Reviewing the Mail: Week of February 21, 2026

I got three books from the library this week - along with the movie Caddyshack, for the weekly watch-with-my-kids Wednesday [1] - and all of them were larger than I expected. This complicates my life, for a silly and quirky reason you certainly don't care about.

You see, over the last few years, my reading time shifted. I used to read mostly while commuting, but now I work from home. And I also wanted to be more active once I was working from home - to get up regularly and spend time walking around. (I now aim to get 25k steps a day, and hit it except for very rare calamities.) So the question was: how do I both spend time reading and spend time walking? [2]

Yes, I do now read books while pacing in the house. Yes, my family thinks I am very weird. Yes, I have bumped into doors and walls more than once. But it does seem to work for me, though I would hesitate to recommend it to anyone else.

It does mean that larger or heavier books can be an issue, because I'm holding them up and walking about with them. Again, this is not a problem that I think anyone else in the world has ever had, and I don't expect anyone to commiserate with me - I'm just mentioning it.

Because E Is For Edward is particularly large, and I spent much of yesterday (Saturday, February 20th; I'm writing this the "today" of publication) walking about with it, and expect to finish it off today. I did whack it into doorframes at least twice. Anyway, this is a coffee-table book - the kind that normal sane people read on their laps in a comfy chair, or perhaps flip through as it sits on a table - about Edward Gorey, by Gregory Hischak, the current director of the museum made out of Gorey's Cape Cod house. It's full of Gorey art, and divided into a number of thematic chapters - designed to be a celebration of all his work on the event of the hundredth anniversary of his birth (last year).

Then there's Tongues, a large graphic novel by Anders Nilsen, whose similarly-large Big Questions I loved a decade ago. I did have access to a digital review copy of this almost a year ago, but it was watermarked in an annoying way, so I just didn't want to read that version. So, instead, I got the book itself, and will be maneuvering that through space in the near future and trying not to whack it into things in its turn. I have no idea what the story of Tongues is about and am deliberately not checking.

Last is the most recent book by Ian Frazier, Paradise Bronx. Frazier is a longtime New Yorker writer, adept at both serious reportage (like On the Rez and Family) and humor (like Cranial Fracking and the great Coyote V. Acme). This is Frazier in serious mode, and, as the title implies, it's a history of Da Bronx. It's also over five hundred pages, which is more than I thought I needed to know about NYC's most blue-collar borough, but I trust Frazier and will read, I expect, all of it.

[1] This time around, it was clearly from a different era. Even more so, I was struck by how it's really just a random collection of scenes - usually pretty funny, at least for audiences in 1980 - thrown together based on the same vague premise and with occasional attempts at an ongoing plotline.

[2] I also now have a sit-stand desk for work and a walking pad I pull out some of the time, so I do quite a bit of editing of work whitepapers and similar activities while trudging forward at that desk.