Fifty-three days and only nine books (American literacy truly is in decline)

. 

Man alive. Reading Moby Dick is really slowing my ability to finish other books. I am enjoying it, but tell you what—I'll be glad when it's done.

Kind of blown away I've been building this set since June. Get reading, Theric!

Incidentally, my essay on Napoleon Dynamite just helped launch Waypoints, a new pop-culture site. Check it out! 

☞

035) Okchundang Candy by Jung-soon Go and translated by Airin Park, finished May 22

Why are there so few picture books for adults?

My guess is economics. Adults don't reread like kids do and so the dollars spent on a picture book divided by the number of minutes spent with it just doesn't make sense.

This book is much longer than a kids picture book (the library put it in Juvenile Graphic Novels) and might appeal to kids, but even with its juvenile p-o-v (sorta; it's an unseen adult remembering) I feel that this story about her grandparents' love and how it navigated lung cancer and widowhood is inherently adult.

It's a lovely and moving book.

(Yes it's a library book and yes this is 2026 but it didn't feel like cheating because I'm not the one who checked it out and it didn't take that long to read.)

one sit before and one sit after dinner 

☞

036) The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card, finished May 27

I actually picked up this book with the intention to get rid of it. I'm a fan of Card's and I do want to finish reading all his early work but this last YA novel didn't hold much interest. Out of respect, I decided to read the first couple paragraphs, however, and here we are.

In the afterword, Card says he's been developing this world and its magic system since 1977. And no question this is one of my favorite magic systems I've ever read. He also, in the afterword, says that he finished this novel by cranking out a chapter a day and getting it to his publisher after the deadline. This may show.

I don't like a lot of of things about this book. It seems to be trying to fit in aberrant sex with the subtlety of a 14yrold writing sex for the first time. It's weird and gross and off. It doesn't work. And all the characters under the age of twenty-five talk like . . . well, not like humans circa 2010, I can tell you that. It's crazy because writing about precocious kids is Card's wheelhouse and these kids aren't real.

But the plot and story are excellent. I'm tempted to read more of the series simply because those aspects are so strong. But that's exactly what one could get from a Wikipedia summary. But as the characters age, they should become more realistic. But, having read a lot of Card, I think I already know how a lot of their characters will develop and related to each other as time goes on.

So in the end, a bit of a mixed bag. I would say I wish he had more time to refine the novel (I feel he could have), but I'm told he recently said in an interview that, since the death of his son, he hasn't been able to tell if his work is good. So maybe not.

(It's a biographical detail imbued with pathos, regardless of this book's quality.)

I understand why people like this novel but in the end, I think it gets a soft thumbs down from me. There are many better Card books. Save this for when you're hungry for second-tier work.

One other quick observation: this book is unfilmable. A new kind of narrative artform demands invention before this book can be adapted to something involving actors. Something deeper and more internal than "virtual reality"; something that can affect your proprioception the way films affect your retina.

perhaps a month 

☞

037) Bad Kitty Goes on Vacation by Nick Bruel, finished June 1

The Bad Kitty books are great. But me, a fuddyduddy, does not prefer them colorized.

a june first 

☞

038) Backward by Ben Abbott, finished June 10

Read or performed, Ben's work is great. This is his final thesis for his MFA and it's terrific. A man relives each day of his life in backwards order then relives them once again—once more forward. I love playing with time. Some of my favorites of life being scrambled include one of the stories in Hyperion and the novels Replay and The Time Traveler's Wife, but Ben's found something new and it's wonderful.

It's a one-man show and I'd love to know how it turned out. It seems like a real challenge for any actor and I'd love to see how it all turned out.

Wonderfully, following the play (because this is a thesis), Ben takes us through the writing process. And I maybe loved that as much as the play (although only the play made me cry). The perfect thing to read, really, before I disappear for a week to rewrite Honeymoon in Copper (this is then world premier of the title—feel special!). Some of the holes in the novel are coming into focus and Ben has pushed me to nail them down. Exciting times!

The play's nominated for an AML Award and you can read it yourself by clicking the title above. I certainly recomment it. 

one long sit 

☞

039) Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout, finished June 12

This is my second Nero Wolfe novel, though I've collected maybe half a dozen since the first.

The structure of this novel was quite different from Fer-de-Lance which made me happy. This was a big more what I expected the first time but, since it wasn't last time, now it wasn't this time. The reveal wasn't until the penultimate chapter in a gather-them-all-in-one-room scene and since Archie's our p-o-v character, I really had no idea what was about to go down. Fun. Less interesting as a mystery, perhaps, as the previous volume, but good.

What was more interesting was how Stout explored racism and misogyny. I know!

Amazingly, this novel not only gets Wolfe out of his apartment but clear down to West Virginia where we encounter some plainfaced Southern racism. Archie's a bit disgusted by it but not because he isn't also racist (though he may dislike d***s more than n*****s) but because it's crass how these white Southerners act. Show some dignity, you crackers.

Anyway, Nero Wolfe does treat the black characters with respect. Partially that's to his own ends, but also, one senses that he means it. That his more worldwide past has led him to a place where he knows better—genuinely knows better—than to judge a man by the color of his skin. He means it.

Yet Nero Wolfe is, simultaneously, the worst misogynist of them all. I suspect his decision to live a life undistracted by such things as romance and wiles was only possible by developing an antipathy for women. Mere disinterest was impossible. Hatred was the only path to safety and he took it.

Mind, most of what I'm saying here is my analysis—it's subtext. But I think I'm right. And it's a richer book for it.

This isn't to say the book as aged brilliantly. But I think it has aged acceptably. 

couple weeks at most 

☞

040) Pickles by Brian Crane, finished July 7
041) Pickles, Too by Brian Crane, finished July 7

Brian Crane is an old friend of my in-laws. We're visiting them now and they have his first two collections, signed, and I picked them up. Good stuff.

two days

☞

042) Lost & Found by Shaun Tan, finished July 13
043) The Arrival by Shaun Tan, finished July 13

Lady Steed insisted she had no idea who Shaun Tan was which seemed insane to me. Who can read The Arrival and ever forget it? But I put some of his books on hold at the library and they came and I couldn't let the opportunity go by without re/reading some myself.

Lost & Found is a collection of three earlier works. They're concerned with some of the same things as The Arrival but they all rely on words which keeps the reader a bit more grounded. The Arrival has words only in an inaccessible tongue. This is part of what makes it perhaps the greatest exploration of the immigrant experience. You the reader will feel as lost and confused as our immigrant protagonist. At the same time, you'll gender a renewed appreciation for the greatness of nations that welcome the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of other teeming shores, the homeless, the tempest-tost. That act of welcoming such peoples may be the best way to define a nation's greatness.

The Arrival's very much in the tradition of the one-image-a-page artists of a century ago, but his artistry has more options available to it. For instance, pacing, as when he spends a single spread with 60 individually drawn images of clouds, or a spread of 24 images of one plant's entire life cycle to show the passage of time. Truly a masterpiece by a master artist.

I would love someday to go to a Shaun Tan retrospective at a museum (are you listening SFMOMA, Cartoon Art Museum?) and just stand in front of his art at the size he made it and just take it all in.

one evening 

☞

 

previous books

After 2026—What?

.

On our trip to Montana, I brought three books. The first I started and finished en route. The second I started en route and finished flying home. Of the third I read the next four chapters while BARTing home. But that doesn't mean Moby Dick will be showing up here any time soon. I'm still only on page 162.

Long book, that Moby Dick. But I have finished these:

☞

030) Saints Volume 3: Boldly, Nobly, and Independent, 1893–1955, finished April 11

I loved this book, the first of Saints that I've read through (slightly embarrassing as I have a number of friends who've worked on them). First, I recognize this is something of a trendy book in that it believes history isn't just Great Man but examples of all the other people as well, "smaller" people doing "smaller" things. The thing is: I think that is great. We need to know what's happening in Cincinnati and Berlin as much as we do inner Salt Lake sanctums. Otherwise, it's not a history of the Church.

Anyway, I've already cited it in talks and even more in conversation. I liked getting to be friends with people now dead. That's one of my favorite things. Love it.

Plus, it's written in a cheery accessible way (without avoiding necessary darkness) and in bitesize pieces which make it perfect for pulling out during a solo breakfast or while waiting for someone to finish their shower. Which is largely how I read it.

Plus, knowing the amount of work that the team put into capturing things with accuracy—every quotation is a quotation, every sunny day was sunny in just that way—while making everything feel as natural as a Judy Blume novel, is just an astonishing accomplishment of both scholarship and artistry.

(Also, hilariously (but thought-provokingly), share this fun fact at your next writing group, they built the books using savethecat as a model.)

almost four years 

☞

031) Wrapped in Plastic: Twin Peaks by Andy Burns, finished April 11

Six years ago I read the Pop Classics on Calvin & Hobbes which remains one of the finest (and most pleasurable) works of criticism in my experience. This volume on Twin Peaks doesn't reach that level—it's more praise and fun facts—but absolutely worth the time I spent reading it. Plus, it's persuaded me to seek out other things (eg, the Psych episode that has over 700 Twin Peaks references which was delightful).

They've released a lot more since I last checked (Jurassic Park! Clueless! Labyrinth!) and, as there are now more I want to read, Imahafta.

But, also, it makes me want to finish my Napoleon Dynamite pitch. Someone needs to write that book and here I am, right here, available. (Soon as I finish this novel....)

perhaps a month

☞

032) After 1903—What? by Robert Benchley, finished April 15

I love Benchley's short videos which is why the last time I read one of his books, I made a vaguely Benchleyesque video in response:

More recently, when I interrupted my Benchley reading for Dave Barry's memoir, I was delighted to learn that Dave Barry counts Benchley as one of his heroes and continues to reread him to this day. I felt in good company.

And a Benchley collection really is the ideal bedside companion. He's a charming host, sometimes very funny, pleasantly old-fashioned, and the essays are all very short. I assume they were written for newspaper syndication but the book never says.

Speaking of, what the heck does After 1903—What? mean, anyway? The collection came out in 1938. So 1903 was 35 years earlier. Robert Benchley was born in 1889 so he turned 14 in 1903 and 50 in 1938. This does not help me any. I suspect it was a funny title in 1938, but why? Why???

Here's my copy:

Here's another version:

Neither of these covers makes the title any clearer to me.

You're welcome to read it yourself and explain the thing to me.

Or you can watch an actually entertaining video from the man himself:

could be less than one year or maybe it was two

☞

033) Money: The True Story of a Made-up Thing by Jacob Goldstein, finished May 4

Loved it. Goldstein is a Planet Money reporter and the book shares that smart but accessible vibe. It covers everything from about four thousand years ago to 2020 and it opened my eyes to a lot of things I thought I understood and things I did not understand and even things I already understood. It's a swift journey through posibility, which is the real thing. Things need not be the way they are. We know that because they haven't been that way long. They haven't been any way long.

Solid work of popular nonfiction. Recommended. 

one or two or three weeks 

☞

034) Montana 1948 by Larry Watson, finished May 6

We have five essentially new ex-library copies of this novel. Some teacher had got them purchased then couldn't have used them more than a time or two. Then they sat for a decade or more before being tossed.

I grabbed five because "Montana." The Big O was considering Missoula for school and I thought maybe reading this together could be a fun family activity. Currently we're flying to Missoula for O's graduation so obviously that didn't happen. But Lady Steed grabbed two of them for us to read on the trip then give to O and his girlfriend when we finished. 

Well, it's probably best we didn't read this with a 12yrold even thought that's the age of the protagonist. Some of the blurbs compare this to To Kill a Mockingbird and part of the reason is the integrity of the father figure but it's also because of the darkness that fuels the novel's plot.

So why has this 1993 novel not had the lasting power of TKAM? They are similar in theme and quality. Its darkness might be slightly too clear for most high-school teachers. And it's probably slightly too short. But the biggest reason might be the title. Montana 1948 is fine, I guess, but it had little evocative power compared to, say, To Kill a Mockingbird. No competition.

I was looking in the text for a better title for the novel. I found options, but it's too late now.

It is a good book, though. I wonder if it will grow in my estimation as time passes.

[Spoiler: between handwriting this review on May 6 and typing it May 13, it already has.] 

from sfo to slc 

☞

035) Clever Girl: Jurassic Park by Hannah McGregor, finished May 11

A lot of "populist" queer writing shares a rhetorical problem: it makes no space for people who don't already agree with whatever is being said. (Sometimes it even makes enemies our of allies for good measure.) Unless you're already fully converted, you're a damn fool and there is not enough time in the world to explain things for you.

This sort of anger is understandable—plenty of queer people fairly feel the world feels this way about them, but this stance not only fails to gain converts, it can't even attain an audience.

Which isn't to say Hannah McGregor isn't angry. In her acknowledgements she calls Clever Girl an angry book. But her writing here is also sad and open and funny and deeply personably. Even if you came into Clever Girl convinced she's wrong about averything, you'll leave the book feeling friendly toward her and understanding why she feels the way she does, how she came to feel that way, and probably sympathetic to her argument. 

(It occurs to me that one of Clever Girl's themes—the depth of time—might partly explain how she's able to provide this context even to those who might start off assuming she's batty.)

Which argument is excellent, by the way. No just her exegesis of Jurassic Park, but every part of reality which it comes into contact with.

This is the most personal of the three Pop Classics I've read, but that deep personal connection is the engine that runs the intellectual vehicle that is Clever Girl.

Good stuff.

(recommended companion readings: my favorite thing is monsters one and two)

one week

☞

 

previous books

Such poetry! Such hardboiling!

.

Since writing this, I've decided this Terry Pratchett is a lesser satire compared to, say, his Moist Von Lipwig books because it ends by erasing everything. There's no room in Discworld for movies when things close. And the presumed future of Holy Wood is left unstated. Which might be artistically justifiable but this is a novel in which his wizards play a large role so this is irrelevant.

Anyway, that's my hot take this time!

☞

025) New & Selected Things Taking Place by May Swenson, finished April 2

This was an exciting find one time walking through Pegasus Books. And now, lo these many years later, I have finished reading these 297 pages of May Swenson poems.

Starting, I knew snippets of her work well enough to predict some sexy stuff and some playing with type on the page, but thinking that was embarrassingly reductive. It's appropriate here, the day after we sent someone to the moon for the first time in my lifetime, to celebrate May Swenson, the great poet of NASA space missions. She is also the great describer of everyday New York, the sly master of sexual metaphor, the acute observer of plants, the undercover agent of distant Mormonism. She has no shyness to be silly, no aversion to splashing words and notwords across the page. She's happy to carry on longer than seems necessary—but is.

I straight-up loved this book. I'm glad I spent so long on it. Reading it in bursts and trickles then setting it aside only to return for fresh pleasures months later.

I've marked the book with favorites and with things for class and potential epigraphs. The two main questions left for me now are 1) as I put it on a shelf, how easily accessible should this shelf be? and 2) how many years should pass before I return it to my nightstand?

gosh probably fifteen years at least

☞

026) Moving Pictures by Terry Pratchett, finished April 4

This was one of the hardest times I've had getting through a Terry Pratchett novel. First it was my in-the-car book then it was stolen and read by a son then it moved from car to car, from book-stashing location to book-stashing location—no matter who was reading it, it tended to get lost.

So when I say it seemed liked lesser Discworld to me, who knows is that is at all true or fair. But it's take on the movie industry seemed less intellectually rich than takes on journalism or the post office (for instance) and while funny it seemed to rely more on taking established characters and sticking them into new situations for laughs. In other words, for a series that really welcomes anyone no matter where they show up, I'm not sure this would be anyone's best first-Discworld book.

But there are smart observations and funny bits and cleareyed satire and interesting characters and provocative observations on the nature of the world and all those sorts of things that we love about a good Pratchett novel. So maybe the issue is really losing the book over and over and taking so long to get it read. Maybe that's the problem.

But who can say with absolute certainty what is cause and what is effect? 

likely well over a year 

☞

027) Loved Ones by Kevin Klein, finished April 4

Kevin and Scott Hales both had books come out from Greg Kofford at the same time. I'd known about Scott's and preordered it, but Kevin's came as a surprise. I figured I'd pick it up but before I got around to it, he sent me a pdf. I don't usually finish booklength pdfs, but a collection of poems means whenever I stop, when I start, I'm starting with something new. So that worked. Plus, the collection's a manageable size and Kevin's poetic manner is easy to slide back into.

I was talking to someone recently about how to make poetry more appealing to a broader audience and I mentioned Loved Ones and how Kevin is reading and commenting on the poems in his newsletter—in fact, each poem in the book has an accompanying qr code which you can scan to see as much. Accessible! Anyway, the person I was speaking with noted that might be the elementary-school teacher in him.

Could be.

 
Anyway, his poems are lovely: easy to enter and welcoming. How about if I, right now, share a short one? Click the title if you want to see a discussion of the poem that goes from simple to studied.

Your Hair

Your hair, my love, is soft and black
with gleaming brown streaks and gray gobs 
that drip down my arm from the clot 
I pulled out of the bathroom sink trap
with my bare hand because it’s your hair.

month and a half

☞

028) Grace Is Not God's Backup Plan: an urgent paraphrase of paul's letter to the romans by Adam S. Miller, finished April 5

I've owned this for a while but picked it up after reading Miller's Original Grace.

This much shorter book is, of course, largely Paul's words rather than Adam's, but in a very real way this book is well read as a necessary preliminary work, preparation for Original Grace.

Funny: I bought my copy used. The first nine chapters are filled with underlining from the original owner. The final chapters, however, are filled with my own marks.

Because this is a great way to read Romans. You will find things to mark.

Perhaps the making of urgent paraphrases should be an exercise we all undertake. 

seven months 

☞

029) The Long Goodbye by Raymond Chandler, finished April 9

Of what I've read so far, I think I like John M. Cain best although Dashielle Hammet's Red Harvest might be my favorite but then maybe that's recency bias talking. Anyway, now I've met Raymond Chandler and he's great too. I thought the book lost its way for a while but it all came together. The ending makes me wonder if he's a little softer than Cain or Hammet, but I don't have enough data to be sure.

I picked up my copy, a beat-up paperback from the early '80s, not that long ago and didn't take long to dive in. I think I have me an epigraph that I found on page 268 but it's too soon to say if I'll use it. Anyway, I had to tape the cover more than once over the last month to keep it from falling off.

I was carrying it the other day when a friend and former colleague of mine asked what I was reading as said a friend of his at Berkeley was teaching it this very moment. I wonder what the class is.

Anyway, Philip Marlowe starts the novel by making a friend, but things don't go well for the friend. He ends up dead in a Mexican hotel room. He works his way through every element of society—hoods, cops, money—seeing what he sees and keeping his thoughts to himself without it feeling like he's hiding anything from us the readers. He's just not a chatty guy. But he has his moral code. He'll never make money or slide into bigger slots but he'll be able to live with himself. That has to count for something.

a shade over twenty days 

☞

previous books

Six for 2026

.

I'm sitting here eating Trader Joe's Sugared Hearts Rice Crackers (better than anticipated) uncertain how to introduce this collection of books, so I guess I just won't I have other thing to do and if you're here, it's probably because you already like books. I'm with you.

015) The Path and the Gate: Mormon Short Fiction edited by Andrew Hall and Robert Raleigh, finished March 15

It took me a long time to read this, which is typical of shortstory collections, even ones I'm in, even ones filled with my friends, even ones I'm very excited about. This is all three.

And now I'm nervous to talk about it because of course I remember some well and others not well and I'm deeply unsure how much I can trust any of the things left to say!

Ugh. I'm the worst.

Anyway, I do feel confident calling the collection worthy of your time and money. It'll be the standard for at least another 15 years so you still have time to be hip. But: dally not. 

over two years 

☞

016) Hyperion by Dan Simmons, finished March 19

I think I liked the book more this second read. My complaints from the first goround are still valid, but they just don't bother me as much. The book's strengths carry the weight. Although knowing ahead of time that the book ends before the characters reach their goal probably eases the frustration.

Perhaps I would like the second book better as well.

I've since recommended these two to my son who has read them many times and has all four volumes. I really want to go on and read all four, but I'm not sure I will. After all, he suggests there are diminishing returns. And, the reason I reread Hyperion now is because he suggested it to our shared book group. And coming up soon is Moby Dick so it's not like I've got lots of time for three five-hundred paged books. I thought I was going to read some classics casually this year!

Anyway, if you don't recall, Hyperion is basically Canturbury Tales. These distant-future pilgrims are headed to the planet Hyperion to ask questions of its godlike resident the Shrike (who looks nothing like what's on the cover of the book; someone really needs to come out with classier covers for this near-classic scifi series. I would probably buy them for my son.) On route, they each (save one pilgrim who goes missing) tell their story explaining why they suppose they were chosen for this, the final Shrike pilgramage. Each of these six stories is about novella length and is told in a different fashion. They are the volume's greatest strenght, though I would not call them all equally successful. Or, perhaps, it would be better to say that they are not all successful in the same ways.

A couple sentences on each (the bit before each title is a descriptor added by Wikipedia):

The Priest's Tale: "The Man Who Cried God"

Of course one needs to be diaries and/or letters and frankly I'm glad it was first, get it out of the way rather than waiting for it to drop. This has a truly fascinating and horrifying alien concept. Best comparison: if Speaker for the Dead had never stopped being a horror tale.

The Soldier's Tale: "The War Lovers"

Never have sex and violence been more fully entwined. Maybe it's been matched, but ne'er exceeded.

The Poet's Tale: "Hyperion Cantos"

The most annoying character gets to be annoying about his writing. It's kind of perfect for a book so concerned with the literary arts to make the most literate character such a bastard.

The Scholar's Tale: "The River Lethe's Taste Is Bitter"

This is my favorite of the six. It starts with the mundane lives of two people who love each other and the most bizarre event imaginable—the backwards aging of their child—complicates their everything. A moving metaphor for many things, dementia perhaps the most obvious.

The Detective's Tale: "The Long Good-Bye"

I just picked up a copy of The Long Goodbye! We got a lady space detective and it's delightfully noirish and scifiïsh and it's exciting and it's just great.

The Consul's Tale: "Remembering Siri" 

Two in one this time. The initial story I like best—imagine being married to someone, only one of you stays on the planet and the other travels around near the speed of life. When you die of old age, your other is only four years older. The most important relationship of your life and you only spent a hundred-some days together. Over four years. Or, perhaps, over seventy. Heartbreaking. The second half is a small story of politics and betrayal that sets us up for the final act.

But the final act never comes. I love the smart worldbuilding and the interesting characters and their compelling journeys and reasons to risk their lives approaching a god made of blades, but, just as each of their stories ended on a cliffhanger, on the cusp of approaching the Shrike, so does the novel.

So...am I gonna actually read the other three books?

I honestly do not know. 

probably a bit over a month 

☞

017) The Wife Upstairs by Rachel Hawkins, finished March 21

If you're a Jane Eyre fan, it won't take you long to recognize that this is a spin on that classic. I mean—the title gave it away, which is why I picked this book up in the first place. And you get the sense Hawkins likes Jane Eyre and enjoys playing with the source material. For instance, the main character's name is Jane (as in Jane Eyre) Bell (as in Currer Bell) but no, actually, her name is Helen Burns (as in Helen Burns) only when her best friend Jane Bell died of illness (ala Helen Burns) she stole her name.

I didn't like the book in the opening pages but then the first twist happened and I really liked it then it went on for a lonnnng time and I was getting bored and then there were a bevy of twists all of which I liked and then it ended.

It's funny though. I was a trifly surprised that the author had failed to notice an alternate explanation of her mystery which is to say I was surprised none of the characters had considered that possibility, but each time I felt that way, it ended up being the truth of the matter. I'm not sure if this is what mystery readers enjoy or not. Is it?

Anyway, it played with one of my favorite novels in fun and interesting ways but I honestly don't know if I'll remember having read it a year from now. 

three or four months

☞

018) Visitations by Corey Egbert, finished March 23

I became aware of Corey Egbert almost two years ago, four months before Visitations came out. I spent a year trying to talk my library into buying it (so strange they did not considering the size of their YA comics collection) before just finally buying my own copy (maybe because of this?) which I've now had for months and months. Glad I finally picked it up as it is excellent.

And it makes me think about myself at the same age. His mother went insane. My father went insane. Our stories don't have much else in common (I'm about fifteen years older but also Mormon), but I know the places he talks about (Northern California and Utah and nowhere Nevada) and the whole thing feels like a near miss. His anxieties and doubts and worries are deeply familiar. 

I'm glad he laid all this bare. It was a rough journey but a worthy one.

If I wanted to get more nitpicky I might talk about the third act being less well placed or make some petty complaints about Utah culture, but whatever. The fact is Visitations is a very good book. Thought-provoking and lovely and easy to recommend.

two days 

☞

019–021) After the Blast by Zoe Kazan, finished March 25

It's been a year and a half since I selected After the Blast to be the play I read in class while students are broken into groups reading different novels out of class. So how did it do? Did I select well?

Well.

First, it did not engender great amounts of discussion between scenes, which I was surprised by. Students suggested this is because they understood it and since they didn't need to ask what stuff meant, there was nothing to talk about.

At first, I totally rejected that premise, but I've been thinking about it in the six days since we wrapped up reading and I wonder know if they're onto something. Let's say a piece of literature has three levels of understanding. First is surface. Easy to do with After the Blast. It's a straightforward work in plain English and simple to follow. Third is deeper understanding where you have smart things to say about the book.

Here's what I'm wondering: If level one is too accessible, is there a path to level three? Perhaps the usual path to level three is a failure to reach level one on your own. Discussing level one as a class leads to connection making that might not otherwise occur. Perhaps those connects are level two. If we skip level to because level one came to easy, what path is there to level three?

I'll be interested to see how their essays turn out. 

two days 

☞

022) Accidental Devotions by Kelli Russell Agodon, finished March 30

Loved this collection of poetry. Loved it. As the title suggests, there are many happened-into prayer-like moments, and that angle of attention was a pleasure to read. But also, naturally, her language. What is poetry without language.

Looking around online for a couple of my favorites I find this one and this one but most of them don't seem available. I wish I could point you to more.

Which I guess I have? Click that link to buy the book, after all.

(And, as it doesn't come out till mid-May, it's not too late to be the first on your block with a copy!) 

probably a couple months but maybe more 

☞

previous books

The first five books of 2026

001) Red Harvest by Dachielle Hammett, finished January 3
002) Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, finished January 14
003) Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life edited by Barnaby Conrad and Monte Schulz, finished January 16
004) You Are Too Much, Charlie Brown by Charles M. Schulz, finished January 19
005) Ice by Anna Kavan, finished January 24

Emotion-of-your-choice Valentine's Day!

006) Midville High: Comic Caper Collection by Matt Blair, finished February 5
007) Guarding the Moon: A Mother's First Year by Francesca Lia Block, finished February 10
008) The Sellout by Paul Beatty, finished February 13 

I don't know much about hats Kafka wore
Or if Bottom's dream sunk in the sea
But I know that George Lucas made a fine film
And that The Shining just isn't for me

009) Where Hats Go by Kurt Wolfgang, finished February 20
010) Kafka's Manuscript, finished February 27
011) Lucas Wars by Laurent Hopman and Renaud Roshe, finished February 28
012–014) A Midsummer's Night Dream by William Shakespeare, finished March 9

 

I don't know much about hats Kafka wore / Or if Bottom's dream sunk in the sea / But I know that George Lucas made a fine film / And that The Shining just isn't for me

.

Come, join with me if you want to find your hat or your true love in a forest. Whether she (he?)'s your true love or not. 

☞

009) Where Hats Go by Kurt Wolfgang, finished February 20

According to the author bio, this is the "first of many books" from the pen of Wolfgang. As is was published in 2001 one that should be true and I can check. So I will. Soon as I write about this one. Which was terrific. Visually, this comic's a cross between Peter Bagge and Tom Neely's rubber-hose stuff. But it's not nearly as cynical or ugly as most of the Bagge stuff I've read and it's more grounded and human than Neely's. So...maybe I like it more? Certainly, he's competitive with these guys and I definitely like him better than Bagge whom I often find tiresome.

Anyway. It's a small little first-book and it's utterly wonderful. It's a kid who lost his hat and he embarks on a quest to get it back. It hits plenty of the required elements to make Joseph Campbell happy. But you don't need to be a scholar to enjoy his growth. But his growth was particularly enjoyable because I didn't see it coming. I suppose the cynicism of indie comics of the ’90s and ’00s led me to assume everything would suck. But this is a human story and even with all the darkness in the corners of the images, the thrust of the humans story is goodness and betterment. So, Wolfgang, thank you—I enjoyed that.

(click image to see more [and more representative] images on ebay) 

Now...where are you today?

Hmm. Okay. Goodreads has one more book from 2013. Okay. There's supposed to be a version of Pinocchio out by now. Amazon hasn't heard of it. Okay. Well, good news is I couldn't find an obituary. But I refuse to believe such a talent simply disappeared. Can't find him on LinkedIn. Lots more Kurt Wolfgangs on Facebook, but I don't think any of them are it either. Bummer.

I'm not totally susprised. Lots of people—even the very best—slip away from the arts. It's hard to do something so time consuming for so little reward. I hope he's still out there, still making stuff. But the fact that I didn't recognize his name (even though he was in the first-ever Best American Comics) suggests someone who disappeared, for one reason or another. Whether it was discouragement or a horrible car crash, I can't say. But I'll reread his BAC entry and wish him well. Let me know when Pinokio comes out.

(Best case scenario, he's a mad genius working on page 983 said book right now.)

(Exactly my home for Adam Hines, incidentally, whose first book I wonder if I should steal from the library.) 

saturday and friday 

☞

010) Kafka's Manuscript, finished February 27

At first this seemed like a bad joke played on the bookbuying public. Simple to the point of ripoff.

But.

Then.

The story of the friend who saved Kafka's manuscripts and saw them through to publication was—suddenly moving.

How in the world did that happen? 

the intro one day, the book another 

☞☞☞

That last book and this next one break me no-library-books-in-2026 rule. Before the new year began, I delayed all books I had on hold to not appear until 2027 with ONE EXCEPTION: books I had asked the library to buy. I figured those should get checked out as soon as they arrived, and since most of them were comics, it wouldn't get too much in my way re reading books I already own.

Three of them arrived earlier this week—these two comics and Scream With Me: Horror Films and the Rise of American Feminism (1968-1980) by Eleanor Johnson. Don't remember how I heard about this one but it's right up my alley. But I probably won't read it. I have read one chapter (Appendix A: "Brief Synopses of the Terrible Remakes of the Original Six Horror Films") and will probably read at least one more (Chapter 7: "Bad Men Making Good Films: An Interlude") and maybe the one on Stepford Wives because I love Stepford Wives, but I don't know all the movies in the book (some of them I don't even care about) and, well, it's a library book and it's 2026.

Incidentally, if you're interested, the six movies primarily under discussion are:

• Rosemary's Baby (sad never to have seen it)
• The Exorcist (active disinterest in seeing it)
• The Stepford Wives (love it)
• The Omen (can't imagine wanting to see this)
• Alien (I claim I want to see this one but our year-long Hulu subscriptions keep expiring before I get around to it)
• The Shining (seen it; don't like it) 

☞☞☞

012) Lucas Wars by Laurent Hopman and Renaud Roshe, finished February 28

Absolutely loved this. I'm no expert, but I was surprised how much new information I picked up. And the writing and art is so generous—Lucas in particular becomes beloved. Weirdo kid perseveres against all odds. It's real hero stuff. And win he wins, so emotional. Someone should adapt this book into a movie! Sort of a Nouvelle Vague sort of thing!

You can also tell it was originally in French. Who else in the 2020s would have so little commentary over the Ford/Hamill affair?

But I think what I love most is Roche's art. He captures famous faces so well and with a clear-reading simplicity that allows for a lot of information to be presented cleanly. It's great work. It's his first comic but I'd keep an eye on this veteran of storyboarding and advertising, see what he does next. 

two days 

☞

013–015) A Midsummer's Night Dream by William Shakespeare, finished March 9

Never taught this before. Haven't read it well over twenty years. And I...really liked it. I know it's popular (part of the reason I've never taught it before—it's the play students are most likely to have encountered in junior high and I figure either it's a beautiful memory or a horror they don't wish to revisit) but I get why. It's mad in all the best ways. An absolute blast to read in class. And so many solid movies to choose from. (Come back for March movies to see the one's the students voted for.) In other words, all the elements of time well spent in class. Tragedies are still better in terms of volume of discussion topics, but a quick fun read it surely just as good a way to get people into Shakespeare? Surely.

Anyway, a pleasure to read. 

four school days 

☞☞☞

The books are adding up very slowly this year. That's less because of the no-library-books rule and more because I've committed myself to reading Robert Alter's The Five Books of Moses (the fascinating footnotes have many more words than the text itself) and keeping up with the book club I'm in (currently reading Hyperion with Moby Dick yet to come). And when you consider that I imagined this year might include The Count of Monte Cristo or Adam Bede, I'm unlikely to speed up the odometer anytime soon.

In other words, less books, but possibly more words. What's the right way to count?

☞

The first five books of 2026

001) Red Harvest by Dachielle Hammett, finished January 3
002) Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, finished January 14
003) Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life edited by Barnaby Conrad and Monte Schulz, finished January 16
004) You Are Too Much, Charlie Brown by Charles M. Schulz, finished January 19
005) Ice by Anna Kavan, finished January 24

Emotion-of-your-choice Valentine's Day!

006) Midville High: Comic Caper Collection by Matt Blair, finished February 5
007) Guarding the Moon: A Mother's First Year by Francesca Lia Block, finished February 10
008) The Sellout by Paul Beatty, finished February 13 

PRIOR YEARS OF BOOKS

2007 = 2008 = 2009 = 2010 = 2011 = 2012 = 2013 = 2014 = 2015
2016 = 2017 = 2018 = 2019 = 2020 = 2021 = 2022 = 2023 = 2024 = 2025

 

Emotion-of-your-choice Valentine's Day!

.

Just realized this is a perfect Valentine's Day collection: Youth, Having Babies, Disenchantment.

Enjoy! 

☞

006) Midville High: Comic Caper Collection by Matt Blair, finished February 5

Apparently Mr Blair started making these comics about high school when he was in high school and continues to make them now as a teacher himself. (The characters stay in the 1990s.)

This near-300pp collection has plenty of hijinks with bits of satire and parody. He's publishing them himself so some things like line-darkness aren't what you'd expect if, say, Fantagraphics had done the release, but the reading is fun and what more do you want? At times, it's excellent. There are moments where I was surprised he didn't get picked up by a syndicate or something. And he has the skill to produce a more high-schooly version of, like, Big Nate or something. I imagine he prefers control and is satisfied with the indie life but he has the chops to go big were that the goal.

But I don't know that a contract with Random House or something would be an improvement. Sure, the blacks would be blacker and a good editor could push him to higher states of excellence but there's a lot of pleasure in this handmade labor of love, and the purity might be lost in a shinier version. 

saturday and thursday 

☞

007) Guarding the Moon: A Mother's First Year by Francesca Lia Block, finished February 10

It's funny it took me so long to read such a slight and readable book. I felt like I was devouring it at great speed—but then something would interrupt and it would end up under a pile and weeks would pass....

But I loved the book. Block's beautifully fluffy way to warping time and relationship on the page to match the feelingof loving another person was never better suited than to the true story of loving her first baby. Everything is fluid and nothing is stable and we are tired and mad and deeply in love and yes this is exactly what it is like to have a child,

It's terrific. 

eight months 

☞

008) The Sellout by Paul Beatty, finished February 13

This is gonna be a multiparter, not all of which are about the contents of the book. Buckle up.

Memory is a fallible thing: I have a very clear memory of my first AP Lit training in room in downtown San Francisco, the summer of 2008. On the last day, there were a bunch of books on the back table. Of course I took some. Among them were at least a dozen copies of The Sellout, its flourescent-pink accents attracting the eye. They were there because CollegeBoard wanted to pressure us to teach more books like this—humorous, as I understood it.

Years pass. I have most of my copies in a drawer at school, waiting for me to read the one I have at home. The one I have at home is on a shelf beside the front door. The visible pink on spine fades out to a barely-there orange you can only see if you put your eyes right next to the paper.

I am embarrassed it is taking me so long. This was a NYTBR 10 Best! This got an award from th National Book Critics Circle Award! NPR called it a masterpiece! It won the Man Booker! It's slathered in exorbitant praise, mostly about how funny it is!

Anyway, I finally pick it up because this is the year I'm only reading books I actually own and it's actually working and one of the first things I notice is the copyright date: 2015.

Huh.

So....

I think my memory is correct. Except I think it's two memories combined.

I also suspect that contrary to what were told, it was less CollegeBoard suggesting we teach The Sellout and more Picador a subsidiary of Macmillan itself a subsidiary of the Georg von Holtzbrinck Publishing Group. Regardless, I would never.

Culturally responsive pedagogy—possible? I've been teaching long enough that I can note when things suddenly change. My two best examples are as follows:

I frequently teach Frankenstein to AP Lit and, when I do, we often watch a movie after the test. Most commonly voted for is the Boris Karloff–starring masterpiece, but occasionally something else gets chosen (especially when I'm teaching multiple classes and don't want to watch the same movie more than once in a day), for instance Young Frankenstein. Which is a great movie although there's a played-for-laffs rape scene that I've always hated. But other people find it funny so hey, maybe I'm a prude for not playing rapes for laffs myself.

Anyway, kids did laugh at that scene, same as their elders. And then, one year, like flipping a switch, they did not. They were deathly quiet and uncomfortable. And so it's been ever since. Which is simpler because it's easier to talk about it when we start on the same page.

The other big example, also from AP Lit, is August Wilson's brilliant Fences. Love that play.

When I started teaching it, I heard scuttlebutt from the online student-services center, that my Black students were grateful that we were reading it and for the way I was handling the plays language.

Then, one year, the scuttlebutt changed. I was getting forwarded complaints. That reading Fences was leaving my black students deeply uncomfortable and angry, that they felt by bringing its language and characters into the classroom was feeding racism among their peers and telling lies about what it means to be Black.

For a few years, I tried changing how we discussed the play, but the complaints intensified. Finally, I dropped it. I now have not taught it for several years. I miss it.

In fact, as time goes on, to keep students happy, I try to avoid teaching anything "culturally responsive." I teach almost entirely dead white Americans and Brits. This quarter, for instance, our primary texts are Steinbeck, Vonnegut, and Shakespeare. And, if everyone is not happy, at least they are not complaining.

I'm not exactly sure what's gone wrong, but I suspect part of it is depth. Fences might be more acceptible if I were also teaching The Emperor of Ocean Park and The Hundred Thousand Kingdoms to balance out the historical-fiction-where-racism genre. The problem of course is I should really also be teaching at least three novels exploring Tibetan-American culture and at least three novels exploring Mexican-American Culture and  at least three novels exploring Japanese-American culture and at least three novels exploring Pakistani-American culture and at least three novels exploring Chinese-American culture and etc etc etc and you see quickly that the semester is not long enough. I hate this.

(I do have a few ways to mitigate the lilywhiteness of our major texts but the fact remains that the average actual single-author book we read and discuss as a class is more Jane Austen than August Wilson.)

Relevancy to the book: Oo boy.

So this is a book decidedly about racism. Racism here in 21st-century American. And it's not just "about" racism. It enacts racism in just about every imaginable way. It insists on placing racism literally front and literally center. Our main character, a Black Angeleno, finds himself owning a slave and instituting segregation.

See, his town has been taken off the map and segregation is part of the trick to bring it back. And not only does it, but the kids believing their school has been segregated leads them to instantly begin to excel. They're on their way to being the third-highest-achieving school in the state.

And of course I hate that but as I look back at what I've already written and am I inadvertently arguing the exact same argument?

The first half of the book I was mostly annoyed. I'm not pretending that post-racial America was achieved or anything, but it's so reactionary and angry I had a hard time finding my way in. And I wasn't sure I was welcomed in, regardless. I did laugh at a couple of the jokes, but most of them—I recognized that they were humor-shaped but I wasn't at all certain they would actually be funny to any slice of America.

The book starts at the end with the opening moments of our protagonist before the Supreme Court with normally taciturn Clarence Thomas losing his mind, cursing out our protag, calling him awful things, and finally collapsing into his seat with.... Well, this isn't the sort of blog that quotes what Clarence Thomas says.

And he's not the only real person to make a show here. Bill Cosby, Colin Powell, and Condoleeza Rice get raked over the coals but they also learn to Crip Walk. Barack Obama is weirdly a source of hope and pleasure but also no better than those other three. But time is weird here because we're both in his presidency and years before simultaneously. But Beatty isn't superconcerned with accuracy.

Or...sometimes he is. Some of what he says about geography or farming or surfing is so exquisitely detailed it's impossible to believe it's not true. But then our protag will plant an apple tree which'll die two days later but have apples on it. To which I express doubt.

I would argue back at myself that this isn't the kind of book to which accuracy matters except then why spend so much time getting us to believe it is accurate? And learning from this book that Stalin executed soldiers photographed with Americans when the two armies met on the Elbe for "fraternizing with the enemy" while I'm teaching Slaughterhouse-Five makes me want to share that tidbit but...given some (granted, casual) googling, I'm not so sure that's true.

This is a book which makes big claims on telling the truth and pumps itself full of realistic details. But this is also a book which proudly declares it couldn't care less about what's true as the fact is the facts matter so much less than the truth of things. As in "How to Tell a True War Story."

Which makes sense. One thing The Sellout makes clear is racism is war. Even if most people won't admit their in the fight.

So you hated it. No. No, I did not. It wasn't really to my taste and I wasn't sure the book wanted me reading it and for much of it I wasn't really enjoying myself and when the satire left the locals and went national I found it more silly than provocative, but—as it wrapped up, I found myself deeply moved.

The final pages with the restoration of his hometown and his memory of a standup comic took all the ugly and the chaos and the nonsense and wrapped it up with a humanist bow. The protagonist, whom I'd always found interesting, compelling, and genuinely human, ceased satirizing himself and his certainty, and opened up to show that, even he who weilds racism confidently as a both scalpel and chainsaw, doesn't know what's going on or what it all means.

I do sometimes wonder if we could all embrace our ignorances publicly and humbly we mightn't be a bit better off.

I don't know if that's true.

But as long as we all know what's going on, we never will. 

about three weeks 

 

☞

Previous books of 2025
(and years more distant)

  

 

The first five books of 2026

001) Red Harvest by Dachielle Hammett, finished January 3
002) Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, finished January 14
003) Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life edited by Barnaby Conrad and Monte Schulz, finished January 16
004) You Are Too Much, Charlie Brown by Charles M. Schulz, finished January 19
005) Ice by Anna Kavan, finished January 24

PRIOR YEARS OF BOOKS

2007 = 2008 = 2009 = 2010 = 2011 = 2012 = 2013 = 2014 = 2015
2016 = 2017 = 2018 = 2019 = 2020 = 2021 = 2022 = 2023 = 2024 = 2025

 

 

The first five books of 2026

.

Baby, we're off to a strong start with this only-reading-books-we-own thing. Three excellent novels and some quality time with Snoopy.

Let me tell you all about it! 

☞

001) Red Harvest by Dachielle Hammett, finished January 3

Incredible novel. It's been a while since I've read any Hammett (The Thin Man in 2019 and The Maltese Falcon in 2007)—well, I read the first story or two in The Continental Op two summers ago (and now I'm anxious to get back)—and man alive is rediscovering him each time that a blast of freezing-cold over-oxegenated air clearing out the lungs and brain of accumulated gunk. Bracing stuff.

Anyway, the Op has been sent to a presumably Montana town although the geography seems more Northern California/Oregon/Washington or Utah to me (the ops seem to travel north from San Francisco but Salt Lake and Ogden are the closest big towns so . . . I have more thoughts about where imaginary Personville might be, but I don't know that we can prove it from the text; ask someone whose read it three times), but it doesn't matter. It's a corrupt mining town and in a fit the richest man in town hires the Op to take down the corruption. Once he gets over his pique, he repents of that desire but the Op's already taken his money and dammit he's gonna earn it.

But the easiest way to earn it is to turn the combinations against each other and let them murder each other off. And so the bodies begin piling up.

This book moved up my to-read list thanks to Murderland which uses descriptions in the book to show how Personville must be Tacoma thanks to the grit and grime and, yes, murder. I'm so glad I did. It's having an immediate impact on my work in progress and, I suspect, in good ways.

One way it hasn't impacted me yet but I hope willis Hammett's acumen in ending something and getting out while the getting is good. Amazing.

If you've never read Hammett, perhaps the time has come. Read this one if you want to watch an alocholic take on an entire corrupt town, compromising his remaining morality every step and solving a batch of mini-mysteries every few chapters; read The Thin Man if you want to watch an alcoholic in an excellent marriage solve a satisfying puzzle; and read The Maltese Falcon if you want to visit classic San Francisco with another alcoholic with a knack for violence and clearsightedness. Or read another one and tell me what I'm missing out out.

three days 

☞

002) Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro, finished January 14

I really should have read this book years ago. It's on the list of dystopian options my students choose from and it gets chosen a lot—almost every semester. I'm finally reading it because a) a student who read it this semester gave me his copy because I hadn't read it and b) the book group I recently joined is discussing it tomorrow.

First, to refine a spoiler you surely already know (assuming you know anything about this book, which seems likely; it's debatable what the most famous English-language dystopias are, but my guess is Nineteen Eighty-four, then Brave New World, then Fahrenheit 451, then The Handmaid's Tale, then Never Let Me Go, the youngest of the five  (and the last one I needed to read).

Anyway, the big spoiler I assume you already know is that our protagonist and her friends (and most of the people in the book) are raised to be donors. The book is near-past (it takes place in the Nineties but was published in 2005) but the world of Never Let Me Go split with ours around World War II. By the Fifties, medical technology had sped forward more quickly than ethical deabates and a subclass of infertile children was being raised to provide the medical needs of society. Everything from cancer on down has been solved thanks to this farm systerm and people are happy not thinking about the implications.

This is the first thing about the book I most appreciated. First, how the will-be donors just accept the way society is, knowing they'll be dead—excuse me—completed by thirty and live their lives day by day, moving from vague awareness of the facts to absolute certainty of the facts' inescapable gravitational well.

That feels like a handy metaphor for / prosecution of our lives.

(By the way, only moving deeper into spoilers from this point on.)

These kids then adults never imagine escape. They never plot it, they never consider it, it's not a possibly possibility. At one point they wistfully imagine a deferral, but that's it. They will donate until they complete and they accept that. Just as we accept spending most of our lives working for wages, hoping retirement might last long enough to finally go/do/become. But escape? No.

As an aside, as in Klara and the Sun, Ishiguro is not great at writing teen dialogue. Once his characters age into adulthood, fine, but pre-adult characters speak . . . off.

Second aside, did you notice how Dr. Morningdale (a character mentioned in passing near the end) is totally Dr. Frankenstein? They even have the same address! And that address, all all Frankenstein's addresses, is the most ironic option because, you know, mates and all.

The way Ishiguro handles character relationship and his very British way of concealing emotions reminds me a lot of Ian McEwan. I like McEwan better but then I've also read more McEwan.

Anyway, the real engine of the book isn't it's loop-back storytelling or its individual scenes, but its story of repressed love which we the readers think we see long before the characters are allowed to bring it to the foreground. But the deeply subterranean aspects of the characters' relationships provide most of the intrigue, page by page. The complications of friendships and loves between the three leads are complex and awful but real and understandable. And so much more tragic and forgivable because they all know they'll be dead soon. Aren't you tired? Don't you just want to get started with your donations? So you can finally rest?

The book ends, with debatable necessity, with a long monologue explaining more (but still very little) of the world. (Note: I appreciate Ishiguro's restraint; the world is well built but its details are always at the edge of our vision.) This scene slows things down and it's primary purpose seems to be to make stuff explicit which we and our narrator know but which the characters, have not been forced to see clearly. I grant it's filled with key information my students always report on, but I'm not certain much of it is necessary. Why and how, exactly, this came to pass is less important than knowing that, having come to pass, it is accepted. Completely and utterly accepted by perpetrator and victim alike and no one questions the status quo. This is why the characters don't know until that near-ultimate scene. Fish don't know they're wet until they've been pulled from the sea. And then they, at least, don't have to comprehend the fact.

I was hot and cool (never cold) on this book as I moved through it, but in the end I'm certain it will stick with me. Which is a way of saying it deserves its spot on that top five I listed above. I have more to think about, to ponder, to discuss. And I'm glad.

UPDATE: At the book group, I mentioned that, in my opinion, the five best known and most influential English-language dystopian novels are 1) Nineteen Eighty-four, 2) Brave New World, 3) Fahrenheit 451, 4) The Handmaid's Tale, and 5) Never Let Me Go. But no one (beside son and I) in attendance that night had even heard of the book before it had been proposed and most of them read it without learning anything and...their experiences were quite different from ours. The same day, I read an Atlantic article that said Ishiguro's Remains of the Day is better known—and I'd been skeptical. But now.... Well. Have you heard of this novel before?

a couple weeks 

☞

003) Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life edited by Barnaby Conrad and Monte Schulz, finished January 16

After twenty years on my Amazon wish list, I decided to use a gift card I'd been given to finally buy Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life, used. Christmas happened between my purchase and the books arrival and, for Christmas, my mother gave me a copy of Snoopy's Guide to the Writing Life.

That's comedy, folks.

Anyway, it's great. Lots of Snoopy-typing comics and some other literature-adjacent strips, intersperced with short essays by writers responding to one of the strips by giving Snoopy helpful pointers. They collected a mix of writers to respond to Snoopy's various interests (a selfhelp writer, Julia Child) and I suspect they were all pretty famous when the book was released in 2002, but most of writers just . . . aren't as famous as they were then. For every Elmore Leonard and Ray Bradbury there's three guys who names I don't recognize. (And for every Sue Grafton, there's just a bunch of guys. Including a couple I thought were men but it ends up they're just so old that by the time I gained consciousness their names had become girls' names.)

The book is good and I'm very glad to have a home copy and a classroom copy, but we could really stand for a 2026 version. You can keep Ray Bradbury, sure, but bring in some people who are less Schulz's contemporaries (or nearly so) and bring in, I don't know, George Saunders and Anne Patchett (just have folks at the museum factcheck them first).

Who are the biggest Peanuts fans among America's literari, after all? There's certainly no shortage of options.

somehow three weeks apparently

☞

004) You Are Too Much, Charlie Brown by Charles M. Schulz, finished January 19

A solid little paperback collection from the late '50s.

Snoopy is pretending to be vultures but hasn't started wearing clothes yet, if you measure time by such things.

saturday/monday 

☞

005) Ice by Anna Kavan, finished January 24

Because I may say things like this book is really weird and I'm surprised I made it through the first half, let me start by saying I really liked it. I thought it was powerful and moving in part because it was so strange and confusing.

But let me start by talking about the copy on the back of my Penguin edition.

Before we start, let me recognize that this text was intended to sell the book. And this probably sells the book pretty well. (It got me to read it!) But I don't think it's, you know, precisely correct. 

In a frozen, apocalyptic landscape,

As I'm doing this, I might as well get petty. There are a lot of different landscapes in this novel. Many of them are frozen and apocalytpic. But this phrasing makes it sound to me like the book takes place in one location. But it takes place all over the globe.

destruction abounds: great walls of ice overrun the world 

No complaint here, but this barely hints at what's happening. These great walls of ice aren't mere glaciers working their way southward and northward—they move faster than you can drive, instantly destroying everything in their path. 

and secretive governments vie for control.

This was a big part of why I read the book. I'm always on the hunt for good dystopian novels for my class, but while these oppressive-regime elements are a big part of the novel, they are more a consequence of a world in process of being destroying. They're not failed utopias; they're human response to apocalypse.

Against this surreal 

Completely agree that the novel is surreal. When nuclear weapons got mentioned over a hundred pages in, I was stunned. I had forgotten the book was published in 1967 and I had landed on an assumption that this was written in the Twenties or something. Because it is surreal—classically surreal—and it would fit in just fine with that era.

(More or less.)

But it's so hard to know what's happening in this novel. Midparagraph, our narrator may confuse another character for himself and something that just happened has not happened will never happen may yet happen what is time what is space nothing matters. Et cetera.

yet eerily familiar broken world,

What does that even mean? 

an unnamed narrator embarks on a hallucinatory quest

I assume this is just a way of repeating surreal without repeating surreal?

for a strange and elusive "glass girl" with silver hair.

She is the most interesting character in the novel. She is a child; she is a woman; she is a victim; she is a goddess of destruction surfing the sheets of ice as they devour Earth.

He crosses icy seas an frozen plains, searching ruined towns and ransacked rooms, 

Kavan (incidentally, she renamed herself after a character from two of her early novels) is a pro at describing frozen, ruined, and ransacked things. Everything is professionally awful.

depearate to free her from the grips of a tyrant known only as the warden

This is the third major character of the novel, the one the narrator occasionally confuses himself with. When we first meet him, he is the leader of a small oppressed nation. But then he runs away, girl in tow, just in front of the ice, leaving his people to be destroyed. He is cruel to the girl, but he does save her.

and save her before the ice closes all around.

He saves her from the ice over and over and over. But so, recall, does the villain. 

A novel unlike any other,

I mean, yes, but sheesh. Puffery much?

Ice is at once a dystopian adventure shattering the conventions of science fiction,

I don't know about you, but "dystopian adventure" suggests something more...dystopian and adventurous? I'm not saying this is an inaccurate description. I've already covered the dystopic elements, but it is an adventure in that he's rushing around the world killing people to save the girl, but this is no cheery Sean Connery Bond. And there can be no happy ending because the world's about to end.

Similarly, all "the conventions of science fiction" means is "we want people who are too good for space opera to feel sneakily highbrow holding this."

a prescient warning of climage change and totalitariansim, 

Is it? Yes, the ice is caused by scientists and politician, but there's nothing terribly precise about this "warning" that can serve as a warning. Same thing with its totalitarianism. It's bad. But you knew that. 

a feminist exploration of violence and trauma,

This is the one I'm most skeptical of. Let me ask whether, if this "feminist exploration" had been written by a man, would it still be feminist? I propose not. I propose, were this book written by a man, it likely would be read as deeply misogynistic. And if that's the case, what do we mean by feminist?

The "glass girl" is raped and kidnapped and beaten and abused. She is murdered more than once. She's thrown to a sea monster once! Her body is weak and fragile and gets more transparent and bruised as our male characters are unkind to her. The moments she show spunk or independence, they act quickly to destroy her.

It takes a while to realize that our narrator is also terrible. The novel starts with him looking for her hoping to rescue her and then she's destroyed by a wall of ice and then she's married to another man who is so kind to her and then the narrator realizes how easy she'd be to murder then her husband is no longer a cool dude and so we, as readers, attempting to hold together a sense of the romantic ideal, hope for our narrator to rescue her. But he doesn't. And then she's locked up by the warden as his little sex toy while our narrator has evolved into some infinitely wealthy (his billfold will never run dry) and brilliant adventurer constantly trying to navigate a Kafka'sTheTrialesque world to save her from the warden but then warden shoots her in the head but don't worry—immediately afterwards he runs away with her, saving them both from the ice.

But don't worry. Our narrator has all the traits of a hero (can escape anything, defeat anyone, never stops in his pursuit of his female counterpart) but he's no better than the warden. When the girl is snarky he beats her.

So I see a simplistic feminist argument to be made (men suck!) but it's no harder to make the misogyny argument (she gots it coming!). So calling it feminist at all strikes me as reductive and insulting. Whatever's going on in this book, it's not simply "feminist exploration." I don't think she would have liked that being on the back of her book.

a speculative literary dreamscape,

More tried-and-true cliches to let you know what kind of book this is, but I'm onboard with this one. 

and a brilliant allegory for its author's struggles with addition—

Booo. I mean, this is not an allegory. Your own copy says it's much much more than one thing. And while addiction may be a useful lens to read the novel through, it's hardly only that. It doesn't make my top three. Keep your dirty allegorizing off my fiction!

all crystallized in prose glittering as the piling snow.

That's fun. I'll allow it. 

I have a couple other things I'd like to say, mostly about the end, so maybe I shouldn't. But all the ideas of this book come to a head as everything is as awful as it's been and then she calls him a bully and his self-image is shook. He discovers the possiblity of kindness and becomes a new man. And they drive off into the snow, ahead of their final doom. It tastes like a happy ending. It's just frosting over all the bitterness we already have in our mouth and we're skeptical he can change and we know they will die soon along with the remaining remnants of Planet Earth, but...it looks like a happy ending.

But there there is this, as the novel's final sentence, tacked onto that phantom of happiness:

"The weight of the gun in my pocket was reassuring."

You tell me how happy we can be. 

three weeks 

 

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