Books Read in 2016, Part 3

And so the year’s reading comes to an end.

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Illumination in the Flatwoods (Joe Hutto)

We stopped for the night at a ranch/motel in western Utah in June, a lovely place outside of a small collection of houses that insisted it was a town.  We were one of two rooms rented, and the proprietor – a transplanted midwesterner named Bill – was glad for the company.  When he found out that Lauren raised turkeys, he recommended that we watch the PBS documentary, My Life as a Turkey, which told the story of a man who raised a flock of wild turkeys from egg to independence and in the process very nearly joined the flock himself.  Eventually Kim and Lauren did watch it and enjoy it, and this is the companion book.  Hutto is a wildlife biologist who likes to get up close and personal with his subjects, and when he is handed two clutches of wild turkey eggs he decides to let them imprint on him and raise them as his own on his undeveloped land in Florida.  Hutto is an eager explorer of all things turkey and a pretty good writer, so the book flows on by quite nicely.  He builds them a pen and takes them for walks.  He learns to call and respond as turkeys do.  Some of the birds die, either from predators or from disease or just from being fragile birds – the odds of a wild turkey seeing its first birthday are incredibly slim – but most survive.  Hutto is openly adoring of his charges and draws both solace and inspiration from them.  As someone who has raised domestic turkeys and found them friendly and enjoyable, I thought the whole project was just lovely.  Turkeys are amiable and curious birds, and the wild ones are incredibly smart – something that has been bred out of the domestic ones.  Eventually they grow up and move out on their own, as they ought, and Hutto is quick to draw lessons from them.  I’m not sure I’d want to spend six months living as a turkey, spending most of my days with them to the point of only grabbing real meals when they are asleep, but I can sympathize anyway.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child (JK Rowling)

It’s been a long time since I was as disappointed in a book as I was with this one.  Like approximately half the world, I enjoyed the Harry Potter books and movies, and the idea that Rowling would revisit that world in print again was a pleasant one.  As a historian, I love the idea of finding out where the characters go after the main story is over, and the epilogue in the 7th Potter book is one of my favorite parts of the entire series.  But this book does not work.  It is set several decades after the original books, and Harry is a 40-year-old man with two kids at Hogwarts.  It turns out that his son, Albus Severus Potter, is a bit of a misfit whose only real friend is Scopius Malfoy, son of Draco.  From there it spirals out to include Voldemort, time travel, and more than a few unlikely events.  There were several problems with this book, the first being that it really isn’t a book – it’s a script for a four-act play.  Rowling has always been a better storyteller than writer, and a lot of what made the books work was that the world was a character just as much as Ron, Hermione, or Harry were.  When you strip all that away and try to tell a story entirely through dialogue, you had better be a damned good writer.  This isn’t her strength.  Although she didn’t write most of it, apparently – the credits in the back (this play was produced in the summer of 2016) list someone else as the “playwright,” with Rowling being credited for the story – so really it should have been better just for this alone.  Writing aside, the story itself is often hamfisted, prone to easy “aha!” moments that should have been more difficult for the characters to achieve, and surprisingly uninteresting for long stretches.  If you crunched this down into prose it would have been maybe 100 pages, and if Rowling had expanded it from that point to the length of the other books she might have been able to make it work, but this did not happen and so it did not. 

The World of Ice and Fire: The Untold History of Westeros and the Game of Thrones (George RR Martin, Elio M. Garcia, Jr., and Linda Antonsson)

This is essentially George RR Martin’s Silmarillion – the prehistory of the main series of books, wherein the vast depths of time and the long forces of history that produced the world of the main books (Martin’s Westeros, Tolkien’s Middle Earth) are set out and explained, although Tolkien’s work is presented as mythology and Martin’s is presented as history.  Told in the voice of a scholar of the Citadel setting out the history of the known world from antiquity to the present and from the kingdoms and rulers of Westeros to the far off lands across the seas, it has all of the hallmarks of medieval European scholarship and in fact reads very much like some of the histories produced during that period.  Martin and his co-authors have done incredible research on replicating not only the substance (take out the obviously fantastic elements and this is a pretty good description of medieval history) but also the tone – the constant referencing of lost texts, the bias toward the present ruling families, the intermixing of legend and record, and so on.  It is a world where warfare is nearly constant, where life is cheap and brutality common, where immense amounts of stone exist to be shaped into similarly immense cities, walls, and structures.  The book itself is also one of the most gorgeously illustrated volumes I have ever read, with hundreds of color paintings depicting scenes from the text.  Few pages are barren of illustration, and some are nothing but.  Of course it’s printed on thick oversized paper and the covers are generously padded and textured, so carting it about to read is a bit of a chore, but it pulls you right along.  The book is written as if it is the very beginning of King Robert’s reign, which means that (with the exception of a one-paragraph Afterward) there are no spoilers for those who have not already read the main series.  This book helped to make sense of a lot of the references, allusions, and relationships that I kind of glossed over in the main series, and I wish I had read it first.

Modernity Britain, 1957-1962 (David Kynaston)

And so another big reading project for the year comes to an end with the third volume of Kynaston’s deeply immersive social history of post-WWII Britain.  Seriously, this is a model for social historians to follow – thorough, readable, and never losing sight of the ordinary people and how they live their lives but without ignoring the movers and shakers either.  This volume covers the years when Britain finally began to emerge from the austerity of the immediate post-war period and enjoy some of the prosperity that had defined the 1950s in the United States.  Consumer goods become more available, popular culture shows signs of the boom that will emerge in the 1960s (Kynaston delights in describing younger days of future stars – Michael “soon to be Mick” Jagger makes repeated appearances as a schoolboy, for example, as does the novice Parliamentarian Margaret Thatcher), and politics chugs along with the Tories mostly in control.  The book is extraordinarily detailed regarding daily life – work, vacations, social mores (especially regarding gender and class, though not much about religion or its lack, which is one of the things that defines this as a British work rather than an American one) – but of necessity also devotes considerable space to more top-down subjects such as the rehousing efforts that Britain had to undertake because of the destruction of WWII.  If there is anything as drearily depressing as mid-20th-century urban planning, I haven’t found it.  But the remainder of the book is a fascinating and absorbing study of British life in the post-war period and my only regret is that the next volume in the series has yet to be published.

Absolute Beginners (Colin MacInnes)

While reading Modernity Britain I got into a discussion with a friend of mine about what, exactly, was a Teddy Boy (answer: a dandified sort of thug in 1950s Britain, whose nearest American equivalent might have been the Zoot-Suiters of the 1940s).  As part of this discussion, she said I should read this novel since there was a character named Ed the Ted, and it turned out to be a good recommendation.  The novel is told as a first-person story by an unnamed narrator living in the Notting Hill section of London in the summer of 1958, and the focal point of the novel is the Notting Hill race riot that took place that September.  Most of the novel is set-up, though, as we get to scoot around with the narrator in his alienated down-and-out-in-post-war-London sort of way.  It’s probably not an accident that the narrator reminded me so much of Holden Caufield from Catcher in the Rye.  Both books were written at about the time their respective nations (the US and Britain) began to emerge from post-war economic troubles into the prosperity that followed – the US in 1951 and Britain in 1959.  Both feature young male narrators alienated from the larger adult culture and situated somewhere between the Silent Generation and the Baby Boom.  The narrator here, for example, is a jazz aficionado who ekes out a living selling pornographic photos and whose prose is peppered with words like “cats” and “dig.”  He has a girl, whom he both loves and pushes away.  He likes his non-white neighbors, whom he invariably calls Spades.  He’s uncomfortable with his parents (the word “square” never appears in that context, but it might as well have) and lives in an apartment building above a gay man (“the Fabulous Hoplite”), a Spade named Cool, and a lesbian, all of whom are as much the heroes of this book as the narrator is.  Other than the riot not a lot happens – it’s a tone poem as much as a novel – and the ending is rather confused.  But it was a fascinating slice of a time and place.

Images of America: [The Next Town From Our Little Town]

Back when I ran the museum one of the projects that I always wanted to get done was a book like this.  The publisher makes it pretty easy for you – they provide you with a full template, and all you have to do is slot in the pictures and write the accompanying captions – but I never did find anyone who could do it and I never had the time to do it myself.  I’m glad to see they finally found someone – not only a Historical Society employee but the former editor of the town newspaper as well, so he did a nice job of it.  It’s a short book, as these are, but it is full of old photographs and does a good job of capturing a lot of the old sights, stories, and events of the town’s history.  It was an easy way for me to get copies of a lot of those old photographs that I enjoyed when I saw them in our archives, and it was fun to read the stories again.

Rogues (George RR Martin and Gardner Dozois, eds)

I bought this collection because it featured stories by Joe Abercrombie and Patrick Rothfuss.  It also, it turned out, had stories by Scott Lynch, Cherie Priest, Neil Gaiman, Connie Willis, and Martin himself, as well as a number of others of equal talent.  The stories are centered around the idea of the rogue – the ne’er-do-well, often sympathetically so, who is always just outside the bounds of propriety and law.  Most of the stories are broadly SF/F, though some are set in the current world and other genres.  Each has its own take on the main theme, though I was right to value Abercrombie and Rothfuss over the others as those are the two I enjoyed most.  This was a matter of degree, though.  This is a superb collection, really – every story is well written and engaging, which is rare in short story collections, I find.

Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency (Douglas Adams)

Kim and I have been watching the new BBC America series that claims to be “based upon” this novel and while it is an entertaining show as shows go it clearly has nothing to do with the source material beyond the name of the title character.  And since Douglas Adams was one of the funniest writers of the last century (odd to think of him that way) and thus a perfect way to forget the nightmare that has been 2016, I thought I’d go back and reread it.  It’s like stumbling into an old friend on a bus, and you wander why you don’t get together more often.  The book has a surprisingly intricate plot, one where you don’t actually meet the title character until a third of the way into the book.  Most of the story revolves around Richard (a software engineer, and this is where it is most apparent that this book was written a quarter century ago), his girlfriend Susan, his boss (and Susan’s brother) Gordon, Cambridge University don “Reg” Chronotus, and my favorite character, the Electric Monk.  Explaining the plot serves no point, but the book moves along nicely and there are more than a few laugh-out-loud lines sprinkled throughout.  I remember being quite proud the first time I read it that I caught the little tip-off from King George III the first time around.

The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul (Douglas Adams)

Dirk Gently plays more of a starring role in his second book, which begins with one of my favorite opening lines ever: “It can hardly be a coincidence that no language on earth has ever produced the expression, ‘As pretty as an airport.’”  Kate is trying to get to Oslo, but an Act of God lands her in the hospital instead, and destroys a good portion of the airport as well.  But which god?  And why?  Soon Dirk Gently, holistic detective, is on the case.  This is a more straightforward story than the first book, if you can call a plot that involves the Norse gods living in England and a number of very bad-tempered eagles wreaking havoc on passersby straightforward, and unless you look very carefully you probably won’t notice the sheer artistry behind Adams’ apparently effortless prose.  The story wraps up a bit too quickly, but the ride is a lot of fun while it lasts.

Unpublished novel 

This is an ARC of a book written by a colleague of mine who asked me to read and review it regarding some specific editorial questions.  It’s a well-written story, and I hope it gets published.

Silver, Sinners and Saints: A History of Old Silver Reef, Utah (Paul Dean Proctor and Morris A. Shirts)

When I was an undergraduate I had a work-study job with an archeology professor who was doing a research project about a ghost town in southwestern Utah – a silver-mining town that appeared virtually overnight in the mid-1870s and disappeared just as quickly when the silver ran out around 1890.  And this past summer I got to go see the place.  The old Wells Fargo building is now the local museum, and I bought this history of the town while I was there, because museums live and die on their gift shop sales and I like books.  It’s not a book that anyone without a connection to the town would seek out – there’s immense amounts of information about silver mining techniques, land claims, mine design, and the like, and the writing is often as dry and dusty as the landscape – but for me it was interesting to be able to connect the research I did back in college and the place I visited this summer to the stories that, occasionally, emerged here.  One thing that is interesting about the book, though, was the deep divide between the Mormons (the “Saints” of the title), who mostly lived one town over from Silver Reef, and the non-Mormons (“Gentiles”) who populated the town.  The authors – clearly Mormons – make no pretense of objectivity, which could be entertaining at times.

We Are What We Pretend to Be: Kurt Vonegut – the First and Last Works (Kurt Vonnegut)

As Kurt Vonnegut’s heirs continue to mine his papers for marketable manuscripts, some genuinely interesting things do occasionally appear.  This is exactly what it says it is: two short unpublished novellas, one complete and one not, bookending Vonnegut’s career as a writer.  “Basic Training” was written in 1950 while “If God Were Alive Today” was something he was working on when he died in 2007.  They’re both interesting stories, but the juxtoposition of the two accomplishes what was presumably the literary purpose of the pairing, which was to highlight how Vonnegut evolved over his career.  The first story is fairly traditional in its sentence structure and describes a young man’s adventures with his rural foster family and their mentally disturbed farmhand.  There is love and peril and it gets wrapped up pretty neatly by the end.  The second is mature Vonnegut – angrier, choppier, more pessimistic about human nature and American culture, and far more interesting.  It would have been a fascinating novel had he been able to complete it.

Visiting Tom: A Man, a Highway, and the Road to Roughneck Grace (Michael Perry)

Michael Perry has made a passable living writing about his corner of rural northwestern Wisconsin.  He is a good observer and an engaging writer with a wide sentimental streak and a tendency to overthink things that is mostly balanced by a sharp sense of humor.  In this book he mostly writes about his neighbor Tom – a man in his early 80s who has seen a lot, done a lot, and mastered the art of persisting with grace, something Perry would like to be able to do himself.  It’s broad and sentimental and warm and funny, and if the Life Lessons seem a bit blunt (Perry talks a lot about his family, especially his two young daughters) they are no less well meant.  It is a pleasant and good-hearted book to read, and in late 2016 that is enough to recommend it right there.

The Long Earth (Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter)

What if there were not one Earth but millions – an infinity, perhaps – each separated by minor differences of random chance or evolution, differences that had, over time, led to astonishing variations?  What if traveling between those Earths was easy, requiring only simple technology available to anyone, or even none at all?  And what if not everyone could do it?  From these questions comes this collaboration between Pratchett and Baxter, the first of a series.  Joshua Valiente is a natural Stepper, someone who can travel across alternate Earths as easily as walking.  Lobsang is a disembodied cyber-intelligence and possibly a former Tibetan handyman, now in charge of a worlds-cruising dirigible named the Mark Twain.  Together they set off to explore the Long Earth – to travel across millions of alternative Earths to see what’s there.  Along the way they will encounter pioneers and settlers, variant flora and fauna, hominids and humanoids, and mysteries of all sorts, while back on Datum Earth (the original), an Earth-First sort of movement begins to make things miserable, as such movements do.  There’s an oddly libertarian ethos behind this book and a sad lack of Pratchett’s humor, but on the other hand it’s fun, well written, and spends a fair amount of time in Madison WI namechecking places I recognize, so there’s that.

The Long War (Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter)

It’s about a decade after The Long Earth now, and Joshua is a family man.  Lobsang is still whatever he was, and several of the minor characters from the first book – Sally and Lt. Janssen, notably – are back in much expanded roles as the implications of the Long Earth continue to sink in to human society.  Like most middle volumes of series, this book is primarily set-up for whatever comes next, even as it explores new tensions in the created world.  The trolls are vanishing.  New sentient species are being discovered and making their demands.  The Chinese are headed Eastward along the Long Earths with the preternaturally intelligent and rather severe Roberta in tow.  And rebellion stalks the colonies in the farther regions of the Long Earth.  Of course it’s hard to sustain or put down such a rebellion, so in the end the Long War is more talk than action – which suits the authors and the story just fine – but it is interesting to think where this well go next.

The Long Mars (Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter)

A few years on and now there are two more or less independent quests going on.  Captain Maggie Kauffman is leading an American expedition deep into the recesses of the Long Earth, aiming for Earth 250,000,000 – a journey that has more than a few echoes of the original Star Trek show in its “boldly go” mission and “teach tolerance” ethos.  Meanwhile Sally Linsay, her father Willis, and former astronaut Frank Wood are exploring the Long Mars – a series of parallel planets similar in theory to the Long Earth but meeting only tangentially with that Long Earth rather than running alongside of it.  Willis seeks a particular object that he’ll know when he sees, and he’s perfectly happy to sacrifice everyone else to get it.  And running underneath this is the story of the Next – the New Humans whose clear superiority to the old ones is seen as a threat to the old humans by both old and New alike.  Lobsang, Joshua Valiente, and Nelson Azikiwe mostly handle this one, though Sally and Captain Kauffman do get involved.  This book is basically three separate stories, only one of which has anything to do with the title, but it moves along pretty well and is entertaining enough to cover its rather fragmentary nature.

The Long Utopia (Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter)

The story moves a few more years into the future, as new problems emerge. There is a settlement at New Springfield, way out in the Long Earth, that is about to find itself in trouble because of an alien race that has somehow managed to intersect perpendicularly with the Long Earth – a race that is working to make the planet their own, in an odd sort of way.  There are the Next, who have mostly but not entirely vanished into their own realms but who keep informed and have their eye particularly on Stan Berg, one of their own but working among the regular humans.  And Joshua Valiente will find out a great deal of his own personal history.  Sally Linsay and Lobsang play their bits, and the story moves along to a dramatic conclusion.  This is a workmanlike series, entertaining and worth reading, but not one that sticks much in your head when you’re done with each book.

The Long Cosmos (Terry Pratchett and Stephen Baxter)

In this last installment of the Long Earth series the story moves yet further into the future, as the characters age and become history to younger generations who have grown up in a world where the fact of the Long Earth is commonplace and unremarkable.  Most of humanity now exists on alternate versions of Datum Earth, in fact – by necessity.  The story opens with an invitation – JOIN US – from somewhere out in interstellar space, an invitation received by all sentient beings including trolls, humans, and Next.  It segues into Joshua Valiente going on walkabout and ending up being cared for by a band of trolls, the rocky relationship of humans and Next as they construct some way to respond to the invitation, and the quest of Nelson Azikiwe to find his grandson.  Eventually most of the principals head out to answer the invitation, and find wonders therein.  Like the other books in this series it is speculative, inconclusive, enjoyable, and not all that memorable – a pleasant way to spend time and no more, but in a year like 2016 that’s probably enough.

Total books read: 53
Total pages read: 19,815
Pages per day: 54.3

Happy reading!

Books Read in 2016, Part 2

More books!  You can’t go wrong with more books, I say.

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The Girl Who Fell Beneath Fairyland and Led the Revels There (Catherynne M. Valente)

September is back in Fairyland, and as you would expect in this sequel to The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making, all is not well.  Her friends A Through L (the wyverary) and Saturday (the marid) are nowhere to be seen, though their shadows are.  And this is a book about shadows, about things being separate and coming together, and what that means for a young heart.  September will travel through Fairyland, which is being leeched of its magic because the shadows are all being pulled into Fairyland Below.  She will travel to Fairyland Below and then even further down to wake the sleeping prince.  And she will discover that when things need to be done, it will be her who needs to do them.  Valente’s series is both charming and arch, a world full of both heart and mind, bleakness and warmth, and written in an odd combination of stilted 1900-style prose and a wickedly modern verve that somehow works to make this one of the better YA series out there.  In this new golden age of YA fiction, that is no small achievement.

The Girl Who Soared Over Fairyland and Cut the Moon in Two (Catherynne M. Valente)

For all the arguments you will find over what exactly constitutes YA fiction, I’ve always felt the definition was rather simple: YA fiction centers on the coming of age of the protagonist.  And in this third installment of Valente’s Fairyland series, September does just this.  It opens with her once again back in our world – Nebraska, sometime during World War II – and once again wishing she were back in Fairyland.  When she meets someone from across the divide while going out to fix a fence she gets her wish, but as with all such wishes it is dangerous to get what you want.  Fairyland is darker and more menacing than in previous volumes, and the stakes are higher.  She will find her old friends A-through-L and Saturday, and eventually she will go to the moon, meet a yeti, and discover that life, love, and wishes are far more complicated than she thought.  Valente’s engaging writing style remains intact, but as September and Saturday come ever closer to their romance and A-through-L goes through his own crisis and the yeti turns out to be far more than he appeared, it is clear that both September and the series are growing up.  I wish this series had come out when my girls were young enough to read it to them.

The Boy Who Lost Fairyland (Catherynne M. Valente)

In this installment of Valente’s Fairyland series the focus shifts away from September – whose whereabouts are discussed on occasion but who appears only fleetingly – to Hawthorne, a troll who becomes a Changeling.  Brought to Chicago in trade for a human boy, he becomes Thomas Rood and grows to a young adolescence with his parents and a nagging sense that something just beyond his fingertips is not right with the world.  Eventually his friend Tamburlaine will provide him a way back into Fairyland, where they and their companions – Scratch, a living gramophone, and Blunderbuss, a wombat made of yarn and attitude - will meet King Charlie Crunchcrab and get into a contest of wills with some sinister fairies. Valente’s sense of humor and gift for a phrase is well in evidence throughout the book – my favorite line came when a cobbler asking what Hawthorne and Tamburlaine wanted of him inquires as to whether they are interested in “Impertinent mules that think they know what’s best for you?  I’ve got them in ruby or silver” – and she spends much more time than before directly addressing the reader.  But the story is charming and the tone gets more bittersweet as it goes on, as Valente drops more serious themes behind the adventure and wordplay.  The story ends, as it inevitably must, back in Omaha with September’s family, and it hints of things to come in the fifth and final installment.

StrengthsFinder 2.0 (Tom Rath)

I read this for my new job.  It’s one of those self-help pop psychology books that is popular among management people these days and which, as a psych major who has more than a passing knowledge of the dangers of constructing surveys and drawing valid conclusions from them, I tend to regard as harmless entertainment but not really anything I’d want to build my life around.  If you take it as a springboard for discussion it can be useful, though relying on it as a diviner of your innermost secrets likely won’t end well.  There’s a test that you’re supposed to take online – which, given that this book was loaned to me and the 1-time user code was already used, I did not take, though a moment’s internet searching brought up several analogous versions free online (which I read through but did not take either) – and the bulk of the book is given to explaining the 34 different Strengths that you’re supposed explore and Find out which five belong to you.  Later in the year my office bought us all copies and we did all take the test, and in fact it did prove to be an interesting discussion afterward.  So there’s that.

In Defense of a Liberal Education (Fareed Zakaria)

Kim heard this author speak at a conference she was at in Chicago and decided I would enjoy reading his book, and for the most part I did.  Zakaria is passionate about the worth of a liberal education – the education worthy of a free citizen, in other words, and precisely the education that is most under fire from the ignorant corporatism that rules American life these days and seeks to reduce citizens to subjects.  When you have actual governors declaring they won’t fund universities because too many of their students major in things that are not clearly corporate training programs, your nation is doomed.  Zakaria is a relentless optimist, however, and his firm – if historically rather unwarranted – faith in the power of reasoned argument to sway closed minds is evident on every page.  He gives some personal history of his own experience with liberal education, some arguments (often from business leaders) in favor of a liberal education over more “practical” training, and ends with a defense of the youth of today, who are often criticized for the same flaws that their forebears have been criticized for going back to the days of the Ancient Greeks.  Zakaria is definitely preaching to the choir here – I came in already convinced of the value of a liberal education and in truth could probably have written half of this book of the top of my head – but it was no less of a good book because of that.

Bill Moyers’ Journal: The Conversation Continues (Bill Moyers)

Bill Moyers is one of the premiere journalists of our era, someone who understands what it means to look for a story and who can interview just about anyone.  This is basically a collection of interviews, each ranging from five to fifteen pages, of some of the most prominent and interesting people of the last thirty or forty years of American history.  On the one hand it’s fascinating, as Moyers elicits complex and enlightening thoughts from his subjects on nearly every topic of importance in American culture today.  On the other hand, the dismal state of American culture and politics today renders those thoughts more than a little depressing in the aggregate and this is therefore not an easy book to get through despite the grace of the interviews and the intellectual depth of the commentary. 

The Last Witness (KJ Parker)

So KJ Parker has come out as the alter ego of Tom Holt now, ending one of the more intriguing mysteries in SF/F writing.  This hasn’t changed the quality of the writing, even if there is an actual photo of Holt at the end where the author bio is.  Parker’s books are still some of the most intriguing, well-written, and compelling stories being told in the genre today.  This slim novella is no exception.  Set in the same world as most of his books, the unnamed first-person narrator tells us about a very particular skill he has – the ability to enter into your mind and remove memories completely.  It’s a dangerous skill for both the narrator and his targets, one that ties him to any number of unsavory people and actions and leaves him unsure just what memories are his anymore, since all of the ones he removes stay with him.  When he runs into someone with the same skill, he knows he’s got problems.  None of the characters in any of Parker’s works end well – the pleasure is watching the story unfold and marveling at the intricacy of how it all falls apart.

The Devil You Know (KJ Parker)

Another slim novella much like the last one – the cover art was done by the same person, and like The Last Witness it has section breaks rather than chapters – this story gives an intriguing take on the old set-up of someone selling their soul to the devil.  On the one hand you have a demon, a high-ranking figure in the bureaucracy that is Hell and a fairly charming and sympathetic figure in this story, and on the other you have Saloninius, the greatest human philosopher of Parker’s alternate universe, now an old man.  He agrees to sell his soul in exchange for 20 years of health in order to work on a project, the details of which he is reluctant to divulge to his demon patron.  Like most Parker works it is intricately plotted and compellingly written, and the question at its core is who is ensnaring whom?  The fact that the first-person perspective shifts occasionally between the two protagonists without notice and without all that much of a change in tone only reinforces this – how different are these two characters, after all?  And what does that say about us?

Avenue of the Mysteries (John Irving)

Listen: Juan Diego Guerrero has come unstuck in time.  On the one hand this is a focused story of a two-week trip he takes from his home in New York City to the Philippines over the New Year’s holiday in 2010/2011 where he spends time with his former student (Clark) as well as two rather forward women named Miriam and Dorothy.  On the other hand, Juan Diego (always referred to as such) is a novelist whose particular focus is, he says repeatedly, on where things come from.  And where Juan Diego comes from is the poverty-stricken side of Oaxaca, Mexico.  He and his sister Lupe – a genuine mind-reader whose speech can only be understood by Juan Diego – were dump kids, raised in the landfill by El Jefe (Rivera, who may have been Juan Diego’s father), and, occasionally, by Esperanza, their mother who works as both a prostitute and a cleaning lady at the Jesuit orphanage.  When Brother Pepe discovers that Juan Diego has taught himself to read he takes them both in, and from there their story spirals out into a long meditation on Catholicism – particularly the conflict between the Virgin Mary and Mexico’s indigenous virgin figure, Our Lady of Guadalupe.  It’s probably not an accident that as the story ping-pongs back and forth between the present of Juan Diego in southeast Asia and the past in the orphanage and the circus in Oaxaca (and, eventually, because this is a John Irving novel, to Iowa City) it becomes more and more a contrast between Miriam (Mary) and Lupe (Guadalupe).  This is one of the more self-referential of Irving’s novels – Juan Diego’s bibliography is pretty much the same as Irving’s, right down to a sly allusion to The Water-Method Man, one of his earlier books – and one of the more meditative in some ways.  Irving is always at his best when he can contrast a hectic pace of events with an introspective interior monologue and this more or less sums up the book.  It’s a thoughtful story, one that builds rather than surprises, and very much one that is in keeping with his larger body of work.

Q2Q Comics, Vol. 1 (Steven Younkins)

There are a couple of online comics that I follow – Bug Martini, Mary Death, Scandinavia and the World, XKCD, and so on – and Q2Q is one of my favorites.  It follows the exploits and travails of a small group of dedicated theater techs as they struggle against all of the various indignities and realities that backstage work entails.  As a backstage tech of long standing, I thought it was all very funny and familiar, so when Younkins started a Kickstarter for his first hard-copy collection of these strips, I chipped in for it.  And eventually a signed hard-bound copy appeared in the mail.  All of the Kickstarter backers are listed in the last few pages, and it isn’t every day that I get a book with my own name in it.

Ready Player One (Ernest Cline)

By the 2040s the world is pretty much falling apart.  There are energy shortages, the economy has tanked, public order has mostly broken down, and most of the population escapes by spending most of its time in a massive online simulation world called the Oasis.  The dichotomy between a collapsing world and a population hiding in virtual space only rarely comes up in the novel, unfortunately – Cline places an impassioned speech on the subject into the mouth of Ogden Morris, one of the more interesting minor characters – and I wish he had done more with it.  But mostly he’s interested in the Oasis and what goes on within it.  At the beginning of the novel James Halliday, one of the original creators of the Oasis, dies.  He wills his extremely vast fortune to whomever can first solve the riddles and clues hidden in the Oasis to collect three keys, each of which unlocks a gate, ultimately leading to the Easter Egg at the center of the game.  The clues and gates are all keyed to Halliday’s life and interests, which can be summed up as 80s nerd culture – classic computer games, music, SF/F books and movies, and so on.  I was a teenager through most of the 80s and pretty much the target demographic for all of the cultural references in the book, though since I never really got into computer games or paid attention to popular music or movies, most of it went over my head.  It was fun to let the names wash over me, though.  Wade is a Gunter – an Egg Hunter – whose Oasis avatar is named Parzival, and the novel largely follows his adventures trying to solve the online game before either his friends (Aech [pronounced “H”], Art3mis [pronounced “Artemis”], Daito, and Shoto) or his enemies (the faceless and evil drones of the IOI corporation, known as “Sixers” because their avatars are identified only with corporate ID numbers, all of which begin with the numeral 6) do.  Along the way Parzival becomes a hero, Wade becomes a fugitive, and his friends follow along and occasionally lead the way.  Most of the action happens in virtual space, which means nobody really knows who anyone else is or where, and some of the romance in the novel gets rather complicated because of this.  It’s an energetic story, careening from one game point and plot point to another, and despite a few holes (how do the Oasis servers stay running in a world of limited energy supplies?) it comes to a suitably intense finish as any good YA novel does, with the coming of age of the protagonist.

A Game of Thrones (George RR Martin)

“When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.”  That pretty much sums up what has become a cultural phenomenon between the time I bought the book (it looked interesting on the bookstore shelf) and the time I actually got around to reading it, spurred on by Kim’s desire to binge-watch the HBO series with me and her promise that said series would display boobs in abundance.  I am a simple man.  For those of you who have been living under a rock and are unfamiliar with the series (in book or television form), it is the story of the Seven Kingdoms of Westeros, a medieval-style land of knights, castles, war, and both natural and supernatural violence.  Martin has done his historical homework, and (supernatural elements aside) the societies he portrays have clear historical analogues and faithfully represent them.  The Dothraki are loosely based on the Mongols – who, in actual history, came very close to conquering Europe – and Westeros is clearly based on medieval Europe.  Martin does a nice job of portraying the stark outlines of medieval society and politics.  One of the things that you notice in the books (as opposed to the series, which I have yet to see) is how young everyone is.  Medieval Europe was a place where 30 was considered old and most people were dead by 45, and in an age where we consider 65 still relatively young you easily forget that most of his main characters – Robb Stark, Jon Snow, Daenerys Targaryen, Joffrey Lannister, and so on – are less than 15 years old.  The various kingdoms are at war – with each other, with the mysterious Others north of the Wall, with the climate (summers in this world can last years or even decades, as can winters), and, by the end, soon the Dothraki as well.  It’s an incredibly complex tapestry, full of blood, intrigue, betrayal, sex, and not a little romance in both the common and literary senses.  It’s easy to see why this became such a cultural touchstone.

A Clash of Kings (George RR Martin)

The grand saga of Westeros gets more complicated, more bloody, and more far flung.  In this installment the Seven Kingdoms have fallen into chaos and four – or is it five? – kings vie to control them, even as winter begins to fall and the supernatural forces beyond the Wall begin to move down from the north.  Armies move and clash, lords become fugitives or vice verse, and all the while the tone gets darker and colder.  Martin divides his narrative by points of view, with each chapter entitled with the name of the perspective’s owner.  We follow Bran Stark in Winterfell, Catelyn Stark as she careens about the south, Tyrion Lannister trying to hold King’s Landing, Cercei Lannister as she does likewise with or without Tyrion, Sansa Stark trying to survive her dual role as hostage and future queen to Cercei’s son Joffrey, Theon Greyjoy as he flails about trying to reclaim his birthright as a prince of the Iron Islands, Daenerys Targaryen with the Dothraki, Davos the Onion Knight as he just tries to get through the day, Jon Snow on the Wall, Arya Stark on her journeys, and so on.  It’s a complex, brutal saga that pulls you in and keeps you focused despite the fact that there are maybe two or three sympathetic characters in the entire story.  It’s also a saga almost entirely devoid of humor, though this book begins with a comet hanging in the sky that everyone is sure is an omen for their pet cause, which after a while can pass for satire.  Nothing is really resolved at the end – one gets the impression that this is kind of the point – and the story continues.

The Jesus Cow (Michael Perry)

I didn’t mean to interrupt the Game of Thrones series, but a friend of mine lent me this book and clearly expected it back sometime before the heat death of the universe, so what other choice did I have?  I’ve read a few books by Michael Perry before, but this was his first work of fiction that I’ve read.  If you’ve never had the pleasure of reading Perry’s work, you should fix that.  He’s Wisconsin’s version of Garrison Keillor – rather more blue collar and self-consciously rural than cosmopolitan Keillor, and more inclined toward heartwarming than slyly subversive (Lake Wobegon, for all its surface cornball feeling, is a fairly dark place), but with a similar vibe.  And he’s a really nice guy face to face, as I can attest from personal experience.  Population 485 is his best book, really, but this was fun.  The story follows Harley Jackson, a thinly veiled stand-in for Perry (most of the towns and people here are rather thinly veiled and not all that hard to figure out if you have any familiarity at all with Perry’s work or northwestern Wisconsin in general), who on Christmas Eve discovers that one of his calves has a near-perfect image of Jesus Christ on his fur.  “This,” he thinks, “is a problem.”  The novel follows Harley as he navigates this problem and interacts with the rest of the small town of Swivel over the next few months.  He finds a girlfriend.  The town outsider has a secret.  His friend Billy dispenses wisdom.  The volunteer fire department is short of cash.  The town’s bankrupt bully of a land developer makes an ass of himself.  And once the secret of the calf is out, it just gets weirder.  Things come to a head and then Perry wraps it all up with an epilogue that tells you what happened next.  It’s a comforting novel full of small moments – of friends, faith, and finances – and it was a nice break.

Hamilton: The Revolution.  Being the Complete Libretto of the Broadway Musical, with a True Account of Its Creation, and Concise Remarks on Hip-Hop, The Power of Stories, and the New America.  (Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jeremy McCarter)

Another book lent to me during the Game of Thrones marathon, but a quick one.  Unless you’ve been living under a cultural rock since late 2015 you’ve heard about Hamilton – an unlikely retelling of the life of Alexander Hamilton as a hip-hop Broadway musical.  This book – as its gloriously 18th-century-style title spells out rather clearly – is not only the words to the songs (accompanied by a raft of photographs) and a history of the production, but it is also a long meditation on the nature of theater, the demands of history, and how all of that fits into an emerging United States that is in some ways unrecognizable to the Founders but in other ways much of a piece.  As a historian, I appreciated Miranda’s efforts to tell Hamilton’s story as accurately as possible and to highlight those areas where he took liberties for the sake of the drama.  As a lifelong theater technician, I found it fascinating to see the process by which one of the most innovative and astonishing productions in decades came to life, from concept to mixtape to rehearsals to opening.  If there is any takeaway it is the depth of the craftsmanship that went into it – there is nothing in this production, from throwaway lines to minutely choreographed gestures, that is random or not thought out well in advance.  This is the story of professionals at the height of their craft, and even if you have seen the musical (which we hope to do in 2017), this book would be a worthwhile way to spend time.  I use several of the songs in Hamilton in my courses when I teach, as I find them both fun (the songs are incredibly catchy) and educational and the students love them.  This book gives me even more appreciation for the artistry of the show, and the fact that the chapter headings, title, and the physical paper of the book are all deliberately throwbacks to the 18th century – my field of specialty – is just a plus.

A Storm of Swords (George RR Martin)

When the girls were little we used to go to the Science Museum a few towns over.  In one exhibit there was a globe about a yard wide that you could spin, and the green and white colored liquids inside would swirl about, changing and reforming, congealing and flying apart, making new patterns yet somehow always remaining more or less the same.  Such is the Game of Thrones series.  Battles are fought.  Characters die, often in brutal and surprisingly casual ways.  Other characters are manipulated – the lot of women in Westeros is particularly grim – and yet others are submerged by events beyond their control.  They fight on, plot on, and trudge on.  And through it all they work diligently to prove the old axiom that there is no situation so dire that it cannot be made worse by politics.  Also, beware of weddings.  A great many things happen in this book, but by the end it is hard to say what if anything has changed.  Kingdoms have risen and fallen, kings have died, castles have been burned, battles fought and won or lost or sometimes neither quite, marriages and lovers have come together and been sundered, the dead have walked and walkers have died and winter finally seems to be coming.  Martin writes vivid characters, even the worst of which having some empathetic qualities and even the best of which having things that make you want to beat them bloody.  And he writes gloriously complex situations and plots that ring true for anyone who has studied history, a rare feat among authors in this genre.  But the globe spins on, changing and reforming and yet remaining more or less the same.  Maybe that’s the point.

A Feast for Crows (George RR Martin)

The saga of Westeros rolls on, as it does.  It’s actually hard to keep track of it all, as the events pile up one on top of another.  There are surprises and twists, good characters die and bad ones get rewarded and then die, and once in a while there is a hint of humor.  Martin has created a richly textured world and has clearly done an immense amount of studying of medieval history – Westeros and its surrounding lands feel remarkably real, and that is no small achievement.  While the characters are complex and compelling, it is the world they move through that stays with you.

A Dance With Dragons (George RR Martin)

And so the summer 2016 Game of Thrones project comes to an end, with Westeros roiling in betrayal and war while the lands to the east, well, also roil with betrayal and war.  Because that’s pretty much the summation of Martin’s creation.  It’s an incredibly well-written series, with complex and three-dimensional characters and a deeply thought out world for them to move around in, and it holds your interest through the 5000+ pages he’s published just in these main novels.  But it is a long time to sustain a mood, and I’m glad that I’ve come to the end of them.  Summarizing the plot is kind of pointless, because a) there’s just so much of it, and b) as noted earlier, while the details swirl in kaleidoscopic patterns the overall picture never really changes.  We may be closer to the Return of the Queen, which as near as I can tell is the one overriding arc to this story, but it’s hard to tell from this distance.  Now I can watch the show with a clear conscience, however, and I suppose that’s something.

Books Read in 2016, Part 1

I read.  It’s what I do. 


I’m the sort of person who generally has a book with him, and on those rare occasions where I don’t I can usually be found reading whatever magazines, websites, cereal boxes, warning labels, or licensing agreements are near to hand.  And ever since I started this blog, I have been keeping track of the things I have read during the year and posting them here.

It’s my blog.  I can do that.

This year was a year of both big projects and reduced output.  In between the usual oddball assortment of things I managed to read four or five series of books to completion, depending on how you count – including the entire Game of Thrones series, which made for a rather skewed summer but gave me a great deal of perspective on the current American political situation.  But my overall reading was a bit down from where it has been since 2009.  Part of that is the fact that I read a fair number of big, dense books, and those sort of slow you down.  Part of it is that I started a new job and had less time available than I had in prior years.  And part of it is that it has just been a rather long year, for a number of reasons, and that sort of thing puts a damper on how much I can focus on anything.

But I still read.

Enjoy -

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Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things (Jenny Lawson)

If you’ve never read Lawson’s blog (“The Bloggess”), you are missing out.  She’s one of the funniest writers out there, and – by her own admission – probably one of the most psychologically screwed up.  She has phobias, anxiety disorders, and a host of other things that make regular life more of a chore for her than for most people, but she owns them and not the other way around.  And she writes about them – honestly, painfully, and often laugh-out-loud funny.  This book gets closer to the bone than her first one did, as the subtitle indicates, and there are a couple of chapters that are fairly sober.  But most of it is a celebration of – to borrow an old Douglas Adams line – “a mind not merely twisted but actually sprained.”  She’s funny, she’s warm, she’s a great writer, and she should be on your list of authors to read.

Soft Apocalypse (Will McIntosh)

In every post-apocalyptic story there is, of course, the apocalypse.  Sometimes it’s nuclear war, sometimes it’s biological war or simply plague, sometimes it’s something else, but most of the time it’s something fairly discrete and identifiable.  This is not that.  McIntosh’s basic point is that – like what happens to the proverbial frog slowly boiling to death, a metaphor that actually does appear in the book – the apocalypse can happen gradually, without any one single dramatic collapse or break with the more stable and prosperous Before, so that it’s hard to tell when you’ve left the Before, when you’re in the middle of the Now, or when you’ve hit the After.  And that is what makes this the most frightening post-apocalyptic novel I’ve read in a long time.  It’s set in a near-future US where the economy, the environment, and the society as a whole are slowly collapsing, and it’s told as a series of vignettes, with each chapter separated from the previous one by anywhere from three days to three years.  It centers on Jasper, a formerly middle-class suburban guy thrust into poverty and nomadism in a US increasingly defined by violence, terrorism, and societal breakdown.  Jasper has a group of friends that he travels with and who swirl around his life, and he is forever seeking love in an age of chaos.  Perhaps the money quote of the book comes when Jasper finds himself speed-dating amid the ruins and one of the women he meets is an economist who tells him to stop believing that it will get better, that it has to get better, because it doesn’t and it won’t – that this is it for the foreseeable future until it gets worse.  As it does.  It’s a simple yet profoundly disturbing look at an all too believable future.

Lafayette in the Somewhat United States (Sarah Vowell)

I’ve always liked Sarah Vowell’s way with words, going as far back as her appearances on This American Life, and I’ve enjoyed the books she’s written.  They’re clever and a bit arch, and mostly she writes about historical things that interest me.  This one focuses on pretty much exactly what the title says it will – the experiences of the Marquis de Lafayette in the newly emerging United States.  Lafayette was a teenaged nobleman, bored with his lot and itching for a war, who offered his services to the rebels in the American Revolution and ended up as one of Washington’s most trusted aides.  Vowell’s story pingpongs back and forth between Lafayette’s life, a general history of the Revolution, and her own attempts to track down both of those (there’s an extended sequence in southeastern Pennsylvania, where I grew up, that was fun to read and follow along with for me), which means that this book never quite settles down into anything in particular.  It is also full of the kind of mistakes that most people won’t notice but which a professional historian who covers this period as a specialty (i.e. me) finds grating.  It was a fun book, but not one of her best.

Seveneves (Neal Stephenson)

Neal Stephenson always gives good value to readers, both in terms of plot and writing and also just sheer words per dollar spent.  This is a very long, very good book that probably could have been yet longer to tie the story up a bit better.  It’s actually three separate stories, linked by the inevitable physics of what happens when the moon explodes (something that happens literally in the first sentence).  The first part starts with people both on Earth and in the International Space Station (ISS, or “Izzy”) being at first fascinating by the thing that had just happened and then horrified by what they eventually figure out must happen next as a matter of scientific law, which is the destruction of the Earth as a habitable planet.  The second part follows the remnant of humanity in space shortly after what comes to be called the Hard Rain starts, a grim and distressing story of heroism and petty rebellion best summed up as “there is no situation that cannot be made worse by politics.”  The third and final part is one long (300pp) chapter entitled “Five Thousand Years Later,” which tells the story of the re-establishment of human life on Earth in light of the preceding summary.  Stephenson spends a lot of time getting the hard science down and explaining it to the reader, so if orbital mechanics or genetics don’t interest you this may be a difficult book for you to read.  But it’s well done and dense with fascinating characters, as are most of his books, and definitely worth the time.  It isn’t every post-apocalyptic space opera that has a Biblical reference to masturbation thrown in for those who can catch it, either.

After the Fall Before the Fall During the Fall (Nancy Kress)

I didn’t really intend to read another post-apocalyptic book so soon after the last few, but it was there on my computer desktop in the HumbleBundle folder, and so it went.  It’s a short but complicated book, one with three storylines that converge only slowly.  The first centers on Pete, who lives in the near future in the Shell with a small number of Survivors, the Six, and the Grabbed.  The world outside the Shell is a desolate empty place, and only the alien technology of the Tesslies allows them to go back in time to Before to Grab things they might use – such as babies.  In the second, roughly contemporary with now, centers on Julia, who has been tracking down the mystery of all the Grabbing and who is pregnant with a child of her own.  The third, also contemporary with now, is mostly about the bacteria in the soil mutating.  It all makes sense eventually.  Kress keeps most of the balls up in the air for most of the plot, though the resolution is a bit predictable and the theory behind it somewhat forced. 

The Compleat Discworld Atlas of General and Descriptive Geography which Together with New Maps and Gazetteer Forms a Compleat Guide to Our World and All It Encompasses (Terry Pratchett, et al) 

Terry Pratchett’s Discworld was a triumph of the imagination, an entire world filled with nations, customs, history, and more concentrated humanity than most authors will ever put down on paper.  This is another exploration of it, in the style of a 19th-century descriptive atlas.  The Disc is broken down by region and then each region broken down by nations, and then each nation is given a short description of its major points of interest, economic strengths, cultural and religious activities, and so on.  There is also an immense and detailed folding map tucked into the back of the book.  This is apparently one of the last things Pratchett worked on before he died, and it is a colorful tribute to the world he created.

Damned (Chuck Palahniuk)

“Are you there, Satan?  It’s me, Madison.”  Madison Spencer is 13, overweight, spoiled, sarcastic, and dead.  She’s also damned to Hell, which is apparently the fate of almost all of humanity.  It’s not so bad, though.  Sure, there are demons who will eat you, lakes of steaming fetid bodily fluids, fields of razor blades, and an eternity working in either telemarketing or internet porn to look forward to, but Hell is a state of mind and Madison has reached the point where she is just going to take over.  Hell, she says, is just the end result of too much deferred maintenance.  Along the way we find out much about Madison’s life and death, as well as her parents (spoiled rich celebrities) and classmates (similar, really).  It’s a strange and unsettling book, as it is clearly intended to be, but a funny and thought-provoking one, and it does set up the sequel (Doomed) quite well.  Having read that one in 2015, I suppose there is nothing left to do but wait for more volumes in Madison’s story.

The Appreciative Advising Revolution (Jennifer L. Bloom, Bryant L. Hutson, and Ye He)

The things you do for professional development.  As part of my realization that the adjunct professor life was not, perhaps, sustainable in a Wisconsin moving inexorably toward the elimination of education completely, I applied for and was hired to a position as an academic advisor, which may or may not have been much of a jump to safety but at least it is a start.  Advising is not as big a leap for this faculty member as it seems – I’ve taught First Year Seminar (i.e. "How to College") a couple of times, and advising is part of any faculty member’s responsibilities.  But it is a rather different occupation with a steep learning curve – a job that you cannot just walk into having been a faculty member and expect to be any good at right away – and this would be my first time doing it as a stand-alone job, and so my new boss gave me this book to read as background.  On the one hand, it is poorly written, filled with immense quantities of jargon, and takes itself far more seriously than anything ought to do.  On the other hand, once you strip away the breathless rhetoric most of it is actually useful advice that I will probably end up employing in my new career.  So there you go.

Opportunities for Student Development in Two-Year Colleges (Don G. Creamer and Charles R. Dassance, eds.)

I probably should have read this one before the previous one, as it does a nice job of filling in the backstory of why “the appreciative advising revolution” was such a change from what came before it.  This is an exceedingly dry collection of monographs on the challenges and opportunities facing student service administrators in the mid-1980s.  The technology is old (“With improved technology it has become even easier to register [for courses] by telephone and through the mail”) and the historical context even older, but it provides much useful background on the issue as well as a bracing sense of continuity reminding us that even then higher education was under assault by the prophets of false economy and careerism.

Family Britain: 1951-1957 (David Kynaston)

This is the second volume of Kynaston’s deeply immersive history of post-WWII Britain – his “New Jerusalem” series – and it is just as absorbing as the first one.  He covers everything from politics and economics to radio, television, vacations, and daily life for people in this nation only slowly recovering from the maelstrom of the biggest war in human history.  There are struggles over housing and unions, the introduction of television, the gradual removal of rationing.  There is a new queen and the first inklings of a new culture that will flower in the 1960s.  This series is an astonishing achievement, written with grace and occasional dry humor, and it will likely be the standard work for British history between 1946 and 1979 for a generation to come.  I look forward to the next volume.

The Road to Little Dribbling (Bill Bryson)

Bill Bryson is one of my favorite travel writers, because he is cranky and sarcastic and just sentimental and cheerful enough to keep it all in balance.  Born in Iowa, he has lived in Britain for decades now and this is his second book about traveling in his adopted homeland.  He’s older now and many of the places he visited in the first such travel book (I’m a Stranger Here Myself) have changed almost as much as he has, generally for the worse, in Bryson’s opinion.  But he writes engagingly about the small infuriating things about Britain and even more engagingly about the many things that the British do well and perhaps better than anyone on the planet.  He travels from Bognor Regis along the southern coast all the way up to Cape Wrath in northern Scotland, stopping along the way at places that I’ve actually been to myself so I can nod along to his descriptions (he liked Avebury too, it turned out).  If you’re looking for an entertaining travel companion, Bill Bryson is a good place to start.

Very British Problems: Making Life Awkward For Ourselves, One Rainy Day At a Time (Rob Temple)

As I delve ever deeper into what appears to be a campaign to turn myself into a Briton, with my tea and my Premier League games and my pile of books exploring this or that aspect of British history and culture, sometimes it is nice to be reminded of just how American I actually am.  This is actually a collection of tweets curated by Rob Temple (many of them his, I suspect), highlighting the awkward moments in British life.  Most of them center on what appears to be the continuing inability of most Britons to express any emotion more vivid than mild annoyance or make any real protest against the indignities of everyday life.  As an American, most of these struck me as nonsense.  But then American culture is loud, aggressive, and ruthlessly centered on extracting everything you can out of any given situation – all foreign qualities to Temple’s Britain.  So it was a funny book for someone who understands a bit of British culture – Temple does not translate any of this into American, so unless you’re coming in with a bit of familiarity you will likely spend much of the book vaguely confused – but my guess is that even if they could translate it out of the British much of this would be lost on most Americans.  It’s a wide cultural gap to try to bridge in 140 characters or less.

Yes We Have No: Adventures in the Other England (Nik Cohn)

If you’ve ever fallen under the impression that modern England is still mostly tea, vicars, and fair play, this book will correct that.  This is a book that really should have been subtitled, “Down and Out in Late 20th-Century Britain” because mostly it is a travelogue of people Cohn and his companion – a sharp-kneed, sharp-witted “Derry Taig” named Mary – run into on their journeys through the rougher parts of English life in the late 1990s.  Cohn is drawn to the outcasts, the oddballs, the hopeless yet still soldiering on, and he is a sharp observer of scene and context.  He meets modern nomads, Odinists, unemployed men and clubbing women.  He describes town fallen on hard times and hustlers aiming for good times.  He doesn’t do much beyond describe these things and let them have their own say, but that is enough to make an interesting story of a journey through an England that tourists don’t often see.

If This Isn’t Nice, What Is?: Advice to the Young (Kurt Vonnegut)

Kurt Vonnegut passed away in 2007 but his legacy lives on in the incessant desire of his literary estate to milk every last dime from every possible manuscript he ever wrote.  On the one hand, I have been a die-hard Vonnegut fan since the mid-1980s and am therefore grateful for the opportunity to read what he had to say.  On the other hand, I’m not sorry I got this one second hand.  This is a slim collection of graduation speeches that he gave over the years – most of them in the 1970s or 1990s – and they have a couple of recurring themes.  First, that graduation is essentially a puberty ceremony, announcing to the world that those going through it are now unequivocally adults.  We need those, he says, since otherwise modern western society has done away with them.  And second, that one should take the time to appreciate good things when they appear, even if they are minor things.  Thus the title, a phrase Vonnegut took from his uncle’s remarks whenever a particularly pleasant situation occurred.  It’s the standard Vonnegut – quotable, short, pessimistically hopeful, and straddling the fine line between anger and bemusement – and that’s enough for me.

To Everything a Season: Shibe Park and Urban Philadelphia, 1909-1976 (Bruce Kuklick)

One of the old family photos I have is of my grandfather and his sandlot baseball team, somewhere around 1930, on a field in Philadelphia.  I’ve been trying to find out more about such teams, but not much is out there.  This is as close as I’ve gotten so far – a book about Shibe Park, where the Philadelphia A’s and Phillies played for much of the 20th century.  The park was built in 1909 for the A’s and saw them win several World Series.  The Phillies came as tenants in the 1930s, stayed when the A’s left in 1954, and finally abandoned the place after the 1970 season, all without winning much of anything.  This is about more than the baseball teams, however – it’s about neighborhoods and public transit, about race relations and economics, about churches, politicians, and businessmen.  It’s about how one structure can define a way of life in many ways.  For those who like eccentric characters, there’s Connie Mack – the owner and manager of the A’s for nearly half a century.  And for those who want context, it’s there.  Kuklick is an entertaining writer – as enjoyable on the page as he was in the classroom when I took his Twentieth-Century US History course as an undergraduate at Penn.  It didn’t help me with my grandfather’s picture, but it was definitely further evidence that of all the professional sports played in North America it is baseball that produces the best books.

The Time Traveler’s Guide to Elizabethan England (Ian Mortimer)

Ian Mortimer writes social history the way it ought to be written, and in this sequel to his similarly-titled book about medieval England he systematically goes through most of things you’d want to know if you ever found yourself stranded in the land of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Drake, and Elizabeth I.  There are chapters on what you’d eat and how you’d eat it, what your hygiene and daily routine would be, what the landscape would look like, where you’d work, how you’d dress, what religious views you would (or at least should) have, how the law works, and so on.  All of these are presented in Mortimer’s immersive and lively writing style.  It’s a grand tour of a fascinating place and time.

Fair Dealing and Clean Playing: The Hilldale Club and the Development of Black Professional Baseball, 1910-1932 (Neil Lanctot)

As part of my Philadelphia baseball history project I found this book.  While it doesn’t have much to say about the sandlot teams my grandfather played for, it had some interesting context.  Hilldale was a black team – “race baseball” in the terminology of the day – that played in Darby, a close-in suburb of Philadelphia.  They were instrumental in the development and course of professional black baseball in the early 20th century, and this book does a pretty good job of balancing the history of the club with the broader history of what eventually came to be called the Negro Leagues.  It’s a story of outsized personalities, economic disparities, teams that came and went, barnstorming, and players who jumped from team to team with abandon.  Roughly half of the teams were nicknamed the Giants, for some reason, so occasionally it does get hard to follow, and Lanctot clearly revels in his subject.  For my purposes, the only useful thing I got out of the book was that black teams like Hilldale often played semi-pro or amateur white teams (and regularly played white major league teams as well, or at least teams made up of white major leaguers), but it was an interesting book nonetheless.

Random Meds

I have reached the age where doctors prescribe me things based solely on my demographics.

I had my annual physical last month – it keeps sliding later and later into the year because of insurance restrictions, and eventually it will cycle all the way around and they will have saved the cost of one whole visit – and it went pretty well.  Nothing of any problematic nature, really.  I’m in about as good a condition as I was this time last year, though I need to schedule some Unpleasantness at some point next year.

Which is, in itself, a demographic decision rather than a personal one.


“Oh, you’re a fifty year old man?  Well, have we got a treat in store for you!”

So there I was, being poked, prodded, fondled, and generally examined in that full-contact way that doctors have, when my physician paused and said, “Wait, you’re how old again?”  And when I answered he said, “Oh, well in that case you should be taking a baby aspirin every day.”

What, does my odometer roll over when I hit 50?  Have I returned to all zeroes, just like the ’64 Malibu my parents owned when I was a kid?  I know what happened to that car not long after that - this is not a reassuring thing.

Well, apparently yes it does mean that.  This advice was not anything to do with me, personally, so much as it was something he felt a man of my age should do.

So I went out and bought some.

The stuff has not changed since 1971.  It still has that same chalky texture.  It still has that same pastel color.  And it still has that odd vaguely orange flavor that I have never found outside of chewable aspirin tablets and Irn Bru.

Memories!

So now I add that to my daily inventory, and I hope that it can make up for the various unhealthy habits that I have, such as sitting too much, using my brain for more than just keeping my ears from colliding, and generally being too aware of my surroundings for the good of my blood pressure.

When I hit 80, I will ask for a prescription for fine whiskey and drink it wherever I want, because medicine.

Until then: baby aspirin.

Faces of Lauren, 2016

Every year I take a look through the photos I’ve taken in order to document what happens when you point a camera at Lauren.

She’s a lot of fun, that one.

I’ve been doing this since 2010.  When she was younger it was my project, but now it’s as much hers as mine.  She gets final say over what appears here.  Fortunately she has a good sense of humor about it all and thinks the whole thing is as funny as I think it is.

I didn't take as many photos this year as I normally do.  It's been that kind of year.  But there were still a few good ones to share.

Enjoy!

 

A Night at the Ballroom

We’re the cool parents.

Well, no.  I wasn’t cool when I was young and cared.  Nor have the intervening years made me any cooler, to be honest, and I stopped caring long before I graduated from high school anyway.  Kim insists that she was cool once, but I’m sure I have leached that right out of her simply by my presence in her life.

So we’re not cool, not really.  But we can do cool things, and that’s about as good, I think.

Last night we took the girls to see Panic! At the Disco in Milwaukee.

Naturally yesterday was the day that winter well and truly arrived here in Wisconsin.  The high temperature was in the single digits, Fahrenheit, and Wisconsin winters are pretty clear about which digit that is most of the time – sometimes with both hands.  Plus it was windy enough that the schools here in Our Little Town opened late that morning to give the wind-chill a chance to get within hailing distance of 0F.  So: cold.

But we were undaunted!  We are hardy souls!  Besides, we’d paid for these tickets and by all that was sweet and holy we were going to use them.

The Rave is one of those venues that was clearly built for better times early in the last century.  It’s a monstrous pile of a building not far from the interstate in an area where the streets are narrow, jumbled, and impassable if there are more than half a dozen cars moving at once.  Naturally there were about 3500 people there last night, all of whom drove at least one car and from the looks of it possibly several at once, perhaps by remote control, and my guess is that this was not all that uncommon of an occurrence at Rave events.  Fortunately the Milwaukee PD understands this and was there to direct traffic, although if I might be so bold as to make a recommendation I would suggest that they wear white gloves next time so you can actually see the hand motions before there is any need to go all single-digit on people.

Kim dropped me and the girls off near the entrance and went in search of parking, so the three of us found a door and walked in.   She joined us later, and if you’re not impressed by the sheer improbability of that achievement in a place as dark and crowded as this one was, you’re not thinking clearly.

The lower levels are an odd cross between ‘70s Italian restaurant (all dark brick and neon) and 80s mosh pit, with signs discouraging crowd surfing and telling you to leave cameras, video-recorders, and weapons elsewhere.  They don’t say anything about phones, though, and since most people under 30 have no idea that there are cameras and video recorders that don’t also text or surf the web I’m not sure how effective that policy is.  They certainly didn’t try to enforce it.  There weren’t any weapons that I saw, though, so at least that one was good.

You climb up a few flights of stairs, go through a line or two, get patted down and wanded by security (which I did twice, since I went back downstairs to check in our coats), and then you walk up the final set of stairs to the ballroom.

The ballroom is exactly what it says it is – a cavernous space roughly the shape and twice the size of the Goodyear blimp, lined with pillars and box seating on the second level, that no doubt was jammed with dancers during the Coolidge Administration.  It looked like the sort of place where a decaying aristocracy would waltz away the night in order to ignore the oncoming war.  There were no seats on the main level.

As soon as we got there the girls disappeared into the crowd on the floor of the ballroom.  They spent the concert out there in the center of things, doing whatever it is teenaged girls do at these concerts.  As a parent, you learn not to enquire too closely about things sometimes.

It was an all-ages show so the level of nonsense was a bit muted from what it might otherwise have been, however, though they did serve alcohol to those who were of age.  I decided to pass on that, though Kim did give me some of her cider and it was quite nice.  If I can forgive that particular company the smugness of its advertisements I may in fact buy some myself in the near future.

Kim and I found a spot way over on stage right.  This was a nice place to land for several reasons.  For one thing, it was on the far side of the room from the main entry point, so relatively few people actually made it that far into the room.  Most people got bogged down in the middle, in front of the stage.  This meant that we could stand right up close to the stage, without being pressed in by bodies.  We were about fifteen paces from the singers most of the time.  For another thing, the stage thrust out a bit from the proscenium arch, and we ended up actually behind the singers most of the time.  We couldn’t see them if they went upstage of the proscenium, but most of the time they were out there on the lip of the stage, working the crowd, and we had a pretty much uninterrupted sight line the whole night except when the guitar player would wander by.

This also meant that we were behind the speakers.  They had a LOT of speakers (“Meet my friend, Marshall Stack!”) and they used them hard.  I was wearing a fairly heavy sweatshirt and we were a good fifteen feet behind the speakers, and I could feel that sweatshirt vibrate just from the noise levels.  The hell of it was that we could see the levels on the sound system from where we were – they never got anywhere close to red.  They could have easily doubled the decibel level of that concert, though the building would likely have fallen down if they had.

There were two opening acts.

The first was a jaunty young woman called Charli XCX, who had a minor hit a few years ago about driving her car into a bridge abutment.  I have to say she was a lot of fun.  It was just her and a DJ providing instrumentals as far as I could see from my vantage point, but she bounced and whirled and generally got things up and lively.

At the end she did another of her songs that most people in the crowd seemed to know – Kim and I were rather toward the older end of this audience’s age range, and they were much more familiar with her stuff than I was – and everyone who had such a thing on their phones cranked up the flash app and swayed back and forth.

The next act, however, was a drag.  The guy was some kind of DJ, apparently from France of all places, and he spent about an hour playing other people’s music in increasingly distorted and random contexts.  I suppose if this were a party where you could dance if you wanted or just wander over and get some food it might have been worthwhile, but in a concert setting he was just a parasite on other people’s talent and I was glad when he finally wound down and went away.

And then the main act came on.  You could tell because all of the sudden the audience was shouting louder than usual.

Panic! At the Disco used to be a band, but now it’s just one guy – Brendon Urie, the lead singer – and whatever musicians he tours with.  He’s a thin man with an unruly mop of hair, and forty years ago he would have been David Byrne except with a much better voice than Byrne ever had.  His music ranges from fairly heavy duty rock/emo sorts of things to songs that are essentially Sinatra updated for the new millennium.

He certainly had a grand time up there – one of the things about being where we were was that we could see the expressions on his face pretty clearly – and I think he got a kick out of the fact that the audience would sing along with him.  He also managed a complete backflip from a platform about two feet above the stage, which I’m sure gives his manager nightmares every time he tries it.

 

The radio station that sponsored the concert had some nice photos up on their website too, and since I was there I figure I can post some of them.  All credit goes to 103.7 KISS FM out of Milwaukee, so the copyright lawyers can rest easy that I am not trying to steal their stuff.

This was Charli XCX.

 

I’m not too worried about getting pictures of the second act, to be honest.  I couldn’t see him from where I was standing and I never saw any reason to fix that while I was there. 

But there is a part of me that wishes I had seen Panic! At the Disco from up front, even though I liked where I was and would probably have been rendered clinically deaf in half a chorus if I had.  Noise is for the young, at least at those levels. 

If you look behind the small box in back of the guitar player in the next picture, that’s pretty much were I was most of the night.  The green dot would be just above my head.

It took forever to get out of the place – the coat check room alone was an exercise in barely controlled chaos far more unruly than the concert itself – but eventually we found our way to the car.  And after some sociologically fascinating experiences driving away from the venue, we hit the interstate and were homeward bound.  We got home around 1am, which is pretty late for a school night.  But sometimes you do things because they are worth doing, and the next day can take care of itself.

We took our daughters to a concert, and it was a grand and lovely time.