Stuff I've Been Reading - January 2024
My 2023 concert year in review was made infinitely easier because I did a detailed summary of each concert shortly after I saw it. Ok, it was also made easier by there being a scant six concerts on it, but the principle held from 2013 to 2019 when I saw lots of concerts and mostly summarized them shortly after the show.
I bring this up because I'm currently looking at the 300 plus entries that will be featured on my 2023 Books in Review post, and it's going to be rough to summarize in any kind of reasonable manner. Even if I completely ignore the 200+ books I read to my daughter (reminder: she was 2 last year, so they weren't real complicated books), that still leaves more than 100 books, most of which I'd at least touch on in a perfect world. Unfortunately, of all the adult books I read last year, I only did a full post about People Love Dead Jews, while quoting from Midnight's Children and a couple of Hellblazer comics. I also casually mentioned a few books in a "Oh yeah, I finished this book" in my Hilton Head summary. Clearly, this is not the materials for a full summary.
I suppose I could revive the last weekend series I did back in 2018, or at least just do it for books, but that seems like overkill, and even there I mostly just mentioned specific books I'd read rather than digging into them in any depth. So instead, I'm going to copy Nick Hornby again. Way back in 2012, I copied his Songbook concept by doing a year-long series about 27 songs that mattered to me. In 2024, I'm going to copy Nick's "Stuff I've Been Reading" monthly magazine column, which has been around since 2003 in The Believer. I'm going to talk about books I've read, books I'm reading, and books I've added to my ever growing slush pile. I figure even if I only talk about a small portion of the books I've got under way, that'll be a big help to my creaky old memory when it comes to summarize them for the year. There is, of course, a new tag, stuff I've been reading.
With introductions aside, let's talk about January. Thus far I'm off to an seemingly amazing 42 books completed in 31 days, but 36 of those are books I read to my daughter. Some of them are beautifully illustrated or fun or things my daughter loves, but I don't think any rose above "well, I wouldn't mind reading that another 17 times before it goes back to the library" (and they almost all came from the library). That doesn't seem like a high bar to clear, but let me assure you that's a lot higher than you think. I'm not going to read any of them for my own entertainment any time soon, so I will dispense with 35 of them unmentioned. The 36th is Sail Away Dragon, which wasn't a phenomenal book but did features our heroine and her dragon setting sail for "The Farthest Far Away", which I rather appreciated.
Back in 2014 I started reading poetry more consistently, starting with three anthologies edited by Garrison Keillor. I'd keep the current book on my kitchen table and read one or two poems each day. Those three collections got me well in 2016, and then my poetry reading became much more sporadic. Occasionally I found an interesting looking book in a bookstore and bought it and read it, but otherwise my poetry consumption was limited to two "poem of the day" sites. Not nothing, but not great. And then I had an epiphany. With some regularity, those poem of the day sites featured a poem that really moved me in some way. Why not find more poems by those authors and read them? I started this late in 2023 and finished one volume in November and another in December. My current poetry book is Dual: Poems by Matthew Minicucci, as inspired by his poem Nostalgia being a poem of the day selection. This volume has been uneven; the opening section of poems read differently if you go horizontally or vertically was more clever than good to my ear, but it's picked up significantly since it got into the variations of the Greek classical canon. And either way, I'm glad to have cracked the "how do I read more poetry?" code for now. You can see the current list/backlog of poems/poets that moved me on the slush pile.
My other daily read is of much longer vintage. A year or two before the pandemic my father got me a copy of The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, 3rd edition, all 1000+ pages of it. I've been trying to read two pages a day, which I achieve maybe 5 of 7 days a week. In January, I finished the letter 'B', which gets me about 15% through. I've never read a dictionary cover to cover before, and it's an interesting exercise made feasibly only by love of baseball trivia and history.
Now that I've talked about two books I didn't finish in January, let's move to the ones I did!
I didn't get to at least two of my featured authors in 2023. I was half way through Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates by Tom Robbins when the ball dropped on New Year's Eve, and if was officially my first 'adult' book of 2024. I'd say that of the five Robbins novels I've read thus far, this was roughly my third favorite, although I'd also say that I'm growing more and more hesitant about such rankings. Anyway, this book has rather more sex and less exotic narcotics than some of his other books, and has the usual hilarious speculations about the nature of the universe and why some people are so uptight. If you like Robbins, you should certainly read it. If you don't like Robbins, you should certainly avoid it, and if you don't know there are worse places to start, although I'd still go with Jitterbug Perfume first.
My second featured author was Jesmyn Ward. Her newest book, Let Us Descend, came out in October. I immediately put it on hold at the library but my number didn't come up until January. I devoured this book. I had to physically stop myself from reading it late at night, and when I woke up instead of going for my walk I finished it. It's a tougher, more emotionally grueling read than her two most famous novels, in large part because it's as brutal a description of life as a slave in the antebellum south as you'll get outside of Kindred. And despite that, it's still somehow hopeful without the usual cliche uplifting tone. If you haven't read Ward yet, this is a solid place to start.
Michael Lewis was not featured in my author series, but as a die hard Oakland A's fan I've of course read Moneyball, and absent the baseball connection I thought The Big Short might have been even better. I knocked out his short recent book The Fifth Risk. It's framed as "here's how the Trump administration screwed up the transition," but it's really much more of "it turns out the Federal Government is full of talented and competent people, and maybe we should defer to their expertise instead of ignoring it." It turns out the titular fifth risk is "project management," which given my work experience is something I appreciate, but Lewis doesn't delve into it in the needed depth as he gets distracted by cool stories about competent people. This is a quick enjoyable read but not up to the level of Lewis's other books.
One of my friends once told me Walden was her favorite book. I read a 150th anniversary edition illustrated with photos taken around modern day Walden Pond. I suspect that if I'd run into Thoreau at a much younger age it might have made a really large impact on me. As it was, I enjoyed some of the descriptions of nature and appreciated the anal-retentive nature of his descriptions of his everyday life, but it wasn't a life changing book for me like it apparently was for her. It would be an interesting exercise to write a list of "suggested ideal age to read various famous books", and if I did Walden would be for late teens / early twenties, probably.
For years I've been reading various books, both fiction and non-fiction, about water. I don't know if this is because I read Dune a million times as a kid, but water-related topics have been a constant over the last many years of my life, ranging from Cadillac Desert to The Control of Nature to media coverage, to name just a few. Last year I read The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, which led me to Water: A Natural History by the appropriately named Alice Outwater.
If you want to get good and angry about how the supposedly civilized white man destroyed America's natural water systems, this is the book for you. I've read 1491 and American Canopy, so some of the revelations here weren't new to me, but I don't think I'd ever seen it laid out so clearly how the continent got screwed up by the extirpation of beavers, prairie dogs, bison and alligators, and all the knock off effects on our aquifers, rivers, lakes and streams, not to mention the plants and animals that depend on them. From there Outwater describes the better known effects of our sewers and water treatment. This book is 25 years old so I'm sure some an updated version might have a different coda about the current state of America's waterways, but the upshot is that even if we snapped out fingers and removed all of humanity and our works from North America, it would take centuries to return to anything vaguely resembling "natural" as it was before 1492. And now that we know that, we should have some humility and realize that our decisions can have massive impacts completely unimaginable today. It's a quick easy and essential read for anyone who cares about water issues.
Last year's big comic read was Hellblazer. I read all 300 issues in collected form last year. For 2024, I'm going to read Fables, and I picked up the first three deluxe trades from the library today. Somewhere Angie and Brent are laughing, as they told me to read this for years and even got me the first trade for my 40th birthday, which was now farther away in time than my upcoming fiftieth birthday. Hey, better late than never, right? It's "only" 160+ issues, so it shouldn't take quite as long as Constantine's adventures did.
My sister had his The Food of a Younger Land on her bookshelf when I was there for the holidays. I'm a sucker for books about food and books about the WPA, so it quickly bubbled to the top of my slush pile. Then I picked it up and realized it's by Mark Kurlansky. I've read several of his books, including Cod last year and Salt longer ago, and frankly both fell into the "great concept, meh execution" bucket. However, it's here now and I'll likely read it anyway. Hopefully it rises out of that bucket.
My adult education class the next two months while my daughter is in Sunday School is on the life and theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel. He's best known to the mainstream for marching in the civil rights movement and turned up with some regularity in Taylor Branch's three part history of the movement. I decided to do some extra work outside class and snagged volume one of a biography of him.
I did add a bunch of books to my slush pile, but
[a] I mostly neglected to note which ones were added when so I can't tell you easily which came on in January.
[b] This has already gotten rather out of hand.
Next time, I hope!
And thanks, Nick. I appreciate it.
I bring this up because I'm currently looking at the 300 plus entries that will be featured on my 2023 Books in Review post, and it's going to be rough to summarize in any kind of reasonable manner. Even if I completely ignore the 200+ books I read to my daughter (reminder: she was 2 last year, so they weren't real complicated books), that still leaves more than 100 books, most of which I'd at least touch on in a perfect world. Unfortunately, of all the adult books I read last year, I only did a full post about People Love Dead Jews, while quoting from Midnight's Children and a couple of Hellblazer comics. I also casually mentioned a few books in a "Oh yeah, I finished this book" in my Hilton Head summary. Clearly, this is not the materials for a full summary.
I suppose I could revive the last weekend series I did back in 2018, or at least just do it for books, but that seems like overkill, and even there I mostly just mentioned specific books I'd read rather than digging into them in any depth. So instead, I'm going to copy Nick Hornby again. Way back in 2012, I copied his Songbook concept by doing a year-long series about 27 songs that mattered to me. In 2024, I'm going to copy Nick's "Stuff I've Been Reading" monthly magazine column, which has been around since 2003 in The Believer. I'm going to talk about books I've read, books I'm reading, and books I've added to my ever growing slush pile. I figure even if I only talk about a small portion of the books I've got under way, that'll be a big help to my creaky old memory when it comes to summarize them for the year. There is, of course, a new tag, stuff I've been reading.
With introductions aside, let's talk about January. Thus far I'm off to an seemingly amazing 42 books completed in 31 days, but 36 of those are books I read to my daughter. Some of them are beautifully illustrated or fun or things my daughter loves, but I don't think any rose above "well, I wouldn't mind reading that another 17 times before it goes back to the library" (and they almost all came from the library). That doesn't seem like a high bar to clear, but let me assure you that's a lot higher than you think. I'm not going to read any of them for my own entertainment any time soon, so I will dispense with 35 of them unmentioned. The 36th is Sail Away Dragon, which wasn't a phenomenal book but did features our heroine and her dragon setting sail for "The Farthest Far Away", which I rather appreciated.
Back in 2014 I started reading poetry more consistently, starting with three anthologies edited by Garrison Keillor. I'd keep the current book on my kitchen table and read one or two poems each day. Those three collections got me well in 2016, and then my poetry reading became much more sporadic. Occasionally I found an interesting looking book in a bookstore and bought it and read it, but otherwise my poetry consumption was limited to two "poem of the day" sites. Not nothing, but not great. And then I had an epiphany. With some regularity, those poem of the day sites featured a poem that really moved me in some way. Why not find more poems by those authors and read them? I started this late in 2023 and finished one volume in November and another in December. My current poetry book is Dual: Poems by Matthew Minicucci, as inspired by his poem Nostalgia being a poem of the day selection. This volume has been uneven; the opening section of poems read differently if you go horizontally or vertically was more clever than good to my ear, but it's picked up significantly since it got into the variations of the Greek classical canon. And either way, I'm glad to have cracked the "how do I read more poetry?" code for now. You can see the current list/backlog of poems/poets that moved me on the slush pile.
My other daily read is of much longer vintage. A year or two before the pandemic my father got me a copy of The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, 3rd edition, all 1000+ pages of it. I've been trying to read two pages a day, which I achieve maybe 5 of 7 days a week. In January, I finished the letter 'B', which gets me about 15% through. I've never read a dictionary cover to cover before, and it's an interesting exercise made feasibly only by love of baseball trivia and history.
Now that I've talked about two books I didn't finish in January, let's move to the ones I did!
I didn't get to at least two of my featured authors in 2023. I was half way through Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates by Tom Robbins when the ball dropped on New Year's Eve, and if was officially my first 'adult' book of 2024. I'd say that of the five Robbins novels I've read thus far, this was roughly my third favorite, although I'd also say that I'm growing more and more hesitant about such rankings. Anyway, this book has rather more sex and less exotic narcotics than some of his other books, and has the usual hilarious speculations about the nature of the universe and why some people are so uptight. If you like Robbins, you should certainly read it. If you don't like Robbins, you should certainly avoid it, and if you don't know there are worse places to start, although I'd still go with Jitterbug Perfume first.
My second featured author was Jesmyn Ward. Her newest book, Let Us Descend, came out in October. I immediately put it on hold at the library but my number didn't come up until January. I devoured this book. I had to physically stop myself from reading it late at night, and when I woke up instead of going for my walk I finished it. It's a tougher, more emotionally grueling read than her two most famous novels, in large part because it's as brutal a description of life as a slave in the antebellum south as you'll get outside of Kindred. And despite that, it's still somehow hopeful without the usual cliche uplifting tone. If you haven't read Ward yet, this is a solid place to start.
Michael Lewis was not featured in my author series, but as a die hard Oakland A's fan I've of course read Moneyball, and absent the baseball connection I thought The Big Short might have been even better. I knocked out his short recent book The Fifth Risk. It's framed as "here's how the Trump administration screwed up the transition," but it's really much more of "it turns out the Federal Government is full of talented and competent people, and maybe we should defer to their expertise instead of ignoring it." It turns out the titular fifth risk is "project management," which given my work experience is something I appreciate, but Lewis doesn't delve into it in the needed depth as he gets distracted by cool stories about competent people. This is a quick enjoyable read but not up to the level of Lewis's other books.
One of my friends once told me Walden was her favorite book. I read a 150th anniversary edition illustrated with photos taken around modern day Walden Pond. I suspect that if I'd run into Thoreau at a much younger age it might have made a really large impact on me. As it was, I enjoyed some of the descriptions of nature and appreciated the anal-retentive nature of his descriptions of his everyday life, but it wasn't a life changing book for me like it apparently was for her. It would be an interesting exercise to write a list of "suggested ideal age to read various famous books", and if I did Walden would be for late teens / early twenties, probably.
For years I've been reading various books, both fiction and non-fiction, about water. I don't know if this is because I read Dune a million times as a kid, but water-related topics have been a constant over the last many years of my life, ranging from Cadillac Desert to The Control of Nature to media coverage, to name just a few. Last year I read The Death and Life of the Great Lakes, which led me to Water: A Natural History by the appropriately named Alice Outwater.
If you want to get good and angry about how the supposedly civilized white man destroyed America's natural water systems, this is the book for you. I've read 1491 and American Canopy, so some of the revelations here weren't new to me, but I don't think I'd ever seen it laid out so clearly how the continent got screwed up by the extirpation of beavers, prairie dogs, bison and alligators, and all the knock off effects on our aquifers, rivers, lakes and streams, not to mention the plants and animals that depend on them. From there Outwater describes the better known effects of our sewers and water treatment. This book is 25 years old so I'm sure some an updated version might have a different coda about the current state of America's waterways, but the upshot is that even if we snapped out fingers and removed all of humanity and our works from North America, it would take centuries to return to anything vaguely resembling "natural" as it was before 1492. And now that we know that, we should have some humility and realize that our decisions can have massive impacts completely unimaginable today. It's a quick easy and essential read for anyone who cares about water issues.
Last year's big comic read was Hellblazer. I read all 300 issues in collected form last year. For 2024, I'm going to read Fables, and I picked up the first three deluxe trades from the library today. Somewhere Angie and Brent are laughing, as they told me to read this for years and even got me the first trade for my 40th birthday, which was now farther away in time than my upcoming fiftieth birthday. Hey, better late than never, right? It's "only" 160+ issues, so it shouldn't take quite as long as Constantine's adventures did.
My sister had his The Food of a Younger Land on her bookshelf when I was there for the holidays. I'm a sucker for books about food and books about the WPA, so it quickly bubbled to the top of my slush pile. Then I picked it up and realized it's by Mark Kurlansky. I've read several of his books, including Cod last year and Salt longer ago, and frankly both fell into the "great concept, meh execution" bucket. However, it's here now and I'll likely read it anyway. Hopefully it rises out of that bucket.
My adult education class the next two months while my daughter is in Sunday School is on the life and theology of Abraham Joshua Heschel. He's best known to the mainstream for marching in the civil rights movement and turned up with some regularity in Taylor Branch's three part history of the movement. I decided to do some extra work outside class and snagged volume one of a biography of him.
I did add a bunch of books to my slush pile, but
[a] I mostly neglected to note which ones were added when so I can't tell you easily which came on in January.
[b] This has already gotten rather out of hand.
Next time, I hope!
And thanks, Nick. I appreciate it.