Reviewing the Mail: Week of August 29, 2026

I'm on vacation this last week of American summer, so I gathered books from all directions - mostly in time for the actual vacation. This post will list everything I got from the library, which I will definitely read this week. Next week will be a post about all of the used books that are still trickling in - mostly for longer-term reading projects, so probably not for right now anyway.

The third (and, so far, last) book in the graphic-novel series by Hope Larson about young musicians is All My Friends. (The first two books in the series are All Summer Long and All Together Now.) It came out in 2021, and I knew it was coming - I'd mentioned it when I wrote about Together - but it took me five years to remember to get it into my hands. This one seems to be more serious-business than the first two; Bina's interest in making music has led to actual professional opportunities, which is a lot for a thirteen-year-old.

John Hodgman would be the first person to tell you he's had a weird career - in fact, his later career seems to be largely commentary about how weird his initial public-facing career was, which fits solidly in the capacious "memoir" category but is pretty quirky. Medallion Status claims to be the book about what it is like to be John Hodgman, in the years after he was no longer on TV as often as he was initially. (It may be about something slightly different; I grumped a bit about Vacationland, his previous book, because the publishers tried to push it as "it's just really funny; don't worry about the topic" when it actually had a solid hook they could have used.)

On vacation towards the beginning of the summer, I read Martha Wells's recent fantasy novel Witch King.  (No link yet; my post goes live on Wednesday and let's see if I remember to go back and add it.) That book had a sequel last year, Queen Demon, which I think ends the series. I don't think I've gotten to two books in a series that quickly in several years, but it's the plan this time.

I probably saw a review of Kay Sohini's graphic-novel memoir This Beautiful, Ridiculous City somewhere, but I have no idea where that would have been. It came out last year, and is about how she moved to New York (from India - so kind of a big deal), what drove her to that move and what she found there. I'm being vague because my knowledge of the book is vague; I'm going to have to read it to find out what it's really about, which is the best way to read, I think.

And last is Black Arms to Hold You Up, a newish book (also last year) from firebrand graphic-novelist Ben Passmore (author of, most recently I think, Sports Is Hell). I tend to think Passmore goes too far, but, then again, I am exactly the kind of guy (white, middle-aged, suburban, comfortable) who would think someone like Passmore goes too far. So I keep reading his books. This one is subtitled "A History of Black Resistance," as in violent resistance to state oppression, but I think there are two caveats to that: first, that it's all in an American context. And, second, that there's some level of fictionalized frame story, involving a version of Passmore, that tells the historical sections. 

Reviewing the Mail: Week of August 15, 2026

I was out at the library, and vaguely unhappy with the choices I had at home for my next book to read. (Three big bookcases just isn't enough choice, I guess.) So I was poking around the new arrivals shelves there, and came away with one book:

Joshua Kendall's Trudeau & Doonesbury: A Biography is just what it says it is, a biography of Doonesbury creator G.B. Trudeau. It came out a couple of months ago from Abrams, and is heavily illustrated, which is a big plus for a biography of a cartoonist: Kendall can describe a strip, and then show it. I'm about halfway through right now, and it's pleasant, though I'm realizing Trudeau had a boring life - a major hazard for the lives of creative types, who mostly live in their own heads. So far, Kendall is impressively well-informed, with lots of interviews of all sorts of people (including the publicity-shy Trudeau himself), so I might just be complaining about Trudeau's actual life, not the book about it.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 25, 2026

There's been an impressive flow of new books coming in, so I'm running these posts further out in the future than perhaps the title would imply. (As I type, it is Sunday the 19th, but I already have a Reviewing the Mail going live today, so this one gets bumped out a week.)

The fourth book of the vacation order (covered last week) arrived recently - which is for a specific reading purpose that will probably be obvious - and I also got three books from the library, which I'll list first in a misguided attempt to create tension.

I might have missed a book in the middle, but The Werewolf at Dusk is (the next?) book of comics stories from David Small, author of the highly lauded 2008 graphic memoir Stitches. (I reviewed it for ComicMix at the time.) Werewolf came out in 2024, and has Small's adaptations of three stories - one of which he's credited as the original author, so I'm not sure if he wrote it in prose and it was published somewhere, or just that he plotted and scripted the comics story - which are all about animals in one way or another. Small is a long-time illustrator, most famously of books for young readers, and won the Caldecott among several other awards.

Mike Dawson is a graphic novelist from my home state of New Jersey - I recently backed the kickstarter for a collection of his short comics - and his new book for young readers is The Hidden Dominion of Geordie James, about a tween boy who has trouble speaking up and what happens when he has to be part of a group project in science class. (I read this yesterday and plan to write about it when I'm done with this post, so I'll leave it at that.)

Yes, graphic novels for young readers are still a big deal, and a huge part of the general comics ecosystem. Both of the above books have a slightly cringe "Pow!" sticker on the spine that I suspect is to the current generation what the SF-rocket-ship was to mine. (And I seriously suspect whether Werewolf is actually for young readers; a librarian might have made a mistake or deliberately paid for the Small book out of a budget that is not entirely correct.)

The third library book, though, is very clearly not aimed at kids, and does not sport a Pow! sticker: the most recent Joe Sacco book, The Once and Future Riot. Following his usual modus operandi, Sacco went somewhere people have killed each other recently for stupid reasons and made non-fiction comics about it - this time it's Uttar Pradesh in India and the two groups are Muslims and Hindus. I don't know if this time he's doing the "this group is clearly the right one and is blameless in every aspect" thing that he sometimes drops into; I suppose I'll see. (There's usually plenty of bad faith and random cruelty and murder on both sides of all the locations he writes about, but everyone has their own viewpoint.)

And the book I paid for is Cox's Fragmenta II, edited by Simon Murphy. See my post three years ago on the first one for something like an explanation of the whole deal - basically, some guy in the 18th century kept huge scrapbooks of newspaper clippings, which ended up in the British Library. That's Cox. And another guy - Murphy - edited a small book with a selection of that stuff in the modern day. And then he did a second one, which is this one. It's random and quirky and entirely made up of small snippets, so you can guess what kind of reading that is.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 18, 2026

This is slightly cheating: I'm writing this the morning of Friday, July 10, and the three books below all arrived earlier this week. But I already have a post about new books going up this Sunday, so this one gets bumped back a week. No one cares about the exact timing anyway.

I was on vacation this week - still am, as of the moment I'm typing this - and wanted some things to read. (Because three big bookcases full of stuff clearly wasn't enough, as often is true.) I ordered some things from that retailer we all wish we didn't use as much as we do, and three of the four books I bought came quickly. (One more is still in transit from somewhere more distant; I imagine I'll post about that when it finally arrives.)

Anyway, this is what arrived Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week - in three separate packages on three separate days for maximum environmental impact, I guess.

For a reading project: The Moving Target, the first of Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer novels. I've already read this, and written a post about it, so what else can I say here? Hmmm. I have a suspicion that this book was printed print-on-demand, if that's interesting. It's the Vintage Crime/Black Lizard edition from 1998, but the copyright page doesn't have a listing of what printing it is. Also, the covers curl somewhat more than usual while reading, the text is ever-so-slightly fuzzy, and there's a bunch of blank pages at the end. All of that, in my mind, adds up to POD - but there's no bar code at the end of the book block, so I can't be sure. If it is POD, it's very close to a "real" offset-printed book, which is nice.

Because I like to try to read longer books when I have a few days free to dive into them: Witch King, the beginning of a fantasy trilogy from Martha Wells. (I almost said "new" trilogy, but this is from 2023, is already in paperback, and I think the sequel is out or nearly out.) I'm not quite a quarter of the way into this one, and looking at my days of vacation left, I might not manage to finish it off before Monday's return to work. So far, it's a meaty, complex book with two timelines, but, given its trilogy-starter status, I'm trying not to expect an actual ending here. If I do get one, that can be a pleasant surprise.

And, more or less as an alternate choice if I decided I didn't want to read Witch King next, I also got Jack Vance's 1982 novel Suldrun's Garden. I've been working my way through Vance novel-series over the past couple of years, and I think I've gotten to all of the classic Vance that has been collected into omnibuses. So now this fantasy trilogy is probably next, and then I'll have to figure out where to go from there. I did read this, I think, but it was a long, long time ago - probably in the mid to late '80s, having gotten them from the SFBC a decade or so before I went to work there.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 11, 2026

I ordered a batch of book-shaped comics recently - I'd gotten a coupon from the shop that I suppose is my "regular" these years, and hey, a deal is a deal - and they arrived early in the week I was off. That was great timing, since I can now read them during those days off.

(And I say "can now," since I'm writing this on Wednesday, but by the time the post goes live on Sunday, I probably will have already read all of them. Such is the miracle of scheduled posts.)

Anyway, these did come in the mail, but I paid for them:

John Porcellino's coming-of-age memoir Perfect Example. I've read a couple of collections of Porcellino's King-Cat Comics, which are lovely minimalist slice-of-life stories, but somehow I'd missed this one when it was published a few years ago.

The most recent "movie book" from Gilbert Hernandez, Proof That the Devil Loves You. It's part of a long, weirdly metafictional side-series of mostly short GNs that are meant to be movies - bad ones, most of the time - that one of his main characters in his regular stories starred in in her fictional world. Like a lot of things with Hernandez, it's weirdly overcomplicated for reasons that I suspect are deeply important to him but don't necessarily come through to the reader. But that weirdness, even if I don't quite get it, is fascinating.

A newish graphic novel from Guy Delisle, Muybridge. I guess this follows Hostage in seeing Delisle making stories about non-fictional things that aren't part of his own life. Previously, his work mostly fell into two buckets: the short books about "Bad Parenting" and the longer memoirs about various things in his life, first the foreign cities he lived in and then Factory Summers a few years ago. This one looks like a biography-in-comics-form of the pioneering 19th century photographer Eadwaerd Muybridge.

I probably got John Cuneo's Good Intentions out of pure prurient interest. Cuneo is an illustrator - maybe also a cartoonist, if you want to argue that captioned drawings automatically put him into that category - whose material tends to the fleshy and uncomfortable. His people are lumpy and middle-aged, their circumstances boring but odd, and this book collects a hundred or so illustrations (some captioned, some not) that I think were all sketchbook work rather than meant for a particular publication.

And last - because I already read it yesterday - is the most recent book by Kim Deitch, How I Make Comics. I'm about to write a full post about it next, so I'll leave it at that here.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of July 4, 2026

I was ordering a movie from the library this week - Knives Out, which I just saw six years after everyone else - and I got a book as well. This is it.

Seek You is a 2021 graphic novel by Kristen Radtke, author of Imagine Wanting Only This. I have been thinking of it as new, but I guess I've been thinking that for longer than I thought. The subtitle is "A Journey through American Loneliness," which I suppose explains what it covers as well as any longer explanation I could give here.

I'm expecting to read it quickly - that's the deal with library books - so I'll see what I think of it then.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 13, 2026

It was my birthday last week, and I got a couple of book-shaped things as presents - one from myself (who knows me better?) and one from my older child.

I also got two books from Tachyon during the week since that momentous birthday party, and, given the title of this post series, they need to come first.

Meg Elison has a new short novel, Foundling Fathers, officially publishing later this month. (Though what I have in my hands is a final book, so you may be able to get one, too.) It's a SF novel, in which some shadowy right-wing billionaires are raising clones of "Thomas, John, George, and Ben" - exactly the ones you think, from the title - as part of their usual schemes. Apparently a modern smartphone falls into their hands, which leads to various funny complications.

(I am exactly the kind of person who immediately thinks, "wait, isn't Franklin a good thirty years older than the others? How does that work?" But the whole raised-in-secret, isolated-island-plantation thing is so vastly different from their original lives that this is a really silly, minor quibble at best.)

Also from Tachyon (published last month): Ignore all Previous Instructions by Ada Hoffmann. I should note that I've never been fond of the "this one company owns everything, and they are Evil and Oppressive, and Our Hero will smash them in the course of the book" kind of story, which this seems to be. (Companies that big and evil and oppressive don't get smashed that way; they wither away when something else crops up or change over time.) It's set on Callisto, where the evil oppressive company is Inspiration, which uses GenAI to something something "own everything and [determine] which stories can be told." Have I mentioned that, after my time in the book-mines, I also have a mild allergy to stories about story-tellers, particularly when that story-telling is Important and Foundational to their Very Identities and the Source of All Good Things in the Known Universe? Also that I think most discourse around AI - especially things that use "GenAI" as the stake in the ground, three years later - is stupid and confused and wrong, on both sides?

So I'm afraid I am very unlikely to enjoy this book, or be able to read it without flames on the side of my face, so I will point you to it, note that you are not me and probably have completely different hobby-horses, and say that Ignore has a bunch of glowing quotes and is notably queer-positive.

Bought for myself: Platform Decay by Martha Wells, the most recent novel in the "Murderbot" series. You probably don't need me to tell you about the series, but I will if you're interested. I don't really know what happens in this book, and I don't much care: I'll read it fairly quickly no matter what.

And last is the big present from my child: a big slipcased thing called The Skyrim Library. There are three books in a very handsome case, each collecting a lot of short material and a lot of art that I think was mostly from in-game materials (the game being Skyrim, of course). It is a cool-looking object that I now need to find an appropriate place on a shelf - and, I hope, also find time to read at least parts of the thing.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of June 6, 2026

I had my annual visit to the eye doctor this week, which means - since she's in Manhattan near Union Square - taking a whole day off work and using that opportunity to do some shopping at the Strand. I still miss the review-copy bonanza that store used to be, but all things decline into the West, I suppose, and it's a big, pretty-good standard indy book store these days.

Here's what I found on this trip:

I am about three decades late starting to read Christopher Brookmyre - is he even still writing these days? - but I've vaguely thought about his stuff pretty much all that time. This trip, I found a copy of his first novel Quite Ugly One Morning, which is a short humorous thriller, and I figured I will have a better chance of reading it if it's on the shelf.

Tom Gauld had a new book of science cartoons late last year: Physics for Cats. I'm a big fan of Gauld; he's one of the few cartoonists whose books I still buy in actual physical form and keep, so take that as a glowing recommendation.

I'm still a couple of books behind on Nick Hornby, but I seem to be catching up: I grabbed a copy of Just Like You, his 2020 novel. I'm pretty sure it's a story about middle-class English people with love trouble: this one is about a fortyish woman who becomes the December in a May-December relationship - I think, from hints in the back-cover copy, that the chap she picks up to be May is also Black, or similarly "clearly unsuitable" for her.

Somehow I also got behind on Walter Mosley's Easy Rawlins mysteries, which I was reading consistently for twenty-plus years. I think Blonde Faith is the first one I missed - there are several more, including one more I already have - so I may be able to catch up.

I saw the movie made of Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats, way back near when it came out., And I've read several of his other books of reportage. But I never read this one - now I can.

And last is a collection of miscellaneous travel pieces by Paul Theroux: Sunrise with Seamonsters. As far as I can tell, he's had a book like this for roughly each decade of his career - this was the first one, starting with short pieces from the late '60s.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of 5/2/2026

I think these two books actually arrived last Saturday (April 25), but I didn't get time to write about them until now. (Now being the next Saturday. It's all very Spaceballs.)

Anyway, two books came in from Tachyon, both of which were recently published. Here's what I can tell you about them:

A new collection of stories by Samantha Mills: Rabbit Test and Other Stories. I think this is actually her first collection, and it has thirteen stories: one of them original to this collection, the rest reprinted from the usual wide range of outlets from about the past decade. The title story won the Nebula, Locus and Sturgeon awards, and Mills has also won a Compton Crook award. This one hit stores on April 21.

And a debut novel told in a very modern epistolary way (emails, chats, and more exotic postings): Justin Feinstein's Your Behavior Will Be Monitored. This one came out on April 7th, and is a satirical novel about AI, in which a copywriter is training a new bot under pressure, as his company barrels towards an ever-accelerating product release. (There seems to be a bit of John Sladek in the set-up, which I am absolutely here for.)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of March 28, 2026

One book this week - it actually arrived in the mail a week ago on Saturday, but I didn't have time to post for last Sunday, and no one cares that much anyway.

The book is the recently Kickstarted collection of Mike Dawson's comics, Fun Time Omnibus, Vol. One, which - like a lot of Kickstarted projects - is probably not actually available generally right now. But I would not be surprised if Dawson has it on a webstore eventually. It collects three issues of his self-published 'zine of the same name, plus (I think) some random other comics from various places. (I've seen Dawson in the NY Times a few times over the past year or two - I think both in that page-two space in the Metropolitan section and in the Book Review - so maybe that material, or short comics from his website, or both, or other things.)

Anyway, this is now a book, I'm going to read it, and you probably can't find it right now if you wanted to - but maybe you'll have a chance later, if you want to make a note.

Also, the final cover is slightly different from the version I have here from the Kickstarter page - all the lettering is hand-drawn and new, with "Fun Time" slightly different and the 3D effect in a darker shade of the purple color.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of February 28, 2026

I got one book from the library this week, and, continuing the theme from last week, it is physically larger than I expected. I'm getting much more of an upper-body workout from my books lately than expected.

That book is the most recent graphic novel by Peter Kuper: Insectopolis: A Natural History. As best I can tell, it's a pop-science book in comics form telling the history of the vast phylum of Arthropoda. (OK, I'm cheating slightly. I was hoping Insects would have their own Kingdom, but they don't - they're Animalia like most of us. And Arthopodia includes things that aren't insects, who all sit within the Class Insecta. But that isn't nearly as much fun to type out.)

The big deal here, for anyone not aware, is that insects are dying out in vast numbers, due to human activity, over the past few decades. And they are an important base level to a lot of ecosystems, which means the extinction of various insect species is A Bad Sign. Kuper has never been the most positive storyteller - he always seems to gravitate to things that are broken, lost, or horrible in various ways - so I expect this will be depressing in multiple ways.

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.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of February 14, 2026

One book came in the mail this week: let me tell you about it.

Rick Geary has been doing Kickstarters for books for about the last decade - I think it started out as his weirder, quirkier projects, but there have also been a few historical-murder stories that looked a lot like the books he did for bigger publishers. So it might just be the way he initially self-publishes his work these days, which is just fine - I'm on the mailing list, so I get 'em.

The most recent book was A Billy the Kid Alphabet, which heads back a bit towards the quirky side. Geary did a more "normal" Billy the Kid book a few years ago with The True Death of Billy the Kid, which is a better bet for anyone who wants the story told in order with the facts lined up nicely. Alphabet, on the other hand, is in the style of a abecadary, with a big double-page entry (one full-page illustration, one page of text) for each letter of the alphabet, from Alias to Zero.

Billy the Kid is still a source of fascination for many - including Geary, I assume - which is why this book exists and has an audience. For, me, I'm mostly here for Geary telling me about historical murderers and showcasing his magnificently detailed pen-and-ink drawings.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of January 31, 2026

One book came in the mail this week, from Norton - who send me things once in a while, so I really should make an effort to actually review this one and encourage them.

It is The Neverending Book by Naoki Matayoshi and Shinsuke Yohsitake, translated from the Japanese by Kendall Heitzman. It's an illustrated story (Matayoshi is the writer; Yoshitake the illustrator) that apparently was a "runaway bestseller."

I've never been clear on how much, or how quickly, a book has to sell to run away. Maybe if the publisher can't manage to keep it in print?

Anyway, this was a big deal in Japan, and the English-language edition is coming on April 21.

The story is, well, let me just quote the official copy:

An aged, near-blind, book-loving king sends two of his subjects out into the world to learn about unusual and magical books. One year later, they return to tell the whimsical, tender, and touching stories they’ve learned.

That makes me want to respond with a version of the old Lou Grant reaction: "Kid, you've got quirk! I hate quirk." But that's dismissive and unwarranted. It does sound quirky and uplifting, in that pop-culture fantasy mode, a compendium of quickly-sketched stories across many genres and types, for the kind of reader who thinks she loves books more than most people. And there are, of course, a lot of people who think they like books more than most people. If you are one of them - I am, myself - this may be of interest.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of January 24, 2026

Two books came in the mail this week, from the fine folks at Tachyon:

Michael Swanwick's new story collection The Universe Box - which I think is his first major collection since The Dog Said Bow-Wow back in 2007 - is publishing very soon, on February 3rd. You can probably pre-order it, and copies of the final book (I have what I still call a "bound galley," since that's what we called them when I worked in the field) might even be wending their way through the system now. Universe Box collects seventeen stories from various places, mostly originally published from 2017 through 2023, but including one 2012 story and two original to this collection.

(Parenthetically, Swanwick has always been prolific in short fiction, so I suspect there's another collection between 2007 and now. Let me fire up ISFDB and investigate...ah, yes! there was a 2016 book, Not So Much Said the Cat, which I must have missed.)

Swanwick has been winning awards for his short fiction since before my SF career, so I recommend this even before reading it. Is it fantasy or SF? Knowing Swanwick, probably both - maybe both even in individual stories. But definitely at least one of them, each time.

The other book is already published: Theodora Goss's Letters from an Imaginary Country, which came out in November. This one is a themed collection, sixteen fantasy stories about storytelling, many of which seem to have a fabulistic or other-people's-stories background. Three of the stories here are original to the collection.

I have not read a book by Goss, though I think I've seen her stories in anthologies over the years. But this is a big interesting book with a connection that seems supple and intriguing, plus an introduction by Jo Walton, so it goes on the shelf and I'll see if I can manage to get to it.

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.

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.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of December 6, 2025

I was getting a movie from the library for my weekly "Movie Night" with my twenty-something kids, and thought "why not look at the ongoing list of books and see if I want to read any of them now?" And so I did, and so I requested these two, and so they were pulled for me.

If you have a local library, check to see if they do this - being able to request specific books online and have them held for you is a really neat feature. (Especially if you already have too many books in the house and are trying not to overly increase that number.)

Here's what I just got, which I'm actually reading this very weekend (one yesterday, one today):

The sixth book in the Asterix series by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo: Asterix and Cleopatra. I read the first three in the current, too-small-for-my-aging-eyes omnibus, then jumped to the older album-sized English-language version for #4, Asterix the Gladiator. #5 is not available as a standalone in my library system, and plot/theme/character development does not seem to be a huge issue with these books, so I just moved on to the next one.

Um. And a misaimed search at that big e-commerce site gave me the surprising revelation that there was a recent French live-action series of Asterix movies? How did they find a lead actor short enough?

And the third (of a planned four) book in George O'Connor's current mythology-retold-for-younger-readers series, Asgardians, is Loki, just published this past fall. The first two books in Asgardians were Odin and Thor, as you'd expect; I haven't seen any hints as to who will be covered in #4. O'Connor previously did a long series about the Greek gods, as Olympians, and his work is detailed and smart, filled with insights from myth and fable and told in modern, compelling ways with complex characterization and a muscular, adventure-comics art style. (He also gets in a lot more quirky material than some people might expect from that "young readers" above - his books are suitable for smart middle-schoolers rather than aimed at them, is how I'd put it.)

Reviewing the Mail: Week of October 11, 2025

And this is the third weekly installment listing books I bought from a clearance sale from Midtown Comics a few weeks back - so not "the mail" this precise week, but in the mail not too long before. This time, I have the last five books that were in that big box, the end of the alphabet:

When I do orders like this, I tend to pick odd things I don't know much about - works that strike me interestingly, that look like something distinct. So I often say things like "I have no idea who this creator is" or "this book is about something, but I don't know what." For example: Dear Beloved Stranger is a Xeric Award-winning graphic novel from Dino Pai, published in 2013, which is probably autobiographical, somewhat fabulistic, and otherwise mysterious to me.

From the German cartoonist Ulf K. comes the wordless collection of strips Hieronymus B.: 1997-2007, all about a little man in a hat who works in some sort of an office and I bet has various travails.

A big biographical comic from two French creators is next: George Sand: True Genius, True Woman, written by Séverine Vidal and drawn by Kim Consigny, about (of course) the 19th century feminist novelist and playwright.

Next up is a book for younger readers, translated from the German - Box by Patrick Wirbeleit and Uwe Heidschӧtter. The kid on the cover, I gather, meets that magical box, and then they build stuff - I imagine it gets more complicated from there.

And last - for today, and overall - is Zach Worton's 2015 graphic novel The Disappearance of Charley Butters, which I saw on some best-of list around that time and had on my "buy this if you see it" list since then. I don't think I ever saw a copy of it in person, but I've got it now...now what (besides the disappearance of the title character) is it actually about? I guess I'll have to read it to find out.