Reviewing the Mail: Week of September 5, 2026

I ordered a big batch of used books recently, from multiple sellers. (I'm using Alibris these days, as the one not owned yet by a giant hegemonic behemoth.) About half of them have come in as I type this, so that seems like enough to throw into a post. These are mostly from authors I have "reading projects" about - which means I'm reading a series, or their whole body of work, either in order or over time as I get to it.

Projects can be fun things!

Anyway, here's what's reached me so far, and which I will read at some point (if I don't get hit by a bus).

I read Jimmy the Kid, somewhat puckishly, as part of my Starktober project - reading the whole works of Richard Stark - a decade ago. You see, Jimmy is a book by Donald E. Westlake, in the Dormunder funny-caper-novel series, that is inspired by a book that does not actually exist, Child Heist by Richard Stark. (Donald Westlake also wrote under the name Richard Stark, to make the connection clearer.) I got that one from the library, I think, since I didn't have a copy of the book in the house and I used an old hardcover image for the Jimmy post. (I try to use the cover of the actual edition I read, for pernickety personal reasons.) I'm now planning to read all of the Dortmunder books in order, so I need to have this third book available.

I've been reading P.G. Wodehouse in the "Collector's Wodehouse" series from Overlook Press for ages - I started before my 2011 flood, but, since then, I'm only counting the ones I've read since then and have on a specific shelf. (It gives me an excuse to buy and read books again, especially since I don't have any records or a good memory of what I had pre-2011.) I got two of them in this batch of books.

First up is Ring for Jeeves, a 1953 novel - based on a play, I think - that is the only Jeeves story not narrated by or featuring Bertie Wooster at all. I probably read this when I read all of the Jeeves books in the '90s, but I don't remember ever hitting a Jeeves book not in Bertie's voice, so I dunno.

The other Wodehouse book is Blandings Castle, which I do remember reading - I got to the Blandings books right after Jeeves, I think largely on the recommendation of my former boss Ellen Asher. (She thought Jeeves was OK, but Blandings was sublime. These days, I don't disagree but I really love the Bertie Wooster voice, and also might make a dark-horse recommendation for Uncle Fred.) This isn't (I think) the first time Blandings appeared, but it's pretty early - it's a 1935 collection of stories that's about one-third Blandings and two-thirds "Elsewhere." And from right in the middle of Wodehouse's best period, too, which is a bonus.

I'm also reading through Ross Macdonald's mystery novels about detective Lew Archer - I hit the first one, The Moving Target, this summer, and will probably continue roughly quarterly until I get through them all. But I was missing a few, so I just got:

The 1952 novel The Ivory Grin. I read this one, way back when I was getting into mysteries as a youngster, and I couldn't tell you anything at all about the specifics of this one. I have a vague soup of Lew Archer in my head, and it will be interesting to see what came from which book and what was my own confusion in my teen years. (The only one I have any specific memory of is The Underground Man, which I still think of as the peak of the series.)

The other Macdonald was the 1961 novel The Wycherly Woman, for which all of the random blather above is also true. Blogger wants each image to have enough text to wrap around it to keep it away from the next paragraph, so I'm just typing a bit here to reduce the amount of unsightly white space below. (Probably not enough blathering, though. Never is.)

And last is a Library of America book: Writings by S.J. Perelman. I've spent years grumping about the LoA's tendency to do "good parts" versions of writers I wish they'd do "complete editions" of - Lovecraft is worth keeping in multiple volumes; that old fraud Henry James is not - but I'm clearly an outlier. And I guess I've mellowed a bit over time. I still wish they'd do official omnibuses, because I like to read "books" that I can make posts about here and put down in my reading notebook and count as metrics in a pointless, silly exercise. But a nearly 600-page collection of Perelman - wait, only 600? my old Franklin book is twice that size! - is still a good thing, despite my grumbling. Anyway, Perelman is one of the great funny New Yorker writers, and I think the most distinctive and odd of that crew. I haven't read a big chunk of Perelman for a long time, and I lost my shelf of his individual books in the 2011 flood, so this is a nice thing to have.

Next week, I expect there will be a very similar post, with different titles by many of the same writers, as the other books from this order trickle in. Come back to see if I manage to say anything different - or interesting!

John Cuneo's Good Intentions

John Cuneo is an illustrator: he's done a bunch of New Yorker covers, worked for Esquire, and so on. But, like any artist, there's work that he wants to do that doesn't fit into what clients want him to draw.

So he's had a series of books collecting his other work, over the past twenty years: nEuROTIC, Not Waving But Drawing, Coping Skills. And, just last year, most recently, John Cuneo's Good Intentions.

His style is familiar, and the older book titles vaguely so, but I can't prove I ever read any of them, or point to a specific time I saw a Cuneo illustration. (That's the curse of illustrators: they're hired to provide distinctive and visually interesting work entirely to support something else. Cuneo has done a bunch of celebrity caricatures, as seen on his site, which I expect originally accompanied various profiles.)

So this was probably the first time I saw a bunch of Cuneo work - and definitely so a bunch of work I knew was by Cuneo. Good Intentions collects eighty or so color drawings, in three themed chapters: In the Wild, In the Studio, and In the Home. More than half of the drawings are captioned, but they're not quite cartoons - the captions are wry, descriptive, allusive, narrative.

And, of course, most of the drawings are about sex, one way or another. (That's what "personal work" means for artists, isn't it?)

They're not sexy, though: Cuneo draws mostly lumpy, middle-aged people, with a few more pounds and wrinkles than they'd like, and his loose line and watercolors can give their skin a mottled look, too. His women tend to be slightly more attractive than his men: their faces are grotesque only occasionally, while men are caricatures around half the time. But there's a lot of flesh in this book: tits and ass and dick, often engaged in activities with other people. Again, it's not particularly attractive tits and ass and dick, so don't go here if that's what you're looking for. (You're on the internet: attractive tits and ass and dick are always only a click away, photographic, hand-drawn, or AI-generated.)

So this is an odd book. It's not quite funny - it's not trying to tell jokes. It's amusing, and quirky, and definitely making commentary about modern life and types of people and things like that. It's not unlike a book of cartoons; it's just not aiming for a laugh reaction. And it is quite polymorphously perverse, which could be a bonus or a detriment, depending on the reader.

Murder Book by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell

Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell has one of those modern gig-style careers where she does multiple things (I presume to get something vaguely like the life the previous generation had with A Job that they kept for decades). She does burlesque and stand-up comedy, illustrates books for other people, cartoons for The New Yorker and elsewhere, makes documentaries - and has done two book-length comics memoirs about specific aspects of her life and family.

I read the second one, The Joy of Snacking, soon after publication a few months back. It's a dense, fun, amusing and deep look at a woman who has certain very specific issues with food and made that into both a great story and a thoughtful exploration of the world she lives in.

So I figured I had to go back to her first book. Murder Book was published in 2021, and it's just as dense, thoughtful, personal, funny and insightful as Snacking. Both could be reduced to clichés about modern women - Snacking is the "nothing for me; I'll just pick" book, and Murder is the "why are so many women obsessed with true crime podcasts?" one.

Campbell's remit is wider than podcasts, though: she's low-key obsessed with true crime in general, books and movies and streaming TV (and the wider world of ripped-from-the-headlines but not-quite-true crime, like Law & Order) as well as podcasts, and she has several friends and family members (one sister and their mother in particular) just as obsessed as she is. She's honest about the genre: the template true crime story is about the mysterious death of an attractive (young, white, more often than not blonde) woman, and how, usually, Some Man is found to be responsible and brought to justice. 

Murder Book is organized roughly into chapters - she has full-page white-text-on-black headers to introduce sections, but they're not titled like chapters, and the narrative flows conversationally throughout - with an introduction and then sections on the various different types of true crime and true-crime-adjacent media (movies, books, TV like 48 Hours, TV like Law & Order, streaming shows, podcasts, and so on), plus a few more about her family's history with true crime (she traces the obsession back to her mother's mother's mother, which is pretty impressive and/or worrying).

Along the way, she retells some of her "favorite" murder stories - the Zodiac killer and Ted Bundy have long sections, among others - mostly through the lens of how she heard the story and engaged with it. Campbell grew up in northern California in the '90s, and compares that with her mother's life, in San Francisco and nearby, during the serial-killer-soaked '70s: both of them felt like death and murder were everywhere around them, though it was probably more true for her mother than the more media-influenced Campbell.

Like Snacking, this is conversational and funny, with long back-and-forth dialogue and extensive narrative captions: Campbell is telling this story, and it's in her voice throughout. Her art is cartoony, with dot eyes and mostly simple figures. Her pages have panels jammed up right against each other without gutters, and tiers that don't always line up, to keep that headlong, energetic, "I'm going-to-tell-you-everything-I-can-think-of" style.

Campbell does get into the "why do women love true crime so much" question, dipping back into it a couple of times during the book, and tends to come down on the worry/fascination side. True crime is about the deaths of women, so women look at it, think "that could be me," and want to know more. Campbell, as a stand-up comedian, joked that she loved true crime so much she wanted to be a murder victim - but she mostly thinks it's the other way, that women consume so much true crime to learn all of the tricks and keep themselves alive.

It's a big book, and a dense one. It might have more about murder than many people want at once - but, clearly, there is a huge audience for murder, so I don't think that's a major problem.

And Campbell has a lot of fun with it. It's weird to say a book so much about murder is breezy, fun, and amusing, but Murder Book definitely is. It's a passionate observer's guide to true-crime media, combined with her personal history, and still recent enough that it's fairly up-to-date. I'm not personally obsessed with true crime - I'm a man; I think men worry more on the other side of that equation - but Murder Book is a fascinating deep dive into the mostly women who are obsessed with true crime stories, what they find in it, and what it means to them.

Bech Is Back by John Updike

I like having omnibuses on the shelf, especially ones that collect books that can easily be read separately. I can pull them down when I get back to that shelf, read the next clump of whatever, and move on.

I used to be the kind of reader who would plow through one of those big omnibuses, beginning to end, over a few days, but that was when I read professionally. I'm pretty sure I could still do that if the professional side of my brain was still connected to capital-L Literature. (Though my bank account might not survive that; there's a reason I'm doing boring content marketing these days.)

So I got back to Henry Bech, John Updike's sad-sack writer character, recently. Bech first appeared in 1970's Bech: A Book, which I read last fall. The second batch of Bech stories were collected in 1982's Bech Is Back - a few scattered pieces from the mid-70s in the New Yorker and Playboy, then what seems to have been a concerted effort by Updike to add enough text to fill it out to book-length soon before that eventual publication.

Both of those are in the omnibus The Complete Henry Bech, along with one later collection and the last (otherwise uncollected?) story.

Bech is a Jewish writer, in the vein of Bellow or Roth, who published some big and/or well-received books in the '50s but had fallen into silence by the time of the mid-'60s and the first stories in A Book. I think Updike meant Bech to be satirical, which is how I can believe that a guy who wrote three novels twenty years before - novels which are taught but not hugely read - can continue to live on them and do nothing else productive.

(And that's the question in the back of my head throughout the Bech stories - how does this guy spend his days? We mostly see him in special moments, away from his usual life and milieu, but how does he fill up the endless days in his small New York apartment, for years and decades? He can't have that many affairs. We don't think he's a theater aficionado, or involved in any volunteer work, or sitting in front of a TV screen twelve hours a day. Does Updike mean us to believe he just sits and reads, all day every day, for twenty-some years?)

Anyway, we know this is literary fiction for a few reasons. First, Updike's prose is lovely and supple, which is a requirement. Second, Bech is a writer and the stories are deeply in his head - literary fiction is about people like their authors, grappling with the Big Serious Questions that writers alone have to face. And third - and possibly most importantly - the stories are also largely about where Bech wants to put his dick. Literary fiction, canonically, is about writer characters having affairs.

Sadly, Bech was not married - had never been married - by the end of A Book, so he was not able, technically, to have affairs. (He did make up for it in dalliances, though.) Updike does remedy that in this second book.

But first some travel. The first book saw Bech on a tour behind the Iron Curtain - it was the '60s - while this book sees him move more widely about the world. There's a story that bounces among three mostly-American trips, another that does something similar with trips to two African countries and South Korea, the what-it-says-on-the-tin "Australia and Canada," and two trips with the new wife he picks up along the way, to "The Holy Land" and to Scotland in "Macbech."

Again, the Bech stories, up to that point, are mostly about him going to some strange (often foreign) place, feeling a bit out of sorts, and trying to get into the pants of some attractive woman he meets there. (Generally at least ten years younger than him, of course - this is both literary fiction and the '70s.)

But then we get a novelette-length - the longest piece in the book and the longest Bech story to date - piece called "Bech Wed," in which our hero settles down in a big house in Ossining with his new wife (the stand-in mistress younger sister of the primary mistress from the prior book). There, she gets him to actually sit down and write every day - a crazy idea he has apparently never had before - and, lo and behold, he actually produces his fifteen-years-delayed fourth novel. It is a massive success, despite being not very good, which leads to Bech fucking his wife's older sister (his former mistress, remember) and blowing up his marriage.

It's literary fiction: characters can be successful or happy, but never both. And frequently neither. Besides, fucking the wrong people is what literary fiction is about.

The last story is a bit of a coda, with a newly-single-again Bech going to someone else's book-launch party, now that he's living in Manhattan again. He of course ends it going home with a lady mud wrestler, because those are the attractive women available at the event, and a literary-novel hero must Always Be Macking.

There are books I can enjoy reading even though I don't take them seriously: space opera, plot-coupon epic fantasy...and this-writer-is-totally-not-me literary fiction. Some readers might find take offense at that odd company for Updike; they can suck it. The Bech books are frivolous and untethered to anything in real life, but they can be enjoyable on that level.

Paradise Bronx by Ian Frazier

Ian Frazier's serious writings are about the places and people around him more than you might expect from a New Yorker writer and reporter. But I also mean "around" somewhat expansively - that Frazier looks around, from wherever he is at the moment, and writes about the distinctive things and people there.

I can most obviously connect Family into that scheme, and Gone to New York, which is largely the story of his life, also fits. Great Plains is somewhat less so, though I could make an argument it arose from Family, and from growing up in the Midwest and looking both East (where he went first, to Harvard and then New York) and West (to those plains and living in Missoula, Montana for what I think were two stretches of his life). And then On the Rez clearly followed Plains and was largely about one friend of Frazier's, an Oglala Sioux man he met on the streets of NYC and followed back to those plains to see where he came from and what his people were like.

I'm not sure quite what the deal with Travels in Siberia is, but I'm sure I can make it fit into this framework with a bit more effort, if the panel sees fit to extend funding.

Anyway, Frazier's newest book - which is also one of his longest - is somewhat in the same vein. Paradise Bronx is explicitly a love-letter to New York City's largest, most spread-out, most diverse borough, and the only one that's actually "on the continent," as Frazier puts it. Frazier never lived in the Bronx, but he lived in Manhattan and Brooklyn, and has spent the last twenty-some years (I think) in a New Jersey suburb, from which he's traveled into the city, and in particular the Bronx, what seems to be quite a lot.

Like Frazier's other long, serious books, this is a combination of the sit-and-research book and the walk-around-and-talk-to-people book. I suspect Frazier has had a number of New Yorker stories about the Bronx during the past decade or so, and that either the actual articles or new versions based on his notes have made their way into this book - I'd call that a large part of the walking-around aspect of the book. Frazier also notes he's a big walker in general; he's walked across the Bronx multiple times in multiple directions, including getting down under major interstate intersections and trying to figure out where various colonial-era events happened.

Paradise Bronx is divided into three sections. "Nobody, or a Nation" is the deep history - mostly that colonial era, where what was then just called "Westchester" saw a lot of activity, particularly during the Revolutionary War. It also follows the life and career of Gouverneur Morris, a mostly-forgotten (and hard-to-spell) Founding Father who wrote a lot of the Constitution, was an important envoy to France during their Revolution, and did a bunch of other interesting things along the way.

The middle section, "Paradise," is somewhat transitional, covering basically everything about the Bronx from the early 1800s through roughly 1970 and presenting roughly the end of that era (particularly the 1930s and 1940s, slightly less the post-war period) as something of a golden age: good housing, strong social cohesion, mostly friendly neighborhoods, relatively even-handed governance. Frazier did not himself grow up in the Bronx, but he did grow up at the end of that era, so some readers may detect in this a new mutant strain of Boomer Special Pleading, My Childhood Was The Bestsest In The Whole Wide World Division.

And then the last section is "Fall and Rise," covering the "Bronx is Burning" years of the '70s, the hip-hop revolution soon afterward, and what the modern-day Bronx is like. Robert Moses, the source of nearly everything modern New Yorkers hate about their city - as well as several things they love - comes in for commentary, though not in any depth; Frazier assumes we already know the story and arguments. Here's where the other voices show up most strongly: Frazier wandered around the Bronx for years and talked to a lot of people; he brings out many of their stories here.

Frazier is an optimist, and he sees reason to be optimistic about the Bronx. He was writing this book, from internal evidence, mostly about 2019-2022, through the peak Covid years, and still was optimistic. This is a positive, surprisingly sunny book about a place most people think of as a punch-line. (My own biggest memory of the Bronx is accidentally walking across more of the South Bronx than expected or wise after getting off a subway on my way to an interview in 1990. I accidentally turned the wrong direction and went completely the opposite direction from the office I was looking for. But I called them when I got back to a payphone, and I rescheduled the interview, and they actually eventually offered me that job. That was one of the vanishly few times I've been on the ground in the Bronx; I ended up taking a different job in Manhattan instead, even though it paid substantially less.)

Non-fiction books are for telling you things you don't know, and often things you didn't know you might have wanted to know. Paradise Bronx is a great example of that: nearly everything in this book is something you don't know that you don't know, and most of it is worth knowing. Even better, Frazier's attitude and viewpoint makes it all fascinating and uplifting.

Writings & Drawings by James Thurber

This is the fourth of four posts on the big '90s Writings & Drawings omnibus of James Thurber's work, assembled about thirty years ago by Garrison Keillor and containing mostly excerpts from the books Thurber published during his life. Because the book is a thousand pages long, I took it in chunks: first The Seal in the Bedroom and My Life and Hard Times (plus some other material), then The Last Flower (plus other material), and then The 13 Clocks (yes, plus some other material).

This home-stretch of Writings & Drawings covers almost three hundred pages and the 1950s, the last decade of Thurber's life. It has some new pieces from the mostly-reprint collections The Thurber Album and Thurber Country, the introduction from Thurber's Dogs, five pieces from Further Fables for Our Time, one from Alarms and Diversions, six chapters from his New Yorker memoir The Years with Ross, and a small collection of uncollected work from earlier in his career.

It's more Thurber, mostly, from the era when he had become a household name - the titles of his collections show that clearly - and when his eyesight had deteriorated to the point where he could no longer draw. Like a lot of successful writers late in their careers, there's a lot of looking back in these pieces - essays about his great-aunt and his mother; one titled "The First Time I Saw Paris," in the mode that a few dozen other American writers essayed in the first half of the 20th century; the whole book about Harold Ross, creator and first editor of The New Yorker - which are pleasant but not core Thurber, to my mind.

Otherwise, it is much of the same kind of thing. The Further Fables are in the same tone and manner as the first batch of fables a decade and a half earlier. There are a handful of Thurberesque amusements, including "File and Forget," one of those sequence-of-letters pieces in which the main character can't get out of an increasingly-unpleasant situation; "Do You Want to Make Something Out of It?," about a word-game played at parties with friends; and the literary-criticism-adjacent "A Final Note on Chanda Bell."

The uncollected pieces are all fairly short, but strong - there's a reworking of the Clement-Clark Moore "A Night Before Christmas" into pseudo-Hemingway, and a kidnappee-charms-the-kidnappers story, and a couple of bits of Thurberesque "I'm no good at everyday life" pieces, with one about broadcasting and one actually titled "I Break Everything I Touch."

Looking at the book as a whole, it is still an excellent, well-rounded introduction to Thurber, even after thirty years. My sense is that it contains maybe half of his total published work, maybe slightly less. But my sense is also that there are a lot of Thurber This and Thurber That books from the second half of his career that overlap quite a bit, and no Grand Unified Thurber to seek out with everything. So my recommendation is still roughly the same. If you think you want to read all of Thurber, or want something not quite as daunting, grab, say, The Thurber Carnival or maybe My Life and Hard Times. But if you want a big book with all the Thurber most people will ever need, this is the one.

Your Caption Has Been Selected by Lawrence Wood

This book is less official than I thought - not that that's a bad thing, but I should note it.

Lawrence Wood is the reigning champion of the New Yorker's weekly Cartoon Caption Contest - he's won eight times and been a finalist fifteen times, far above anyone else. Bob Mankoff is the founding editor of that contest, though he left the New Yorker a few years back. Wood, supported and introduced by Mankoff, wrote Your Caption Has Been Selected to explain what the contest is, how it works, and, most importantly, how entrants can maximize their chances of winning.

(The long and informative subtitle, as required by any nonfiction book, is "More Than Anyone Could Possibly Want to Know About The New Yorker Cartoon Caption Contest.")

Your Caption was published by St. Martin's Press in 2024, and is not officially endorsed or otherwise directly connected with The New Yorker, as a disclaimer on the copyright page states. But...it does reprint more than a hundred New Yorker "drawings," with and without captions, so old-publishing-hand me suspects there was some kind of underlying agreement, possibly brokered by Mankoff.

Obviously, the audience for Your Caption is made up almost entirely of people who are already well aware of the Cartoon Caption Contest, and probably enter it regularly. (I used to enter back in the early days, but fell off the wagon some years ago and have never quite remembered to start up again.) So the "what is it" portion of the book is short and somewhat perfunctory - and it's not that hard to explain, anyway. 

Here's my potted version: The New Yorker posts a "drawing" without a caption on Week One, and during that week collects reader-contributed captions for it, which are also up- and down-voted by readers and sorted by a semi-automated system. In Week Two, an august board of New Yorker worthies selects three finalists, which are presented for a final reader vote in Week Three. Week Four sees the winning caption published.

Wood uses about a hundred examples, including the first few annual versions of the Contest going back to 1999, to discuss, in concrete terms, what makes a good cartoon caption and what should be avoided. His lessons are generally pretty good ones: be short, address the elements of the cartoon (who is speaking, any incongruities, all the major oddities), avoid the obvious jokes that everyone else will think of, and put it into the best words for the idea possible. He has some more detailed rules, too, which are also good - don't take my thumbnail here as covering it all.

This is a fun book about cartoons, which delves more deeply into how and why single-panel cartoons are funny - and the ways in which they can attempt to be funny and fail - than a "normal" collection of cartoons. If you're the kind of person interested in theories of humor, this is a good choice. Or if you just want to see your name in The New Yorker and win a contest - it could be useful there, too.

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.

The 13 Clocks by James Thurber

This is the third of what looks to be four posts on the big James Thurber Writings & Drawings volume from the Library of America. My reading rules and plans are a bit quirky: I keep track of books read, which (since every metric turns into a target, as marketers like me well know) means that I tend to prioritize both short books and discrete books. So when I wanted to read Writings & Drawings again, for the first time since the late '90s, the fact that it's mostly made up of excerpts from Thurber's various collections was annoying to me and threatened to mess up my carefully-organized system.

But! Thurber wrote a few short books, which were incorporated in toto into Writings & Drawings by the compiler, Garrison Keillor, and so I'm able to name the separate posts - and, more importantly, write down actual books finished in my reading notebook - after those books. So the first post was named after The Seal in the Bedroom and My Life and Hard Times, while the second was named after The Last Flower.

And this one, which will cover almost three hundred pages of miscellaneous Thurber, including excerpts from Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated, My World - And Welcome To It, Men, Women and Dogs, The Thurber Carnival, and The Beast in Me and Other Animals, is named after the short 1950 fable The 13 Clocks, which is at the end of that sequence of stuff.

This clump of Thurber covers the Forties, and it's largely similar to the selections I mentioned in my first two posts: autobiographical snippets pitched in the humorous mode, officially fictional sketches that are often very similar in tone and matter to the aforementioned, Thurber's quirky simple drawings, light satire of various things.

The first big group of pieces are from the 1940 collection Fables for Our Time & Famous Poems Illustrated, which is made up of two kinds of pieces, exactly what the title promises. First we get twenty-eight fractured fables, of the kind that others have done since but none done better. Among them is the famous "The Unicorn in the Garden," and a handful of others that might seem vaguely familiar, either from actually reading them or just because others have "borrowed" Thurber's ideas since. Then there are four famous poems, in the heroic mode - three of them are "Excelsior," "Lochinvar," and "Barbara Frietchie" - made somewhat bathetic by Thurber's drawings.

My World - and Welcome To It has a clump of the usual Thurber pieces, including "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty." There's also "You Could Look It Up," a baseball story in light dialect that's reasonably famous and somewhat outside of Thurber's usual narrow bounds. Like earlier collections, some - like "Mitty" - are pitched as fictional and others, like "The Macbeth Murder Mystery," are framed as stories from Thurber's life, but both styles have very similar tones and styles and plots.

Next up is Men, Women and Dogs, which opens with a big group of captioned cartoons and also includes my tag-defining "The War Between Men and Women" and one other piece. The Thurber Carnival (which I think was partially reprint anyway, way back in 1945) with two pieces and The Beast in Me and Other Animals with four come next. Of these, "The Princess and the Tin Box" is interesting as either a late addition to the Fables cluster or a precursor to 13 Clocks, and "A New Natural History" is another one of the distinctive Thurber pieces that combines writings and drawings - in this case, using a lot of jargon or technical words and drawing the odd creatures Thurber thought appropriate for those names.

Then comes The 13 Clocks, which I expect was originally aimed at younger readers. Thurber's old New Yorker buddy E.B. White had published Stuart Little in 1945, which I think was a success from the beginning, which may have inspired him. (Or, as I see from some digging, it could be that 13 Clocks was the fourth of Thurber's eventual five books for younger readers, all in the fairy-tale mode, the first of which was previous to Stuart. So that's a nice theory that doesn't fit the facts.) Clocks is another fractured fable, told at greater length and with more detail. Somewhere unspecified and medieval, there is an evil Duke, in whose castle dwells the beautiful Princess Saralinda. As is typical, princes appear regularly to ask for her hand; the Duke either just kills them (slicing them from zatch to guggle) if they break his many and quirky rules, or sets them to impossible tasks so they never return.

But one prince - Zorn of Zorna, disguised as a wandering minstrel named Xingu - arrives, and is aided by a magical person called the Golux, son of a witch and a wizard, and not a mere device, in a tag that's repeated several times without ever becoming entirely clear to this reader for all its punchy specificity. With the Golux's aid, Zorn wins the hand of the princess, restarts the titular clocks - stopped at ten minutes to five years before by the evil of the Duke - and generally sets things right in the world. As a fable, it's substantially less fractured than the short ones, for obvious reasons.

This is another good clump of Thurber work, including several of his most famous pieces, including "Mitty," the "War Between Men and Women" and 13 Clocks. I'm still recommending the overall Writings & Drawings as a great single-volume Thurber; if you want more, though, you will have to go to the individual books and dig through for the pieces Keillor left out of this one. So the question for a reader is: do you want one big thousand-page clump of Thurber, or do you think you'll want to read it all? If the latter, probably start with Thurber Carnival or something similar, and then chase after all of the other books individually.

The Joy of Snacking by Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell

There were three major comics memoirs by women in the fall of 2025, all about the same cluster of topics: eating, cooking, family, and how those things are connected. I don't know if it's going to be surprising to anyone that many women have issues around both eating (their bodies are often policed by others) and cooking (they are generally assumed to be responsible for feeding the people around them), but the cluster is an interesting thing, and I hope someone better-qualified than me (an actual woman, at a minimum) digs in and looks at the three books together.

I first saw Jennifer Hayden's Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner, published in November, leaning towards the production side of food and making comic hay about Hayden's inability or unwillingness to do it well. Then I noticed My Perfectly Imperfect Body by Debbie Tung from September, which is more focused on the consumption side of food, and a bout of disordered eating in Tung's youth.

Published in between the two of those is The Joy of Snacking, from Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, whose work I've seen as a cartoonist in The New Yorker, but has also done a previous comics memoir, illustrated several other books, made a few documentary movies, and also works in burlesque.

Snacking is mostly about eating - young Hilary was what we call "a picky eater," and that's continued into her adult life. (She's now in her early thirties.) The spine of this book is, as the title implies, "snacking" - Campbell is one of those people who eats lots of little bits all day long, isn't terribly fond of big meals, and tends to focus on a few preferred, beloved, standard snacks. (She also says this is a youngest-kid thing, which made me realize my younger son is also a grazer - there's a kind of bowl that he uses to gather stuff to eat, and we see them pile up in the sink - so I tentatively think her theory has some merit and she should get a major research grant to investigate it.)

Campbell organizes Snacking into loose chapters, bouncing between two timelines: her childhood and young-adulthood, as she discovered new foods and mostly tried to avoid them, and the last few years and her tumultuous relationship with a man she calls E. Separating scenes or sections are cookbook-like pages, which are each about a food Campbell likes - apples and peanut butter, or "a baggie of goldfish," or "a bowl of potato chips," or Cool Ranch Doritos - with details on how to "prepare" them, when and where to eat them, and their significance to her.

It might be the fact that this isn't her first memoir, but I found Campbell to be harder on herself than other people - in particular, E comes across (maybe, though, because I am a man) as a fairly reasonable guy trying to live with Campbell's issues, as the two of them snipe at each other in that deeply nasty way some couples develop. I'm sure he had his flaws, but I felt that Campbell presented him in a mostly-positive light: he's a guy who is in many ways her opposite (a foodie who works selling wine to restaurants!), but they made it work, more or less, for a number of years.

This is not a how-I-changed book, or a I-fixed-my-problem book. Campbell likes snacking. She's going to continue doing it. On the other hand, this isn't entirely a celebration, since she's also clear that she had a weird, often unpleasant childhood because of her food issues, and that it's affected her adult life in ways she doesn't like. That tension plays out throughout the book - can she be herself, eat the stuff she likes (and maybe "normal" food, too, OK, sure, sometimes), and go through life with less stress and anxiety? Well, maybe. But how about some popcorn and white wine now, while she thinks about it?

This is a big book, with some aspects I've not even mentioned - Campbell traces the eating habits of her parents as well in flashback sections, so it's not just a book about her individually - and a warm open-heartedness I found deeply engaging. Campbell has a cartoony, dense style here: her people are loosely defined with thin lines, her panels are many and jammed together without gutters, her dialogue is long and rambling, like real people. This is a fun book about a distinctive person who's not afraid to show herself being odd and quirky - that's the whole point of the exercise. I don't know if anyone else eats quite like Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell does, but, then again, do any of us really eat like all of the rest of us? This book made me wonder that - and that's a good thing to wonder about.

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.

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.

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.