Reviewing the Mail: Week of March 23, 2024

These books didn't come in the mail; I had an eye doctor appointment this last Monday, and my long-time doctor has an office on the fringes of the Village (or is 13th Street still Chelsea? I'm not dogmatic, or terribly well-informed, about the exact boundaries of Manhattan neighborhoods).

The office was convenient to work for a long time: first a quick subway ride from Times Square, and then a quick subway ride from Rockefeller Center, and then a quick walk from Madison Square Park, and then a quick PATH from Hoboken, and then a slightly more complicated subway ride from the UN area, and then again a quick PATH from Hoboken. But I went full-time work-from-home - somewhat sideways, and not by specific choice - just before or during the pandemic, so now she's not nearly as convenient as she was for almost twenty years. Still, a good doctor is worth a bit of fuss, so once a year I make the trek.

And, since I'm already on 13th Street between Fifth and Sixth, and The Strand is less than five minutes away...well, I have to make a stop, don't I?

I did; these are the books I got there (and one at Forbidden Planet down the block).

The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe by D.G. Compton - a book I've heard about for years, in a nice classy relatively recent edition with an introduction by Jeff Vandermeer. This is the one about a near-future world in which no one dies of random diseases, but one woman is dying, and is secretly recorded for the entertainment of the rest of the world. I get a '70s Ballard vibe from it - media landscapes, death, British pessimism, all that jazz - and that sounds just fine.

Ocean State is a novel by Stewart O'Nan that I didn't realize existed; it was published in 2022 and I got the trade paperback from a year later. (It's been about fifteen years since I obsessively read Publishers Weekly and related materials for work, cataloging every book of interest and maintaining massive lists - and I'm still weirdly surprised that I'm not plugged into every last book being published the way I was when I did all of that. Expectations are weird.) Anyway, I like O'Nan's work, and keep thinking I will catch up on him eventually. This one is about teenage murder, which gives me a vague Speed Queen sense.

Animal Vegetable Criminal was Mary Roach's new book for 2021; she's a fine writer of nonfiction who I've read intermittently. (Well, I say that, but doing a search here, I might not have read anything of hers since Stiff in 2009. OK, maybe I just have a couple of her books on my to-be-read shelves and/or lists, but I think that counts as reading, or at least planning to read.) This one is about animals that get into criminal mischief - or maybe just interfere with human activities. I'm not expecting this to be law-geeky as the wonderful The Emergency Sasquatch Ordinance (which you all should read, and which I hope will develop a sequel one day), but I do live in hope, as always.

A Matter of Life is a small graphic novel by Jeffrey Brown, subtitled "An Autobiographical Meditation on Fatherhood and Faith." I've like several of Brown's previous autobio pieces and this is from Top Shelf, who have never steered me wrong before.

Hypercapitalism is a 2018 book that I feel like I've been looking for, every time I was in a book or comics store, since then. I finally saw it in person, so I guess I had to buy it. It's by Larry (Cartoon History of the Universe) Gonick and Tim Kasser, who I gather is the actual expert on economics here. It looks as dense and mixed serious/funny as the rest of Gonick's work, so I hope to get to it more quickly than the six years it took me to find it.

And last is another book I've ben vaguely looking for multiple years: Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell, a 2014 book collecting that entire webcomic by Sophie Goldstein and Jenn Jordan. I probably read the whole strip, or most of it, when it ran, and I haven't checked to see if it's still online anywhere - it might well be. And I think I almost bought it when it was new, but maybe balked at full retail. Well, it's a decade later, and now it was very slightly cheaper, so yay for procratination.