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.