bookwyrm posts from 2024 / 12

1. a few of my favorite very-online writers—but I’m think of Pargin and Jeb Lund (who for all I know don’t know each other at all) specifically here and not like, uh, Lockwood—are pretty good about using their veterans-of-forum-wars (or at least that era of online) past to be pretty strong voices for not being assholes on the internet.

   this is a lot of that

   cw: mens rights nonsense

   my point: so if you feel like you don’t need some old guy rubbing your nose in a “deuteragonist" (I had to look up the word for that) “hey look at this kid who is a twitch streamer who is kinda black pilled, don’t be lame like this”, because you yourself are also over that, maybe skip this one

   Ultimately it’s a fun read and a break from the John and Zoe books and pretty mad at the same stuff a lot of people are on mastodon are mad about re: the other social networks, so, I’m glad I read it.

   

2. picked up after a friend who had already enjoyed it linked x.com/mickey17movie/status/1836197947668860958 in discord, very fun, read it in a few days.

   

3. p good! kinda Y.A. and a little slow to start but w/e, fun ending

   

4. Another one that I waited out thinking “eh, probably great but maybe I’ll pass” and then people I follow just kept citing it months and months later, so onto the pile it went. My first and not last Klein book, about significantly more than I expected.

   

5. The later, somewhat darker, more explicitly autobiographical half of Munro’s anthologies of short stories.

   Munro’s characters tend to (I know this reads like a horoscope) move on from situations for the next thing without a plan, or to be a little selfish before getting back to being serious, if they ever do. She’s always putting characters on trains, or in cars, or on buses.

   

6. Lots of people read this last year when Marshall published it and the title was so catchy, I thought about it after the last few accidents in SF, which made me think I should go back and actually read it.

   80+ three page ideas, lots of overlap with the incident management side of my day job, casually written (if a little too pop, even, but I guess that’s ok).

   Every field is like this, it seems.

   

7. Re-using my comment on Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore: “Fun, light, very quick read. Very weird to read something so connected to ~2017~ techie-San-Francisco and get 100% of the references and roll my eyes at a few of them.”

   Started Sloan’s newest, Moonbound, immediately afterward, and it’s very different so far.

   

8. Fun, light, very quick read. Very weird to read something so connected to ~2012-techie-San-Francisco (I was here by then) and get 100% of the references (and roll my eyes at a few w/ 12 years of hindsight).

   

9. There are a few authors I simply pre-order without question—Jason Pargin, Kelly Link, Emily Wilson in the past year alone, but always King. I was going to save this for vacation in a few weeks but ended up with more time on my hands so it came off the pile.

   I particularly liked "The Answer Man”

   

10. I particularly enjoyed the last one, “Skinder’s Veil”

    I’ve never actually read any actual Brothers Grimm, nor have I read (or even heard of) Lang’s “The Blue Fairy Book” which I just learned about in a review of these Link stories, so I think they have to both go on the pile.

    

11. I really enjoyed Wilson’s “Odyssey” and “Oedipus Tyrannos” translations and had hoped to get to this last fall when I put it on the to-read pile. Alas.

    I’ve never read any The Iliad before, and it does kinda go on a bit (really? that’s your thoughts on the Iliad? sure why not, is “it was good” better?).

    Wilson manages to sneak in some slapstick amid all the brutality.

    

12. I forget why this got my attention but I will cop to the “by the author of Severance” blurb helping more than somewhat, not realizing that it’s a novel that predates the show by four years and is completely unrelated to it.

    What a lovely mistake! The stories were excellent and I will probably grab the novel too. Warning: maybe check the content before starting on the first two stories?

    

13. Goth surrealist tangential punny folklore ghost stories? Idk what the hell I just read and if it was a TV show I’d turn it off but I can read stuff like this all day long (and just did).

    

14. Nice.

    

15. More great stories, some of which, but fewer than those in “Stranger Things Happen” would fit right in with those collected in “Black Water” (mastodon.social/@gravely/110403938932091902) and “Black Water 2” (mastodon.social/@gravely/110899731695137550).

    

16. So good, I’m grabbing another collection of Link’s, "Get in Trouble”, immediately.

    

17. What it says on the tin and knows it. Spoonfuls of chewy metaphors.

    

18. I feel like more than a few people I follow posted about this over the past year so I eventually followed suit. More memoir (again!) than I’m normally into but just enough history, novelty, and new-to-me theory to be pretty good after all.

    

19. After enjoying every single story in the “Hainish Novels and Stories (www.ursulakleguin.com/hainish-novels-and-stories), I figured I can’t go wrong tackling Earthsea for the first time by just reading all of them in the similar “The Books of Earthsea" (www.ursulakleguin.com/the-books-of-earthsea).

    

20. I grabbed this one after landing on a Don Norman piece (www.fastcompany.com/90338379/i-wrote-the-book-on-user-friendly-design-what-i-see-today-horrifies-me). I enjoyed “The Design of Everyday Things" so I followed Norman’s suggestion to read Mismatch.

    Pretty quick read, and full of things so obviously correct that I got impatient with the author’s patience? Good stuff.

    

21. Two memoirs to start the year. Weird, I never read memoirs.

    This one was quoted in some video I watched chasing Chris Scruggs stuff (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TeR2yZ2pWCw what a great band! that steel player?!) that I probably landed on looking up a 500songs.com (which I’m 90 episodes into) citation, so I found myself reading it.

    

22. I don’t know how this made it onto my pile but it was a quick read (I started it yesterday). It’s so weird to read 90s tech memoirs. People were still sorta building stuff back then, weren’t sure where things would end up, and so on.

    

23. Fun as expected. A pre-order, because that this point I just subscribe to Pargin stuff.

    It’s been two months since I finished anything, my head has not been in the right space to read, I’d bounced off three other things, and I’ve been taking lots of long walks instead.

    

24. Someone in Bernal Heights (Bonview at or near Cortland? It was a few months ago) left a box of books on the sidewalk with “FREE” written on a flap that had a few things I grabbed, among them, DFW’s “Consider the Lobster, and other essays” which I started and abandoned (lol), and this.

    I enjoy stuff like this from time to time but don’t think I’m “smart enough” for it, whatever that means (and I’m not entirely sure).

    

25. A friend posted that they’d just read a book that they think might be the best book they’d ever read, and it was this one. 4, 3, 2, 1 was listed for a Booker and this one won the prize? OK, I’ll try it.

    I really wanted to like it more than I did, and the second act really flows well, but I had a hard time finishing it, today, finally. It’s right up my alley in lots of ways. v0v

    

26. 4 3 2 1 was full of writers learning the trade from other writers and hundreds of books are mentioned. I’m sure I’ll thumb through it for more suggestions but this one was the first I chose.

    I think probably best to go in completely without any idea what it is beyond: german, written early 1800s, takes place in the 1500s, and Kafka, of all people liked it a lot.

    

27. Loved it, spent most of my spare time since I started it with it, will miss it, probably missed a lot in it.

    

28. 18th book of the year: “SPQR”, by Mary Beard

    Wanted to read some history after the last few things. Kept seeing Beard press over the years, saw she has a new book out and grabbed a used copy of her old stuff instead.

    lotta “assassinated for tyranny after proposing social and/or land use reforms” Kermit-confused-face.bmp

    lotta good stuff on how normal people lived

    

29. The story I enjoyed in Black Water 2 was an excerpt from “The Palm-Wine Drinkard” (which is subtitled “and his dead Palm-Wine Tapster in the Deads’ Town)

    I preferred the drinkard because more of the stories in it seem like little self-contained myths. And of course I’m glad to now have a connection back to the Byrne/Eno album that I love.

    

30. “Black Water 2, More Tales of the Fantastic” loved it, full of surprises and delights from authors I’ve never heard of and authors most have — Arthur Conan Doyle, F Scott Fitzgerald, E B White, Joseph Conrad, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Margret Atwood, George Bernard Shaw , Arthur C Lark) — and stories too , like Melville’s Bartleby.

    "The Complete Gentleman” turned me onto Amos Tutuola, who I’m now reading in full.

    And a story from Isabell Allende?! Nice.

    

31. Egan again. I knew I’d have a 10 hours of plane time, so I brought “Oceanic” and it delivered.

    Egan’s political and hard science (the bulk of this set) stories are my favorites while the atheist ones like the title story “Oceanic” are probably more interesting to previously religious people, which I never was. I’ve always found faith to be entirely inscrutable, so exploring losing it is kinda just more of that to me?

    

32. It is out of print, but available self published by the author. The stories from just after those in Axiomatic.

    Some fun stuff, although I would have liked it a lot more had I read it contemporaneously, when I was in my own more annoying atheist phase.

    

33. Wow! Loved it.

    The “Selected Stories” title has had time to be rated and critiqued by much more careful readers. Lots of comparisons to Chekov, who I suppose I’ll check out next. I’ll also definitely be getting the companion collection, Family Furnishings, Selected Stories 1995-2014.