Jan 24 Reading

 My goal this year is one short story a day, but I'll only post the "book version" (anthology or collection). I'll continue to include New Yorker issues, simply because it helps with the backlog. Speaking of which,

1. NYer 12/4//23. (Teju Cole short story). 
2. NYer 11/13/23 (including a Clare Sestanovich ss, plus feature on Ridley Scott and review by Wood of House of Doors)
3. Superman:Space Age by Russel and Allred. Clever use of one of the Infinite Earths, including a "retcon" to well, when it happened. 
4. Fantastic Four by Ryan North: Whatever Happened to the Fantastic Four. Accentuates the Johnny (Jonny?) is the worst (or his least favorite) and Dr. Susan Storm-Richards the best (his favorite). Reed a verbose explainer and Ben a simple, kind man (as always). 
5. Richard Stark's Parker: The Hunter. Lots of text. Lots of pages with no text. Not great as a comic.
6. NYer 12/18/23. Gopnick on comedy: Marx Bros=optimism; Tati=pessimsim; Keaton=stoicism; Chaplin=humanism. Larger point: "Comedy has a range as large as human feeling"
7. NYer 10/17/22. Strange David Gilbert story "Come Softly To Me" plus Lydia Millet review.
8. Planet of Exile. Secretly the story of how a genetic mutation led to the exiled Far born being assimilated (though it's never said)
9. NYer 1/8/24. Next three all finished while travelling
10. NYer 9/19/22
11. NYer 3/21/22. Running count 7!
12. NYer 4/17/23. Emahoy, the musical genius Ethiopian nun. 
13. NYer 10/2/23. Featuring "Bruises" by Graham Swift. Veteran pointed in right direction home. 
14. NYer 3/13/23. "Terriers are deranged animals who could probably teach us a lot about how brains pointlessly track small movements and changes; these traits of theirs far exceed those needed to hunt small rustling prey." Rivka Galchen, "How I Became a Vet."
15. NYer 12/25/23. Games and comics. Longish comic on Patricia Highsmith. 
16. NYer 1/15/24. Smart double review of Frantz Fanon and Ian Fleming biographies. 
17. NYer 10/24/22. Wendell Pierce as Wally Loman.
18. Dinosaurs by Lydia Millet. Fave scene: "'you have a lovely house/'so do you." They agreed. They both had lovely houses. They had bought them with money."
19. NYer 8/15/22. Anthony Lane's review of Bodies Bodies Bodies: in most whodunnits you don't particularly care about who dies, but "I found myself actively willing the extinction of every single character, if possible in conspicuous agony."
20. NYer 10/10/22. Gotta go, my Mom jeans and Dad jeans are here.
21. NYer 1/22/24. Final count-16!

Dec 23 Reading

I'll have more time this month maybe?

1. NYer 10/23/23. Need to catch up.
2. NYer 11/6/2023. Remnick's Letter from Israel
3. NYer 11/27/23. New font for bylines? How dare they! New Haven pizza? Intrigued!
4. NYer 9/18/23. Emily Wilson (translator) is super annoying.
5. Babel by R.F. Kuang. 3 complaints and 3 concessions. Complaints 1)scene constructions 2)flat characters 3)anachronistic dialogue Concessions 3)It's well researched2)It's polemic, so 1)the magic system is cool
6. Lost Time by Jozek Czapski
7. Fante Bukowski by Noah van Scriver
8. How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy.
9. NYer 12/11/23. John Adams reviewing book on memorials in music, includes discussion of his 9/11 memorial ("On the Transmigration of Souls")
10. How Proust Can Change Your Life: Not a Novel by Alain de Botton. The simple lesson is don't read great literature with your eyes, see the world with their eyes. 
11. The Dark Design (Riverworld v. 3). I mentally steampunk it as I read along, changing batteries to wood-fired boilers etc.
12. NYer 11/20/23. Sheila Heti wrote "According to Alice" with help of AI. It starts "My name is Alice and I was born from an egg that fell out of Mommy's butt."
    

Nov 23 Reading

Hopefully I can use the Turkey Break to do better this month, but numbers-wise I might be hampered by the two long books I'm planning to read.

1. Cop Killer--One of the better Martin Becks, despite a crazy coincidence bringing two plot lines together. A pointedly ironic title, as the titular character was only along for the ride. You can tell the authors are getting ready to wrap up the series, as they're bringing a ton of past characters back for a walk-on (even the killer from book 1).
2. The Terrorists--the conclusion to the ten volume series. Some dark comedy, like the assassinated preseidente's head propelled through the hotel window into Gunvald Larson's new suit.
3. The Tiger's Wife by Tea Obreht. A workshop novel, with its liberal political stances, polished prose (including redundant descriptions, often in triplicate), and detachable (workshopable) chapters. Not bad, but that's what it is. 
4. 101 Books to Read Before You're Murdered. Not well-written and not really trustworthy. But with that title I couldn't stop. 
5. Time Regained. Not that long (552 pages), but one of the reasons for the same number of books read this month. 
6. Curtain. The final Poirot mystery by Agatha Christie. 

In the end I only read one of the two long books, so this was a very disappointing month by the numbers. But hey, I finished In Search of Lost Time for a second time, so that's something!

Oct 23 Reading

 Continuing the continuance...

1. Creepshow v1. 
2. NYer 9/25/23. Fashion issue
3. Ninefox Gambit. I'm thinking about this in relation to Gideon the Ninth (science-fantasy set up), A Memory Called Empire, and to a lesser extent  Ancillary Justice. 
4. The Abominable Man which is another Martin Beck. The AbMan is a cop, and one of the comic relief cops is killed by a rooftop sniper! Uncool!
5. The Locked Room which is yet another Martin Beck. Martin solves a crime, but the criminal is sent up for another one, which he did not commit. 
6. NYer 10/9/23. Hanif Abdurraquib makes his debut (maybe) as pop music critic, as does Jackson Arn (maybe again) in art
7. Halloween Party Poirot investigates a child murder with the help of author stand-in Ariadne Oliver. Some creepy filligree around the complicated plot.
8. NYer 9/11/23. George Eliot lived in sin.
9. Tomb of Dracula. Gene Colan and diverse hands. The first half is the color comic, while the second is the first part of the Dracula Lives magazine run. 
10. The Fugitive. Marcel Proust. 
11. NYer 10/16/23. McPhee on Bill Bradley. He shredded the Persian carpet with nervous energy while working on his thesis. 
12. The Writer's Library by Nancy Pearl and Jeff Schwager. I like reading what writers have to say about reading. I do so enough that it takes away from my reader. 
13. NYer 10/30/23. 4 in, 5 out. Profile on Jim Jordan. Review essay on Bill Waterson.

A disappointing month, but ended with an auspicious number and I did watch 31 horror movies, so...

Sep 23 Reading

 Continuing.

1. NYer 8/7/23. Long, pre-death feature on Prigozhin (and how he had seemed to have "gotten away with it")
2. NYer 8/14/23. Nice retrospective review of Steven Millhauser.
3. New Teen Titans v5. It's.. the human scenes. Like Donna walking in on the mess between Terry and his ex. Though Terry is terryble.
4. New Teen Titans v6. George Perez inking himself is... kind of messy. 
5. NYer 7/10&17/23. "[C]ontinued exercise of craft breeds competence in it, but in writing there are other things than competence. THere are certain organic values, such as intensity of feeling, freshness of perception, moral earnestness and conviction. These are virtues that may exist in beginning writers and unfortunately they may exist more in the beginning than in the later stages" Tennessee Williams. 
6. The Continuous Life of Katherine Martinhoe. Not sure what I think. The two novae (TV eyes and information overload sickness) go together, but I'm not sure of the overall point. Are we to think we got the continuous Katherine or not? Wasn't she changed utterly, multiple times in her life? Maybe even every day in her last week. 
7. Cannon by Wally Wood. Men's adventure with naked ladies on almost every page. Wood said something like "never draw what you can copy, never copy what you can trace, never trace what you can cut out, and go to town on the rest
8. NYer 9/4/23. An all archival issue with Thurber cover, articles by Nabokov, Mitchell, Grann, Orleans. Story by Murakami and poem by Oliver. 
9. Invincible v 10:  Includes issue 50 and the break with Cecil. Like with NTT, the best part is the people, like Ryan and Eve's love talk. 
10. New Teen Titans v8. Almost no Perez, but still kind of ok. The end of my initial time with the series. 
11. The Captive (Proust). Who is the captive, Marcel (just now named) or Albertine? There's an especially symphonic sequence where a ton of past themes--the "little phrase," pining for Mama, "inverts," more I'm forgetting, come together and intertwine at the party where Charlus is snubbed by Madame Verdurin. 
12. After the Funeral. Another Poirot, entertaining but based on a caprice as usual. He actually hires an agent for background information, which seems to be a variation of the formula. 
13. Invincible v 11. Still on his own, and back together with Eve. Cameo of Dr Venture and Brock Samson at the burger joint. 
14. NYer 8/28/23. 5 out this month; maybe only 3 in? There was a fashion issue?
15. The Bat Man of Gotham. Chip Zdarksy and some mostly bad artists. Is it funny? The skeleton im Gordon is. The straining after the Bat Shark Repellent is not. 

Aug 23 Reading

 The challenge is over, but this seems a more convenient way of tracking my reading. 

1. Murder at the Savoy. Another Martin Beck. Though I complained about the bland characterizations last time, I'm starting to differentiate among the various cops. Some, like the two incompetent beat cops, are types, but others are more subtle (Larson and Kroll for instance.) This one was sharply anti-capitalist. 
2. NYer 9/5/22. I'll get through the stack yet!
3. NYer 7/24/23
4. Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything (Or, Old Bob Exposes His Ignorance). Given the rise of conspiracy thinking, his final reckoning awaits. His diagnosis of Internet (which he uses without the definite article) as a counter-agent was typical of the early 21st century but way wrong. Still, he can speak fluidly on everything from general semantics to James Joyce (which is not as broad as it once seemed, perhaps).
5. NYer 9/26/22
6. NYer 7/31/23
7. Grindhouse: Doors Open at Midnight vol 2.
8. Red Mars. Less hip Neal Stephenson
9. Human Target. Palette, structure. Ending?
10. Blacksad: The Complete Stories Remarkable facial expressions on animals. Embarrassingly sexy animals. 
11. Manhattan Projects. Color palette. Multiple Oppenheimers. Boy Feynman. 
12. New Teen Titans v. 4. George Perez, people. There's a bottom role in the Runaways story where a kid is hit by a car. Everyone is facing the reader, except for the middle panel where the runaway is silhouetted by headlights. 
13. NYer 8/21/23. Five out, four in. I'll get through the pile somehow. 
14. We Have Always Lived In the Castle. Jackson's sheer command of storyteller: The awkward ballet of Helen Clarke in the living room, plotting Charle's progress against the last normal morning, the flow of time. 
15. Invincible v. 8: My Favorite Martian. It's actually Allen the Alien, not a Martian.
16. Invincible v. 9: Out of this World: I kind of think the relationship with Eve is handled well. The Dad stuff, I'm not so sure. 
17. Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck: Beautifully rendered, but really intended as a work of Duck scholarship, apparently collecting and accounting for previous Barksian references. 
18. Sodom and Gomorrah. Moving deeper into Proust. This is the one where Marcel notices everyone is gay. 
19. Green Mars. Green represents life, indigenous to Mars. Ends with a bunch of refugees walking out of Burroughs with simple rebreathers, the atmosphere almost breathable. 

Not a particularly impressive month, but 3 really long ones (Proust and two Robinsons). Plus I travelled and started back at school, so actually pretty good. 

July 23 Reading

 I have modified my book-a-day challenge to a book or old NYer challenge. Also, my paper notebook is used up so that's why "you" are seeing it here (as if there is a you).

The dates roughly correspond to the listed number. 

1. Rhialto the Magnificent by Jack Vance. I rather wish I hadn't stuck with this series, even though it has some pleasures. 
2. Sex and Rockets (John Parsons biography). Weird guy who was a self-taught rocket scientist and occultist (and apparently something of a libertarian icon), but not an especially well-done job.
3. The Laughing Policeman. Back to the Martin Beck books. They've all been good, and sort of the same, but I like the title scene(s) of this one in particular. 
4. Daredevil by Chip Zdarsky volume 2. Kingpin, Elektra, Bullseye, Typhoid Mary, and Catholic guilt are all trotted out as usual. Done well enough, especially the two issues drawn by... I forget who. 
5. June 19th New Yorker
6. June 26th New Yorker
7. JLI volume 3. This one is funny, and also obnoxious funny. It concludes the space capitalist storyline, ending with the human trafficking of Mr. Miracle to Apokolips. 
8. June 12th NYer
9. Spider-Man: Life Story
10. Dalkey Days by Steven Moore.
11. May 16th NYer
12. 12-26-22 NYer
13. JLI volume 4. I really noticed the pacing and the use of the page as a unit. Seldom does a segment last more than 4 pages, the lengths vary, and only when two storylines come together are they shared on a page. 
14. 8-1-22 NYer
15. 1/2-9/23 NYer.
16. 7/3/23 NYer.
17. 52 Volume 1 (again)
18. Love Everlasting- Expected to end, don't know why. I am into it, trying to figure it out alongside Joan. A little nervous about nature of mother and threat of father beyond.
19. New Teen Titans v. 2. The sumptuously rendered "Clash of the Titans" plus the quest for the Doom Patrol (replete with indelible jungle scenes). Some of Perez's best art. 
20. Grindhouse: Doors Open at Midnight. Alex DiCampi and others. One is a graphic rapey fairly tale (the sexual violence grindy, but not the fairy tale) and a summer camp monster movie. 
21. The Guermantes Way. Marcel finds his way into the Faubourg St. Germain, who strike me as the ultra-rich superconservatives among us today. Dreyfus all over the place. The Duke Guermantes sends out to find out if his ailing cousin has died yet, so that he can go to a party. He refuses to hear the news he doesn't want to hear. 
22. The Violent Bear It Away. The nephew writes about him in a schoolteacher magazine! The boy fails at everything--baptism, drowning, burying, and burning. 
23. Invincible vol. 7: Three's Company. Nice triangle stuff--cover of Mark, Amber, and Eve out of costume with Eve looking jealous, then next ish Eve and Mark in costume flying off with Amber looking on. Also, older other-dimensional Eve to Mark: "Tell her anything!"
24. Daredevil by Zdarsky v. 3. I'm done. Not terrible, but the premise of the super-hero as legal person is so stupid. Less stupid than the Venom invasion of the prison though. 
25. Gone to the Wolves by John Wray. A bad book with three incompatible metal scenes as successive back drops. 
26. JLI volume 5. Shifts focus to Justice League Europe including a legitimately funny issue with team taking French lessons with a stern teacher, alongside the incognito Injustice League and, we learn at the end, a handful of intelligent agents from various countries. 
27. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the 1970s. Erik Davis dives deeply into work and experiences of Dennis and Terence McKenna, RAW, and Philip K. Dick using theory of Sloterdijk, Latour, Agamben, and a passel of others. 
28. JLI volume 6. Still executing the formula, but even if this wasn't the last one available, I'd probably be done. 
29. Fast by Jorie Graham. New use of spacing (single vs double, blocks of texts vs. typical long lines0 dashes, arrows (vectors), bursts of internal rhyme. About life and death, of the parents, herself, the planet: "Manacled to a whelm. Asked the plancts to give me my small identity. No, the planets."
30. Grindhouse: Doors Open at Midnight vol 2
31. NYer 8/22/22
32. The Firetruck that Disappeared (Martin Beck). Mentions recent events (from Laughing Policeman) but characters remain generic.