We are off. The week between Christmas and New Years Day is sacred to me. Religiously, yes, sure, very important. But we don’t have regular work for a few days, and are filling up time with family and errands, as we always have. There were years when this was the only week-long break I’d get, and I developed an advanced relaxation tactic:
Wake up early. Take walk while listening to new year music you missed. Return. Read with family or, if Christmas Day, unwrap presents and then read what you got. (You will always have something, and they will have whatever books you got them.) Fiddle around on laptop. Walk while listening to podcast. Return, clean. Eat dinner. Take a drive somewhere. Return. Watch something. Read until exhausted.
There are ways to screw this up. I can get far too involved in a game of Civilization, letting minutes click by with no sense of tiem until I look around and see my family’s left the room. I can drink too much, a risk during the six years when my father and I would get single malt scotch for each other, less of a risk now. I can walk too little, and feel beached instead of comfortable.
It’s not hard to get this right, and we unwound real good this season. We watched “The Holdovers” together, perfect for boomers who get wrapped up in nostalgia when Cat Stevens starts playing on a soundtrack. Legitimately great movie, drawing on the deathless bond between a formerly ambitious man who settled for a monkish life and a smart young kid who worries that he’s doomed.
And it was a very good week for clearing out stuff. It had been, no joke, 20 years since I’d last sold anything on eBay. I’d given away hundreds of books, but I was starting to churn through out of print stuff, and my diogenic brain had been convinced that anything hard to replace should never be given away.
Come on. I’d always picked up cheap graphic novels or paperbacks from the bins when I visited used book stores. (This was a problem for years: If I had any downtime on a trip, I’d map to a used book store, root around, and find a first edition of “Sabbath’s Theater” or a signed book by Alex Jones (“to Joan”). Didn’t need them! Compromise: I would check if they were worth anything, and sell the ones that were.
Twelve days online, and a nice guy from Indiana bought my “Warriors of Plasm” collection. Why did I have that? When I was a teenager, I saw a compelling feature about the tenpole in Jim Shooter’s second comics start-up, Defiant Comics, and made a note to check it out. Years later, in Omaha, I saw a $5 copy of the book, grabbed it, and forgot about it. Verdict: Nice little sci-fi epic about the inhabitants of a living, hungry planet. But I didn’t need to own it forever.
Shooter was one of the major figures of 1980s and early 1990s comics, the period when I got into them. He had an irresistible story — the son of a steelworker who, at age 14, started selling scripts and art to D.C. and Marvel. By age 27, Marvel Comics had made him editor-in-chief, and according to Shooter, he’d been expected to wind the comics business down so the brand could move into more respectable markets. He led it through its second boom period, creating the cross-over (“Secret Wars”) that stretched a single story across more different comics than anyone ever had, popularizing (not quite creating) the sort of IP blizzard that would re-make the blockbuster movie, 30 years later.
I got a bit more than I gave away, but consider the timing. The haul, under the tree:
GENRE: Krautrock, Death Metal, Trip-Hop. Three short guides to musical trends from the publishers of the 33 1/3 books. The Trip-Hop one did the trick for me. I’d been living in England during the peak of trip-hop; Best Albums Ever lists, which I took seriously in high school, put stuff by Portishead and Tricky next to the Beatles. But I was never really into it, and didn’t understand where it came from. Twenty-five years later, problem solved.
Kurt Vonnegut: The Complete Novels. A big box from the Library of America folks, which contains not all of Vonnegut, but more than you want to read. Did I ever intend to read “Timequake?” Now I will.
Shirley Tepper, “Grass”
Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth, “The Space Merchants”
M. John Harrison, “The Centauri Device.” Three of the SF Masterwork paperbacks put out by the UK publisher Orion. No opinions yet.
I’m skipping the Best Thing I Read this week to throw the net further and run down everything I read this year. Next week’s final diary will cover movies, because except for the two years we were in east L.A., I never get a chance to watch those 11:59 Oscar bait pictures that get dumps into just two markets in December. I’m not trying to watch everything, but let’s give “Ferrari” a chance to make the list.
The Damage
Goodreads is discussed mostly for how it’s misused, most recently by a YA author review-bombing her competition — something that apparently happens all the time. (Stay safe: Don’t read YAF.) You’ll excuse me, but I think I use it brilliantly. Here is a website that contains the ISBNs of every published book, with very few exceptions. (“The Turner Diaries” doesn’t have an ISBN.) Here’s a date/time feature that lets you track when you’ve read something. Here are clubs that I… honestly, I ignore the clubs and other features. The website helps me gamify my hobby, like this newsletter.
For the second year, I did a “reading challenge,” and kept a record of what I flipped through. My goal was two books per week, which I demolished, thanks to the generous definition of “book” on the site. All the graphic novels I churned through counted as reads, inflating my count. The rundown:
Graphic Novels: 138
Non-fiction: 99
Fiction: 70
Nice to have that in one place. I read graphic novels quickly unless the art’s extraordinary, and I read most of them to give away. (See above.) They’re not training too much time from the serious reading, but at times, I realize I’m reading sophomoric stuff that I stopped being interested in a decade ago. Either I held onto it that long, or grabbed it from a discount pile with the temporarily feeling that I can recover my youth by reading “Wolverine versus Badrock.” Reader, I cannot, nor would I want to anymore.
Favorite Graphic Novel: Daniel Clowes, “Monica.” It’s the best thing he’s done. There is plenty of the Lynchian stuff that built his audience with “Eightball,” and no two chapters are told the same; our protagonist changes, our setting changes, the narration changes. This is all used to tell a brutally personal story of maternal abandonment and regret, personal like he never gets. Clowes’s generation is old now, more self-reflective but no less ironic.
Runner-up: Mattie Lubchansky, “Boys Weekend.” Huge leap forward for a cartoonist I already loved.
Favorite Nonfiction Graphic Novel: Noah Van Scivers, “Joseph Smith and the Mormons.” Terrific story to tell in this form.
Runner-Up: Box Brown, “The He-Man Effect.” Cynical but complete fair profile of the toy industry and how it ate childhood.
Least favorite trend: Peak Junji Ito. Japan’s great horror manga-ka has been on a cold streak. It happens, and it often happens in these conditions, when an artist’s fame has exploded and people will pay for anything he’d ever published. A collection of pretty boring Soichi stories, an adapted urban legend handbook (“Mimi’s Tales of Taylor”) — just a firehose of okay stuff right now, he needs a break.
The other books — all real, with words and just a couple pictures. (Alex Garland’s “The Beach” has native art above some chapter headings.)
Favorite Audiobook: Rory Stewart, “How Not to Be a Politician.” (In the UK it was published as “The Edge of Politics.”) Stewart entered politics as a budding Great Man, having walked across Afghanistan at great personal risk to write about it. In the opening chapter of his memoir, he recounts a talk with Michael Ignatieff, the Canadian intellectual who became the Liberals’ least effective leader in a century. The older man convinced the younger to run for parliament, and Stewart lucked out, winning a safe Tory constituency on his first try and climbing to a cabinet seat. He’s a witty writer, half Larry David and half Lord Byron, and he shares hilariously dark impressions of five prime ministers - a hack (Cameron), a try-hard (May), a clown (Johnson), an automaton (Truss), and a hack again (Sunak).
Best Biography: I said it on the work newsletter and I’ll say it now: Richard Norton Smith’s biography of Gerald Ford is a marvel, superseding every other Ford book, enriched by the oral histories and off-record stories that became available after 2006.
Best Classic: Joseph Heller, “Catch-22.” Held up. I surprised myself laughing at the Major Major Major Major joke each time.
Best Apocalypse: The mass, planned starvation of England in “Nordenholt’s Million.” Reading the first stories in played-out genres gave me fun all year. I learned about this proto-dystopian novel, bought it cheap, and thrilled at the story of a Henry Ford-like efficiency maniac staving off the end of civilization by bringing an elite group of scholars and workers to a safety zone.
The worsts: There were quite a few, especially when I was speeding through mediocre superhero comics to give away. Vicky Osterweil’s “In Defense of Looting” was underbaked and never proved its premise. “Foot Soldiers,” a Jim Kreuger project about kids who obtain the power-transferring weapons of defeated superheroes, was just boring. The early utopian novels, “News from Nowhere” and “Looking Backward,” were just plain dull, completely replaced by later, better novels in their genre.
Ten best reads, no particular category:
10. Henry James, “The Ambassadors”
9. Zeke Faux, “Number Go Up”
8. Jack Womack, “Random Acts of Senseless Violence”
7. Walter Chaw, “A Walter Hill Film”
6. Saul Bellow, “Mr. Sammler’s Planet”
5. Gene Wolfe, “The Fifth Head of Cerebrus”
4. Martin Amis, “The Zone of Interest”
3. Kerry Howley, “Bottoms Up and the Devil Laughts”
2. Joseph Heller, “Catch-22”
1. Marcus Aurelias, “Meditations”
Make your jokes, but you can’t shame me for “pretentious” reading. “Meditations” holds up, and I’ve kept it on the Kindle to go back to. This made it funnier when the book showed up as Hunham’s default gift in “The Holdovers.”
I’ll run down movies next week. Hope you’re getting some time off, too.