STL #131: The Year(s) in Reading, 2023 and 2024

Note: STL #130 is still in process. 

It is early 2025, so time to compile my year in reading list. I seem to have put off making the 2023 list, so that took some notebook archaeology but I came up with some material for that year as well. 

The focus of the year was engaging with series, so I'll split it in two parts. First up, series that I started and finished, had started and finished, or restarted and refinished. 

1. In Search of Lost Time: A reread, but really came so much more came alive. I also reread Beckett's trilogy; also better on rereading. 
2. Per Wahloo and Maj Showall's Martin Beck novels, also collectively known as The Story of a Crime. 
3. The Mars Trilogy of Kim Stanley Robinson. Despite enjoying Red Mars, I would not typically have proceeded to Green and Blue under normal conditions. 
4. Agatha Christie's Poirot books. Ok, I didn't "finish" in the sense of reading all 39 of the novels. But I read many more, including the series end Final Curtain. However, I did finish Chesterton's Father Brown stories by finally getting my hands on the late Scandal of Father Brown (1935)
5. The Slough House books by Mick Herron. Which I didn't "finish" because it's ongoing. 

Other favorite books from 2023 (sans commentary, because I've a ways to go)

1. The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor
2. Human Target by Tom King and Greg Smallwood
3. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata.
4. Cold Millions by Jess Walters
5. Poems 1962-2012 by Louise Gluck

In 2024, I read a short story every day. Here are the highest rated stories, excluding re-reads like "That Evening Sun Go Down" and "Where I'm Calling From."

1. "Crazy Sunday" and "Babylon Revisited" by F. Scott F.
2. "The Farmer's Children" by Elizabeth Bishop
3. "The Whole World Knows" by Eudora Welty
4. "The Destructors" by Graham Greene
5. "The Girl on the Plane" by Mary Gaitskill
6. "Vandals" and many others by Alice Munro
7. "Pretty Good Jazz Piano" by Richard Yates
8. "The Conventional Wisdom" by Stanley Elkin
9. "Harmony of the World" by Charles Baxter
10. "What You Pawn I Will Redeem" by Sherman Alexie
11. "An Abduction" by Tessa Hadley
12. "Again Again Again" by Mary Robison
13. "The Good Husband" by Nathan Ballingrud
14. "Alisa" by Lyudmila Vlitsky
15. "Between the Shadow and the Soul" by Lauren Goff
16. "Sonny Liston Was a Friend of Mine" by Thom Jones
17. "The Boy Upstairs" by Joshua Ferris
18. "What's the Deal, Hummingbird" by Arthur Krystal

Finally, here's the top 10 books of 2024:

1. Best American Short Stories of the Twentieth Century ed. John Updike. Lorrie Moore's similar anthology on the first 100 years of the series also had a lot of good ones. 
2. Selected Stories 1968-1994 by Alice Munro. So many stories that I rated highly in my daily notebook. 
3. Bad Dreams by Tessa Hadley. Could be paired with Munro, but a half-step off (of perfect). 
4. True Grit by Charles Portis. A reread, but this time through the tremendous narration of Donna Tartt. 
5. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. As I wrote in my notebook, "Starts as a comedy of manners and ends as Satanic conversion story, without changing tone! There are several moments that serve as evidence of the occult, and the reader explains them away until at the end we realize we've been viewing Lolly the same as everyone else." 
6. Guy Davenport's correspondence with Hugh Kenner, plus many of his short story collections. I got to the point where I skimmed Kenner's bristly, reductive letters to focus on Davenport's humane and richly populated missives. 
7. Wonder Twins: Activate by Mark Russell and/or Rainbow Rowell's She-Hulk. My two favorite comics of the year. 
8. The Science-Fiction Hall of Fame ed. Robert Silverberg. Also a re-read, but something of value in each story. Includes the all-time classics "Nightfall" and "Nine Billion Names of God," both of which overcome any literary short-comings. 
9. Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell. "Magical" in that way only YA novels about magic can be. 
10. Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet. Read in January and not remembered that well, but this one passage: "That was established now—they both had lovely homes. They'd bought them with money."  

December '24 Reading

 Dumb idea, but I'm going to try to finish a New Yorker every day. I have a lot that are partially read stored up, and obviously this will help with the story project too. 

1. Invincible: Get Smart. In which we meet Fat Eve. I am conflicted about it, she's portrayed humanely but it mostly seems to be done so that we can see what a good guy Mark is.
2. She-Hulk by Rainbow v4:Jen-Sational. Nice guest spots from Carol and Patsy. 
3. NYer of 11/18/24. Jackson Arn's streak continues with a visit to the NYC tattoo convention. 
4. NYer of 9/16/24. Photo-essay on "The World's Longest Yard Sale," stretching along Highway 147 from Michigan to Alabama. 
5. Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock. Oddly, I found the audio version easier to follow. 
6. NYer of 9/30/24. Madison defined a "faction" as "a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community."
7. NYer o f 12/2/24. Jackson Arn on John Singer Sargent: He "seemed to be at ease anywhere, as long as there was a butler."
8. NYer of 7/25/22. Big tribes disenfranchised black descendents of their slaves.
9. NYer of 11/25/24."Minimum Payment Due" by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh.
10. NYer of 3/27/2023. Mary Gaitskill updates "Secretary" by telling the story from an older woman's viewpoint in the #MeToo era. 
11. Green Arrow: Hunter's Moon written by Mike Grell. This is what "grim and gritty" was like in the 80s, post Dark Knight. It makes me wince now, though there's this cool gauntlet scene. 
12. The Nation of November 2024.  "Rimbaud's Beach is only a mile from the 'Elephant Trunk'/ where dolphins leap up laughing and Russian women twirl,/ where Goldmore Road stretches, and beer like water flows, / where sailors drown among the nymphs." Saadi Youssef
13. The NYer of 3/7/22. Dickens directed two charities: one for struggling writers, the other for former prostitutes. 
14. Invincible: Family Ties. Teen Ollie doesn't care if all Earthlings are killed as by-product of scourge virus. 
15. She-Hulk by Rainbow Rowell v5: All In. Last scene with Patsy Walker, with the Eat Cake and Wear Dresses Wednesday meeting. 
16. The Shrieking Skull and Other Victorian Ghost Stories by James Skipp Borlase. The stand out is "Bored To Death," about an unsuccessful writer who literally bores to death the editor he thinks is blocking his genius.
17. NYer of July 11&18, 2022. Fiction issue. Profile of Emmanuel Carrere, good stories by Rachel Kushner and Ling Ma.  
18. The Nation  of Dec 24. Michel Houllebecq had a hard right turn. 
19. Invincible: What's Happening He actually found the pathos in Eve. 
20. Paris Review Summer 2024. "Blue" by K. Patrick, behind the scenes at "Teletubbies."
21. NYer 0f10/14/24. Crypto targets any all unfriendly or perceived unfriendly legislators.
22. NYer of 12/16/24. Good story by Goff about the later days of controversially mismatched couple. 
23. NYer of 10/7/24. Poetry of Mosab Abu Toha. 
24. Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell. Similar to Pullman, with an ecological angle.
25. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Starts as a comedy of manners and ends as Satanic conversion story, without changing tone! There are several moments that serve as evidence of the occult, and the reader explains them away until at the end we realize we've been viewing Lolly the same as everyone else. 
26. NYer of 12/23/24. Puzzle and cartoon issue. The struggle to contain stuff escalated as the typical American house increased from 1500 sq ft to 2200, 1973-2023. 

Nov '24 Reading

 Here goes:

1. Selected Stories 1968-1994 by Alice Munro
2. Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski
3. True Grit by Charles Portis. Read by Donna Tartt--maybe best narration I've heard. 
4. NYer of 10/21. "My Camp" by Joshua Cohen
5. NYer of 10/28. "In England, in the days before the Industrial Revolution ruined everything, there were two professions a gentleman could pursue: wine merchant and rare-book dealer.  Neither required undue exertion."
6. NYer of 11/11: Barry Blitt's cover is Lady Liberty walking a tightrope. 
7. NYer of 11/4: Profile of Mati Diop , director of Dahomey, a film about the repatriation of indigenous art. (Touki Bouki directed by her uncle). 
8. Legion of Super-Heroes Before the Great Darkness. Steven Ditko's fill in issues seem aggressively cartoonish
9. Ronia, the Robber's Daughter. Lovely, episodic story about growing up and forgining relationships.
10. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One, 1929-1964. Read all these short stories decades ago. Still remembered and like Asimov, Clarke, Keyes. New appreciation for James Blish, Fritz Leiber, Tom Godwin.  Something worthwhile in all of them. 

October 24 Reading

 Spookytimes+continuing short stories

1. North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud. Been on my list for years and I'm glad to have finally gotten to in. Not every story is a winner, but ends with a strong trio of title story, in which and angry ex-con hacks up a lake monster, "The Way Station," in which doubly homeless main displaced by Katrina seeks out his daughter, and "The Good Husband," in which the titular character 
2. The Mysterious Mr. Quin. Actually a Mr. Satterwaite is the protagonist. Aging, alone idle, a connoisseur of art and Duchesses, he really needs Quin to lead him to old mysteries to solve. None of the stories are that great, but all together it's quite the vibe! 
3. Different Seasons. Actually, I like all four of these novellas, though all have flaws. My favorite is the last one, "Breathing Lessons," for its frame-tale setting of a secret New York story-tellers' club. Next I think I'd go with "Apt Pupil" because the antagonist and protagonist are both despicable, followed by "The Body" because the writer's voice is a bit too overbearing closely followed by "Rita Hayworth..." which was just a little too... Shawshank. 
4. NYer of 2/28/22. Claire Keegan's "So Late in the Day."
5. The Nation of Oct. 24. I am worried about Arab-American voters in Michigan. 
6. Ghost Summer by Tananarive Due. Divided into sections: "Gracetown" (Florida town haunted by racist past)  "The Knowing" (weird relationships); "Carriers" (post-virus American, with the same character), "Vanishings" (dealing with death). "Gracetown" and "Carriers" stood out--though I don't really like zombie apocali. 
7. The Beast You Are by Paul Tremblay. This short story collection is easily the worst thing I've read by Tremblay. 
8. Ghost Stories edited by Joseph Lewis French. Tbh, the best were the best remembered: M.R. James and Blackwood. 
9. Hack/Slash Omnibus vol. 1. Some good world building in bits and pieces. 

September '24 Reading

Hopefully I do better than last month!

1. The Jules Verne Steam Balloon: The title vehicle, crewed by three spritely lads named Buckeye, Tumble, and Quark, crop up over and again, and apparently steal away with scoutmaster/divinity student Hugo at the end.
2. NYer of 8/12/24   Archival issue on comedy. Als on Pryor and Kael on Funny Girl. I think I finally get Kael. 
3. Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi. The best parts of this books are the best parts of Goodfellas. This isn't dig against Pileggi or Scorsese--they both know a narrative beat when they see it. 
4. NYer of 9/9/24. Epochal, Prufrockian poem "A Sunset" by Robert Hass: "And the sunset--peach to dull gold which faded/To what felt, for just a second, for less/Than a second, a blessed and arriving silence,/And then a pale green at the skyline,/And then dark. And it was Monday night."
5. The Nation of Sept. 2024. Books issue. Kohei Saito's Slow Down [is] a disarmingly good-natured summons to 'degrowth communism' as the political program that will save the world. 
6. NYer of 9/2/24: "A political party," according to the political scientist E.E. Schattschneider, " is an organized attempt to get control of the government."
7. King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany. Some nice little lyrical moments--the king and his band wandering through "the fields we know" looking for Elfland, glimpsed occasionally in your backyard; the teeny troll Lurulu in the henhouse finds a cobweb, which they don't have in Elfland but 'he admired the construction. May not have really cohered, but will try Dunsany shorts. 
8. Twenty-One Stories by Graham Greene. 
9. NYer of 1/7/22. Stanislav Lem thought sf "comes from a whorehouuse but it wants to break into the place where the most sublime thoughts of human history are stored"
10. NYer of 9/23/24. Jackson Arn says that John Berger said of Monet, "You cannot enter into one of Monet's impressions as you enter into another painting--'instead... it extracts you memories... what you recieve is taken from what happens between you and it.'"
11. NYer of 8/26/24. Not sold on Justin Chang as a film guru, but believe his recommendation of "Close Your Eyes" an the rest of Victor Erice's small body of work past his debut"The Spirit of the Beehive."
12. NYer of 12/5/22. Feature on Mick Herron. Turns out J. Lamb was the name of a cabbie in Smiley's People. 
13. Believe Them by Mary Robison. Top stories= "Again, Again, Again"; "Seizing Control"; "Culpability"; "Trying"
14. Zen and the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury. Really just a collection of odds and sods--occasional essays, introductions to reissues, even a pretentious interview about screenwriting. Some good bits though, like "'Drunk, and in charge of a bicycle' as an Irish police report once put it."

August 24 Reading

 Back to work this month.

1. NYer of 8/8/22. Poem by Simon Armitage consisting of anagrams of "Simon Armitage": "I am a Song Timer. /I am Sir Megaton./ Against Memoir I am."
2. NYer of 6/27/22.  There's a half-million dollar hand-made mattress hand-stitched in Sweden. Drake has one.
3. The Weird of the White Wolf by Michael Moorcock. Mostly earlier tales rounded out with a couple new ones. 
4. NYer of 8/5/2024. Long true-crime story on murders at Whitehouse Farm in U.K.
5. X-Men/Fantastic Four: 4X by Chip Zdarsky and Dodsons. I really enjoyed this despite the lazy interior art. But they nailed family faces; kids really do look like different combos of Reed and Sue. 
6. Search and Destroy by Atsushi Kaneko. Fine set up (cyborg looking to recover 48 different human parts) but not enough to keep going. 
7. NYer of 2/7/22. Read while traveling
8. Bad Dreams by Tessa Hadley. Set of exiquisite Munro-esque stories about either British girls growing up in the 60s ("The Abduction," "Bad Dreams") or contemporary British women of a certain age ("Flight," Under the Sign of the Moon"). 
9. NYer of 8/12/24.Teen RFK, Jr., tripping on acid, runs into picture of father uncle and Jesus praying. Bad trip ensues. 
10. The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury. Best stories= 1)The Veldt 2)The Long Rain 3)Kaliedescope 4)Rocket Man. Worst= title story; Marionettes, Inc.; The Rocket.
11. The Nation of August 2024. Rae Armantrout's "Witch": "Cousin Rust,/with your look of blood| and sunset,//In almost in love/with the lace you've made/of metal"

July 24 Reading

 Geared up for one-a-day this month. 

1. NYer of 3/11/24. Arn on Haring's reputation: "The dust never settles--consensus seems perpetually just around the corner, but, since it would be better if it didn't arrive, it doesn't." 
2. NYer of 6/24/24. Gopnik reviews Charles Taylor's book on enchantment vs. enlightenment dialectic.
3. The Nation of June 2024. Long depressing series on Project 2025. 
4. Good Girls Don't Die by Christina Henry. Stir together Truman Show, Stepford Wives,  Cabin in the Woods, Hunger Games, and voila, feminista! Worst book I've read in a minute
5. NYer of 7/1/24. John Fetterman's strange mix of progressivism and populism means he's one of the few sincere senators. 
6. Invincible Volume 13: Growing Pains. Eve is preggers. 
7. Invincible Volume 14: The Viltrimite War. Cool effect of blood splatter going out of panels. 
8. She-Hulk v2: Jen of Hearts by Rainbow Rowell. Fight club + wear fancy dresses and eat cake club.
9. Eclogues by Guy Davenport. I recently saw an observation that Davenport writes a world where paganism and Xtianity evolved side-by-side. That can be seen from the first story ("The Trees at Lystra") set in the ancient world to the last one ("On Some Lines in Virgil") set in the roughly contemporary late 60s but saturated by history trailing back to the paleolithic. 
10. She-Hulk v3: Girl Can't Help It. The standout story was the book-club satire (with Patsy, Sue Storm Richards, Volcana, Misty and Colleen). 
11. Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn, ed. Asprin. Brings some god-encounters to the table. 
12. Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck by Don Rosa. Took a long time, but finally got back to this detailed tribute to Duckworld. 
13. Do a Powerbomb by Daniel Warren Johnson. He only deals with things he loves--in this case pro wrestling, inter-dimensional fight tournaments, and... family. 
14. Wonder Twins v. 1:Activate! by Marc Russell and Stephen Byrne. The best bit is the scene with Jayna in the form of an ant with the stinky "hero" Repulsor. 
15. Wonder Twins v. 2: The Fall and Rise of the Wonder Twins. Gen Z--no real prospects (unpaid interships) but unwilling to accept the status quo (sheltering Philo Math) or respect the old ways (freeing him from Phantom Zone). Boys are either inept (Zan) or toxic (Red Flag). 
16. Night Fever by Brubaker and Phillips. Standard issue post-Criminal product. 
17. Where the Body Was by Brubaker and Phillips. Slightly better. I like the map.
18. NYer of July 8&15. Fiction issue.
19. Wonder Woman: Dead Earth. Daniel Warren Johnson gives Princess Dianna the Mad Max meets Dune meets Kingdom Come treatment. Not the best thing ever. 
20. 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. ed. Lorrie Moore. Discoveries include Charles Baxter, Mary Gaitskilll, ZZ Packer, Benjamin Percy. And for first time, appreciation of Sherman Alexie. 
21. Susceptible by genevieve castree. Comics memoir of first 18 years. Troubled homelife with mother and her boyfriend, Amere and Amer. Occasional escape to her English-speaking father, Oeuf de tete. 
22. The Eternaut by Hecter German Oesterheld and Francisco Solanao Lopez. 300+ pages, but strangely like an EC comics Weird Science 8 pager. 
23. NYer of June 3, 2024. Hannah Goldfield on Hawaiian food in Las Vegas. 
24. City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter. Ersatz Fine Writing. Insufferably narcissistic main character. Notable lack of humor. 
25. Foster. This novella has the quiet gravity of a timeless classic. 
26. Artists Authors Thinkers Directors by Paul Hornschemeier
27. Paris Review Spring 2023. Fun poem called "John Wick Is So Tired." Good story by MarieNDiaye called "Irreproachable. 
28. Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow. 
29. NYer of 7/22/24. Blade Runner, The Thing, Conan the Barbarian, Tron, The Road Warrior, Wrath of Khan, Poltergeist, and E.T. all came out within an 8 week period during the summer of 1982. 
30. The Michael Moorcock Library: Elric of Melnibone. Read side-by-side with the original. Nearly every scene is present--some dialogue trimmed along with exposition, but only a tavern scene about the mirror of forgetting is (I think) absent. 
31. NYer of 7/29/24. "The moon, the ocean--some things never change." Campbell McGrath, "Hummingbirds."
32. Elric of Melnibone by Michael Moorcock. It literally says Yrykoon could "make Melibone great again.)