- A Moveable Feast by Ernest Hemingway. Best parts, naturally, are about sitting around writing in the cafe. Sad to think about him churning those lost years through his style machine near the end.
- Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion. Lots of short chapters lead to a quick read. I don't remember all that much about it though.
- Daredevil: Born Again by Miller & Mazzuchelli. Actually liked it more than I remembered. The Nuke storyline is an all-time great Captain America story tucked in toward the end of a Daredevil story.
- Starman: Sins of the Father by Robinson & Harris. Feels like the set up to a long series, which is what it is. "I'm not Starman."
- All Star Batman by Spencer & Romita Jr. Batman driving a semi truck was ok. Not much else was though.
- Lady in the Lake by Laura Lippman. A pretty compelling stew of race relations, murder, and newpaper lore in 60s Baltimore.
- Black God's Drum by P. Djelli Clark. A visit to New Orleans in Clark's revanchist magical universe. I am not using that word correctly, by the way.
- Wonder Woman vol 1 by Greg Rucka. The Batman story is a morality play focusing on the ethical codes of the two most ethically-freighted characters in the DCU. It's almost a Greek tragedy.
- Night of the Gun by David Carr. Liked it while reading it, but ultimately did not live up to expectations.
- A Childhood by Harry Crews. Crews is a writing connected to the land and its people, and the stories they tell. The most memorable scene to me ways the last one, where he realizes that after a few years in the service he returns a heretic.
- Secondhand Time by Sventlana Alexeivich. We used to live for a principle, now there's salami in the stores and we're supposed to sell bottled water to one another.
- The Way of the World by V.S. Naipal. Reads like a memoir, but apparently a novel. One figure, at least, is invented or maybe just given a pseudonym.
- Shake It Up: Great American Writing on Rock and Pop ed. Jonathan Lethem. Lots of good (Richard Poirer's incisive analysis of Sgt Pepper's, Lenny Kaye on what he calls acapella, Lester Bangs asking random people what they think about Elvis who just died), not much great (maybe Bangs, don't know for sure).
- Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick. Like Naipal, an apparent memoir fictionalized enough to be a published as a novel. I felt I owed to Hardwick after reading her letters interpolated in Lowell's Dolphin Street, but might try essays instead.
- Under Lock and Skeleton Key by Gigi Pandian Grasping at coziness; not good.
- A Fortnight in September by R. C. Sheriff. Like a warm bath. Best of the month.
- Starman vol 2 by Robinson and Harris. Didn't intend the symmetry, but makes me think of how real time, as in waiting a month in between chapters, affected the perception of character development.
Stats: 5(!) memoirs counting the fictive ones; 1 oral history; 4 novels not including the psuedo-memoirs but not including 1 alt-history fantasy novella; 4 comics; 1 collection of music essays. Best book: Sheriff's Fortnight.
