evelyn_b

Wednesday's On the Moon

2022-04-27T22:17:35Z

What I Finished Reading A While Ago And Then Forgot To Post About

I loved The Corrections with all my heart for maybe 500 pages straight and then very suddenly at the end I didn't love it anymore. It's not that it "pulled a Zadie" (as my brother calls it when a book climbs a dizzying ladder of plot threads and then vanishes in midair), but it went sour and brittle for me all at once. Not because of the fathomlessly miserable ending; the misery is great. I think it's because Franzen persistently has it in for Enid in a way that activated all my reactionary sympathies, and then tried to end the book with a stilleto thrust into the dark heart of Enid Being Godawful instead of complicating the picture like he knows he's capable of. I know that in real life, sometimes there really is nothing to say but "Wow, what a bitch." But I expect more from fiction.

Do I recommend The Corrections anyway? I absolutely do. Franzen's international satire is a lot weaker than his quotidian Midwestern angst, and his walk-on characters aren't always distinguishable from Candyland cutouts, but when he's good he's very, very good.

I was surprised to find an entire sequence based on the difficulty of finding a working pay phone in Manhattan in 2001. This must be a regional thing, or possibly an NYC thing - I can't recall ever having trouble finding a pay phone until at least 2005. Or maybe I was just lucky?

What I Finished More Recently

I've been trying to get up earlier lately, and almost always succeeding, though it has not led to new heights of productivity (whatever that would entail). Yesterday, for example, I was awake, dressed, and carrying a cup of delicious coffee by 6AM, three hours before it makes sense for me to clock in, and all I did with the extra time was read Weike Wang's novel Chemistry in its entirety. So Chemistry must have been good, right? I've been thinking about it ever since, so I'm going to say yes.

( MSS Fall 1984 )

Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her is fine. I was fascinated to learn that Nancy was created by the same Stratemeyer Syndicate that gave the world not only the Hardy Boys, but the Bobbsey Twins, the excreable Rover Boys, the Motor Girls, Dorothy Dale, and literally dozens more resolutely formulaic series books. The ins and outs of producing a series, dealing with rogue authors, rewriting old books to better suit contemporary mores and then having to do it all over again because time keeps passing, and so on are interesting but not necessarily fascinating. There's some enjoyable material on the world of early land-grant coeducation and the perils of trying to bring popular series books to the screen. The description of the 1938 movie adaptation, where Nancy is played by a sassy 15-year-old who spouts statistics about the average mental age of women and makes a lot of cutesy faces, was a high point for me. Maybe I would have enjoyed it more if I had liked Nancy Drew growing up? It tended to assume that anyone reading the book was a Nancy fan and that non-fans were all humorless librarians or male chauvinists, and didn't really take the opportunity to help me appreciate Nancy more.

Anyway, if you want to learn all about the Stratemeyer Syndicate, this guy has created a website about it.

What I'm Reading Now

I was so excited about Sindya Bhanoo's book Seeking Fortune Elsewhere that I accidentally ordered it twice. I placed an order at the bookstore the day it came out, and the next day got the copy I'd pre-ordered from the publisher back in 2021. It's a small collection of nearly perfect short stories.

Of A Fire On the Moon, Norman Mailer's book-length journalistic inquiry into the space program, is a good candidate for Most Norman Mailer Thing Ever Written By Norman Mailer. But isn't that everything by Norman Mailer, you ask? Yes, but only Of A Fire On the Moon begins with Mailer in the dumps because Hemingway shot himself and no one called Mailer for a comment. Then he clarifies, in case you were worried, that he did eventually get asked to comment, just not right away! Then he decides to name himself Aquarius for the duration of this essay, because he was born under the sign of Aquarius and there's this song about the Age of Aquarius, and Aquarius is in space, so it's relevant. And then we're off to the space races! Like all the best Mailer, this one veers drunkenly from insight to ass-pinching and from prescience to petrification, usually within the same paragraph. This is probably a bug for someone, but it's a feature for me. It's hard to write about the present, especially when you're trying to look knowing and world-weary at the same time.

Do You Have Enough Book-Related Challenges in Your Life?

22 in '22 is a "visit more bookstores" challenge - the idea is to visit 22 bookstores in the year 2022. If your region is low on bookstores you can even visit the same one 22 times, as long as you go on different days. Sounds fun!

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There Will Be No Other End of the Wednesday

2022-03-16T16:31:06Z

What I've Finished Reading

Warmth: Coming of Age At The End of Our World is a mostly very thoughtful and attentive small book by Daniel Sherrell, a climate-change activist who is trying to decide whether to have children and how to live meaningfully within what he calls The Problem without just crying all the time. It's written in the form of a letter to a hypothetical child, in explicit imitation of (and sticking the landing a little better than) Ta-Nehisi Coates' Between the World and Me. I like this kind of book because I'm a sucker for tender and fraught parental feelings but also because I inevitably spend them imagining the bewildered, distressed, embarrassed and exasperated teenager defensively rolling his eyes at the end of all those plaintive and searching "you"s.

I loved Heavens on Earth by Carmen Boullosa, which is an elegantly weird double elegy for the end of two worlds, past and future. In the far-future cloud city that is all that remains of human life on Earth, a community member named Lear translates a mid-90s translation of the lost memoirs of a sixteenth-century Aztec boy turned Catholic priest, as her own community resolves to end history for real this time by forgoing language entirely. You can probably figure out for yourself whether this is a good idea, but it's worth reading the whole thing.

Credit Card Carole also deals with the end of a world, but author Sheila Solomon Klass isn't going to help Carole mourn it. Carole is 17 and loves to shop! She loves to do other things, too, like track and quoting Shakespeare, but she also just loves to shop! Her credit card, paid off every month by her parents, makes it easy and fun! Then one day her dad announces that he is leaving dentistry for the stage! and they will all have to tighten their belts. . . and cut up their credit cards!!! Carole mopes around for a while but eventually discovers The Value of Work, courtesy of the easiest job search imaginable (her friend's parents' collectable figurines need dusting! which also gives her the opportunity to eavesdrop on their troubles and reflect on the paltriness of her own) and also the Value of True Friends Who Are Not Shallow Bitches. The other side of the consumer-identity-formation coin is represented by Jim, who is so guilt-ridden by his father doing business with South Africa's apartheid government that he shaves his head and stops eating. There's also a con-man plot that I completely forgot about until I opened the book just now to check on Jim's name! It's a lot for 150 pages.

1980s Money Mores Check-In

Readers over 40 (or younger if you feel like jumping in), did you have the impression when you were a teenager that it was normal or desireable for minors to have credit cards? I ask because Carole's panic at being asked to live without one (in New Jersey, 1987) was so intense ("Mom - I can't. I don't carry cash like you and Dad. I can't write checks. I can't manage.") I'm about ten years younger than Carol and grew up in a mall-rich environment in the US, and I didn't know anyone in high school - at least, not anyone I was close enough to try on clothes with - who had a credit card as a minor, and it would never have occured to me to ask for one. So I'm curious about other people's experiences.

What I'm Reading Now

Robert Silverberg, The World Inside. Silverberg is a new-to-me science-fiction author who writes exuberant, fast-moving, weird but mostly transparent books - the other one was Project Pendulum, about a novel structure for a time-travel experiment involving identical twins. In The World Inside, 75 billion human beings live their whole lives within a procession of thousand-story tower blocks that girdle the continents, seldom leaving their five-story "cities" and never going outside. Since the problem of where to put everyone has been temporarily solved by eliminating privacy, building really tall, and shoving dissenters down the garbage chute at the slightest provocation, a culture of frenetic fertility has developed in which young people marry at twelve or thirteen and vie with each other to produce the largest families possible. Could this system have a flaw? Some of the characters are worried that it might.

The World Inside was published in 1970. Besides the population anxiety, its 70sness is expressed mostly through state-mandated casual sex (mostly but not entirely hetero and usually involving young teenagers), and occasionally by the presence of really good drugs. Its landscape owes a medium-sized debt to We and a large one to Urban Renewal.

What I Plan to Read Next

I just learned that Vernor Vinge wrote a book set in 2025! In which computers are tired and SMART AR CONTACT LENSES are wired! I tried and failed miserably to get contact lenses when I was 13 so I am always a little taken aback by how easily everyone in the world pops those little buggers in and out in speculative fiction.

(see also: the Very Topical Second Life Contact Lens Plot on Supergirl. Or don't, if you value any of the irreplacable minutes of your life).

Anyway, 2025 is right around the corner, so I'm going to see if the library has it.

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Measureless Oceans of Wednesday

2022-02-23T15:28:37Z

What I've Finished Reading

By the end I was just about all on board for A Deepness in the Sky, whose moving parts pick up steam at different rates but evenually come together in an almost-totally-satisfying way (I was not pleased with the gruesome fate of one of its resident villans, for example, but I guess if you play mass-enslavement games, sometimes you win morally uncomfortable prizes) and by the end even had me telling most of the humans apart most of the time. Pham Trinli's plot in particular, which had me zoning out a little in the first half or two-thirds, has a better payoff than I was expecting. And then there is the best payoff of all: ( Spoiler for the thing you KNOW has to happen )

Vinge's aliens are rarely any better than we are at things like peaceful coexistence and not immediately turning new technologies into weapons, but somehow it's nice to have the company.

I accidentally read Gwen Kirby's short story collection Shit Cassandra Saw all at once after dinner on Monday, and maybe if I'd read it in a different way I would have a different idea of its range. The overwhelming impression created by these short stories - in spite of Cassandra's usual problems in the title story, and in spite of the odd death and dismemberment and some dark nights and a lot of persistent tiredness - is of everything being more or less ok. There were so many stories where I found myself thinking, Oh no, I hope this doesn't go anywhere grisly and defeating, after which, to my mild surprise and equally mild relief, it didn't. Most of these characters will be all right, even if they cheat on their spouses in front of disapproving ghosts or cut up all their clothes in a fit of self-loathing after watching too many episodes of a chirpy home-minimalism show. This is a fairly refreshing takeaway from a short story collection, even if it only made me laugh about 1/20th as much as I had been led to expect.

What I'm Reading Now

I am happy to report that within only a few pages of my previous Reading Wednesday, The Corrections got really good. This is mainly due to the appearance on the scene of Chip Lambert, thirty-nine-year-old son of Enid and Alfred and one of litfic's great fuckups. Chip got involved and subsequently obsessed with a messy thrifted-polyester-wearing undergraduate who is only a little less magnificently awful than the undergraduate lust interest in Dubin's Lives, and now, surprise surprise, he is going to get fired from his teaching job. Here is a representative description of Chip's recent Christmas-related failures in the light of his more general failure not to shoot his own life in the face at every opportunity.

( As if leftover wine were a problem Chip had ever had )

A summary of breast-related notes from Chip's regrettably breast-haunted screenplay gave me the first real laugh of the book, and after that I was feeling much better disposed toward all of its sentences and everyone in it. As an incurable sap, I feel like Franzen is a little too mean sometimes - especially to Enid - but at least he's good at it.

What I Plan to Read Next

I have some books to read, but also some previously-finished books to catch up on posting about in the next few weeks.

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Wednesday Supposes Erroneously

2022-02-17T00:22:14Z

What I've Finished Reading

In the end I gave up on the idea that The Power Broker was too large to take to bed or to the local coffee shop, even though it really, really is, and just let it bulldoze straight through all the hours of my life until it was over. The day after I finished it, I was on the porch of said coffee shop, trying to describe the desolation of the Cross-Bronx Expressway to someone who hadn't read it, when a guy from the other side of the porch leaned over and said, "Are you talking about The Power Broker??" And just like that, we were all talking about The Power Broker.

The subtitle of The Power Broker is "Robert Moses and the Fall of New York," and that's because the premise of the book is that while New York City in the twentieth century could theoretically have been ruined by a lot of things, it was actually ruined mainly by one guy, his unchecked power over all things concrete, and his insatiable love of gigantic freeways and bridges. And the New York Times being a magnifying mirror for the characteristic errors of every age, but that probably goes without saying. I don't have the background to know if this is an accurate analysis, but it's definitely a vivid one. If you like deep dives into city infrastructure and its discontents, or dazzlingly lucid descriptions of arcane political manuvering, you might like this book! Side effects may include nightmares about living by firelight in half-demolished buildings in the shadow of an unfinished freeway, and/or never again being able to shut up about Robert Moses for generations to come.

I also finally made good on my promise to read one of Kevin Kwan's rich-people books, which I've been making to myself ever since Crazy Rich Asians made a splash . . . what, ten years ago now? The one that turned up in the Little Free Library is Sex and Vanity, and it's a lot sweeter than I expected. It's also a meticulous homage to or hand-tinted xeroxed photocopy of A Room With A View. Some of the plot-driving mores fit a little awkwardly into the contemporary setting, but I know so little about Haute New York poshos, and Kwan serves them up with such breezy assurance, that I was willing to go with it 80-90% of the time.

And I spent a long time wishing to love but not really feeling His Dark Materials, which I bought in a big three-in-one paperback years ago. Why I didn't actually love it, it's hard to say. It's chock full of Cool Stuff that I wasn't super into. The only point at which I got emotionally involved was briefly when Will and Lyra met, and later when the worldbuilding contrived itself to force Will and Lyra to live in separate worlds. This is probably my own fault for not being ten.

What I'm Reading Now

It's Franzen O'Clock! Time to give the fiction of Jonathan Franzen another shot with The Corrections. The prose is admirably deep and specific but I don't care for it. Reading it feels like someone is gently forcing my head into a large fish tank, only instead of water, the fish and my head are swimming in Mid-American Malaise. But maybe, eventually, in a good way? Who knows; I'm just getting started.

I'm also reading A Deepness in the Sky by Vernor Vinge. My impression of Vinge based on one and a half books is that his plots don't thrill me but his aliens are the best. A year after reading it, I couldn't tell you with any certainty what happened in A Fire Upon the Deep, but I doubt a day has gone by since that I haven't thought of its pack-intelligent space dogs or its tragic cyborg kelp. A Deepness in the Sky alternates between the representatives of a couple of antagonistic human cultures investigating a very weird star system and trying to manipulate one another, who are all right I guess, and the star system's inhabitants, a civilization of hibernating spiders trying to reckon with the effects of industrialization on traditional culture, whom I will love to my dying day.

What I Plan to Read Next

I just bought a short-story collection called Shit Cassandra Saw, which looks promising! But I might not get to it for a while.

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Chronicle of a Wednesday Foretold

2022-01-12T23:12:00Z

It's always a bad sign for the life of a blog (or whatever this is) when the increasingly infrequent entries all begin with some version of "I didn't die!" Nevertheless, I am still alive and not intentionally winding this thing down, though I guess it depends on what you mean by "intentionally." If you believe that intention is the flower and not the root of action, then I guess I am. But that's not what my conscious mind thinks it wants.

What I Think I Want

I made exactly one New Year's resolution for 2022, and it's "actually read The History of the Peloponnesian War." This allegedly rewarding ancient analysis of a grinding series of Greek conflicts has been on my "currently reading" list since April 2019, and what happens is I read a paragraph, think I've understood it, read three more paragraphs, and realize I have no idea who these people are or what they're doing. This is because it's a densely-written book about a lot of similarly-named people and groups that requires more attention than I'm used to giving to a book. In that sense, it's a little like my old friend Gravity's Rainbow. Unlike Gravity's Rainbow, reading it aloud doesn't help at all and probably makes the problem worse. However, I'm taking notes and it seems to be helping, though the going is slow. Also unlike Gravity's Rainbow, Thucydides clearly isn't trying to provoke the reading brain into producing a hallucinatory nightmare experience; he just has a very specific rhetorical style where all the clauses are made to do complicated Regency-style dances with one another, which he probably genuinely believes is the most compact way of describing the morass. As with Gravity's Rainbow, I had to start over from the beginning. I am now two crises into the pre-war period, three if you count T.'s introduction about how ancient wars were probably pretty weak tea compared to this one.

One Book I Read Recently

I was thrilled to find a gem from my childhood, This Place Has No Atmosphere, at John K. King Books in Detroit. I read this book only once, in the vague stew of time between about 7-10, but little pieces of it have stuck in my head for decades. This is a Paula Danziger book about a normal teen who reluctantly moves to the new moon colony with her parents in 2057, misses her old crew, puts on a community theater production of Our Town, and develops valuable inner resources. If you love retro futurism from the golden age of the shopping mall, there is a lot to love here, and the small moon school is both cozy and convincing. About the only thing that didn't work for me as an adult is the character of the lunar poet in residence, whose bad poetry was probably hilarious to me in elementary school. But as an adult I just wonder what happened to all the other poets.

Two Books I'm Reading Now

Joy Williams is a magnificent weirdo and I can't decide if her weird-ass dialogue (most recently in Harrow, which I've just started) is crookedly resonant or bullshit. There is always the chance that it's both. Everyone in Joy Williamsworld talks like an AI fed exclusively on 1980s litfic. She also has a tendency to just lean eight or nine scraps of grotesque Floridian detritus and deliberately mis-explained fragments from Harper's Findings together in a junkyard pyramid and call it a chapter. For some reason, this works. I blame the junkyard zeitgeist, and talent. Harrow so far is about a young girl whose mother thinks she has a destiny, so she's been sent to a kind of monastery for teens amid a series of cascading environmental disasters. Whether it's supposed to be the present or the future isn't totally clear, but the crowded cross-country train suggests it's not quite now.

I am also deep in The Power Broker by Robert A. Caro, which is the probably mostly true story of a guy who really really wanted to build things without anyone telling him how things should be built. So far he has succeeded through a fantastic combination of bullying and sneakiness.

One Thing I Plan to Read Next

Along with This Place Has No Atmosphere, I found a new-to-me YA book from 1987 - Credit Card Carol, addressing the difficult but important subject of shopaholism. I'm looking forward to it, not least because it's very short.

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Where Have All the Reading Wednesdays Gone?

2021-11-24T16:10:15Z

What I'm Reading Now

A long time ago, when I used to spend a lot more time online than I do today, I had a nemesis called Anne Lamott. Anne Lamott wrote a column for an electronic magazine called Salon.com, which at the time was a bustling hub of light iconoclasm and liberal Christianity, or something like that.

I'm sure there were far worse columnists on the payroll, but Anne Lamott consistently rubbed me the wrong way because she was conviced that her multi-braid hairstyle made her the "cool mom," and then as now I felt strongly that one should refrain from calling oneself a "cool mom" on any national news and commentary platform. Or was it dreads? I can't remember now. She wasn't really my nemesis, because she had no idea I existed and I never interacted with her other than hate-reading her column whenever I remembered to check for new ones. There was really nothing to it, except that I found her intensely embarrassing, with the boiling, choking, utterly useless secondhand embarrassment of the deeply insecure.

Anyway, I picked up her 1993 memoir Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son's First Year at a Little Free Library in Jacksonville, AL recently, and I'm trying to still the rolling of my eyes and sit with it in sympathy, possibly to prove that I'm not as petty now as I was in my twenties. It's not going all that well, but I'm trying.

The book itself is ok. You can see that Lamott is turning up the dial on a selection of her second- or third-worst thoughts in order to reassure her readers that they aren't monsters, which is a kind thing to do even if it doesn't always make for my personal favorite books. Then as now, I have this dislike of motherhood memoirs because I always imagine being the kid in them, now in middle school, with some gleeful homeroom galoot shout-reading all those heartfelt lyrical descriptions of my infant beauty and/or gushing bowels as I unsuccessfully pretend not to know what he's talking about. Maybe what I like best about it is that it's a window onto the world of 1989, when baby Sam was born. This world is sometimes hilariously similar to and sometimes far from our own, but there's probably a lot of interpersonal variation in which details will make you feel which way.

Some Other Books I've Read Recently

Charles Johnson's Middle Passage is noticeably funnier, and a more ripping yarn, than you would expect from a book called Middle Passage. Maybe that's the only description it should have.

The Great Turkey Walk is a middle-grade charm bomb from Kathleen Karr, about a fifteen-year-old called Simon with no head for figures but a decent sense for birds, who in the year 1860 gives up on taking a fifth crack at the third grade to seek his fortune herding turkeys from Missouri to Denver with the help of a few friends. This is a well-researched historical novel that is also funny and fun, where grim realities and wacky mishaps are treated with equal aplomb in Simon's immediately believable and lovable narrative voice.

I wasn't expecting a lot from Nightlight, the Harvard Lampoon parody of Twilight (also found in Jacksonville), but it hooked me right away. The end isn't as good as the beginning, but I thought it had a good ear for what was funny and weird about Twilight.

We sat at a table with Tom and some other ordinaries. They kept asking probing questions about what my interests were. I gently explained that that was between me and my potential friends.

It was then that I saw him. He was sitting at a table all by himself, not even eating. He had an entire tray of baked potatoes in front of him and still he did not touch a single one. How could a human have his pick of baked potatoes and resist them all?

What I Might Read in the Near Future

A few days later, in a completley different Little Free Library, I found a book called The Submissive by Tara Sue Me, and now I'm skeptical all over again. Can a parody of Fifty Shades of Grey possibly be as funny as a parody of Twilight? More to the point, will this one be? I'll find out when I find out.

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Nothing to See Wednesday

2021-10-27T19:49:16Z

A True Book Story

We have one of those municipal recycling centers where you dump different things in different industrial-size dumpsters. I took some trash there last Thursday and there were three books sitting on top of the flattened cardboard in the cardboad bin. I said, "You're not cardboard!" and plucked them out (the bin was pretty full, so it was easy). Then a guy said, "You want books? I've got more in the car. I was going to just spread them out."

I didn't attempt to school this guy on the advisability of "spreading out" paper products across a bunch of bins not intended for them. I just let him put his box of books in my trunk, and told him that the next time he had books in good condition he didn't know what to do with, he should check in with the bookstore on [road] to see if they're accepting used books. Then he tried to give me a broken clock and a large electric griddle with no cord, which I politely refused.

Anyway, now I have a bunch of books by Alfred Bester and Robert Silverberg and people like that. Most of them are just going in the variously sized Free Libraries, but some of them I'll probably read.

What's In the Cards for Reading Wednesdays

I can't tell if Reading Wednesdays are fading from my life or if I just want a hiatus. It'll probably stay once a month for the near future.

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Wednesday Will Tear Us Apart

2021-09-22T19:27:25Z

What I Finished Reading A While Ago

I'll confess that I thought Hard Feelings was going to be enjoyably dumb and a little exploitative, and that's why I brought it home in the first place. It turns out to be pretty good. It's an honest attempt at literary versimiliude about being a sixteen-year-old tennis player in 1978, which means the perspective is sometimes brutal, sometimes painfully ignorant, unhelpfully reflective in unreliable spurts, and wildly inconsistent in all things, up to and including tennis. Is unrelenting versimilitude the best thing to shoot for when writing a novel about teenagers? It's hard to say. There's no real resolution to any of the plot threads except one (and that one is the least convincing thing in the whole book) but the half-formed muddledness of everything is part of what makes it feel so much like real life.

In My Dog Rinty, an extremely meandering picture book from 1948, Rinty is such a bad dog that David's family can no longer justify their leash and doghouse budget (Rinty keeps destroying them both). Eventually he has to be sold to a rich lady, who promptly takes him to obedience school and turns him into a good dog. But then the rich lady's landlord tells her that his building no longer allows dogs, so she gives him back to David. There's a happy ending, sort of, that turns on New York housing stock being full of mice.

What makes My Dog Rinty the absolute gem it is, though, are the beautiful quotidian photographs of 1940s Harlem on every page: children in living rooms, scuffed shoes and church shoes, a dime store and a hotel lobby, a fat baby (now over seventy) being bathed in a basin at someone's kitchen table). Two real-life children's librarians get a loving portrait each.

What I Finished More Recently

All I can say about Lent is be prepared for plot twists. And a pun that is also a punch. And take the dust jacket off if you can, because the cover copy is full of spoilers. Not that you have to be surprised to enjoy a book, but I was and I did.

I loved With Teeth by Kristen Arnett, even though (because?) the main character was so horrendously frustrating and I kept wanting it to turn into a kinder, less thorny, less hopeless story, like a chump. Basically, it's about a mother who doesn't understand her difficult son, or her wife, or any other human being, or herself. There's some deliberately disgusting cockroach content that hit a little too close to home, and a lot of miserable petty failures ditto. Nothing ever gets better for more than 30 minutes at a time and everyone ends up worse than they started. It's utterly bleak (and also funny) and I wish I were still reading it.

What I May Someday Finish Reading

Despite my long-standing promise to finally read some Jonathan Franzen fiction, I gave up on The Twenty-Seventh City about two-thirds of the way in. I didn't hate it, I wanted to like it, but I just got tired of not caring about any of the characters or the stupid edgy plot. Which might have been a perfectly good plot if I'd been in a better mood, who knows? It's a baroque city-corruption-plus-kidnapping plot, an odd clothesline to hang Franzen's large collection of coldly observed marital and municipal minutuae on, and I never got around to believing in it, for whatever reason.

A Milestone Is Reached

For the first time since I got it six years ago, there's space for new books on my little "to read" shelf. I've read all the unread books in my room! (I haven't read all the unread books in the apartment, but that's Phase Two, maybe).

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Love the Wednesday You're With

2021-08-25T21:29:20Z

What I've Finished Reading

The Proposal is a light-as-air romance that I bought because of its wonderful/horrible starting premise, which is that Nik's douchey boyfriend proposes to her by Jumbtron at a Dodgers game (with her name misspelled), and she has to reject him in front of thousands of outraged fans. Luckily, a nice doctor named Carlos and his equally nice sister decide to rescue her from the approaching camera crew by pretending to be long-lost friends and hustling her out of there. They give her a ride home, Carlos and Nik hit it off, and there you go. The rest of the book huffs and puffs like an adorable toy steam engine trying to throw flimsy stumbling blocks in the way of Nik and Carlos living happily every after, but most of them don't even register. They are things like, "Nik doesn't want to get seriously involved so soon after a breakup" and "Carlos worries that Nik is too bourgie to appreciate his favorite taco place." Finally the flimsiest roadblock of all hits its mark and sends them hurtling into the Obligatory Late-Book Breakup.

( Very mild spoilers for a book with no surprises )

This is one of those interlocking shared-cast romance series books, which doesn't cause too many problems, but the attempt to "tie in" to books the reader may or may not have read is probably responsible for some of The Proposal's weirder and more pointless conversational cul-de-sacs. Nik's friendships are believable even if the dialogue and the overbearingly cute/convenient cupcake entrepeneurship isn't. Overall, this is good buttery corn: two likable people enjoy each other's company, survive an obligatory stupid conflict, and go right back to having a good time. It should also be noted that author Jasmine Guillory makes fun of people who use too many exclamation points not five pages after ending a sentence in the narration with four question marks. You can't have it both ways, Guillory! Except apparently you can.

What I'm Reading Now

Lent is a pleasant oddball of a novel by noted weirdo Jo Walton - it's less deliberately alienating than Among Others, which I loved, and less of a lecture on wheels than The Just City, which I couldn't get into. It begins with a demon infestation in fifteenth-century Florence, expels the demons so it can go be a regular historical novel for a few chapters, and is now easing gently back into demon city. I don't know where it's going exactly, but happy enough to take the ride.

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The Long Way to a Small, Angry Wednesday

2021-07-28T16:26:54Z

What I've Finished Reading

There's a character in The Long Way to a Small, Angry Planet who bears a very strong resemblance to Kaylee from (the short-lived sci-fi show) Firefly, or rather to someone's lovingly crafted fan novel about Kaylee. Some people might object to this resemblance, but I liked Kaylee and was happy to see her barely-disguised twin enjoying herself in a story with few serious dangers and no shortage of engines to mess around with.

In addition to Kaylee Plus, there's a no-nonsense sexy reptile, a loveable AI and her human soulmate, a surly space racist with a secret, the conflicted host of a navigation-enabling brain parasite, and the captain, whose primary character trait is "captain." The author clearly enjoys spending time with all of them and has contrived an incredibly leisurely plot in order to maximize your enjoyment and hers. I expect opinions will vary a lot as to whether this book is obnoxiously self-indulgent or delightfully self-indulgent. I spent about the first seventy-five pages getting progressively more and more impatient with the never-ending introductions (with eager thought-bubbles of worldbuliding popping up over each one), then very suddenly forgave everything around page 100 and never looked back. It's fun.

What I Finished A Couple Weeks Ago But Didn't Get Around To Posting About

I loved The Haunting of Hill House. It was one of those books that I keep meaning to put down very soon and just don't. A professor and some unattractive "assistants" haunt a weird, unpleasant old house - it's the classic "let's stay at the haunted house to see how haunted it is" setup - outside of a grubby town. After I'd stopped reading it I wondered about the ending "landing," but this is 100% a vestigal artifact of thinking I have to have something to criticize about a perfect book; I didn't worry about it at all while I was reading it. This book is nuts in a good way.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle is also nuts, but I don't know how I feel about it - I love the mostly useless narrator and the wonderful May Kasahara (not all manic pixie dream girls are an evil) and was mildly excited when it got all Orphic for a second, primarily because poor Mr. Wind-Up Bird is such a useless everyman Orpheus and I have an intermittent weak spot for useless everymen. I'm pretty unclear on what, if anything, I was supposed to get out of this mishmash of war crimes, ambiguous magic, and sandwich making, but what does anyone get out of this messy and confusing world, I guess? Haruki Murakami has a very definite sensibility and there's nothing wrong with that.

What I'm Reading Now

Maida's Little House is a children's book from 1921 - I bought it because I'd never heard of it. It's actually a sequel to Maida's Little Shop, though I didn't realize that when I bought it (naively assuming that "house" preceded "shop"). It's an extreme example of a kind of children's book that was fairly popular at one time, in which poor (or, in this case, just not-obscenely-wealthy) kids get a rich benefactor and are set up with a series of highly choreographed, expensive and safety-netted adventures.

( A description of a book )

Also: this book called Hard Feelings that I got from a LFL because the back cover called its narrator "this generation's Holden Caulfield" (this generation = circa 1978) and hey, I like that mixed-up Caulfied kid. Bernie Hergruter is not as loveable or as mixed-up; he's mostly a normally stressed-out teenager who starts the book by winning a bet with his friend on which one of them is going to get laid first, but the circumstances are embarrassing. There's also a deranged bully after him (unrelated to the sex adventure) so he runs away to Cleveland to stay with an aunt. So far it's not terrible, not spectacular.

Is This Going to Be A Once-a-Month Thing From Now On?

Possibly for a while. I'm not all that busy, even, just constantly distracted.

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Wednesday Buyer's Lack of Remorse

2021-06-30T17:19:36Z

It's been a ridiculous week and a half for books. I was out of town visiting family for a little while, which also meant visiting local bookstores, which means I came home with a lot more books than I brought with me. It was less worse than it could have been because we didn't have time to visit John K. King (the Trantor of used bookstores) but the Library Bookstore in Ferndale did more than enough damage with its frankly beautiful selection and elegant pricing (used book pricing is an art, like everything else; not all stores do it exceptionally well). I'm allowing myself to pat myself on the back, in hopes that encouragement will lead to further strengthening of restraint, for only buying two issues of The New Yorker circa 1953 when I could easily have gotten ten. Then we came home just in time for a book sale at one of the local bookstores, at which I was able to limit myself to three only because the selection wasn't that great.

Anyway, the "get rid of books" project is suffering a small setback, but it's nothing to worry about yet! In the meantime, there are some new books on the TBR conveyor belt.

What I've Finished Reading

I've been swimming in periodicals lately, which is part of my plan (to shift the backreading-contemporaneous ratio a little further toward the present for a while) but also part of the problem getting-rid-of-bookswise. Ashley M. Jones' stint as editor of Poetry has been good. There was an article in last week's Sunday Times about a subscription box for parents who want to teach their children the importance of volunteering but can't be bothered to spend twenty minutes finding and contacting the nearest food bank. I thought it was mildly funny in a "let's enjoy feeling superior to professional writers" way, so I shared it with my brother, who got unexpectedly furious about this apparently harmless puff-piecer representing the end of civilization. If you would like to decide for yourself which one it is, it's here.

What I'm Reading Now

The Madwoman of Serrano is a pleasantly odd sort-of fableish novel about a village that keeps to its old ways (or tries to) and some of the people it damages, by Dina Salústio. I'm not sure what I think of it so far, but I'm still reading. A larger and slightly glossier bolus of oddness is Haruki Murakami's The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, which is the book one of the founders of the sci-fi book club has been trying to get us all to read for years. It's not very sci-fi yet, but I do like the closed-in alley where the narrator goes to look for his cat, and the narrator's total lack of ambition and penchant for describing whatever sandwich he's making for himself when the assorted mysteries disrupt his non-schedule. Chances seem pretty good that this will be the first Murakami I don't forget shortly after reading, but we'll see what happens.

What I Plan to Read Next

Some of the books acquired in the Great Not Buying More Books Massacre of 2021: The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron, The Twenty-Seventh City by Jonathan Franzen, Selected Poems of Mervyn Peake, With Teeth by Kristen Arnett, The Windfall by Diksha Basu, The Long Way to an Angry Planet by Becky Chambers, A Burning by Megha Majumdar, Collected Stories of Isaac Babel, and Knowing Woman: A Feminine Psychology by Irene Claremont de Castillejo. The latter is copyright 1973 by the C. G. Jung foundation and was brought over by one of my aunts because she knows I like books.

What's actually next on the conveyor belt: The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson.

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Wednesdays of Tomorrow

2021-06-22T21:33:55Z

Or, it's not Wednesday yet, but I'm going to be AFK all day when it is.

Last week, I found a very nice new Little Free Library that was suffering from lack of books - it was only half full and most of the contents were self-published inspirational memoirs, self-published self-help, and Consumer Reports - so I resolved to come back with a few good books once I'd finished them. The other day, I came back with Burger's Daughter by Nadine Gordimer, Les Mis, and Bring Out the Dog, a solid collection of contemporary war stories by Will Mackin - only to find the old selections gone and the library stuffed to the gills with appealing popular fiction (and two boxes of Kraft Mac & Cheese Dinner). There was only room for the smallest of my books, and then only after I took two books out of the box. So now I'm up a book, but I'm glad to see that the LFL is well looked after.

Normal Wednesdays to return next week, probaly.

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The Wednesday's Just A Wednesday

2021-06-16T21:30:20Z

What I've Finished Reading

I finally finished Les Miserables! It was too much by a long shot and it was good. Marius should feel bad for the rest of his life. The translation was by Norman Denny, who also translated the biography of Balzac that I loved, and I thought it was pretty good, too. It provides a big boost in readability over some earlier translations, with no corresponding loss of Hugorrendousness.

Next week: maybe a different book?

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It's a long way from Wednesday

2021-06-11T14:47:03Z

Yet I still have some feelings about Les Misérables. Here are a few.

1. This book is a trap. The chapters are short, so I keep thinking, "One more won't hurt!" but the book is neverending. Usually when I get stuck in a short-chapter trap, I lose a little sleep and it's over in a few days, but this book never ends.

2. There are so many ludicrous coincidences that they very quickly cease to be ludicrous and start functioning more like a rhyme scheme than a traditional plot.

3. When I was a teenager, before I read the book for the first time but after my middle-school choir did "Castle on a Cloud," I thought it was a terrific bit of moral sophistication on my part to be annoyed that someone had taken this extremely important srs realist book about the plight of the poor and made a trashy singing-dancing extravaganza out of it for filthy lucre. I could not have been more wrong about the nature of Les Misérables-the-book, which is practically a musical already.

( Spoilers ahoy! )

7. Writers who are deeply concerned with how little (literal) shit there is in everyone else's literature will always have a place in my heart.

That's about all I can report on this week, except that I found this book during an ill-advised procrastination jag. It's a collection of satirical suffrage verses from 1915, and it's just a basket of gems.

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Barely Even Wednesday

2021-06-02T18:31:52Z

If I had to pick just one author of ridiculously self-indulgent massive novels to take to a desert island, there's no question that it would be Tolstoy. But Hugo's large-scale asides are about five to ten times more charming on average than Tolstoy's. Since we're all rethinking public memorials, maybe now is a good time for someone to commission a monument to the time Victor Hugo wrote an entire chapter on the allegedly breathtaking sublimity of Cambronne saying "Shit!" to an English general's surrender request, in the midde of his 60-odd-page digression on the Battle of Waterloo.

These days, Jean Valjean is tucked safely away in the Convent of Convenience and we're learning about street urchins. Les Miserables continues to be the best and I continue to be out of commission for the most part.

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Reading Wednesday: An Apology and a Placeholder

2021-05-19T20:33:46Z

I'd like to apologize for the recent streak of non-posting, which is likely to continue off and on. There are some non-book things in real life that are taking up all my spare time. One of them involves cockroaches.

However, I can say that I've started reading Les Miserables for the first time in many years and it's so great. Hugo has just decided that he's going to let this melodrama finish bUT FIRST it's very important that he set the scene with twenty chapters on the battle of Waterloo. Maybe it won't turn out to be literally twenty! But then again, maybe it will.

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Wednesday and Co.

2021-04-28T22:51:53Z

What I've Finished Reading

A Fatal Thing Happened On The Way To the Forum is a lively, thoughtful book about murder in Ancient Rome by a very smart author who is also Too Cool For School. I am chronically Too Uncool To Leave Study Hall and reached my saturation point for cutesy pop-culture references somewhere around page ten; I also got annoyed with the sheer number of times Emma Southon gestured toward some interesting rabbit trail of clarification and said, "I COULD get way down into the weeds on this, but we'd all die of boredom so let's not." Speak for yourself! Plus, half the footnotes were just elaborations on contemporary true-crime allusions, which, as a humorless lump who hates true crime, I could only see as a waste of valuable footnote space. Also, as an adult who can decide for myself whether or not names are funny, I got no added value from Southon elbowing me in the ribs whenever she thought a Roman name was funny. In spite of this, would I read it again? Absolutely. It's pungent and insightful and full of great details. Would I give it as a gift to my dad? No, it's too insecure and loud about how Not Like Other Roman History Books it is. Will you like it? There's only one way to find out.

What I'm Reading Now

Jean and Co., Unlimited (1937) is a nice enough book about a nice American kid named Jean who goes on a European tour in the thirties with her museum-curator mother to buy up traditional costumes, and meets a bunch of other nice kids with other versions of the name Jean. They pledge to write round-robin letters to each other and to promote peace on earth through friendship. It's not bad, but so far there's not much to it other than quaint customs, cute accents, exotic food, and the ghosts of an invisible present. I learned just now, in the course of checking to see if author Helen Perry Curtis has a Wikipedia page (no) that this book has a small following, and the author is the subject of a recent passion project/biography published through Belt Publishing's vanity arm, Parafine Press.

All Very Nice, And Bad, But Inefficient

That's the verdict when an inspector from Horde Prime comes to inspect Hordak's planet-conquering apparatus in the latest episode of She-Ra, and it's hard to disagree. Hordak likes to grow hideous beasts in his own image in pools of bubbling mud; the inspector just wants to put an impenetrable crystal dome around the Whispering Woods and fill it up with robot laser bats. In the end, neither approach works because He-Man happens to be visiting from his dimension and between the two of them, the twins just lift up the whole dome and toss it away, like an enormous contact lens. This episode is credited to J. Michael Straczynski.

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Reach Out and Touch Wednesday

2021-04-14T16:10:54Z

What I'm Not Reading Anymore

Immediately after Luo Ji used his cop connections and ultra-top-security clearance to have the real woman who most closely resembles his imaginary fake girlfriend sent to his stylish mountaintop lair, The Dark Forest pulled a time jump five years into the future and now they're married with an adorable baby so we can all get back to the part of the plot I didn't care about. I decided that life was too short to read the rest of The Dark Forest. If you have read this book and it turns out that Luo Ji and his perfect wife have a falling out when she discovers he invented her on a dare, or anything like that, let me know and maybe I'll double back in a decade or so.

(There's a whole very sixth-grade Gary Stu secret global security reason why Luo Ji lives in a stylish mountaintop lair and can get whatever he wants; it has to do with aliens who are going to invade Earth in about four centuries and it's been explained at great length at several very important meetings but I still couldn't manage to care even a little bit, so it's for the best that I'm not reading The Dark Forest anymore).

What I've Finished Reading

Ring Shout is a hell of a book and there's not much of it, so give it a try if you like the premise of grossout parasitic demons using the Ku Klux Klan as a vehicle for world conquest (or trying anyway). It fell suddenly flat for me for just a second toward the very end, because there was a kind of Avengers: Endgame supporting character charge and I hadn't, as it turned out, developed any feeling for or interest in the characters involved. The rest of the time, it was a fantastically fast moving, confident and humane splatterfest. Hate and fear are bad, songs and love are good; be careful when fighting ravening fleshbeasts that you don't accidentally get fleshbeastified in turn: this isn't a complex moral universe, but it's a gorgeously and hideously illustrated one.

What I'm Reading Now

VOTING WORKS, or at least it did in this case; the sci-fi book club is NOT moving on to the next Three-Body book and even more exposition for the exposition gods, but will be discussing my own first choice, Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. It's good so far! It diverges a little from my usual Ishiguro pattern of being very slightly bored for two hundred pages and then suddenly overwhelmed with feelings, because I'm already pretty verklempt about this sad robot friend getting bullied by her human friend's human peer group. Don't bully your robot friends, poor little rich kids of the future!

Also reading: Our Environment: How We Use and Control It, an innovative multi-science junior high school textbook from 1931, with a special focus on the mind-boggling complexity of modern life. As a textbook, I don't think it's as good as Harold Rugg's Introduction to Problems of American Culture from the same time period, but it is valuable if you want to contemplate, for example, the eternal problem of sewage, plus I like to imagine an irritable young LM Montgomery heroine having to read this paean to Industrial Man and just getting more and more upset. And at this point in the history of What The Heck Is Light Even, the existence of ether is still the going theory, which was a complete delight to stumble across.

What I Plan to Read Next

I've actually already started My Year Abroad and the latest Most Comfortable Man in London book, but I'm kicking the can down the road as far as saying anything about them goes, so I can post this now before I get distracted again.

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The Wednesday Stalks at Midnight

2021-03-31T18:25:18Z

What I've Finished Reading

Bunnicula is an intrinsically hilarious concept if you're about seven years old and have seen a rabbit and heard of vampires. See, there was this bunny and we brought him home because he was so cute and fluffy, but guess what it turned out he was a VAMPIRE BUNNY who SUCKS THE BLOOD of vegetables get it because bunnies aRE vEGETARIANS! GET IT? WooOOOoooOOOO!

The problem with a bunny vampire who sucks vegetables dry is that there's no problem, really. No one's getting hurt. There's no fraught question of vegetable consent to explore. Vegetables aren't rising from the dead to cannibalize one another straight off the vine and then wander the streets with a haunted look in their nonexistent eyes. They do look a little weird with all the juice sucked out of them, but it's all the same to the compost pile. To give this funny concept the incomplete skeleton of a plot, the authors have to invent a semi-genre-savvy cat who immediately suspects that something vampiric is going on, then torments the bunny with garlic garlands and tries to pound a raw steak into its little bunny heart. Finally the humans intervene and the bunny vampire is fully integrated into its new home. The book is narrated by the family dog, a steadier, less genre-savvy character who only asks for something to chew on.

Does it hold up? Yes and no. As an adult reader, I could identify a number of places where I'd fallen over laughing at age eight. Did I actually laugh even once this time around? Not really. But I don't think that's because Bunnicula isn't funny; I think it's because Bunnicula isn't a book for middle-aged people.

The only thing that really raised my present-day eyebrows in this book published in 1979 is the dog's several-times-referenced craving for chocolate cupcakes, which one of the human children happily feeds him. How long has "don't feed chocolate to dogs?" been a mainstream warning? I don't remember if it was around when I was growing up or not.

What I'm Reading Now

Ring Shout has a wild premise (what if the 1920s KKK revival were just a thin cover for a really super grotesque demonic takeover of Earth?) and when you have that kind of premise, total confidence in the premise is everything; P. Djèlí Clark is more than up to the task and Maryse, the narrator, doesn't have time to be too coy or self-conscious or overly pedantic about the fact that she's weilding a magical vengeance sword against hideous hate vampires that feed on the fury of their human hosts until they can replace them completely; there's too much to do and too short a book to do it in.

As of a third of the way through, the only part of The Dark Forest I really like or care about is Luo Ji's imaginary girlfriend. See, he was dating this real woman who was an author, and one day she confessed to him that she could never really love him as much as she loved the fictional heroes of her novels, and he was like, "Wait, what?" so she challenged him to go home and try to really imagine the perfect woman for him, and just really linger on all the hot ego-affirming details. And he does! And then the imaginary perfect woman shows up in his mind and they take a bunch of walks and so on, and he goes back to his regular human girlfriend and tells her all about his weird experience and she's like, "Now you understand why I can never love a non-fictional man." And they both sort of nod wistfully as if this were some kind of meaningful commentary on the nature of fiction and relationships and fictional relationships. Now Luo Ji is trying to get his cop friend to find the real woman who most closely resembles his imaginary girlfriend using his vast array of high-tech cop tools. I don't know what he's going to do when he finds her.

If the whole book were Luo Ji's ridiculous fantasy girlfriend adventures (with cop friend), I'd have finished it much faster. But there's also all this tedious alien-contact exposition and it's like a massive fog rolling across my brain every time the characters start in explaining things to each other again, which is why I'm still only a third of the way through.

What I Plan to Read Next

Not the third book in the Three Body trilogy, that's for sure! I'm only still reading this one for the fake girlfriend story.

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Ceci n'est pas un Reading Wednesday

2021-03-24T18:32:42Z

Books Are Passing From Our Lives

I've been pulling a book or two off my shelves every week that I don't necessarily need to keep right now, given limited space. When I took down Finnegans Wake, I found that I'd put tabs in to mark off certain sections - something I'd completely forgotten about doing. In case you're interested, the sections are: Rocks Fall, Bar Gossip, Museum of Puns, The Tristan Part, and Will You Have A Nice Cup of Tea?

It's easy to give away books like the Wake which are new/in good condition and (seem to me) highly likely to find buyers; it's harder when it's something with a less obvious pitch, like Starting Your Own Magazine, a hard-nosed guide for the entrepreneur in 1998 by "Mr. Magazine" Samir Husni, which I wouldn't find especially interesting even if I had a time machine and plans to start a magazine in the past, or Unleashing Feminism, a messy and unpleasant dispatch from the Porn Wars of the 1990s. I feel a perverse sense of responsibility toward these books I don't really want, because if I don't want them, who could?

Anyway, the master plan is working well enough; my shelves are getting emptier and I don't have random yearbooks sitting on the floor under the bookcases anymore.

However, I Left The House

. . . and came back with five new books. It could have been a lot fewer, but I made the mistake of opening the door of the Larger Free Library on my way to pay some fees and renew my card at the university library (Largest Restricted Library, if we're keeping up the naming scheme) and couldn't give myself a reason not to take Les Miserables, Bunnicula, and Too Much and Never Enough by Mary Trump. The first two are books I've vaguely wanted to re-read for years and was never going to get around to taking out of the library; the third I was curious about but reluctant to feed the Trump attention spiral in any way. Its appearance in an anonymous library box is a rare chance to have it both ways.

The other two books I bought at the bookstore on purpose: Ring Shout and My Year Abroad. These are both books that I read a review of at some point, thought "I should read this IMMEDIATELY" and immediately forgot about. Now they're right in front of me so I won't forget again. This doesn't do much to help me with the other ~5000 books in that category, but it's not nothing.

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What A Friend We Have in Wednesday

2021-03-10T15:36:20Z

I Finally Finished Reading About Fictional Thomas Cromwell's Cromwell Problems

. . . and I cried my eyes out.

It's not that Cromwell and his family are particularly loveable or anything like that. It's just a stupidly immersive book about people who used to be alive, and I'm a sucker for that thing where someone is about to get their head chopped off and they see some sky in a puddle or something and you suddenly remember for the millionth time that everyone who ever lived had a childhood and a body.

What I'm Reading Now

I am embarrassed to say that I didn't manage to finish The Dark Forest in time for book club, even though I had over two weeks; first there was the Tom Crom Chronicles to finish, then I just kept picking up other books that happened to be better. I may eventually run out of books that I want to read more than I want to read The Dark Forest, but there's also a real chance that I might not.

The Damnation of Theron Ware is one of a series of "Belt Revivals" - nice crisp paperback reprints of late 19th and early 20th century realist fiction by Belt Publishing. It couldn't have happened to a more deserving book - Harold Frederic's 1896 tale of an earnest young preacher who may or may not be succumbing to the temptations of Higher Criticism is amazingly fresh and very funny - but did Belt Publishing really just copy-paste the Project Gutenberg text without changing any of the ALL CAPS back to italics? All internal evidence points to yes.

The other problem with this book is that the protagonist's name sounds just enough like "Thurston Moore" that I now have two lines of "Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone" stuck in my head on a stable loop. It's not a song I've ever had any special fondness for or thought about for years, yet here we are.

Heyyyyyy, Adora

I'm still watching She-Ra Original Flavor. Some of the differences between it and (the objectively much better) New She-Ra are interesting, and some are obviously the result of one being a witty labor of love and the other being a literal toy commercial produced as quickly and cheaply as possible in a time when cheapness went a lot further than it does today.

( You can read more if you want to, but do you really want to? ) Can I recommend this show to fans of the new She-Ra? Absolutely not. Am I going to watch all 93 episodes out of sheer inertia? It remains to be seen.

What I Plan to Read Next

Maybe The Dark Forest, maybe not.

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Wednesday Has the Power

2021-02-24T14:38:05Z

What I've Been Reading

At this point Tarek attempted to draw an analogy to a TV series starring Ghada Abdel Razek: Surely you couldn’t try the actress for murder, he reasoned, just because she’d killed someone in one of the episodes? The prosecutor took in this new piece of information and said, deadly serious: “So you’re telling me this is a TV show now?” Tarek tried to explain, but the prosecutor was warming to his theme. “In that case,” he replied with a confident flourish, “where are the other episodes?”

Rotten Evidence by Ahmed Naji.

Otherwise, not much! Thomas Cromwell is still climbing a rickety ladder to who knows what. I got this weird passion-project sci-fi anthology as a gift from one of its contributors, but since the only commentary I have to offer is a series of screeds about how poorly edited it is, it's probably best that I refrain for now.

For the Honor of Love

I liked the Noelle Stevenson She-Ra reboot so much that I've started watching the orginal Filmation She-Ra from 1985. I'm pretty sure I didn't watch it when it was new, though I know we had some (terrible) He-Man episodes on cassette, and I'm almost sure I had a stuffed animal of one of the annoying comic relief characters (a prissy koala with rainbow wings). The Horde is a little more successful as a conquering force in this version, and this version of Hordak is having a much better time - festooning himself with bones, cackling up a storm, flying around in a fighter plane with his own face painted on the nose. The voice acting is astonishing right across the board; you would think it had been deliberately directed to drive adults and sensitive older siblings from the room. Maybe it was? The best thing I can say about She-Ra is that Bow is a cinnamon roll in every continuity. The second-best thing is that the closing credits theme ROCKS.

There's Always Next Week

Maybe I'll be a little further into The Dark Forest by then?

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The Lost Booklist of 2020

2021-02-20T15:15:13Z

Well, well, well. I finally managed to type up a list! Lots of nonfiction lately. Several months where I read hardly any books at all, including December which was apparently completely consumed by A Suitable Boy. I clearly still can't figure out which periodicals to count as books. No matter how many times I write "Aeneid," I can't remember which order the vowels go in unless I look it up. If you want to know more about any book, just ask!

( Books finished in 2020 )

Confessions of a Pregnant Cinderella was the last book of 2020! I found it in a Little Free Library at the arboretum. It's a very silly book about a sad billionare and a perky waitress who have inexplicably transcendent chemistry and eventually, a baby. To be honest, I would have liked the guy a lot better if he'd hoarded less of his money, but "billionaires" are, or were, a standard Harlequin masculinity unit for some reason.

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Wednesday With Good Company (On Thursday)

2021-02-18T23:50:55Z

What I've Finished Reading

And now, dear children, I trust you will not think I have told you these sad stories to make you afraid of death. I have rather told them to you that, being reminded of the shortness and uncertainty of life, you might so prepare to meet its end as to have no farther cause for fear.

Our Prize Book: Heirs to the Kingdom is a Methodist Sunday School gift book full of poetry and dead children. Ostensibly it's a children's book: the print is large, the language is simple - and probably a number of pious or morbid or unspeakably bored children devoured these with some pleasure back in 1874, when it was new - but its appeal is not obvious to the layman. It consists of brief beseeching sermons and briefer stories, which are mostly about how statistically likely its readers are to die young. As a Prize Book, it was probably given to the winner of a Scripture-memorizing contest or similar. This is part of the built-in mental furniture of classic children's authors like L.M. Montgomery (the ranks of the morbid and the bored) and so, in a way, it's part of my own. Sadly, that doesn't make it very good reading.

What I'm Reading Now

I haven't had a lot of time for reading, because it's the busy season at work again. Hilary Mantel's Thomas Cromwell novels are keeping me up late anyway, even though the characters aren't all that likeable and some of them (miscellaneous skuldugging houses of this and that) are hard to tell apart. I blew right through Wolf Hall and now it's the middle of Bring Up the Bodies and Henry is carefully floating the idea that maybe he was bewitched and that's why he burned so many bridges just to marry that snaky Boleyn person who isn't even all that nice to him if you think about it. Henry is such a tragic baby blimp at all times, and because he's accidentally king of England instead of some rando in his mother's basement, the tragedy is everyone else's and Henry just keeps bobbing along through the clouds, wondering why everything has to be so hard.

What I Plan to Read Next

The sequel to The Three Body Problem, The Dark Forest, finally arrived, and the intermittent sci-fi book club was put off until next month, so I still have time to read it! Also I might try to catch up on the past few weeks, if I don't forget again.

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The Wednesday Turns

2021-01-21T02:24:49Z

What I've Finished Reading

Incorrigable cyberoptimist that I am, I couldn't have been better catered to by Megan Phelps-Roper's Unfollow if it was knitted specially for me out of my own most self-indulgent daydreams by a swarm of benevolent algorithms. Phelps-Roper grew up in Topeka's Westboro Baptist Church, a tiny splinter sect made up of abusive showboating rage pastor Fred Phelps and his family, took to Twitter at a young age to spread the message of God's wrath among the reprobates, made friends in spite of herself, and eventually left the church as a result. It's a generous, hopeful book.

What I'm Reading Now

Maybe Prison Memoirs of an Anarchist is better understood as "a document" than as a work of literature. What do I mean by that? I mean I find myself implicitly trusting the sincerity and earnestness of Alexander Berkman simply because he's such a godawful writer. Like Wolf Hall, Prison Memoirs is done in "immersive" present tense, and the consciousness into which you are dropped, in the chapters describing Berkman's abortive attempt to kill anti-labor steel boss Henry Clay Frick and thereby (somehow) spark a revolution among The People, is that of an absolute wanker.

I pace the floor in agitation over the conversation with my fellow-prisoners. Why can't they understand the motives that prompted my act? Their manner of pitying condescension is aggravating [. . .] My remark that the probable consequences to myself are not to be weighed in the scale against the welfare of the People, they had met with a smile of derision, suggestive of doubt as to my sanity. It is, of course, consoling to reflect that neither of these men can properly be said to represent The People. The negro is a very inferior type of laborer; and the other-- he is a bourgeois, "in business." He is not worth while. Besides, he confessed that it his third offense. He is a common criminal, not an honest producer. But that tall man -- the Homestead steelworker whom the negro pointed out to me -- oh, he will understand: he is of the real People.

[Spoiler: he also doesn't understand].

I'd guess that I have a little more baseline sympathy for Berkman than the average American just because I first met him in the pages of Emma Goldman's autobiography Living My Life, as an ardent young man throwing his whole self into the radical act of eating an enormous steak at a restaurant before his money runs out again. Goldman has a knack for the telling detail that Berkman (so far) lacks.

Quichotte is giving me the same problem I had with The Golden House. Whenever the narration goes into a glorious garbage-island Rushdie fugue about, say, the many kinds of snoring to be heard through the walls of a seedy motel, my patience is endless and my indulgence joyful; when he does the same thing about some currently circulating op-ed hot topic, like "political and cultural fragmentation in America" it just makes me tired. I realize tarted-up op-eds have been part of Rushdie's M.O. from the beginning, it's just that I used to get a lot fewer of the references. Familiarity breeds nitpicking. I don't feel much like blaming either of us, though. It's hard to be contemporary.

That doesn't mean I'm not also enjoying Quichotte, whose characters include an imaginary son, wished into existence by his would-be father, who doesn't yet realize that he is also a fiction, and the "real" author of both.

What's Next

Some boring stuff! Some James Baldwin! Also this Three-Body Problem sequel that I absolutely don't feel like reading.

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