Stuff I've Been Reading - October 2024
CategoryFinished This MonthFinished YTD
Books442
Comics529
Poetry16
Kids34396
Total44465
Slush Pile
What I Read
I finished three letters in the The Dickson Baseball Dictionary: H, I, and J. Some time this month I should pass the 50% mark in that book, which at one page per year still gives me more than a year to reach the end. The only quibble I have about the dictionary so far is that sometimes the ranking of potential definitions makes no sense. As with a standard dictionary, for any term that has multiple possible definitions they rank the most used definition first, the next most second, and so on. It's a regular occurrence for me to not recognize the first definition but to completely agree with second or subsequent definitions. Since these rankings are hardly scientific, it's not a big problem, but it does jar me every time it happens.
I finished another volume of poetry, this one A Larger Country by Tomas Q. Morin. Morin's poetry wasn't "comfortable" like Erika Meitner, but it felt... warm? Inviting? Like Morin was delighted to be showing you these little vignettes that were all over the place, and while all of them weren't themselves safe or warm (or unchallenging), there was a delight in playing with words, and just a little bit of "look how clever I am?" I particularly enjoyed "Presidential Portrait" and "Little Odessa Social Club", the latter of which tied back into my slush pile in unanticipated ways by calling out to Isaac Babel, a Soviet author who was executed by Stalin but who is renowned for a short story collection titled Red Cavalry that's been on my list for years.
As far prose goes, I finished my first book by Herman Wouk. I read Marjorie Morningstar for my class at the synagogue, and then naturally I missed the day we discussed it because we went to see Neko Case. On balance, it was enjoyable historical fiction, but you could have clipped out at least 100 pages of the title character not realizing her boyfriend was a loser with no significant harm to the book. I'm going to leave Wouk on the list, but not as a priority.
I went back to my author summaries twice in October. First up was The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson. This book is a sequel to Notes From a Small Island, where in Bryson roamed around the United Kingdom and told interesting stories about places you've mostly never heard of. Regrettably, in the twenty year interval between the books, Bryson got older and grumpier. A very high percentage of the locations touched upon in The Road to Little Dribbling lead Bryson to complain about something getting worse in a way that felt very much like "I'm a grouchy old man" rather than "here are some measured concerns about how the world has problematically changed." It happened over and over, and it mostly wasn't entertaining. He also dropped in a pretty casually ignorant anti-trans comment along the way. It was more of the "I don't understand these trans people" tone than "I hate all trans people" but still, seriously? Between the problems with this book (2015) and the disaster of his most recent book The Body: A Guide for Occupants, perhaps it's for the best that he's announced his retirement.
Happily, the other author I reached back into was John Steinbeck. He was a war correspondent during WWII, and late in 1942 came out with a piece of historically interesting propaganda called Bombs Away: The Story of a Bomber Team. Steinbeck states up front that the book is intended for the men who will soon enlist or be drafted who will serve in the bomber wings of the Army Air Force. He explains what training is like for the major roles in a bomber (pilot, navigator, bombardier, crew cheif, radio, gunner) and talks about the planes, which at that point was largely the B-17 or the B-24. The book is propaganda, and how could it not be given that the assignment was literally handed down by General Hap Arnold, so the tone is a very reassuring "the boys of America are better suited to fly bombers than the boys of any other country, and they've got the best training, and the best planes, and we're going to win this war and by god I pity those poor bastards who were dumb enough to pick a fight with us." I mean, it came out in 1942 when there was still a real question about whether we'd win the damn war, so what do you expect? If you're interested in WWII aviation, it's definitely worth reading. As someone who spent his childhood reading the biographies of WWII pilots, I really enjoyed this. The book also features photos by John Swope, which compliment the text wonderfully.
My father gave me another baseball book that he snagged off a pile somewhere. This one was Play Ball: The Life and Troubled Times of Major League Baseball by noted sportswriter John Feinstein. The book tells the story of the 1992 Major League Baseball Season and uses that story to make various points about baseball. It's not a great book, or even a good baseball book, but 1992 was right in the wheelhouse of my baseball fandom taking off, and 1992 was the last great season from the Jose Canseco/Mark McGwire/Rickey Henderson/Dave Steward/Dennis Eckersly A's. As such, for me this book was a nostalgic walk back to a time when I read box scores every day and probably knew the names of 95% of the players in MLB and read the new Sports Illustrated when it showed up at my house every week. The upshot is that I would have loved this book if I'd read it in 1993 and would probably own a copy. Alas, I didn't read it until 2024 so it provided me a pleasant burst of nostalgia, but I recognize that it is not actually very good.
I decided to read a new comic series that came across my radar. Once & Future has the killer concept that "King Arthur is summoned to save Britain in its time of need. He's got some different ideas about what that means than the people who summoned him. Chaos ensues." The series is by Kieron Gillen and has five trade paperbacks. I've read the first four, and as of this writing have been on hold for the fifth for almost a month. The book is basically a literary delight, as it explicitly says "stories are dangerous" and then uses the old stories to put the heroes in a lot of danger from folks like Merlin, Beowulf, assorted knights of the Round Table, and of course Arthur. It's hardly perfect, but it keeps things moving and doesn't give you time to dwell on the inconsistencies. I sure hope v.5 shows up soon!
I also read one more piece of Fables. They made a comic called Batman vs. Bigby! A Wolf in Gotham which hits the exact same notes as every other Batman vs. title you've ever read or heard of, mostly not well. I've wasted 45 minutes on worse things than this comic, but my life would be no poorer if I had not read it at all. I suspect the real reason it exists is that someone gave Bill Willingham a chance to write Batman, and how could he say no?
I read another 44 books to my daughter in October. Her absolute favorite for a good two weeks was Rainbowsaurus, which apparently just came out this year. She also enjoyed Way Up High in a Tall Green Tree a great deal.
What I Am Reading
The current poetry: Lexicon by Allison Joseph. Really, really liking this one so far. Like "I may buy this book" liking it. I'm 1/3 of the way through and have already stuck post-its on at least 7 poems, and there were a couple more where I thought "am I just post-marking everything? That seems untrue" even though they were quite good.
The current book: I heard Werner Herzog put out a memoir. I googled it and it was true, so I got A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin from the library. Herzog inimitable voice comes right through, and I'm enjoying it greatly. It's part of a long series of books on famous directors, all of which have titles like Scorsese on Scorsese. Nobody who has seen a Herzog film is surprised that his title is very different, and I bet that if I read other books in the series, I'd find that Herzog is doing things very differently, again.
I should note that I heard Herzog put out a recent memoir, then I realized that A Guide to the Perplexed came out in 2003 and was updated in 2014, and that probably wasn't recent. Sure enough, more focused googling led me to Every Man for Himself and God Against All, which came out in 2022 and is probably still 'recent'. It's now on my slush pile to read next.
What I Hope to Read One Day, Not Now
Not counting Herzog's memoir, I added two books and three poets to the slush pile in October, so technically the list got shorter. Technically.
First, the poets:
Solmaz Sharif - 10/25/2024 - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/1580548/social-skills-training
Allison Albino - 10/25/2024 - https://poets.org/poem/cast-iron
Yasmine Ameli - 10/09/24 - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/1600472/bedtime-story-1
And as for the books:
NK Jemisin - The City We Became (10/28/2024 via Slate article)
Lewis Packwood - Curious Video Game Machines - (10/24/2024 via excerpt in The Guardian)