Stuff I've Been Reading - April 2024
I've been tracking the number of books I've read for years, so it was only a matter of time until I took the next step and dropped a stat block into these posts.
CategoryFinished This MonthFinished YTD
Comics313
Books419
Poetry01
Kids56161
Total63194
Slush Pile
Even though they still feel quite low by my high school standards, these numbers are quite similar to the numbers for March. If they drop much lower I might be have to check in and make sure I'm reading less due to a specific choice to do other things, as opposed to just wasting time on mindless stuff. And yes, I spend a lot of time worrying about what I'm spending my time on. Given that time is the most valuable thing we have and we never know when we're going to run out of it, I'm not going to apologize for it, although a good therapist might have some interesting things to say about my tendency to over-examine my life.
What I Read
[1] Reading to Birdie - Or the Inexplicableness of Fame
Our rampant pillaging of the children's section of various library branches continues unabated. I read AT LEAST 56 books to Birdie in April, of them from the library. I'm absolutely getting my money's worth out of my library taxes. As I review the list, I see that I recall most of them in greater or less detail, but there wasn't that stood out as something I could unequivocally recommend to friends for their kids.
With that said, I feel obligated to note that my daughter has the obligatory copy of Good Moon, which I loathe. It is Margaret Wise Brown's most famous book, which I find inexplicable because each of the five other books of hers that I've read to Birdie were miles better. For instance, this month we read one called North, South, East, West, which I rather liked. Truly, what becomes "sticky" and lasts forever and what disappears into the void is inexplicable to me.
And while it means absolutely nothing, the baseball fan in me is mildly entertained that through April 30 I've read exactly 162 children's books to Birdie. EDIT: Was checking numbers, and it was really only 161. Alas for romantic coincidence.
[2] Comics - One Upon a Time, Later
I finished another 3 deluxe volumes of Fables, which leaves me just two more in the main series to complete. Since the ending of the first major storyline it has sputtered a bit, with some great pieces sandwiched around some filler. I'll certainly finish the series, but I may hold off on the spinoff materials.
[3] Books - A Novel Idea
I finished four books in April.
- One of the very earliest additions I can recall making to my slush pile was Appointment in Samarra. Author John O'Hara was a renowned writer of short fiction in his time, and Appointment in Samarra sometimes feels like several interrelated short stories loosely. When published in 1934 it was considered to be risque for its frank discussions of sex. This, of course, feels ridiculous 90 years later. What doesn't feel ridiculous is the portrayal of a the patheticness of the small city's WASPy milieu. If I had been alive in 1934 and familiar with the culture of the time this book might have hit harder. As it was, I enjoyed it well enough but suspect I missed quite a bit of the cultural references.
- When I summarized my enjoyment of Lionel Shriver in 2019, I had read three of her books. In the subsequent five years, I'd read only one more, and that was later in 2019. In the face of these facts, I snagged The Mandibles. Wow. Shriver follows a family of some means through an American economic disaster that leads to Argentinian or Weimer Republic-style hyperinflation, and shows exactly how bad it could get. This gives her plenty of opportunities to skewer racial politics, immigration, the Federal Reserve, the Euro and about a gazillion other topics. This is the very rare novel that I spent a lot of time thinking about while it was on my nightstand, when it was in my hands, when it went back to the library. Heck, I'm still thinking about it, and I finished it in the first week of April. I'm not sure this is the best book I've read this year, but it is certainly the one that I want to get into a big argument with about with a friend after they read it. So pick it up and then give me a call!
- I read my second Michael Lewis book of the year when I knocked out The Blind Side. There are some good moments about football, and some more good moments where it details exactly how much human potential we are letting go to waste in this country due to a simple lack of caring. Leaving aside their motives, the Tuohy family spent a lot of money and effort on getting just Michael Oher out of the ghetto and a failed educational system and getting him into college. This involved a complicated and expensive support system, but it seems to have worked. Of course, Oher was good at football. What all the other kids in that situation who didn't necessarily have an obvious special talent? Lewis mostly shies away from the full implications and keeps the focus largely on football, which makes for a good book but misses the larger point.
- I somehow missed the Nick Hornby novel Juliet, Naked when it came out, despite it being a dark mirror of the great High Fidelity. The record store owner protagonist of High Fidelity is someone taking an obsessive interest and turning it into a net positive. Juliet, Naked is someone taking an obsessive interest in a single musician (the fictional Tucker Crowe) and wasting their life to more or less no productive benefit, and dragging their girlfriend along with. Fortunately, the events of this book show the girlfriend breaking free the emotional vortex of Crowe fandom by... meeting the real Crowe as his first album in decades drops. I cranked through all 400+ pages during one platelet donation session of just over 3 hours, which even for me is a fast pace. If you recognized yourself in High Fidelity (most of my radio friends nod in unison), hopefully you won't recognize yourself in this one. I'm not sure this is a great book, but once again Hornby seems to have a direct path into the middle of my brain.
I should note that there was apparently also a movie made of Juliet, Naked, which I somehow missed despite it starring Ethan Hawke, who is one of my personal favorites.
What I'm Reading
At the very end of April I finished the letter 'C' in The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, 3rd edition. Letters A and B took many years. Letter C took two months. Having a system helps. Weirdly, letters A-C cover 11.5% of the alphabet and 24.7% of the book. Of course, the letter B has all the "baseball <>" terms, which pads it out. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone but a dire baseball fanatic, but as one of that legion, I'm really enjoying it. Which is good, because it's going to be a few more years until I finish it. I get why some crazy people read the OED.
Further progress has been made on The Best American Poetry of 2022, and thank goodness the Cleveland library system has a liberal approach to allowing renewals. I've got 17/75 poems left to go, and the 'hit rate' of ones that have really snagged me is very high.
I'm not sure which book I'm going to start next, but right now I've got two more books out from the library and another my father lent me so it will likely be one of these three:
- Arena: The Story of the Federal Theatre - this history of the Depression era project was published in 1940 by Hallie Flanagan, one of the directors in that project. My streak of having some brief mention of a book about the WPA projects is at 4 and will continue for at least a fifth month. The copy that came from the library appears to be an original 1940 edition, and the old school paper checkout card with the stamped dates on it in the back has only three dates in it from 1957, 1962 and 1966. I like it already. I don't recall when I added this to the slush pile, but I 100% understand why I did.
- My friend Gayle mentioned The Death of Expertise on social media, and it sounded like the kind of short non-fiction / social analysis I enjoy.
- The biography of Abraham Joshua Heschel I finished last month was meh, but my father noted that he had a copy of Heschel's book The Sabbath that he'd read for a synagogue book club. Did I want to borrow it? I did indeed, so he brought me his copy of the slim volume, heavily annotated with post-it notes. I look forward to it.
What I Hope to Read
Oh man, I added so much to the slush pile in April, and since I'm now consistently adding dates and a source, I can even summarize it.
I had a bunch of 'saved links' in Facebook that were related to books I wanted to read, so I moved them into the slush pile. I'm not sure in most cases when they were saved, but here they are:
Moses Ose Utomi - The Lies of the Ajungo - Interesting looking science fiction.
Willaim Souder - Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck - Would I like it more than reading more Steinbeck? Not sure. Brandt recommended it.
Aaron Carnes - In Defense of Ska - I love ska.
Marc Wasserman - Skaboom!: An American Ska & Reggae Oral History - I really love ska.
Lawrence Weinstein - Grammar For a Full Life - Seems like the kind of word nerdery I can get behind.
Then there were the book specific ads that got me:
Judi Dench - Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent (Facebook Ad) - I love Shakespeare and M. Granted, I love a different M than the one Dame Dench so memorably portrayed, but still.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil - Bite by Bite (Bookshop.org email) - Her book "Worlds of Wonder" was fantastic and I recommend it.
Thomas Modley - Vectors (featured on website for the I was buying tickets for a tunnel tour of Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument)
And two new poets, both from Poetry Foundation, who hit hard:
Camille T. Dungy - 4/25/24 - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/146218/naming-what-has-risen
Frank Marshall Davis - 4/7/24 - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/161537/lady-day-6544187379765
So the slush pile got longer in April even as I removed things. If I want to fully catch up on my reading, I've no choice but to live forever.
CategoryFinished This MonthFinished YTD
Comics313
Books419
Poetry01
Kids56161
Total63194
Slush Pile
Even though they still feel quite low by my high school standards, these numbers are quite similar to the numbers for March. If they drop much lower I might be have to check in and make sure I'm reading less due to a specific choice to do other things, as opposed to just wasting time on mindless stuff. And yes, I spend a lot of time worrying about what I'm spending my time on. Given that time is the most valuable thing we have and we never know when we're going to run out of it, I'm not going to apologize for it, although a good therapist might have some interesting things to say about my tendency to over-examine my life.
What I Read
[1] Reading to Birdie - Or the Inexplicableness of Fame
Our rampant pillaging of the children's section of various library branches continues unabated. I read AT LEAST 56 books to Birdie in April, of them from the library. I'm absolutely getting my money's worth out of my library taxes. As I review the list, I see that I recall most of them in greater or less detail, but there wasn't that stood out as something I could unequivocally recommend to friends for their kids.
With that said, I feel obligated to note that my daughter has the obligatory copy of Good Moon, which I loathe. It is Margaret Wise Brown's most famous book, which I find inexplicable because each of the five other books of hers that I've read to Birdie were miles better. For instance, this month we read one called North, South, East, West, which I rather liked. Truly, what becomes "sticky" and lasts forever and what disappears into the void is inexplicable to me.
And while it means absolutely nothing, the baseball fan in me is mildly entertained that through April 30 I've read exactly 162 children's books to Birdie. EDIT: Was checking numbers, and it was really only 161. Alas for romantic coincidence.
[2] Comics - One Upon a Time, Later
I finished another 3 deluxe volumes of Fables, which leaves me just two more in the main series to complete. Since the ending of the first major storyline it has sputtered a bit, with some great pieces sandwiched around some filler. I'll certainly finish the series, but I may hold off on the spinoff materials.
[3] Books - A Novel Idea
I finished four books in April.
- One of the very earliest additions I can recall making to my slush pile was Appointment in Samarra. Author John O'Hara was a renowned writer of short fiction in his time, and Appointment in Samarra sometimes feels like several interrelated short stories loosely. When published in 1934 it was considered to be risque for its frank discussions of sex. This, of course, feels ridiculous 90 years later. What doesn't feel ridiculous is the portrayal of a the patheticness of the small city's WASPy milieu. If I had been alive in 1934 and familiar with the culture of the time this book might have hit harder. As it was, I enjoyed it well enough but suspect I missed quite a bit of the cultural references.
- When I summarized my enjoyment of Lionel Shriver in 2019, I had read three of her books. In the subsequent five years, I'd read only one more, and that was later in 2019. In the face of these facts, I snagged The Mandibles. Wow. Shriver follows a family of some means through an American economic disaster that leads to Argentinian or Weimer Republic-style hyperinflation, and shows exactly how bad it could get. This gives her plenty of opportunities to skewer racial politics, immigration, the Federal Reserve, the Euro and about a gazillion other topics. This is the very rare novel that I spent a lot of time thinking about while it was on my nightstand, when it was in my hands, when it went back to the library. Heck, I'm still thinking about it, and I finished it in the first week of April. I'm not sure this is the best book I've read this year, but it is certainly the one that I want to get into a big argument with about with a friend after they read it. So pick it up and then give me a call!
- I read my second Michael Lewis book of the year when I knocked out The Blind Side. There are some good moments about football, and some more good moments where it details exactly how much human potential we are letting go to waste in this country due to a simple lack of caring. Leaving aside their motives, the Tuohy family spent a lot of money and effort on getting just Michael Oher out of the ghetto and a failed educational system and getting him into college. This involved a complicated and expensive support system, but it seems to have worked. Of course, Oher was good at football. What all the other kids in that situation who didn't necessarily have an obvious special talent? Lewis mostly shies away from the full implications and keeps the focus largely on football, which makes for a good book but misses the larger point.
- I somehow missed the Nick Hornby novel Juliet, Naked when it came out, despite it being a dark mirror of the great High Fidelity. The record store owner protagonist of High Fidelity is someone taking an obsessive interest and turning it into a net positive. Juliet, Naked is someone taking an obsessive interest in a single musician (the fictional Tucker Crowe) and wasting their life to more or less no productive benefit, and dragging their girlfriend along with. Fortunately, the events of this book show the girlfriend breaking free the emotional vortex of Crowe fandom by... meeting the real Crowe as his first album in decades drops. I cranked through all 400+ pages during one platelet donation session of just over 3 hours, which even for me is a fast pace. If you recognized yourself in High Fidelity (most of my radio friends nod in unison), hopefully you won't recognize yourself in this one. I'm not sure this is a great book, but once again Hornby seems to have a direct path into the middle of my brain.
I should note that there was apparently also a movie made of Juliet, Naked, which I somehow missed despite it starring Ethan Hawke, who is one of my personal favorites.
What I'm Reading
At the very end of April I finished the letter 'C' in The Dickson Baseball Dictionary, 3rd edition. Letters A and B took many years. Letter C took two months. Having a system helps. Weirdly, letters A-C cover 11.5% of the alphabet and 24.7% of the book. Of course, the letter B has all the "baseball <>" terms, which pads it out. I wouldn't recommend this to anyone but a dire baseball fanatic, but as one of that legion, I'm really enjoying it. Which is good, because it's going to be a few more years until I finish it. I get why some crazy people read the OED.
Further progress has been made on The Best American Poetry of 2022, and thank goodness the Cleveland library system has a liberal approach to allowing renewals. I've got 17/75 poems left to go, and the 'hit rate' of ones that have really snagged me is very high.
I'm not sure which book I'm going to start next, but right now I've got two more books out from the library and another my father lent me so it will likely be one of these three:
- Arena: The Story of the Federal Theatre - this history of the Depression era project was published in 1940 by Hallie Flanagan, one of the directors in that project. My streak of having some brief mention of a book about the WPA projects is at 4 and will continue for at least a fifth month. The copy that came from the library appears to be an original 1940 edition, and the old school paper checkout card with the stamped dates on it in the back has only three dates in it from 1957, 1962 and 1966. I like it already. I don't recall when I added this to the slush pile, but I 100% understand why I did.
- My friend Gayle mentioned The Death of Expertise on social media, and it sounded like the kind of short non-fiction / social analysis I enjoy.
- The biography of Abraham Joshua Heschel I finished last month was meh, but my father noted that he had a copy of Heschel's book The Sabbath that he'd read for a synagogue book club. Did I want to borrow it? I did indeed, so he brought me his copy of the slim volume, heavily annotated with post-it notes. I look forward to it.
What I Hope to Read
Oh man, I added so much to the slush pile in April, and since I'm now consistently adding dates and a source, I can even summarize it.
I had a bunch of 'saved links' in Facebook that were related to books I wanted to read, so I moved them into the slush pile. I'm not sure in most cases when they were saved, but here they are:
Moses Ose Utomi - The Lies of the Ajungo - Interesting looking science fiction.
Willaim Souder - Mad at the World: A Life of John Steinbeck - Would I like it more than reading more Steinbeck? Not sure. Brandt recommended it.
Aaron Carnes - In Defense of Ska - I love ska.
Marc Wasserman - Skaboom!: An American Ska & Reggae Oral History - I really love ska.
Lawrence Weinstein - Grammar For a Full Life - Seems like the kind of word nerdery I can get behind.
Then there were the book specific ads that got me:
Judi Dench - Shakespeare: The Man Who Pays the Rent (Facebook Ad) - I love Shakespeare and M. Granted, I love a different M than the one Dame Dench so memorably portrayed, but still.
Aimee Nezhukumatathil - Bite by Bite (Bookshop.org email) - Her book "Worlds of Wonder" was fantastic and I recommend it.
Thomas Modley - Vectors (featured on website for the I was buying tickets for a tunnel tour of Soldiers’ and Sailors’ Monument)
And two new poets, both from Poetry Foundation, who hit hard:
Camille T. Dungy - 4/25/24 - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/146218/naming-what-has-risen
Frank Marshall Davis - 4/7/24 - https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/poems/161537/lady-day-6544187379765
So the slush pile got longer in April even as I removed things. If I want to fully catch up on my reading, I've no choice but to live forever.