Stuff I've Been Reading - July 2024
CategoryFinished This MonthFinished YTD
Books632
Comics424
Poetry14
Kids38287
Total49347
Slush Pile
If I was a really good writer, I'd turn these monthly roundups into a commentary about recent current events with ties to things in my life and other areas of culture. It might also help to actually have a useful critical turn of phrase. I am not yet a really good writer, and I recognize that to achieve that I'm going to have to stop writing about every book I read. Next time, maybe. For now, July was a good month for reading, and I don't want to leave anything out... yet.
What I Read
Let's dive right in with my ongoing reading projects.
- I finished the letter "F" in the The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, 3rd Edition. And if you're wondering why someone would read any dictionary, let alone a baseball dictionary, I direct you to the definition of the word "Fungo", which covers 2.5 pages and features not one, not two, but 5 possible etymologies. Sure, as a dictionary there are a lot of synonyms and words that are only of historical import (I now know a lot more about 1800s era baseball terminology than I ever expected to), but then you get treasures like "Fungo" and it's amazing.
- I missed reading Shakespeare in Q2 of 2024 by all of 1 day, but on July 1 I finished The Scottish Play while I was giving blood. Technically this was a re-read, as my English class read this my senior year of high school, but anything you had to read for class doesn't count, no matter how much you enjoy it.
I've been considering what over books might be interesting for me to read over a long period of time, whether daily like the baseball dictionary, weekly like the Rolling Stone Encyclopedia of Rock & Roll (which I really need to finish since my radio show ended with literally 1.5 pages left to go) or at a less regular cadence like Shakespeare. Most of the options I came up with were religious in nature, which isn't inherently a problem; religious writing can be very beautiful. My very tentative list is:
- The Federalist Papers
- The Torah, which of course is ideally set up to read weekly.
- The Haftorah. Ditto.
- The Old Testament, and for that matter the King James version of the New Testament, which is such a huge impact on literature that it's worth reading even if you aren't at all religious.
- Somehow in all the years of knowing about and occasionally reading excerpts from The Talmud, it never occurred to me to read it all the way through until I read People Love Dead Jews which has an essay talking about Daf Yomi - where in people read a page of Talmud a day until they finish it, which takes about seven and a half years. The next cycle starts in 2027. There are sites designed to help with this, Sefaria being the most famous. And if you like that, there are study cycles for all sorts of other Jewish writing.
That's enough possible future projects to keep me going for the rest of my life.
In the ongoing reading via poetry, I wrapped up Ideal Cities by Erika Meitner. Last month I said I got into her via the poem Yiddishland, and then I realized she was actually on my slush pile TWICE, and of course I quoted "Just as the Darkness Gets Very Dark / Another Data Point" back in back in March. Ideal Cities felt... comfortable. She had a lot of poems about pregnancy and the early days of having a child, and I mostly enjoyed it, but nothing hit as hard as the peak of "Just as the Darkness Gets Very Dark / Another Data Point." I particularly enjoyed these four poems:
- Small, Generic Night Towns
- Careful
- Interstate Cities
- Ideal Cities
I think she'll stay on my slush pile for future reading, because "comfortable" is underrated as a reason to read something.
Ideal Cities was one of three books I had in progress at the end of June. I finished both of the others.
- The Baseball 100 was everything I wanted in a baseball book. It tells a lot of entertaining stories about 100 great players, most of whom I knew very well. It does a particularly good job of highlighting some Negro League players who aren't in the top tier of "Satchel Paige / Josh Gibson" level players. Posnanski does this by means of a hypothetical - suppose that we had no video of players from the 1950s and 1960s, and only incomplete stats. Then imagine that somebody told you about the accomplishments of Willie Mays or Hank Aaron. Would you believe them, or would you assume that they had to be making it up? Then consider some of the great Negro League players you've never heard of, who played without substantial media coverage long before video. Are you still willing to assume that they couldn't possibly be that good?
- God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater was my first Vonnegut in quite some time. It skewers pretensions of class and wealth in a short pointed novel that's quite funny. My plan of "read the books with Kilgore Trout appearances" is off to a great start.
As far as other books go:
- Having picked up Vonnegut for the first time in ages, I moved over to Margaret Atwood with her non-fiction book Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. This book came out in October 2008, and takes a very interesting spin through the history of debt and creditors. It touches on morality, literature and practical economics. It comes across as more of a stream of consciousness exploration of debt than a reasoned argument. I enjoyed it and finished it all in one go as I rode in the back of the car on the way to Chicago, but it is definitely secondary Atwood.
- My father gave me a copy of The Spy and the Traitor that he got from my sister. It tells the story of Oleg Gordievsky, who as a KGB agent spied for the British for many years and then, once back in Moscow and about to be arrested, was dramatically whisked out of the country in a plot that makes The Cardinal and the Kremlin seem almost plausible.
- On the way back from Chicago I read 1599: A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare by James S. Shapiro. Shakespeare completed four plays in 1599 - Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet. Shapiro explores that current events might have impacted the writing of those plays. He convincingly argues that several of those themes and lines in those plays would have been heard by his audience as commentary and references to current events of the day, and with those events now lost the references are lost as well. Unfortunately, he also spends several chapters diving deep into multiple revisions of Hamlet and other literary analysis that was not interesting to me. If he'd stuck to the history and connections there, I'd have enjoyed the book a great deal more. Still, it was fun to learn more about the Earl of Essex, his campaign in Ireland, and the nuts and bolts of how Shakespeare and his fellow playwrights made money.
On the comics front, I finished the last four volumes of Fairest. Volumes 3 and 6 were quite good, volumes 4 and 5 were pretty bad. Volumes 4 & 6 might as well have been official Cinderella spinoffs. The series as a whole is only for Fables completists. It came out concurrent to the main series, and so a number of plots that seemed like they were thrown away from the main line were finished here, or that seemed like they came out of nowhere in the main line started here. Have I mentioned that I'm not wild about comics that have multiple titles that spin together tightly? It's virtually always too much work and too little reward, and that was true here as well.
On the children's book front, I learned that apparently there are multiple library reading programs that reward kids for having had 1000 books read to them. Based on my lists, Birdie was at 460 at the end of 2023, and as of the end of July is at 747. I think she's going to make it pretty easily! The most fun of all the books I read to Birdie in July, and really in all of 2024, was The Book With No Pictures by BJ Novak, who apparently is primarily an actor. It's a hilarious read (at least the first 30 times) and never fails to make Birdie giggle wildly.
What I Am Reading
I am about half way through The Sabbath. I'm intentionally only reading one chapter a day so I have time to truly absorb it.
I've got Questlove's Music is History at the house right now. M said she thought about getting it for me as a gift when it came out, which is probably a sign I'm on the right path. Questlove has great musical taste, and I remember enjoying something to food about: Exploring Creativity with Innovative Chefs, so hopefully this book is solid too.
I've got a bunch of other books on hold. We'll see how August goes!
What I Hope to Read One Day, Not Now
Everyone knows who Jackie Robinson is, and rightfully so. Larry Doby was the first black player in the American League, and second in MLB, and is virtually forgotten outside of Cleveland. Larry Doby in Black and White: The Story of a Baseball Pioneer aims to change that. It was mentioned on Fangraphs, which is increasingly where I seem to be finding books lately.
Apparently PJ Library (the Jewish version of Dolly Parton's Imagination Library) was giving away adult copies of Israel: A Simple guide to the Most Understood Country on Earth and now I'm morbidly curious.
David Brooks, of all people, came up on a Facebook comment on a friend's post for How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen, which purports to be a book about how to 'see someone else deeply and make them feel seen', which seems relevant to me.
And there were three more poets added to the list:
Kathi Wolfe - 7/29/24 - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/58791/tasting-braille
Nora Hikari - 7/8/24 - https://poets.org/poem/imago-dei
Lucille Clifton - 7/02/24 - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/49491/jasper-texas-1998