Fifty-three days and only nine books

(American literacy truly is in decline)

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Man alive. Reading Moby Dick is really slowing my ability to finish other books. I am enjoying it, but tell you what—I’ll be glad when it’s done.

Kind of blown away I’ve been building this set since May. Get reading, Theric!

Incidentally, my essay on Napoleon Dynamite just helped launch Waypoints, a new pop-culture site. Check it out!

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035) Okchundang Candy by Jung-soon Go and translated by Airin Park, finished May 22

Why are there so few picture books for adults?

My guess is economics. Adults don’t reread like kids do and so the dollars spent on a picture book divided by the number of minutes spent with it just doesn’t make sense.

This book is much longer than a kids picture book (the library put it in Juvenile Graphic Novels) and might appeal to kids, but even with its juvenile p-o-v (sorta; it’s an unseen adult remembering) I feel that this story about her grandparents’ love and how it navigated lung cancer and widowhood is inherently adult.

It’s a lovely and moving book.

(Yes it’s a library book and yes this is 2026 but it didn’t feel like cheating because I’m not the one who checked it out and it didn’t take that long to read.)

one sit before and one sit after dinner

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036) The Lost Gate by Orson Scott Card, finished May 27

I actually picked up this book with the intention to get rid of it. I’m a fan of Card’s and I do want to finish reading all his early work but this last YA novel didn’t hold much interest. Out of respect, I decided to read the first couple paragraphs, however, and here we are.

In the afterword, Card says he’s been developing this world and its magic system since 1977. And no question this is one of my favorite magic systems I’ve ever read. He also, in the afterword, says that he finished this novel by cranking out a chapter a day and getting it to his publisher after the deadline. This may show.

I don’t like a lot of of things about this book. It seems to be trying to fit in aberrant sex with the subtlety of a 14yrold writing sex for the first time. It’s weird and gross and off. It doesn’t work. And all the characters under the age of twenty-five talk like . . . well, not like humans circa 2010, I can tell you that. It’s crazy because writing about precocious kids is Card’s wheelhouse and these kids aren’t real.

But the plot and story are excellent. I’m tempted to read more of the series simply because those aspects are so strong. But that’s exactly what one could get from a Wikipedia summary. But as the characters age, they should become more realistic. But, having read a lot of Card, I think I already know how a lot of their characters will develop and related to each other as time goes on.

So in the end, a bit of a mixed bag. I would say I wish he had more time to refine the novel (I feel he could have), but I’m told he recently said in an interview that, since the death of his son, he hasn’t been able to tell if his work is good. So maybe not.

(It’s a biographical detail imbued with pathos, regardless of this book’s quality.)

I understand why people like this novel but in the end, I think it gets a soft thumbs down from me. There are many better Card books. Save this for when you’re hungry for second-tier work.

One other quick observation: this book is unfilmable. A new kind of narrative artform demands invention before this book can be adapted to something involving actors. Something deeper and more internal than “virtual reality”; something that can affect your proprioception the way films affect your retina.

perhaps a month

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037) Bad Kitty Goes on Vacation by Nick Bruel, finished June 1

The Bad Kitty books are great. But me, a fuddyduddy, does not prefer them colorized.

a june first

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038) Backward by Ben Abbott, finished June 10

Read or performed, Ben’s work is great. This is his final thesis for his MFA and it’s terrific. A man relives each day of his life in backwards order then relives them once again—once more forward. I love playing with time. Some of my favorites of life being scrambled include one of the stories in Hyperion and the novels Replay and The Time Traveler’s Wife, but Ben’s found something new and it’s wonderful.

It’s a one-man show and I’d love to know how it turned out. It seems like a real challenge for any actor and I’d love to see how it all turned out.

Wonderfully, following the play (because this is a thesis), Ben takes us through the writing process. And I maybe loved that as much as the play (although only the play made me cry). The perfect thing to read, really, before I disappear for a week to rewrite Honeymoon in Copper (this is then world premier of the title—feel special!). Some of the holes in the novel are coming into focus and Ben has pushed me to nail them down. Exciting times!

The play’s nominated for an AML Award and you can read it yourself by clicking the title above. I certainly recomment it.

one long sit

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039) Too Many Cooks by Rex Stout, finished June 12

This is my second Nero Wolfe novel, though I’ve collected maybe half a dozen since the first.

The structure of this novel was quite different from Fer-de-Lance which made me happy. This was a big more what I expected the first time but, since it wasn’t last time, now it wasn’t this time. The reveal wasn’t until the penultimate chapter in a gather-them-all-in-one-room scene and since Archie’s our p-o-v character, I really had no idea what was about to go down. Fun. Less interesting as a mystery, perhaps, as the previous volume, but good.

What was more interesting was how Stout explored racism and misogyny. I know!

Amazingly, this novel not only gets Wolfe out of his apartment but clear down to West Virginia where we encounter some plainfaced Southern racism. Archie’s a bit disgusted by it but not because he isn’t also racist (though he may dislike d***s more than n*****s) but because it’s crass how these white Southerners act. Show some dignity, you crackers.

Anyway, Nero Wolfe does treat the black characters with respect. Partially that’s to his own ends, but also, one senses that he means it. That his more worldwide past has led him to a place where he knows better—genuinely knows better—than to judge a man by the color of his skin. He means it.

Yet Nero Wolfe is, simultaneously, the worst misogynist of them all. I suspect his decision to live a life undistracted by such things as romance and wiles was only possible by developing an antipathy for women. Mere disinterest was impossible. Hatred was the only path to safety and he took it.

Mind, most of what I’m saying here is my analysis—it’s subtext. But I think I’m right. And it’s a richer book for it.

This isn’t to say the book as aged brilliantly. But I think it has aged acceptably.

couple weeks at most

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040) Pickles by Brian Crane, finished July 7
041) Pickles, Too by Brian Crane, finished July 7

Brian Crane is an old friend of my in-laws. We’re visiting them now and they have his first two collections, signed, and I picked them up. Good stuff.

two days

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042) Lost & Found by Shaun Tan, finished July 13
043) The Arrival by Shaun Tan, finished July 13

Lady Steed insisted she had no idea who Shaun Tan was which seemed insane to me. Who can read The Arrival and ever forget it? But I put some of his books on hold at the library and they came and I couldn’t let the opportunity go by without re/reading some myself.

Lost & Found is a collection of three earlier works. They’re concerned with some of the same things as The Arrival but they all rely on words which keeps the reader a bit more grounded. The Arrival has words only in an inaccessible tongue. This is part of what makes it perhaps the greatest exploration of the immigrant experience. You the reader will feel as lost and confused as our immigrant protagonist. At the same time, you’ll gender a renewed appreciation for the greatness of nations that welcome the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of other teeming shores, the homeless, the tempest-tost. That act of welcoming such peoples may be the best way to define a nation’s greatness.

The Arrival‘s very much in the tradition of the one-image-a-page artists of a century ago, but his artistry has more options available to it. For instance, pacing, as when he spends a single spread with 60 individually drawn images of clouds, or a spread of 24 images of one plant’s entire life cycle to show the passage of time. Truly a masterpiece by a master artist.

I would love someday to go to a Shaun Tan retrospective at a museum (are you listening SFMOMA, Cartoon Art Museum?) and just stand in front of his art at the size he made it and just take it all in.

one evening