; I might need to find ways to do that again more regularly.

Quote of the Week: Getting Better

To say that he beamed at the girl would be too much. A man who has lost his favourite hat, and is contending in the lists of love against a butler who might have stepped out of a collar advertisement in a magazine, does not readily beam. But his gloom perceptibly lightened. A moment before, you would have taken him for a corpse that had been some days in the water. Now, he might have passed for such a corpse at a fairly early stage of its immersion.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, Spring Fever, p.39 

Asterix and Cleopatra by Rene Goscinny and Albert Uderzo

OK, this is going to sound silly. But if the Carry On movies were actually for children, and made by French people, they would be a lot like the Asterix comics. There's a certain strain of mid-century humor - a little more European than American, with just a touch of world-weariness and a bit less parochialism - that's common to a lot of durable comedy institutions of that era.

I start there because, otherwise, there's absolutely nothing new or interesting or distinctive about Asterix and Cleopatra, the 1965 sixth entry in the bande desinée series originally (and at this point) written by René Goscinny and drawn by Albert Uderzo, but continued, more recently and after their time, by other hands.

Oh, there's nothing wrong with A&C, or bad about it. But the Asterix series, I'm coming to think, is deeply formulaic. Asterix and his buddy Obelix - the usual much-stronger-than-he-is-smart sidekick - go to some new corner of Roman Europe, are enlisted to Do a Thing, and they Do It very easily, despite the efforts of various nefarious figures, usually Roman, to foil them, and It Is Funny. Sometimes other Gauls come with them - in this book, the druid Getafix is along - and they support the action, and sometimes (especially if it's the horrible bard Cacofonix) they are Also Funny.

Oh, and the names are all very music-hall nudge-you-in-the-ribs style. Well, maybe not "music-hall" specifically, since this is French, but some rough equivalent.

In this one, Cleopatra - whose nose is a major topic of conversation, in that background-sexist '60s way - has a fight with Caesar and says she'll build him a palace in three months, as part of a bet to keep Caesar from invading and subjugating Egypt. (This is also part of the mid-century comedy gestalt - people make weird wagers, and always live up 100% to their commitments in those bets.) She tells a local schlubby architect, Edifis, to do it, and he immediately takes ship to find and enlist the help of Getafix, without whom he would have no chance of getting it done.

(Now, of course, traveling by ship from Cairo to the Gaul village - famously at the very northwest tip of Brittany - would probably take close to three months all by itself. This is the moment when I decided not to sweat the details. OK, a slight exaggeration. I first checked ORBIS, and then decided not to sweat the details.)

Edifis brings back Getafix, who brews magic potion for the Egyptian workers, which makes construction go super-fast. Edifis's rival Artifis tries to sabotage the project, as does Caesar's forces once he realizes the Gauls (Asterix and Obelix came along, of course) are there. None of that works; our heroes foil every problem quickly and without much trouble. All moves smoothly towards the standard happy ending, with the usual jokes along the way.

So this is a lot like the previous books - I read the first three in the current omnibus edition and then the fourth book, Asterix the Gladiator. I might be giving up here, though: all of these books are the same, and I'm not eight, so I'm not getting a whole lot from them. Uderzo's art is fun and energetic, admittedly, but the utter lack of tension and reliance on very dull, hoary jokes more than makes up for that.

My Perfectly Imperfect Body by Debbie Tung

Debbie Tung makes personal, almost confessional books of comics - every one I've seen to date is in the rough territory of "here's this thing about me that's quirky, or that caused trouble at first, and then here's how things got better for me." The work is positive, even when the underlying issues - depression in other books, an unspecified eating disorder here - are serious and clearly took a lot of time and effort to get through.

My Perfectly Imperfect Body was her new book last year; her earlier books - at least the ones I've seen; I might have missed something - were (most famously) Quiet Girl in a Noisy World, Book Love, Happily Ever After & Everything in Between, and Everything Is OK.

And I'm leaning into taxonomy and background here, as I often do, when I hit an interesting, good book that is just fundamentally not for me. Tung is a British woman, still (I think) relatively young, and she writes for other young women about topics core to that experience - from the outside, I tend to think of it as the cluster of issues around particularly introverted women living in a world and a society that pushes women to be pretty, decorative, accommodating, and outgoing. Tung's books are very particular, about what happened to her and how she dealt with it, but they're open and welcoming, pitched in a tone that says "if you're like me, you can do the same; you can have a great life, get a little better at this stuff, and still be the person you are."

This is the one about disordered eating, telling the story of Tung's teen years. And I come to it as a person who never had any kind of eating disorder and definitely wasn't ever a teen girl. I have struggled with weight, like so many other people, and lost about a hundred pounds over a six-year period not long ago after twenty years of yo-yo-ing. So my eating issues have been close to the opposite of Tung's.

More centrally, my discomfort here is that I'm a middle-aged man writing about a book entirely about a teen girl's concerns about her body. I want to say that I have no opinion about any teen girl's body, past or present, unless she specifically asks me a very particular question. (Like, maybe, "is this a wasp sting between my shoulder blades?" - I'd be OK answering that.) I want to avoid having any opinions about teen girl's bodies, in general or particular, or to pay attention to those bodies more than nominally, because that would be creepy.

So I came to this book with a mix of wanting to see what Tung would do next - I enjoy her positivity and her conversational comics, with soft tones and realistic gestures - and not wanting to question or focus on the body stuff. And the book is all body stuff.

Tung had the sadly common kind of mother who focused on her body and eating habits, and I think Tung also has habits of thinking that makes her susceptible to spiraling - see Everything Is OK how that turned into depression for her, a few years later - which meant that puberty meant anxiety about her body. Tung here tells the story of those years: she had some kind of eating disorder, though she doesn't here say whether she was ever diagnosed with anything specific or even saw a medical professional to help her get better. She ate less than she should have, and exercised relentlessly, with some notable negative health impacts while not getting to the body she thought she wanted. (Because - and she implies this - that "thought she wanted" was a moving target: it's always that bit slimmer than right now, always a vision and never a reality.)

Like her other books, Perfectly Imperfect is mostly a story of how she got better; how she realized this was a problem and took steps to get out of it. That's a lot of what makes her work so positive: there's an underlying central idea of "I had this problem, and realized it; I may not be perfect but I'm getting better - and you can too!" in most of her books.

If you're more like Tung than I am, you may get more out of it, but even I found it inspiring and (there's that word again!) positive, a welcome flash of can-do in the sometimes dour world of misery memoirs.

Spring Fever by P.G. Wodehouse

I am still zipping through P.G. Wodehouse books, hitting another one every two months or so. He wrote about a hundred of the things, so I still have some runway, but my unread-Wodehouse shelf is dwindling, and it may be time to fill it back up soon.

This time, I have a just-post-war comedy (well, they're nearly all comedies, once you get out of the first decade of his long career) unrelated to any of his major series, about a peer who looks like a butler and wants to marry his cook, get out of his stately pile, and settle down running a pub. That's Spring Fever, from 1948.

It also felt like another Wodehouse book that could have been adapted from a stage play, but I find from Wikipedia - which I have no reason to disbelieve - that it was actually the other way around; Spring Fever was adapted into a play, which was not produced, which was then adapted into another novel, The Old Reliable, which I've actually read recently.

Holding up the juvenile romance end of the plot are two young American friends. First is Stanwood Cobbold, a beefy ex-college football player not overly endowed with brains, sent by his tycoon father to London to extricate him from his entanglement with the mercurial movie star Eileen Stoker, whom he wants to marry. His smarter friend is Mycroft "Mike" Cardinal, junior Hollywood agent who is himself deeply head-over-heels with Lady Theresa "Terry" Cobbold, third and nicest daughter of the Earl Lord Shortlands, called "Shorty" by Terry.

Shorty is the aforementioned peer who wants to marry his cook. He owns the stately pile Beevor, in Kent, and hates it. Mrs. Punter, that cook, wants to marry a man with two hundred pounds to invest in a London pub, so she can get out of service and into business for herself. She has some standards for who that man will be, but is willing to be somewhat flexible in her ends. Shorty, sadly, doesn't have two hundred pounds, which torments him. Worse, his rival in love is his own butler, the wily and scheming Mervyn Spink, whose success at betting threatens to give him the financial leg up in their competition.

Mostly in charge at Bevor is Shorty's domineering eldest daughter Lady Adela Topping, married to the rich American Desborough, whose money keeps the castle as solvent as it's possible for an English castle in 1948 to be. The middle daughter is Lady Claire; she doesn't do much in the book but is heading towards marriage with a well-off but deeply tedious playwright currently staying at Beevor.

Also important is Stanwood's man Augustus Robb, a reformed burglar and current teetotaler. 

The last major piece of the plot is a fantastically valuable stamp, discovered in an old album in Beevor and squabbled over by Shorty and Spink. As part of their machinations, the two young men arrive at Beevor as impostors: first Mike, pretending to be Stanwood (who wanted to stay in London to be with Eileen, filming a picture there), and then Stanwood, pretending to be someone who can vouch for Spink's claim to the stamp.

There's a fair bit of plotting among various factions to get the stamp and further their schemes, some running about, the usual severed-hearts stuff, a failed safebreaking and related drunk scene, and other usual Wodehouse bits. In the end, both young couples ride off into the sunset (or, rather, the registry office) to get married as quickly as possible. Shorty finds happiness in a slightly different way, which is not usual for Wodehouse - generally, if he sets up potential marriages at the beginning of the book, he ticks off every single one of them at the end.

It's all slightly quicker and tighter than it could possibly have been - one reason why I thought it might have been a play - with opportunities for additional comedy material (such as the stuffy playwright) left almost entirely as suggestions. In my mind, Spring Fever is a three-hundred-page novel that would have been better off about four hundred pages, with possibly the addition of a policeman, bringing Eileen onto stage at least once, and some actual thefts of the stamp for spice.

But the book Wodehouse actually wrote is just fine and quite entertaining in his best manner, so that's a pure quibble.