"I Feel Bad About My Neck" by Nora Ephron (Knopf, $19.95) --Is Ephron's neck crepey? Does she have a wattle? Creases? Mottled, saggy skin? She doesn't give specifics, only this lament: Her neck reveals her age. And so, poor reader, does yours. "You have to cut open a redwood tree to see how old it is," Ephron says, "but you wouldn't have to if it had a neck."

She also speaks on other issues of advancing womanhood, including failing eyesight, gray hair ("Sometimes I think not having to worry about your hair anymore is the secret upside of death") and the skin on her heels, which has the consistency of a loofah.

Known for her screenplays ("When Harry Met Sally...," "Sleepless in Seattle"), Ephron writes funny essays in which every thought leads to another, which gives her sentences a trainlike quality: Each is a long string of musings that gathers momentum until eventually it deposits you somewhere you never expected to be. What's more, her style is catching: You might find yourself talking like her for days after you close the book. You will learn two things in these pages: Laughter will improve your life even if your neck is crepey. And if you are growing older, you're in very good company.

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"Pound for Pound" by F.X. Toole (Ecco, $25.95) --F.X. Toole was the pseudonym of a former boxing trainer and "cutman" (the corner attendant who staunches blood between rounds) named Jerry Boyd, who was 70 in 2000 when his first book, a story collection called "Rope Burns," was released. Its best story, "Million $$$ Baby," became the Oscar-winning film, but Boyd never saw it. He died during heart surgery in 2002, leaving behind this unfinished novel. It has now been "shaped" (as James Ellroy says in his foreword) into completion by Boyd's agent and an editor.

The heart of the book is former boxer and trainer Dan Cooley, who has survived his wife, his three children and now his beloved 11-year-old grandson. The world of small-time boxing is the backdrop for Cooley's pain and anger, and it serves to balance the weary sweetness of some scenes. Toole's sentences are tough, spare and full of his obvious belief in the solace of friendship and forgiveness. Only the tidy ending is jarring; it hardly seems to belong with the rest of the book. But if such shaping helped Toole's last effort into print, it's nothing to complain about.