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.

Hi, It's Me Again by Asher Perlman

I bemoan the sorry state of single-panel cartoons a lot here - because I like them, and because they used to be a massive tide rolling across popular culture, so there were many more of the things I liked, albeit mostly before I was born - so it's nice to be able to balance that out now and then.

Asher Perlman's first book of cartoons, covering a decade or so of toil and strife, was published last fall: Well, This Is Me. It was a best-seller, says the publisher, and I believe them. The reason I believe them is because they backed it up: they published what looks very much like a sequel to the first book just about exactly a year later, which is the time-honored model for a publisher that has found a good thing and wants it to continue as long as they possibly can.

The 2025 Asher Perlman collection is Hi, It's Me Again, featuring the same character (and a variation on the joke) from the cover of the first book. Again, "hey, this is a sequel!" is a reaction you aim for when the first thing did well, so I am happy for Perlman and for comics-in-book-form in general.

Like the first book, it has three new short page-formatted comic sections to organize it (Introduction, Interlude, Epilogue), all with the "real" Perlman taking to another character about his work, in the usual half self-deprecating, half self-aggrandizing manner appropriate for comedy.

In between are two big sections, transparently called Part One and Part Two, each with eighty or ninety single-panel cartoons. The whole book is just about two hundred pages long, so it has almost that many pages of Perlman art and gags.

The only remaining major regular outlet for single-panel cartoons is The New Yorker, and Perlman does appear regularly there. According to the copyright page, nine of the cartoons here first appeared in that magazine - it's possible that some of the others appeared elsewhere, but likely the vast majority of them are new to this book. (At least as far as the general public goes; my guess is that they were part of Perlman's weekly "batches" over the past who-knows-how-long, though potentially reworked or finished for this book.)

As always, it's difficult to say anything specific about a pile of nearly two hundred individual cartoons. Perlman has a fine modern cartoon style, with confident lines mostly of a single weight and various tones overlaid for texture and depth, and his ideas and punch lines are funny. (At least, I think so, and I'm the one reading the book.) A lot of people liked the first book; if you were one of them, this second book is more of the same stuff you already liked.

If you weren't one of them, well, a lot of people liked the first book, so the odds you'll like this one are solid - give it a try, won't you? Help keep single-panel cartoons alive; it's your civic duty.

All of This and Nothing: My Rights Versus Yours

"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 is the first "Famous" one in this year's series; that will alternate with "Obscure" for the rest of the year. I hope that's not too fiddly or precious.

The New Pornographers are of course a well-known Canadian supergroup - and, in the way of supergroups, they're I think more famous than the individual bands that the various members were part of originally. But then I tend to think no one famous is actually happy about why and how they became famous - that they all think, maybe secretly, that they're famous for the wrong thing. So, in my mind, that's how supergroups work: they're almost as much shackles as wings.

My favorite New Pornographers song is My Rights Versus Yours, from their 2007 record Challengers.

It begins magnificently, which might be one of the reasons I love it - that quick chiming guitar strum, the quiet first verse, with lovely harmonies along the way...and then the rest of the band drops in, chugging along and building as the song goes on.

It's probably about a divorce, but it's the kind of song where the words are complex and allusive - allowing a listener to make up their own story if they want to.

Courts knew this and nothing more
Now it's my rights versus yours

That's the way of life, isn't it? What's yours, what's mine, how they conflict - what we can get out of it, how we can negotiate or fight through that.

The truth in one free afternoon
A new empire in rags

Quote of the Week: Happy Mondays

She placed the tray in the middle of the bed between them and around it they played little games with each other's rudest parts. Then, before it got too cold, they drank their tea. It was Monday morning and neither of them cared. The time passed delightfully.

 - D.G. Compton, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe, p.233

Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner by Jennifer Hayden

Hayden was the author, about a decade ago, of an excellent comics memoir with a great, striking title: The Story of My Tits. She's back with another big memoir, on a slightly lighter topic, and this one is even denser and substantially more fun just by virtue of its topic.

Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner: Confessions of a Cartoonist Cook is structured like a cookbook, in chapters that include a "recipe" for making the dish that Hayden tried (and often failed) to cook in the preceding pages. Each chapter is a bit of memoir, from various times in Hayden's life, and all are about the preparation of food. As the title implies, Hayden's never been particularly good at cooking - and doesn't seem to have ever wanted to be, though she definitely resents that making meals is her responsibility mostly for she's-the-wife-and-mother reasons. So there's a lot of complicated emotions tangled up in her relationship with cooking - and, as readers of My Tits know [1], Hayden is really good at navigating through her complex emotional states.

I've been poking around her website, and goofing off in other windows, as I try to think about how to talk about how interesting and specific and strong this unique book actually is. I'm a man, and not the main cook in my family, so I don't have an obvious, direct way into this wonderful book about feminism, gender roles, family expectations, and that mix of anger, regret, bitterness, resentment, and just a bit of hope that comes out when Hayden finds herself in the kitchen, yet again, with a hungry family expecting her to feed them.

I can point at the things Hayden does well, even as I suspect I'm more like her husband "Jim" in the book: mildly clueless, wandering in when the work is mostly done, wanting to be helpful but never offering to actually do the difficult stuff. My own wife is the main cook in our family, and I think she falls somewhat farther on the "I want to be good at this" spectrum than Hayden does - but there's still the core cultural expectations: that the wife/mother makes all the meals, is responsible for taking care of the family, is the domestic goddess or the angel at the hearth or whatever depersonalizing term you want to plug in there.

Each chapter here combines both a story from Hayden's life, ranging from her own childhood, through the childhood of her two kids, up to her present empty-nest life. They're not in chronological order: Hayden hasn't structured Smoke in any obvious way, so it comes across as a cluster of stories she's telling us: they're all related, and each one leads naturally into the next one until she tells them all. Along the way, she gets into how her relationship with cooking was influenced by her own mother, and how that has changed over time - but keeps the focus on herself, on what she does in her own kitchen and how it makes her feel.

There's a lot to experience, to unpack, and to make the reader think about how they cook themselves (or don't, and let other people do it for them). Hayden has a wonderfully immediate cartooning style, mostly in four-panel grids, full of lines and color and action in every panel - it could all be too much, except that's the point, that cooking for Hayden is doing a dozen things at once that she never wanted to spend her time on. She wants it to be simpler and easier, but it never is - even in the few cases where everything goes right, it's always complicated.

(I will say one detail reminded me a lot of my own life - Hayden shows how her kids, when young, would get called out when dinner started inevitably burning to open all the windows and doors and flap their coats madly to disperse the smoke. We never did anything quite like that in my house, but whenever steak gets cooked, the smoke detector goes off - and I'm the one who gets to stand under it waving a big book or something until it stops beeping.)

I want to say something like "if you cook or eat, you'll find a lot to love here." I think that's basically true, actually. But if you're a woman, and particularly one who has been responsible for keeping the rest of the people in your house alive, I think it will be even more resonant and strong.

[1] Sorry not sorry, but I love being able to refer to a book that way. And it is appropriate in this case.

Renée by Ludovic Debeurme

A dozen or so years ago, I covered Ludovic Debeurme's engrossing but dark bande desinée Lucille. At the time, I praised the story of two young doomed lovers, noted that a sequel Renée had already been published in France, and expressed some hope that, given the sequel, they were not perhaps as doomed as they seemed to be.

Reader, I was wrong. They are much more doomed than I thought. And many other people are also doomed, in this larger, multi-threaded story of violence, despair, unhealthy love, and generational trauma.

Debeurme tells the story of Renée much as he did Lucille - thin-lined, vignetted drawings, floating on his large open pages without borders, with minimal words for the first hundred or more pages of the book. (It's unpaginated, but looks to be three hundred pages or so.) He doesn't name most of his characters on first appearance, and some of them not at all - but we do learn, by the end, the names and connections of all of the major characters, if we pay close attention.

There are basically four strands: two women and two men. Lucille and Renée, Lucille's now-incarcerated boyfriend Arthur (who was Vladimir in the first book, and there's a brief explanation of that here) and an unnamed boy with a twisted face.

Parenthetically, Debeurme makes a lot of his characters - mostly just minor background people, though - exceptionally ugly in this story. There's a whole imagistic section in the middle about that, in fact. Occasionally at the Basil Wolverton level, with some creepy transformations and images mostly used as transitions, but most of the time recognizable normal people in a normal world, who are not attractive in the slightest bit in any way.

Debeurme moves among these four strands constantly, back and forth. For close to a hundred pages, the reader isn't really clear on who any of them are, and how they all connect doesn't come clear until the very end. And, again, their names appear only sparsely, generally later in the book. But here's who they are, and what they're dealing with:

• Lucille is living with her mother, trying to rebuild a normal life after the events of Lucille and to recover from an eating disorder.
• Arthur is in prison because of what he did in that book.
• The unnamed boy is dead; we learn his story late in the book.
• Renée is in a tumultuous love affair with a married jazz musician, Pierre. They both are demanding in different, unfortunate, unhelpful ways, and readers may suspect they are not good for each other at all.

The strands overlap and combine as the book goes on: Renée and Lucille meet very late in the story, Arthur gets a new cellmate who is related to another character, which leads to another moment of shocking violence for him.

It all comes out badly, for nearly everyone. I don't know if Debeurme is always a storyteller of despair and death and hideous grotesques and broken people lashing out at each other, but that's what you'll find in Renée, and, as I remember, Lucille was much the same. If that's what you're looking for, at this darkest time of the year, this is exactly that.

Laser Eye Surgery by Walker Tate

In a city somewhere, there's a tall man, bald on top. We don't know his name. We don't know his job, or if he has one. We know he lives in a small apartment, plagued by a mouse he keeps trying to catch, and that he eats some kind of canned food, maybe exclusively, and gets big packages of the cans in the mail. We think he's some kind of a nut, or a hermit, or similar - one of those urban types who radiate a "don't talk to me" aura as you see them stalking down the street or ranting on a corner or staring intently at something you can't see.

This man has bad eyesight: he wears glasses sometimes, contacts sometimes. One day, he finds a flyer about eye correction - a local clinic is offering a two-eyes-for-the-price-of-one deal, with the testing upfront thrown in free and satisfaction guaranteed. He puts the flyer away, but remembers it when, the next morning, he accidentally steps on his glasses, breaking them.

So he goes to the clinic, which we readers see is shadier than he realizes. He's tested, has the operation. He seems to stay in that clinic, just lying on a table recuperating, for many days, and eventually goes home, his sight hugely improved. But he has floaters - more than before, sometimes overwhelmingly so. (As someone who has had his optometrist say to him "you have a lot of floaters" basically every yearly visit for two decades, I sympathize but also think he's over-reacting. But I think his deal is to over-react.)

Things escalate; the man, as we may have expected, tends to be paranoid and subject to conspiratorial thinking...and may also be right.

This is Laser Eye Surgery, the first graphic novel by New York cartoonist Walker Tate. Tate works in thin lines, tightly defined and precise, almost mechanical but with life and energy to them. His writing is laconic and minimal; the story told mostly through images.

The defining image, in fact, is of this man, striding at pace - often away from the viewer, usually at an angle. Always without eyes - either his face is turned away or Tate just doesn't draw that level of detail. His eyes show up in close-up, and drive some imagistic sequences where the floaters wander about and proliferate, in a way we think the man considers deliberate.

Tate tells this story quietly, with an assurance that the reader will pick up the nuances and connect the dots - there's no narration, and minimal details. This is a book about seeing, and so the reader must see it. I don't know if I got all of the things Tate was trying to say, but I'm impressed by the power of his images and by the confident way he constructed this story; I want to see more of his work.

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by D.G. Compton

Some SF novels seem to predict the world we actually got, and are brought back out of the depths and lauded for that, as if being right was the point of fiction. I wonder if it bothers the traditionalists that those novels tend to have been the quirky, oddball ones when they were new - so much Philip K. Dick reads like reportage these days, minus the occasional thriller plot elements.

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe is one of those books: a 1974 near-future SF novel by the British writer D.G. Compton, published in the US as The Unsleeping Eye and filmed a few years later as Death Watch. It's set in the media landscape of the time, so some elements are old-fashioned - TV shows are broadcast at a particular time, and only seen in whole on big screens, for one major issue - but the depiction of a type of reality show, and how the public reacts to it, is true and prescient and starkly crisp. And its psychology, as Jeff VanderMeer notes in the introduction in the edition I read, is deep and nuanced and masterful.

Continuous has two main characters; I'll get to the title character second. Roddie is a reporter for the major outlet NTV in near-future Britain. He's recently had a major operation to install a TV camera in his eyes; we don't get the exact details, but it captures everything he sees and somehow transmits back to his company. He has additional tech for capturing sound; how exactly it works is not important. This is new technology, and a secret: NTV hopes to launch it in the world with a spectacular new series of some kind. Roddie is a rising star, and narrates his sections in first person.

Katherine is seen in third person. She's a middle-aged woman working in publishing - for Computabook, more-or-less creating complex AI prompts and then editing the output into a stream of romance novels that will be published under house names. This world has the usual '70s contract marriage with specific terms; her first marriage ended after the initial five-year term, and she's now remarried to Harold Clegg.

The time period is fuzzy: let's say two generations after it was written, but with no details of the geopolitical or even the UK-governance situation. Call it 2024 if you want; that's reasonable. It's not our 2024, because it never is in fiction. In this world, phones are still corded '70s tech and computers have somewhat enhanced capabilities but are still floor-filling '70s mainframes. But biotech has advanced much further, as we see with Roddie's eyes. In fact, it's advanced so far that it's vanishingly rare for anyone to die of any reason besides old age - diseases and syndromes and conditions can pretty much all be managed and cured, other than a tiny handful of exceptions. (Presumably, violent death, from accident or deliberate action, can't be guarded against in the same way, but Continuous isn't about that kind of death, so we don't learn the details.)

Katherine is called in to see Dr. Mason, her usual doctor. Behind a one-way glass are Roddie and his boss, Vincent Ferriman, a powerful producer at NTV. She's told that she has a terminal disease, that there is no possible cure. The details are a bit fuzzy as Compton tells it - a long list of symptoms he mostly glosses over, and an overall description that, frankly, read to this reader like bullshit. (Later in the novel, there's a reason for that - I won't explain further, but it does sound like bullshit, and that's on purpose.) She has perhaps four weeks to live, and might rapidly decline during that time.

Ferriman wants to give Katherine a contract; she'll make a small fortune by being the center of a "Human Destiny" TV show for as long as she lives. Roddie will film it; at some point they'll explain his eyes but maybe not at first. Ferriman intends to reach out to her later that day; he does contact her husband Harold before she even comes home from work for the day. He also - we infer from other things - leaks this story, with a garbled version of Katherine's name, which makes other media outlets start nosing around Katherine almost immediately. "Terminals" are media sensations: we don't get a good sense of how many there are, or how often, but they seem rare - one or two a year, perhaps, so surprising and novel and exciting every time.

Continuous is broken into eight sections, each named after a day, from Tuesday to Tuesday. We follow Roddie and Katherine, first separately and then eventually together, as they live through the media frenzy and navigate their changing lives. The world is fairly utopian, but we see mostly the underside of it - rapacious media packs, the "fringies" who have dropped out of normal life, protestors and youth gangs and sex cults.

Katherine doesn't want to sign with NTV - to sign with anyone, since it's basically a given (at least from the media companies) that she will sign an exclusive contract with someone to broadcast the details of her dying. She wants to stay private, not to be splashed all over the media. And her actions are mostly driven by trying to subvert that expectation, to get away from the camera eye and the public scrutiny, in a world where all of the forces push the opposite direction.

Roddie is more conflicted. He wants to make a great TV show, but he also wants to present "the true, continuous Katherine Mortenhoe" - to show her as she is, in context of her whole life, in a way she would recognize and agree with, and yet also be a big media splash in the way the audience wants. The reader might suspect Roddie can't possibly get what he wants, and might not like or trust him, particularly as he meets Katherine and doesn't tell her who is is or how his eyes work.

But, in the end, they do meet. Katherine does run away. It does all get televised. And it does end, for both of them, strongly and inevitably. Continuous is a novel about people, the kind of SF book where the technology is there to heighten the human drama, to make choices and options starker and crisper, and a book that does a great job of delineating those people, making them real and true, conflicted and contingent, specific and particular.

All of This and Nothing: The Driver

"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.

I don't know who Andrew Deadman is. I half-suspect that's a stage name, or otherwise not the name he was born with - but I don't know. The world is large and contains multitudes.

I got his record Santa Monica Airport 1987 around when it was released in 2019 - probably as a publicity thing. (Yes, I get music for publicity purposes. I find it hard to believe myself; I can't see how I've ever been useful in the slightest to publicize anything.) It's a solid record, atmospheric and discursive, all supporting Deadman's tense, cracking voice.

My favorite song from that record is The Driver, the story (true or false or fictionalized) of one ride in a car, from somewhere to somewhere. Like a lot of the obscure songs I like, this year and previously, the lyrics don't exist anywhere online I can find.

So I'm sitting here typing, listening to the guitar solo at around three minutes in, wondering how much I want to try to transcribe lyrics myself. Maybe just the chorus; that's always a good thing. Maybe that's what I want to leave you with.

Driver please
I'm too young to be bleeding
Dead on the side of the road
And I'll take what you give me
I will take what you give me
As long as I live 'till I'm old

Books Read: December 2025

As always, this is mostly an index, mostly for me, and not-particularly-useful until the posts actually go live and I come back and update this. (And that will be roughly six weeks from now; I'm running about that far ahead.)

René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo, Asterix and Cleopatra (12/6)

George O'Connor, Asgardians: Loki (12/7)

Mervyn Peake, Mr. Pye (12/11)

Wiley Miller, The Non Sequitur Guide to Finance (digital, 12/13)

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, The Joy of Snacking (digital, 12/14)

Ana Ocina, Croquette & Empanada: A Love Story (digital, 12/20)

James Thurber, The 13 Clocks (in Writings & Drawings, 12/20)

John Allison and Max Sarin, The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt (digital, 12/21)

Jason, Death in Trieste (digital, 12/24)

Jack Vance, Wyst: Alastor 1716 (in Alastor)

Roger Langridge and Ryan Ferrier, Criminy (digital, 12/25)

Jeff Lemire, Fishflies (digital, 12/26)

Edward Welch, ed., Captain Cuttle's Mailbag (12/26)

Sergio Aragonés, Louder Than Words, Actions Speak (digital, 12/27)

Gilbert Hernandez, Lovers and Haters (digital, 12/28)

Evelyn Waugh, Robbery Under Law (in Waugh Abroad, 12/28)

Kazuo Koike & Goseki Kojima, Lone Wolf & Cub, Vol.8: Chains of Death (digital, 12/29)

Kenji Tsurata, Wandering Island, Vol.2 (digital, 12/30)

Stan Sakai, Usagi Yojimbo, Book 9: Daisho (digital, 12/31)

Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye (in Later Novels & Other Writings, 12/31)

I plan to keep reading books in 2026. Not all my plans come true, but I'm pretty sure that one will.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of January 3, 2026

This year, I got one book as a Christmas present - and it wasn't even something I bought for myself! (I got myself a computer, which is why I didn't buy myself any books.)

So this notice is actually a week late, because I've been busy being on vacation the past week or so.

The book is Mystery Science Theater 3000: A Cultural History, part of a larger series of books about notable TV shows from the Rowman & Littlefield publishing house. This one is written by Matt Foy and Christopher J. Olson, both academics who seem to specialize in TV and TV-adjacent studies. It sounds a lot like The Worst We Can Find, a different history of MST3K I read in mid-2025, so I suppose I should get to  it quickly enough that I can compare the two in my head.

How many histories of a basic-cable comedy puppet show does the world need? As with anything else: it's not a question of need, it's about who wants to do it and if they can get it published. And at least these two did - I bet there are several more, too.

Quote of the Week: Tell Us What You Really Think

Hugo Gernsback? That son of a bitch. I never dealt with him, not with the rates he paid. Every time I see someone being awarded a Hugo I see the biggest fraud, swindler, chickenshit fucking scoundrel ever in the business. He's the only editor I've ever known, or known of, who so fully deserved these understatements of mine.

 - E. Hoffman Price, Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! edited by Richard Wolinsky, p.9

Jim Henson's The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow adapted by Roger Langridge

I knew I was going to be writing this post on Thanksgiving morning, so I picked an appropriate book. Of course, since time flows forward, you're reading this much later, untethered from any holiday (unless you celebrate Three Kings' Day, in which case, go you), but that's the reason for it.

Jim Henson was the kind of creative personality who generated a lot of ideas. My sense is that most of them never happened; I don't know what that meant for his focus on the projects that did happen, but the work was generally top-quality, so I don't suppose it matters. He generally worked with screenwriter Jerry Juhl, who put Henson ideas into a usable form, and they were credited together with scripts for a lot of projects that did come to fruition.

As well as a lot of things that are still sitting in trunks at the Henson Company, or Disney, or wherever.

One of those was a script from the late '60s for a Thanksgiving special, to include both Muppets and live-action actors. So not quite an early precursor to Emmett Otter's Jug-Band Christmas, but clearly coming from the same strand of Henson's creative output. The special was never made; it's '60s enough that I doubt it ever would get made now.

But, about ten years ago, the Jim Henson Company decided, for whatever reason, they wanted to get this project out into the world somehow, and connected with cartoonist Roger Langridge. Langridge took the Henson/Juhl script, turned it into four issues of comics, and drew it all, with colors by Ian Herring.

And that's how we got to Jim Henson's The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow.

Somewhere fairly rural in New England, in a region with a lot of turkey farms, is the small town of Turkey Hollow. Living there is Timmy Henderson, a boy who wants to learn to play his guitar but is finding it difficult, his hippie-ish older sister Ann, their aunt and guardian Clytemnestra, the grocer/mayor/sheriff/postmaster Grover Cowley, and nasty evil landowner Eldridge Sump.

Sump wants to drive the Hendersons from their land, for the usual I'm-evil, I-want-to-take-everything reasons in stories for children. He is thoroughly one-note, and you probably can already picture him in your mind: black clothes, white hair, little round glasses, goatee, sharp face, always scowling and declaiming.

Timmy is out practicing his guitar in the woods one day near Thanksgiving, and a meteor - which we saw crash-land three hundred years earlier in a prologue - opens, with five furry "monsters" emerging. They don't talk, but they're musical Muppets - each one makes a particular sound/note, and they help him with his song. He tries to hide the monsters from everyone else, but Ann and Aunt Cly soon find out, and love them just as much as he does, including at least one musical number. (This was going to be a musical, so the cast breaks into song every ten pages or so.)

Meanwhile, Sump has heard the monsters, and wants to use them to force the Hendersons off their land. He's also got a plot - possibly originally unrelated - to steal all of the other turkeys from all of his neighbors for unspecified reasons, which he puts into action, framing the monsters. The monsters are thrown into jail for eating turkeys, even though we readers know they only eat rocks.

Timmy helps the monsters escape jail - because it's difficult to hold rock-eating monsters in a stone building - and it all comes to a head on Thanksgiving, with a thug hired by Sump running around with a shotgun trying to kill the monsters, Grover investigating both real crimes and the ones Sump alleges, and other tomfoolery.

In the end, there's a song, good wins out, and the missing turkeys are found unharmed and stolen in Sump's house - so they can all be slaughtered and eaten in the final scene. (I mean, yes, that's how it works, but you don't expect it to be so blatant in a story for kids.) Oh, and Grover finally admits he's hot for Aunt Cly, so they start dating.

This would have been a perfectly cromulent 1968 TV special, which would have been re-run annually for much of the '70s and then probably half-forgotten, with revivals now and then. It wasn't, but it's a comic now, so that's close enough. It's not a lost classic, but it's a very Henson-y thing, with all of the music and found-family stuff, and this package also includes photos of the puppets Henson's team built for the network presentations back in 1968 and some other historical material, which adds to the package.

If you're looking for a Thanksgiving-themed comic to read - and I was - there's not a lot to choose from, but this is a solid choice. Langridge always does good work, particularly when trying to depict music on the page or when doing Muppet-adjacent stories, so this fits well with his strengths.

All of This and Nothing: An Introduction

I've been posting one song every Monday for three years now; I suppose it's now a tradition of the blog.

The series for 2023 was This Year, inspired by something John Scalzi did in a single post the end of the year before: one song for each year of my life, each by a different artist, each song somehow important to me. I followed that up with Portions for Foxes in 2024, which was all women: solo artists and women-led bands, to try to make up for what was a bit of a sausage-fest the first year. Last year was Better Things, which continued to follow the only-different-artists paradigm, with largely songs I'd considered for the first two years but didn't manage to fit in.

Each yearly series, as you might be able to guess, had a title song - one that wasn't part of the general schema, but was thematically important in some way, or (maybe more accurately) was a way for me to cram one more song in when the choosing got difficult. 

I wanted to keep going in 2026, and keep the only-different-artists thing going for one more year. So I ran through a few ideas - first Instrumentals (not enough different artists, and I'd want to showcase weird songs by people I already listed anyway). I thought about cover songs, which had the same issue - a fair list wouldn't be all different artists.

Then I toyed with a series of "Second Songs" - the other songs by bands I've already featured once. And that might come up next year.

But, instead, I ended up going with a double theme, or a theme that is two sides of the same coin. With a lot of the songs in the back half of 2025, I found myself musing about which ones were famous and which ones were obscure - and sometimes wondering why that happened for a particular song, or if, maybe, something I thought was obscure was actually well-known.

So this year will alternate - obscure songs with famous ones, back and forth through the weeks of the year.

And the title song - which is not part of the series, but defines it in some odd, indescribable way, is another obscure one (of course), The Psychedelic Furs with a sad, lamenting look back at something completely broken: All of This and Nothing. The Furs themselves are not obscure - I hope, even this many years later - but this song is, which I guess makes it right as the exemplar song for this year's series.

Favorite Books of the Year: 2025

Every year, I post a list of the books I liked best the previous year, early on the New Year's morning. Some years I've read less, and kept it simple, but usually I pick a book as a favorite for each month (and some also-rans worth mentioning) and pull them all together at the end into a list.

First, though, I like including long lists of links, so here are all of the previous installments: 2024, 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.

And then, before I get into the list: I'm idiosyncratic, and I feel the need to explain those idiosyncrasies every year, so....

Rules & Explanations:

• This list is finalized on December 31 on purpose; it includes everything I read this year. I occasionally cast shade on people who do "best of the year" lists as early as Halloween; they are slackers and will get theirs eventually.
• These are favorites, not "best." I can't define "best." I can define "favorite."
• This is not separated or compartmentalized by genre; it's based on everything I read. Maybe that means I'm lazy, maybe it means I reject tired genre dichotomies: you decide.
• Each month gets some also-rans; the bolded book is the favorite.
• I try to chose new(ish) books for the favorites, so this is roughly similar to the big fancy lists; it doesn't always work. My reading is not at all focused on newly-published books, to begin with - that would be nice, and the part of me that used to work in publishing wishes I was still doing that, but I just don't read enough anymore, or in that focused a way.

But Why?

I didn't have some specific reason, originally, for making my list this way - it seemed like a reasonable way to organize a list, maybe a little idiosyncratic, certainly, but defensible. As the years have gone on, making those weird, particular choices for each month loom larger, and have become a more central part of the process. For example: if I read only books that vaguely annoyed me in a given month, how do I pick a "favorite?"

I'm ambivalent about the idea of literary standards to begin with - they've been used as a cudgel often against the kinds of books I like (not to mention all of the other problems with canon-making, starting with which groups are allowed to be part of it and how they get in) - while at the same time I do think there are aspects of a work that can be clearly done badly or well. There are standards, on some level, which I do think serious readers can identify and note. 

At the same time, lousy things can on occasion be a lot of fun, and well-executed works can be tedious, horrible bilge not worth reading. (cf. Henry James) And I didn't have any interest in celebrating the worthy but dull.

So I wanted to do a list, and I wanted it to have rules that constrained it - but not the same rules as anyone else. These rules grew up as I was doing it, mostly that first year, and have been tweaked since then but are still recognizably the same. So that's why there's twelve, and why each month is its own little competition - because listing favorites for a year is already artificial to begin with, so why not emphasize that artificiality?

January

The last few years, I've been reading a lot of older books - that's good for my reading things I actually enjoy (at least most of the time), but it's bad for this list. Maybe some year I'll break down and say some of my favorite books of a given year are decades old, but I don't think I'm there yet.

Still - I did read a bunch of older, excellent books this year. I started the year reading about a corrupt political establishment and a weird, twisty election in A.J. Liebling's classic book of reportage The Earl of Louisiana, for reasons I think I can leave unstated. Later in January, I got to Stewart O'Nan's first novel, the seasonally appropriate Snow Angels, and also continued a vague project to re-read a lot of Jack Vance, starting his "Tschai" novels with City of the Chasch. (I read the rest of the Tschai books and the three Alastor novels in 2025.)

I also noticed that George O'Connor had started what will be a four-book series of graphic novels (officially for younger readers, but don't let that scare you) and got to the first one, Odin, in January and two more (the ones already published) before the year ended.

But the favorite for the month was a new graphic novel by the unique Carol Lay, My Time Machine, which also - to loop back to Liebling - had a lot of relevance to the world we find ourselves in.

February

Starting with old things again, I continued a re-read of Raymond Chandler's novels (as I type this, I'm just a bit into The Long Goodbye, which I should finish before the year ends) with Farewell, My Lovely this month. They're favorites, but, again, it's not fair to claim anything seven decades old for this year.

Not quite as old, and just as much a favorite, was Frank Miller and David Mazzucchelli's Batman: Year One, which sent me, a bit later in the year, into re-reading Miller's Daredevil as well.

Even newer - only about a decade old, and new to me - was a fine and visually stunning graphic novel about Brian Epstein, Vivek J. Tiwary and Andrew C. Robinson's The Fifth Beatle. I liked it but didn't love it, and thought it had more than a bit of special pleading.

Two other things that I can't quite call my favorites, for different reasons: Axelle Lenoir's fun collection What If We Were.... is enough not-quite-new that I have to make it an also-ran, and Cathy Malkasian's Percy Gloom is both a bit too old to be a 2025 favorite and quirky in ways that sometimes set my teeth on edge (which I'm finding common with Malkasian - she's a very particular creator with definite strengths, so I want to both read her books closely and argue with them intensely).

The favorite for the month is partly a sentimental favorite - Daniel Pinkwater had a new novel this year, the middle-grade story Jules, Penny, and the Rooster. I don't want to say that any new Pinkwater book would automatically be a favorite, but it's close to that - he's such a unique writer, who I've been reading since I was a middle-grade myself, and this is yet another fine bit of Pinkwateriana for brighten the world a bit.

March

My list of possibilities this month is entirely "old," so my favorite will end up being not as new as I would like. Maybe the way to figure out which one it should be is to start from the oldest books. 

I dug back into a big omnibus of Evelyn Waugh travel books by reading Remote People, the story of his trip to see Haile Selassie crowned King of Abyssina, and read a bunch more in that book later in the year - most of it deeply entertaining, even as Waugh was full of opinions and ideas I can't quite bring myself to agree with.

I re-read David Goodis's fine noir novel Down There, which I think I read in a big bunch of Goodis twenty-five years or so ago, so it was time enough to get back to it.

I found and read two good books of memoir this month: Louise Brooks' collection of essays about her time making movies, Lulu in Hollywood, and the newspaperwoman Helene Stapinski's memoir about her childhood in Jersey City, Five-Finger Discount.

I've been reading Julian Hanshaw's graphic novels as I've found them - he's a quirky, specific creator with something new to say in each book so far, which I appreciate. This month, I made my way back to his 2018 book Cloud Hotel.

And I've been spending the year reading the fine Freddy Lombard books of Yves Chaland, who died unexpectedly and far too young around thity years ago. The one that's the most impressive is right in the middle, and that will take pride of place for this month: Freddy Lombard, Vol. 3: The Comet of Carthage.

April

A few years later than I expected, I re-read Gene Wolfe's quirky sequel to his "Book of the New Sun" series, The Urth of the New Sun, which I found just as quirky this time around.

Also a few years old, but new to me, was Daria Tessler's semi-wordless (there's no dialogue, but a lot of in-world text) graphic novel Cult of the Ibis, which is deeply quirky in its own way.

For newer things, I read two very different, interesting, good graphic novels: Michael Avon Oeming's moody medieval supernatural tale William of Newbury and Craig Thompson's massive autobiographical Ginseng Roots.

The most impressive book of the month - it's a tough read, and about horrible things at times, so I don't want to say "favorite" quite as strongly for this month - was the new collection of Kayla E.'s stories about her childhood, Precious Rubbish.

May

I listed Chandler's The High Window in my first cut for this post, but I don't want to keep mentioning re-reading old things in the same series, so let me instead call out Chester Himes and The Real Cool Killers, about a decade more current and still as cool and smart and electric as it was sixty years ago.

I read two excellent novels - very different from each other - for the first time this month; both are over a decade old. Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog is the fourth of her novels about Jackson Brodie, which have been championed by crime-fiction readers but are bigger and more encompassing that that. (For all that "crime fiction" is already a very large bucket that can include a vast number of stories.) And William Kotzwinkle's The Midnight Examiner was a fever dream of an '80s tabloid.

I read a bunch of good graphic novels this month, and am finding it difficult to pick one as a favorite. All had strengths, but all also had things I disliked. So I can't quite make Eric Drooker's Naked City or Noah Van Sciver's Beat It, Rufus or Laura Pérez's Ocultos or Grant Snider's Thinking About Thinking or even Mia Oberlӓnder's Anna as my "favorite."

I will give pride of place to All My Bicycles by Powerpaola, a book and a creator I'd never heard of before I picked them up, a distinctive and interestingly framed memoir of a specific, quirky life, a book that was fun and energetic and colorful and wonderful.

June

On the old side, I read Evelyn Waugh's Scoop again, after twenty-some years, and found it just as cynical and nasty and cutting as the first time.

For newer things, I actually read a first novel around the time of publication! There was a decade or so where I did that several times a month, but times change on us. This time around, it was Auston Habershaw with a fine contemporary fantasy, If Wishes Were Retail.

And my favorite of the month was a graphic novel: Love Languages by James Albon, a fine love story by a creator whose work I need to dig into more deeply.

July

I mentioned a Julian Hanshaw book earlier, so, under my rules, I'm not supposed to say that I also read Free Pass this year. Pretend I didn't.

For old books, I read a few - another Evelyn Waugh travel book that I shouldn't mention, for one. I also re-read Kurt Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, which I think I got a lot more out of than when I first read it, as a teenager. (But isn't that always the case?) 

The favorite was a no-brainer. Jaime Hernandez had a new collection of his Love & Rockets stories: Life Drawing. 

August

August is a complicated one. If I hadn't already picked a Carol Lay book for this year's list, I'd be happy to give the nod to her Murderburg, which is a fun, zippy collection of great stories about a small-town (island) where killing people is something of a local hobby. But I had, so I couldn't.

I've been watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 a bunch the last year or so, with my kids, and this year dug into a few books about it, because that's the kind of over-intellectualizer I am. Best of that bunch, no surprise, is the book by the cast & crew themselves, The Mystery Science Theater 3000 Amazing Colossal Episode Guide from the mid-90s.

I should throw the "old" books in somewhere around here: I re-read William Goldman's classic fantasy novel The Princess Bride, which is as bright and cutting as ever. New to me, but nearly twenty years old, was the cultural history How to Be a Victorian by Ruth Goodman, which was smart and full of interesting details of everyday life for a lot of people over close to a century.

And then there were two books that could have been the favorite. One was "new," but largely reprinted old work by a great, now-dead master - so I think I'm going to take half a point off for that and list it first. Richard Sala was a massive talent who died much too soon, and his first book Night Drive was a quirky gem to begin with and made vastly better by the additional material added to the recent posthumous edition.

That leaves pride of place to Jeff Lemire's big, detailed memoir of his life in comics: 10,000 Ink Stains.

September

There were a lot of OK books in September, but not many I want to drag back out here. I got to another Cathy Malkasian book, The Heavy Bright, which I enjoyed and argued with in almost equal proportions. (I've seen reports that she's planning to stop making books, which would be sad: she's a unique, distinctive voice, and I say that even as I argue with almost every page of hers I read.)

I could also mention the fun but slight Who Killed Nessie? by Paul Cornell and Rachael Smith and the gorgeous but weirdly-ending Betty Blues by Renaud Dilles.

And the favorite for the month was another surprise: Smoking Kills by Thijs Desmet, an afterlife fantasy by a creator I've never heard of.

October

I've been reading or re-reading P.G. Wodehouse books, about one every second or third month, for several years now - he wrote about a hundred of them, so I have a lot to get through. I read several this year, all entertaining, all uniquely Wodehousian, but the only one I'll mention was this month: The Mating Season.

Also old, also a re-read, also the end of a re-read project: Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man. I was less-impressed by his middle novels, but this one is still zippy and bright.

Two random graphic novels worth mentioning: the stylish spy thriller Bang! by Matt Kindt & Wilfredo Torrres, and the major French biography George Sand: True Genius, True Woman by Séverine Vidal & Kim Consigny.

And one more, which almost became the favorite: The Interview by Manuelle Fior, an excellent SFnal story about a decade old now.

But I actually read a big non-fiction prose book, only a few years after publication, and it was full of insights and research and details about forty-some years of underground cartoonists and their followers, so that will take the slot: Brian Doherty's Dirty Pictures.

November

At this point in the year, my links start to give out, since the posts haven't gone live yet. I might go back later in '26 and add them in, but I suspect I won't remember to do that.

To start with the old: this year I finally read A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, which was mostly familiar from a million adaptations but full of specifics that strong originals always have and their adaptations never quite include all of.

I also read the excellent '70s SF novel The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by D.G. Compton, also for the first time. Vaguely related - since it's about old SF - is the oral history Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods!, edited by Richard Wolinsky from several decades of a San Francisco radio-interview program.

On the comics side, I found two excellent books by European creators from earlier this century: Naomi Nowak's Graylight and Ludovic Debeurme's Renée.

For newer comics, also worth noting were Walker Tate's debut Laser Eye Surgery and two books of an unexpected triptych of women cartoonists making memoirs about their relationships with food and eating: Jennifer Hayden's Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner and Debbie Tung's My Perfectly Imperfect Body. (I'll mention the third a section down, under December.)

The favorite was a big new book by Bill Griffith, covering the long, complex, fascinating life of his photographer grandfather: Photographic Memory.

December

In the last month of the year, I read a weird old book worth mentioning: Mister Pye, the other novel by Gormenghast author Mervyn Peake. It is light in tone and amiable and utterly its own odd supernatural thing, in a Christian vein unlike anything else I've ever read.

I mentioned Jaime Hernandez's new Love & Rockets collection above, so, out of fairness, I should also mention the similarly new collection by his brother Gilbert, Lovers and Haters. There: I have now mentioned it. I make no claims for favorites or quality.

Reading Jeff Lemire's 10,000 Ink Stains inspired me to make a list of the books of his I'd missed, and I got to his excellent, recent, mostly horror/crime Fishflies this month.

I need to mention John Allison somewhere in this list, though I seem to mostly read his stuff online these days. I did get to the collection of his recent series with Max Sarin, The Great British Bump-Off: Kill or Be Quilt, which is full of his great dialogue and sparkling plots - plus Sarin's fine cartoony drawing, too.

The third of the three memoirs by women cartoonist about cooking and eating - and the one that made me notice there were three of them, published almost on top of each other, was the smart and insightful The Joy of Snacking by New Yorker cartoonist and standup comic Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell.

And the favorite for the month, to close out the year, was another collection of laconic genre stories told sideways by the inimitable cartoonist known only as Jason, Death in Trieste.

Top 12 of 2024

• Love Languages by James Albon
• Freddy Lombard, Vol. 3: The Comet of Carthage by Yves Chaland 
• Smoking Kills by Thijs Desmet
• Dirty Pictures by Brian Doherty
• Precious Rubbish by Kayla E.
• Photographic Memory by Bill Griffith
• Life Drawing by Jaime Hernandez
• Death in Trieste by Jason
• My Time Machine by Carol Lay
• 10,000 Ink Stains by Jeff Lemire
• Jules, Penny, and the Rooster by Daniel Pinkwater
• All My Bicycles by Powerpaola

I read 207 books last year - less than 2024, more than the four years before that, less than my Book-A-Day Years but more than the ones between. I seem to have found a pattern that works for me.

I don't know if you're like me, but I need to find ways to embed reading - like so many other things that I want to make sure I do regularly - into the fabric of my life, so that it just happens. Years ago, I read for myself while commuting and for work (when I was an editor) in long stretches every weekend and many evenings. Losing the editorial job freed up my weekends, though I sometimes miss that life. Losing the commute sent me into a reading tailspin, and it took me years to figure out how to replace that time regularly.

What I mean to say is: think about the things that matter to you. If you read this far, "reading books" is probably one of them. Embed those things in your life regularly. Make time for them, structurally. Don't let the things you really want to do become contingent and secondary.

And, of course: read good books. I recommend the ones above; you'll have others based on your own tastes. 2026 is as good a time as any. Today is the best time to do anything, to start any project.