> i have read <
dorohedoro - q hayashida
i did not have much of an opportunity to read any comics or manga this year, largely due to the fact that i just: didn't make much of an effort. however, running away with my favorite reading experience of the year, i made time to read the conclusion to the 18-year long series "dorohedoro" by q hayashida. to explain dorohedoro would be difficult and rob you of the unique experience to dive into a world so incomprehensibly dark and wholesome that, well... i refuse to do it. what i will say is that i have never before engaged with a story so grungy and hellish on the surface while rippling with joy and good humor just beneath the harsh veneer. i would die for nearly any of the characters in this series (and, in the spirit of the series, be immediately resurrected in some ridiculous manner and promptly enjoy a nice meal of gyoza and beer with my friends and frenemies alike). the series wrapped up is 23 volumes this year in america and is surprisingly available on amazon and even at your local library (if you are, like me, local to [my address]). it is simultaneously absurd, horrifying, lovely, and thoughtful, and no work i can think of that i've ever engaged with has existed so comfortably within the boundaries of its own paradoxes. my good friend seth hahne spent some time unpacking the entire series in his most recent, excellent review over at goodokbad if you're looking for a more in-depth discussion of the series.the complete stories - flannery o'connor
it was august 11th when it hit me: i could not marry flannery o'connor. immediately frustrated by this discovery, i drained my ritual sunday bourbon and sat in the backyard in the evening heat we're so accustomed to in southern orange county year-round. a faint orange glow was sifting through the pepper trees on the hamlet butted up to my backyard and i shifted uneasily in the plastic party chair. i couldn't think much beyond the refrain of "damn.."several things drew me to her writing, the language, the imagery, but what kept me thoroughly invested in her fictions and drawn to her as a writer and a thinker was her razor-sharp ability to cut through the chaff of american religion, specifically of the christian variety, and reveal its darkly glow from time immemorial. having grown up in a world, country, town, household that held certain truths to be self-evident, that leaked into the religious folds of my brain juices, i was quickly desensitized and sold a specific idea of what christian faith was, how it looked, smelled, what it would scream if you squeezed it just so... but it created what i think of as a very sterile textbook-y feel to something that, by its very nature, defied such a categorization. everything is neat, there are highlighted terms and copyrighted images that correspond to specific events,
christianity is difficult, to say the least, for so very many reasons. many of which you, my reader, may bring to the table unique from my own. but if there is one crime that i purport is most heinous from my churlish church-ish experience is the death of wonder. in an effort to combat the cold realism and age of reason that congregants perceived as a threat to their faith and, in-fact, well-being, they adapted the strange tongue of the marketeer, the iron walls of the rationalist, and the warped mask of the politician. "dinosaurs don't matter." "evolution is preposterous." "here are three concrete reasons that prove the existence of god." for the child reared in this pristine faith, there is no room for growth or query. the colors drain. o'connor tugs at the fray on this superficial religion, and what she proves is not that faith is fantasy, rather that we've intentionally blinded ourselves so that when we do find the face of god, we cannot see his disappointment.except that one,
please don't touch,
and don't bother,
"nephilim" cannot be found or explained in the appendix.
also, she's dead. that's the other reason i can't marry her.
the witcher (last wish, blood of elves) - andrzej sapkowski
in 2015, the witcher 3 came out for pc's and xbox's and ps4's, and i sat irritably in my cramped room, stuffed into my tiny desk, staring at the claustrophobic corner that contained the milk-box-sized pc tower that i had and sweat about whether i could spare the $45 that gog.com had decided to charge for a copy of the witcher 3. it looked gorgeous, it was guaranteed to work 75% of the time (as any launch title from cd projekt red was prone to do), and it looked hornier than anything i'd played up until that point in time (even if you take fire emblem awakening into account). i bought it and it was great until my pc's ram petered out because the game was absolutely unstable for the first few months of its release. i was free, for now..
in the last month of 2018, i sat in the corner of a family christmas party in manhattan beach, my kindle gripped tightly in one hand while the other hovered over the "purchase" button for "the last wish: introducing the witcher by andrzej sapkowski" with much of the same intensity i felt in 2015. i bought it and it was great, though i only read about two pages before i was whisked away by family for the evening and wouldn't have a chance to check it out until the following year. i would also read "blood of elves" shortly afterward, and enjoy that as well. maybe some day i'll get around to playing the witcher 3... but i'm going to watch the show first, probably, maybe!
a canticle for leibowitz - walter m. miller jr.
 |
i cannot believe i got this wild version that a
canadian high school teacher saw fit to
publish with essay questions and
review questions?? now i HAVE to teach it.
|
the sellout - paul beatty
this year i was robbed of the opportunity to attend a book club meeting for this book that would have had a nearly entirely white, female attendance. i think that if i had been able to experience that, then i would have had something scary and lovely to write here. but alas, i can only think of my goodreads review for this novel:
i loved everything about it. its humor, its style, its unrepentant demand for humanity. but what's more, i'm excited to see how this book continues to unfold for me. i know that in 20 years i'll still be having experiences that cause me to go, "oh, like the sellout."
i think it holds true. i believe i have yet to read a more frank discussion on black experience with talking about thinking about living in a racist america.
howl's moving castle trilogy - diana wynne jones
this is perhaps the most nourished i've felt since i read the wrinkle in time trilogy a few years back. i've mentioned here and elsewhere that 2019 was a tumultuous year for me (and will continue into 2020) for reasons of purpose, identity, agency, etc. taking time to sit with this series settled my stomach and my soul, and the anxiety of having everything figured out and put together melted away. the sense of humor than diana wynne jones approaches her works with is one both thoughtful and airy; it is never so convoluted or derogatory as so many jokes these days are (PSA: we can let go of sarcasm by the way, it has never been funny, it has always been bad), that for a time i felt like i was engaging with something new and unfamiliar. not to mention the way that she illustrates her novels with such elegantly simple language. for a time i felt like i was in the presence of colors i had never fully appreciated, scenes in nature and cozy homes that i had taken for granted. if you enjoyed hayao miyazaki's take on her novel "howl's moving castle", then you owe it to yourself to read the original works that might in fact be more enjoyable than the movie (to be fair, they become wildly different from the movie about 100 pages in). "castle in the air" and "house of many ways" are just as good if focussing on different characters within the fantastical lands of ingary and all round up to such a lovely end. it's a series you can always return to and never overstay your welcome. i cannot hope to convey the extent to which these books moved me, but they come with my highest recommendation.there there - tommy orange
this book had perhaps the most compelling introduction i've read... ever. the rest of the novel is a healthy challenge of presuppositions and touches on the strength and difficulty of the urban native american experience. but the introduction was powerful in a way that made ripples throughout the rest of the work as a whole, that lent power to the splintered narratives that constituted the rest of the novel. it is a hard book. in fact, i feel utterly unequipped to discuss it with the gravity that it deserves in a space like this. but for all the dark that it reveals at the heart of america, i feel there are equal parts hope in the humanity of these characters and their determination to reclaim their identities in a shifting world that wants to erase them.good omens - neil gaiman and terry pratchett
i had not previously read anything substantial or novel by neil gaiman, but i had spent a number of books in the mind of terry pratchett, and the work that the two of them have come together to construct (in 1990) is made of light fantastic. the television series (written by gaiman!) is also quite lovely, too! a nice, light read that had me chuckling all the while. hyuck hyuck, hyuck... yeah that's about all i can say about that. i think one of the things i ended up enjoying about this so much was being able to engage with a humor that i was so scared of growing up: religious parody. it is wild how rife christianity is for parody with the long history it's had, so it was a bit of fun dabbling in that for a bit, too.
ender's game - arthur c. clarke
a lot of people really wanted me to read this for a long time. and it took me a long time to get around to it. it took me procrastinating from actual work that would affect my actual life and make things much more difficult for me if i ignored them—so, naturally, i picked up "ender's game" to distract myself from the looming abyss that threatened my well-being. while the first large chunk of the book was only vaguely interesting for me at times, i was hooked the moment that the book takes its first big left turn. which leads me to what i was frustrated with and enamored with in this book, which future books promise to deliver on: we need more bugs in books. not just "insects". i mean bugs. creepy, crawly things. stuff that lays eggs, eats its young, eats its post-coital lovers, eats dirt. i love bugs. we are afraid of bugs, so we don't write about bugs. but i posit that if we were to generate more art and media with bugs, we would come to know and love them at a deeper, more primal level. also dinosaurs. there is a disturbing lack of dinosaurs in our media, and i know... i know it's because the jurassic park money people have money in intellectual property legal whiz-kid bang-bucks that keep that good good locked away from us. imagine with me, if you will, the final jurassic park movie delivering on its next logical step: human-dinosaur fusion. they won't do it, because they are cowards and would sooner attach a gun to a lizard (also cool, but beside the point). we are getting to a point in human development where these things are closer to reality than they are to fiction, so there is a certain level of hesitation that comes with generating content like that. however, i say we need to take the dive. we need to plunker on down to dino-town and just embrace what we know we desire in our heart-of-hearts: human-dinosaur fusion. "ender's game" was great, excited to see more.late bloomer - maré odomo
2019 was a difficult year for me, as it featured one of the most difficult trials i've ever faced in my life: the edTPA. for those of you unbaptized by this literal lick of flame from hell, it is the means by which the united states of america deems one worthy of being a credentialed public school teacher. if you grew up roughly in the same period i did, or even before, then you might go, "there is no way that [mr./mrs. x] was ever observed and deemed competent by a higher power, let alone by some desk jockey in an office building somewhere! all they did was eat lunch in class and talk about their wretched lives!" it was certainly jarring to me that so many teachers i'd had in my days of yore had been scrutinized at any level so vociferous as the edTPA. i will not go into detail with the edTPA, it was one of the worst things i've ever had to do in my life. suffice it to say that i needed to be comforted during this time. maré odomo's "late bloomer" came out in 2016 and has been an exercise in compartmentalizing for me ever since. it is a collection of art and comics that touch on things such as the title suggests, as well as general depression and anxiety. none of it is prescriptive and i don't think it'll work for everyone, but whenever i leaf through it i know that these feelings of incompetence and exhaustion are not unique to me and that our society moves at a pace and cherishes that which is wholly inconsistent with a healthy headspace. big fan.macbeth - william shakespeare & lord of the flies - william goulding
i taught both of these books in the year of our lord 2019 to over 80 sophomore students. this taught me a couple things, in turn:
- lord of the flies owns, hard, and it's better than heart of darkness.
- macbeth owns, hard, and it's actually good and not bad.
something that i was worried about, going into the teacher field (and, still, trying, to get into, this field,,) was feeling confident with my understanding of a given work. i was going to be influencing blank slates, dummies, little babies for the rest of their lives with my comprehensive take-downs of literary giants—they would be able to smell fear from a mile away, they would know when i was faltering, they would see right through me and call me out for the quack that i am. my education could not (and did not, frankly) prepare me for something like this. sitting in multiple meetings with the english department i was a part of, i felt immediately out of my depth and like a born fool. these guys had it together, they got their masters in this stuff, in english stuff, not just education like me, the child in swaddling cloth, scared out of its mind by the world it had been born into.
but then i found out: actually, everyone's always faking it until they make it. this may seem like a cheap conclusion, and it is. it's super cheap, i'm just handing it out for free. but it's true. so long as you stay one step ahead of your students, your superiors, your whatevers, you're going to be just fine, because they're concerned with everything else they've got going on in their lives, they hardly have enough time to hear the words that you're sweating about constructing into grammatically sound sentences.the conversations i had with my students, the good conversations we had, were never because of notes i took during a lecture in my undergrad, my grad school coursework, or even when my mentor teacher was leading by example. it was always when i took the time to listen to what they had brought to the table. kids aren't dummies, babies, or blank slates. they're individuals with complex lives that inform their unique perspectives and wild senses of humor (wild senses of humor), and they've got their own questions about the content that they're spending (or not spending) their time with, rightfully so. "macbeth" and "lord of the flies" gave me opportunities to speak to universal truths in literature and the lived experiences of my students. i was exhausted and had a sore throat at the end of every class session, but taking the time to really dive into the nitty-gritty of these novels at the behest of my wonderful children and their bizarre questions really helped me appreciate these works more and convinced me that, even if only for a short while, i would really like to continue to teach for these mountain-highs.
10 telltale signs that daddy's home - clickhole
as i read this aloud to a group of my closest friends, i laughed, i cried, i sobbed, my belly ached so bad that i couldn't breathe, my friends yelled at me, cursed me, physically assaulted me, and tried to wrench my phone from my hand... i highly recommend you do the same.
> i wanted to read/finish <
killing commendatore - haruki murakamisomething in me will not allow me to burn through this great, great novel. perhaps it is that i have exhausted haruki murakami's library of works. i saved this as an emotional fire hydrant to save me from the impending flames of unemployment, and even in the midst of these fires i cannot bring myself to read through the work in its entirety. i believe i live in fear of the day that i will have no more haruki murakami left to read.
the chrestomanci series - diana wynne jones
after finishing the "howl's moving castle" trilogy, i really wanted to dig in to jones' other works, the largest series of hers being the chrestomanci series. i began the first book and, though its timbre seemed a bit different from what i was used to previously, i know that i'm going to enjoy a lot of the same humor and wonder that i found in her other works. i have tabled it for my next panic attack.
the earthsea cycle - ursula k. le guin
it is a war crime that i have had the splendid bantam trilogy set that i've had for three years and i have only read the first book of this series. i frequently receive calls from anonymous parties at all hours making vague and specious threats regarding my fate if i don't clean up my act soon. but, and i need everyone to shut up right now so they can hear me when i say, i am a confirmed coward and will try to get to "the farthest shore" before the end of 2020.
dune - frank herbert
if you're going to read frank herbert's monolithic work "dune", do not do as i did and read it on the kindle. a work of this heft demands that you carry that weight and know the commitment you are embracing prior to your dallying through the pages. "oh, this is fun! it's very dense, i love how unwieldy it is at first... it does open up, yes?" the book does not lend well to the digital format beyond the occasional easy-access footnotes. i am utterly lost, i don't know my progress well enough to figure out how long its taken me to get to the vague point i'm at, and the work demands your full attention. maybe some day i will return.
desert solitaire - edward abbey
i love the hecking cover of this paperback. its imagery, its feel... it's a good-looking book. and there are scrawls inside too that i can make neither heads-nor-tails of. justin brown told me to read it years ago. i'd like to make good on that. but i am also a known coward.
king leopold's ghost - eric hochschild
when i was supposed to be reading something else, i was possessed by an ebook sale and purchased this to read instead. i had never been so transfixed by a piece of nonfiction in my life (even annie dillard took time for me to adjust to). i would like to finish this in the coming year, it is absolutely haunting and luminous.
ancillary justice - ann leckie
word is: there's a wild rock in this book.
the origin of satan - elaine pagels
hm.. kinda self-explanatory, but i'll include the subtitle: how christians demonized jews, pagans, and heretics. i also recommend episode 666 of "this american life" where pagels is interviewed by ira glass.
an acceptable time - madeleine l'engle
this is the final book in the wrinkle in time quintet, and i'm told that its enjoyment is fantastically manifold when read during samhain. so... i've got some time before i wind up what is one of my favorite young adult trilogies (i don't accept the 4th as canon, so,). also i want to try to read as seasonally as i can, if i can help it. it sounds... fun??
so, happy 2020, enjoy reading! later this weekend we will talk about movies and shows.
and, again, thanks.
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