Stuff I've Been Reading - February 2024
In my inaugural post, I put down all sorts of foundation and backstory. With that done, I hope the February edition of "Stuff I've Been reading" is a tad shorter! In my subsequent 2023 Books in Review I noted some places that I felt I'd missed in my reading. With all that under my belt, how did it go?
What I Read
First, comics. I read four more of the Fables deluxe trades. I'm really enjoying this series, and I'm quite glad that there are still 17 trades remaining, plus assorted spinoffs. I would likely have finished more in February if it weren't for a ten day international trip. The ratio of a comic's weight & space versus how long it takes to read is usually not in its favor for travel, so I didn't bring any along.
Kevin read my 2023 Year in Review and saw that I'd read Murder Falcon. He asked if I knew about Do a Powerbomb!, also by Daniel Warren Johnson. I did not, but Kevin said "I've heard it described as lucha libre wrestling meets Dragonball Z and Mortal Kombat" and I immediately put it on hold at the library for the description alone. I'm going to be honest: it's not good. But oh man is it bad in ALL the right ways. I highly recommend it.
Our travel plans (of which I'll certainly write the inevitable trip diary in the future) kept the number of kids books I read to my daughter for the first time to a minimal 19. Sadly, my daughter enjoyed them all far more than I did.
Otherwise, I finished my current poetry book Dual just before my trip. Most of Matthew Minicucci's work was not to my personal taste, although there were occasional high points, like the opening two lines of "On Conversations", which went:
There was a moment I realized prayer
is just a conversation with who you'd rather be
I also really enjoyed another two poem set in the section of poems based on Greek myth which riffed on the legend of Astyanax with a modern and subtly horrifying twist. However, although I'm glad to have read him, on the whole Minicucci didn't do much for me.
Any serious student of the Baseball Hall of Fame has run across the JAWS metric, created by Jay Jaffe to make it easier to evaluate Hall of Fame candidates against existing members. I've been Jaffe's columns for years on Fangraphs and some his prior employers, but I'd never read his book. I knocked out The Cooperstown Casebook: Who's in the Baseball Hall of Fame, Who Should Be In, and Who Should Pack Their Plaques as a little warm up for spring training. As a long-time reader of Jaffe, most of it was stuff I had already read elsewhere, but if you personally need an easy primer to some of the more basic advanced statistics and/or want to read about every Hall of Famer who was elected by the BBWAA or the Veteran's Committee, this is a pretty good primer.
For years I've been hauling along long books on my trips. For a ten day trip with about 8 hours of flights in each direction, I decided to bring 5 smaller books. I went for books from my preferred authors.
My read on the flights there was Outer Dark, Cormac McCarthy's second book. This is basically The Road without the fig leaf of an apocalyptic disaster to justify man's inhumanity to man, right down to the people cannibalizing an infant. This is pretty handily the McCarthy book I enjoyed the least.
While we were in country I got relatively little reading done, but over two afternoons on the hotel room balcony while my wife and daughter napped I read A Moveable Feast. I'm not one of those guys who dreams about living in 1920s Paris, but this memoir of Hemingway's time in the Lost Generation is vivid and entertaining, and even has a great quote about memory. I've also been thinking about how Hemingway being in Paris really put him in a different environment from the United States, while someone who moved to Paris today would more or less be in the same place they were but with more French. That's an exaggeration, certainly, but the world has flattened somewhat and now places (at least places like Paris) are a lot more alike than different, or so it seems to me.
After finishing with Hemingway I went to Stephen King. Fairy Tale took me through the rest of the trip and most of the flights home. I've always liked his fantasy novels, and Fairy Tale's weird take on Dorothy in Oz probably couldn't have been more to my taste if King has interviewed me before writing it. And who doesn't like a kid who risks everything to save his dog's life?
What I'm Reading
For comics, Fables continues. I may not need to change this line for another six months.
I have quite a bit of poetry on the slush pile, so naturally I decided to ignore that and go to an anthology, specifically The Best American Poetry series. It lets me hit a bunch of different authors, it is a manageable 75 poems and if this works the series goes back to 1988. I'm reading 2022 right now.
I checked out The Food of a Younger Land in January, brought it with me on my trip, and still haven't even started it, so that's a focus. I'm also slowly working my way through my Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness, which is a mentally intensive read. And once I get through those two I'll worry about what's next. Well, worry is a strong word.
What I Added to the Slush Pile
I added a bunch of poets and am now tracking the dates I added them. Otherwise it's been a slow month for encountering books I might want to read. Since the current list is probably going to last for years, this is not the problem it sounds like.
What I Read
First, comics. I read four more of the Fables deluxe trades. I'm really enjoying this series, and I'm quite glad that there are still 17 trades remaining, plus assorted spinoffs. I would likely have finished more in February if it weren't for a ten day international trip. The ratio of a comic's weight & space versus how long it takes to read is usually not in its favor for travel, so I didn't bring any along.
Kevin read my 2023 Year in Review and saw that I'd read Murder Falcon. He asked if I knew about Do a Powerbomb!, also by Daniel Warren Johnson. I did not, but Kevin said "I've heard it described as lucha libre wrestling meets Dragonball Z and Mortal Kombat" and I immediately put it on hold at the library for the description alone. I'm going to be honest: it's not good. But oh man is it bad in ALL the right ways. I highly recommend it.
Our travel plans (of which I'll certainly write the inevitable trip diary in the future) kept the number of kids books I read to my daughter for the first time to a minimal 19. Sadly, my daughter enjoyed them all far more than I did.
Otherwise, I finished my current poetry book Dual just before my trip. Most of Matthew Minicucci's work was not to my personal taste, although there were occasional high points, like the opening two lines of "On Conversations", which went:
There was a moment I realized prayer
is just a conversation with who you'd rather be
I also really enjoyed another two poem set in the section of poems based on Greek myth which riffed on the legend of Astyanax with a modern and subtly horrifying twist. However, although I'm glad to have read him, on the whole Minicucci didn't do much for me.
Any serious student of the Baseball Hall of Fame has run across the JAWS metric, created by Jay Jaffe to make it easier to evaluate Hall of Fame candidates against existing members. I've been Jaffe's columns for years on Fangraphs and some his prior employers, but I'd never read his book. I knocked out The Cooperstown Casebook: Who's in the Baseball Hall of Fame, Who Should Be In, and Who Should Pack Their Plaques as a little warm up for spring training. As a long-time reader of Jaffe, most of it was stuff I had already read elsewhere, but if you personally need an easy primer to some of the more basic advanced statistics and/or want to read about every Hall of Famer who was elected by the BBWAA or the Veteran's Committee, this is a pretty good primer.
For years I've been hauling along long books on my trips. For a ten day trip with about 8 hours of flights in each direction, I decided to bring 5 smaller books. I went for books from my preferred authors.
My read on the flights there was Outer Dark, Cormac McCarthy's second book. This is basically The Road without the fig leaf of an apocalyptic disaster to justify man's inhumanity to man, right down to the people cannibalizing an infant. This is pretty handily the McCarthy book I enjoyed the least.
While we were in country I got relatively little reading done, but over two afternoons on the hotel room balcony while my wife and daughter napped I read A Moveable Feast. I'm not one of those guys who dreams about living in 1920s Paris, but this memoir of Hemingway's time in the Lost Generation is vivid and entertaining, and even has a great quote about memory. I've also been thinking about how Hemingway being in Paris really put him in a different environment from the United States, while someone who moved to Paris today would more or less be in the same place they were but with more French. That's an exaggeration, certainly, but the world has flattened somewhat and now places (at least places like Paris) are a lot more alike than different, or so it seems to me.
After finishing with Hemingway I went to Stephen King. Fairy Tale took me through the rest of the trip and most of the flights home. I've always liked his fantasy novels, and Fairy Tale's weird take on Dorothy in Oz probably couldn't have been more to my taste if King has interviewed me before writing it. And who doesn't like a kid who risks everything to save his dog's life?
What I'm Reading
For comics, Fables continues. I may not need to change this line for another six months.
I have quite a bit of poetry on the slush pile, so naturally I decided to ignore that and go to an anthology, specifically The Best American Poetry series. It lets me hit a bunch of different authors, it is a manageable 75 poems and if this works the series goes back to 1988. I'm reading 2022 right now.
I checked out The Food of a Younger Land in January, brought it with me on my trip, and still haven't even started it, so that's a focus. I'm also slowly working my way through my Abraham Joshua Heschel: Prophetic Witness, which is a mentally intensive read. And once I get through those two I'll worry about what's next. Well, worry is a strong word.
What I Added to the Slush Pile
I added a bunch of poets and am now tracking the dates I added them. Otherwise it's been a slow month for encountering books I might want to read. Since the current list is probably going to last for years, this is not the problem it sounds like.