Summer reads

And what I've been up to

Last Friday, after I filed the last of my assignments for the week, I experienced a perfect moment. My wife and I had checked into a Joshua Tree hotel, not far from the park, about as far up in the arid hills as anybody was allowed to build. The rooms circled three common areas — a campfire, a game area with the giant-sized Jenga and Connect Four games that some people like to bond over, and a pool. I applied too little sunscreen, pulled on a billowy Hawaiian shirt with a yellow and white flower print, and brought my sturdy little Kindle and a 33 1/3 book (“70s Jazz Fusion,” from the newer GENRE series) over to a spot that would get shady after an hour of sitting.

It all flew by, the book and the time. A week later, when I dropped into two friends’ annual backyard parties, they naturally asked where I’d been; I started gushing about the desert and what I’d read. “Lord Byron,” I said. “Uh-huh,” they said — one time, “wow.” Not necessary! “Don Juan” doesn’t pop up in conversation anymore, but it’s funny, if you have a glossary near you, and the Kindle comes with one. After the first canto I flipped to the jazz fusion book; I flipped back and read most of “Unscripted,” James B. Stewart on the last days of Sumner Redstone and the fight for his empire, which was packaged to look like a promotional poster for “Succession.”

I had only good memories inside the Joshua Tree park. Even my recollection of shifting awkwardly and carefully down the same rocks that our friends had bounced across like Mario and Luigi was fairly warm; I looked goofy, but I didn’t fall. This trip’s memories were about the read, the wedding itself, and the little side trip I took to explore some rebuilt ruins and buy too-sweet iced coffee. The wedding, at a ranch outside the park, began with a ceremony between two trees bent toward each other, heart-shaped, and ended with a live band who blew the fuse box. Nobody minded. They sang “All These Things I’ve Done for You” a cappella then waited for the guests to warm themselves at the fireplaces nearby until the power came back on.

Then back to work, though I did work while out there; part of that week’s newsletter got written next to a slice of San Jacinto cake at Sherman’s. The news cycle I move in was consumed by “Original Sin,” the close study of Joe Biden’s aging and how his closest staff covered it up. What’s tough about that subject, if you’re a reporter, is that you probably didn’t break a story about it; the tools used to move the White House press corps off this topic, from rudimentary peer pressure to the withholding of access, are agonizing to read unless you beat them. If you’re just watching? Terrific stuff, satisfying almost nobody except the outer membrane of Democratic consultants who can’t be blamed for what happened.

I read a lot, and ripped through “The Camp of the Saints” in one sitting. This novel gets re-discovered every few years and has swelled in reputation because American publishers stopped printing it. Why? Its unapologetic racism, which swims next to a lot of Malthusian panic books from the 1970s through 1980s. It has nastier things to say about Indians than “Song of Kali,” the Dan Simmons novel that portrayed Calcutta as a child-stealing hell, or “Nature’s End,” the airport adventure novel with a villain who starts a global cult around selective self-suicide. I’d only read of TCOTS; under the sun, with enough time to finish it, it felt like one of the many eco-panic, population-panic novels I’d read since 2020. The difference is in its indictment of western do-gooders, who condemn western civilization (the camp) to permanent decline by being generous to third-worlders.

Sci-fi stories have enjoyed tremendous political power for the last 100-odd years, or once science got the power to blow up everything. Ayn Rand’s Objectivism will probably outlive Episcopalianism, and stirs in every capitalist once the regulator shows up. Kim Stanley Robinson’s “The Ministry for the Future,” which didn’t work on me as intended, starts with an unforgettable scene of an Indian heat wave that kills 20 million people. TCOTS is supposed to stimulate the same feelings about immigration; in its version of the heat wave sequence, the “last chance Armada” devolves into a scene of mass fornication and excrement-burning, bad enough that you root for the South Africans (still the National Party, with the old flag) when they won’t let them disembark.

I thought of more pleasant books when I put that down. And I realized: This was maybe the 30th in a big pile of unpleasant reads. And I’d been thinking about Jason Koelber’s expose of an AI-generated “summer books” list, just a miserable read, one that made me think again about how much young nerds like me relied on lists to tell us what to try and how that kind of fandom was over. (I don’t feel sad about that, just that there aren’t many jobs that let people read for fun and recommend the best stuff, and that at least one of those jobs is held by somebody who doesn’t want to read anything.

So, something new: I’ll recommend a set of books I enjoyed recently, on a theme. Let’s stick to this grim them, because that’ll make the next edition read more cheerful.

Do you have some time off? Do you want to read some nightmare futures? I can recommend eight.

Anthony Burgess, “The Wanting Seed.” A population growth panic novel, particularly lurid on the social pressure that a post-democratic country would produce to enforce it. As in “The Forever War,” same-sex relationships are encouraged and rewarded: “all over the country blared posters put out by the Ministry of Infertility, showing, in ironical nursery colours, an embracing pair of one sex or the other with the legend It’s Sapiens to be Homo.” Abortion had just been made legal when Burgess wrote this, and the commentary on liberalism is thick:

Liberalism prevails, and liberalism means laxness. We leave it to education and propaganda and free contraceptives, abortion clinics and condolences. We encourage non-productive forms of sexual activity. We like to kid ourselves that people are good enough and wise enough to be aware of their responsibilities. But what happens?

Brian Aldiss, “Greybeard.” An eco-collapse story, set decades after an outbreak of mass infertility, which saps everyone’s will to live and ceases all progress or basic maintenance. Same premise as “The Children of Men,” a decade later, but grimmer, because almost everyone now combs grey hair; the world is a decaying playground for senior citizens.

J.G. Ballard, “The Drought.” Oops, no more water. Lots of sentences like this: “The past had slipped away, leaving behind it, like the debris of a vanished glacier, a moraine of unrelated mementoes, the blunted nodes of the memories that now surrounded him in the houseboat.” I ate it in one night.

Ned Beauman, “Venemous Lumpsucker.” The best piece of pure writing in the bunch, eco-tragedy set in a polluted future where the collapsing ecosystem is great if you bought extinction credits.

John Brunner, “The Sheep Look Up.” More eco-cide, whole world brought down by pollution and a lot of self-denial about how sick you can be while keeping live on earth viable. I didn’t get much out of the political intrigue. Everything that stuck with me was a description of the mucked-up American future.

John Wyndham, “The Kraken Wakes.” An alien invasion from below; something wakes at the bottom of the ocean and launches unpredictable attacks on the surface. When the glaciers melt, people wonder why they complained so much about the fireballs.

Jack Womack, “Random Acts of Senseless Violence.” I think I’ve recommended this before. Near-future America gets pulled under by political unrest, seen through a little girl whose family falls from comfortable laptop jobs with middle-class housing to the violent edge of poverty.

Philip K. Dick, “Selected Stories of Philip K. Dick.” The newish edition, published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, a bit under 500 pages. My old roommate, Julian, had the five-part paperback collection of every Dick story, and for a while, if I saw one used, I’d get it. Uninspired, I just read the stories that had been adapted into movies, then snorted when I read “The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford,” just so nobody would think I enjoyed a pathetic fallacy.

You are in good shape with this. The future Hollywood blockbuster stories are all here, giving you some new respect for the people who crafted gunfights into them. Dick set more stories in drab, sickly post-World War III landscapes, of which “Autofac” and its resource-devouring self-replicating machines if the scariest.

A few other things I’d recommend, if you’re not into grim fiction:

Greg Grandin, “America, América.” The western hemisphere from colonization to Trump. Grandin’s project, which is not in vogue right now, is attacking the United States’s defense of itself as an expansionist power that now wants to wall the world off.

Mark Stevens and Analyn Swan, “Francis Bacon.”

Andy Partridge and Todd Bernhardt, “Complicated Game.” The songwriter for about 80% of XTC’s music on the band and its catalogue. I’d read lots of books with this format; Partridge, a nerd whose anxiety issues took the band offstage in the mid-80s, is especially eloquent and sharp. His anger at Todd Rundgren for how he handled “Skylarking” never fades, and I’ve never fully understood it, but I’m glad for him that the band’s reputation now rests more on its jittery early stuff.

Just a couple graphic novels:

Derf Backderf, “Trashed.” Out-shone on either side by “My Friend Dahmer” (the best story about that serial killer) and “Kent State” (the best story about that incident). I think I like it better. Derf worked as a garbageman for a little while, befriending the kind of guys who have that job for life, and seeing where the city ends. He turns that into a low-stakes story that tells you how sanitation works. Get it for a thoughtful kid.

Box Brown, “The He-Man Effect.” Speaking of thoughtful kids; Brown’s thesis here, jarring to see in a comic, is that childhood was more or less ruined in the 80s by toy companies who colonized young minds and trained their imaginations of collectible IP. Who argues with that? Who doesn’t feel the shudder when we see a balding man pose in his “Amity Beach Lifeguard” shirt in front of his IKEA Kallax shelf of Funkos?

Warren Ellis, “Black Summer.” The 90s Brit comic writers outdid each other with Last Superhero Stories, real nasty explorations of the genre. Mark Millar had “Wanted,” set in a world where all the bad guys teamed up and won, each taking over a continent, an idea he’d revisit with Marvel and “Old Man Logan.” Garth Ennis did “The Boys,” which you’ve probably heard of by now. Ellis and Alan Moore kept going back to the theme to polish it until they perfected it. “Black Summer” differentiates by getting Juan José Ryp to draw horrifyingly detailed hallucinations, decaying skin, and disembowelment. This is the sort of story I left behind when I grew up a little. But maybe you’ll like it!

New the usual diary; I’ll just start with last Friday and end with the holiday.

Books read
Arthur C. Clarke, “Imperial Earth”
James B. Stewart, “Unscripted”
Michelle Alexander, “The New Jim Crow”
Jack Bass, “Strom”

The Best Thing I Watched: “Friendship,” the black comedy about an annoying co-worker with no interests who forms a para-social relationship with his hotshot neighbor. I came out pretentiously comparing Tim Robinson’s usual character, the guy who is always trying to get away with something and claiming that people who deny him this are breaking “rules,” to the Little Tramp. He’s just joy to watch here, and it’s full of little touches that color in his world, like the Obama decision room picture on his garage wall and the “Storm’s-a-comin” etching on his friend’s gun box.

Off to watch the new “Mission Impossible” movie, with very low expectations.