There's a lot of navel contemplating in the first month of a new year and if aging (gracefully or otherwise) is part of your pondering, be sure to listen to Nora Ephron's latest, I Feel Bad About My Neck. Ephron is a successful screenwriter (When Harry Met Sally), novelist and a quintessentially smart, savvy New Yorker of a certain age, who can move from stinging self-surveillance to elegiac poignancy in a New York nanosecond. She not only feels bad about her neck, she feels bad about not finding the cabbage strudel of her dreams, spending hours maintaining her 60-plus façade, not being able to read without reading glasses which always do a disappearing act, and a long list of other all-too-valid complaints. She dispenses her wonderfully candid, wickedly witty worldly wisdom in snippets that serve as a staccato bio, including her many marriages and abiding love for her city. Ephron performs like a pro, making the whole package even more delicious—but maybe not as delicious as the cabbage strudel. Copyright 2006 BookPage Reviews.

Ephron's eclectic essays about life as an older woman certainly provide humor and insight into the lives of sexagenarians who have spent most of their lives as city girls. She both mocks and embraces the lifestyle she has maintained over the past decades. Whether she is waxing poetic about the rituals of everyday life, her love-hate relationship with purses, her affinity for celebrity chefs or her obsession over her apartment, Ephron delivers this audiobook in the spirited tone of one who is at peace with the life she has lived. Her gentle comedic delivery of punch lines will evoke smiles in listeners. While her sincerity at times clashes with her sarcasm, causing the listener to pause and determine what she meant, she still produces moments where her positive energy summons up a picture of her smiling as she reads into the microphone. Ephron's writing style lends weight to these brief trysts into the personal and worldly, strange and mundane aspects of her life. But mostly, her voice evokes the image of a serene and wise woman providing her insights. Simultaneous release with the Knopf hardcover (Reviews, June 6). (Nov.)