Stuff I've Been Reading - November 2024
CategoryFinished This MonthFinished YTD
Books951
Comics231
Poetry06
Kids33429
Total44517
Slush Pile
I track the books I read for three reasons:
1- I can reliably find the name of the book later if I need it for some reason. That reason is almost always me referencing the book in a conversation with someone else. Irritatingly, I increasingly find that I while I can still remember entire portions of books, the names of those books sometimes escape me.
2- If I write the books down that I've read, I'm more likely to remember I've read them when I encounter them again. This isn't a perfect system (see: my asking for Lords of the Realm as a gift in 2022 and reading it in 2023, having forgotten I read it in 2015), but it's the best system I've got right now.
3- If the number of books I'm reading drops unexpectedly I have a built-in "wait, what's the problem?" checkpoint.
And with that, let's get into it.
What I Read
I finished Werner Herzog: A Guide for the Complexed. It took me the better part of two weeks, but I enjoyed every bit of it. Here are some quotes from Werner, because you know you want them.
Herzog on television:
Our culture today, especially television, infantilies us. The indignity of it kills our imaginations. May I propose a Herzog dictum? Those who read own the world. Those who watch television lose it. Sitting at home on your own, in front of the screen, is a very different experience from being in the communal spaces of the world, those centres of collective dreaming. Television creates loneliness.
You'll be unsurprised from that quote that Herzog doesn't have much use for the internet. He appreciates the utilitarian uses like email and paying bills online, but has no use for social media or most of the rest of it.
Herzog on music:
Music is able to make visible what is latent; it reveals new things to us, helps shift our perception and enables us to see deeper into things.
Herzog also introduced me to Hercules Seghers and Carlos Gesualdo, to name just two.
Beyond Herzog, I managed to read 8 other books this month, largely because I spent a week ignoring other things I should have been doing and thereby successfully reading 5 books in 8 days. It felt pretty great but probably isn't super sustainable. 4 of the 5 books were essentially drawn from my author list. The five were:
Gwendy's Magic Feather - Richard Chizmar
Gwendy's Final Task - Richard Chizmar and Stephen King
To Have and Have Not - Ernest Hemingway
The Earth is the Lord's: The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe - Abraham Joshua Heschel
Roman Stories - Jhumpa Lahiri
Back in 2017, I read a then new collaboration between Richard Chizmar and Stephen King called Gwendy's Button Box. The titular Gwendy is one of my favorite King characters of all time, and given that I've read 95%+ of his books and his super power is creating characters that are easy to get invested in, that's saying something. King's books don't typically have sequels outside the Dark Tower, but in this case Chizmar convinced him to keep going. Chizmar wrote the first sequel by himself (which is why it doesn't have a wiki article, I'm sure) and they teamed up again for the third and final sequel. I loved them both. Gwendy is still a great character. I cried at the end, which I guess means something.
Also back in 2017, the Art Museum showed all the films with Bogart and Bacall in them, including To Have and Have Not. I finally read the original book by Ernest Hemingway, and let's just say that there's not much overlap between the book and the movie. The main character has the same name, and the first section of the book has some of the same situations, but the remainder of the book is completely different, and often more interesting, than the movie. It works particularly well when it contrasts wealthy yacht owners with the down and out of the Florida Keys.
I wonder if Hemingway would have liked Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri. Lahiri here writes in Italian and translates back to English, as she did with Whereabouts. The stories are short, stripped down and quite direct. We say an assortment of people living in and around the Eternal City. Some come as illegal immigrants, others native Italians, others tourists. She has a particularly sympathetic eye for those who don't look Italian and suffer because of it. Last year I said about Whereabouts that "if I'd read it knowing nothing about the author I would have sought out her other books based on this one" and that is doubly true for Roman Stories, which for most authors would be the best book of their career.
Which leads to a digression - do I think Roman Stories is good because it's good, or because Lahiri wrote it and my prior enjoyment of her books gave this one an additional patina of excellence in my mind, or because I happened to be in a particularly mood the day I read it because it came at the end of a week of enjoyable reading? I have no idea. It made me want to re-read all of her prior books again, and perhaps I shall.
The last book that week was The Earth is the Lord's: The Inner World of the Jew in Eastern Europe, which was the last of the little Abraham Joshua Heschel kick I went on this year, having borrowed it from my father in August. It was written in much the same tone as The Sabbath (and indeed, was paired with that book in my father's copy) but I found it to be an unsatisfying attempt to talk about the religious mindset of the now destroyed Jewish worlds of Eastern Europe. It did give me a good quote to throw at advocates of utilitarianism though: A civilization that is devoted exclusively to the utilitarian is at bottom not different from the barbarism.
I also finally finished the last short story in Goodbye, Columbus. I'd long ago completed the titular novella for my class at the synagogue, but the short stories were mostly so uninteresting or flat out unpleasant that it took me a while to work my way through them. Several of the other people in my class swear that Philip Roth is a great author and has many books worth reading, but I loathed most of the characters in Goodbye, Columbus and have no immediate desire to read more.
In 2019, M and I visited Halifax and toured the last existing Flower-class corvette. On the last day of November, I finished the The Cruel Sea, which tells the story of HMS Compass Rose and HMS Saltash, a fictional Flower-class corvette and River-class frigate on the Atlantic convoys during WWII. Author Nicholas Monsarrat served on a Flower-class before commanding a River-class and his story of ships and men versus the U-boats and the ocean is as good a description of the Battle of the Atlantic as is ever likely to be written, while simultaneously being not at all glorious or heroic. I recommend to anyone who enjoys WWII history; it definitely comes across as Monsarrat thinly fictionalizing his experiences and those of his peers.
On the comics front, the fifth and final volume of Once & Future finally arrive via library hold, so I was able to finish the series I had started in October. It had a satisfactory ending, and I greatly enjoyed the little side plot that the historical Shakespeare was a monster hunter who trapped a river god by writing him into King Lear using a magic pen that was made from a feather on one of Robin Hood's arrows. Because obviously. If you don't like all sorts of strange fiction connections like that, you probably shouldn't read Once & Future.
Speaking of Shakespeare, I read Antony and Cleopatra while giving blood on Veteran's Day. That marked my third Shakespeare of the year, and the first Shakespeare in quite a long time that I had absolutely no prior history of engagement with. I'd never read any of it and knew very little about it besides its connection to Julius Caesar. My general summation is that on paper, at least, it's not very good until the last act, when a lot of dying happens.
Way back in 2012 I started reading a comic called The Boys, which I then finished off in 2017. Since then it was adapted for television, which blows my mind because it's the likely most ridiculously over the top offensive thing that Garth Ennis has written, which is saying something. Anyway, they issued a epilogue to the comics as part of the marketing for the TV show. It's a little epilogue to the main series called Dear Becky, and it's not really very good. The highlight is probably watching the Boys cut out the tongue of a Billy Batson analog, which illustrates the tone of The Boys in general.
None of the 33 kids book I read really stood out to me. I will note that a tremendous percentage of them feature rabbits. My daughter loves rabbits and my wife attempts to cater to that with the book selections at the library. Just counting the ones with rabbits explicitly mentioned in the title gets us to 7/33, and I'm sure that if I went back and marked rabbit-related content we'd be into double digits. Note: I will not do this. There are SOME limits.
With K and L completed, I passed the halfway mark of the alphabet in the Dickson Baseball Dictionary. It somehow had two different entries tied to Linda Ronstadt. Apparently in the 70s a Linda Ronstadt was a fastball. Why? Because she covered Blue Bayou, and a fastball "blew by you". And because that wasn't esoteric enough, it shifted to a fastball being called a Louisiana, because that's where the bayous were. Ok then.
What I Am Reading
I've almost completed the poetry collection Lexicon by Allison Joseph. So far, it's pretty easily my favorite poetry of the year.
I've started reading the viral poetry collection of 1900, A Shropshire Lad by AE Housman. It would be hard to overstate how popular these poems were from 1896 to 1920, and I think I may have added it to the slush pile because poems from it were quoted in so many other things I read.
I also have cued up the following books: A Bell for Adano, Red Cavalry and This is the Voice. The former two are from the slush pile, the latter I borrowed from my mother.
What I Hope to Read One Day, Not Now
I added one book and three poets to the slush pile.
The book is Dollar Signs on the Muscle: The World of Baseball Scouting by Kevin Kerrane. It was referenced in the Dickson Baseball Dictionary. It's from 1984 so hopefully there's an updated version tying in some of how analytics impacts scouting, but even if there isn't I'm sure I'll enjoy reading about a section of baseball I haven't seen covered in print in detail.
The poets were as follows:
Diane Seuss - 11/27/2024 - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/161499/juke
Ted Kooser - 11/13/2024 - https://poets.org/poem/legacy-5
Tanaya Winder - 11/4/2024 - (great first couplet) https://poets.org/poem/girls-who-run-through-storms-buffalos-knowing-its-quickest-way-through
Yep, I definitely need to consider not writing about every book when there are this many. But what do I cut from the 9? Not the Bard. Not books by three of my highlight authors, King, Lahiri and Hemingway. Not The Cruel Sea, which was fantastic, or the eminently quotable Herzog. That leaves Heschel, the two comics or the Roth, which I hated, but better hatred than mediocrity? I'll have to think about that, assuming it's ever a problem again!