In the 365 days which occurred between January 1st 2022 and December 31st 2022, I read some books. Many of them were audio books which were listened to with my ears rather than systematically viewed with my eyes. It is not useful to make a distinction between these two modes of ingestion. Likewise some of what I list here are comic books, or long form writing published digitally. There are many axes on which bibliomanic quibblers might dislike certain inclusions on this list. I do not respect those opinions.
I previously wrote a similar list for the books I read in 2020. The process of making the list was pleasantly meditative. It's also something I enjoy returning to from time to time. Yet it was so burdensome to write that I was still exhausted from it when 2021 ended. I had no will to go through that process again, so I didn't. Now it's 2023 and I've recovered sufficiently to want to write about 2022, but I hope to avoid the mistakes of the past. To prevent exhausting myself again I will be much more brief and slapdash in my approach to the below. (I completely failed to do that, but I also got through the process more easily this time around anyway.) Perhaps in future years I'll endeavor to work on putting down my book thoughts throughout the whole year rather than all at once after the year is ended. I don't know if I'll actually do that, but it would be good if I did.
Please note that I've taken no particular effort to avoid spoilers. If that's something you care about, don't read this.
A Brief History of Seven Killings
by Marlon James
The audio recording I acquired for this book was broken up into 3 files. This is always irritating. It means the files are each like 9 hours long, and if I lose my place in the recording it will be a huge hassle to find it again. For whatever reason these 3 files were named such that they defaulted to playing in reverse order. I did not notice this. Thus I read the final third of this book first, then the middle third, then the first third. I only realized something was up when I got to the end of the book and was jarred by how much of an abrupt anticlimax it was. More anticlimactic even than books that intentionally end on an anticlimax.
It's not a bad way to experience the story, actually. The narrative works well as a nonlinear one. We open on a violent man making a stupid decision which lands him in jail, and being in jail eventually results in his death. We then step back to see how that man rose through his criminal syndicate to be in a position to make that stupid decision in the first place. We then step even further back to see why this man is the way he is at all. Why he is a man who defaults to violence. There are other characters as well, and all of them have similar progressions backwards through time. Or, at least I thought they did. Others probably will not experience the book in three big reversed chunks.
I loved this book, and I love it all the more because I consumed it in this peculiar way. It gave me a unique perspective on the work I otherwise would not have had. It gave me the best example I know of for the value of approaching art in unusual ways. It also gave me a good reason to return to the book and read it again in a few years, and see it in a whole new light by reading it from the start this time.
The Road to Wellville
by T.C. Boyle
I began reading this in 2019, set it down after the first 3 chapters, and didn't pick it up again until late 2021. After that I couldn't put it down. A real page turner once you get over that 2 year gap in the middle. ;)
This one was recommended by a coworker when I told them I wanted to step outside my usual genre wheelhouse. It's a bunch of rich dummies preaching woo and failing to pitch woo. There's also a token poor who wants to get in on the woo-preaching scam, but doesn't have the capital to be insulated from mistakes and poor fortune the way everyone around him does. There's also one character who plays Diogenes to everyone's bullshit.
Bone
by Jeff Smith
It's a pretty darn good comic book. The art is strong and the storytelling is good. I didn't love the way Thorn was often drawn to look sexy when that wasn't appropriate to the scene, but there are much more egregious examples of that tendency in comic books than Bone.
The Abominable Charles Christopher
by Karl Kerschl
A webcomic I was introduced to this year. I enjoyed it well enough to read through its archives, though it left little lasting impression. There's a disconnect between this this serious story about strength, nature, and responsibility; set against a backdrop of gag strips about animals lampooning the foibles of human culture in the forest. It doesn't gel for me, and currently looks unlikely to reach any kind of conclusion.
Norse Mythology
by Neil Gaiman
Before this I had only a passing familiarity with the canon of Norse myths. Now I perhaps know them a bit better, though I've got no idea how much Gaiman elaborated on what comes down to us from the primary sources. The way the stories were told seemed tainted by comic bookery.
It's a good book, I don't mean to denigrate it, but it's difficult to talk about since I don't know where ancient myths end and this book begins. I can say I enjoyed it, but I can't properly say it's a good way to experience these myths. For all I know Gaiman gutted and bastardized the source material in his reimagining of them. Probably not, but I can't judge.
The Order of the Pale Moon Reflected on Water
by Zen Cho
Above I mentioned that I ought to write these thoughts down throughout the year to make the task of assembling them less daunting. Another reason to do so would be to avoid the lag between the books described towards the start of the page which I finished reading a year or more ago; and the books at the end which I may have finished a few days ago or, indeed, still be reading.
As I write this, a year later, I remember the broad strokes of this story. I appreciated the world it gave me a look into, enjoyed my time with this band of robbers, and their flexible and nuanced understanding of gender. There was an undeniable sense that I was only reading this on a surface level, because much of its background depended on having a cultural context to which I am not privy.
But if I had anything really insightful to say about it other than "Good book, u should read" then it has slipped from my mind over the past 11 months.
Shade's Children
by Garth Nix
I enjoy Garth Nix' work. I enjoy post-apocalypse stories. I enjoy books that refuse to explain their fantastic elements, and I enjoy self-contained stories that begin and end within a single novel. Despite all of that, I did not enjoy Shade's Children.
Really, that's okay. Garth Nix is a Young Adult author, and I am not a Young Adult. His books aren't for me, even when I do enjoy them. Still, after his masterwork Old Kingdom books, the fact that this one is merely "fine" was disappointing.
I was never able to get invested in the world's status quo enough to care when it was shattered. I kept expecting to spend some time with the characters as they lived the normal parts of their lives. There are social and personal lives on the submarine. It's harshly regimented and frequently interrupted, but downtime between dangerous missions exists—just, not for the reader. Our characters jump from one crisis to another, and so the only thing it ever felt like they were fighting for was their survival. They had nothing more than that to protect.
Also Shade himself was too obviously a bastard from the start for his "betrayal" to leave any kind of emotional wound. And his redemption, such as it is, kinda comes outta nowhere without feeling sincere.
Space Weirdos
by Casey Garske
I have still never managed to play miniature skirmish games with anyone, but I keep reading rules for them. This one was written by a friend, and seemed particularly accessible even compared to other simple rulesets I've read. Maybe someday I'll attend a con Casey is at, and I can leverage our acquaintance to get some play time with him.
Piranesi
by Susanna Clarke
Recommendations for this book were really stacking up before I ever got around to it. Three different friends pointed me towards it independently of one another. Once I did read it it was easy to see why it has so much influence in my sphere. On the one hand it appeals to my base nerd instincts. There's a mysterious dungeon, occultic wizards, mysterious adventures in another world! On the other hand those subjects are all handled with uncommon literary grace. Among the best books I've read this year, and one I definitely want to return to someday.
Star Gate
by Andre Norton
I have no recollection of how this book came into my possession. One day I was perusing my shelves for something easy to travel with, and this little yellowed pulp novel printed in the 1950s caught my attention. It's a book with a strong setup, but the execution was mid.
The story follows Kincar, native of a world which space faring humans first visited a generation ago. The world is technologically primitive, with society organized into fortress city-states governed by a warrior caste. Humans have attempted to live alongside the natives of this planet, but as the story begins the humans have realized they're having a bad influence, and have chosen to depart. They take with them all of the half-humans who have been born as a result of interbreeding with the native nonhumans, and Kincar is surprised to learn that his father was a human!
The humans love this planet too much to leave it entirely, though. So instead of flying away in their space ship they shift themselves into an alternate reality where intelligent life never evolved on this world, thus allowing them to ethically colonize it. However, they fail to find such a reality. Instead they find one in which intelligent life evolved the same way it did on Kincar's original home, and humans came to this world as well. But they're EVIL versions of the same humans Kincar is now traveling with. The evil humans have used their superior technology to brutalize and enslave the native peoples. Our heroes cannot bring themselves to continue searching for another reality without first freeing this one from the clutches of their doppelgangers.
It's a bit convoluted and trite with its purely good and purely evil humans. The storytelling is also pretty mid, like I said; but none the less I did enjoy this book. One of the most interesting things about it is that the appearance of the humans is only ever described by how they differ from Kincar's own people; and likewise everything we know about what Kincar's people look like is inferred by assuming the inverse. So, for example, the humans are described as being very tall; so the reader is left to understand that Kincar's people are shorter than us. All the humans are also noted as having dark skin, which presumably means all the humans in this 1958 novel are Black. Way to go Andre Norton, (who seems like a pretty interesting character herself tbh).
The Gentle Giants of Ganymede and Giant's Star
by James P. Hogan
The latter two parts of the trilogy which begins with Inherit the Stars. The books are oldschool dry science fiction of my favorite sort, where the characters encounter some problem or mystery they solve in bits and pieces throughout the narrative. Each new discovery creates two new questions until finally it all comes together at the end. In "The Gentle Giants of Ganymede," humanity encounters a group of aliens whose species evolved in our solar system eons before we ourselves did. This specific group suffered a malfunction in their ship's FTL drive, and they've been stuck in a time dilated state for 25 million years. In that time their civilization completely collapsed, ours began, and developed enough to be just now colonizing the solar system. It was sincerely heartwarming the way humanity and the Ganymeans immediately made friends with one another. I kept expecting something to go wrong, but none of the conflict ever depends on the two species antagonizing one another.
Giant's Star wasn't quite as good IMHO. In fact I'd say each book in the trilogy is a bit of a step down from the one before it, though all are worth reading. The last book has the time-dilated Ganymeans reconnecting with their own people, who moved their civilization to a different solar system eons in the past. They took a group of humans with them who have maintained a singular fascist state for 20 million years, have been actively interfering with earth because they regard earth humans as genetically inferior, and have managed to keep all of this hidden from the more-advanced Ganymeans because the Ganymeans have no concept of deception. It felt a little cheap to me to say that all humanity's past evil was due to evil space humans, rather than letting humanity own and outgrow their faults. Though the story was a real page turner by the end in any event.
Sometime after writing this trilogy the author apparently adopted a bunch of fascist ideals himself, then returned to write more books in the series that are shit. I haven't read them myself so I can't confirm, but I'm also not inclined to give them a try.
The Marrow Thieves
by Cherie Dimaline
The strongest piece of Young Adult literature I read this year. It hardly even feels like YA aside from the main characters being teens, and the fact that they're oppressed by a cartoonishly evil government. And the teens, rather than learning to be entirely self reliant, must learn to trust the wisdom of the adults who care for them. And the cartoonishly evil government is just real-world colonial genocide of native peoples. So…fax, no printer.
This is a kids' book without kids' gloves. Contemporary literature where the characters talk like actual human beings, rather than bots who've been trained on how to avoid getting canceled on twitter. That in itself is a mark of distinction among the contemporary lit I've read lately.
Always Coming Home
by Ursula K. Le Guin
This is Zedeck Siew's favorite book, which he recommended to me when I asked him and some other friends for book recommendations. (Actually, a lot of these books were recommended by Zedeck because he was the last one to send me his recs, and I started reading through the recs at the end of the list moving towards the start.) I didn't enjoy reading this book at all, but it has stuck with me more than many books I enjoyed more this year.
I appreciate the experimentation of it. It's less of a novel and more of a fictional anthropological report with a novel-esque center to make it approachable. I wanna be the sorta cool intellectual fella who delights in that sorta thing, but I was bored and I'd be lying if I said I wasn't. Even that novel-esque center is more a framing device for personalized descriptions of the anthropology stuff.
Setting delight and boredom to one side, though, the story has stuck with me. After a world-ending cataclysm a young woman lives in a society with only rudimentary technology, but which has developed a social structure that is much better than the one we all live under today. Her father, whom she doesn't meet until she is a teenager, is from a different society which is hierarchical, patriarchal, and warlike. When she meets him, she decides to go live with him. She discovers it is terrible, and as a young woman she returns home with a new appreciation for her own society. This plot synopsis will be useful for understanding my feelings about The Dispossessed, which I read later in the year.
The Ruins
by Scott Smith
A big part of what I enjoy about slasher movies is that they're short. This is basically a slasher book. Books are not short. This story wore out its welcome for me a long before the end.
Also, if you're gonna write a book where every character is unpleasant to be around you gotta try harder to make them feel like real people. Consider this punnett square:
| Likable | Unlikable | |
|---|---|---|
| Well Rounded Characters |
Good simple fun! | Good complex fun! |
| Simple Caricatures |
This isn't good, but at least it's kinda fun. | The corner of misery. |
Note to self: there's gotta be a more attractive way to display Punnett squares.
I don't know if there's any truth in that punnett square. I can imagine myself arguing the inverse of this for a book I liked more, but I didn't like this book very much.
Also also, it's not clever to have your characters lampshade the traditional order in which horror movie victims are killed off, then reverse that order completely arbitrarily. There is no reason for "the good girl" to die first (etc.) except that it's the opposite of what horror movies used to do 10 years before this book came out.
Civilization of the Middle Ages
by Norman Cantor
I'm relatively certain I've actually read this book before and simply forgot about it. That's probably more of an indictment of this book's memorability than I want it to be. The history is interesting! Both times I've read it (or…at least I think so) my appetite has been whetted to find a secular history of the Catholic Church through this period. The politics and social norms of Europe through the middle ages bend and sway with every shift in church politics, and it seems like a fun subject to dig into.
I think, though, that the shared civilization of a dozen different states in conflict with one another is too broad a history for me to internalize in one gulp.
Truth of the Divine
by Lindsay Ellis
In 2020 I wrote of Ellis' previous novel, Axiom's End, that it was "obviously a freshman effort." I enjoyed the book immensely, but there were a lot of little things about the writing which made it feel uncertain and unpolished.
There is nothing uncertain or unpolished about Truth of the Divine. It is a beautiful and relevant story, told with skill. It is the book which hurt me the most this year, and I look forward to the next opportunity I have to be hurt by this author.
You Just Don't Understand
by Deborah Tannen
Apparently I socialize like a girl.
The stated purpose of this book is to bridge the communication gap between men and women. That sounds like bunk to me even as I type it. A lifetime of rolling my eyes at titles like "Boys Are Like Condensation on a Window Pane And Girls Are Like a Horse's Concept of Self" have poisoned my brain. The author of this book is a disciplined researcher who knows her subject well, and communicates it clearly and usefully here. The distinction she demonstrates between Men and Women has perhaps gotten fuzzier in the 33 years since the book was published. The way we experience gender has changed a lot in that time. None the less, the styles of communication she outlines remain present.
Over and over again as I read this book I clearly recognized my own behaviors described on the page, and it was always the girl ones. For example, the way I endeavor to keep social groups in hierarchical equilibrium, where no one feels like I hold dominance over them. Often this manifests by deflecting praise that's directed towards me, or by attempting to minimize the effective of criticism directed towards, or setbacks experienced by others. It's a tendency that also comes out in ways that aren't annoying. Why I have these traits had never occurred to me before, but the reasoning makes an exciting amount of sense.
After reading this book I feel as though I know myself better. That I have a better handle on my own life. I appreciate that.
The Hunger Games 2: Catching Fire and 3: Mockingjay
by Suzanne Collins
I read the original Hunger Games quite a few years ago at this point. My intent was to read the whole series, but I didn't enjoy the first book as much as I had expected. Obviously YA isn't for me, but usually YA is at least a fun page-turner. It wasn't, and so I procrastinated on the rest until this year when I instituted a new rule about my reading stack. (Namely: I read the next book in line, no matter what.)
None of which is intended to denigrate these books. They're good books! I see why they're so popular, and they've got a legitimately useful message for young people being raised in the core of the American empire. Also, Catching Fire is totally the highpoint in the series. Mockingjay feels forced. Like none of our main characters actually fit into a central role in a war story, but they've got to be there because they're the main characters. And also this is a children's story so the bad guy needs to be defeated at the end. There's no time to do that in a way that feels earned so we're just going to rush through a quick war where a new faction pops outta nowhere to do all the work. It's an adequate ending, but not a good one.
Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Two Towers
by J.R.R. Tolkien
I last read these books as a child in the late '90s. This was before I knew they had any significant place in culture. Before the movies came out. I got bored halfway through Return of the King and never finished it. That's mostly been my memory of what these books are like, actually: boring. That Tolkien's writing starts strong with The Hobbit, and gradually gets weaker and weaker through the following trilogy.
I'm enjoying the series more now as an adult than I did as a youth. I'll be particularly interested to read Return of the King at some point this year, since that's the one I never finished.
The latter half of Conan The Cimmerian Barbarian: The Complete Weird Tales Omnibus
by Robert E. Howard
This was an immense work to get through. I don't remember when I started reading it, but it was probably back in 2018 or 2019. After what the editor calls Howard's "middle period" I just couldn't muster the energy to continue. Conan is great, but a lot of those stories blur together into an indistinct mush. They really aren't meant to be read all at once. I put the book down, and didn't pick it up again for a few years.
I'd lost my place, and wound up re-reading both The People of the Black Circle, and A Witch Shall be Born. Two all timers which reminded me how much there is to love about Howard's writing, and kept my energy up through some of the drabber entries so I could get to both Red Nails (chef kiss!) and Hour of the Dragon (What a victory lap of a story that one is!)
Side note: the editor of this omnibus is an absolute dweeb who needs someone to bully him. The People of the Black Circle is not proto-feminist literature. Who the hell do you think you're fooling? Embrace the fact that these authors¹ had a worldview steeped deeply in misogyny and racism. Examining their work through that lens gives them so much depth that you strip from them by pretending otherwise.
¹ This same editor wrote a similar omnibus for the works of H.P. Lovecraft, which I've also read. He attempts to minimize that guy's prejudices as well, to the great detriment of his interpretation of the work.
Hidden Grove of the Deep Druids
by Harald Maassen
I am intending to review this for Bones of Contention, and was hoping it would be the first of my reviews where I could confirm I'd played through the module rather than simply reading it. Unfortunately, after introducing it into two of my campaigns, the players preferred to avoid the adventure both times rather than engage with it. The first time was my own fault, though there were big extenuating circumstances to contend with. The second time the players were just being stinkers. I may yet try to run it a third time.
True History
by Lucian of Samosata
The book opens on an essay which plays at moral outrage over the lies written in travel logs like Xenophon's Anabasis and Herodotus' Histories. Even nearly 2000 years after it was written it was funny enough to get genuine laughs out of me. The essay ends with the author deciding that he really ought to get in on some of this "lying" business, so anyway here's the totally true story of a totally real journey that he actually totally went on for real…
The story that followed was never quite as funny as that opening essay, though it was interesting for its own reasons. Lucian is turning the fantastic travel log of the ancient world up to 11. He visits the moon, and participates in a war against the people who live on the sun, etc. It's all too much to be believed in a way that, say, encountering a monster on a distant island might not have been at the time. But reading today the satire comes off more as being a work of proto-SciFi/Fantasy. I wound up appreciating his adventures more sincerely than I think he intended them to be read.
American Gods
by Neil Gaiman
Absolutely nothing like what I expected it to be, in the best way. I've hesitated to pick this book up in the past because I thought it would be an exercise in constructing mythology for the colonizing culture of the United States. Campfire tales about the God of McDonalds, that sorta thing. There's an element of that, but only in service to a much more down-to-earth genre of fantasy adventure. Gods are real creatures, not so very powerful, and given shape by how humans imagine them. In America the gods are starving and weak, hunted by the nouveau riche Gods of McDonalds et al.
Particularly fun is that Odin and Loki are two of the book's main characters. Having just read Gaiman's interpretation of their traditional mythologies earlier in the year gave me a fun perspective on how he uses them here.
1977
by W. Byron Wilkins
Summer is a nostalgic time for me. During the Summer months I'm often drawn to seek out art which is new to me, but reminiscent of my youth in some way. I'm not sure why this is, it's just a pattern I've noticed in myself. For example, I spent a great deal of time in the early and mid 2000 reading lots and lots of webcomics, and this summer I was struck by the desire to find some comics made during that era that I'd never read before. Passion projects made by Gen X'ers or tech savvy Baby Boomers. 1977 was the first one that held my attention.
"Held my attention" is about as high as my praise can go. It's not a comic I would recommend to anyone. Or, if I did, I'd advise them to stop reading at a certain point. Eventually the plotlines start to become ambitious, and the author doesn't have the chops to follow through on any of them. Everything that is begun gets abandoned. The early strips about burnout twenty-somethings doing drugs and watching TV are where the strip peaked, I think. Reading 1977 was like asking someone to scratch your back. The itch gets scratched, but the effort isn't worth it.
Imy
by Irma
When my interest in 1977 began to wane I clicked through some of the comics it was affiliated with, and found this little gem, which was a much more satisfying read. Just a young woman snarking her way through life while feeling smugly superior to everyone who doesn't listen to the same music she does. This was extremely my shit this past summer. It also hits a point of sharp decline eventually. 20-some years is a long time for any creative project to try and maintain its energy. Eventually most of the characters fall away, the protagonist's passion for music disappears, and the updates become infrequent enough that the always-commented-upon changing of the seasons are often the only strips for a given year.
Roadside Picnic
by Arkady Strugasky and Boris Stugatsky
What an odd little book. I never knew what to expect from it, and was often left puzzled as to why it did the things it did. It's great science fiction, no doubt. It examines the idea of Earth being visited by creatures from another world with a completely novel, plausible scenario. It is enjoyable from start to finish, but the intention of the work is as alien to me as the objects Stalkers bring back from the forbidden zone. (Damn, that was a cute little line. Gonna pat myself on the back for that one.)
Questionable Content
by Jeff Jacques
My summertime webcomic feelings were fully satisfied by re-reading the entire archives of Jeph Jacques' nearly 5000-page-long opus. I've been reading it daily for 20 years now, but it's always surprising how much slips past me as a daily reader. How many little foreshadowings I don't notice, how many plotlines get dropped out of nowhere, etc. Questionable Content is a great strip, fax no printer, and re-reading the archives was well worth it. Though goddamn did it devour my time there for awhile. I completely lost control of my life before getting to the end.
Religions of Rome: Volume 1: A History
by Mary Beard
It is a common joke / seriously held belief / thing that is at least a little bit true that the Romans had no religion or culture of their own. They just appropriated Greek religion and culture. In my various reading over the years, though, there have always been hints at the unique character of Roman mythology and religious practice. Particularly in McCullough's fictional-but-superbly-researched Masters of Rome series, mentioned below. For a long time I've wanted to gain a more concrete understanding of it.
Finding a good text on the subject was difficult for some reason. I spent a couple years lamenting that no such book existed outside of out-of-print textbooks that are prohibitively expensive to acquire. This year this book was recommended to me, and I'm absolutely baffled as to how it never came up in my previous searching. The title of the book could not possibly match my search queries more clearly.
The actual facts of the history is that there's a great deal with don't actually know. Much of what seems like we might know has strong counterfactual evidence. One can never expect history to be clean cut, but in this instance the messiness of it is particularly frustrating.
Among the more interesting things we do understand is the collegiate nature of Roman priesthood. That the most relevant religious offices were held in common by a small group. There were individual priesthoods like the Rex Sacrorum³, but the office holder of these were politically neutered. Unable to hold offices, or really to make any important decisions. The Rex Sacrorum, for example, existed so that the Romans could continue to perform certain religious rites which required the participation of the King of Rome. After the establishment of the Republic they gave someone the title of "Sacred King," whose only role was to do what the king would have done when those rituals were performed.
By far the most interesting thing I've learned so far is about the existence of the Haruspex. Essentially these were just diviners who told the future by examining the entrails of animals. What's interesting, though, is that the Romans had no tradition of this style of divination. They divined the will of the gods by observing the movements of birds. Entrail reading was a religious rite of the Etruscans, a cultural progenitor to the Romans. Certain problems were regarded as being most properly understood by the Haruspex' art, and so the Romans would call on the Etruscans to send them a Coterie of Haruspices. This was a thing both fully outside the domain of Roman religious understanding, but also fully integrated into Roman religious practice. To me, it seems like an acknowledgement of their own limits, that others possess wisdom which must always be forbidden to the Romans themselves.
Trek to Kraggen-Cor & The Brega Path
by Dennis L. McKiernan
The Silver Call Duology as the books are collectively called is the worst piece of published fiction writing I've ever read. I technically read the second book in 2023, but I never want to talk about this trash again, so I'm lumping them together here.
To call these books Tolkien ripoffs is to be too generous. No matter the degree of plagiarism you imagine when I label these books ripoffs, it is insufficient. They go so far as to ripoff the weirdly mundane and esoteric bits of Tolkien's world. Like how the Hobbit's (I'm sorry, they're called the "Wirlinga" in these books) last fought a war in their homeland about a generation ago, in the winter.
Nothing that is good about Tolkien is present, and everything that is bad about Tolkien is cranked up to 11.
To give these books exactly one iota of credit: I think it's a nice character trait for dwarfs to be intensely distrustful of copies. That seems like a good foible for a civilization of craftspeople to have.
Full stop that is everything of value I got from these two books.
Walkaway
by Cory Doctorow
Wil Wheaton is not good at reading audio books. In fact he has a unique talent for making books he reads worse because he enunciates every sentence with the same smug and sarcastic intonation. His performances warp what would be a more natural reading of any text I've ever heard him read. Thankfully this is a book which employs different readers depending on which character's PoV is used for a given chapter, and Wheaton's character becomes gradually less prevalent as the book goes on. None the less, if anyone is inclined to read this book I would strongly recommend eye-reading rather than ear-reading it.
Even beyond the damage done by Wheaton, I am conflicted by this book. On the one hand I cannot deny that I enjoyed it. While listening to it I often found excuses to spend more time with it throughout the day by choosing to perform tasks that allowed me to listen while I worked. Yet despite undeniably enjoying it, I don't actually think I like it.
The story is too clean. Too easy. A left-liberal power fantasy. Utopian while vehemently claiming not to be utopian. A story where technological advancements have been imagined to elide any difficult questions about resource scarcity. A story about a champagne socialist who labels herself a champagne socialist in order to rob the criticism of its power, then embarks on a series of herculean trials to demonstrate that she is the most socialist one of all. A book where all the characters talk as if they've been trained by twitter to avoid getting canceled.
I shouldn't overstate the case. There is conflict. There are mistakes, and moral failings. The book imagines a better world but not a perfect one. None the less something about it makes saying I liked it feel dirty. This is perhaps exacerbated because this year I read two other accounts of flawed anarchistic utopias in Le Guin's Always Coming Home and The Dispossessed. Both of those felt more genuine in their flaws. More in touch with the reality of human weakness. More willing to grapple with difficult questions, rather than simply imagining technology sufficient to skip questions of dirt and hard work in favor of questions about high science and nationbuilding.
The Snow Queen
by Hans Christian Anderson
When I took my younger siblings to see Frozen in theaters back in 2013, I enjoyed it easily as much as they did. It's a fun fuckin' little movie, even if the past 9 years have overexposed us all to it.
The short story it is "based on" really has nothing at all in common with the movie. Even for a Disney adaptation I expected a bit more, but there's nothing at all. Like, Tangled at least has a girl with long hair who is stuck in a tower to connect it to the original story. You might argue that The Snow Queen and Frozen both have a snow queen in them, but the two characters are so different in every conceivable respect that I don't think it counts.
As for what the story is: it's fine. Kind of a basic fairy tale pastiche with a dash of Alice in Wonderland. It's like a vignette adventure story for kids. G-rated Cugel the Clever sorta stuff.
The Worm Ouroboros
by E. R. Eddison
The lyrical quality of the oft-repeated phrase “Many mountained demon land” has lodged itself firmly between the folds of my mind, such that unbidden I utter it to myself on occasion.
Shortly after I began, I conversed with a few others who had read this book already. I told them about how much I liked the opening. They all gave me a puzzled look, so I described the bit about the married couple having a breakfast conversation about whether or not they'd sleep in the East wing of the house that night, where sleep reliably brought strange dreams of far off adventures which can last for years at a time. The wife wasn't in the mood, the husband asked if she'd mind if he slept there himself, and she noted that she didn't want him to go off without her for what he might perceive as months or years, even if for her it would only be overnight. As I described this, eyes went wide. Everyone had forgotten this opening existed, because it's never mentioned again. It seems like a framing device for the story, but the story ends without returning to it. I'm glad this conversation made that bit stick in my mind.
I was not riveted by this book, but it sticks in my mind. The force of its pull has shifted my sensibilities towards its aesthetic. Not many works of art do that. So, though my attention frequently wandered while reading it, I must concede that it is a great work.
Invisible Girl
by Zenmackie
Okay, so this is less of a book and more a serialized piece of erotica that I didn't finish because it got boring, but which I found interesting enough for non-erotic reasons that I wanna mention it.
Even in relatively gentle erotica there's often a lack of proper consent. That's not necessarily a criticism. Fiction is fiction, and it allows us to play with ideas we don't want to deal with in real life. Authors, with their god's eye view, can make characters behave with an unearned confidence in what a partner wants, and be correct about it because that's what makes the story fun. Often, though, this fuzzy consent feels like more of a blind spot or a concession to expedience than it does a choice.
What I appreciated about Invisible Girl was the reciprocity of the non-consent. A relationship begins when a boy blackmails a girl; but in their next encounter she gets him back. The two characters trade the position of coercion back and forth, and gradually it becomes more of a consensual game between the two of them. It's a form I hadn't seen before, and I appreciated it.
Steading of the Hill Giant Chief and Glacial Rift of the Frost Giant Jarl
by Gary Gygax
I first read these two classic modules many years ago. I then looked at classic play as something foreign. Something I still needed to grasp the fundamentals of. I approached them in the mindset of a student studying a masterwork. The best the scholars of old had produced, and that anything about them I perceived as flawed was perhaps something I should work harder to understand.
This year I set out to run this series of adventures, and I've been re-reading them one at a time now as an expert in this form. I fully expected them to fall short of my needs, so I sat down with pen and paper to fix them as I went. But tbh they hold up better than I thought they would. They ain't perfect, but they pretty dang good. Easy enough to run without many extraneous notes. Tho goddang, I really don't need to know so many details about the furniture in every room bro. "two tables, three chairs and six stools, with eight satchels along the walls" in every room c'mon.
A Wizard of Earthsea, The Tombs of Atuan, and The Farthest Shore
by Ursula K. Le Guin
If any three books in a series deserve to be discussed separately, it is these three. I'm lumping them together in full knowledge that I'm doing each book a disservice. As you may have noticed, though, this post is already very long. Also the importance of a book really doesn't correlate to how much I have to say about it.
Harlan Ellison is one of the greatest audio book readers ever recorded. This is the only time I've heard him read writing other than his own, and he seems like such a peculiar choice, but his angry rasp sets a superb tone in the first book. There are many haters of his performance. They are simpletons. #HarlanIsMyGed
These are good books. I wish I'd read them as a youth, and if I'm ever in a position to direct a youth towards books these are among those I'd direct them to.
Station 11
by Emily St. John Mandel
You know I love a good post apoc! This one hit extra hard since the cataclysm is brought about by a pandemic, written shortly before the real actual pandemic that we had. My pal Ramanan says the show is a banger too, but I dunno. Watching TV shows is so much fuckin' work bro. All those episodes, goddamn.
I appreciated what felt like a very grounded look at what would happen in a world where some 95% of humans succumbed to disease. The ways in which the survivors would think about the old world, and how they would approach a new one. I do wonder if 5% of humanity would really fall so far. Surely that 5% would include a cross section of skilled people. Surely someone in that 5% would know how to get an electrical grid running, right? Though at the same time years of being afraid of contracting the disease would keep people separated from one another, so who can say?
What really makes the book more than a sum of its parts is the connective thread of this one piece of art created in the world. The eponymous Station 11. The way we follow the woman who made it, who dies in the first big wave of pandemic deaths. How her famous ex-husband is a nexus around which many of those who survive the disease orbit even decades later, and how him gifting some of the rare few copies of this artwork to children allows this woman's vision to survive her as a captivating artwork with no history that anyone can place.
Half of The First Man in Rome and maybe 200 pages of The Grass Crown
by Colleen McCullough
I fully re-read this series in the first half of 2021, so I was surprised when I was drawn to it again so soon. Though, at roughly 6,000 pages² of narrative, the series is expansive enough that by the time I get to the end the beginning feels like a distant memory. So one day I absent mindedly opened to a page about halfway through The First Man in Rome, and became enthralled enough that before I knew it I'd read all the way through to the end of the book. The spell didn't wear off until I'd gotten a good way into the following book.
² I don't count McCullough's Antony and Cleopatra as part of the series, which would bring that page count up another 1,000 pages or so. She didn't want to write it, and her instincts were correct. It's not a bad book, but it feels like an afterthought that was tacked on to the series. Because that's exactly what it was.
Swords in the Mist
by Fritz Leiber
One of my earliest conversations with my friend Ava began with me saying I'd given Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser a try, but that Swords and Deviltry was so bland I didn't feel inclined to read any more of Leiber's work. She agreed Deviltry overall sucks, but urged me to read the next book, Swords Against Death, because it was 'the good one.' I did, and I really enjoyed it! So many good stories in that book.
Ava warned me that the stories go downhill after that. She said I shouldn't even read all the ones in Swords in the Mist. Would that I had heeded her wisdom! There is literally only one story in this book that I enjoyed: Lean Times in Lankhmar. And I enjoyed it a lot! It's the longest in the book, and probably my favorite of all the Leiber stories I've read. But once it's over the book becomes a massive slog that meanders through boring adventures, and ends in the most boring adventure of all.
Leiber's writing is so absurdly hit-or-miss for me that I might be inclined to create an abbreviated reading order for myself, so I can return these stories at some point in the future and enjoy the good ones without immediately having my mood soured by the more numerous bad ones.
The Dispossessed
by Ursula K. Le Guin
The Dispossessed is the story of a man from an idealized anarchistic society. It is imperfect, and he struggles against its imperfections. He travels to another society to live among them. This other society is hierarchical, patriarchal, and violent. Much of the latter part of the story follows the protagonist's struggle to return home, now with a greater appreciation for his native society
The Dispossessed and Always Coming Home are two different takes on the same story. But while the one I read earlier experimented greatly with its form, this story was a much more traditional narrative, and clicked much more with me.
I also just kinda vibed more with the world of this story than the one in Always Coming Home. In The Dispossessed, humans were seeded across the galaxy by a progenitor species. On this distant world they evolved societies which are similar-to-yet-distinct-from mid-20th century earth societies. This world has a moon that is harsh but technically habitable, and a few generations back all the anarchists were sent there so they'd stop making so much trouble on the main world. In Always Coming Home, an undescribed past event put an end to Earth's past cultures. Survivors had to build new societies starting from hunter-gatherers, with the exception that every major settlement has a computer that links to orbiting satellite databases governed by a powerful artificial intelligences. These do not seem to be communicated with very often. Three cultures are depicted in the book: a pastiche of Native American cultures, a sort of Romanesque culture, and some manner of observer culture which has universities and dispatches anthropologists to study the protagonist's culture. Though that last one may not actually exist in-fiction, but might rather be a storytelling device.
All of which is to say: The Dispossessed ver gud.
Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome's Greatest Politician
by Anthony Everitt
Everitt's writing is highly accessible, and provided an easy entry point into studying Roman history for me back when I was new to the subject. This book demonstrated to me that I have outgrown him. It has no particular insights into Cicero's life that I wasn't already familiar with. I'm also prejudiced against the subject though. Chickpea was a nerd. Literally the ur-liberal.
Downtime in Zyan
by Ben Laurence
The handling of downtime has been one of my major D&D interests in recent years. A few years back I was working on developing my own methods in a similar direction to what Ben describes here. I turned off that path, but it is exciting to see the road not traveled in a form so much more developed than I would have been able to take it. I particularly like Ben's very direct framing of Downtime Play being about the individual, while the rest of the game ought to focus on the adventuring party as a collective unit. That notion has been present in my approach, but Ben's articulation was clarifying for me.
Senlin Ascends
by Josiah Bancroft
I started reading this book with the explicit understanding that it was a self contained novel. I was terribly annoyed at the end to discover that it's merely the first of a series. Worse than that: the first of a four part series. Whose got time to read four whole books I ask you? Annoying.
Anyway the next book in the series is in my stack now. So I guess I'm doing that.
Never Split the Difference
by Christopher Voss and Tahl Raz
Ava mentioned she was reading this book, and out of idle curiosity I googled it. I stumbled into reading the free sample chapter, and got invested enough to acquire the book and continue reading it all the way through. As someone who isn't very good at normal human socialization, and is especially bad at anything resembling confrontation, this book included many useful insights. I've been attempting to work the best of what it has to offer into my normal patterns of conversation. It may even be worth a re-read in a few years.
You should definitely steal this book though. ACAB.
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
by Scott McCloud
Apparently it is a great surprise to people that I'd never heard of this book before recently; and a terrible shame upon me that I never read it (even despite having not heard of it.) I can see why. Having now read it, it's an important and useful work. The world is full of important and useful works. Even if one had a great big list of them, and only consumed them without ever looking at any less pivotal works of art, one couldn't consume them all in a lifetime. That's like…the human condition or something, man.
For real though, good book. Given how much I enjoy comics it is a bit of a shame I didn't encounter this earlier in my life, since I think I'm a more skillful reader for having internalized some of its perspective. Though whether or not I actually consistently carry that perspective with me in my comic reading is another question.
I will say though that anytime the author strays from discussing the strictly technical elements of comics, and tries to speak on the nature of art more generally, he's clearly outside his wheelhouse. Like the simplistic little rape comic about how art is everything we do when we're not trying to reproduce or survive. Or the interesting-yet-flawed section describing the various levels of artistic understanding that different craftspeople possess.
Berserk
by Kentaro Miura
Years ago a friend excitedly told me how great Berserk was. He told me about this tough swordsman who went on to inspire so much other art that he knew I liked. About the creative monster designs, another thing he knew I enjoyed. About these cool, brutally gory fight scenes. I agreed with him that it sounded great, and I should read it, then never did. Not until this year, long after that friend and I have sadly drifted apart.
My friend's pitch was well tailored to my interests, but he really buried the lede on what makes this series special. It's not the brutality of its violence or the inventiveness of the fantasy. Berserk is built on the relationships between its characters. I was hooked by it because I felt warmed by the characters' friendships. Wounded by their losses. Given hope by their empathy. To quote Ava: "It's josei with action scenes." (It seems like I've discussed a lot of books with Ava this year).
You heard it here last: Berserk is one of the all time greats.
Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair
by Sarah Schulman
There's a moment early in this book when Schulman criticizes our cultural overreliance on digital missives (texts, emails, tweets). I rolled my eyes at another boomer whinging about how the youths are all messed up. As she went on, though, her argument became terrible in its cogency. She was right.
The argument made by this book is useful, and vital to our moment. A good amount of it was not new to me. The overstatement of harm has been too present an evil in the spaces I frequent for many years now. Even what wasn't new to me was described in a usefully clarifying manner. And what was new was, well. This book made me feel called-out several times. It was not always a comfortable read, but hopefully I can amend those failings it highlighted in me for the future.
The Etymologicon and The Horologicon
by Mark Forsyth
I've been reading the Etymologicon for years. On average there is a new section heading every 2 paragraphs, so it's an easy book to read when you've got 60 seconds to kill. The quintessential bathroom book. Each section is an exposition of some interesting etymology or another; written in conversational style and often with an ironic tone. Word-liker junkfood which I enjoyed, despite the several years it required for me to get all the way through it. Amusingly I unwittingly left the book 2 paragraphs away from finishing it for several months before picking it up to read one day and quickly winding up stuck bored on the toilet.
I've only just barely begun the Horologicon as of this writing, and am taking it at a similarly glacial pace. Its subject matter —defunct words—is less personally interesting to me. At least so far. The choice of which words to highlight relies on the pop-history "isn't history wacky" sorta gimmick. That shit gets real tedious real fast for me.
Iron Fist
by Aaron Allston
Haha, remember in the 2020 post how I said I'm always slowly reading through an old Star Wars novel? Well here we are 2 years later and I'm still slowly reading through the sequel. That's how slowly I read them! I actually finished reading it on the 17th of January 2023. Allston's first three X-Wing books may well be the most meaningful and enjoyable Star Wars media that exists for me. They're some of the only Star Wars media that still holds up for me now that I'm an adult.
All-Star Superman
by Grant Morrison and Frank Quitely
I must make an effort not to be too harsh. It is not All-Star Superman's fault that so many people have told me it's the best Superman story of all time. It is not All-Star Superman's fault that the book I imagined when it was mis-described to me was so much more interesting than the book All-Star Superman is. Neither is it All-Star Superman's fault that I don't like Superman very much and was hoping this story would transcend the stuff I usually dislike about stories centered on this character. All-Star Superman is what it is, and my expectations for it were unfair.
That having been said, I still think the concept of "How would Superman spend his last days if he had a terminal illness" was tragically mishandled here. There's never any hint that he's experiencing fear or grief of any kind. He dispassionately ties up loose ends. Also, going back in time to have a final conversation with your dead father is neat and all, but it would have been nice for him to visit his mother in the present day too, right? She's still alive and is about to outlive her son and he won't even visit her?
The art doesn't do anything to mitigate the story's failings. Faces are inconsistent, nobody has lips, half the characters are drawn with an effort at minimalist realism while others are cartoons, and all of it is buried under these ugly-as-sin digital color gradients.
—Nick LS Whelan
February 5, 2023