Tag: books

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DNF

 I read this article with interest. It’s on the topic of DNFing books. What does that mean? It means Did Not Finish. For some people, DNFing a book is a simple matter, but for many there’s almost an honor code among readers that you have to finish a book when you start it.

Dear reader, you can.

I’ve tried to force myself at times to join Team Finish What You Started, but in honesty, I’ve always been on Team DNF. Many times I’ve found myself simply not enjoying a book that much, not “clicking” with it. I’m not the type of reader who needs the all-night page-turning experience, and I am not the type of reader who insists that the first page has to GRAB GRAB GRAB me. Of all the books I’ve read and loved over the years, I honestly can’t think of very many at all where I can say “Wow, this book had me hooked from the very first paragraph!”

I know there are readers like that, because I’ve encountered them, but giving a book the first page or just the first few pages is like buying a ticket to a movie and walking out during the opening credits. It makes no sense to me at all.

So when do I DNF a book? Generally, if I find myself reaching the halfway point and I’m just not enjoying it, that’s a sign. If I get that far and I open it up to read and I have to think a bit about what the plot is, or even backtrack a bit to remind myself what’s going on, that’s a bad sign. More often, though, I’ll DNF something if I get roughly a quarter or a third of the way in and the book just isn’t clicking with me. Life’s too short and there are too many books I want to read! Why spend the effort on something I’m not enjoying?

However! There are a couple of caveats to this:

First, I almost never indicate on Goodreads that I DNFed a book. I will only do this once in a great while (I think that at this point I have only listed four books as DNF over there.) This is why my reviews almost entirely skew positive: While I’m fine with not finishing a book, I am not fine with reviewing a book I did not finish. So, by definition, my Goodreads books are books I finished, and therefore I enjoyed just about all of them.

And second, I never hold a DNF against a book, really. All I’ll say is that at the time I tried reading it, a book just didn’t click with me, for whatever reason. Did you ever have a pizza for dinner that you weren’t really in the mood for, and you ended up having it because it was easy and it was there and hey, you gotta eat something? The pizza doesn’t suck, it’s just not doing it for you. Same thing with books, and there are a lot of books that are beloved to me that I DNFed the first time around. Hell, my very first attempt to read Guy Gavriel Kay, who has since become my favorite living author, ended in a DNF.

How do you all approach your reading? Are you DNFers, or are you Finish Or Die types?

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2021 in the Books: Grief, and the Learn’d Astronomer

 I generally try to avoid reading grief memoirs, for various reasons that mainly boil down to…well, I’ve had enough grief in my life already and I know that more is on the way someday*, and it’s a subject I don’t much enjoy plumbing any more than I have to. But sometimes I find a grief memoir that piques my interest and I read it anyway. Smallest Lights is such a book, and I am very glad that I read it. It’s so much more than a grief memoir, really. It’s about science and love and life and death and love again and parenthood and dealing with autism.

The Smallest Lights in the Universe, Sara Seager

It’s also beautifully written.

Not every planet has a star. Some aren’t part of a solar system. They are alone. We call them rogue planets.

Because rogue planets aren’t the subjects of stars, they aren’t anchored in space. They don’t orbit. Rogue planets waner, drifting in the current of an endless ocean. They have neither the light nor the heat that stars provide. We know of one rogue planet, PSO J318.5-22–right now, it’s up there, it’s out there–lurching across the galaxy like a rudderless ship, wrapped in perpetual darkness. Its surface is swept by constant storms. It likely rains on PSO J318.5-22, but it wouldn’t rain water there. Its black skies would more likely unleash bands of molten iron.

It can be hard to picture, a planet where it rains liquid metal in the dark, but rogue planets aren’t science fiction. We haven’t imagined them or dreamed them. Astrophysicists like me have found them. They are real places on our celestial maps. There might be thousands of billions of more conventional exoplanets–planets that orbit stars other than the sun–in the Milky Way alone, circling our galaxy’s hundreds of billions of stars. But amid that nearly infinite, perfect order, in the emptiness between countless pushes and pulls, there are also the lost ones: rogue planets. PSO J318.5-22 is as real as Earth.

There were days when I woke up and couldn’t see much difference between there and here.

Sara Seager is an astrophysicist at MIT whose main body of work involves exoplanets, their discovery around other stars, and analyzing them for signs of life. Among other things, if you wonder how on Earth (literally!) we can look for life on planets lightyears away that nobody in our lifetime (or, likely, in our great-grandchildrens’ lifetimes) will ever see directly, this book will give you some hints as to how that search is currently going. (It involves ingenious analysis of light coming from those planets. It really is amazing, when you think about it, the degree to which light energy is the main carrier of information in this universe of ours.)

In her book, Seager discusses her own work and the degree to which her work has shaped her personal life, and how her personal life has shaped her work in return. Her first husband was a man of considerable energy, whom she met on a canoeing trip; their courtship progressed on more canoeing trips all over the place. But he developed cancer, which eventually killed him at a terribly and unfairly young age. Thus this brilliant astrophysicist, whose work is an important part of the current growth of human knowledge of our universe, finds herself a single parent attending meetings of the local widow’s club, figuring out the nature of this new world she’s been thrust into. It’s the cruelest of ironies, I suppose, that this woman whose life’s work is understanding the universe and seeking other worlds suddenly finds herself in a new world, one that’s familiar to people who have known deep grief, where everything is the same and yet everything is deeply different.

Throughout Seager’s book, I found myself frequently hit in the heart by some of her observations:

:: Everybody dies instantly. It’s the dying that happens either quickly or over a long period of time. Mike spent a long time dying: eighteen months separated his diagnosis and his death.

:: There have been lessons I have chosen not to teach. Not all knowledge is power; not all things are worth knowing. Max and Alex [her sons] never saw Mike’s body. They did not see him leave the house. 

:: [On the Widow’s club] All of our children had become friends. They didn’t gather because their fathers had died; they gathered because it was fun. There is a reason every children’s book is written from the perspective of the child. Children don’t care about adult concerns. We think of children as helpless when they are the embodiment of resilience, more impervious to outside forces than we could ever be again. Despite their suffering, our kids still knew pure joy. 

:: Sometimes you need darkness to see. Sometimes you need light.

:: I don’t think it’s an accident that there’s a mirror at the heart of every telescope. If we want to find another Earth, that means we want to find another us. We think we’re worth knowing. We want to be a light in somebody else’s sky. And so long as we keep looking for each other, we will never be alone.

I love that last one (which actually closes the book, so apologies for the ‘spoiler’). Seager casts loneliness not in terms of presence but in terms of action: we’re only truly lonely when we accept that we are alone and stop seeking others to enrich our lives. True loneliness, really being alone, comes of a permanent turning inward, of looking down and not up. And really, how else would someone who loves the stars see things?

The Smallest Lights in the Universe is a wonderful book that stands in stark contrast, it seems to me, to the view of science as cold and mechanical and mathematical, an enterprise that somehow forgets about emotion and wonder. No less a genius than Walt Whitman expressed this view, in “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer”. But the numbers and the proofs surely don’t have to get in the way of the wonder; rather they inform it and give it focus. Science is not an impediment to love and life. Science is a part of those things. Sara Seager’s book shows us how.

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2021 in the Books: Greeks by any other name, and how I learned to stop fearing the budget deficit!

 More reading!

::  Lloyd Alexander has been one of my favorite authors since I was a kid, but that assessment is basically on the strength of just two of his series: the Prydain Chronicles (which are a classic of 20th century fantasy), and the Westmark Trilogy (which I also consider a classic of “historical fantasy”, the genre that my favorite author of all time, Guy Gavriel Kay, calls home). I had never read much beyond his output in those works, so I read The Arkadians.

The Arkadians, Lloyd Alexander

Alexander was definitely drawn to the trope of the earnest young man thrown into the deep end of adventures involving the powerful (and usually nasty) people of his world, and this book is no exception. Lucian is basically an accountant, a bean-counter in the King’s court, when he manages to overhear the King’s soothsayers plotting against the King. Just like that he is forced to flee, and like other Alexander protagonists, he travels the world looking for a way to get his life back while he finds friends along the way. Here he meets a poet who has been turned by curse into a donkey, and a girl who has secrets of her own. Lucian embarks on adventures that recall the Greek epics, albeit with more gentle humor and a lot less violence.

The Arkadians is steeped in Greek mythology, but Alexander doesn’t beat you over the head with it, which is something I remember from the Prydain books: the Welsh myth in those books was very muted, something you almost had to look for. It’s the same here, and Alexander’s prose style makes for a fun and breezy read. There’s none of the emotional heft in this book that you find in Prydain or Westmark, but that’s not a complaint at all.

::  Americans tend to worry a lot about the Federal budget deficit and the national debt, and rightfully so.

Or…do they rightly worry about those things?

What if we’re worry about the wrong thing? And what if, by worrying about those things, we handicap our own governmental response to the issues of the day?

Hence Stephanie Kelton’s book The Deficit Myth.

The Deficit Myth, Stephanie Kelton

I am the first to admit that I don’t have the strongest foundational of knowledge when it comes to economics, but I have felt a vague sense for years that our discussions of these issues is based on a whole damn lot of faulty assumptions. We talk about dollars that only exist as ones and zeroes in certain columns on a computer drive somewhere as being genuinely real dollars, and we constantly kvetch about government debt and deficits. (Well, we sometimes kvetch about those things. It usually depends on which party is in control of the levers of power in Washington.

I’ve also been hearing for years that “Government should be run like a business!” and “Government has to live within its means, like a household budget!” and so on. I’ve always had the vague feeling that these sentiments are completely wrong, but I could never really articulate just why I thought those sentiments were completely wrong. Along comes this book, The Deficit Myth, by Stephanie Kelton, an economist at Stony Brook University who has also worked for Senator Bernie Sanders. Her central argument is that deficits and the debt don’t really matter, not really, for many reasons, the most important being that the United States is monetarily sovereign and its government is an issuer of its own currency, so by definition, the US government cannot go broke. The things to focus on, for Kelton, are employment and inflation.

I found Kelton’s arguments interesting and even convincing a great deal of the time, even if I didn’t always understand the more technical, nuts-and-bolts aspects of her positions. She focuses quite a lot on a “job guarantee” program administered at the Federal level, which would maintain full employment even in times of economic downturn, which is an interesting approach. I did find myself wondering how this will work as automation takes over more and more of the typical work of human beings. I count myself among those who believe that we are rapidly approaching a point where there simply won’t be enough work for humans to do, and that’s going to pose serious problems. Will we start transitioning to an economy that is not based on work? Or will we prop up the work economy by simply creating busy work? These issues don’t come up in Kelton’s book, and I found myself wondering about them.

Still, this book is an engaging and even interesting read.

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2021 in the Books: Beethoven, Merlin, and the Hardy Boys meet Veronica Mars

 Here’s some of my recent reading!

::  Beethoven: The Relentless Revolutionary by John Clubbe is simply superb. I wanted to get this one done in time to blog about it during 2020, but getting it done this year is fine.

Beethoven: The Relentless Revolutionary, Clubbe

While not really a “life and works” biography, Clubbe’s book has enough of that within its pages that it would suffice if one was looking for a single-volume account of Beethoven’s life. Clubbe is more interested in tracing through Beethoven’s life and music the influences of late-18th and early-19th century revolutionary history and politics. Beethoven emerges not just as a towering figure in art, then, but as an important historical figure in his own right. Many histories of music and biographies of artists don’t really do this kind of heavy lifting; any history is often treated as incidental. Mozart, for example, is often shown not as a part of history, but as a force of his own, only occasionally interacting with history, such as in his dealings with Emperor Joseph II of Austria.

Beethoven, on the other hand, was profoundly impacted by history, and Clubbe shows this readily by tracing Beethoven’s artistic influences and artistic goals in the light of the revolutions in human rights and political philosophy that shaped that time. Napoleon Bonaparte turns out to be a deeply important figure in Beethoven’s world, going far beyond the famous anecdote of the great composer initially dedicating his Symphony No. 3 in E flat major to Napoleon, and then ripping the dedication away when the Frenchman declared himself Emperor.

Clubbe writes:

Beethoven’s music thus reflects both the turmoil of the age in which he lived and no less the turmoil within himself. As he matured, he affirmed ever more passionately the ideals in which he believed. By focusing on the revolutionary origins of his music, itself a response to the revolutionary age in which he lived, we enter the heart of his genius. For listeners, past and present, who have yearned for political and social change, Beethoven’s music has been and remains an inspiration.

This book is outstanding and I highly recommend it.

::  The Crystal Cave, by Mary Stewart.

The Crystal Cave, Mary Stewart

This was a re-read of the first book in Stewart’s Merlin trilogy, which I first read almost thirty years ago when I went on a massive Arthurian binge during my collegiate years. I was obsessed with “the Matter of Britain” back then, and those stories have held a special place in my heart ever since. I remember finding Stewart’s trilogy, with a fourth book she added on later, in a boxed set in a shopping mall bookstore while on a tour with my college band, someplace in Wisconsin, and I read the four books the following summer. I remember loving them as I read them, but I never re-read them until now, although I’ve intended to re-read them for several years now. Time to get that job done!

Stewart wrote The Crystal Cave in 1970. How does it hold up fifty years later? Quite well, in all honesty. Stewart writes a very historically-focused story here, keeping the fantastical elements to a minimum. The Arthurian saga has always presented problems to those who would write stories based on it, seeing as how there is no single “Arthurian saga”; what we call that, or “the Matter of Britain”, is a collection of tales and stories that accrued and gathered and evolved over hundreds of years. This can result in a lot of versions to take on a disjointed feel, which Stewart avoids by making Merlin, not Arthur, her main character; in fact, Arthur himself doesn’t arrive on the scene, and then only by virtue of being born, until the very end of The Crystal Cave. Everything up to then is Merlin’s story: his questionable birth, his entry into the world of post-Roman Britain mysticism, and his dealings with the pre-Arthurian Kings like Vortigern and Uther.

Stewart’s prose is cooler than I remember, heavy on description and with long paragraphs. In this she might not appeal quite as much to modern readers, but I like this Tolkienesque approach. Her characters are sharply drawn, though, and Merlin’s adventures are interesting throughout. There’s a lot of military maneuvering in this book as armies tromp all over Wales, which is something I didn’t remember from my first reading, but then…it’s been a while!

I will be reading the other two books in the trilogy later this year.

::  The Montague Twins: The Witch’s Hand, by Nathan Page and Drew Shannon.

I checked this out of the library on a whim, because I like to use graphic novels as way to cleanse my reading palate from time to time. This one is an absolute delight. I loved it!

The Montague Twins: The Witch's Hand, Page and Shannon

Basically, what you have here is something that reads like The Hardy Boys mashed up with Veronica Mars, set in a small New England town in the 1960s, with magic and witchcraft thrown in. Actual magic and witchcraft, mind you, not the Scooby-Doo fake magic-and-monsters that always turns out to be Old Man Carruthers in a rubber suit and latex mask, who “woulda got away with it if it hadn’t been for you meddlin’ kids.”

Our leads here are, yes, “the Montague twins”, but they have a larger supporting cast to the point where it seems like actually calling the book The Montague Twins feels like a bit of a misnomer. But they’re two late-teen twin brothers who wear their hair in stylish pompadours and who investigate local crimes. As the book opens, they’ve successfully located the missing dog of the local Very Rich Family Who Owns Everything, and yet oddly, the Very Rich Family doesn’t seem quite as happy with this as they should, which does play in later in the book. There’s a lot of bad-blood history in this book that comes out over the course of its story, not all of which is exactly surprising but a lot of which is satisfying in the “A-ha, I knew it!” way.

What I loved most about this one is that it takes its time. We live in a storytelling epoch in which pacing is seemingly everything, in the sense that the faster-paced the better. One bit of writing advice I see all the time is “Every word must advance your story, and if it doesn’t, cut it!” This has resulted in stories that are constantly rush rush RUSHing their way through their plot beats, with no time for the reader to digest or think or linger in the world or enjoy a quiet moment here or there with characters. The Montague Twins: The Witch’s Hand does not rush, which pleased me greatly. Not every story has to whip by like a damn episode of a CBS procedural, folks!

I read that a sequel is forthcoming to this book. I hope it’s a success and there are more to come!

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From the Books: THE BOYS OF SUMMER, by Roger Kahn

 

My years with the Dodgers were 1952 and 1953, two seasons in which they lost the World Series to the Yankees. You may glory in a team triumphant, but you fall in love with a team in defeat. Losing after great striving is the story of man, who was born to sorrow, whose sweetest songs tell of saddest thought, and who, if he is a hero, does nothing in his life as becomingly as leaving it.

–Roger Kahn, The Boys of Summer

I was once a huge baseball fan, mainly during the 1990s. It started with the Pittsburgh Pirates’ string of three consecutive National League Eastern Division championships (they were in the NL East back then, before the realignment that created the NL Central), each of which was followed by a heartbreaking loss in the NLCS. Those three years gave my father and I a lot to talk about and a rooting interest in common, which was a lovely thing. (It’s not like we especially needed that; it’s not as if we had a wounded relationship that was somehow healed by baseball or some shit like that. But a shared interest and joy is always good!) Looking back, it’s amazing how my college years were grounded by sports heartbreak: I’d watch the Pirates lose an NLCS in October, and then three months later I’d watch the Bills lose a Super Bowl.

As the 1990s came to an end, I still loved baseball even though by this time the Pirates had become bad (in an epic stretch of badness that would go on for twenty years), but as the 2000s arrived I had less and less opportunity to watch baseball on teevee, because we didn’t have cable. I never lost my admiration for the game itself, though. I loved its rhythm, I loved how it created moments of fantastic tension without the breakneck pace that lots of people seem to think is essential to an exciting sporting event. And I loved how baseball, for some reason, lent itself to wonderful writing. Good sports writing abounds all over the place, I have to admit, but there’s just something about baseball that makes it fodder for great writers.

I think it has to do with how much baseball there is. Each season lasts for six months, with games nearly every single day; unless there’s a no-hitter or a perfect game or some other kind of highlight, few individual games linger in the mind, which means that an entire season can take on the feel of a long epic struggle that feels sad when it ends, whether your team finishes as World Champion, or a pennant winner, or as just another also-ran along the way.

And it’s not just that the seasons are long; baseball itself has been around seemingly forever, too. The history of baseball lasts to around the time of the Civil War, if not before that, and its rise echoes evolutions of so much of America: the urbanization of our society, our ongoing struggles to find some semblance of racial justice, and the desire so many feel to hang on to aging traditions as our society seems to relentlessly speed up.

Baseball careers last a long time too, at least compared to other sports. A typical football career lasts, on average, only four or five seasons. A good baseball player, who manages to avoid catastrophic injury, can play ten, fifteen, even up to nearly twenty years before the inevitability of age takes its toll. And there’s also the progression from the minor leagues to the Majors to take into account: a poetic questing nature seems to apply to players who toil on and on, always chasing the dream.

Roger Kahn, regarded as one of the finest of all baseball writers, died in 2020 at the age of 92, and when he passed, many paeans to his most famous book, The Boys of Summer, showed up online and elsewhere. I had never read Boys, so I added it to my reading list, and I finally got to it just a couple of weeks ago. (Hooray for borrowing e-books from the library–but that’s for another time!) I finished Boys just a couple days ago, and it really is every bit as good as its admirers claim.

Kahn’s book is billed as a chronicle of the Brooklyn Dodgers over a remarkable period in which they were always very good and yet only won it all a single time, but the book is more than that. It opens with a long reminiscence of Kahn’s family life, of how he learned and grew and learned some more and eventually came first to writing and then to writing baseball. We don’t arrive with the Dodgers until some time in the book, and if you expect the kind of long telling of a great team’s championship season, well…that’s not what Kahn is up to here. He writes about baseball in the larger sense, with baseball’s dual feeling of being something unending, through which individual men come and go. In the book’s latter half, Kahn catches up with many of the stars from those Dodgers teams, the last ones to play in Brooklyn before the team’s eventually forsaking of Ebbets Field and Brooklyn for Chavez Ravine in Los Angeles.

Kahn doesn’t draw much attention to the way time is a constant theme in his book, but it is always there. Everyone whom Kahn profiles here is now dead, and the first edition of The Boys of Summer came out in 1972. The oldest players in baseball today were not even born when this book came out, chronicling baseball events that were already decades old. Baseball keeps on keeping on, doesn’t it?

Toward the end of the book Kahn discusses, almost in passing, the team’s move to Los Angeles. Though he doesn’t underline the point, it’s hard not to sense a disapproval on Kahn’s part of what he might describe as the corporatization of baseball. Even that, however, must be viewed through the lens of time. When Kahn was writing, Ebbets Field was still a living memory. Now, the Dodgers have been in Los Angeles over half a century, and the then-shiny and new stadium at Chavez Ravine is one of baseball’s oldest and most beloved venues. Baseball keeps on keeping on.

Finally, I close with a few specific passages that struck me. Roger Kahn is, among other things, a hell of a storyteller and wordsmith. An anecdote about Gil Hodges, who played first base for the Dodgers before becoming a manager:

A sense of strength stays with a man. When Hodges managed the Washington Senators, he learned once that four players were violating a midnight curfew. Hodges believes in curfews and he convened his ball club and announced: “I know who you were. You’re each fined one hundred dollars. But a lot of us are married and I don’t want to embarrass anyone. There’s a cigar box on my desk. At the end of the day, I’m going to look into that box and I want to see four hundred dollars in it. Then the matter will be closed.” Hodges gazed. At the end of the day, he looked into the cigar box. He found $700.

As Kahn travels around the country to meet personally with the retired stars of those great Dodgers teams, he finds himself often well off the beaten paths in towns that were once something but which are now just doddering along. The town that I grew up in is one of those, a onetime “city” in New York’s Southern Tier that is now just another small town with a lot of closed factories and empty buildings, but still enough people to keep the place being a place. Interestingly, my town–Olean, NY–is name-checked in The Boys of Summer, as the location of a tryout camp for guys who maybe wanted to play baseball. I have trouble imagining such a thing now, but that camp was Gil Hodges’s route to the big leagues.

This passage, about Newport, PA, rings very true to me. The towns of my youth were very much like this town.

The reasons for which Newport was built died along with the tannery and ironworks. A river bend no longer makes a town and jobs are so short at the Penn Central that only men with twenty years’ seniority survive recurrent layoffs. But Newport is not dying; the petrified village may even grow. It is a refuge for certain whites, raising young families, who talk about “the niggers stealing America.” No black man lives in Newport, Pennsylvania. None wants to come and none is asked. A few blacks who work for Bethlehem Steel have built a cabin near Lost Creek Gap, but the Newport elders say these aren’t bad ones.

And finally, a quote about the inevitable shifting of the world and how it appears to those living in as it shifts:

There is only so much space on the planet. Fathers perish to make room for sons. At the end, some go with grace, but the middle years–and these Dodgers are striding through middle years–shake with contention. Jack and Jackie Robinson; Clem and Jay Labine, father and son circling one another in a spiky maze of love.

It is too easy to lay griefs on the end of summer. Once I wrote the poet Robert Graves, asking, among other questions, how it felt to be seventy years old. He could not tell me, Graves responded, because in his own mind he was still twenty-one.

In The Boys of Summer Roger Kahn writes about the lives of baseball, and the way that baseball looms larger in those lives than maybe it should, since the baseball part takes up, what, one fifth or one-sixth of a life? Baseball isn’t a bad way to mark the time, though.

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2021 in the Books: SOULCATCHER and THE WEIRDSTONE OF BRISINGAMEN

 So, this year I’m going to try to do more with regard to writing in this space about the books I read. I’ve set a Goodreads challenge for myself of 52 books read, and as I write this, I’m ahead of schedule, with three books done. Huzzah! Here are capsule reviews of the first two.

::  Soulcatcher, by J.Q. Davis.

Davis is a contact of mine on Instagram, and an indie author whose work I decided to support by buying one of her books. This one is quite an effective thriller, involving a company which employs sales reps whose job is to sell people on the idea of literally selling their souls to the Devil. Our heroine, Frankie, is an alcoholic who is quite good at her job, no matter how creepy her boss is and how deeply she knows that her job is morally repugnant. All she has is her sister, but when that relationship is threatened, Frankie meets a literal angel who is intent on destroying the business of soul-selling forever and freeing Frankie from her own contract which binds her to Hell.

Soulcatcher, JQ Davis

This book is very dark, with a lot of adult content. I also found it a bit slow in the first act, because of a lot of infodumping. But once Davis has her stage set, the book becomes a lot more involving, with a lot of surprises along the way. I was pleased at several junctures to find that what I was sure was going to happen actually was not, and yet, the things that do happen in the book make total sense. I ended up enjoying this one a great deal, even though this kind of story tends to not be my cup of tea more often than not.

::  The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, by Alan Garner.

This YA fantasy novel dates from 1960, which makes it a pleasing throwback for me. Two young siblings, Colin and Susan, are living in England when they are attacked by strange creatures called the “svart alfar” while exploring their wilderness. They are rescued by a wizard who is tasked with overseeing and protecting the enchanted sleep of a small army of knights. Their is a particular item called the Weirdstone (also the Firefrost) that governs the magic behind the sleeping nights, and the Weirdstone has been lost. Now the forces of darkness are rallying to search for it, which leads to a desperate flight across the English countryside to hopeful safety.

The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, Alan Garner

Garner’s writing is dense in a way that a lot of contemporary YA is not, and it was actually a very refreshing read. I also liked his pacing: he takes his time. I do occasionally get frustrated with the idea that stories have to be all-motion, all-plot, all-the-time. This book opens slowly and gets more and more involving and faster paced as it goes, and by the time I got to the third act, I was turning the pages as quickly as I could. This is not a long novel, but Garner packs a lot into it. The book is pretty dense, and Garner’s mythology seems to be more a blend of various elements like Celtic and Norse myth, rather than reflecting specifics of each.

I did find that the book’s characterization isn’t the greatest; if you’re a reader who needs your characters to feel like “real people” with sharply-drawn personalities. I suspect that this is partly the style of the time; it didn’t bother me all that much, really, and the characterization actually improves as more supporting characters arrive on the scene.

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Books Read in 2020


Book, beer, and bibs? #reading #yum #beer #overalls #dungarees #biboveralls #lckingmfg #hickorystripe #denimoveralls #overallsarelife

 Well, one area for me in which this year did not drink deep from the Keg of Suck was in reading: I read a lot of great stuff. My goal each year is 52 books, averaging one a week. This year I got through 52, so, yay! You can find all my various short write-ups on these over on Goodreads; here’s my 2020 Goodreads shelf. This is just a list, because…lists! I am listing these in order that I read them, but the Goodreads shelf can be sorted in a lot of ways. We’re separating these into fiction and nonfiction, and I’ll leave a few notes as I go.

(Goodreads gets a lot of shit for being kind of a mess to use, which is certainly true. I don’t use it at all for its social media mechanisms; for me it’s just a decent way to track what I’ve read.)

UPDATE 1/1/2021: Titles in bold are books I rated with five stars on Goodreads. I reserve five stars for books that truly rock my world, books that I know will shift and inform my worldview moving forward. Four stars is for really really really good books that I love. Three stars mean “Good book, I’m glad I read it!” I almost never award two stars and never single stars, because as a general policy I only rate books that I finish, and if I’m not liking it, I don’t finish it. And in all honesty, I usually don’t conclude that a book I don’t finish is bad, because I’ve had a lot of my favorite books of all time come from the ranks of books I couldn’t finish the first time. It’s rare for me to conclude that I genuinely dislike something I read.

Fiction

Heir of Thunder, Karissa Laurel (an indie fantasy)

Red Christmas, Tayna Laubacher (an indie noir-fantasy, by a personal friend of mine)

Magic for Liars, Sarah Gailey (I remember when Gailey first went viral on Twitter for live-tweeting their first-ever viewing of Star Wars: A New Hope while slightly buzzed. Little did I know what a talented writer they are.)

The Scorpio Races, Maggie Stiefvater

A Witch in Time, Constance Sayers

The Wolf of Oren-Yaro, K.S. Villoso (Filipino-inspired fantasy. Very memorable.)

The Hate U Give, Angie Thomas (Brilliant and disturbing. Necessary, and I hate the fact that we’ve build a world where this book is necessary.)

Last Song Before Night, Ilana C. Myer (Lyric fantasy)

The Parsifal Mosaic, Robert Ludlum (I read a ton of Ludlum as a teen. Loved him. This was a favorite. I wanted to see if it held up. It mostly does, though even with my appreciation of slower-paced stories, this one really takes its time.)

Noir, Christopher Moore (One of my favorite authors, of whose work I always seem to be one book behind. I liked this one, but not quite as much as others of his.)

The Ranger of Marzanna, Jon Skovron (Decent opening volume of a fantasy series. Not sure I’ll make it back for the rest, tbh)

The Consuming Fire, John Scalzi (Book 2 of a space opera trilogy. Breezy fun, but it does feel like the second book in a trilogy.)

This is How You Lose the Time War, Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone (Much has been said about how good this is, and rightly so)

We Ride the Storm, Devin Madson (Violent and grim fantasy set in a China analogue.)

Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (I was truly unprepared for how much this book made me laugh.)

Strange Planet and Stranger Planet, Nathan W. Pyle (collections of Pyle’s comics about a family of non-humans on a non-Earth world and yet whose everyday concerns seem oddly familiar)

A Memory Called Empire, Arkady Martine (A space opera that I liked, but not wildly so. But other readers gushed over it, and one podcast I listen to made pretty clear that I somehow missed a lot of this book’s forest, so intent was I on focusing on its trees. I will likely give this one a re-read in a year or two because I’m pretty sure I missed some stuff.)

Ashes of the Sun, Django Wexler (Fantasy with a Star Wars aesthetic. Hard to describe.)

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me, Mariko Tamaki (teen romance graphic novel. Loved it.)

Nobody’s Fool, Richard Russo (Read partly because I like Russo, and partly for inspiration for a bunch of supernaturally-tinged Finger Lakes-set stories that popped into my head this year. This book was…well, it was too damned long. It just kept on keeping on, if you take my meaning.)

The Life and (Medieval) Times of Kit Sweetly, Jamie Pacton (This was the first e-book I ever checked out of the library! I had no idea about it until someone I like tweeted about it, so I gave it a whirl and I actually enjoyed it quite a lot.)

Annihilation Aria, Michael R. Underwood (Space opera that I liked, but it felt like a sequel to an original that hasn’t been written, if that makes sense.)

Seven Devils, Laura Lam and Elizabeth May (Space opera again, one of whose authors–Ms. May–is a favorite Twitter follow of mine. Good stuff, violent, queer, and the first book in a duology, which I didn’t realize until I suddenly saw that there was no way Lam and May were wrapping up their story in the few pages they had left.)

Last of Her Name, Jessica Khoury. (Another space opera! I need to branch out in 2021, huh…but this was really good. A YA space opera retelling of the Anastasia legend. Loved it!)

A Spark of White Fire, Sangu Mandanna (Yet another space opera. And another really good one, this one inspired by Indian mythology.)

Livingston Girls, Briana Morgan (Another indie by a personal friend. I loved this queer blend of Harry Potter and Dead Poets Society.)

The Spy with the Red Balloon, Katherine Locke (YA supernatural espionage thriller set in World War II. Outstanding! I actually tweeted Locke directly when I was emotionally assaulted by one of their plot developments. They said “Sorry,” but I don’t think they were all that sorry!)

Non-fiction

Letters from an Astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson

The Devil in the White City, Erik Larson (I’ve been told for years about this book and while I liked it, I was also mildly disappointed for some reason)

We Were Eight Years In Power: An American Tragedy, Ta-Nehisi Coates (I’m trying to look more unflinchingly into the bleakest nature of the American character.)

Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare, Stephen Goldblatt (I’ve owned this book for years; finally read it this year. Fascinating stuff that I never knew about the Bard.)

Fooling Houdini: Magicians, Mentalists, Math Geeks, and the Hidden Powers of the Mind, Alex Stone (great read about the subculture of magic, card sharks, and so on)

The Odd Clauses: Understanding the Constitution Through Ten of Its Most Curious Provisions, Jay Wexler (I am increasingly vexed by the US Constitution.)

Glorious Adventure, Richard Halliburton (I love Halliburton, but wow, have aspects of his adventures aged poorly.)

The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bill Bryson (I always enjoy Bryson, but I probably shouldn’t have read this book while a pandemic was unfolding)

Beethoven: The Music and the Life, Lewis Lockwood (Fantastic bio of this year’s immortal birthday composer.)

How to Love a Country, Richard Blanco (poetry)

Dangerous Melodies: Classical Music in America from the Great War through the Cold War, Jonathan Rosenberg

On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft, Stephen King. (A re-read, because I hadn’t read it all the way through in some years. It is still my favorite writing book of all time. I noticed in various writerly communities this year a pushback against King’s hatred of adverbs, but I’m with King here. I avoid adverbs at all costs.)

The Secret History of STAR WARS, Michael Kaminski (Fascinating for its deep dive into George Lucas’s life, influences, and storytelling practices. Annoying for a very clear axe to grind, blaming Lucas for everything ever seen as wrong with Star Wars. Very long and desperately needed an editor.)

A Shooting Star Meets the Well of Death, William R. Taylor. (Biography of Richard Halliburton, mentioned above. If you like Halliburton, this will fascinate.)

A Haunted Atlas of Western New York, Amanda R. Woomer. (Of local fascination, but I may find some story inspiration in listings of haunted places I never knew about.)

The Finger Lakes: Nature’s Beauty, Den Linnehan

Waterfalls and Gorges of the Finger Lakes, Derek Doeffinger (used for inspiration for a future story I want to write)

Summer in a Glass: The COming of Age of Winemaking in the Finger Lakes, Evan Dawson (really good book about the rise of the FLX region as a wine center)

Choose Your Own Disaster, Dana Schwartz (Schwartz is the host of Noble Blood, one of my favorite podcasts. Her book is memoir structured as a choose-your-own-adventure book. Fun and engaging and very open about mental illness struggles.)

Taking Joy: A Writer’s Guide to Loving the Craft, Jane Yolen (another favorite writing book that I hadn’t visited in a long time. I don’t read many writing books, because I figure I’ll learn more by writing than by reading about writing, but a few craft books here or there are nice.)

So You Want To Talk About Race, Ijeoma Oluo. (Again, important. And it shouldn’t be.)

Little Chapel on the River: A Pub, a Town, and the Search for What Matters Most, Gwendolyn Bounds (A re-read of a book that hit me between the eyes quite a few years ago, and it hit me between the eyes again. I dearly love this love letter to a small town on the Hudson and its dying tavern.)

Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change, Maggie Smith (Good, but I didn’t come to it when I needed such a book. I might have found it more necessary 15 years ago, when my world was a crumbling mess.)

The Boys of Summer, Roger Kahn (When Kahn died in early 2020, a lot of people held up this book as a baseball classic, so I read it. And all those people were right. What an amazing book.)

I Want To Be Where the Normal People Are, Rachel Bloom. (Bloom may well be my biggest celebrity crush these days. I’ve been aware of her ever since her comedy song video “F*ck Me Ray Bradbury” went viral, and I was a huge fan of her teevee show, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend. I consider her a national treasure and will follow her wherever she goes. From afar, though, because I don’t want to be creepy. Anyway, this amazing memoir of her own struggles as a theater kid with mental health issues is blunt, funny, moving, sexy, and at times just the right amount of gross.)

—

Thoughts:

Not a bad batch of reading! I’m struck that I didn’t read any Shakespeare this year, so I need to rectify that in 2021. I also need to track the poetry I read; I don’t list poetry books because I am always a “dipper” when it comes to poetry, jumping into and out of various collections as I go. Maybe I should read a collection or two all the way through….

Also, in terms of genre, I didn’t realize how much space opera I read last year, and while I’ve no intention of not reading more space opera, I do need to look in on some of the other genres I love! And I need to branch out, so romance awaits.

I note with surprise how few graphic novels I read in 2020. I remember starting several but bouncing off them, which is strange. I love comics and graphic novels and I hope to get back to them next year.

I close with a photo: I made a literal stack for my Major TBR reads in 2021. Obviously I’m going to read way more than this, but these books are the ones I want to ensure that I hit in 2021. There’s quite a lot of reading here! I’d best get started, hmmmm?

This is my "Must Read in 2021" stack. My other reading will be as-I-go, but I most definitely want these titles read in one year's time. #books #bookstagram #fantasy #sciencefiction #science #spaceopera #JamesBond #nature

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From the books: THE HIGH KING

Today, a passage from one of many books that my mother required me to read in moments when my behavior wasn’t the best. Actually, though–this isn’t from one of those books, but a book downstream in the series that she made me start with Book One. Funny how often those books she made me read were Book One…it’s like she knew what she was doing.

This is the closing two paragraphs from Lloyd Alexander’s The High King, itself the final volume in Alexander’s series The Prydain Chronicles, which was my gateway into epic fantasy and adventure stories. I suppose there are spoilers here, but these books have been around forever, so I make no apologies.

This ending is one of the most perfect endings I know. I hope I can end at least one story half so well as Alexander ended this one.

In the waiting throng beyond the cottage, Taran glimsed Hevydd, Llassar, the folk of the Commots, Gast and Goryon side by side near the farmer Aeddan, King Smoit towering above them, his beard bright as flame. But many were the well-loved faces he saw clearly only with his heart. A sudden burst of cheering voices greeted him as he took Eilonwy’s hand tightly in his own and stepped through the door.

And so they lived many happy years, and the promised tasks were accomplished. Yet long afterward, when all had passed away into distant memory, there were many who wondered whether King Taran, Queen Eilonwy, and their companions had indeed walked the earth, or whether they had been no more than dreams in a tale set down to beguile children. And, in time, only the bards knew the truth of it.

Sigh….

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Reading in Review: 2019

Reading, with coffee
Reading, with coffee.

Greetings, Programs!

The last few years I’ve adopted a self-challenge on Goodreads to keep my reading on track: 52 books a year. And I’ve been successful, so, yay, me! Reading is the creative center of a writer’s life. It’s fuel for stories, as much as food is for life. Writers who don’t read are kidding themselves.

Anyway, if you want to see the roster of everything I read in 2019, feel free to peruse my Goodreads shelf for 2019. It was a good year for reading, and I didn’t suffer through too many slumps last year, which was nice. “Reader’s Block” can be a deeply frustrating thing. Fortunately, that never happened to me in 2019. I was quite consistent.

You may note that almost every book has a rating of four stars or higher. The absolute lowest rating I will almost ever give a book is three stars, and that’s for a book that’s perfectly fine and unobjectionable. My reason for this is simple. No, I don’t love every book I read, but I only finish books I love and I only rate books I’ve finished. The books that I either dislike, or decide aren’t my cup of tea, or that I simply peter out on…these get set aside in favor of something else, and not rated. Many times I’ve “bounced off” a book at one time only to read it sometime later and have it become a beloved favorite, so I am generally loath to genuinely pan a book. It’s something I just don’t do very often.

Likewise, on Goodreads I often won’t even list a book under “Currently Reading” until I’m sure I’m going to finish it. This isn’t for appearances’ sake, since I use Goodreads mainly to track the books I’ve finished. Filling it up with all my various DNF’s doesn’t seem useful to me.

Finally, here are the cream of the crop, the very best books I read last year. I recommend each of these very highly! (Links are to my Goodreads reviews.)

FICTION

The Fifth Season, N.K. Jemisin.

A Brightness Long Ago, Guy Gavriel Kay.

The Night Circus, Erin Morganstern.

The Serpent of Venice, Christopher Moore.

On a Sunbeam, Tillie Walden.

NONFICTION

A Gentle Madness, Nicholas Basbanes.

These Truths: A History of the United States, Jill Lepore.

Shakespeare’s Restless World: A Portrait of an Era in Twenty Objects, Neil MacGregor

Maestros and Their Music, John Mauceri.

These are just the books that stand out in my mind from 2019. In truth it was a wonderful year for my reading life, and if 2020 is half so good it will be a great year too. If you read anything really wonderful last year, by all means, let me know!

 

See you ’round the galaxy,

-K

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