(I left out graphic novels, because how much patience are you the reader supposed to have? GN fans can find my in-depth analysis of Clowes’s Monica here. Also no picture books, which I usu. read under duress.)
I’m ranking based on Goodreads ratings, and approximately within those ratings. Starting with the best! (Um…follow me on Goodreads for live updates?)
Five stars!
•Michael Kohlhaas by Heinrich von Kleist (1810): Best of the year! This classic German novella is the story of a poor schmuck who has two horses swiped by an upper-class twit (in the sixteenth-century H.R.E.). All the schmuck wants are his horses back, which goal proves challenging, and his efforts (first within, and then outside the law) spiral into ever so much murder and arson. It really goes poorly, guys! Calling this an existential text with an existential hero is clearly anachronistic, but if you read the book, you’ll understand what I mean. Kafka was a big fan, and that’s no surprise.
•A Good Man is Hard to Find and Other Stories by Flannery O’Conner (1955): Almost the best of the year! I got to the end of the first story, and my initial thought was, “Well, I did not think that was going to happen.” As the stories went on, I began more and more to think it was going to happen, and it usually did. Everything is so terrible that it’s almost funny. Possibly the best short story collection by an American?
•The Legend of Seleucus: Kingship, Narrative and Mythmaking in the Ancient World by Daniel Ogden (2017): A thorough collection of (and analysis of) ancient texts dealing with Seleucus, a somewhat peripheral character in the career of Alexander the Great who really comes into his own after Alexander’s death, building a (somewhat smaller) empire and gathering a host of legends around his own crazy life. Ogden is himself clearly a Seleucus fan, which always makes for a fun read; and by the end of the book I was, too.
•The Whiz Mob and the Grenadine Kid by Colin Meloy (2017): A middle-grade romp about swinging-sixties pickpockets in France, all informed by the linguistic work of David Maurer, this book is so smart and fun and escalatingly ridiculous! You may see the plot twists coming, but you see them coming in such a way that you’d be more disappointed if they didn’t happen—they seem perfect in their inevitability. Includes glossary (!).
•Diogenes the Cynic: Sayings and Anecdotes, with Other Popular Moralists edited by Robin Hard (2012): Diogenes the homeless scold is obviously my favorite philosopher, and this collection contains everything that has survived about him from the ancient world (most of it probably made up, alas) in one convenient location. The seduction of a life of absolute freedom: “Aristotle dines when Philip pleases, and Diogenes when Diogenes pleases.” Other ancient jerks, such as Aristippos, are also included. (When a sailor mocks Aristippos for being afraid during a storm at sea, A. replies, “You have only your wretched life to worry about, while for me it is a life if true happiness that is in peril.”) Outtasight stuff!
•Three Icelandic Outlaw Sagas: The Saga of Gisli / The Saga of Grettir / The Saga of Hord (C13–14): I’d read two of these outlaw sagas some years before and frankly I’d underestimated how good they were. Maybe because I was comparing them with Njal’s or Egil’s Saga, against which almost nothing can compare? Anyway, on rereading, these sagas have all the adventure, swordfights, undead monsters, arson, grim resignation in the face of despair, and laconic prose anyone could want.
•The Trouble with Being Born by E.M. Cioran (1973): Just the absolutely most cynical and pessimistic statements you can imagine. As grim and hilarious as a Flannery O’Conner story. “It’s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late.”
•The Faith and Practice of Al-Ghazali by Al-Ghazali (C12): This book collects two books by Al-Ghazali, and I’ll admit that the second one was only of academic interest; but the first is a gold mine, a spiritual autobiography that details Al-Ghazali’s attempts to find the capital-T truth through philosophy, mysticism, and various forms of more orthodox religion. You may not agree with his conclusions (it’s not like I converted to Islam after reading this book) but watching someone struggle towards understanding is the book I wanted to read, and I got it.
•The Road To Wigan Pier by George Orwell (1936): Orwell’s unforgettable portrait of the lives of poor and frequently unemployed miners in the north of England. Few descriptions of grinding poverty have been so disturbing; few visions of the developed world not so long ago are so alien. No one has teeth! I would like to suggest that this book be published as an Ace-double-style flip book two-in-one with Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom. As Shea & Wilson remind us, good and evil are two ends of the same road, but the road was built by the Illuminati. That might not be relevant, but I think Orwell’s and Hayek’s works can inform each other in interesting ways.
•The Conquering Sword of Conan by Robert E. Howard (coll. 2005): “Red Nails” is one of the all-time greatest fantasy stories, and has been my favorite Conan since I read the de Camp & Carter collections as a teenager. It’s also Howard’s capstone, the last Conan story he ever wrote, never to be repeated or rivaled: only one of many tragedies around his suicide. This is the third volume (of three o.c.) collecting Howard’s original Conan corpus in its original form, without de Campy or Carterine tinkering, and the best of the lot (i.e., it’s the one with “Red Nails”). Interesting to read them in order, to see that Conan gets more sexually aggressive (less gentlemanly, a little rapey) as the series goes on. Plenty of critical and textual apparatus in this vol., for those who indulge, but others can ignore the appendices and enjoy the unmatchable pulp writing.
•Religio Medici by Thomas Browne (1643): Not really a persuasive apologist for religion in general or the C of E in particular, Browne remains indispensable as one of English’s finest prose stylists. “Surely there are in every man’s life certain rubs, doublings, and wrenches, which pass a while under the effects of chance; but at the last, well examined, prove the mere hand of God”—a point debatable, but made wonderful by “rubs, doublings, and wrenches.”
•The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire Volume II by Edward Gibbon (1781–1788): Speaking of great prose stylists, here’s Edward Gibbon with by far the longest book I read all year. Gibbon’s sentences are beautiful, although some of them over-rely on vague paraphrases (the prince, the general) and then I get confused. Perhaps not as fresh as the first volume, but so chokingly full of fascinating detail. I used one story from the book in this post.
•Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir by Werner Herzog (2022): Usually I think the foreword should be cut from books, but in this one—Herzog segues from the time Japanese commando Hiro Onoda described to him how in certain lights bullets leave a visible trail…to a hummingbird banging into his window while he was typing this book out. He decided (he says) that the moment the hummingbird hit he would end his memoir. And sure enough, if you flip to the end of the book, it ends in the middle of a sentence. That’s perfect. The whole memoir is just pure Herzog.
•Lessons by Ian McEwan (2022): Many years ago I read (in the intro to a Thackeray novel) the horrible priggish sentence: “What is it that gives one, as he lays down Vanity Fair, such a sense of life lived?” and the badness of that sentence has haunted me ever since, along with the tooth-grinding realization that it is, in fact, an excellent description of Vanity Fair and also some other novels—including this one. McEwan has been hit or miss for me lately, and I thought I was enjoying him more when he was ridiculous and not so “respectable”: but here he is with something that is practically a nineteenth-century realistic novel and I loved it.
•Everything’s Fine by Cecila Rabess (2023): A pleasant romantic comedy in a Curtis Sittenfeld vein, given extra gravitas by its exploration of the impact of politics on personal relationships. Unjustly pilloried by illiterate morons online, this book is far less outrageous or scandalous than those pearl-clutchers would have you believe. I found every character insufferable, like a Flannery O’Conner cast.
•King of the Wood: The Sacrificial Victor in Virgil's Aeneid by Julia T. Dyson (2001): The pickle that academic writers are in is that if the thesis of their book is not audacious then the book is probably redundant and dull; but if it is audacious it’s probably crazy! Dyson walks that fine line, admitting that half her book (the second half) may be off the rails—but I will always take crazy but interesting over sober but grinding. The Aeneid reimagined as a veiled allegory for Roman sacrificial practice is great stuff! Bonus points for basing everything around the original so-crazy-it’s-great book, The Golden Bough.
•The Passionate State of Mind by Eric Hoffer (1955): If you liked Hoffer’s The True Believer (which you should certainly read), you’ll…uh…also like The Passionate State of Mind, which is similar in theme and method, although even more aphoristic (I mean the individual pieces are shorter). A terrible title, but a book that certainly resonates today. “Were one to invent a pill which if taken before going to bed would transform men overnight into patterns of perfection, the reformer would be the unhappiest man on earth. The reformer wants to play a role; he wants to make history.”
•Big Swiss by Jen Beagin (2023): Part character study of a messed-up relationship (that’s two characters to study, o.c.), part merciless satire on a very particular exurban hipness. I’m amazed a book this strange and this good was able to get published in the current climate, let alone garner the attention it has. Hilarious and harrowing is what I’d blurb, were I a blurber.
•Nasreddin Hodja by Alpay Kabacalı (1992): Utterly delightful collection of short folktales/jokes about the Muslim culture hero Nasreddin, this one from Turkey. It’s pitched at kids, it’s fully illustrated, it's not proofread in the least, and it’s really a great book.
•Ballads for Broadbrows by A.P. Herbert (1931): One of the twentieth-century’s three masters of light verse (alongside Ogden Nash and Stoddard King), Herbert labored for decades cranking out quality stuff for Punch. Perhaps not my favorite of his collections (honestly, they blend together), but a great one. Highlights include a mock-temperance piece about the ways “talkie” motion pictures can ruin a home, the busybody ballad “Let’s Stop Somebody from Doing Something,” and a prose diatribe ridiculing “serious” poets who try stooping to comedy.
•Siren Song by A.P. Herbert (1940): More Herbert, but this time the opening salvos of WWII give Herbert’s verse a weight it has not had since the volumes he wrote from the trenches of WWI. Often propaganda, but, you know, anti-Nazi propaganda so whatever.
•Shot All to Hell: Jesse James, the Northfield Raid, and the Wild West's Greatest Escape by Mark Lee Gardner (2013): Unlike certain other wild west outlaws (Billy the Kid, Butch Cassidy, Black Bart), Jesse James is someone I have no soft spot in my heart for. But fortunately Gardner’s heart is bigger than mine, and he demands at least grudging respect for the competence and doggedness of the James /Younger gang. A fascinating story, well researched and well told.
•The Adventures of John Jewitt, Only Survivor of the Crew of the Ship Boston, During a Captivity of Nearly Three Years, Among the Indians of Nootka Sound in Vancouver Island by John Jewitt (1815): The title says it all (except that there was, in fact, one more survivor). Kept alive because of his useful skills, kept one step ahead of his captors because of his literacy. Perhaps the last great Indian captivity narrative?
•What If? 2: Additional Serious Scientific Answers to Absurd Hypothetical Questions by Randall Monroe (2023): Exactly what you want it to be, sc. the same as the first What If?
•The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry by Cleanth Brooks (1947): I’m mildly addicted to criticism, although I usually dislike what I read. But Brooks provides what so few provide, which is to say criticism that is useful; I felt that I understood these poems better after reading Brooks than I had before. (This is not an endorsement of New Criticism in general). Bonus: The texts under discussion are all in the back of the book for easy reference.
•Homegrown: Timothy McVeigh and the Rise of Right-Wing Extremism by Jeffrey Toobin (2023): Toobin has an agenda here—to draw a line directly from McVeigh to Trump, and I’m not sure he pulls the argument off. But his careful analysis at the very least renders one of America’s evil monsters if not sympathetic then at least complicated. “Well, if you don’t consider what happened in Oklahoma, Tim is a good person,” said one friend at McVeigh’s trial. Eric Hoffer would have had a lot to say about McVeigh’s passionate state of mind.
•Mr. Burns, a Post-Electric Play by Anne Washburn (2013): In the post-apocalyptic future, TV-starved masses amuse each other by recounting their favorite Simpsons episodes. Over time, the recounting becomes spectacle, then ritual. It’s like watching the birth of a cargo cult. Satire, but persuasive satire, as satire should be.
•The Waste Land and Other Poems by T.S. Eliot (coll. 1958): I picked this up for a buck because I thought it would be convenient to own a slim mass-market collection to carry when needed in my pocket. Of course, carried in the pocket, it then got read quickly. You already know this is good. (But I wish it had “The Hollow Men” too, just for canonicity.)
•Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves! by P.G. Wodehouse (1963): Pretty similar, of course, to the previous twelve Jeeves & Wooster books (not all of which I read; I’m making assumptions), but I’ll admit I found this one funnier than most. Who else could keep a series bubbling along for over 45 years?
•Mots d'heures: gousses, rames: The d'Antin manuscript by Luis D'Antin Van Rooten (1967): I don’t speak a lick of French, and I found this book hilarious. My assumption is that it’s eight or nine times funnier if you do speak French. But it’s also funnier, I think, if you don’t know, at first, “the trick.” So if you speak French, especially, go seek this book out blind, read it, and tell me if it’s as funny for you as I assume it will be.
•Octopus, Seahorse, Jellyfish by David Liittschwager (2022): Absolutely bonkers photographs of three very different groups of sea life. Despite my loyalty to class Cephalopoda, the jellies are the true heroes here, looking like rough sketches of life, and not like actual things—except sometimes, when they are the most hauntingly beautiful things in all of creation.
•The Zaks and Other Lost Stories by Dr. Seuss et al. (2023): Part collection of Seussian rarities, part act of revenge. Longer review here.
•Tic Tac Tome by Willy Yonkers (2014): The perfect “dumb little book”; essentially a choose-your-own-adventure with tic-tac-toe. You cannot win, as War Games reminds us. My kids keep accusing the book of cheating (it wasn’t).
No. Wait.
In fact, the best books I read this year were old favorites; but it didn’t seem fair to put them at the top, because no book can compete with an old favorite. The old favorite will always win! Similarly, these books will always win, and sorry, other books.
•Watership Down by Richard Adams (1972): My all-time favorite standalone novel. I wrote a perhaps insufferable review of this for a book review contest, so read all about it there.
•Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges (1944): The greatest short story collection of all time, by the short story’s greatest (but most idiosyncratic) master. Borges’s recurrent symbols (labyrinth, knife, mirror, tiger) are so oppressive that it’s easy to miss his recurrent theme: that an ordered system (the Babylon Lottery, the Library of Babel, Orbis Tertius, Funes’s counting method, Ts’ui Pên’s novel) is indistinguishable from chaos—welcome news to an old Discordian like me. Only occasionally explicitly but everywhere implicitly anti-fascist.
•Lizard Music by Daniel Pinkwater (1976): I was rereading this as part of a project to draw chapter headers for every chapter of Lizard Music; I putzed out like two chapters from the end for various reasons. Maybe I should restart. Anyway, this book is boss. My (lengthy) thoughts on Pinkwater’s whole oeuvre can be found here.
•Time’s Arrow by Martin Amis (1991): One of the most audacious books in the history of audacity, a story narrated by a homunculus who lives in a Nazi doctor’s brain and travels backwards in time. A ridiculous premise put to serious use.
•Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl (1964): Old reliable; I’ve read it to each kid in turn and it never fails. I remember as a kid being amazed by how long Dahl makes you wait for the thing you know is going to happen.
•She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith (1773): Still my favorite eighteenth-century farce. Mistaken identities in the most ridiculous 1773 way—rich people mistaken for poor people! gentlemen mistaken for tradesmen! upper-class ladies (ergo virtuous) mistaken for lower-class ladies (ergo prostitutes)! Makes you want to start dumping tea in Boston harbor all over again, possibly even storm a Bastille. Nevertheless, still such pure silly fun.
Four stars!
•The Twilight World by Werner Herzog (2021): Daniel Pinkwater dedicated one of his Young Adults volumes to Hiro Onoda—the Japanese soldier who kept fighting World War II three decades after it ended, refusing to believe that Japan had lost. Whether Onoda is in fact an absurdist figure, as Pinkwater presumably intends him to be, he certainly is a fascinating one. He hung out with Werner Herzog (of course he did!) and related his life story (of course he did!) to the director, who lightly fictionalized it for this novel. Indeed if not an absurdist it is (in Herzog’s hands) at least an existentialist journey. One highlight is when Onoda refuses to believe a current newspaper is real because it has too many advertisements. Maybe this should have been five stars?
•Blindsight by Peter Watts (2007): Good, depressing relatively near-future hard science fiction with vampires, aliens, spaceships, and the kind of despair you expect from E.M. Cioran. The case against consciousness disguised as a first-contact narrative.
•frank: sonnets by Diane Seuss (2021): My first impression was: You’re not allowed to call fourteen lines of free verse sonnets! Words have meanings! But of course words don’t really have meanings anymore and, anyway, Seuss is very skilled at putting together fourteen-line free verse poems. Largely autobiographical…and yet it was still really good! “…the Band-Aid’s little upturned corner / beckons like dead Ahab lashed to the whale’s side…”
•Ayoade On Top by Richard Ayoade (2019): Probably the only possible world in which I’d (willingly) watch A View from the Top is one in which I read this book; which indeed makes me worry for my future. One of the great acts of sustained satire, a book-length analysis of the 2003 film. Merciless. The index is particularly good.
•On the Syrian Goddess by Lucian of Samosata (ca. 150): A rare first-hand account of one very particular form of classical paganism. Of course, Lucian is literally antiquity’s most notorious liar, so who knows how many layers of irony we are away from the truth; but as I’ve pointed out elsewhere our best description of the Mysteries of Isis is a novel about a shape-shifting donkey, so you take what you can get!
•Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger (1920): Fascinating WWI memoir by a guy who was in the trenches and was kind of, you know, into it.
•Crazy in Poughkeepsie by Daniel Pinkwater (2022): There’s always been a vestige of late ’60s, early ’70s counterculture in Pinkwater. His best work is drenched in health food (crunchy granola), gurus, fake Buddhists, thinly-disguised head shops, and even overt hippies. By Borgel (1990), say, these anachronisms were getting more and more sublimated, but still, isn’t there something a little Easy-Riderish in Melvin Spellbound’s freewheeling jaunt across time & space (& the Other)? The whole Neddie cycle is perhaps Pinkwater’s attempt to make his genius accessible (or “relatable”) to generations of kids increasingly removed from the counterculture years; and certainly the nihilistic anarcho-syndicalist environmental graffiti taggers of Crazy in Poughkeepsie seem the most “modern” of any recent DMP characters. (The book also had a literal guru in it; don’t worry!; Pinkwater has not compromised his vision!) A very funny book, to boot.
•Nixon Volume 1: The Education of a Politician, 1913–1962 by Stephen E. Ambrose (1987): A friend of mine once described Nixon as the only American president complex enough to be a Shakespearean hero. I don’t know about that (Lincoln?), but Ambrose’s biography certainly presents a complex and even sympathetic Nixon. I mostly read it to write this post (absurdly enough, still my most popular), but I dug it enough that I’d like to read the remaining volumes when I get a chance. I mean…what will happen next???
•Chike and the River by Chinua Achebe (1966): This isn’t marketed (at least in this edition) as a kid’s book, but it works as a kid’s book works: The adventure is partially trying things out for the first time and partially thwarting thieves, as my young self assumed all of life would be.
•Mongol Warrior versus European Knight: Eastern Europe 1237–42 by Stephen Turnbull (2003): An account of the Mongol invasion of Europe, so much better researched than I would have thought one of these volumes (they look like they should be quick hackwork) would be. I should check more of them out! Especially eye-opening was the part on why the Mongols turned back east, a well-argued theory that overturns conventional wisdom.
•The Vicar of Wakefield by Oliver Goldsmith (1766): The best satires also work as straight texts to baffle the uninitiated; but Goldsmith’s novel is, perhaps uniquely, both satirical and sincere. The conventions of eighteenth-century melodrama are lampooned (but how can you tell?) and the optimism of the narrator is simultaneously insufferable, virtuous, and, thanks to the conventions of eighteenth-century melodrama, factually correct. “I now began to find that all my long and painful lectures upon temperance, simplicity, and contentment, were entirely disregarded.” At once the gentlest and most caustic of books.
•Let Us Be Glum by A.P. Herbert (1941): This is pretty much the same thing as Siren Song above, but I deducted a few points because I thought the jingoism had gotten shriller (perhaps understandably, but we are dealing with art, and understandably-excuses don’t rate).
•The Oxford Murders by Guillermo Martínez (2003): A clever homage to Borges. Full(er) review here.
•Much Ado About Nothing by William Shakespeare (1598): One of my self-imposed rules for reading (there are several) is I need to do one new Shakespeare play a year, and this one I just squeaked in, finishing it New Year’s Eve. Look at that cover: Has any major author ever had a series so hideously designed? The godawful fake-crazy handwriting isn’t even real fake-crazy handwriting—it’s a font! Here’s a so-crazy capital A and nearby…an identical capital A! So crazy! Anyway, I’m not the guy who’s going to think of a new thing to say about a Shakespearean play after all these years. This isn’t my favorite of his comedies, but it’s a good one. Makes me want to go rewatch that Kate Beckinsdale movie—she’s always a delight.
•Kirby: King of Comics by Mark Evanier (2007): Curiously impersonal Jack “King” Kirby biography, especially curiously considering the author’s relationship with his subject—the most humanizing anecdotes are reserved for the afterword. This is very much a biography of The Work, as perhaps all artists’ biographies should be.
•Vermeer edited by Pieter Roelofs & Gregor J.M. Weber (2023): Vermeer’s slight catalog could hardly fill a 320-page book, so you know just by hefting this massive tome that it’s less an art book and more a collection of essays (but also an art book). The essays do a good job pinpointing why Vermeer’s pictures are so great; or you could just look at them. The complete list of items in Vermeer’s house was something I could have done without, though. That part’s a snooze.
•The Testament of Cresseid and Other Poems by Robert Henryson (coll. 1989): Editor Hugh MacDiarmid argues in his introduction for the preeminence of Henryson among the Scottish “makars.” Me, I’ll still choose Dunbar, but, irregardful, this collection is a solid case for Henryson, and YMMV. The title poem is an especial favorite.
•How to Read Nancy: The Elements of Comics in Three Easy Panels by Paul Karasik & Mark Newgarden (2017): This attempt to establish a comic aesthetic from one three-panel Nancy strip is more audacious than successful. The early pages are too often obviously time wasting, wallowing in a semi-parody of an academic text. Can you believe we’re churning out this much text on three Nancy panels wowzers guys look??!?!? But as the book goes on it becomes more grounded in comic strip in general and Bushmiller specifically minutiae, and more interesting. A beautiful dream, a book like this, even if a partially unsuccessful one.
•Cloak & Dagger: Ten Thrilling Stories of Espionage edited (?) by Robert Arthur (1967): A nice anthology, mixing “real” writers (Maugham, Twain) with “fun” writers (Household, Fleming) and all between. It’s pitched at a YA audience and was published right near the beginning of that brief period when young adults were literate enough to read these stories but also free to consume some “adult” content (mostly salty talk).
•The Mexican Pet by Jan Harold Brunvand (1986): The first Brunvand collection of urban legends I read blew the top of my brain straight off and I was never really the same again. After that it’s diminishing returns, but these legends are still fun. Also interesting that Brunvand, in those pre-internet days, could only interact with readers and issue updates through the glacial method of publishing books.
•The Story of Lionbruno by Cirono of Ancona (1476): A facsimile of a late-fifteenth-century printing of a late fourteenth-century Italian narrative poem, with translation. The story is a fun fairy tale of familiar motifs, with seven-league boots and a cloak of darkness.
•All Gall Is Divided: The Aphorisms of a Legendary Iconoclast by E.M. Cioran (1952): Doesn’t hit the heights of Cioran’s later work (above) from which it is otherwise almost indistinguishable.
•The Bronze Tables of Iguvium edited by James Wilson Poultney (coll. 1959): Verrrry detailed accounts of Roman or para-Roman ritual practice, translated from the Umbrian. A more direct and authoritative glimpse of ancient religion than, say, Lucian above, but of course hardly meant for the casual browser of two thousand years later (i.e. me).
•Tehanu by Ursula K. Le Guin (1990): Picking up right where the Earthsea Trilogy left off decades before. Ostensibly a kids’ book, but more about being middle aged. Le Guin is sometimes too elliptical for me, but that’s a small complaint. If you were wondering when Ged would lose his virginity, this book is for you.
•The Zen Teaching of Bodhidharma (coll. 1986): It is embarrassing and perhaps offensive now to admit how influential two books on Zen—Gyomay Kubose’s Zen Koans and Reps & Senzaki’s Zen Flesh. Zen Bones—were to my adolescence. Zen is probably the subject I’ve read the most about that I understand the least. Here Bodhidharma lays it out as clearly as anyone will. (Of course he does; that’s his job!)
•The Ha Ha Bonk Book by Janet & Allan Ahlberg (1982): Almost all joke books for kids are stupid, and I love them all, but this one, which I love, is much better (i.e. funnier) than the usual Stine fare. Does that mean it’s not stupid? Well, it’s a book of jokes for kids; it had better be stupid or else!
•Sweet as a Pickle and Clean as a Pig by Carson McCullers (1964): Slight, sweet children’s verse. McCullers’s last published book (in her lifetime o.c.). “I’ve never seen the ocean, / I’ve never seen the sea, / But once I loved a sailor, / And that’s good enough for me.”
•Struwwelhitler: A Nazi Storybook by Doktor Schrecklichkeit (actually by Robert & Philip Spence) (1941): The old German picture book Struwwelpeter (“Shock-headed Peter”) had been parodied dozens of times—Impossible Histories talked about its WWI-era parody with Kaiser Wilhelm cast in the lead role—when the British did it again in 1941 , making fun of Hitler this time. Always a good time, hacking on Hitler; and satire is better when it carries the element of danger: Had Hitler managed to sealion his way across the Channel…well, “Germany has declared war in the [Spence] boys.”
•Whit Stillman: Not So Long Ago edited by Cyril Neyrat (2023): Whit Stillman is my favorite living director and you know he must be good because two of my least favorite things in the world are yuppies and dancing, and dancing yuppies are all Stillman loves. His godfather coined the term WASP? This is all too on-point! But anyway, here is a collection of interviews with and film criticism on Stillman, mostly translated from the French (because of course). Also some occasional pieces by Stillman and rarities from the shooting of Metropolitan. Maybe it’s for true fans only, but I am one so I enjoyed it.
•The Number Ones: Twenty Chart-Topping Hits That Reveal the History of Pop Music by Tom Breihan (2022): Really a very interesting overview of pop history through the lens of twenty songs, almost all of which I hate.
•Wild Men in the Middle Ages: A Study in Art, Sentiment and Demonology by Richard Bernheimer (1952): I read this as research for my appearance on the monster podcast Uncle Monster’s Spooky-Time Fright Hour. I was borrowing it hourly on archive.org and then the ability to take it out disappeared, and by the time I managed to procure a copy the podcast appearance had long since passed—so if my audio-self doesn’t seem to know anything from the second half of the book, that’s why. Maybe Bernheimer is too credulous (ancient pagan remnants?), maybe he’s too far-ranging, but I sure learned a lot!
•Iphigenia in Aulis by Euripides (406 BC): I’m a huge fan of Eric Shanower’s Age of Bronze series, and I think I picked this up at my LCS because I wanted to buy new Age of Bronze and couldn’t. This edition features Shanower artwork (and an Age of Bronze-adjacent story, o.c.). Considering how much I usually like old literature, my record with ancient Greek drama is spotty (a personal failing, I am aware), but this one was above average; Agamemnon is really in a pickle!
•Dear Abby by Abigail Van Buren (1958): Snapped this up for fifty cents at a church rummage sale; a great find! I grew up with an Ann Landers paper, so I have come to Dear Abby later in life, but she’s every bit the match of her sister. This volume is from early in Abby’s run, and is of course, quite a period piece. As a bonus: illustrations by the old standby, Carl Rose.
•Lapland Outlaw by Arthur Catherall (1966): Solid boys’ adventure tale set among the Sami of northern Finland. Metis vs. civilization, in a very mid-’60s way. So many lassos!
•1776 by David McCullough (2005): Exciting account of one year in the Revolutionary War. Reading the book inspired this what-if.
•Bomb: The Race to Build—and Steal—the World's Most Dangerous Weapon by Steve Sheinkin (2012): One of my former editors told me I should have written this book. I couldn’t have, but oh well. It’s a good YA historical thriller. Had I written it, I would have wedged a cameo from the Oak Ridge Boys in (they were there!!!).
•The Joy of Trash: Flaming Garbage Fire Extended Edition by Nathan Rabin (2023 revision): Fun collection of essays about terrible things. If I could find my (autographed!) copy, I’d have very specific complaints, but I think it’s behind the Christmas tree and I can’t get to it. I remember thinking Rabin got The Brady Bunch Hour wrong (everyone does); I remember thinking he was too nervous or careful about pointing out how offended he was. I should try to peek behind this tree…
•Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan (1978): Can you believe people used to write YA books about killing teachers and they’d just be in like the school library and you could check them out without being sent to a counsellor? A weird time, the past. Anyway, Duncan is no stylist but she can write a page-turner.
•The Spectra Hoax by William Jay Smith (1966): A fun record of a rather mild hoax. “I wrote poems and then tricked you into thinking I wrote poems” is always a weird flex. In the nineteen teens, apparently people were so excited for poetry to fall into schools that they would clamor behind an invented school of poetry. Try to get into that mindset! Bonus: Lots of hoax poems included!
•Fantastic Mr. Fox by Roald Dahl (1970): Another old favorite revisited to read to kids. Easy to see why children would like it; its logic is pure child logic. “No problem, guys, we’ll just live underground forever.”
•Winning Backgammon by John Leet (1998): Better than most backgammon books, with the caveat that to put its suggestions into practice you may have to do more math in your head than you might think strictly necessary for a game that’s supposed to be fun.
•Chocolate Fever by Robert Kimmell Smith (1972): A more serious subtext (and not very sub, that text) than I noticed in my youth. Probably too many criminals.
•The Secrets of Tutankhamen’s Tomb by Leonard Cottrell (1964): I like Cottrell because he takes his assignments very personally. His descriptions of the boy pharaoh’s treasures are thorough enough, but it’s his visceral excitement at the thought of unearthing them that makes the book fun. At one point he says something like how he envies, above all men, Carter at the moment he broke through the seals, and, you know what, Cottrell? Me too!
•Church Signs Across America by Steve & Pam Paulson (2007): Neat little sampler of a quasi-oral quasi-art form. Full review here.
•Don't Let the Turkeys Get You Down by Sandra Boynton (1986): A solid humor book for adults. When I say it’s for adults I don’t mean it gets blue; I just mean kids are historically not overfond of yuppie jokes. When I say it’s solid I mean it is, unlike many humor books, funny. Boynton’s hit or miss with me when I read board books to babies, but this one (which I shared with zero babies) was a hit.
•Typhoon by Joseph Conrad (1902): Exciting Conrad novella. Ships at sea, you know the drill.
•The Interrogative Mood by Padgett Powell (2009): Not even remotely a novel (despite what the cover coyly suggests), this rapidfire string of questions is almost an exercise in pure rhythm. Much better than it (a random collection of nonsense questions, some quite unanswerable) sounds.
•Killed Cartoons: Casualties from the War on Free Expression by David Wallis (2007): This nice collection does contain the cartoons mentioned, but the focus is on the context why each (political, generally) cartoon was “killed.” Most interesting is hearing cartoonists lament the increasing censoriousness of the industry, the increasing oversensitivity of readers and the increasingly pusillanimous tendency of editors to cave to them—all in 2007! As Chief Wiggum said when he caught his tie in the ringer, “This is going to get worse before it gets better.”
•The Boy Slaves by Thomas Mayne Reid (1865): This boy’s adventure novel has a great villain, a much cooler character than you would expect for the depiction of a black African in a nineteenth-century novel (the works of H. Rider Haggard excepted). He’s still a villain, though. Reid consistently confuses (the biblical) Shem and Japheth, which wouldn’t be so bad except be brings them up a lot. I don’t think crouching or kneeling in water by the beach is as physically challenging as he makes it out to be. Still, quite exciting; the best Mayne Reid novel I've read.
•Cannae: Hannibal's Greatest Victory by Adrian Goldsworthy (2002): I loved Goldsworthy’s book The Punic Wars; this one just gives a lot more detail on one small part of the Third. I read this as part of writing this what-if.
•Vivolo And His Wooden Children by Ken Laffal (1976): I know I’m in danger of calling too many things outsider art, but Vivolo is an outsider artist with a capital O, his obsessive little mannequins the real deal. Some biography, mostly art book.
•The Hittites: People of a Thousand Gods by Johannes Lehmann (1975): While the Hittites are fascinating, it’s not easy to make reading about them fascinating, in part because they left us so little narrative comparable to other ancient peoples’ Gilgamesh, the Baal poems, or Sinuhe. Lehmann therefore bends over backwards to keep a reader’s interest, playing up the gradually unfolding mystery of the Hittites’ identity through the agency of various colorful characters. There’re plenty of Hittites, too, though.
•Cubism and the Trompe l’Oeil Tradition edited by Emily Braun & Elizabeth Cowling (2023): I think cubism usually isn’t good and trompe l’oeil usually isn’t art, but I fond this collection of essays about the union of these two sets surprisingly interesting.
•Dick Prescott’s Fourth Year at West Point or Ready to Drop the Gray for Shoulder Straps by H. Irving Hancock (1911): I’m mildly addicted to H. Irving Hancock. His Grammar School boys, who became the High School Boys, who graduated into three series—one at West Point, one at Annapolis, and one out West—offered kids a series they could grow up with alongside the characters…except that Hancock cranks the books out at the rate of eight to twelve a year, so between birthdays the preteens have already left college. Dick Prescott is the slightly less odiously priggish of Hancock’s officer protagonists. He’s always being accused of something dishonorable (cheating or peaching or something), and only after long suffering is he redeemed. Now he’s graduating (after long suffering, and then redemption) to more adventures in (soon enough) WWI.
•Dave Darrin’s First Year at Annapolis by H. Irving Hancock (1910): The same book as the previous, but with boats.
•Comic Book Collecting for Fun and Profit by Mike Benton (1985): Mostly interesting as a period snapshot of the state of comic collecting in 1985, an era of mail-order services and ever-rising back issue prices. Like so many how-to books, this one welters in ridiculous chapters, such as how to pick what comics to read and enjoy. If you don’t already read and enjoy comics you probably shouldn’t be collecting! But that, too, is presumably 1985.
•The Art of the Comic Strip by Shirley Glubok (1979): And here’s another neat period piece, a kids’ book about the history of strips from an era when Hagar the Horrible was the most recent strip represented. Annie’s pupils in the cover art are yet another strange vestige of the time the book was released.
•Norse Mythology by Neil Gaiman (2017): Mostly I’m just jealous because I didn’t get to write this book. Loki and Thor talk like characters from a Marvel film, but I guess that’s supposed to be a value add for most. Why was Thor’s duel with Hrungnir omitted? All my gripes are really just me saying “I would have done this slightly differently and now I don’t get to.”
•Richard Scarry's Best Mother Goose Ever! by Richard Scarry (1961): I love Mother Goose collections! I just like seeing what rhymes are included; how they’re illustrated; someday I want to do something with the knowledge I’m gaining, but I don’t know what yet. Anyway, this one’s a good one.
•Henry V, War Criminal? and Other Shakespeare Puzzles by John Sutherland & Cedric Watts (2000): I don’t think John Sutherland has heard of a No-Prize (IYKYK, True Believer), but he deserves a heap of them for his books that find and explain away plot holes in classics. This one’s on Shakespeare instead of nineteenth-century literature, but it’s otherwise the same idea.
•The Deleted World by Tomas Tranströmer (2006): Poetry’s rough in translation, but I thought Tranströmer’s melancholy traveled well.
•A Book of Things About Vladimir Nabokov edited by Carl R. Proffer (1974): A jumble of criticism, some useful, some not. I remember liking a piece on Despair; made me want to reread it. I remember being bored with a piece on Onegin, which I have never read.
•Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino (2022): Interesting exploration of the origin of Tarantino’s exploitation esthetic. Because a precocious QT was watching R-rated movies as an adolescent, he naturally giggled at the swear words and whatnot; but as he points out the whole audience was in the position of adolescence: R-rated movies being new to them, they all giggled at the swear words.
•The Real Dada Mother Goose: A Treasury of Complete Nonsense by Jon Scieszka (2022): A fun set of remixes applied to nursery rhymes, all in the name of introducing kids to a century-old artistic movement. As good an excuse as any!
•Select Epigrams from the Greek Anthology edited by John William Mackail (coll. 1906): This book would have ranked higher if I’d liked the prosy translations more.
•Pagan: Being the First Connected Account in English of the 11th Century Capital of Burma, with the History of a Few of Its Most Important Pagodas by C.M. Enriquez (1914): One of the good things with reading a book on a subject you know nothing about is you’re guaranteed to learn a lot. The historical account of the rise of King Kyanzittha (it starts with a dice game!) is a highlight.
•The Lunatic: Poems by Charles Simic (2015): Pretty good for contemporary poetry, but I didn’t copy any lines down from it, and isn’t that telling?
Three stars.
•Up Your Ass by Valerie Solanas (1965): Weird, sometimes funny play made more ominous by Solanas’s later crime(s). Interesting to see back in 1965 a character ridiculing another for merely wanting to have straight sex with a steady boyfriend. How pathetically vanilla!
•Hannibal: Enemy of Rome by Leonard Cottrell (1961): Here’s Cottrell again, still taking things personally; he follows Hannibal’s path and ruminates on his own WWII experiences. A fine biography that never rises above being a fine biography. Another book I read to write this what-if.
•Good Vibrations: My Life as a Beach Boy by Mike Love (2016): Ultimately Mike Love is not a good enough writer, or an interesting enough character, to elevate this biography above the midtier groove it was destined for, but he does manage to be persuasive about one thing: After reading this book I am willing to believe it was not Love’s mercenary philistinism that drove Brian mad but rather the more prosaic drugs. It was drugs. Come on, obviously it was drugs.
•How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement by Fredrik deBoer (2023): I get the feeling that some editor neutered deBoer’s characteristically feisty prose. I’m a genuine deBoer fan, but I thought his last book did a better job capturing what you might call his online energy. I feel bad not liking this more, and I’ll probably read it again, since I own it.
•Tom Sawyer, Detective by Mark Twain (1896): Adventures of Huckleberry Finn more or less spoils The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, in the sense that after reading one book you want to be Tom, and after its sequel you want to murder that insufferable little wretch; and then Tom Sawyer Abroad ruins Huck, reducing its pathos to farce in a way far worse than the ending of Huck ever could; so I was more or less expecting (hoping?) that Detective would continue the cycle, and somehow ruin Abroad. But apparently nothing can ruin the travesty that is Abroad, and so Detective is just a pleasant little mystery with some good jokes. My one carping: Twain clearly sets up a climax of distinguishing twins by one’s characteristic moles—and then he forgets about it! The plot point dangles limply. Also: Two men literally get away with murder; quite unusual for 1896.
•Rhymes for the Irreverent by E.Y. Harburg (2006): A Harburg poem or two made a big impression on me in junior high, but I learned from this posthumous collection that his work was very uneven, and only sometimes clever. Most ridiculously, the editors decided to “update” the politically satirical poems such that their barbs were now jabbing contemporary politicians that long-dead Harburg had never heard of. Time for a new edition with new politicians, guys! Just keep doing it forever, I guess.
•Dave Darrin’s Second Year at Annapolis by H. Irving Hancock (1911): More Hancock school adventures, same as they ever was.
•Dave Darrin’s Fourth Year at Annapolis by H. Irving Hancock (1911): Ibid., with a bonus cameo by the Submarine Boys, heroes from another Altemus boys’ series, this one by Victor G. Durham…a pen name of Hancock’s!
•The Young Engineers in Colorado; or, At Railroad Building in Earnest by H. Irving Hancock (1912): When two High School Boys went to West Point, and two went to Annapolis, the remaining two became engineers, a much butcher career than your slide-rule-packing nerd of a roommate let on. I have earmarked this book as an early example of manly men jocularly “hacking on” each other to show their manliness. “This is Jack Rutter, the spotted hyena of the camp. If he ever gets in your way just push him over a cliff,” says Jack Rutter’s friend.
•Axel’s Castle: A Study of the Imaginative Literature of 1870–1930 by Edmund Wilson (1931): Interesting to see Wilson wrestle with the themes of modernism back in 1931, before everything was so safe and canonical. Obviously I’m more invested when he writes about authors I know and like (Yeats, Eliot) than when he writes about authors I don’t (some French guy).
•Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld (2023): A rare disappointment from the usu. reliable Sittenfeld. Two annoying people and will they find happiness who cares?
•Parker: The Hunter by Richard Stark (1962): I read this for the Darwyn Cooke illustrations. The illustrations were great! The book was fine, hard-boiled fun but not as good as the Ones I Like (Jim Thompson, Ross Macdonald). I may try another.
•A Sicilian Romance by Ann Radcliffe (1790): Radcliffe is famous for inventing Scooby-Doo, i.e. inventing the idea that there are gothic supernaturalities aplenty but in the end you can pull their masks off and they’re all just Old Man MacGregor looking to scare people. A Sicilian Romance isn’t her most famous book, but it’s the one I found for a dollar at the local used book store, so it’s the one I read; it’s relatively light on the supernatural, and even on the gothicicty, but as promised the mask comes off in the end. Mostly it’s one of those novels where one thing happens after another, like a story from Boccaccio.
•Good God, Lemon!: The Unofficial Fan’s Guide to 30 Rock by Amy Lewis (2021): Enjoy revisiting the jokes you laughed at when you saw them on 30 Rock. This is the kind of book I’d like to write but when I tell my agent he says they don’t exist anymore. Look at this one, though! Still, it should probably have been a website, or a disconnected series of memes.
•The Jewish Artistic Heritage: An Album by…Semyon An-Sky? (1994?): I read fifty pages of introductory material and I’m still not sure what this book is. Did S. Ansky (as others call him) collect this material for publication around 1918 (as sometimes is hinted)? Was it published? Is it just his field notes? Are there other similar works included? Anyway, as a record of the Russian Jewish folk tradition from the early twentieth century, Ansky’s files, which might have some relation to this book, must be indispensable, as the remainder of the century would be busy stamping that tradition out. The art included is nice, although one should probably have more foreknowledge of the tradition than I possess (which is zero) to appreciate it fully.
•The Governess; or, The Little Female Academy by Sarah Fielding (1749): Sarah Fielding was the sister of Henry Fielding (one of my favorite authors) and best friends with Jane Collier (author of one of my favorite books) so I had high expectations for her, expectation she could not meet. The Governess is one of those early not-quite-a novels, with mostly allegorical characters (Jenny Sly; Dolly Friendly; the titular governess is literally named Mrs. Teachum) who in this case spend most of their time swapping fairy tales (printed in full). Could be worse.
•Knights of Malta, 1523-1798 by Reuben Cohen (1920): I wanted the Knights of Malta to be cooler than this!
•King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table by Roger Lancelyn Green (1953): My preference for Lanier’s The Boy’s King Arthur may simply reflect the age at which I came to that text and this; but still, I do think Green fumbles his explicit goal (to add parts of Chretien, Middle English verse romance, etc., to the skeleton of Malory in order to create a harmonious Arthurian unity). Too much of Malory’s incoherence is maintained (the death of the Lady of the Lake, e.g.); the quest for the Holy Grail is never going to make logical sense anyway, so it requires the essential strangeness of an internal quest that Malory or the French Vulgate bring to it (and Green does not); and Green is too squeamish and protective of his young audience to include vital Arthurian details (such as Uther’s adulterous disguise or Mordred’s bastardy). A game effort; I should have read it when I was twelve.
•The Hugo Winners, Volume 3 edited by Isaac Asimov (1977): The only stories here that I think deserved the Hugo are Leiber’s “Ill-Met in Lankhmar” and Niven’s “The Hole Man” (and possibly “Omelas,” not because I like it but because it really has shaped nerdy public discourse like no other ’70s story). The rest are good or bad to various degrees. Asimov’s unnecessary introductions are supposed to be cute, but are mostly grating.
•The Setting Sun by Osamu Dazai (1947): This novel of hardship and self-destruction in postwar Japan was recommended to me by someone who read in in Japanese. I read it in English, and at times found it dissatisfying. I’ll blame the translation, or perhaps the untranslatability of the original.
•The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (1927): Contains the lamest of all Sherlock Holmes stories, “The Adventure of the Veiled Lodger,” which is solved by…someone just explaining the whole thing to Holmes. Elementary! But some of the other stories are fine.
•The Errand Boy or How Phil Brent Won Success by Horatio Alger Jr. (1888): Alger wrote over a hundred juvenile novels with the same plot, and I’m trying to read all of them. This is not one of the better ones; long review here.
•Tartuffe by Molière (1664): Richard Wilbur translates, and I had high hopes, but his verse is too ragged for my taste. In The Muppet Christmas Carol, Molière is on a shelf between Dante & Shakespeare, but I’m still looking for the translator who will put him there.
•Cato: A Tragedy in Five Acts by Joseph Addison (1712): Wildly popular, much quoted, adequate melodrama. “Justice gives way to force: the conquer’d world / Is Cæsar’s! Cato has no business in it.”
•Carrie by Stephen King (1974): I’m not really a Stephen King fan, but some atavistic desire to be a real American makes me keep trying him out. This book was okay, and not nearly as long as some other of his books I thought were just okay.
•Myths and Enchantment Tales by Margaret Evans Price (1941): I thought these children’s retellings of Greek and Roman myths were too slow and stately, but one of my kids preferred them to the d’Aulaires’, so !!!!!
•The Ambiguous Iroquois Empire: The Covenant Chain Confederation of Indian Tribes with English Colonies from Its Beginnings to the Lancaster Treaty of 1744 by Francis Jennings (1984): I do realize that by saying this book had too much tedious detail I am merely admitting that I am weak. But what can you do? The beginning was interesting enough that I got sucked in, and then it was a thousand little treaties! So many lawsuits!
•Welcome to Dead House (Goosebumps #1) by R.L. Stine (1992): When I was a kid, R.L. Stine was my hero, or at least someone whose career I thought I wanted to emulate. He was everywhere, his finger in every pie; a book of jokes, or a magazine masthead or a fumetti paperback or a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure knockoff; you’d find Stine’s name there. Alongside Charlie Weaver, it was Stine who taught me to appreciate bad jokes as well as good. So I was excited for him when he hit megastardom with Goosebumps, and even though I was too old to read and enjoy it “naively,” I tried the series out. This one I reread, out loud, to my kids, who were (although usually foolishly brave) scared witless.
•Home Sweet Horror (Scary Tales #1) by James Preller (2013): Another read aloud. Pretty much the same book as Goosebumps but less (my kids say) scary. This should probably go lower down, but I’m lazy.
•Martin Amis by Brian Finney (2004): The less academic of the two books about Amis I read this year; a fine overview, I guess. I was impressed that Finney seemed to have tracked down a good number of interviews, articles, and ephemera. Man, I just read books!
•Martians, Monsters and Madonna: Fiction and Form in the World of Martin Amis by John A. Dern (2000): Apparently the year 2000 marks the very last time you could shoehorn Madonna’s name into an academic text for absolutely no reason.
•Conversations of Socrates by Xenophon (coll. 1990): I’d meant to read this for the Socrates/Alcibiades chapter of Impossible Histories, but I got around to it too late (obvs.). Plato’s Socrates is sufficiently entrenched in the popular consciousness that encountering an alternate version feels like Sliders, you know? But there’s a reason Plato’s Socrates is entrenched, and it’s because Plato’s Socrates is more interesting.
•Dave Sim’s Collected Letters 2 by Dave Sim (2007): I wish I could quit you, Dave Sim.
•Alien Invasion in My Backyard by Ruben Bolling (2015): I like Bolling’s comics, and I bought this years ago so he would do a sketch in it. Read it to my kids; everyone thought it was okay. A series that didn’t take off, but I think it could have grown into something; too bad.
•Inner Experience by Georges Bataille (1940): Usually Bataille is one of my go-to guys for a book that’s weird enough I can feel as though I’m almost grasping something in it below the surface, just out of reach. Maybe this one was too weird? Maybe it’s hard to describe inner experiences? The book disintegrates into poetry by the end, which is, I think, fitting, but no less abstruse. A lot of other people really like this one! Not my least-favorite Bataille—that would be the puzzling Blue of Noon. I should probably read it again.
•Classic Haiku: The Greatest Japanese Poetry from Basho, Buson, Issa, Shiki, and Their Followers edited by Tom Lowenstein (2007): Has anyone ever succeeded in translating haiku? An attractive book, at least, if somewhat kitschily attractive.
•Munch by David Loshak (1990): Loshak tries hard to give a thorough reading to each painting, but I’m beginning to think Munch mostly was not a very good painter. He had one gem up his sleeve, and the rest fall between monotonous and incompetent. But honestly this just isn’t my kind of art and I probably should’t have read it.
•Folklore in America: Tales, Songs, Superstitions, Proverbs, Riddles, Games, Folk Drama and Folk Festivals edited by Tristram Potter Coffin & Hennig Cohen (1966): An okay compendium of folk tales, folk customs, oral tradition, and all such things, but one I have reservations about. Keeping the sources in the back, away from the text, would usually be a good idea, but here you’re left with no grounding, no way to know what you’re reading—because folktales always assume a shared context, and so there’s none there in the story for you, the reader. Is this an African-American folktale or a racist folktale?: unclear! A long list of “superstitions” with no indication of just who believes these things is a mere curiosity. Also, collecting from recent immigrants (Armenian, Chinese, Greek, etc.) stories from their native lands just feels like cheating. I mean, imagine picking up a book of Greek or Chinese folktales and getting something from an American expatriate.
•The Quotable Ronald Reagan edited by Joseph R. Holmes (1975): I found this book on the street and gave it to a friend of mine the next day, but it was short enough that I could read it in the interim. Most interesting because of its publication date, five years before Reagan was elected president (but eight years after J.G. Ballard expressed a desire unprintable in a family substack).
•Playboy's Party Jokes (1963): Not a great collection of pervy jokes, but interesting because of how comparatively mild they were back in 1963.
•Lights, Camera, Accordion!: Eye-Popping Photographs of "Weird Al" Yankovic, 1981–2006 by Jon "Bermuda" Schwartz (2022): Maybe it turns out I didn’t need to see this many candid pictures of Weird Al, mostly without context.
•Where Was Rebecca Shot? Curiosities, Puzzles, and Conundrums in Modern Fiction by John Sutherland (1999): Sutherland’s attempt to extend his “conundra” series to modern literature often doesn’t work. Maybe he just doesn’t know enough about modern fiction? Entire chapters (Lolita; Neuromancer) offer neither puzzles nor solutions. I guess some do, which is how the book squeaked its way up to three stars.
•The Novel 100: A Ranking of the Greatest Novels of All Time by Daniel S. Burt (2003): “Greatest” here means something like “most influential” so you’re going to have a hard time griping that your faves aren’t in the top five. But partway through the book, Burt loses interest or focus or something, and everything is just a plot summary. Why? Who could possibly benefit from reading two and a half pages about the terrible things that happen to Holden Caulfield in NYC? Obviously I have complaints about what gets chosen, but that’s the point of a book like this; so I can complain! But mostly I want to complain about the plot summaries. Woman in White has a coy “I won’t spoil the surprises,” but of course every other book gets narrated all the way through to the spoileriffic ending. Typos increase as the list chugs along. By the end we’re just going through popular novels of no literary pretense, and the book peters out.
Two stars.
•Morrie Turner, Creator of Wee Pals by Mary K. Ericsson (1986): I was searching the library system for a collection of the comic strip Wee Pals and all I found was this biography of the creator of Wee Pals, pitched at kids and inexplicably appearing well after the strip’s heyday. A workmanlike bio; but of course cartoonists do not live interesting lives.
•Chernowitz! by Fran Arrick (1981): Not bad until the final act, when the gears of the morality play force everything into ABC Afterschool Special nonsense. I guess it’s earnest? Nevertheless, this is a YA novel and they don’t even kill a teacher.
•The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov (1953): The problem always is that you can imagine future technology more easily than you can imagine future people to live among that technology. Sometimes I’m able to suspend my disbelief and sometimes it’s the caves of steel. Nice poetic title. I always like Asimov’s Foundation books more than his robot books, I guess.
•Pizarro by Richard Brinsley Sheridan (1799): Not Sheridan’s best, but his most popular (in his lifetime) play. It is, of course, melodramatic nonsense.
•The Kingdom of Downtown: Finding Teenagers in Their Music by Louis M. Savary (1967): A kind of hilarious and very 1967 attempt to understand rock ’n’ roll rebellion by a real square, man. I should have used this book for the Impossible Histories chapter on Freud, but I read it too late so it only makes it into the annotations.
•Amphitryon and Two Other Plays by Plautus (coll. 1971): I did not like this translation. I’m not even sure I like Plautus!
•Roll for Initiative by Jaime Formato (2022): Too benign; too pat; too easy; too safe; too on point. This one’s a MG novel with a D&D theme.
•Dave Darrin’s Third Year at Annapolis by H. Irving Hancock (1911): Sometimes Dave Darrin is so insufferable you have to knock him down a star. So many civilians saved from drowning!
•How the Hell Did This Happen?: The Election of 2016 by P.J. O’Rourke (2017): O’Rourke used to be pretty funny, but I didn’t think this one was funny. Maybe I just read it six years too late.
•A Hacker's Mind: How the Powerful Bend Society's Rules, and How to Bend them Back by Bruce Schneier (2023): I always like Schneier until I try to read one of his books. I read this in the beginning of the year, and don’t even remember why I found it so annoying; I had very concrete complaints at the time. Certainly the title is a fraud, an ad copywriter’s trick to pretend the book is something it is not. Is that thematic? Maybe, maybe.
•Leonard da Vinci by Sigmund Freud (1910): I guess it’s kind of fun in a ridiculous way. The more coke you assume Freud was on, the more this book makes sense.
•Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma by Clare Dederer (2023): Dederer is smart and occasionally pulls off a good reading, but her prose is so irritating. She’s always reaching too far. Calling the 1950s “a decade of turbulence” would be more acceptable if the ’50s did not come between the ’40s and the ’60s. Take all the decades of the 20th century and put them in order, the order being the order of turbulence: Honestly, how far from the bottom would you put the ’50s? The whole book is like this. No human being had ever liked Polanski’s films as much as Dederer has to pretend to like Polanski’s films in order to make a sale. A book I wanted to pick apart at great length but never got around to.
•Species with Amnesia: Our Forgotten History by Robert Sepehr (2015): Recommended to me, but I don’t recommend it. Ultimately just too dumb. I wrote a longer and more specific review here.
•Rhymes for Kindly Children: Modern Mother Goose Jingles by Fairmont Snyder (1916): If Mother Goose rhymes were this overtly sententious, they never would have survived. Nice Johnny Gruelle art, though.
•The Supernaturalism of New England by John Greenleaf Whittier (1847): Whittier composed this protoanthropological collection of folklore before anyone, including Whittier, really know how to collect folklore or why. So the few bits of oral tradition get buried under, oh, man, Whittier quotes so much poetry. And not, like, relevant poetry.
•With an Adamantine Sickle: A Devotional to the Titans edited by Rebecca Buchanan (2023): A neopagan anthology with a couple of good nonfiction essays and a lot of …look, don’t feel bad, guys. Most religious poetry is mediocre. We can’t all be George Herbert. One poet, John Muro, acquits himself well. I wanted to like this book a lot more than I did.
•Mabel Parker; or, the Hidden Treasure: A Tale of the Frontier Settlements by Horatio Alger Jr. (1986): Alger wrote and almost published this novel in the 1870s, but the publisher went bankrupt and blah blah blah it didn’t appear until over a century later. Too bad for Alger, because this was intended to be his big break, his book that would make him a novelist for grownups. But not really too bad, because the book’s not very good. Without a plucky urchin to ratchet upwards, Alger falls back on hoary coincidences and tedious non-characters.
•Waterhouses: The Romantic Alternative by Ferenc Máté (1977): I was trying to get a book about J.W. Waterhouse and got this instead. If you hear the words “romantic alternative” and think houseboats, you’ll like this book. Honestly I was kind of creeped out for reasons I don’t understand and do not wish to explore.
•Works on Paper by Antonin Artaud (1996): Outsider art by an insider artist sounds like a great hook, but it turns out Artaud’s mad scribbles are just not that interesting. Maybe for real Artaud fans or something.
•The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Explained by Paramhansa Yogananda (1994): A not-very-convincing attempt to pretend that an Englishman’s hedonistic poem inspired by a Muslim’s mystic text is actually about…yoga?
•Hyperion: A Romance by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1839): Just your average boy gets girl, boy loses girl story, which, okay, fine, except that in a novel of 400 pages the boy gets the girl on (I’m approximating) page 250 and loses her on page 300. That’s a lot of pages left over, Longfellow!
•Blossoming Out (Powerpuff Girls Chapter Books #4) by E.S. Mooney (2000): I am well aware that I’m reading a marketing tie-in (out loud to a child), but I don’t think this moralistic tale works as a PPG story. Needs more charm, humor, or action. Speaking as a fan.
•The Necronomicon by Simon (1973): No one likes this book, and I could almost feel bad for it; I generally like frauds and hoaxes, which this transparently is; but it’s dull.
One star.
•The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate (2012): Everyone seems to love this book (including my 3yo), and the only people who dislike it are people who hate 1. zoos or 2. evolution (these are different people). “How dare this book expose my child to zoo / evolution propaganda etc.” Well, I’m pro-zoo and pro-evolution (not really but you know what I mean) and I think everyone of sense should hate this poorly written, twee, melodramatic, implausible scold of a book. I’m perfectly willing to read a series of lectures about how rotten humans are (see the works of E.M. Cioran above) but when the lectures depend on the assumption that animals are all friends together, with human intelligence, superhuman wisdom, and none of humans’ wickednesses—well, the lecture is not going to be persuasive. And if you take out the lecture, there’s almost nothing left of this book except the idea that chapters should be two sentences long. So irritating!
•The One and Only Bob by Katherine Applegate (2020): Just as bad.
•The Robots of Dawn by Isaac Asimov (1983): A guy at a sf con once told me that Heinlein started out writing juveniles and ended up writing seniles. Mutatis mutandis. Longer review here.
•The Nazi Conspiracy: The Secret Plot to Kill Roosevelt, Stalin, and Churchill by Brad Meltzer & Josh Mensch (2023): By far the worst book I read all year. Both the authors and their editor should be arrested for crimes against prose. A long, and quite cruel, review here.
I didn’t rate them
I read four more books this year, and I didn’t rate them. Three of them because I wrote them and one because…who knows why I do things?
•Junie B. Jones and the Stupid Smelly Bus by Barbara Park (1992): My kid loves these books and I wanted to see what the fuss was about. Not for me, but I guess I knew that going in, which is why I didn’t bother trying to judge it.
To avoid gaucherie, I won’t comment on the following three books, relying instead on the testimonies of strangers from the internet.
•Impossible Histories by me, Hal Johnson (2023): “This book, which I picked up at a local bookstore on a whim, is the best book I have read in a lonnng time. I love history, and this is that at its best. It’s alternative history, but so much actual history also; it's fascinating—and funny. It’s well written and thought provoking.”
•Sudden Glory by me, Hal Johnson (2023): “A really funny, bonkers satirical philosophical novel about life in NYC in the early 2000s, American masculinity, sex, and the epistemological state of masking/closetedness.”
•Apprentice Academy: Sorcerers by me, Hal Johnson (2023): “Hooked me immediately! I opened this and felt as if I really was invited to the academy. Although it’s more of a YA or kids book—I still enjoyed it and my 10 year old was enthralled. The illustrations are beautiful as well.”
That’s it, all πrad of them. Everyone should do this. I will probably never do this again.