Hundreds: Weetzie Bat finishes the first and the Desert Prophet begins the second

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I try very hard not to care how many books I read in a year.

But the nature of recording all the books I read (a sin I've been committing since 2007) is that I've very aware of the number and, being very aware of it, I must care a little bit. And I do. But I think I've managed to hold it to the pleasure of passing #100. Which, this year, I now have done.

Thanks for travelling with me.

Do you have a favorite book, so far, from your 2025? 

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097) Math for English Majors: A Human Take on the Universal Language by Ben Orlin, finished November 13

I was delighted by this book but I still think Math with Bad Drawings is the best entrypoint to his helpful world of relearning how to like math.

Everyone learning to be an elementary-school teacher should read that book. Then this one, why not? 

about ten weeks

☞

098) This One Summer by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki, finished November 14

I came across this a couple months ago via my friend Jake.

I trust Jake's taste and I was compelled by his breakdown so I picked it up from the library. It is just as he says, an excellent slice-of-life comic beautifully paced. I found it stronger than their follow-up (which I've already read), fwiw.

It's the story of two girls. The year-and-a-half gap in their age begins to matter in new ways this summer as the older is getting new (and perplexing) feeling about (very much the wrong) boys. The spend the summer playing at the beach and discovering horror movies and watching teenagers and the adults in their houses. It's measured. It's smart. It doesn't push. It's very well made.

Jake was right. 

a couple weeks maybe

☞

099) The Things You Have to Do Before I Buy You a Phone by Adam Ferguson, finished November 14

We didn't have a great policy for our kids when it comes to phones. The main thing was we're not going to get you one so earn it yourself. The first one did this and got it, if I remember correctly, as a high-school sophomore. The other two had friends with phones lying around their house who fell sorry for them. There are so many superfluous phones in the world now that the old policy's a bad policy.

I think the daughter, so far behind her brothers, needs a different policy. I was thinking about getting her a cool dumb phone and that still might be the best solution but this book is also a pretty great solution.

Some of the things are obvious (earn the money) or sensible (navigate a drive without a phone) but some are surprising if you're taking getting-a-phone as life's purpose. Why should I write a letter or attend a religious service or visit the fire station or build a fire? But that's the genius of the book. It's so easy to disappear into a phone, never to return. This is sort of like The Dangerous Book for Boys only with a pretty good carrot hanging from the end to keep a kid motivated to live a little.

I was tempted to try and get copies of this book to teach—this would be an excellent semester-long project: do, say, four of the items (I might need to give them point values so they don't just do the easy ones) then write about some, present to the class about others.

It's a great idea but more appropriate to a junior high. Some of the stuff in the book (and the book's general rhetorical stance—I mean, #50 is Turn Fourteen) just skews younger. But it's a good idea and it would be cool if this became a textbook in, say, a seventh-grade English class. 

Regardless! It's a cool book and I may well use it for my daughter. If you're trying to figure out how to navigate this now-universal step in growing up, check it out. You might like what you find.

It might work particularly well for an entire friendgroup? Dunno. If you try it, let me know. 

maybe seven days over three or four weeks

☞

100) Weetzie Bat by Francesca Lia Block, finished November 17

I love this book. It's been sixteen years since my first (and only prior) read. That read opened up an aspect of my style I'd tamped down by trying to be an adult and allowed me to start writing Curses and Llew, a book I'd been trying to write for four years. Since 2009, I've worked on COLl (its abbreviation in my notes) in starts and spurts. Rereading Weetzie Bat is a bit startling because things in my book have parallels to things in Weetzie Bat that I had completely forgotten. We share, it seems, an attitude on sex and death and art's intersections.

Anyway, still haven't finished COLl. But I will! I've finished what I think of as the first third, but maybe I've set it down (again) because it's now (roughly) the length of Weetzie Bat? Something to think about.

Anyway, sometimes it's a mistake to reread something you loved long ago. But not today. Love this book. 

probably three days two weeks apart

☞

101) The Desert Prophet by Camilla Stark, finished November 18

 I'm not sure I've read a comic book that behaves quite this way. Camilla draws the Desert Prophet and his friends with the casual certainty of a daily strip artist. She displays them in different ways at different scales and under different emotions like manga. She's deeply literate (I planned to get more into this, but there's an appendix laying out most of the references, so I guess I won't.) It's picaresque in a sacred way ala Piers Plowman or any Everyman story (or, as she says in the notes, the Little Prince). Yet it's deeply contemporary, concerned with contemporary crises. And deeply Mormon, casually conversant with our sacred rites and movement. It is, in short, mystical. A holy work. A work that proposes that the temporal is spiritual, whether you're paying attention or not; a work that provides a form of nihilistic optimism; a work that encourages moving forward no matter no matter no matter what. Plus, it's beautifully drawn and humorously drawn in striking chiaroscuro that rewards attention but does not allow the eye to rest.

two days

☞

Previous books of 2025
(and years more distant)

A couple thoughts on Thornton Wilder

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I read Our Town in high school (sophomore year?) and my class also watched (I think) the classic version starring Hal Holbrook. I don’t remember much about it now other than how it made me feel and how much I liked it.

Just a few years ago I read The Skin of Our Teeth which has some of the same modernist tendencies but really could not be any more different from Our Town (I think; cf previous paragraph). It’s a weird little domestic comedy that covers all of human history.

Then, just two years ago, I read his novel The Bridge over San Luis Rey because someone compared Just Julie’s Fine to it. Again. Decidedly modern and so unlike the other two.

And now I’ve watched a production of The Matchmaker.

I don’t usually write about plays I see and expecially not school plays as writing about minors seems untoward to do behind their backs and they are not my intended audience so—

I’ll just say this was perhaps the most challenging script I’ve seen them take on and one of the best scripts I’ve seen them take on. I think the best under the current theater teacher. And some of the best acting work I’ve seen too. I shan’t say more than that.

What I want to talk about is the play.

I recently saw Hello, Dolly! for the first time but I was not prepared for how similar it would be to it’s ur-text. Very similar, in fact. That said, the musical added two characters and sanded down the original’s sharp political edges. Because this play has bite! Oo, baby! Talk capitalism to me, Wilder!

Anyway. Now I’ve seen or read Wilder’s four best-remembered work and I gotta say:

He’s terrific.

And, if you’re local, there’re three shows left.

Drunk crows, dystopian Jews,elderly werewolves, and brooding kaiju

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Unquestionably my favorite book of this set was Chuck Palahniuk's memoir. Not something I would have guessed. Not because it was entertaining but because it is hands down one of the most useful books about writing I've ever read. It's a veritably bible of good ideas. Not kidding.

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089) The Art of Tony Millionaire by Tony Millionaire, finished October 4

This is a pretty packed collection from way back in 2009. And it captures well the dichomatic nature of his work. It's cute and lovely and delightful. It is awful and demented and repulsive.

It's quite the split.

But you always believe he is being honest. And I think that's why I like it even when I don't. 

a bit over twenty days 

☞

090) Consider This: Moments in My Writing Life After Which Everything Was Different by Chuck Palahniuk, finished October 16

I loved this book. This is a classic of the writing advice/memoir of which Steven King's On Writing is perhaps the most lauded entry. Palahniuk packs us full with genuinely useful things to consider alongside wild stories that end up mattering to the writing in unexpected ways. It's also a love letter to writers and editors and publicists and friends and family he has known and loved.

Frankly, this is excellent. I intend to return this library copy and buy my own copy. Little notes I wrote to myself thanks to Consider This have already appeared in my current WIP. I need one for my classroom if nothing else.

Highly recommended. 

two or three weeks 

☞

091) Superman: The Harvests of Youth by Sina Grace, finished October 18

This is fine. It's a message novel using Smallville as setting. Bits of it work well and other bits are pure afternoon-movie. The audience is definitely people who want to understand those sucked into online hate and not at all those who are. It lacks the interiority of a good novel while largely keeping away from the visual dazzle or action of a good superhero comic. Bit of an identity crisis, this book. But, you know, fine.

two or three days over two or three weeks 

☞ 

092) The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, finished October 22

Shakespeare's always fun to read with a class. Never underestimate your students. And something dumb but so filled with provocative stuff to talk about like Merchant? Goldmine.

a couple weeks 

☞

093) The Third Temple by Yishai Sarid, translated by Yardenne Greenspan, finished October 23

The publisher's giddy promotional text includes this:

I am wary of hyperbolic language, so allow me to be as concrete as possible: as a reader, I see The Third Temple fitting squarely into the dystopian tradition of George Orwell's critique of fascism in Animal Farm; Ray Bradbury's fight against censorship in Fahrenheit 451; and Margaret Atwood's courageous denunciation of patriarchy in The Handmaid's Tale.

These lofty comparisons are a big part of why I wanted to read the book. And I feel bad saying it, but my experience makes that litany of excellence about the right description. Which is to say I don't see much original here. Placing the action in a near-future Jewish fascist-religious dictatorship is a new setting, to be sure. But it's mostly like Animal Farm in that lots of animals die gruesome death. It's take on censorship is much less Fahrenheit 451 than Nineteen Eighty-four but I suppose you can't mention Orwell twice. The Handmaid's Tale makes the most sense as this is a dystopia run by fundamentalists.

 The one truly original addition to the genre The Third Temple gives us is the introduction of supernatural elements. God is in this book. Angels. Wisdom. I wonder if in the original Hebrew the language allows us to wonder if this is all in the head of our solo point-of-view character, but in this translation, that's rarely an option. God is in this novel. So are angels. And Wisdom. Their introduction excites me but I'm not quite certain what I'm supposed to make of it. At times, it feels like it might be a satire of fundamentalists Jews in modern Israel, but at other times it feels quite sincere. Given Sarid's reputation in his home nation, again, I suspect there may be more happening between the Hebrew lines than survives the translation into English.

The ending scene appears modeled after either Tale of Two Cities or Nineteen Eight-four but thematically it falls short of either.

In the end I'm left mildly confused and distinctly unsatisfied, and uncertain whether that's because this is so culturally specific that I'm being left out or if, maybe, it isn't actually as good as Animal Farm or Fahrenheit or Handmaid. I dunno. What do you think? 

about a month 

☞

094) Pumpkinheads by Rainbow Rowell and Faith Erin Hicks, finished October 25

Honestly, this might be the best thing I've read by either Rowell or Hicks. It's simple and straightforward and charming and in a genre of which I am famously pro (best friends who discover they are in love with each other). Plus: it's seasonal.

My only complaint is the character all look about ten years older than they're supposed to be, but according to the bonus materials that was intentional. Okay. 

one day 

☞

095) The Werewolf at Dusk and Other Stories by David Small, finished November 3

Small was once best known as one of the great contemporary illustrators, but nowadays he's best known as the author of Stitches. This is a collection of three stories—one original and two adaptations. The most immediately accessible is the first, the title story, an adaptation of a story by Lincoln Michel about an elderly werewolf. But all the stories are, in some way, about aging, about being old. The second story is his original, a surrealist piece in which a man's survival depends on whether or not the dream he is in is his own. The third is a story by Jean Ferry, a fable for our times. The story takes place in the days before Hitler's rise to power, when most well-thinking individuals knew better than to consider that little man, that clown, a threat to the political order. The story's protagonist can sense there is more danger than the others recognize, but he's not sure what that danger is and he's not willing to stick his neck out to do anything about it.

Together, the stories don't suggest anything happy. 

two noncontiguous days 

☞

096) Kaiju Preservation Society by John Scalzi, finished November 6

I didn't intend to read this book. Although my previous experiences with Scalzi have been enjoyable, he's not, like, all that interesting. He's potato chips.

But I found myself locked out of the house with a copy of this book so I started it. And. Well. You can't eat just one chapter.

This is the most airy of the Scalzi books I've read, but he knows that too. In the postscript he talks about writing it in two months and compares it to a three-minute pop song. And that's a good metaphor. It's good dumb fun.

But the craft does still get on my nerves. One complaint I've felt before but is so egregious here is that all his characters sound the same. They all have the same wit, telling the same jokes and making the same asides. Even the bad guy, though he's supposed to be less than? Scalzi can't help himself. The same cleverness at the same level sneaks through. And one of the results is, a little past halfway when we are reminded that this novel has Real Stakes when several characters are killed, it doesn't matter. Because who cares? They were interchangeable with every other character.

THAT SAID.

I'm reminded of Alfred Hitchcock saying there was no reason to adapt The Brothers Karamazov to film because it was already perfect as a novel. The novels to adapt are the bad novels that have potential. Kaiji Preservation Society is a such a novel. Even without rewritten dialogue, good actors can bring the characters to life. The final action sequence would absolutely kill. And the subtle politics of the novel are what we need right now. This is the kaiju movie I want. It's the kaiju movie we need. I sure hope someone makes it. (And not a ten-episode series on Peacock.)

three weeks

 

 

 

Previous books of 2025
(and years more distant)

Fresh meat come to market

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I have a bunch of stuff in the pipeline, but two seem rather urgent to mention.

First, my story “Do Not Open Until Christmas” (originally published and still available in Carol of the Tales and Other Nightly Noels) will soon reappear as part of the Center for Latter-day Saint Arts production The Christmasing Spirit: Advent Calendar of Latter-day Saint Literature. You should subscribe to receive this advent calendar of writings by Latter-day Saints (including dead luminaries like Nephi Anderson, Josephine Spencer, and Maurine Whipple; and living people I’ve pushed on you before including Barrett Burgin, James Goldberg, William Morris, Steven L. Peck, Luisa Perkins, Todd Robert Petersen, and Darlene Young) in your email.

Second, the debut of a new story, “Upon the Altar,” which just appeared in Breaking Through the Penumbra (Cicada Song Press) edited by Johanna Haas, Jessica Bradshaw, Jacqui Paul, and Jenny Graman.

In this story, a young sister missionary who, while giving blood for the first time, experiences a remarkable vision. This was a great team to work with (my editor was Jacqui Paul) and if you order RIGHT NOW you’ll nine dollars off the normal price. It ain’t, in other words, gonna be six-something forever.