Book Log 2024

1. MCU: The Reign of Marvel Studios by Joanna Robinson, Dave Gonzales, and Gavin Edwards (started 12/7; finished 1/18): B This is a book clearly written by authors who bore Marvel Studios no ill will, and I wouldn't necessarily want them to, except that it might otherwise have included a lot more juicy content than what actually made it to print. Mind you, it has plenty of content representing criticism of Marvel and some specific executives among certain sectors, but it still plays out in a pretty warmed-over way. In short, although this book got much more interesting to me the more recent its coverage got (specific chapters dedicated to Black Panther, Captain Marvel and Spider-Man: No Way Home are especially good reads), this book just overall wasn't that exciting to me.Mind you, that's more of a "me problem," because, probably unlike most readers of this book, I approached it as someone with a love of cinema and the film industry overall, rather than someone with any direct love of Marvel movies, which I have long felt have, with a few notable exceptions, become rote, carbon plot-copies of countless superhero movies that came before them. I'm just generally bored of them—but, I can also acknowledge the unprecedented achievement of the "Marvel Cinematic Universe," connecting a couple dozen separate movies over the course of fifteen years. The book barely touches on how this very same approach is now becoming a liability, and even the most ardent fans of yesterday aren't as interested anymore (thank god).Still, the book is extremely well-researched and a generally fun read, if a bit long, with 432 pages before nearly 50 pages of endnotes. Speaking of which, if you do read this, don't miss the clever "mid-credits sequence" of a couple of pages they insert into the middle of those notes.


2. America the Beautiful? One Woman in a Borrowed Prius on the Road Most Traveled by Blythe Roberson (started 1/18; finished 2/5): B A curious experience with this book: I found it flawed, and I really enjoyed reading it. Blythe Roberson regularly makes me laugh out loud, while I also found her tendency to wear her white-liberal guilt on her sleeve to be a little insufferable. She writes a lot about the environmental impact of driving a car literally all over the country to visit land meant to be protected (specifically, national parks), as though to shield herself from readers criticizing her for that very thing. I can't say she's super successful there. This book sure taught me about a bunch of national parks I'd love to visit, though. Maybe I can get a book deal out of my own multi-month road trip! This book is overall fine, but I feel confident that my own book about the same thing would have been better.


3. Comedy Book: How Comedy Conquered Culture—and the Magic That Makes It Work by Jesse David Fox (started 2/6; finished 2/20): B This is a sort of curious book, esoteric in a way: I really devoured it, just because I love standup comedy, and comedy in general, and most "inside baseball" type conversations about the industry of comedy. Fox is the host of a podcast I have listened to intermittently, called Good One, in which he interviews comedians abou the construction of specific jokes—and then he was a guest on the podcast I have listened to the longest, WTF with Marc Maron, to promote this very book, that being how I learned about it. But, here are two pertinent questions: 1) did I really learn anything useful from this book that I didn't already know? and 2) would I recommend this book to anyone, unless I knew them to be as into comedy as I am? I must admit that ultimately the answers are no, and no. I sure enjoyed it though! Even though I do have one major complaint, which is actually about the book cover design, with the phrase "Comedy Book" printed several times in different fonts, all of which give the misleading impression that it's a silly book rather than the deeply academic exercise it actually is. But, inside the cover, it really worked for me, at least.


4. A Taste for Poison: Eleven Deadly Molecules and the Killers Who Used Them by Neil Bradbury, Ph.D. (started 2/21; finished 3/12): B+ In spite of it being written in a sometimes distractingly, incongruously wholesome literary voice, this is a really fun, fascinating read. It's a little like reading true crime as reported by Pollyanna, but the great amount of specific and sometimes unsettling detail makes that easy to look past—I'm not sure I'll ever look at hospital visits the same way again. (A stunning number of murders and attempted murders recounted in the book were carried out by health care professionals.) The stories in this book run the gamut, from the aforementioned hospital workers to disgruntled Victorian-era spouses to 20th-century international espionage. This is a great book for the person with equal amounts of educational and morbid interests.


5. The Future by Naomi Alderman (started 3/12; finished 3/24): B+ "On the day the world ended," these are the opening six words to The Future, with several more references to the world ending in the early pages of this book. If I had any actual complaint about this book, it would be that it's nearly three quarters of the way through before we get even a hint as to exactly how the world ended. On the other hand, I have to hand it to author Naomi Alderman: it sure is an effective way to keep you turning the pages. Soon enough we are introduced to the CEOs of three megacorporations: one a social network; one focused on e-commerce and delivery; one a computer company. Gee, I wonder what the real-world analogs are here? They all have bunkers and they have a coordinated plan for how to get to them in case of the world ending—and in my view having them all wind up on the same escape plane stretches plausibility, but whatever. This book covers a lot about tech and the environmental crises and how the two can either be at odds or work to mutual benefit, contextualized with a kind of intrigue that made it hard for me to put it down. Everything ties up in the end perhaps a bit too neatly—but also, somehow, very satisfyingly. If you liked Alderman's previous novel The Power you'll definitely like this one—which isn't quite as good, but it's close. 


6. Tress of the Emerald Sea by Brandon Sanderson (started 3/24; finished 5/7): A- With this wonderful fantasy novel, about a simple, cup-loving young woman leaving her island home to sail across the dangerous "spore seas" of her planet with a band of pirates on a quest to confront the sorceress who kidnapped the man she loves, the best point of comparison is The Princess Bride (more so the spectacular 1973 William Goldman novel than the 1987 film)—a comparison so obvious, in fact, that Brandon Sanderson makes it directly explicit as an intentional inspiration in his postscript. It's difficult to summarize this novel's story in a way that does justice to what a great read it is, largely because of its narrator, who is mentally compromised due to a curse from the aforementioned sorceress. I suppose there is a distinction to be made, because The Princess Bride, particularly the novel, goes to some surprisingly dark places that Tress of the Emerald Sea does not quite sail into. And yet, the characters and the world, where air-churned spores that fall from several moons in stationary orbit are what make up its seas, are both vividly realized, making this a world that is a delight to inhabit, and sprinkled with whimiscally offbeat, laugh-out-loud humor. As of reading this novel, it was easily the best I have read this year, and I would easily recommend it to readers of all ages. 


7. Dune by Frank Herbert (started 5/12; finished 7/12): A This is the most monumental, enduring, spectacular novel I have read in a very, very long time. A great many years, it could be argued. I know I have recency bias going on here, but I'm feeling confident about my opinions if for no other reason than my enduring love of the Denis Villeneuve film adaptations, which have been out a while now, I have watched several times, and I never tire of. I can count on one hand the number of novels I have re-read, and I can easily see myself re-reading this one day. For now, I must share this excerpt from Frank Herbert's son Brian's Afterward in the 2005 edition of the novel that I had checked out of the library: Dad told me that you could follow any of the novel's layers as you read it, and then start the book all over again, focusing on an entirely different layer. At the end of the book, he intentionally left loose ends and said he did this to send the readers spinning out of the story with bits and pieces of it still clinging to them, so that they would want to go back and read it again. This passage really stands out to me as I come away from finishing the novel for the first time. I have noted how I long felt an aversion to even trying to read this novel, mostly because I heard that for decades it was regarded as "unadaptable" and I was put under the impression that it had this impenetrable narrative. Between that and how long I also knew the novel to be, it sounded like a chore to read that I doubted was worth the effort. Much to my surprise and delight, once I finally picked it up, Dune became one of the very few novels that truly hooked me with its narrative literally on page 1. What I discovered was that, yes, the narrative is incredibly dense—but, to Brian's point, that is only one layer, and this book can be read easily as simply gripping science fiction entertainment without having to drill too far into its density. Just as already happened to me with the Villeneuve films, I know that I can return to it and glean more from it that I did not the first time around. The detail of this universe, as fully realized, is astonishing, and I am in awe of it. It took me a solid two months to read this book from start to finish, and I'd have been happy for it to take longer: I loved just picking it up and spending time simmering in its world. There is another incredibly useful factor in how the story is set 20,000 in the future: it hardly matters that the novel was first published in 1965, 59 years ago as I write this—in the lore of the novel, humanity has long ago destroyed machines as we currently think of them. Given the rise and fear of AI today, this is more prescient and relevant than ever. In any case, the novel is set so wildly far into the future that almost nothing about it feels implausible or dated, regardless of how long ago it was written, and in all likelihood it never will in any of our lifetimes. To call this novel "ageless" is an understatement—and, given that this is one of the best-selling science fiction novels of all time, I realize I'm coming rather late to this party. But, that's the beauty of this novel: it is never too late, nor can it ever be. I absolutely adored this book—and I say this even with the caveat of its subtly homophobic depiction of the Baron Harkonnen (maybe the one thing in it that could objectively qualify as dated)—and I would recommend it to any and everyone.


8. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (started 7/13; finished 8/8): A+ What better book to follow up Dune than with what remains both my favorite science fiction novel and my favorite novel overall? I'm not sure how often these two novels are mentioned in the same conversations, but for me they both have lasting and deep cultural impact with a lot of overlap, and it's quite possible that if I had to rank all of my favorite novels, I could put Dune at #2—and Brave New World still at #1. This was the fifth time I have read Brave New World and I posted to social media only minutes after finishing it: The 20 years since I last read it was enough time for the entire world to change and thus alter the lens through which it is perceived. And although I have since read other spectacular books that could have challenged its standing in my mind (DUNE came *very* close), I must say the depth of how impressed I am by this vision of the future from 92 years ago goes on unabated. What a truly spectacular book this is, so dense with provocative meaning and implication, more and more prescient with each passing decade. I just love this book so much, I am certain I will read it yet again one day—the only book I have read nearly so many times, a stellar intellectual exercise that challenges and stretches far beyond what its deceptively short length might suggest. The key difference from Dune is that novel's evergreen effect due to its vision of a future tens of thousands of years from now. Brave New World is set in what would to us be the year 2540—all of about 3% of the time from now as Dune—and yet is astonishingly prescient, depicting elements of a world we live in currently that fit right into our current realities (society run by deluded amusements; social conditioning; rampant cloning). There's something deeply unsettling about the feeling of a current society visibly moving in this direction as opposed to the wild conjecture it no doubt seemed to be upon first publication in 1932, presumably deeply scandalizing readers. There's some real irony in the foreward Huxley wrote for the 1946 edition of the novel that I tend to read, in that he laments the story's lack of any reference to nuclear warfare; naturally anyone in the 1940s would assume nuclear conflict would play a big part in our future, but—so far at least—his original, unspoiled vision from before the atom bomb is proving to be far more accurate than he ever could have imagined. As such, there is a kind of deep, dark magic to the time traveling element to reading this novel, and I just love it.


9. Sea of Tranquility by Emily St. John Mandel (started 8/11; finished 8/26): B I was really wanting to read the second in the Dune series, Dune Prophesy, but predictably I had many other holds at the library to wait through. When I checked this book out, Seattle Public Library had only just been able to start accepting book returns, literally months after a malware attack that completely crippled their systems. Once I could return Dune, I went to the library with the vain hope that I could just find Dune Prophesy on the shelf, which of course I did not find. I was still very much in a science-fiction mood, though—I had just re-read Brave New World—so that's what I went in search of, among the books already on the shelf. Then I remembered the CEO at work at recommended Sea of Tranquility many months ago, and I had put it on my list. I found it on the shelf, and was pleased to learn it was by the same author as Station Eleven, which I still have not read but really loved the HBO limited series adapted from it. All of these elements set up pretty high expectations for this novel . . . which honestly did not meet them. This book is fine. I just wanted something better. I was fascinated by the premise, with time settings jumping from 1912 to 2020 to 2203 to 2401. But, maybe halfway through, a key character starts theorizing about whether we are all living in a simulation, and then it becomes clear that all of these time periods are connected by time travel. And I was just like: oh. That's what this is? Been there, done that. I'd have loved for there to be some other reason for these time jumps in narrative, some actually original idea that never quite materializes. The author weaves in themes of loneliness and learning how to step away from the hustle and bustle of life by connecting all the time periods as either very near or during global pandemics. And to her credit, the writing is quite vivid for how relatively simple it is, which alone made it difficult for me to put the book down. The writing is excellent. The story didn't much do it for me.


10. Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin (started 8/26; finished 9/23): B I know for certain that I read this novel at least once before—in 2006. I thought I read both this and Armistead Maupin's two follow-up books earlier than that, but my annual book logs I keep only go back to 2003, so I can't remember for sure. This is a light, breezy, fun read, and I kept wondering what it must have been like when initially serialized weekly in San Francisco newspapers in 1974. And that's kind of just the thing: I gave this a B+ in 2006, but can't help but downgrade it to a solid B from the vantage point of 2024, when the way we look at things like race, gender and sexuality are (hopefully) a bit more sophisticated. None of the themes in this novel are tackled awfully, but it's still very much a product of its time, and some of what Maupin explores is done, let's say, slightly inelegantly. It's subtle, but there is a bit of cringe there that may not have been detected in less enlightened years passed. Nevertheless, I intend to move forward in the series, whose very existence serves as a kind of historical record. It will be interesting to see how Maupin's characters eventually navigate a world with HIV, legalized same-sex marriage, intersectionality, or the mainstreaming of the fight for queer and trans rights—all within the specific setting of San Francisco, which itself is now an entire world apart from the city it was in the seventies, the eighties, or even the ninetes.


11. More Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin (started 9/24; finished 10/10): B Infidelity. Pregnancy. Secret parentage. Amnesia. If anyone thought the first Tales of the City was like a soap opera, Armistead Maupin sure as shit pumps the accelerator with this follow-up. It still treats both race and gender in a way that makes it feel like an artifact—"It was a different time," you might say—including an older trans character who endures getting deadnamed by an ex. The fascinating element here is how progressive this was in the context of its first publication in 1980, an ensemble cast of characters navigating countless recognizable real-life landmarks in the "modern Sodom" of then-contemporary San Francisco. That city and Tales of the City are synonymous with each other, and its narrative flaws aside, the characters are just impossible not to get attached to.


12. Dune Messiah by Frank Herbert (started 10/10; finished 11/14): A- I was a bit surprised to discover Dune Messiah is only about half the length of Dune. It makes it feel a little less epic, and a tad more like an extended epilogue to the first novel, set 12 years later. I also had a feeling of even more of this one, also dense with layered meaning and themes, going over my head. And then, somehow, by the time I finished it . . . I found that I still loved it. There's just something about Herbert's Dune universe, I absolutely love spending time in it. And there are unusually vivid elements that I find difficult to shake, super cool narrative threads that continue to make these stories exceptional. There are many in both novels, but my favorite from Dune is the wisened knowledge inside of Alia as a little girl; in Dune Messiah, for me anyway, I fell in love with the character arc of Duncan Idaho as a ghola, particularly with his blank, metal Tleilaxu eyes, a persistently haunting image. There's a ton more of societies, histories and mythologies thrown around in this book that I struggled to wrap my brain around, and in the end I didn't care so much: the Dune universe is something you surrender to, and swim through, like a Guild Navigator in a tank of spice gas.


13. Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (started 11/16; finished 12/24): B I enjoyed this book overall, but also have somewhat mixed feelings about it. I really enjoyed Tova, the tiny grandma protagonist, and it was nice to spend the majority of the pages with her. My absolute favorite was definitely Marcellus, the giant Pacific octopus living in the Puget Sound aquarium where Tova does janitorial work—and, much more specifically, the sporadic chapters that are narrated by him. The thing is, Selby Van Pelt has a particular talent for writing from an anthropomorphic viewpoint, by far the most novel (pardon the pun) part of this book, though she uses admirable restraint in engaging with it, as those chapters are the most infrequent and use up the least number of pages. Honestly, the greatest challenge was with adopting the viewpoint of a straight young man, specifically Cameron, the irresponsible character who loses his job in California and heads to Washington in search of a rich man he assumes is his biological father (and we all know far before Cameron does where that is headed). There's just something about the way Cameron thinks, the things he says, the things he does—there's something about it all that feels like an author trying her best but not truly understanding how typical young straight guys like this are. Granted, this is a far more common effect with male writers creating young women characters, so I suppose turnabout is fair play, but the ultimate effect is still the same. It did get a bit better as the novel went along, but the male characters in this book had a real lack of authenticity to them, and often came across as rather contrived. What's more, I'd say the first third or so of the book was so slow, with so little happening I wondered why I was reading about any of these people's lives, I nearly gave up on the book. I'm still glad I didn't; Van Pelt at the very least has a knack for slow-burn plotting, and by the final chapters I actually couldn't put it down, and was nearly late for an engagement on Christmas Eve. The way the mystery of Tova's long-dead son gets solved in the end is wildly implausible (even outside the involvement of a highly intelligent octopus), but so what? This is the stuff we come to these kinds of books for. One final complaint: Sowel Bay is a fictional town on Washington State's Puget Sound. I'm totally fine with creating fictional towns, but Van Pelt sprinkles in distances and drive times from Sowel Bay to Bellingham to the north and Seattle to the south, none of which come even close to adding up. My best guess was that Sowel Bay would have to be somewhere in the vicinity of Tulalip, but the distances and local geographical references still did not fully match, and every time this came up it took me out of the book. I rather wish she had just found a point on the map, decided that was where Sowel Bay would be, and then took actual measurements for these references. This only matters to Puget Sound locals like myself, though; no one reading this from anywhere else in the world is going to care. For locals, however, it could be a bit of a different story.

Book Log 2023

1. Managing Expectations: A Memoir in Essays by Minnie Driver (started 1/4; finished 1/9): B+ This book is all of 276 pages, with a lot of paragraph breaks, making it an easy, quick read—and my first Book Club book of the year, which I had to read last-minute before our January meeting, thus necessitating a six-day break from the novel I was reading, very much enjoying, and about halfway through. This was a huge gear shift, too, which is why it boggles my mind how anyone can read multiple books at once as a common practice. I prefer to read one book at a time. But, once I got into the vibe of this one, I found Minnie Driver to be a surprisingly gifted writer, and now, if she were to write another one, I would read it without needing the recommendation that resulted in our reading this one (Steve from Book Club was particularly enamored with this one when he was reading it in November, and I said I would be happy to make it our next selection). Admittedly I didn't find it quite as funny as Steve seemed to, but I did find it an engaging mix of humor and poignancy, and in particular, incredibly well-structured writing. I found every one of these ten essays a deeply satisfying read, particularly upon their conclusion. Minnie Driver, it turns out, is rather skilled at sticking the landing, right down to the essay with which she chose to close this book.


2. The Book of Strange New Things by Michel Faber (started 12/14; finished 1/16): B This book took me a full month to complete, which to many might not seem impressive, but for me, it was still a book I felt like I just couldn't put down—I just had a lot of distractions from it, from a bevy of holiday events and activities, to a full week pause on it to read the latest Book Club title (that being #1 on this list). The Book of Stange New Things was recommended to me by Laney, who had just finished re-reading it, and knowing she found it compelling enough to read twice, combined with the fascinating premise, quickly piqued my interest: this is about a near-future Christian missionary traveling to a faraway planet to minister to its native inhabitants. In the end I had somewhat mixed feelings about this book, given how I constantly wanted to pick it up and keep reading, in spite of all I found implausible about it: this inhabited planet has a stunning lack of biodiversity as presented here, with all of three animal species ever even mentioned (weird vicious duck-like creatures; some type of flying insect that feeds on corpses; and the humanoids of  deeply modest yet higher intelligence with a rather primitive way of living). The "whiteflower" crop that the natives of the planet cultivate into a wide variety of different types of foods, depending on when it's pulled out of the ground in its growth cycle, does little to compensate for this issue. I have a hard time accepting a developed society existing in a world with all of four known living species of any kind, the obvious idea that other regions of the planet may have plenty of other life notwithstanding. It bugged me that these things were rarely, or in many cases never, discussed by the characters. Instead, there is a huge focus on this minister protagonist, Peter, experiencing steady breakdowns in email communication with the wife he had to leave back on Earth, where environmental and political and societal disasters are increasing exponentially. In spite of all this, I loved the characters—human and "Oasan" alike—and found it to be a grippingly vivid journey, even if my suspicions of danger among the Oasans proved unfounded, thereby resulting in an ending I found a bit anticlimactic. My favorite meta detail about this reading experience, which people reading digital copies did not get, was the gold edging of the pages of the book, a clear physical reference to actual Bibles.


3. The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green (started 1/16; finished 2/8): B+ This delightful nonfiction collection of essays by the novelist who wrote The Fault In Our Stars (as well as seven other books) ends each essay with a five-star review some random aspect of the "Athropocene," or modern human era, from CNN to viral meningitis to the Notes app, and I give this book four and a half stars. 


4. Under the Skin by Michel Faber (started 2/8; finished 2/25): B+ An allegory about factory farming that sometimes is a little on the nose, still deeply compelling as it shifts the perspectives: what we think of as humans (ourselves) are the harvested "animals" (here called vodsels); and the word "human" is used in the narrative here at lot—but it gradually becomes clear that the narrator, and her cohorts, are aliens secretly living on Earth referring only to their own kind when they use the word. It can be disorienting as the reader, but that is the point, and effective. The central character here, a female who has been shaved of her natural fur and surgically altered in the face, chest, spine and limbs to resemble a "vodsel," spends a lot of solitary time driving along Irish back highways, finding hitchhikers and bringing them to a hidden farm processing plant as soon as she is able to discern whether they live a solitary enough life not to be missed when they go missing. The trick Faber pulls here, in his debut novel and still easily his most well known, is in getting the reader to empathize with her, this literally figure who functions as predator to the very species reading the novel, as she grapples with her own daily frustrations, and more crucially, with how her opinions of "vodsels" and their worth as living beings are eventually challenged. This is a truly unique novel with an unparalleled point of view, if occasionally slightly clunky in execution. If nothing else, this is a novel I will not soon forget, and which I found difficult to put down. 


5. It's Not TV: The Spectacular Rise, Revolution and Future of HBO by Felix Gillette and John Koblin (started 3/3; finished 4/7): B+ There's something unavoidably disappointing about a detailed account of a subject whose evolution is so up-to-the-minute: HBO was very much in the headlines this year (and last year) after the Warner Bross Discovery merger. Hell, in the very next month after I finished this book—on May 23—HBO Max was rebranded as "Max." It's Not TV was published in May 2022, which means that, although it covers every similarly momentous change in HBO's history up to that point, none of the seismic shifts you might expect such a book to cover from 2022 are included. That's not to say I was inherently disappointed in this book, mind you: I want to be clear. I really enjoyed reading it, and getting a definitively detailed background into what I still consider the premium channel / streamer with the highest-quality content on offer, something I have felt for a long time. Anyone with an interest in such things, especially given its own shortsighted missteps in its long history, should read it and will enjoy it. It just also comes with the caveat that any book about something still so actively changing and evolving is by definition going to feel incomplete. The more time goes by, the less up to date this book will feel. So read it now! (Even though by the time you read this very blurb about it, it will be over a year old.)


6. Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat and TearsOscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat and Tears by Michael Schulman (started 4/8; finished 5/14): A- This book could hardly have been more tailor-made to my tastes. It's as though Michael Schulman woke up one morning and had an epiphone: I know—I'm going to write a book just for Matthew! Oscar Wars is divided into eleven chapters, each devoted to a different, famous—or infamous—chapter in the history of the Academy Awards. They are by and large presented in chronological order, starting with the inception of the Academy in the late twenties and ending with "envelopegate" at the 2017 telecast. Oscar Wars has something in common with It's Not TV, in that it covers an entity that is still actively evolving—due to print deadlines, the infamous Will Smith "slap" from the 2022 telecast barely gets a mention in an afterward—but this one still has more of a sense of urgency in its reading, as so much of the Academy's rich history so directly informs where it is today. Not only that, but this history is both broader and juicier; I particularly enjoyed the chapter on the 1951 Best Actress race between Gloria Swanson (Sunset Boulevard), Bette Davis (All About Eve and Judy Holliday (Born Yesterday); and the chapter about the infamous 1989 telecast. "Envelopegate" being still in such recent memory made it an especially delicious read, but I was riveted by it all, from the chapter on how the disgusting Harvey Weinstein managed to get Shakespeare in Love to beat out Saving Private Ryan in 1998, all the way back to the extended period of blacklisting screenwriters for being suspected communists in the late forties and well into the fifties.

If Oscar Wars has any weakness, it's its white author offering what feels like bullet-point overviews of racial nuances in the 2016 race between La La Land and Moonlight, as well as things like "#OscarsSoWhite" and the Academy reckoning with its history of exclusion on gendered and racial lines. To be fair, this puts Schulman a bit between a rock and a hard place, because a book covering a history spanning an entire century cannot by definition do much more than summarize such things, but those very same summaries underscore the need for deeper dives into those specific issues. That aside, though, I read this book with absolute relish from start to finish.


7. Portrait: The Photographs of George Platt Lynes 1927-1955 by George Platt Lynes / Two Palms Publishers (started 6/27; finished 7/2): B

Every place I could find online that referenced this volume of photographs by almost-famous photographer George Platt Lynes lists Lynes himself as the author. But, considering Lynes died of lung cancer at the age of 48 in 1955, and published by Twin Palms Publishers in 1994, that seems a little misleading. The book, 132 pages all but about seven of which are dedicated to the photographs themselves, is one of several that have been published over the years but the only one I could find carried by the Seattle Public Library after I discovered his incredible visual work via the fantastic documentary Hidden Master: The Legacy of George Platt Lynes, playing at this year's Seattle International Film Festival. I then found a couple of other titles dedicated to Lynes that I sent in to the library as suggestions.Because, honestly, while the photography in this book is absolutely fantastic, I was a little disappointed by its, in retrospect, evidently deliberate distancing from not just Lyne's homosexuality, but his vast array of homoerotic fine photography—something the documentary had very much focused on. The very first photograph in this volume, of a clothed George Balanchine flanked by a nude Nicholas Magallanes to the left and a nude Marie-Jeane to the right, is subtly provocative—and almost no other photo in the book matches that vibe. The only other one featured in the book that matches it, or arguably surpasses it, is a shot of a clothed White man with three, artfully posed naked Black men—and there is a lot to unpack regarding Lynes's contexualized racial progressiveness in the forties versus how some of the photos might read today.It almost feels unfair to count this as one of the books I "read" this year, when it featured fewer than ten pages of actual text. But, here we are; I've counted it, and it's a literal bound book, after all. And yes, I took five days to finish even this one, but that's only because I picked it up briefly three different times, and otherwise spent time savoring the best of the photos. Still, I look forward to finding a more recently published volume that directly addresses the sexuality, of George Platt Lynes himself; of the subjects of his photographs; and of the artistic expression of the photographs. This book hardly gets there. 


8. The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History by John M. Barry (started 5/14; finished 7/26): B This was another Book Club title, but I had been a part of selecting it as, after it was suggested, I argued that perhaps we were just enough past the covid-19 pandemic to handle a read like this, and perhaps be able to compare notes, both in regards to how people coped with and responded to a lethal pandemic in 1918 versus 2020, and the degree to which we could actually say 1918 prepared us for 2020 (honestly? not much—people forget a lot after a hundred years, and thus about four generations). I'd have been interested in this pretty much any time outside of the middle of covid-19 (when it would have been way too close to home), actually, just because I have a lifetime of fascination with natural disasters, for which I think this arguably qualifies. That said, taken on its own merits, I had a great deal of ambivalence about this book, which had sections of insanely dull content and other sections that read like part one of Stephen King's The Stand (and were thus riveting). To call this book well-researched would be an understatement, but if you were to divide it up into quarters—very broadly speaking—I'd say the middle two quarters of it are what made it worth reading, as that was all about where infections started, how they spread, how authorities either attempted and failed to respond to it, or willfully ignored it and thus made it worse, and how the 1918 pandemic was massively exacerbated by its coinciding with World War I. The first places the virus spread like wildfire were in insanely overcrowded military cantonments. But, a lot is also written about the American cities where civilians were hit first and hardest, most notably Boston and especially Philadelphia. Once I got to those sections, the book became a comparatively easy read, a real page-turner. It was the other sections that were the challenge: the first ninety pages are so are where John M. Barry frontloads the narrative with a truly dense history of medical professionals of the era and their forebears, how radically medicine changed both in the couple of decades previous to the 1918 influenza pandemic and in the couple of decades after, and the surprising degree to which those recent changes actually made doctors far more prepared for such a global event than they might have been otherwise. About fifty of the final 65 or so pages, then, are similarly dense with history of where the doctors and medical researchers went in the wake of the pandemic, very little of it written engagingly. The final breath of fresh air in the book is in its Afterward, written in 2017, speculating on our preparedness and how we might cope with an inevitable next pandemic. The author clearly had no idea how close we actually were to the next one—literally just a couple of years. That part is a fascinating and surreal read, closing out a book which, in the end, is by turns riveting and boring as shit.


9. Lessons from the Covid War: An Investigative Report by The Covid Crisis Group (started 7/29; finished 9/1): B Apparently I am a glutton for punishment, so right after reading a detailed account of the 1918 flu pandemic, I decided to see what was maybe a consensus book regarded as one of the best, if not the best, book about the Covid-19 pandemic. After weeding out books at the tops of several lists that turned out to be written by right-wing nutjob "skeptics," I came upon this book, with 34 credited writers—including John M. Barry, who had written The Great Influenza. I really like the premise of this book being that we should have had a Congressional commission for a 9/11 Commission-style report on Covid-19 and never got one (talk about stunningly shortsighted), and so this group of experts came together to create the next-best thing by putting together this book. On the one hand, this book is far less dense, shorter (at just under 300 pages), and reads far more easily than The Great Influenza did. On the other hand, the details shared here are far more broad in scope, otherwise focusing on, as the title suggests, lessons learned from the many things done wrong and the few things done well in response to a 21st-century pandemic. This means there are no gripping stories of death and danger in this book, like there was in the middle section of The Great Influenza. As a result, this book is kind of more blandly academic in tone, as opposed to getting into what actually happened from the start and how we got here—to be fair, a lot of that remains unknown, thanks to the virus having begun in China and China's unwillingness to share those details. Maybe one day those details will be better revealed and we can get a book with a better narrative. Or, I can find another book about covid to try and read after a while.


10. Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach (started 9/11; finished10/2): B+ I generally found Packing for Mars to be a delightful read, if disappointingly lackluster in its final chapter, "Eating Your Pants: Is Mars Worth It?" It reads much more like an epilogue, briefly contemplating the possibilities. Why tease us with the details of research on a years-long mission to Mars—it's literally in the title of the entire book—and then only provide limited concrete information on assumptions made by researchers in the sixties? I want to know what the logistical and moral quandaries are with this kind of endeavor, and how they compare and contrast with those of "merely" getting to space, and the moon! Most bizarrely, the closing line of this chapter—and book—answers the question of "Is Mars worth it?" with basically, "We're going to waste resources anyway so why not!" And I had been enjoying this book so much up to that point, the reason for which I would still very much recommend it. I would just include a warning about the surprisingly uninformed, downbeat note it ends up. But! Up to that point, all the chapters cover specific things regarding space travel we all want to know about but no one else has reported on with such delightful irreverence—using the bathroom in space; sex and procreation in space; eating in space; not to mention things like weightlessness testing on parabolic flights and motion sickness—it's great fun to read. I laughed frequently. Roach also covers plenty of things we haven't considered (thanks to being preoccupied with things like eating and pooping), such as the psychological effects of extended periods in confined spaces with just a few other people, none of whom can bathe properly. Or many, many everyday things that are completely upended in zero gravity. Mary Roach approaches all this stuff with both an inquisitive mind and a slightly bent sense of humor, which is very much my style. I just wanted more about the actual hypothetical mission to Mars referenced in the book's title.


11. The House in the Cerulean Sea by TJ Klune (started 9/2; finished10/3): A- Where to begin, with all the ways I loved this novel? Not since reading Kira Jane Buxton's Hollow Kingdom in 2019 have I been so utterly delighted by a work of fiction, particularly one with a deliciously bent sense of humor. It has been perhaps even longer, not since reading David Levithan's Two Boys Kissing have I been so moved by a work of queer YA fiction. Has there ever before been a single novel that did both at once? No, I don't think there has. If I had any complaint about The House in the Cerulean Sea—and it barely counts as one—it would be that I wish it spent a little more time with its world building, particularly on the part of the government bureaucracy its protagonist, Linus, works for, in the Department In Charge of Magical Youth (DICOMY). On the other hand, this could be seen as a narrative strength, as instead of a protagonist fated with saving the universe, this is the story of an ordinary government worker charged with assessing an orphanage housing six of said magical youth—including a hilariously dark, six-year-old AntiChrist named Lucy (short for Lucifer). All of the other children, which range from a tentacled blob learning he doesn't have to be the monster under the bed (he dreams of being a bellhop) to a forest sprite, among others, are equally multidimensional. I love that there is literally an AntiChrist character in this book and he's just one of six kids who are all given equal air time in the narrative. But, by far my favorite detail is this: Linus is gay, a fact that is never more than incidental—the characters all face many challenges, including metaphorical ones of bigotry, but this is a world in which sexual orientation is as normalized as anything. Even better, Linus, the gay protagonist, is a shy, unassuming, portly, middle-aged man. Arthur, the ward of the orphanage, is tall, stick thin, self-assured, and also gay, it gradually becomes apparent. Their love story is far from the overall focus of the book, but rather just one charming subplot among many. I loved this book more the further I got into it, and marveled that such books exist for young readers today, a thing I could not have fathomed when I was young.


12. Aristolte and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz (started 10/3; finished 10/7): A I adored this book. It is hands down my favorite of the books I read this year, and maybe my favorite novel I have read in over a decade. And: what a perfect novel to read right after The House in the Cerulean Sea. Shout out to queer YA fiction! I know it's a cliché in regards to beloved novels, but I truly wish this book were longer. My heart aches to be back in its world, so specific and vividly realized, from the point of view of a Mexican-American teen in El Paso, whose loving parents understand him before he understands himself. Whose deep friendship forged over the summer, and then the years following, becomes something he doesn't want to face or acknowledge. I didn't even know about this book, beloved by many of its readers, until I saw the film it was adapted into and released in the late summer of this year. I even chose the film in an unusually arbitrary way: no mainstream releases were playing that I had not already seen, and I happened to see this compelling title, and my interest was piqued when I read the brief synopsis. I went to see it, felt it was an imperfect movie, and yet I was still deeply moved by it. I learned only after seeing it that it was based on a novel and I immediately placed a hold on it at my local library.This book is very dialogue-heavy, with many very short chapters. This means a lot of blank page space, which in turn makes it a very quick read. It's ostensibly 359 pages, and I read it in four days, lightning-quick for me—I usually take weeks, often months, to finish a book. I could not put this one down. To say it warmed my heart doesn't even do it justice. I would still recommend the movie. There are reports of a woman at a TIFF Q&A demanding an explanation for the absence of certain lines from the novel in the film, which betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how successful adaptation works. There are some things done in the movie that I actually like better, but the movie does have its flaws. I find it to be lovably imperfect. The novel, though—no notes. I love every part of it. I want time to pass so I can read it again and feel as though I am experiencing it for the first time. And, oh, to have had a novel like this to read when I was fifteen! It could have changed my life. And at that age I woudn't even have picked up on nuances I appreciate now, such as the truly unique element of the loving parents who completely accept their queer son. His parents aren't perfect either, but their flaws exist in other places. What a wonderful, beautiful thing, queer storytelling the way it should always be.


13. Sure, I'll Join Your Cult: A Memoir of Mental Illness and the Quest to Belong Anywhere by Maria Bamford (started 10/7; finished 10/20): B+ The thing that is inherently unfair to this book is reading it right after finishing a novel I loved more than any other in a decade: even as a very enjoyable book, it is by definition a bit of a comedown. And yet? I achieved a rare feat indeed with this book: I started it not long after checking it out of the library and finished it within two weeks—well within the three-week checkout window, so I neither had to renew it (not possible since, of course, it's very popular and there are 121 other people waiting for it) nor did I have to keep it well past its due date in order to finish it! I am feeling very accomplished here.As for the book itself, it's a truly unique reading experience, as is the great Maria Bamford's standup comedy that is a) not everyone's cup of tea but very much mine; and b) the sole reason I even know who she is. This book is nowhere near as hilarious as her standup though, again by definition: it's a (largely) comedic exploration of her lengthy and complex journey of mental health. People with complex mental health issues will probably really relate to it; the best I can do is sympathize, as I do not have these same experiences. I still found it a very compelling read—refer again to how unusually quickly I finished it—and would absolutely recommend it to anyone, mental or not.


14. Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road by Kyle Buchanan (started 10/20; finished 11/5): B+ I'm eager to say that Blood, Swest & Chrome will be compelling even to readers who have not seen Mad Max: Fury Road, but I'm honestly not sure. I did see the movie—I've seen it multiple times—and I would not argue with anyone calling it the greatest action movie ever made. And I knew a lot went into the making of it, but I had no idea the breadth of its backstory, which dates back decades, includes multiple false starts, and gives truly new meaning to the term "passion project." I devoured this book, loved the descriptions of extended weeks of principal photography in Namibia, and even lapped up the relatively subdued accounting of tensions between the two lead actors. Reading this book, structured as an expertly edited oral history from interviews with over a hundred people involved, just made me want to watch the movie yet again. If you love this movie or if you love cinema in general, presumably it will do the same for you.


15. The Day the World Came to Town: 9/11 in Gander, Newfoundland by Jim Defede (started 11/5; finished 11/15): A- I was 21 years behind the curve on this one—it was first published in 2002—but, I heard a passing reference to it on a podcast: there's this great book out there about the town of Gander, Newfoundland, whose roughly 10,000 population was doubled by diverted international flights that were not allowed to enter American airspace the morning of September 11, 2001. More specifically, it's about the above-and-beyond kindness of the locals, who banded together to do whatever they could to ease the fear and frustrations of passengers who were stranded there for up to five days. I thought: that sounds fantastic! And indeed, it was. Defede went to Gander and conducted countless interviews, which could only have covered a fraction of the passengers and flight crews who were forced to land there. It must have been a massive exercise in editing, to get the book down to a lean 244 pages. There were 38 commercial flights diverted there, an usual number for the town's size, for fascinating reasons related to the town's history (read the book!), and this account follows the most interesting people, the best anecodtes, from that truly unique set of days. I was regularly moved by Defede's narrative, notwithstanding the sprinkling of references to defiant American patriotism, which likely read as quite justifiable in the year after the attacks, but to some people (me), haven't necessarily aged well. Defede wisely avoided any exploration whatsoever of the geopolitics that informed those terrorist attacks, and kept the focus on the confusion and exhaustion of the passengers, the bottomless well of empathy of the locals—many of whom opened their homes for passengers to shower, or in some cases stay—and the connections, friendships and relationships that formed as a result. I could not get enough of this book, and wished it could have included many more stories. Someone should have made this into a miniseries.


16. Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World by Benjamin Alire Sáenz (started 11/15; finished 12/6): A- I so adored Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe, when it ended, I ached to stay in its world. If only I could see where these two boys in love go from there! And then, on the very day I finished the book, and I went to Goodreads to post my review of it, I discovered there was indeed a sequel—published pretty recently, in 2021, a good nine years after the first novel. Well, here I am, able to consume both of them within weeks of each other. As to the question of wanting a book you deeply love to keep going, often when that actually does happen with a sequel, there comes an element of: be careful what you wish for. And I have to be fair, there are stretches of Waters of the World that had me inching closer to feeling that way. Much of it strains plausibility, the dialogue is often stilted or doesn't quite ring true—but the fact is, those same things were true of the first novel as well, and in both cases, there is such a beautiful purity to the storytelling that it more than makes up for the minor flaws, especially when considering these are books written for youth and young adults. These two novels combined make me yearn for the kind of content I never had available when I was young, and leave me moved that it's there for queer youth today. The ability to see ourselves in art truly cannot be underestimated. In the acknowledgments section at the end of this book, Benjamin Alire Sáenz comments on how much was "left unsaid" in the first book, and how increasingly dissatisfied he was with that, which was why he was compelled to write this one. The story here directly addresses both AIDS and racism in a way the previous book all but ignored—but which I was not compelled to judge, because sometimes a simple love story is all that's needed. (I was admittedly a little struck by the first novel being about gay kids in the eighties and it barely mentions AIDS, and how the film adaptation clearly took inspiration from this sequel and included more background references to it.) Furthermore, the first novel ends with Ari coming to the very realization that he's in love with Dante. Aristotle and Dante Dive into the Waters of the World picks up right where the first book ended, the opening page right from the next morning, and it's a natural progression for a story about the discovery of love to evolve into the complexities of same-sex love in the modern world. There have been some complaints about how much of this book is absent Dante, who goes to a different school as Ari. Ari is the narrator though, and it's less about the two of them than it is about Ari's journey, both as a young man in love with another young man, and as a young man growing up, learning to be open with other people, forging close friendships on his own terms. This really is Ari's journey, and these are all vital steps to coming of age. Some might also balk at some of the plot turns in this book, in which Ari moves through late-eighties El Paso discovering how much his friends and family love him no matter what. I chose not to balk at any of it, because ultimately, this book is a fantasy, and the kind of fantasy that is good for readers, particularly young ones, where in at least one universe, things work out for the queer kids. There's a particular chapter in which Ari urges a classmate to come out to his friends at a party, and I have really mixed feelings about how it plays out—there's something to be said for letting someone come out on their own terms and only when they're ready—but still, it moved me to tears. Between that and a tragic occurrence in Ari's life, this book made me cry two or three times. By the end of it—and this is a much longer book, 538 vs the first one's 359 pages, written in the same style though so still a quick, breezy read—all of my mixed feelings about how this book was constructed melted away. I just loved both Ari and Dante, imperfect and beautitful, just as I loved this imperfect but beautiful book. Given how much it had to live up to, in the end I felt it met the expectations incredibly well.