Stuff I've Been Reading - May 2024
CategoryFinished This MonthFinished YTD
Comics417
Books120
Poetry12
Kids39200
Total45239
Slush Pile
I started writing this post last Sunday, but I was updating the stats blocks and I realized that my numbers from April couldn't be correct, and then I went down a rabbit hole of recalculating numbers, and the upshot is that I used all my free time fixing that. The moral of this story is that manual counts, like memory, are inherently inaccurate. I should probably at least switch to a spreadsheet to track all this instead of a plain text file, but old habits die hard and also I'm pretty sure I'd mentally be required to spend a few days converting all my historical records into the spreadsheet and I just don't have time for that.
If you look at the paltry single book and four comics that I finished in May, you'd quite reasonably think I didn't have time for reading either. Fortunately, that number is misleading. I spent most of the month reading some collections of short fiction. I didn't quite finish any of them in May, but cumulatively I read a lot.
What I Read
Let's start with the one book I actually finished. My friend Gayle mentioned The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why It Matters on social media earlier this year. Tom Nichols published this in 2017 based on an earlier magazine piece, but he swears it wasn't a reaction to President Trump. The book itself is fine. It covers much of the same ground as Richard Hofstader's Anti-intellectualism in American Life that I read back in 2012. Now, Hofstader rightfully won the Pulitzer in 1964, and his book is a much more enjoyable and illuminating read. However, America has changed a lot since 1964, and Nichol's covers a lot of trends that were nascent or non-existent in Hofstader's day, like the internet or media consolidation. If I'd never read Hofstader, I'd rate Nichols more highly, but I'd probably recommend Nichols to someone who was looking for a quicker overview of the topic. I will say that Nichols points out some of the drawbacks to "I researched it on the internet", in particular the likelihood that you are mostly just skimming long articles for salient points, not reading them in depth. I've caught myself doing that a time or two on wikipedia since I finished the book, so it was worth reading just to get me to notice that behavior so I can at least acknowledge it or preferably stop it.
In February I predicted that I might be able to reuse the line "For comics, Fables continues" for another six months. I was off by just a wee bit, at least as far as the mainline series goes. In May, I finished volumes 14 and 15 of the deluxe editions. Overall, it was a pretty solid series and I'm glad ayb2 and Brent gifted me the first volume even if it took me 6 years to follow up. Sadly, the main storyline was never successfully restarted once it reached its natural end, so the last 5-6 trades were kind of meh. Sometimes ending is hard.
However, the characters from Fables were pretty great, so when I heard that there were trades about everybody's favorite Fables spy, Cinderella, I had to read them. The Bondesque names From Fabletown with Love and Fables are Forever didn't hurt either. They were about what I expected - competently done but not amazing secret agent stories with magic substituting in for the gadgets Q gives Bond. The rest of the Bond formula of exotic locales, sex and violence still held up though. You certainly don't need to rush out to read these unless you love Fables and/or spy stuff.
I started The Best American Poetry of 2022 in late February and finished in on May 14. It took me a little over 2 months to read 75 poems. As an overview of poetry, it worked much as my two poem a day sites went. I specifically marked the following eight poems as being particularly moving to me:
- Dara Barrois/Dixon - Remembering
- Forrest Gander - Sea: Night Surfing in Bolinas
- Terrance Hayes - What Would You Ask the Artist?
- Brionne Janae - Capitalism
- Julia Anna Morrison - Myths About the Trees
- Robin Myers - Diego de Montemayor
- D.A. Powell - Elegy on Fire
- Matthew Rorhrer - Follow Them
Would I still find them as moving on another read at another time? Apparently not consistently, as I re-read all 8 before I returned the book and some fell flat. Of course, this means some of the others I didn't mark might have soared on a second read, and more importantly that pop culture enjoyment has a major time/mood component. No surprise there. The poem that held up the best for me on a second reading was Diego de Montemayor by Robin Myers.
Lastly, I read another 39 kids books to my daughter. None particularly stood out to me. I will say that our constant trips to the library keeps me from getting bored while reading, but sometimes I wonder if Birdie would have a stronger reaction to a book if we re-read it constantly. On the whole, I think I'll let her have the strong reactions when she's reading the books to herself.
I also recently noted some friends talking about how their kids finished challenges to "read (or have read to you) 1000 books before kindergarten". As far as I can tell, through the end of May the lifetime number for Birdie is 660. With 200 just this year (just shy of 211 from last year, there's an outside chance that she hits 1000 before she turns 4, let alone kindergarten. It certainly seems entirely likely that I'll personally read more than a book a day to her this year, which is a testament to our library system. Thanks library system!
What I Am Reading
The short fiction that I hadn't quite finished continues.
- I'm working my way through The Snows of Kilimanjaro, which I specifically called out when I wrote up Hemingway 5 years ago.
- My father snagged me an old copy of The Baseball Reader, edited by Charles Einstein, from a booksale somewhere. My father knows me well. This book came out in 1980, and is actually a "best of" compilation from three earlier collections in 1956, 1958 and 1968. The original collections purported to capture the best writing about baseball from the early days of baseball to the time of publication. There are many pieces here that I've read and loved before, but there are also many pieces I've never read or never even heard of. So far, the quality has been uniformly great, whether it's a short poem or a fifty page biographical treatment of Satchel Paige. Apparently the original collections are very difficult to find, but I might have to try because this compilation has been a delight.
For my next poetry book, I considered several of the authors from my slush pile and decided to go with Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who got added on the strength of I am Waiting. I snagged A Coney Island of the Mind, which was a big hit in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
Last month I mentioned that I was going to start Arena: The Story of the Federal Theatre by Hallie Flanagan, who was the head of the Federal Theatre. The book was published in 1940, and unfortunately it's a bit disappointing. Instead of a deep dive into particular famous productions or challenges, Flanagan wrote an overview of all the things they tried in all the states. Sometimes this is very interesting (especially for New York City), but a lot of times it's brief and not very interesting. I feel like she was defending the program after it had been shut down by talking about how it touched all the states and people. Oddly, it comes across much like Food of a Younger Land, which was an survey of writing collected for a book that was never published. As a first line historical record of the Federal Theatre program, Arena is invaluable. I was going to say that I hope somebody uses Arena to write a much better history book, and as I was googling to see what was out there I found that literally one month ago The Playbook: A Story of Theater, Democracy, and the Making of a Culture War came out. I'm adding that to the slush pile, and it looks like the author has an interesting book about Shakespeare too. So yeah, I can't even get through this post without adding to the slush pile.
Speaking of the slush pile, I have cued up two books and a comic on my physical slush pile:
- The Pitch That Killed: Carl Mays, Ray Chapman and the Pennant Race of 1920. I've visited Ray Chapman's grave several times, time to learn more.
- I read the first couple of chapters of Sailing Alone Around the World at an AirBNB some years ago and enjoyed it, so it's time to read the whole thing.
- Fables had a shorted lived successor series called "Everafter: From the Pages of Fables" that was collected in two trades. I've got the first one, which appears to heavy on the secret agent stuff again.
What I Hope to Read
A commenter on Fangraphs mentioned Color Blind: The Forgotten Team That Broke Baseball's Color Line, which is about, of all things, a minor league team in Bismarck North Dakota that signed Satchel Paige to pitch for them in 1935. Baseball, Satch and my home state? Sign me up.
I was reading an old Fangraphs post and the author mentioned both The World Beneath Their Feet: Mountaineering, Madness, and the Deadly Race to Summit the Himalayas and Empires of the Sky: Zeppelins, Airplanes, and Two Men's Epic Duel to Rule the World, which both seem like my kind of thing.
My most recent Smithsonian magazine had an excerpt about Benjamin Franklin from The Book-Makers: A History of the Book in Eighteen Lives. The excerpt was great, and I have high hopes for the full book.
Only one poet caught my fancy via my poem a day sites in May.
Hari Alluri - 5/1/24 - https://poets.org/poem/spiral
And that's enough for now. I allotted 30 minutes to write this, and it took more than an hour. This is a good problem to have.