November '25 Reading

 This is an after-the-fact attempt at capture. 

1. I, Claudius by Robert Graves. "I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles), who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as 'Claudius the Idiot', or 'That Claudius', or 'Claudius the Stammerer', or 'Clau-Clau-Claudius', or at best as 'Poor Uncle Claudius', am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the 'golden predicament' from which I have never since become disentangled. "
2. October Country by Ray Bradbury. Standouts: "The Emissary," "Homecoming," The Cistern," "Next in Line," "The Wind."
3. A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand. An adequate haunted house story set in Hill House which I rather regret reading.   
4. NYer of 8/11/25. "Breeze,/blow for one/I love, stretch/his muscles as/he needs and wants." (James Schuyler). 

October '25 Reading

A busy month in general, and filling in a lot of free time with pickleball and horror movies. 

1. Meditations Marcus Aurelius. I can't get beyond this text as a illustration of the massive privilege (a word I avoid as much as possible). 
2. Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon. Trope of the petit patriarch assuming superiority over everyone only to fall hard
3. Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden. "On and off, all that hot French August, we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages."
4. Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay. A mid riff on the "cursed film" trope. Kind of ok in parts, like the method acting=descent into psychosis idea. 

September '25 Reading

 Back to work full-time, so who knows.

1. Letters from a Stoic by Seneca. Quotes Epicurus, his rival, frequently: "I...make a practice of going over the the enemy's camp--by way of reconnaissance, not as a deserter!"
2. NYer of 7/21/25. "[S]tories of family trauma are not communicated directly to children but mentioned in passing and half forgotten, ore overheard out of context. The information lodges somewhere in our unconscious. Children...  absorb their parents' history subliminally, “before there are words, and thus before a narrative can be told."
3. The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister. Could be good, if everything about it was different. Pointless references to Jessie Weston (coded) and Grail myth (explicit) throughout. 
4. The Amateur by Robert Littell. "I'm Colonel Henderson. Henderson isn't my real name, Colonel isn't my real rank. My friends call me Hank. You will call me Colonel Henderson."
5. GI Joe: Real American Hero by Larry Hama and others. Major Bludd such a bad poet, he thinks Proust rhymes with Faust!
6. City of Illusions by U.K.LeG. Cool story of alien who loses memory, develops identity on Earth, then restored to original memories while secretly maintaining others. 

August '25 Reading

 

1. The Last Good Kiss by James Crumely. "When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."
2. The NYer of July 7&14 "Cake sounds good,/and after cake, being older/and missing cake. If the dead/could speak, they'd tell us to start/with the dessert menu. The best thing/about my mother's apple pie:/she was here to make it." ("The Eulogy I Didn't Give (XXXVII)" by Bob Hicok)
3. The Wrong Case by James Crumley. First Milo, and my favorite.
4. Dancing Bear by James Crumley. Second Milo. "We had been blessed with a long, easy fall for western Montana. The two light snowfalls had melted before noon, and in November we had three weeks of Indian Summer so warm and seductive that even we natives seemed to forget about winter." 
5. The Mexican Tree Duck Second Sughrue. ("Sugh as in sugar and rue as in rue the day.") "When the 3:12 through freight to Spokane hit the East Meriwether crossing, the engineer touched his horm and released a long, mournful wail into the wet, snowy air of our second early fall storm in western Montana. It sounded a hell of a lot like the first note of a Hank Snow ballad."
6. Bordersnakes by James Crumley. Where Milo and Sughrue work together (Milo showed up at the end of Tree Duck.) "Maybe it was the goddamned suit. Tailor-made Italian silk, as light and flimsy as shed snakeskin."
7. Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy by Walter C. Willet. So... avoid unsaturated fat. 
8. Silver Surfer: Requiem by JMS & Esad Ribic. There is no definitive SS story because he is by definition peripheral. 
9. LSH: Teenage Revolution by Waid and Kitson. The premise, of intergalactic teens who are obsessed with mid-20th century pop culture and band together to stick it to the man, is delightfully absurd. 
10. Secret Wars by Shooter et. al. Doom in this is just great.
11. The NYer of 8/4/25. The black/white wealth gap in was 6:1 at the dawn of the Civil Rights era. It is now 6:1, meaning... what exactly?
12. NYer of 7/28/25. Head of CIA's office on Soviet analysis, on looming fall of the USSR: "There are not many homes for old wizards of Armageddon."

July '25 Reading

 Goals for this month: more Vinge, Roman history, and final catch up with magazine backlog. 

1. NYer of 6/16/25. Gertrude Berg, "Mother of the Sitcom."
2. The Nation of July/August 2025. Your pain, "She has nothing to eat but story" (from "Nothing Survives Without Food," a poem by Leah Naomi Green)
3. NYer of 5/30/22. “There are some who claim the automobile will replace the bicycle, but this is rank nonsense,” a Maine magazine reported in 1899. “Those who have become attached to their bicycles—there are several millions of bicycle riders—will not easily give up the pleasure of skimming along the country like a bird...  for the more doubtful delight of riding in the cumbersome, ill-smelling automobile.”
4. The Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus. "The enemies lined the shore in a dense armed mass. Among them were black-robed women with dishevelled hair like Furies, brandishing torches. Close by stood Druids, raising their hands to heaven and screaming dreadful curses." 
5. NYer of 6/9/25. Fascinating piece on Nutella's Algerian competitor, El Mordjene. 
6. NYer of 4/3/23. One fifth of respondents who want the U.S. to be a "Christian nation" identify as secular. 
7. The Two Towers by JRRT.  But which towers? I suppose it's Saruman's and Sauron's, but the only direct reference is the gate into Mordor that the hobbits don't take.
8. First Dawn by Mike Moscoe. Absurd premise (the U.S. government orders a mission to go back in time and stop the first instance of militarized violence, thus preserving the matriarchy), but a real page-turner. 
9. My Death by Lisa Tuttle. A quick, captivating read. 
10. Queen of Air and Darkness by T.H. White. Magic is a mixture of feminine allure and animal abuse, it seems. 
11. NYer of 5/26/25. "Her mother had misread something about the Property Brothers on the internet and was insisting that they were being persecuted for being Christian" (Fairy Pools by Patricia Lockwood)

June '25 Reading

Starting off with some Roman history then some hard sf. May finally finish NYer backlog as well. We'll see how it goes. 

1. NYer of 3/28/22. Paumgarten on Jimmy Buffet: "A poor man's Gordon Lightfoot grows into a drinking man's Martha Stewart, hardly having to change his tune."
2. NYer of 6/2/25. Sonaran style flour tortillas. Carmello brand out of Kansas (Hannah Goldfield)
3. SPQR by Mary Beard. Lots of good ancient trivia. Did you know that the Emperor usually adopted his successor, often as an adult?
4. A Deepness in the Sky. Something about a big fat space opera in the summer. This one didn't really have a hero--one sadistic torturer, one would-be galactic emperor, one spider-planet disrupting inventor. Lots of cool weird stuff, from the On-Off star to the Focused. Oh, and all along the bad guys are like "once they develop the internet we can take them over." But it's from hacking missile command, not media manipulation.
   
5. The Nation of June 2025. From a review of Guillory's On Close Reading: "But if we embrace a broader definition of close reading, if we take a closer look at how it works and what is required of it when it succeeds, we can teach it better. We can specify the steps of close reading, even if no close reading succeeds by performing the steps alone but requires beauty and grace. We can note that one should delimit the context for the text and one’s reading of it. One should quote a detail worth noticing and construct an argument to persuade one’s reader how to understand that detail, why it matters, and how it changes what we know about the text. Each of these steps entails skills that we can teach and that can sometimes blossom—with, yes, practice and imitation—into beautiful performances. We can, in other words, democratize close reading."
6. Sex Criminals v. 3 It's still good.
7. Sex Criminals v. 4 Robert Rainbow. 
8. NYer of 6/30/25. Mutter Museum of medical oddities in Philadelphia comes to terms with consent and exploitation. 
9. NYer of 6/xx/25. Merve Emre on history of advice columns, including Reddit's AITA

April '25 Reading

 Starting out with Catullus for National Poetry Month, then on to Ovid. 

1. The Nation of April 2025. Elie Mystal on airline regulation--fixing prices on flights is like stamps. "The CAB [Civil Aeronautics Board] would give popular, well-travelled routes to airlines if the airlines agreed to serve less popular routes as well, for a fixed fee. It was a way to make air travel from NY to Akron affordable, because that route was subsidized by the fares for NY to Chicago."
2. Poems of Catullus translated by Peter Whigham. Catullus is a rapper with erudite vocab, an arsenal of different flows, private references, and nasty sex rhymes. 
3. The NYer of 4/7/25. Daniel Mendelsohn on Catullus: " Much of the poem [Attis] takes the form of an anguished monologue the young man delivers after he wakes up the next day, short on body parts and long on regrets."
4. Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald. Out-of-context on a live mic ("Leave it alone Pete" and "He's going to get an ax," which is a guitar) created an urban myth. OR DID IT!?!
5. NYer of 4/14/25. Another reason for de-extincting dire wolves (sort of) and "this is really important" says the startup CEO, is their prominence in recent pop culture. Huh?
6. NYer of 3/31/25. Crazy investigation by Ronan Farrow of corrupt Johnson City, TN police who were paid off by serial rapist for years.
7. The Art of Love by Ovid. How to find 'em, woo 'em, and keep 'em. 
8. The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. The unicorn described as Venus emerging from sea-foam at beginning. 
9. The NYer of 1/24/22(!). Reread a lovely lyrical story-essay, "What's the Deal, Hummingbird?" by Arthur Krystal. "Why isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?" vs. "Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?"
10. The Nation of May 2025. "In the dialogues, philosophical conversation involves a sort of role-play, with one person acting as the 'theory builder,' who tries to establish the truth of some idea, and the other acting as the 'refuter,' who tries to tear the idea down. This resolves an apparent paradox between the dueling commitments of good inquiry: seeking out truth (and thus being somewhat confident that you’ve found it) and avoiding falsehood (and thus being skeptical that you’re in possession of the truth after all)." Olufemi O. Taiwo reviewing Agnes Callard.
11. If On a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. Created with Gremais squares: Reader--Book/Not-Reader--Not-Book.