Books Read in 2023, Part 1

The first couple of weeks of the year always have much to blog about, and as always I am behind. I figured I’d get the easy posts out of the way and work on the more involved ones for later, because that’s Strategic Planning and we could do with more of that in this chaotic world. So look for a series of posts on a trip that occupied the first week or so of this month and another on the end of the Christmas holiday period for us, coming soon to a blog near you.

In the meantime, however.

I read. It’s what I do, or at least what I would like to do. This year, as with the last couple of years, however, it has been something of a battle to carve time away from the various demands being made on my life and even more of a battle to have the energy and focus to read when I do manage to carve out that time. It’s been a down year by historical standards, though more or less in line with the recent past. We’ll take what we can get.

Here are the books I read in 2023.

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In the Weeds: Around the World and Behind the Scenes with Anthony Bourdain (Tom Vitale)

I’m not sure why I find myself endlessly fascinated with Anthony Bourdain but I’ve stopped questioning it and am just enjoying it. He was a larger than life character, with all of the virtues and vices that this phrase implies – driven, demon-haunted, interested and interesting, addicted to many things (some of them legal), and ultimately gone before his time. Tom Vitale was one of the producers on his shows and he frames this as both a memoir of his time with Bourdain and an attempt to come to grips with Bourdain’s death. After the intense experience of working with Bourdain, an experience that very nearly drove him to breakdown, suddenly having nothing to do is a disorienting thing, particularly because of the reasons it happened. Vitale traces his time on the show, tells a great many fascinating stories, and ultimately comes to no real conclusion about anything, which is probably the only appropriate thing to do. Oddly enough, he is to my knowledge the only one of the many people who knew Bourdain personally and who have written books about him who is at least interested in hearing from Asia Argento, Bourdain’s last girlfriend and the person blamed by many of Bourdain’s friends for his suicide. Vitale’s encounter with Argento doesn’t reach any real conclusions either, but it was interesting to hear her discuss it with him. Vitale takes a chapter or two to get rolling, but this was one of the better Bourdain books I’ve read that wasn’t by the man himself.

One Summer: America 1927 (Bill Bryson)

I needed a book that was dense enough to last for a while but interesting enough to keep me reading for a couple of long flights and while I have read this before it’s been a while and it fit that bill quite nicely. Bryson takes as his subject the summer of 1927 in the United States – a summer of lasting impact in many ways – and he divides his book into sections focusing on individuals. The first section is about Charles Lindbergh, whose cross-Atlantic flight took place that May. June is given over to Babe Ruth, though Lindbergh continues to make appearances. July sees the focus shift to Calvin Coolidge, while August moves on to Sacco and Vanzetti, and it all wraps up in September. What makes this fascinating is that Bryson – an entertaining writer with a gift for humanizing his subjects with interesting and often hilariously funny anecdotes – uses that summer and those people as prisms for much larger events over a much longer timescale. He reaches back through the entire 1920s (and often further) and extends out into the 1930s as well, and a better social history of the United States on the brink of modernity in the 1920s you will likely never find. This is aimed at a popular audience and is breezy and entertaining that way, but it is surprisingly thoughtful and thorough and as a professional historian I would have no problem assigning this for a class. My students would probably thank me.

The Nineties (Chuck Klosterman)

The 1990s were, for Chuck Klosterman, a pivotal decade in American history – a hinge between Before and After, with concerns and views that would have made no sense earlier and made even less sense later. This is not a particularly bold argument, as most decades can be summed up like that. What makes this collection of essays worth reading is the level of cultural analysis that Klosterman brings to a decade that in many ways still seems too insubstantial and meaningless to support it, as well as the sheer melancholy rage that informs this analysis. Klosterman looks at music, politics, journalism, media (the shift from television to the internet as the main medium of information is in this telling both consequential and totemic), and almost every other aspect of the culture of the decade to argue his case, and as someone who is old enough to remember the 90s clearly it was fascinating to see the differences between history and memory play out in this book. Klosterman is an engaging writer with sharp observational skills and incisive arguments, and the book will make you think differently (though not necessarily more positively) about a decade that is often underappreciated.

Interesting Facts for Curious Minds (Jordan Moore)

Every year at Christmas we play the Dice Game, which is a fun way to exchange gifts without going bankrupt. And every year I end up with an assortment of random things. My goal is always to end up with a) things I can give to my kids, and/or b) things that are small. This year one of the things I ended up with was this book, which was at least small and I do enjoy trivia. It seems churlish to criticize what was clearly a labor of love for the author, but the simple fact is that this is not a good book. It was self-published and remains about two drafts short of anything a professional editor would let loose in the world. It’s divided into 63 short chapters of 25 or so “facts” each, though the organization is more random than that as Moore makes no real distinction between fiction and nonfiction (the chapter on geology has tidbits about both rocks and fictional character names, for example) or between trivia and information. Things that should be grouped together within chapters are often widely separated, which is tricky when he makes references back to them, and he randomly inserts comments which are clearly meant to be funny or chummy but are mostly just puzzling. At least half a dozen of these “facts” were flat out wrong and those were just the ones that were obvious to me. Plus if you’re not a fan of Comic Sans the layout will just kill you. I read it because it was in some sense a gift, and now you don’t have to.

On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous (Ocean Vuong)

This is a kaleidoscope of a book, fragmented and often nonlinear – a letter written to someone who can’t read about a life betwixt and between, in sentences that often shine like jewels. It’s not really surprising to discover that Vuong is a poet. Little Dog, the narrator, is Vietnamese, a child and grandchild of the American war there, now growing up in Hartford CT. His mother works hard, his grandmother is slowly slipping away, and in that landscape he is figuring out who he is, who is family is, and how it all fits together, or if it does at all. Little Dog flits from subject to subject, often in alternating paragraphs – you find out a lot about Tiger Woods, the terrible toll of Oxy-Contin and other opioids, domestic violence, and the Vietnam War itself, among other things – all the while narrating his coming out as a gay man of color in a time and place that doesn’t value any of that. It’s a book you read for the characters and the tone rather than the plot, of which there is very little. But there doesn’t need to be when the writing is this crystalline.

Ithaca (Claire North)

History sounds different when you listen to the voiceless. The Greek story of Odysseus and Penelope is generally told from the point of view of Odysseus – from the man, in other words. It is a story of war and the gods, of adventure and return, and of politics and power. In this version, though, Claire North focuses on the story of the women, of Penelope at home waiting for Odysseus to return, besieged by suitors who consider her a widow and a target, on a poor and increasingly desperate island full of young boys, old men, and women, always women – maids and elders, servants and priestesses, but always women. The story is told by Hera, queen of the gods for whatever that’s worth in a pantheon dominated by Zeus and his masculine followers, and her long perspective on these short, circumscribed lives is both loving and remote in a way that only those who have forever to think about things can manage. This is the first of a projected trilogy and as such it plays to North’s strengths – the complex and intertwining characters deftly sketched and set against each other, the deep and abiding sense of melancholy that pervades everything, and the lack of any need to come to a definite conclusion before the story ends. It’s a story of intrigue and betrayal, of destiny and humanity, of the limits of the gods and the importance of the women who usually go unnoticed by the poets, and it is a story well told.

Face It (Debbie Harry)

I am old enough to remember when Blondie was new to the charts, when Call Me and Heart of Glass were all over Top-40 radio and photos of their bleached-blonde lead singer were much sought after things among my peer group. Like most people, though, Debbie Harry is more complex than her public image and here – in a memoir that reads like the transcribed and edited interviews that it is based on – she tells her life story. She was adopted not long after being born, right after WWII, and grew up in a quiet family in New Jersey, but was drawn to the New York City in the 1960s and the emerging punk scene of the 1970s, where she met and hung out with pretty much everyone who was or would become anyone – David Bowie plays a large role in her story, for example, as does Andy Warhol. She tells the standard rock and roll memoir in some ways – sex and drugs and trauma (including at least two sexual assaults and one abusive ex-husband) over a litany of hard times, hard work, and astonishing success in the end, though not necessarily lasting success in many ways – but through it all she maintains her sense of humor, her energetic drive, and oddly enough for someone who repeatedly describes herself as “punk” her sense of wonder at it all. There are several sections in the book that are just reproductions of fan art that people sent to her over the years, for example, and she describes not only the ups and downs of Blondie but also the ins and outs of her professional life since then. Her acting credits came as a surprise. If there is a main character in her life it is Chris Stein, her bandmate and boyfriend through much of the early Blondie years and still one of her closest friends long after they broke up. Through it all she is an engaging storyteller who has led a fascinating life, and as much as she protests that she never intended or wanted to write a memoir I’m glad she did.

Ryder (Ginya Lawrence)

When a friend of mine announced on Instagram that she had self-published a small collection of poems that we could buy, I figured I would do that. And it was definitely worth it. These are lovely and often thoughtful poems accompanied by spare illustrations and a shout-out at the end to another loved one. My personal favorite was one called “Lemons,” which has the line “I don’t enjoy throwing away something that once brought me joy.” I also liked “Let there be love not made to be a lesson,” which is a valuable thought indeed. Support your friends in their endeavors! You may end up with poetry.

Bull Cook and Authentic Historical Recipes and Practices (George Leonard Herter and Berthe E. Herter)

I’ve written about this book extensively here on the blog – it’s the only cookbook I’ve ever felt compelled to liveblog, and if you read those posts you’ll understand why. George Herter was a member in good standing of the fine American tradition of cranks – the overconfident Dunning Kruger cases who somehow feel compelled to share their opinions with you in a way that is both vaguely off putting and strangely fascinating. This purports to be a cookbook and there are in fact recipes in it, but mostly it is a compendium of George’s opinions on everything from food to historical figures to ethnology to the conspiracies of the flour industry. I don’t think I’ll make any of the recipes, but it was a wild ride from start to finish.

Speaking Italian: The Fine Art of the Gesture (Bruno Munari)

My family emigrated from various places in Italy over a century ago, but culture changes slowly and we still retain a few things from the Old Country. Some recipes, adapted to the United States. A few phrases. And a distinct tendency to talk with our hands, one that encompasses both particular gestures and general motion for emphasis. This short illustrated guide, first published in 1963, is pretty much what it says it is – a visual guide to some of the gestures common in Italian culture – particularly in southern Italy, where my family is from. Many of them I recognized and at least one I will dispute, as it does not mean anything nearly as polite as what this book says it means. But it’s a quick and entertaining guide, with text in Italian and English on one facing page and small photos and illustrations of the corresponding gestures on the other. Next time I go to Italy, I will have to remember this one.

Risk! True Stories People Never Thought They’d Share (Kevin Allison, ed)

This is a collection of stories told on the podcast of the same name, one that asks people to tell a story that is close to them, that is something that perhaps they’ve never shared before or never thought they would, and as with all such stories they are deeply felt, often traumatic, and occasionally very difficult to read. There are stories of violence and victimhood, of bad choices and hard consequences, of misfortunes and lessons learned the hard way – positive stories generally aren’t risky to tell, after all. It’s a fascinating collection but not for the faint of heart, and if you can get through it without tearing up at least once then you are a more hardened person than I am.

The Ankh-Morpork Archives: A Discworld Anthology, Volume 1 (Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs, illustrated by Paul Kidby)

Of the mining of popular franchises there is no end. But for those of us who love the franchise and miss it now that the author is gone, these bits and bobs of further explorations into the dark corners and deep recesses of the world created are irresistible and fun, so perhaps that’s not such a bad thing. This large-format heavily illustrated book purports to be a guide to some of the guilds of Ankh-Morpork, the main city of Terry Pratchett’s Discworld. Ankh-Morpork was a gritty, run-down, venal and ramshackle place that managed to be vibrant and functional almost despite itself, in stark contrast to the usual pristine Cities that populated the fantasy genre when Pratchett started the series in the 1980s. And that messy humanness was precisely the point, even – and especially – if it often extended to non-human species. In this volume we discover the inner workings of the Unseen University (where the wizards are), the Assassin’s Guild (nil mortify sine lucre), the Thieves Guild, and the Post Office, along with a table of significant dates and a pile of Kidby’s eccentric illustrations. It’s a lovely stroll down memory lane for any Discworld fan.

The Ankh-Morpork Archives: A Discworld Anthology, Volume 2 (Terry Pratchett and Stephen Briggs, illustrated by Paul Kidby)

Basically a continuation of the last volume, except with a red cover instead of a blue one. This volume covers the City Watch, the Fools’ Guild (with the running joke that these are the least funny people in the entire Discworld), Reformed Vampyres, and Lu-Tze (one of the Monks of the Discworld). This set has been a nice way to walk through the Discworld again, and perhaps I will have to reread the actual books sometime soon.

The Water Knife (Paolo Bacigalupi)

The American Southwest lives on borrowed time. There’s nothing particularly magical about this statement – just the simple math of population versus water. It’s desert land. It was never made to support cities and large scale commercial agriculture. And when the aquifers are exhausted and the rivers dry up, as they inevitably will, there will be blood. Into the maelstrom of a parched and dying Phoenix comes Angel – a “water knife” working for Catherine Case, who controls the water supply for Las Vegas and most of the surrounding states in the ramshackle and Balkanized husk of what used to be the United States, a collapse that occurred in living memory for all of the characters in this book. Angel, originally from the Cartel States that were once Mexico, is one of her hatchet men, cutting off water from areas Case doesn’t want to have it, occasionally with missile fire. Lucy is a journalist in Phoenix, watching the city die around her. Maria is a refugee from Texas, despised and poor like the rest of her fellow Texans, and doing what it takes to survive even as she dreams of better times across the hard borders of California or points north. This is a soft-apocalypse noir of a book, with double-crosses and triple-crosses, rampant and often brutal violence, squandered opportunities, and a general sense this is as good as it will ever get until it gets worse. It is a world of casual cruelty where the weak are destroyed simply because they can be, where the strong survive until they meet someone stronger, and where basic human decency rarely goes unpunished. If there’s a hero in here it’s Angel, though that may be stretching the term a bit. He understands the game he’s playing, and even when double-crossed he rarely takes it personally. It’s just how things work in his world. Bacigalupi is a good writer and – aside from a rather poorly thought out bit of romance intruding into the plot for a bit – it’s a compelling story. And like all soft apocalypse stories, where there is no one Event that brought about collapse just the death by a thousand cuts of current trends, it’s all the more frightening for its recognizability.