Book Notes - 3 so far

 At the start of the year I had an idea for a book project I have been thinking about for some time. I don't think that I am going to go for it quite yet, but I have been wanting to get back into writing about books on this blog. I am going to keep the project under my hat for the moment in case I do decide to start it up in the near future. 

However, I do want to shake off some of the dust and start posting again, so I thought I would do a few quick notes about the books that I have read so far this year as a way to motivate myself to keep coming back.

 Kill Creek by Scott Thomas was recommended to me by a colleague who shares an interest in gothic and horror novels. This book is a few years old at this point but I had not heard of it or the author. I have been more interested in postmodern horror over the last couple of years and have been working on a couple of scholarly projects involving the genre lately (perhaps more on my conference presentation upcoming?). After reading the synopsis, I was excited to start reading this book.

This starts out as a haunted house story that brings in tech media and internet fame. A young tech bro running a horror fansite -- which he insists is so successful that it is actually just a pop culture site -- invites 4 horror authors to a curated event in this haunted house to livestream a group interview. Each of the authors brings their own personal baggage with them, experiences weird things, and then heads home. The novel takes a turn here in an interesting direction. Upon returning home, each of the authors becomes obsessed with writing a new novel about the house that they were in and, upon checking notes with one another, discover that they are all writing the same novel. 

I won't reveal what happens next here for the sake of anyone interested in reading this novel, but I will say that this was a suspenseful and exciting novel to read. Thomas' work plays with the conventions of the haunted house story, blending in the personal demons that each of the authors in the book contend with. The read is fun and the ending took me by surprise in a way that I have not experienced in a long time. Definitely worth the read.

 Famous is the latest work by Blake Crouch. I have enjoyed Crouch's work for some time. I think Recursion  was the first novel I read and I have worked my way through the Wayward Pines series and several other stand-alone novels. This novel breaks tone and genre from a lot of his prior work. I have come to expect carefully crafted time-travel plots or some other sci-fi adjacent work but Famous strays from this. To be honest, this read more like a Chuck Palahniuk novel than it did a Blake Crouch one. The cover of this novel boasted an A24 movie adaptation which, sorry to say, I won't be watching. This book didn't do it for me. I have read better from Crouch and I hope to see a return to form in future novels.

Finally, I took a recent read through an older book: Manhood for Amateurs by Michael Chabon. I have read a lot of Chabon over the years and have always liked his work for its attention to character and devotion to pop culture fandom. I was blown away by The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Klay when I first read it in graduate school. This book is not a novel but a collection of essays loosely centering on the topic of a gen X author reaching middle age and reflecting on his life. This topic, as a somewhat younger member of gen X reaching middle age and considering my own relevance, is one that I find sympathetic. Chabon writes about his experience parenting and attempting to expose his children to art and music that he enjoyed, he writes about his first experience carrying a diaper bag while still wanting to appear masculine. One of the essays that hit me the hardest was one in which he describes briefly meeting David Foster Wallace at a Democratic party event. In all, the essays work as an expression of the time. Some have aged better than others but the book was worth a read, overall. It would probably work best for the demographic I fit comfortably into and might have limited returns venturing outside of that.

On uncertainty and new beginnings

 

It has been some time wince I have posted anything here: just a shade over 2 years to be precise. I posted a list of the books that I read in 2022 at the end of that year and it has been silent here ever since. I have started posts that I never finished. I have thought a lot about what I might put here and I thought a lot about the direction that I wanted to take with this. All of these meaning that I never did anything with it.

Since the fall of last year, I have found myself in a new job. I almost stumbled into a full-time teaching job at a community college. This was an unexpected step for me. Though I have been teaching college English for quite a long time, most of that has been part-time, and almost all of it has been fully online since about 2016. I didn’t think that a job like this was in the books for me and I had stopped looking for this kind of work a long time ago. I won’t go into details here about how the job came about, but suffice to say that the change has been good.

In the last 2 years I have read as much as I ever have, but I didn’t feel the drive to write about anything. But that is returning to me. I have two different academic projects in the works that I will wrap up in the coming months and I think I am ready to restart writing here.

I don’t know with what regularity this will happen, but I am making myself write this as an act of explanation to myself and as a motivation to keep this up. I do enjoy doing this but I am out of practice.

2022 Books

I don't write about all of the books that I read. Here is a list of the books that I read in 2022.


Abrahams, Peter. A Perfect Crime.

Adams, Douglas. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Alworth, Jeff.  The Beer Bible.

Anderson, Poul.  The Boat of a Million Years.

Asimov, Isaac.  The Currents of Space.

---. The Robots of Dawn.

---. Robots and Empire.

Babineaux, Ryan & John Krumboltz. Fail Fast, Fail Often.

Bowlin, Barrett. Ghosts Caught on Film.

Butler, Octavia. Parable of the Sower.

Cantwell, Dick. The Brewers Association's Guide to Starting Your Own Brewery.

Cham, Jorge & Daniel Whiteson. Frequently Asked Questions about the Universe.

Corey, James, SA.  Leviathan Falls.

---. Memory's Legion.

Crouch, Blake. Pines.

---. Recursion.

---. Wayward.

---. The Last Town.

Dick, Philip K. Paycheck and Other Classic Stories.

Doctorow, Cory. Walkaway.

Freud, Sigmund. Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis.

Haldeman, Joe. Camouflage. 

Hill, Joe. Horns. 

Jackson, Shirley.  Hangsaman.

King, Stephen. If it Bleeds.

King, Stephen & Peter Straub. The Talisman.

Lem, Stanislaw. Solaris.

Lewis, Sean. We Make Beer.
Neuvel, Sylvain.  A History of What Comes Next.

Nevala-Lee, Alec.  Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard,         and the Golden Age of Science Fiction.

Odenkirk, Bob. Comedy Comedy Comedy Drama.
Papazian, Charlie. The Complete Joy of Homebrewing.

Paretsky, Sara. Overboard.

Quindlan, Anna. Write for Your Life. 

Rimbaud, Penny.  The Last of the Hippies.

Robinson, Kim Stanley.  Green Mars.

---.  Blue Mars.

---. The Martians.

Scalzi, John. Kaiju Protection Society.

---. Old Man's War.

---. The Ghost Brigade.

---. The Last Colony.

St. John Mandel, Emily. Station Eleven.

Consider the Author

 This is something that I started writing some time ago and I think that it has legs but I lost track of it and just never finished it. As of now, I am not interested in finishing this, but I want to post this because I think that I make a few good observations here and it is hard to throw away a piece of writing like this once it has begun. It's my blog, so that's it.

Parts of this are a little rough and some places I just leave off because I was just jotting down notes. There is one point at the end that I will comment on after the text that I have written.

So here it is, another unfinished essay about David Foster Wallace.

Consider the Author

I have written a lot about the work of David Foster Wallace in my academic career and elsewhere. He has always been something of a problematic figure for me because there is a great deal of his output that I have enjoyed but there has always been a kernel of something that is at the heart of it that gives me pause. If this were a piece of my academic work, I would take the time to work this all out ahead of time and treat you to a thesis claim. But since you are reading (maybe) this on my personal blog, I am going to write for exploration and maybe figure out what I mean by the end of it.

There is something about Wallace's work that has started to chafe at me. Still, there is much about his work that I enjoy, so I have found this to be a difficult relationship. I have written about my early experiences reading DFW elsewhere, but it bears repeating in brief here.

When I first read his work I hated it. I picked up Oblivion on the recommendation of a friend (he didn't recommend this book in particular, just that I read DFW's work and this is the one that I selected). I hated it. The overly detailed exactitude of his descriptions and the seeming lack of emotional depth turned me off and I quit reading. After further coaxing I picked up Infinite Jest and struggled through reading it over the course of about 8 months. This novel was less jarring in its minutiae than the stories in Oblivion but I still just didn't get it, didn't like it. But I kept thinking about. For the next two years I thought about that book and discussed it with whomever I met who had also read it (even in my doctoral program I found few who had made it through the whole of it). I eventually picked it back up to read again and had a very different experience. I loved the novel for a number of reasons. There were parts of it that still rankled, but I like the the experience of reading it and what it seemed to stand for. On that first read-through I had missed a lot of the post-/anti-ironic elements and I missed the true suffering that Hal faces. I, as I found others would too, had misread the character and read Wallace's descriptions of Hal's postmodern detatchment as endorsement rather than diagnosis.

I come to this point in my writing now because I have picked up DFW's Consider the Lobster, one of his collections of essays. The background here is that, with the exception of Infinite Jest, I have always preferred Wallace's non-fiction to his fiction. This is going to figure into my summation later. But what I noticed while reading the first essay in this collection, “Big Red Son,” is that it just drips with smarm.

“Big Red Son” is the first essay in the collection and it details Wallace's attendance at the Adult Video News awards, porn awards. While there are some amusing observations throughout, one really gets the sense that DFW is congratulating himself throughout for the edginess of covering this subject. Wallace attempts to give the subject the serious treatment that he implies that it deserves while simultaneously making fun of the people involved for their earnestness in their profession and undercutting his reportage at nearly every turn. Wallace's signature style is to insert himself into his own journalism and he casts himself as a sort of gee-shucks regular Joe that he does in much of

One of the big problems that emerges in DFW's work is a self-assuredness in his perspective as some sort of “outsider.” Wallace adopts a particular tone in which he assumes authority on select topics because he is a combination of a) being young enough to understand youth and youth perspective; b) being educated enough to view this perspective critically while also tapping into traditionalist views; and c) aware enough of the irony of the confluence of these positions to comment on all of it. The difficulty is that he then often writes himself into blind spots that seem to confirm the negative assertions of his critics.

Let me give you a specific example from the essay “Authority and American Usage,” a review of a style guide that ends up a polemic on English dialects and the role of proper English. I will note that I do agree with much of what Wallace writes in this essay and it is, overall, an extremely fine argument about the political role of language as political and cultural signifier. In one aside, Wallace strives to tell his reader what the problem of “politically correct” language is. The problem, for Wallace, is that it amounts to self-congratulatory virtue signaling on the part of the Left. But Wallace seems to go out of his way to provide examples in bad faith, referring to the poor as “economically disadvantaged” and eventually “pre-prosperous.” His examples tend to follow in the footsteps of many conservative critics who would demean “PC” by just making things up that no one ever actually said and then pointing at their imagined examples as subject of ridicule. This is poor argumentation. But there is a more serious flaw. In the pages leading up to this analysis, Wallace off-handedly uses the word “fag” as

This is where I ended it. I wanted to pick back up here because I remember the point that I was moving toward and I think that it bears finishing that thought, at least.

So what rankled me about this is not that Wallace has a dislike for what he calls PC language or that that he uses a slur in a denigrating way. What bothered me then, and what I still think about, is that in this essay that is supposedly about the political power of language, Wallace ignores the power of language to damage and dehumanize others. I don't think that he means to be hurtful by using the word “fag” in such a way, but that is what he is doing. By not thinking about his usage in this way, he participates and promotes a homophobic agenda.

This is disappointing because Wallace is typically a very thorough thinker and this seems like a real gap in his reasoning that is surprising to read now. It is also disappointing because Wallace is typically such an empathetic writer.

Book Notes

 I wrote this some time last year or the year before. I'm not sure when this is from, exactly. I am posting without further comment.

Island in the Sea of Time – SM Stirling

This is a series that I have known about for some time and I read the opening novel of the sister series about a year and a half ago. Without being too glib about it, I will just say that these books aren't for me. They straddle the line between SF and fantasy and I think that they end up being a bit on the fantasy side of things for my tastes.

The basic story is that the island of Nantucket is inexplicably transported 3000 years into the past and the islanders have to figure out how to survive. I like the concept. Stirling really gets into details on various aspects and has a very broad view of the world he wants to remake. I don't fault his vision or the writing. I just don't particularly care for the kind of tactical writing that he gets into. There are a lot of descriptions of fight scenes and war tactics that don't do it for me. For the right person, though, I can see this being a fantastic series.

Lincoln in the Bardo – George Saunders

I'm not sure I get George Saunders anymore. I wonder if I ever did.

The Bone Clocks – David Mitchell

I first read David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas when I was in graduate school. That is a nesting novel that interlaces several different characters and settings into a sort of cosmic return/cycle/metempsychosis that is pretty entertaining but unravels after one particular narratological mis-step that I won't get into here.

The Bone Clocks revisits some of the themes and narrative techniques featured in Cloud Atlas. Characters called “atemporals” live outside of time, fight an unseen war, and influence mortal humans around the world. Pretty good stuff. The opening sections of the book serve as character studies for the principal characters that will influence the latter half of the novel and the way that Mitchell interlaces their stories is confusing at first but comes together as the novel progresses.

While I found myself getting a little lost in the particulars of the individual characters I did enjoy the leaps in time that occur throughout the novel. Mitchell predicts a future Ireland in the “Endarkenment” after some cataclysmic event forces much of humanity back into a mostly pre-technology existence. I ended up liking the near-future predictions a bit more than some of the other aspects that ran a little more fantastic. This ends up being a better novel than Cloud Atlas and a better representation of some of the same ideas.

Riot Baby – Tochi Onyebuchi

This is a fantastic novel that blends near-future carceral dystopian elements with just enough fantasy to keep it going. The meditations on the impacts of violence on physical and psychological beings are moving and inspiring.

Read it.

How to Survive a Robot Uprising – Daniel H. Wilson

This is an odd little book that came to my attention recently. Over the last couple of years I have been trying to read more pop science books. This book came up on a list and so I requested it through the county library. This book is actually a guide to surviving a robot uprising. It includes some meditations on current technologies (well, current as of its publication in 2005) and how to evade, defeat these things. It is billed as a humor book as well, and it has its moments. I burned through the book pretty quickly because much of it is laid out in very small sections. Interesting book but I have the feeling that it will soon be completely obsolete if it is not already due to the rise of smart phones and all of that attendant technology. It would be cool to see an update of this written with more contemporary tech in mind.

Restarting.

It has been some time since I have posted anything here. I am, optimistically, going to set myself up to begin posting again. There are some books that I have read in the last year that I wanted to write about but I think I missed the boat because it has been some time since I read them. Some of them I may try to work back to them regardless.

As I draft this and think about getting started again, I also think about the ebb and flow of my interest, my energy, and my motivation. These things change over time and I often find myself being drawn back to old projects. I do have a different project in mind that I am not quite ready to reveal yet. It is something that I have been working on for quite some time (off-and-on) and that builds upon some of my previous work as well. It is a project that really energizes me when I think about it but it is also big, so it can overwhelm me as well.

Before this gets too long, I will just note that I am excited to find my motivation to write here returning. I will keep this flame stoked as long as possible.

Ending another year.

I am ending out 2021 without ever having returned to the blog. After all of the changes of 2020, I had high hopes for 2021. I won't say that it was worse because I don't think that it was. Instead, I will say that it was different. The successes and challenges were different. The second half of the year particularly presented a number of challenges for me, but it also brought a lot of hope as well. I won't get into specifics here but those who know me will be aware of what all of this means.

I do hope to begin posting again in 2022. I'm not sure when, how often, or in what capacity, but I do want to make a return. Be on the lookout. I may eventually finish up some of the series that I have started and begin writing about some new topics. Check back, or just wait for my annoying social media posts.