Tag: books

Blog, Reading

2023 in Reading

I was hanging out with some new friends recently and the conversation turned, as it inevitably does, toward books. Someone asked me to guess who read the least out of the assembled company. (Weird move, but okay.) I guessed that one person had grand bookish intentions, but really only read one “big ideas” book a quarter, another escaped into lengthy fantasy series, and the third was a wild card bouncing between fiction and pop psych. Not far off, it turned out. But that’s subject matter, not quantity. Someone said they had a hunch I went through books “like food,” which is true. “A book a month?” someone suggested. I looked shifty. “A book a week?!”

I had to pull up this list to check. It feels off to make that claim when I read so many graphic novels, but it’s true. I love books. I love devouring them. I love thinking about them and talking about them and letting them change and shape me.

Interesting that so many of my top favorites this year were comics! Getting back into working on Seacritters has me wanting to explore the medium more than I usually do, and I found some real gems. I love looking over the list and remembering where I was while reading each of these. It’s a strangely vivid experience. Getting lost in Hilary Mantel at Christopher’s was otherworldly. Plowing through Aidan Truhen at home was a riot. Being bewitched by Trung Le Nguyen’s lines on a beanbag in the Ojai Library kids’ section was nostalgic and peaceful.

I look at these lists and struggle to explain to new people what and how I read. In some groups it’s a shorthand for belonging—in others it’s a gateway to somewhere else.

(Previously: 2022 in Reading, 2021 in Reading, 2020 in Reading)

LegendRough Guide to Ratings
🎭 – Plays
📝 – Poetry
📖 – Books (Fiction)
📓 – Books (Nonfiction)
💬 – Graphic Novels
🔄 – Reread
🎙️ – Audiobook		❤︎ = Yes
❤︎❤︎ = Oh Yes
❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Oh Hell Yes
  1. 📖 Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow – Gabrielle Zevin ❤︎❤︎
  2. 📓 The Quiet Eye – Sylvia Shaw Judson
  3. 📓 Soundings: the Story of the Remarkable Woman Who Mapped the Ocean Floor – Hali Felt
  4. 🔄 💬 Diary Comics – Dustin Harbin
  5. 🔄 📖 This is How You Lose the Time War – Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  6. 📓 The Wisdom of Insecurity – Alan Watts
  7. 📓 Also a Poet – Ada Calhoun ❤︎❤︎
  8. 💬 The Well – Jake Wyatt, Choo
  9. 💬 The Magic Fish – Trung Le Nguyen ❤︎❤︎
  10. 📝 The Wrecking Light – Robin Robertson ❤︎
  11. 📓/💬 Solutions and Other Problems – Allie Brosh
  12. 💬 Snapdragon – Kat Leyh ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  13. 📝 Four Reincarnations – Max Ritvo
  14. 💬 It’s Okay That It’s Not Okay – Christina Tran ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  15. 💬 Queenie: Godmother of Harlem – Elizabeth Colomba & Aurélie Levy
  16. 💬 Garlic and the Vampire – Bree Paulsen
  17. 💬 Garlic and the Witch – Bree Paulsen
  18. 💬 Lightfall Book 1: The Girl & The Galdurian – Tim Probert ❤︎❤︎
  19. 📓 A Sacred Shift – marlee grace
  20. 💬 The River – Alessandro Sanna
  21. 🔄 📖 The End of Mr. Y – Scarlett Thomas
  22. 💬 Skim – Mariko & Jillian Tamaki ❤︎❤︎
  23. 💬 Lightfall Book 2: Shadow of the Bird – Tim Probert ❤︎
  24. 💬 Grass of Parnassus – Kathryn & Stuart Immonen
  25. 📓 Facing the Wolf – Theresa Sheppard Alexander ❤︎
  26. 📖 Hamnet – Maggie O’Farrell ❤︎❤︎
  27. 🔄 📖 A Wizard of Earthsea – Ursula K. Le Guin
  28. 📖 White Cat, Black Dog – Kelly Link ❤︎
  29. 📓 Recollections of my Nonexistence – Rebecca Solnit ❤︎
  30. 📓 Art + Faith – Makoto Fujimura
  31. 💬 Ducks – Kate Beaton ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  32. 💬 I Thought You Loved Me – MariNaomi
  33. 💬 Dear Sophie, Love Sophie – Sophie Lucido Johnson ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  34. 💬 The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil – Stephen Collins
  35. 📖 Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel
  36. 📖 Bring Up the Bodies – Hilary Mantel ❤︎
  37. 📓 The Old Ways – Robert Macfarlane ❤︎❤︎
  38. 💬 Tales of a Seventh-Grade Lizard Boy – Jonathan Hill
  39. 💬 Equinoxes – Cyril Pedrosa ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  40. 💬 Feeding Ghosts – Tessa Hulls ❤︎❤︎
  41. 📖 The Mirror and The Light – Hilary Mantel ❤︎
  42. 💬 Hoops – Matt Tavares
  43. 📓 The Book Lover – Ali Smith ❤︎
  44. 📖 /📓 Kick the Latch – Kathryn Scanlan
  45. 📖 The Big Over Easy – Jasper Fford
  46. 💬 Himawari House – Harmony Becker ❤︎
  47. 💬 Always, Never – Jordi Lafebre ❤︎❤︎
  48. 📖 Just Like Home – Sarah Gailey
  49. 📖 The Fourth Bear – Jasper Fford
  50. 📖 To Rise Again At a Decent Hour – Joshua Ferris
  51. 📓 Giving Up the Ghost – Hilary Mantel
  52. 🔄 📖 Thief of Time – Terry Pratchett
  53. 🎙️ 📖 A Magic Steeped in Poison – Judy I. Lin
  54. 🎙️ 📖 A Venom Dark and Sweet – Judy I. Lin
  55. 📓 Enchantment – Katherine May ❤︎❤︎
  56. 📖 Fugitive Telemetry – Martha Wells
  57. 🔄 🎙️ 📖 Thud – Terry Pratchett
  58. 📖 System Collapse – Martha Wells
  59. 🔄 📖 Carpe Jugulum – Terry Pratchett
  60. 📖 The Price You Pay – Aidan Truhen
  61. 📖 Seven Demons – Aidan Truhen
  62. 📓 Mending Life – Nina and Sonya Montenegro
Brain Food, Reading

Four Reading Rhymes

I’m washing my eyes with words and hoping something turns up that works as I’m moving forward.

Robert Eggers, on writing dialect for The Lighthouse

7. People pretend there are readers and non-readers. But there are just people willing to practice the patience necessary to get hypnotized, and those who quit before their eyes turn into spirals. To read is to welcome this hypnosis, await its arrival, then trust its direction.

Gabi Abrão

Life happened because I turned the pages.

Alberto Manguel, A History of Reading
Reading

A Blaze of Kindness

The Terra Nova Expedition is the Millennials’ polar expedition. We’ve worked really hard, we’ve done everything we were supposed to, we made what appeared to be the right decisions at the time, and we’re still losing. Nothing in the mythology we’ve been fed has prepared us for this. No amount of positive attitude is going to change it. We have all the aphorisms in the world, but what we need is an example of how to behave when the chips are down, when the Boss is not sailing into the tempest to rescue us, when the Yelcho is not on the horizon. When circumstances are beyond your power to change, how do you make the best of your bad situation? What does that look like? Even if you can’t fix anything, how do you make it better for the people around you – or at the very least, not worse? Scott tells us: you can be patient, supportive, and humble; see who needs help and offer it; be realistic but don’t give in to despair; and if you’re up against a wall with no hope of rescue, go out in a blaze of kindness. We learn by imitation: it’s easy to say these things, but to see them in action, in much harder circumstances than we will ever face, is a far greater help. And to see them exemplified by real, flawed, complicated people like us is better still; they are not fairly-tale ideals, they are achievable. Real people achieved them.

I am leaping out of my chair and whooping and cheering and hollering about this passage from Sarah Airriess’s latest Patreon post. (The whole essay was released early for Patrons, so you can either become a supporter to read the whole thing today or just wait it out until it becomes more widely available in a month. Personally I’d recommend the former, because Sarah’s Patreon is one of the best around, but I’m biased.)

This talk originally accompanied the launch of The Worst Journey in the World, Vol. 1, Sarah’s graphic novel adaptation of Apsley Cherry-Garrard’s account of the Terra Nova Expedition. I’m holding my copy right now, and it’s one of the most beautiful comics I’ve ever seen. Again: my appreciation is probably heightened by the fact that I’ve been following along on Patreon for years as she’s shared the process behind every page, but even without that context it’s a beautiful, beautiful book.

A page from "The Worst Journey in the World" showing a view of pack ice from the rigging of a tall ship.
A page from The Worst Journey in the World showing two characters observing a beautiful sunset.

In the microcosm of caregiving, I’m learning this lesson over and over again: it isn’t the systems that make it bearable; it’s the people. It’s Gabriela texting to say she’s bringing over a rotisserie chicken. It’s Jim coming by in an hour to take my dad out for a visit to his favorite coffee shop. It’s Jen holding space for our cohort of young caregivers to show up and commiserate with each other over Zoom because she went through what we’re going through and wants to pay it forward. It’s Hayley texting a loving thought from across the country when I somehow need it most. It’s Sarah picking up my watch from the place in Ventura that I keep forgetting to stop at and then coming to help me build a bed frame. It’s also whoever left a free mattress in the parking lot behind Vons.

I think back on the way I lived through the first ten years of my career and it feels so different. I was bolstered and supported by community, it’s true. I was even asking them for help at every turn to make my books and my work possible! But somehow the ways I’m relying on others right now feel so different. I’m humbled so much more thoroughly by letting people in during this season of my life because it’s not just creative anxiety anymore. That’s peanuts. That’s easy.

This is the real shit.

It’s not freezing to death in Antarctica shit, but some days it feels real close. I’ve feared and loathed the thought of anyone seeing me like this for so long, but time and time again I see that people want to help each other. Or, at the very least, my people want to help me. And my dad’s people want to help me. And my hometown wants to help me.

I just have to let them in.

Reading

The Society of Split Minds

Two pages from J.B. Priestley's book Delight.

I’ve been reading J.B. Priestley’s book Delight during my morning excursions to the lavatory for the last couple months. Maybe this is a sign I’m turning into my father as I age, but I’ve really embraced the art of reading in the loo. I have yet to achieve his ability to stay in there for a half hour every morning, but I’m learning the ins and outs of the practice. You can’t, for example, just pick any old book! You need something with short enough chapters to remain enjoyable and engaging even if you’re only reading a page or two a day.

When I look back at 2022 in reading I realize a lot of my favorite books from this year happened to be Loo Reads. 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write, The Timeless Way of Building, A Primer for Forgetting, Notes from Walnut Tree Farm, Delight, 300 Arguments…I’m sure I enjoyed them for their own merits, but I also wonder if the pace of consumption didn’t have something to do with it as well. They kept me company for far longer than books typically do, and with far more consistency.

Anyway, Priestley is marvelous. So many of these entries feel like they could’ve been written yesterday; I’ve been resisting the temptation to write about them all. (It does, however, give me great pleasure to see Robin blogging about bits from the copy I sent him. I love it when a gift finds its mark.)

Reading

2022 in Reading

Back at it and even less able to provide commentary than I was this time last year, but hot damn I love books.

(Previously: 2021 in Reading)

LegendRough Guide to Ratings
🎭 – Plays
📝 – Poetry
📖 – Books (Fiction)
📓 – Books (Nonfiction)
💬 – Graphic Novels		❤︎ = Yes
❤︎❤︎ = Oh Yes
❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Oh Hell Yes
❤︎❤︎❤︎❤︎ = Priestdaddy
  1. 💬 Five Worlds: The Sand Warrior – Mark Siegel, Alexis Siegel, Xanthe Bouma,  Matt Rockefeller,  Boya Sun
  2. 📖 Pirate Freedom – Gene Wolfe
  3. 💬 Thirsty Mermaids – Kat Leyh ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  4. 🔄 📖 Going Postal – Terry Pratchett ❤︎❤︎
  5. 📖 A Dark and Starless Forest – Sarah Hollowell
  6. 📖 Northanger Abbey – Jane Austen
  7. 🔄 📓 The Do-it-yourself Guide to Fighting the Big Motherfuckin’ Sad — Adam Gnade 
  8. 💬 The Daughters of Ys – M.T. Anderson, Jo Rioux
  9. 📓 How to Live, or A Life of Montaigne – Sarah Bakewell
  10. 🔄 📓 Burnout – Emily & Amelia Nagoski
  11. 🔄 📖 Small Gods – Terry Pratchett ❤︎❤︎
  12. 📓 At the Center of All Beauty: Solitude and the Creative Life – Fenton Johnson ❤︎❤︎
  13. 📖 A Psalm for the Wild-Built – Becky Chambers ❤︎❤︎
  14. 📖 Luster – Raven Leilani ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  15. 📓 A Primer for Forgetting – Lewis Hyde ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  16. 📓 The Artist’s Way – Julia Cameron ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  17. 📓 Tiny House Living – Ryan Mitchell
  18. 💬 Amulet Book 1 – Kazu Kibuishi
  19. 💬 Amulet Book 2 – Kazu Kibuishi
  20. 💬 Amulet Book 3 – Kazu Kibuishi
  21. 💬 Amulet Book 4 – Kazu Kibuishi
  22. 💬 Amulet Book 5 – Kazu Kibuishi
  23. 💬 Amulet Book 6 – Kazu Kibuishi
  24. 💬 Amulet Book 7 – Kazu Kibuishi
  25. 💬 Amulet Book 8 – Kazu Kibuishi
  26. 📖 Doctor Zhivago – Boris Pasternak
  27. 📖 River of Teeth – Sarah Gailey ❤︎
  28. 📓 The Four Agreements – don Miguel Ruiz
  29. 📖 The Echo Wife – Sarah Gailey ❤︎❤︎
  30. 📓 When Strangers Meet – Kio Stark
  31. 📖 Sing, Unburied, Sing – Jesmyn Ward ❤︎
  32. 🔄📓 The Sabbath – Abraham Joshua Heschel ❤︎
  33. 📓 On Imagination – Mary Ruefle
  34. 📓 The Timeless Way of Building – Christopher Alexander ❤︎
  35. 🔄 💬 Mighty Jack – Ben Hatke
  36. 💬 Dancing at the Pity Party – Tyler Feder
  37. 💬 Zita the Spacegirl – Ben Hatke
  38. 📖 A Gentleman in Moscow – Amor Towles ❤︎
  39. 📖 The Decagon House Murders – Yukito Ayatsuji
  40. 💬 Salt Magic – Rebecca Mock & Hope Larson
  41. 📖 Lies Sleeping – Ben Aaronovitch
  42. 🔄 💬 Mighty Jack & Zita the Spacegirl – Ben Hatke
  43. 💬 Making Comics – Lynda Barry ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  44. 📖 A Master of Djinn – P. Djèlí Clark
  45. 💬 Coyote Doggirl – Lisa Hanawalt
  46. 🔄 💬 Mighty Jack and the Goblin King – Ben Hatke ❤︎
  47. 💬 Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? – Roz Chast ❤︎❤︎
  48. 📖 Fair Play – Tove Jansson ❤︎
  49. 📖 Plus One – Christopher Noxon
  50. 💬 Berlin – Jason Lutes ❤︎❤︎
  51. 💬 Your Illustrated Guide to Becoming One with the Universe – Yumi Sakugawa ❤︎
  52. 📖 Matrix – Lauren Groff ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  53. 💬 Belonging – Nora Krug ❤︎❤︎
  54. 💬 My Depression – Elizabeth Swados
  55. 💬 This Woman’s Work – Julie Delporte ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  56. 📖 Shadowshaper – Daniel José Older
  57. 💬 Genderqueer – Maia Kobabe
  58. 📖 Full Dark House – Christopher Fowler
  59. 📓 Polysecure – Jessica Fern
  60. 📖 Spear – Nicola Griffith
  61. 💬 Dying for Attention: a Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care – Susan MacLeod
  62. 📓 300 Arguments – Sarah Manguso ❤︎
  63. 📓 More Than Two – Franklin Veaux & Eve Rickert
  64. 📖 Unclean Jobs for Women and Girls – Alissa Nutting
  65. 📓 Notes from Walnut Tree Farm – Roger Deakin ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  66. 📓 Unmastered, A Book on Desire, Most Difficult to Tell – Katherine Angel ❤︎❤︎
  67. 📖 Maxwell’s Demon – Stephen Hall
  68. 📖 Magic for Liars – Sarah Gailey
  69. 📖 A Prayer for the Crown Shy – Becky Chambers
  70. 🔄📓 Pilgrim at Tinker Creek – Annie Dillard ❤︎❤︎❤︎ (last read in 2017)
  71. 📓 Everybody: A Book About Freedom – Olivia Laing ❤︎❤︎
  72. 📖 Detransition, Baby – Torrey Peters ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  73. 📓 The Joy of Small Things – Hannah Jane Parkinson
  74. 📖 Fisher of Bones – Sarah Gailey
  75. 📖 The Spy Who Came in from the Cold – John le Carré
  76. 🔄📓 100 Essays I Don’t Have Time to Write – Sarah Ruhl
  77. 📓 Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again – Katherine Angel ❤︎
  78. 📖 Toad – Katherine Dunn ❤︎
  79. 📖 No One is Talking About This – Patricia Lockwood ❤︎❤︎
  80. 📖 The Impossible Us – Sarah Lotz ❤︎❤︎❤︎
  81. 💬 Sheets – Brenna Thummler
  82. 📓 Priestdaddy – Patricia Lockwood ❤︎❤︎❤︎❤︎
  83. 📖 Upright Women Wanted – Sarah Gailey ❤︎
  84. 📖 When We Were Magic – Sarah Gailey
  85. 📓 Emergent Strategy – adrienne maree brown ❤︎❤︎
  86. 📖 The Daughter of Time – Josephine Tey
  87. 📖 Fantasian – Larissa Pham ❤︎
  88. 📓 A Handbook of Disappointed Fate – Anne Boyer ❤︎
  89. 📓 Love – Leo Buscaglia
  90. 📓 Delight – J.B. Priestley ❤︎❤︎
Reading

Hollerin’

It felt as if everyone else had already read Priestdaddy and I was last person to arrive at the Priestdaddy Party and yet when I scream at anyone in earshot about how this is the funniest book I’ve read in years, many of them haven’t heard of it at all. A reminder, then, to holler about the things we love, never assuming they’re old hat to those around us. We can always be the catalyst for someone’s next foray into joy.

Reading

Just the Thicket

A zero-to-sixty obsession with Katherine Angel this past week, having never encountered her work before. Just finished Unmastered and a cursory Google reveals that of course it was Olivia Laing who reviewed it in The Guardian when it came out, referring to it as “a giddily joyful book, thicketed with exclamation marks.”

Thicketed!!

I love her. I love that they are peers. I love this game of finding out that people I admire know other people I admire. (See also: endnotes in Unmastered referencing Hélène Cixous.)

This is probably the sign I’ve been waiting for, wondering what book to take when I flee to an island with no internet or cell reception next week. I’ve had Laing’s Everybody, A Book About Freedom sitting on my shelf since it came out, but for some ungodly reason haven’t cracked it. Everything else on my list is a library eBook accessible only via an iPad app and it feels deeply wrong to be reading on an iPad in the wilderness. BRING ME PAPER.

Brain Food, Reading

Rhymes

I haven’t historically been someone who reads a lot of books simultaneously, but I won’t lie: it’s doing a lot for me right now. My brain is scattered and anxious and burnt out and overwhelmed and uncertain, but allowing pattern recognition to come into play as I’m reading across genres and timescales…that I can manage. It helps things feel as if they make sense.

Of course, sometimes the patterns I recognize are massively uncomfortable. Here’s three about habit, practice, belief, and enthusiasm:

Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way:

A photo of a book that reads: As artists, grounding our self-image in military discipline is dangerous. In the short run, discipline may work, but it will work only for a while. By its very nature, discipline is rooted in self-admiration. (Think of discipline as a battery, useful but short-lived.) We admire ourselves for being so wonderful. The discipline itself, not the creative outflow, becomes the point. That part of us that creates best is not a driven, disciplined automaton, functioning from willpower, with a booster of pride to back it up. This is operating out of self-will. You know the image: rising at dawn with military precision, saluting the desk, the easel, the drawing board... Over any extended period of time, being an artist requires enthusiasm more than discipline. Enthusiasm is not an emotional state. It is a spiritual commitment, a loving surrender to our creative process, a loving recognition of all the creativity around us. Enthusiasm (from the Greek, "filled with God") is an ongoing energy supply tapped into the flow of life itself. Enthusiasm is grounded in play, not work. Far from being a brain-numbed soldier, our artist is actually our child within, our inner playmate. As with all playmates, it is joy, not duty, that makes for a lasting bond. An annotation in the margin reads "Jesus fucking christ, OKAY."

Terry Pratchett’s Small Gods:

"Right," said Om. "Now...listen. Do you know how gods get power?" "By people believing in them," said Brutha. "Millions of people believe in you." Om hesitated. All right, all right. We are here and it is now. Sooner or later he'll find out for himself... "They don't believe," said Om. "But—" "It's happened before," said the tortoise. "Dozens of times. D'you know Abraxas found the lost city of Ee? Very strange carvings, he says. Belief, he says. Belief shifts. People start out believing in the god and end up believing in the structure."

Fenton Johnson’s At the Center of All Beauty:

The thing about living alone is that—exactly like living as a couple—after a long time it becomes either a habit or a practice. A habit is a way of living that you follow because it's what you did yesterday and the day before and the day before that. A practice is a way of living that you create and renew every day. A habit is a way of being that controls you. A practice is a way of being that you control—a deliberate (ad)venture into the unknown.

I think I’ve listed these in the order I encountered them, but I can’t be sure. I just know I read the Cameron passage and felt personally attacked in that good, awful way that means something true is surfacing. I love daily drawing challenges. Arguably I’ve built a whole career on them. But I also, deep down, know that they can become a kind of ego trap. Fortunately there are all these other rhyming passages that offer alternative paths and approaches. Johnson underlines a truth I’ve already folded into large parts of my brain: that there’s a fundamental difference between a habit and a practice.

Bonus Kicker: I read Zina that passage from Cameron and she immediately latched onto the etymology of enthusiasm. “Did you know?” she asked. And I had to reply that I did, because there’s a phrase rattling around in my brain:

“The Greeks said that to be enthusiastic was to be filled with God.”

Why do I know this? Why do I know it with this specific wording? It feels like something I know through repetition, like I’ve heard it read aloud many times or included in a talk. I dig around in the filing cabinets of surface memory and find nothing.

At 11:30 that night I finally find it: a single quote pulled from a series of small stories written by Frank Chimero in, as far as I can tell, 2010. I’d written it down in 2016 in an old notes document where I kept links and things to include in my newsletter. A quick spin through the archives suggests that I never actually wove it into an update, but every time I went to write one I’d skim through that list of quotes and links and there it would be: a phrase.

I suppose this is how we learn.