2023 Reading

I read 279 books in 2023. (“Books” is defined inclusively here, to include graphic novels, coffee table books, poetry collections, separately-published novellas, and children’s picture books.) An asterisk indicates a rereading.

I don’t really do top tens and so forth, but the following is a short list of writers I read this year that you may not have heard of but might like to check out:

  1. Bitter Karella
  2. Jocelyn Nicole Johnson
  3. Hiron Ennes
  4. Joan Silber
  5. A. E. Stallings
  6. Domenico Starnone
  7. Brontez Purnell
  8. Patricia Smith
  9. Graeme Macrae Burnet
  10. Christophe Chaboute
  11. Mike Curato
  12. Sylvain Neuvel
  13. Caroline O’Donoghue
  14. Jerry Craft
  15. Mick Herron
  16. Daniel Mason

Full reading list follows:

2023

January

  1. Marion Crawford, The Little Princesses
  2. Charles Yu, How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe
  3. Robert Galbraith, The Silkworm
  4. Bitter Karella, Midnight Pals
  5. Tom Perrotta, Election
  6. Bitter Karella, Midnight Pals II
  7. Tom Perrotta, Tracy Flick Can’t Win
  8. Lord Dunsany, Fifty-One Tales
  9. Hannah Gadsby, Ten Steps to Nanette
  10. Sarah Monette, The Witness for the Dead
  11. Sarah Monette, The Grief of Stones
  12. Paul La Farge, Luminous Airplanes (hypertext edition)
  13. Paul La Farge, Luminous Airplanes (print edition)
  14. Thomas Harris, Cari Mora
  15. Alan Downs, The Velvet Rage
  16. Mohsin Hamid, The Last White Man
  17. Nicola Griffith, Spear
  18. Rosemary Pardoe, The Angry Dead
  19. Jhumpa Lahiri, Whereabouts
  20. Anne Carson, Bakkhai
  21. Jocelyn Nicole Johnson, My Monticello
  22. Alice Randall, The Wind Done Gone*
  23. Madeleine L’Engle, A Wrinkle in Time*

February

  1. Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending
  2. Billy Collins, Musical Tables
  3. Matthew Perry, Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing
  4. Hiron Ennes, Leech
  5. Vivian Gornick, Approaching Eye Level
  6. Anne Carson, An Oresteia
  7. James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
  8. Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat
  9. Rick Emerson, Unmask Alice
  10. Maggie O’Farrell, I Am, I Am, I Am
  11. Harry G. Frankfurt, On Bullshit
  12. J. K. Rowling, Short Stories from Hogwarts of Heroism, Hardship and Dangerous Hobbies
  13. J. K. Rowling, Short Stories from Hogwarts of Power, Politics and Pesky Poltergeists
  14. J. K. Rowling, Hogwarts: An Incomplete and Unreliable Guide
  15. Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story
  16. Dave Barry, Dave Barry’s Book of Bad Songs*
  17. Kiersten White, Hide
  18. Edmund White, Our Young Man

March

  1. Joan Silber, Improvement
  2. Loretta Lynn, Me & Patsy Kickin’ Up Dust
  3. Joan Silber, Secrets of Happiness
  4. Ty Seidule, Robert E. Lee and Me
  5. A. E. Stallings, Like
  6. Christine Woodside, Libertarians on the Prairie
  7. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House in the Big Woods*
  8. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Farmer Boy*
  9. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little House on the Prairie*
  10. Laura Ingalls Wilder, On the Banks of Plum Creek*
  11. Paul Auster, City of Glass*
  12. Paul Auster, Ghosts*
  13. Paul Auster, The Locked Room*
  14. Patricia Engel, Vida
  15. Shel Silverstein, Where the Sidewalk Ends*
  16. Shel Silverstein, A Light in the Attic*

April

  1. Michael Moorcock, Elric of Melnibone
  2. Laura Ingalls Wilder, By the Shores of Silver Lake*
  3. Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Long Winter*
  4. Laura Ingalls Wilder, Little Town on the Prairie*
  5. Laura Ingalls Wilder, These Happy Golden Years*
  6. Laura Ingalls Wilder, The First Four Years*
  7. Caroline Fraser, Prairie Fires
  8. William Anderson, The Selected Letters of Laura Ingalls Wilder
  9. Peter Baker and Susan Glassner, The Divider
  10. Anne Tyler, Redhead by the Side of the Road

May

  1. Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny
  2. James Baldwin, The Evidence of Things Not Seen
  3. Stephen King, Carrie*
  4. Lyndsay Faye, The Whole Art of Detection
  5. Katie Hafner, The Boys
  6. Anne Glenconner, Whatever Next?
  7. Jeffrey Cranor and Janina Matthewson, You Feel It Just Below the Ribs
  8. Joseph Knox, True Crime Story
  9. Lorrie Moore, Who Will Run the Frog Hospital?
  10. Donn Fendler, Lost on a Mountain in Maine*
  11. Geraldine Brooks, Horse
  12. Josh Riedel, Please Report Your Bug Here
  13. Louis Sachar, Wayside School Beneath the Cloud of Doom
  14. Erika Krouse, Tell Me Everything
  15. Vivian Gornick, Fierce Attachments

June

  1. Anne Tyler, French Braid
  2. Rick Moody, Hotels of North America
  3. Domenico Starnone, Ties
  4. Patricia Roberts-Miller, Demagoguery and Democracy
  5. LeAnne Howe, Savage Conversations
  6. Umberto Eco, How to Talk to a Salmon
  7. Madeleine L’Engle, The Arm of the Starfish
  8. Aubrey Gordon, “You Just Need to Lose Weight”
  9. Madeleine L’Engle, A Wind in the Door*
  10. Valeria Luiselli, Sidewalks
  11. Penelope Fitzgerald, Human Voices
  12. Brontez Purnell, 100 Boyfriends
  13. Peter Bussian, Trans New York
  14. Patricia Smith, Blood Dazzler
  15. Lisa Peterson and Denis O’Hare, An Iliad
  16. Amy Fusselman, Idiophone
  17. Amy Bloom, In Love
  18. Kelly Forsythe, Perennial
  19. Caroline Fraser, God’s Perfect Child
  20. Ada Limon, The Carrying

July

  1. Meg Cabot, The Quarantine Princess Diaries
  2. Nico Walker, Cherry
  3. Rachel Yoder, Nightbitch
  4. Viet Thanh Nguyen, The Refugees
  5. Kelly Link, White Cat, Black Dog
  6. Robert Morrison, The Regency Years
  7. Grant Ginder, Let’s Not Do That Again
  8. Graeme Macrae Burnet, The Accident on the A35
  9. Mike Rothschild, The Storm is Upon Us
  10. Ada Limon, Bright Dead Things
  11. Anne Lamott, All New People
  12. Penelope Fitzgerald, The Means of Escape
  13. Da’Shaun L. Harrison, Belly of the Beast
  14. Kelly Barnhill, The Crane Husband
  15. Joan Aiken, The Wolves of Willoughby Chase

August

  1. Grant Chemidlin, What We Lost in the Swamp
  2. Ronald Malfi, Ghostwritten
  3. James Tate, The Government Lake
  4. Robert L. Fish, The Incredible Schlock Homes
  5. Robert L. Fish, The Memoirs of Schlock Homes
  6. Kathy Acker, Great Expectations
  7. Lois Lowry and P. Craig Russell, The Giver (graphic novel)
  8. Sierra Simone, American Queen
  9. Shirley Jackson and Miles Hyman, The Lottery (graphic novel)
  10. Richard Chizmar, Chasing the Boogeyman
  11. Octavia E. Butler, Damian Duffy, and John Jennings, Kindred (graphic novel)
  12. A. S. Byatt, Ragnarok
  13. Margaret Atwood, Dearly
  14. K. J. Parker, Pulling the Wings Off Angels
  15. Tade Thompson, The Murders of Molly Southbourne
  16. V, The Apology
  17. V, Reckoning
  18. Naomi Salman, Nothing But the Rain
  19. Bitter Karella, Midnight Pals III
  20. Christopher Rowe, These Prisoning Hills
  21. Rainbow Rowell and Faith Erin Hicks, Pumpkinheads
  22. Tade Thompson, The Survival of Molly Southbourne
  23. Mike Rinder, A Billion Years (audiobook)
  24. Tade Thompson, The Legacy of Molly Southbourne
  25. Ada Limon, Sharks in the Rivers
  26. Victor LaValle, The Ballad of Black Tom
  27. Kij Johnson, The Dream-Quest of Vellitt Boe
  28. Cassandra Khaw, Hammers on Bone
  29. Caitlin R. Kiernan, Agents of Dreamland
  30. Matt Zoller Seitz and Alan Sepinwall, The Sopranos Sessions
  31. Diana Athill, Somewhere Towards the End
  32. Alex Michaelides, The Silent Patient
  33. Amanda Gorman, Call Us What We Carry
  34. Alora Young, Walking Gentry Home
  35. Elisa Gabbert, Normal Distance
  36. Jamila Rowser and Robyn Smith, Wash Day Diaries
  37. Franny Choi, The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On
  38. Debbie Tung, Everything is OK
  39. Warsan Shire, Bless the Daughter Raised by a Voice in Her Head
  40. Safia Elhillo, Girls That Never Die
  41. Malaka Gharib, It Won’t Always Be Like This
  42. Elizabeth Alexander, The Trayvon Generation

September

  1. Joy Arlene Renee Cox, Fat Girls in Black Bodies
  2. Robin Hobb, Assassin’s Apprentice*
  3. Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, Black Orchid
  4. Norman Finkelstein, The Holocaust Industry
  5. Robert Draper, Weapons of Mass Delusion
  6. Douglas Wolk, All of the Marvels
  7. Christophe Chaboute, Alone
  8. Abraham Riesman, True Believer: The Rise and Fall of Stan Lee
  9. Neil Gaiman and Charles Vess, Instructions
  10. Samantha Harvey, The Shapeless Unease
  11. August Derleth and James Turner (editors), Tales of the Cthulhu Mythos
  12. Ta-Nehisi Coates, Between the World and Me*
  13. Malcolm X, The End of White World Supremacy
  14. Lemony Snicket, Poison for Breakfast
  15. Christophe Chaboute, Park Bench
  16. Lucy Maud Montgomery, Mariah Marsden, and Brenna Thummler, Anne of Green Gables (graphic novel)
  17. Harper Lee and Fred Fordham, To Kill a Mockingbird (graphic novel)
  18. Cullen Bunn and Leila Leiz, The Last Book You’ll Ever Read
  19. Tananarive Due, Steven Barnes, and Marco Finneran, The Keeper
  20. Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power
  21. Agustina Bazterrica, Nineteen Claws and a Blackbird

October

  1. Jack London and Christophe Chaboute, To Build a Fire
  2. G. B. Trudeau, The Long Road Home
  3. Mike Curato, Flamer
  4. Luke Dumas, A History of Fear
  5. T. Kingfisher, What Moves the Dead
  6. R. F. Kuang, Babel
  7. Veronica Roth, Arch-Conspirator
  8. Claire Dederer, Monsters
  9. Sylvain Neuvel, The Test
  10. Martha Wells, All Systems Red
  11. Emily Tesh, Silver in the Wood
  12. Gregory Maguire, The Witch of Maracoor
  13. Richard Chizmar, Becoming the Boogeyman
  14. Diana Wynne Jones, The Tough Guide to Fantasyland (revised edition)
  15. Lorrie Moore, I am Homeless if This is Not My Home
  16. Caroline O’Donoghue, The Rachel Incident
  17. Seymour Chwast, Dante’s Divine Comedy
  18. John Carlin and Oriol Malet, Mandela and the General
  19. Frances Hodgson Burnett, Mariah Marsden, and Hanna Luechtefeld, The Secret Garden (graphic novel)
  20. Catherynne M. Valente, Comfort Me with Apples
  21. Billy Collins, Horoscopes for the Dead
  22. Louis Sachar, Sideways Stories from Wayside School*
  23. Louis Sachar, Wayside School is Falling Down*
  24. The Death of Superman: 30th Anniversary Deluxe Edition
  25. Louis Sachar, Wayside School Gets a Little Stranger*
  26. Louis Sachar, Wayside School Beneath the Cloud of Doom*
  27. Emily Tesh, Drowned Country
  28. Ama Asantewa Diaka, Woman, Eat Me Whole
  29. A. A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
  30. A. A. Milne, The House at Pooh Corner
  31. A. A. Milne, When We Were Very Young
  32. A. A. Milne, Now We Are Six

November

  1. M. Rickert, Lucky Girl
  2. Scott Snyder, Jock, et al, The Batman Who Laughs: The Deluxe Edition
  3. Hilary Fitzgerald Campbell, Murder Book
  4. Malcolm Devlin, And Then I Woke Up
  5. Alex Michaelides, The Maidens
  6. David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon
  7. Edgar Cantero, Meddling Kids
  8. Louis Sachar, Sideways Arithmetic from Wayside School*
  9. The John Varley Reader: 30 Years of Short Fiction
  10. Henry Hoke, Open Throat
  11. Ottessa Moshfegh, Death in Her Hands
  12. Jerry Craft, School Trip
  13. Jerry Craft, New Kid
  14. Claire Keegan, Antarctica
  15. R. F. Kuang, Yellowface
  16. Daniel Sweren-Becker, Kill Show
  17. Mick Herron, Real Tigers

December

  1. Neil Gaiman, The Ocean at the End of the Lane
  2. N. Scott Momaday, The Death of Sitting Bear
  3. Dr. Seuss, The Lorax*
  4. Denise Levertov, Selected Poems (2002)
  5. Van Jensen and Nate Powell, Two Dead
  6. Ada Limon, The Hurting Kind
  7. Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat*
  8. Dr. Seuss, The Cat in the Hat Comes Back*
  9. Truman Capote, A Christmas Memory (with One Christmas and The Thanksgiving Visitor)
  10. Dr. Seuss, One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish*
  11. Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham*
  12. Dr. Seuss, Hop on Pop*
  13. Jason Rodriguez, Colonial Comics
  14. Dr. Seuss, Dr. Seuss’s ABC
  15. Dr. Seuss, Fox in Socks*
  16. Mick Herron, Spook Street
  17. Dr. Seuss, Oh, the Thinks You Can Think!*
  18. Dr. Seuss, I Can Read with my Eyes Shut!*
  19. Dr. Seuss, Oh Say Can You Say?
  20. Chris McCoy, Safely Endangered Comics
  21. Karl Stevens, Penny
  22. Dr. Seuss, What Pet Should I Get?
  23. Dr. Seuss, Mr. Brown Can Moo! Can You?*
  24. Dr. Seuss, The Foot Book
  25. Dr. Seuss, Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!*
  26. Dr. Seuss, The Shape of Me and Other Stuff
  27. Dr. Seuss, There’s a Wocket in my Pocket!*
  28. Alvin Schwartz and Victor Rivas, In a Dark, Dark Room*
  29. Charles Addams and H. Kevin Miserocchi, The Addams Family: An Evilution
  30. Mick Herron, London Rules
  31. Lorrie Moore, See What Can Be Done
  32. Nicola Dinan, Bellies
  33. Bill Bryson, Shakespeare: The World as Stage
  34. Brent Katz, Josh Morgenthau, Simon Rich, and code-davinci-002, I Am Code
  35. Stephen King, If It Bleeds
  36. Stephen King, The Outsider
  37. Stephen King, Mr. Mercedes
  38. Daniel Lavery, Texts from Jane Eyre
  39. Mick Herron, Joe Country
  40. Charles Dickens, The Annotated Christmas Carol (edited by Michael Patrick Hearn)
  41. Daniel Mason, North Woods
  42. Elizabeth Hand, A Haunting on the Hill
  43. Jon Clinch, Marley
  44. Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House*
  45. Mick Herron, Slough House
  46. Mick Herron, Bad Actors
  47. Mick Herron, Standing by the Wall
  48. Mick Herron, Dolphin Junction
  49. Mick Herron, The Secret Hours
  50. Rod Espinosa and Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (graphic novel)

Memory Lane (Digital Edition)

On Friday I remembered, as I do from time to time, that several years back I bought e-book editions of Diane Duane’s Young Wizards books direct from her website. Because they weren’t bought through Amazon and the “Send to Kindle” feature didn’t exist at that time, I sideloaded them onto my Kindle, which meant they didn’t end up in my Kindle cloud with most of my other ebooks. Several Kindles later, I had no idea where the files were or if I even still had copies. I’d been putting off looking for them for a while now, because I had the feeling it would be an irritating project and I would only end up annoyed with myself if I’d managed to lose them. But around 11:00 on Friday night, I decided to dig in.

Step one was to see if I’d copied them onto the external hard drive I keep in my bedside drawer. I discovered that the manufacturer of this hard drive has apparently not updated its drivers for whatever release of Windows I have on my laptop; my machine recognizes what kind of device it is but won’t let me view the contents in File Explorer. So that was out.

Steps two and three were to see if the two old laptops sitting on a shelf in the hall closet (1) still worked and (2) had anything promising. I started with what I thought was the older one, an Asus model. It turned on relatively smoothly, but I couldn’t come up with the Microsoft password it wanted; because it had been offline it wanted the password I used at the time, and I tried eight or ten of my old passwords with no luck.

I then switched to the newer machine, a Toshiba with a cracked screen (I believe I stepped on it). On this one the Microsoft password reset option was working, and fortunately my old Microsoft account is still linked to my current phone number, so I was able to get into my desktop. Unfortunately, after a couple minutes dealing with its appalling trackpad I determined that there were no e-book files in the Documents or Downloads folders; everything on that machine was a little too new.

I switched back to the older laptop. I tried getting in on my mother’s account, figuring I might be able to get into my documents via File Explorer from her profile. And one of her old passwords did work. File Explorer wanted an admin password to get into my documents, but after thinking about it for several suspenseful minutes it decided it was happy with the new Microsoft password I had just set on the other laptop. And there, inside a “Stuff from Old Laptop” folder within My Documents, was another folder named “Owned Ebooks,” with a “Young Wizards” folder inside that. The question now was, how to get them off this relic and onto a current device

If it was just the Young Wizards books I could have emailed them to myself. But there were a bunch of other e-books I didn’t have access to any other way, and a couple personal files that looked worth saving. My external hard drive didn’t want to cooperate with these machines either, and I couldn’t lay my hands on a jump drive.

Finally I decided to try Google Drive. I had to update Firefox on the old laptop to get Drive to even open on it, and that was a halting process that froze once in the middle, but finally I was able to get Drive cooperating and upload the entire Owned Ebooks folder. Then I decided to browse the documents folder on that laptop for anything else worth saving. And I hit an unexpected mother lode of memories.

Scattered throughout another folder named “Stuff from External Hard Drive” were folders containing virtually every attempt I made at writing fiction between summer 2004, when I had just graduated high school, through 2017. None of it’s any good, of course, but it’s nice to know I’ve managed to hang on to just about all of it. I moved it all into my Google Drive.

I then copied the Young Wizards books into my Kindle cloud, which accepted them with a little grumbling that they’re mobi files, for which Amazon is perpetually on the verge of stopping support. But they look just fine on my current Kindle. I’d like to believe I’ll take this little odyssey as a reason to get them read, but I have my doubts.

Thrones, Dominions, Principalities, Powers

There are three levels on which one can respond to the claim that abortion has now been “sent back to the states.”

First, one can point out that many states have been so gerrymandered by Republican state legislators (aided by the same Republican justices who just sent abortion “back to the states”) that their governments are not remotely answerable to the people. Republicans at all levels have abandoned any effort to appeal to, or respond to the will of, the majority; as long as gerrymandering, the Senate, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court supermajority allow them to hold power irrespective of whether they get the most votes, they will do what they like and piously intone that we are “a republic, not a democracy” (which, being translated, means “we get to run things no matter what, fuck you”).

Second, one can bring up the inconvenient truth that the next Republican trifecta will in fact take abortion away from the states again by passing or attempting to pass a federal abortion ban. Whether they’ll succeed I don’t know, but acting like they couldn’t or they won’t try is ridiculous. One of the concurrences today even pointed in that direction, because for the contemporary right, half the fun is in winking at the obvious falseness of your lies even as you call your opponent uncivil for not believing them.

Third, and most morally significant, to say that an issue should be sent back to the states is to frame it as an issue on which all possible opinions are equally valid. This is the same sort of nauseating faux broad-mindedness that inspires people to attack the deplatforming of empty-headed bigots. When you say that someone who mocks trans people “is entitled to their opinion,” you mean that you are basically ok with the belief that trans people are subhuman even if you wouldn’t go that far yourself. Likewise, when you say that abortion is now “in the hands of the states where it belongs,” you mean that you’re basically OK with women dying from lack of medical care even if you yourself would rather they didn’t have to.

When basic issues of public health are at stake, as they are when you allow sweeping abortion bans with no health exceptions, appeals to diversity of opinion are monstrous. The dishonest crux of the “back to the states” framing is its implication that Roe, a nuanced decision that gave states a good deal of authority to set their own restrictions, was some kind of federal jackboot. The denial of bodily autonomy to women in today’s decision is far more authoritarian than Roe could ever have been. The problem is that the actual extremism of the Republican position on abortion has been so normalized that the national discourse has warped around it, making “I won’t raise a finger to stop women dying, but I’ll furrow my brow about it when it happens” the sensible moderate position. For the moment, anyway; as Republicans gear up for attacks on contraception, we should all get ready for Susan Collins to primly declare that while she thinks a total ban on birth control pills is going too far, she can’t vote for the Democratic bill that protects contraception access because it’s just so darn liberal. I keep trying to find a less depressing thought on which to end this post, but I don’t think today’s the day for that.

Where We’re Going, Where We’ve Been

Much of what our society frames as tolerance in political discourse is infantilizing nonsense. It is not actually respectful to treat people like children, to sit silently as they deny or obfuscate the consequences of their actions, to allow ill-formed or selfish intentions to weigh heavier than results. Adults ought to own what they believe and what it leads to. The problem with the rhetoric of civic duty is not that it is wrong, but that it is used to encourage the mere act of voting, as if filling in a bubble on a ballot were inherently dignified and mature. Just as a juror has a greater obligation than showing up and writing yea or nay on a slip of paper, a person who can vote ought to be making a sober consideration of outcomes, and if he (I do not use a gender-specific pronoun thoughtlessly, though this is far from an exclusively male problem) does not do so, it is neither unfair nor cruel to point this out and to hold him accountable.

So: yes, if you voted for this to happen or failed to vote against it, I hold you responsible for it, irrespective of whether you wanted it to happen, thought it would happen, live in a “swing state,” etc. If you dismissed the importance of the Supreme Court or declared that you wouldn’t be “blackmailed” into voting for someone who didn’t share your ideology entirely or make you feel special, you are responsible for what happened today. This is adult life: things that you don’t mean to happen can still be held against you, even if someone else was the prime mover.

I don’t say this lightly or with any sense of moral purity. I didn’t vote in 2008, and I only voted on ballot questions in 2012, leaving all the offices blank. That was dumb, and I was wrong. I voted in 2016, but even then I don’t think I really accepted that this was a possible outcome. All I can do is own that, and try not to be wrong anymore. I’m lucky, if lucky is a word anyone who believes in personal freedoms can use today, that my failure to vote wasn’t more directly tied to today’s outcome, but that doesn’t absolve me of much. I was wrong.

The way not to be wrong right now is to admit and reject past error. If you thought this day would never come, own that. Instead of trying to explain why this isn’t as bad as it seems (or how it’s not your fault because reasons), listen to the people who were right, especially when they tell you what’s coming next. The logic of this decision is not, despite the majority’s posturing, limited. So many decades-old freedoms related to sex, gender, sexuality, and race that Americans take for granted are rooted in the interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment that the conservative supermajority has just rejected. Does that mean all those decisions are doomed? No, but it doesn’t make them safe either. Certainly it’s ridiculous to suggest that 21st century gay rights decisions that are more recent and less publicly popular than Roe won’t be challenged if the far right thinks they can win.

I don’t pretend to have answers about what anyone should do next. Voting for Democrats in every race from local to national is a moral baseline, not a strategy. All I can say is, don’t underestimate the seriousness of the moment, and don’t reject bold choices that would have seemed absurd as little as seven years ago, when most of us were operating under different assumptions that turned out to be dangerously incorrect.

Part of being an adult is accepting that most life decisions require you to make the choice that is least bad rather than the choice that is best, and acknowledging that your instinctive emotional responses to a situation are rarely helpful indicators of what to do. Don’t vote like you’re making an aesthetic choice or identifying yourself with a style or brand. Vote like lives depend on it, because it turns out that they do. And if you don’t think women are going to die because of this decision, including some who don’t even support abortion themselves, then you’re just demonstrating that you don’t know enough about the subject to be putting forth an opinion. There’s no shame in ignorance- there are so many things in the world to know about that we all have to rely on generalities sometimes. Wisdom is acknowledging your ignorance when the world demonstrates it to you, and educating yourself before you speak out again. Maybe I’ve gotten something wrong here; if I have, I’m sure someone will point it out to me.

Myths Transformed

What is history? History is women following behind with the bucket.

Over the past 24 hours I’ve read Margaret Atwood’s The Penelopiad and Karthika Nair’s Until the Lions. Both are short, sharp reworkings of ancient literature that grapple with the violence of war and the subjugation of women. Both are also on sale in the U.S. Kindle store at the moment, and come highly recommended.

The Penelopiad is more obviously contemporary and ironic, somewhat in the same vein as Atwood’s very short story “Gertrude Talks Back.” It’s quite a lot of fun, especially the glamorous, catty Helen of Troy, and I appreciate the ways Atwood tweaks myth to give Penelope greater agency. At times the playfulness cuts against dramatic effect. Envisioning the slain maids as a collective that communicates principally through burlesques makes it harder to highlight the horror of their execution. Acknowledging that Penelope, though vulnerable as a woman in a patriarchal society, is in a position of privilege compared to her maids presents an opportunity to deepen the narrative, but I’m not sure the novella does all that it might with the resulting tension.

Until the Lions, a poem cycle set at the margins of the Mahabharata, uses modern forms but doesn’t shy away from the strangeness and ferocity of its setting. I’ll confess that I knew very little about the Mahabharata or ancient Hinduism before reading. There’s a dramatis personae at the front of the book, but I still spent a fair bit of time filling in some gaps. Working in a variety of different styles and voices, Nair focuses on the cyclic, self-sustaining nature of hate and the awful power of violence. Like Atwood, she grants women more centrality and agency than in the source material, but the emphasis on suffering is greater, almost unrelenting. Whether it’s highly-structured work, prose poetry, or free verse, there’s a rawness to the language that captures the constant pain of living with unimaginable loss. Until the Lions is, despite or because of its ancient milieu, one of the most powerful anti-war statements I’ve ever read. I’ll pay it one of the highest compliments I can give a book: right now, some six hours after finishing it, I already wish I could read it again for the first time.

General roundup, late February 2022

Part of the reason my blogging is, um, let’s be charitable and say “intermittent” is that I have such a backlog of things to watch and read and listen to and play that it’s hard to justify spending time writing about the things I’ve actually managed to watch and read and so on. Here, in the name of justifying what I pay for WordPress and the domain name, are some quick thoughts on my recent media consumption.

Star Trek: Picard: No Man’s Land: the first Star Trek audio drama in quite some time. It was a pleasant enough listen. Michelle Hurd is better than Jeri Ryan at consistently evoking her character through a voice-only performance, but they both do solid work, and the supporting characters are entertaining if fairly flat. The thematic ground it covers is well-worn and not something I especially like, but the character work for Raffi and Seven is engagingly delivered, if equally familiar. Some people have suggested the production feels amateurish compared to Big Finish’s Doctor Who audios, but I think it’s just a matter of a different approach. Big Finish tries (sometimes to a fault) to produce something that’s like a Doctor Who episode on audio, with a more immersive soundscape. No Man’s Land is more of an audio play, with limited sound design. I hope to see more Star Trek audios in the future; Patrick Stewart is probably too expensive, but other Picard characters, Discovery, Strange New Worlds… lots of possibilities there.

Star Trek: Discovery: Fear Itself: a solid Saru-centric novel that both captures his character and finds a way to use him effectively in a very Star Trek kind of story. It’s on the slight side, the original Starfleet characters don’t really pop, and for some reason the ending is three different versions in a row of the same basic sequence, but this book, like the first Discovery novel and all the Picard novels to date, takes the right approach to tying in to modern Trek.

Star Trek: Vanguard: Summon the Thunder: I skipped the Vanguard series when it was coming out; for whatever reason Harbinger didn’t do it for me back in the day. But I picked up all the ebooks on sale recently and decided to give the series another shot. So far it’s good fun. Ward and Dilmore are pretty awkward stylists even by the standards of mass-market adventure fiction, but there are a lot of moving parts to the Vanguard saga and some excellent use of dramatic irony as secrets start to be revealed and ancient history is pieced together. Despite its being a serialized, more morally ambiguous series set on a space station, series creator/editor Marco Palmieri didn’t like the idea of calling i “DS9 for the TOS era.” If I wanted to be cheeky I might suggest it’s closer to “Babylon 5 for the TOS era,” and I do not mean that in a negative way.

Elden Ring: clearly the key to getting “10/10 game of the millennium” level reviews from the games press is to add an open world to an already beloved action RPG franchise; the hype here is Breath of the Wild-level. I’m not sure this game quite lives up to it for me, but then it very much is “open world Dark Souls,” and I’ve never been as sold on Dark Souls as many gamers. I loved Bloodborne, but what I most loved about it were all the ways it was different from a Souls game: the rally mechanic and resulting faster combat, the simpler upgrade and item mechanics, the horror rather than dark fantasy aesthetics. To be clear, I’m enjoying Elden Ring quite a lot, and I’m only nine hours in; I’ve beaten one main boss, one side boss, and a few optional areas. Just wandering the map and finding little unexpected things is rewarding, as it always is in open world games. I’m just not sure the level of execution is as high as review scores are suggesting. Adding an open world to anything is like adding chocolate to peanut butter, but that doesn’t make either the chocolate or the peanut butter high quality in and of itself.

It’s a Sin: I put watching this off for a year because I expected it to be emotionally devastating. And in places it is, but it’s also life-affirming and cheeky and clever in the way everything Russell T Davies writes is. As ever in his work, there are depictions of honest little moments in gay life that you just wouldn’t get anywhere else. The original concept for this was eight episodes rather than five, and you can feel the absence in places; some of the characters feel underserved, and the rhythms of the story progression are occasionally off. But it’s a first-rate drama all the same.

Other things I’m consuming and may or may not blog about down the line are : The Gilded Age, The Afterparty, Only Murders in the Building, Marianne Williamson’s novel Home, the audiobook of Nancy Kress’s Tomorrow’s Kin, the short stories of Elizabeth Bowen, the Discovery novel The Way to the Stars… you see what I mean about a backlog.

Reading list, 2021

I read 91 books in 2021. An asterisk means I was rereading something.

January

1. Garth Greenwell, Cleanness

2. Thomas Rid, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare

3. James Swallow, Star Trek: Picard: The Dark Veil

4. Bernardine Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other

5. Jonathan Metzl, Dying of Whiteness

6. John Gaskin, The New Inn Hall Deception

7. Joan Didion, Let Me Tell You What I Mean

8. Ayad Akhtar, Homeland Elegies

February

1. Gabriel Pogrund and Patrick Maguire, Left Out: The Inside Story of Labour Under Corbyn

2. Rachel Kushner, The Mars Room

3. Erin Monroe et al, Gorey’s Worlds

4. Matthew Lane, Power-up: Unlocking the Hidden Mathematics in Video Games

5. Julia Quinn, Romancing Mister Bridgerton

6. Leslie S. Klinger (editor), The New Annotated H. P. Lovecraft

7. James O’Brien, How to Be Right

8. Ayad Akhtar, American Dervish

9. Ayad Akhtar, The Invisible Hand

10. Ayad Akhtar, Disgraced

11. Ayad Akhtar, The Who and the What

12. Ayad Akhtar, Junk

13. S. A. Chakraborty, The City of Brass

14. Neil Price, Children of Ash and Elm: A History of the Vikings

15. Valeria Luiselli, Tell Me How It Ends: An Essay in 40 Questions

March

1. Jonathan Aycliffe, A Shadow on the Wall

2. Una McCormack, Enigma Tales

3. Justin Torres, We the Animals

4. Jenny Offill, Weather

5. Jenny Offill, Dept. of Speculation

6. Sue Black, All That Remains: A Renowned Forensic Scientist on Death, Mortality, and Solving Crimes

7 Ernest Cline, Ready Player One

8. Angela Slatter, Sourdough and Other Stories

9. Melissa Albert, The Hazel Wood

10. Anne Boyer, The Undying

11. Jorge Luis Borges, Ficciones

12. Andrew Caldecott, Not Exactly Ghosts

13. Kage Baker, The Hotel Under the Sand

14. Andrew Caldecott, Fires Burn Blue

April

1. Danez Smith, Homie

2. Jericho Brown, The Tradition

3. TaraShea Nesbit, Beheld

4. Lou Cannon, Governor Reagan: His Rise to Power

5. Michael Cooperson, Impostures by al-Hariri

6. Miriam Toews, Women Talking

7. Kevin Barry, That Old Country Music

8. Zadie Smith, Intimations

9. Mohsin Hamid, Exit West

10. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone*

May

1. Anne Carson, Norma Jeane Baker of Troy

2. Anne Carson, Antigonick

3. Oksana Zabuzhko, Your Ad Could Go Here

4. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets*

5. Rebecca Solnit, Whose Story is This?

6. Fran Lebowitz, Metropolitan Life

7. Fran Lebowitz, Social Studies

8. Barbara Pym, Excellent Women

9. Nicole Chung, All You Can Ever Know

10. Becky Cooper, We Keep the Dead Close

11. J. K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban*

June

1. Anna Wiener, Uncanny Valley

2. Margaret Rhodes, The Final Curtsey

3. Donna Zuckerberg, Not All Dead White Men

4. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

5. Leah Remini, Troublemaker

July

1. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead

2. Anne Glenconner, Lady in Waiting

3. Rainbow Rowell, Carry On

4. Jason Schreier, Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry

August

1. Katherine Angel, Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again

2. David Baddiel, Jews Don’t Count

3. Anna Fields, The Girl in the Show

September

1. Noah Hawley, Before the Fall

2. Carrie Fisher, Shockaholic

3. Taylor Jenkins Reid, Daisy Jones & The Six

4. The Secret Barrister, Fake Law: The Truth About Justice in an Age of Lies

5. Edouard Louis, History of Violence

6. Una McCormack, The Baba Yaga

October

1. Dayton Ward, Star Trek: Coda: Moments Asunder

2. Gregory Maguire, Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West*

3. Lacy Crawford, Notes on a Silencing

November

1. John Boyne, A Ladder to the Sky

2. James Swallow, Star Trek: Coda: The Ashes of Tomorrow

3. Una McCormack, Star of the Sea

4. E. L. Doctorow, Ragtime

5. Loretta Lynn, Coal Miner’s Daughter (expanded edition)

6. Philip Purser-Hallard, Sherlock Holmes: The Vanishing Man

December

1. David Mack, Star Trek: Coda: Oblivion’s Gate

2. Reggie Oliver, A Maze for the Minotaur and Other Strange Stories

3. John Jackson Miller, Star Trek: Picard: Rogue Elements

4. Tommy Orange, There There

5. Laurie R. King, The Murder of Mary Russell

6. Deborah Eisenberg, Transactions in a Foreign Currency

Book Notes: A Ladder to the Sky

I’m a compulsive buyer of bargain-priced e-books; if I did nothing else with my free time I might possibly be able to keep up with my purchases, but since I also watch TV and play video games I’ve more or less had to accept that collecting books and reading them are fundamentally unrelated habits. Part of the problem is that once I’ve bought one book by an author I feel more comfortable buying another, even if I’ve never read the first one. So it was that when John Boyne’s A Ladder to the Sky was a Kindle deal last month I felt authorized to buy it because I already had his Victorian ghost story This House is Haunted, which I bought in August 2020 and haven’t even tried to read. (The only thing about that that surprises me is that I would have guessed I bought it earlier. Probably I had considered but skipped it in a previous sale.)

It wasn’t just having another book by the same author that drew me to A Ladder to the Sky, though. It’s a literary thriller with dark satirical elements, a “What if Tom Ripley was an aspiring writer?” deal. Maurice Swift wants to be a writer, and he can put sentences together well enough, but he can’t come up with an idea to save his life. So he steals them from others, even if he has to ruin their lives in the process. The novel is divided into three parts with two interludes. The first four sections show Maurice honing his sociopathic version of the craft and rising to great heights, while in the fifth his charade is inevitably crumbling.

I say inevitably, and the biggest drawback of A Ladder to the Sky is that the course of each section is pretty predictable; not only the fact but also the manner of the various betrayals is thoroughly telegraphed, though I’ll admit one aspect of the ending took me by surprise. Straightforwardness of plot wouldn’t be a problem if the book were dramatically richer, but most of the characters are two-dimensional satires of the parochial ruthlessness of writers. Maurice himself is a little more interesting; monstrous, to be sure, but there’s something fascinating in his detached intellectual curiosity about his own lack of emotional response. This might, I suspect have been a stronger book if Maurice had been put at the center from the start. Instead the first two thirds or so are narrated by other, generally less interesting characters, though an interlude from the perspective of Gore Vidal is delightful, irrespective of how much its Vidal is like the real one.

A Ladder to the Sky is never less than elegantly written– the writers’ witty attacks on each other’s achievements may not be profound, but they’re certainly entertaining– and the plot flows along well enough that its predictability never becomes a crippling flaw. Overall it’s a book I’m very glad to have read, and I suspect I’ll pick up others by Boyne if I see them on sale. I may even read them.

Lisey’s Slog

On first reading Lisey’s Story was one of my favorite Stephen King novels, as it’s one of the author’s own favorites, and though an attempt to reread it a few years back didn’t go well I’m still fond of the book in theory. So I was looking forward to the Apple TV+ adaptation. That King was scripting it himself was a double-edged sword; it guaranteed a comprehension of and fidelity to the source material that you don’t always get with King adaptations, but King is not a distinguished screenwriter, and eight episodes for a 500-page novel is more than enough rope for a writer who loves a digression. The surprise, then, is not that the first two episodes of Lisey’s Story are an elegant-looking exercise in tedium, but that King feels less to blame than director Pablo Lorrain.

King can be faulted for the lack of narrative focus and the failure to structure the story into coherent episodes, but it’s Lorrain chilly cinematography, bland direction, and indifference to soundtrack that leave the series feeling like a long low-key dream sequence. The abrupt time jumps are surely in King’s script, but it’s Lorrain who fails to offer any visual or directorial cues as to when we’re flashing back or moving forward. And it can only be Lorrain who apparently told Julianne Moore and Clive Owen to emote as little as possible, though I can’t imagine what his reasoning was. Joan Allen and Jennifer Jason Leigh are given a little more leeway as Lisey’s sisters, but the only person actually allowed to act is Dane DeHaan, who makes full use of the opportunity to embody the psychotic folksiness of Jim Dooley.

The one upside of the blanket of indifference that Lorrain has thrown over the production is that the excessive quirkiness of most King characters is thoroughly smothered. (I also appreciate that only one performer so far has attempted a Maine accent; the one who does is predictably terrible.) But as the scenes rolled over me like waves of nothing, I started thinking that a few of those overwrought verbal tics might almost be preferable. I don’t know why anyone who hasn’t read the book would stick with this; I don’t even know how they’d follow the plot, though I thought the same thing about people understanding Game of Thrones without reading A Song of Ice and Fire, and they obviously did. I couldn’t swear that I’ll watch more, though it might make appropriate background noise while I’m playing a video game or doing housework. I’ve started rereading the book, and this time I’m enjoying it more than on my aborted reread of a few years ago. Certainly it deserved better than becoming the TV equivalent of elevator music.

Book Notes: Pre-Posthumous Joan Didion

I’m never quite sure whether to regret that Joan Didion stopped producing new work before the rise of Donald Trump. It would be easy to say that in times like these the need for her incisive insight is greater than ever, but I don’t know that that’s true. When things get terrible, it’s obvious that they’re terrible; when an intellectual culture degrades, it needs no Didion come from the pages of the NYRB to tell us this. “Fixed Opinions,” her essay on the determinedly infantile political discourse of the post-9/11 United States, is an effective piece of writing, but it doesn’t read with the urgency of something only Didion could say.

Regrettable or not, Didion’s retirement seems to be, as she might put it, the new fact on the ground. After Blue Nights in 2011, which felt like a valediction (and, dare I suggest it, seemed a work of less supreme control than the rest of Didion’s mature output), there have been 2017’s South and West: From a Notebook, trunk material drawn mostly from a June 1970 road trip through the southern United States for a piece that didn’t ultimately come together, and now Let Me Tell You What I Mean, a haphazard assemblage of twelve previously-published but uncollected pieces dated between 1968 and 2000, supplemented (a less charitable person might say “padded out”) by a Hilton Als introduction that is appreciative, basically insightful but not especially dazzling, and does little to clarify why these twelve pieces in particular appear between this set of covers.

The first six, all from 1968, appeared in Didion and her husband John Gregory Dunne’s Saturday Evening Post column “Points West.” Didion is not at her best in the short form of a magazine column, and 1968 was before the deeper sense of disorder chronicled in “The White Album” had fully permeated her style and leavened the wittily chilly but superficial conservative skepticism of her early style, but these are fine work nonetheless, and have much in common with the pieces collected in Slouching Towards Bethlehem. I particularly enjoyed “On Being Unchosen by the College of One’s Choice,” in which Didion turns on her own extreme reaction to being rejected by Stanford the same vicious irony she aims everywhere else:

I went upstairs to my room and locked the door and for a couple of hours I cried. For a while I sat on the floor of my closet and buried my face in an old quilted robe and later, after the situation’s real humiliations (all my friends who applied to Stanford had been admitted) had faded into safe theatrics, I sat on the edge of the bathtub and thought about swallowing the contents of an old bottle of codeine-and-Empirin. I saw myself in an oxygen tent, with Rixford K. Snyder [Stanford’s Director of Admissions] hovering outside, although how the news was to reach Rixford K. Snyder was a plot point that troubled me even as I counted out the tablets.

The rest of the book consists of three introductions (to a collection of Mapplethorpe photos, a memoir by Tony Richardson, and a keepsake edition of three short stories by Didion herself), a lecture titled “Why I Write,” and two essays from The New Yorker. The introductions are unexceptionable, though even with a writer as gifted as Didion one is reminded of Stephen King’s observation that “you have never seen a book entitled One Hundred Great Introductions of Western Civilization or Best-Loved Forewords of the American People.” Didion’s comments on her own writing are rewarding for devotees as insight into her development and for the strange intoxication of her sharp-edged prose, but one can certainly sense why none of this material has been collected before.

The essays from The New Yorker are sharper, more substantial work. “Everywoman.com,” the only piece in this volume I’d previously read, is the closest thing in it to Didion’s mature journalism, a consideration of the Martha Stewart phenomenon written before the insider trading scandal. The other New Yorker essay is “Last Words,” a consideration of the posthumous publications of Ernest Hemingway and the larger problem of what to do with the material a great writer leaves behind after death. It’s a passionate essay, and yet one can’t help but feel, to build on a point that Als makes in his introduction, that Didion’s own writerly identity, and her similarities with Hemingway, are leading her toward a position that would leave the larger culture poorer for the theoretical benefit of those who are forever beyond actual benefit.

The irony of reading “Last Words” in its present context is that, while Didion is alive and (presumably) approved which pieces appeared in this collection and which did not, Let Me Tell You What I Mean has a similar air of the posthumous rag-bag, and its inclusions and exclusions are baffling. Gathering the Saturday Evening Post columns, which would otherwise be inaccessible outside of well-stocked libraries, is noble enough, but why none of the uncollected essays from The New York Review of Books? There’s only so much room in the collection, which is formatted, like South and West, Blue Nights, and The Year of Magical Thinking, as a tiny hardcover with wide margins, but surely an audience for whom these four late publications are Didion deserves a better ratio of substance to style? Anyone who admires Didion will buy this book and be glad to have done so, but those who know her ouevre well enough to know what it omits may be frustrated by those omissions.