Reviewing the Mail: Week of February 4, 2023

Two more books from the library for this week.

What more can I say about that category? Even at my age, the fact that I can look something up online and ask for it to be held for me, for free, in a building in my town is amazing.

Modern society, man! Civilization! It's really nice. We should all try to preserve it, and not, like, destroy the financial position of our national government for petty and incoherent political ends. (But that's just me.)

Cranial Fracking is a 2021 collection of humorous essays by Ian Frazier that I only realized exited a couple of weeks ago, when I was typing up my thoughts on his 2000 book On the Rez. [1] The most recent previous collection of Frazier's funny stuff was Lamentations of the Father (which had a deeply unfortunate cover) and the most famous one was Coyote V. Acme. I generally think Frazier is really good at this funny-essay stuff, so I'm looking forward to this one.

Also in the funny-stuff category, Number One Is Walking, a memoir of Steve Martin's life in the film industry, written by Martin and drawn - the whole thing is in graphic-novel form, for some inexplicable reason - by Harry Bliss. In fact, it looks like the memoir peters out about halfway through, and the back of the book is Martin/Bliss single-panel gag cartoons. I have no ideas if those are related to Martin's film career, or just random stuff put in to add laughs and bulk the book out to a salable length. Either way: I got it from the library, as previously mentioned, so I don't care.

[1] Look for my post on March 1st. Mark it on your calendars! (Or don't; I'm not your mother.)