Reading List: Q1 2025

Now deep into the 2nd decade of publishing quarterly book reports, I’ve started adding context on how I found the book or author. In keeping with the “1,000 True Fans” theme, anything I can do to help deserving authors receive more exposure and small bumps in sales volumes is worth transcribing some notes.

As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. If you click through on a book link and buy something, I get a small commission.

I finished a surprising number of books in the first quarter of the year, despite a few false starts: two vacation that involved long flights and some beach reading helped, as did inspiration from book stores doubling as music venues such as Reykjavik’s Hus Mals og Menningar

Wonderful book store, jazz cafe, coffee shop and refuge from the rain in central Reykjavik, Iceland.

1. “Cahokia Jazz,” Francis Spufford, fiction, finished January 20.
   Recommended by former Sun Microsystems DE Brenda Laurel.

   A deep, dark alternative history of 1920s America, where a city of Native Americans sits between the burgeoning capitalist (and monopolist) push from the east and an influx of Black Americans from the South. A staged murder intended to draw the city into chaos forms the chord changes for this detective story, but it’s really about loyalty, love, tradition and a sense of identity in what you do. Right up there with Colson Whitehead for capturing the possibilities of a different America. Reading “Four Lost Cities” by Annalee Newitz gave me much more perspective on Cahokia and the entire cultural domain lost — read the backstory before the fiction and it’s an even better story.

2. “The Octogenarian Handbook,” Peter Schroeder, non-fiction, finished January 25.
   I don’t remember who highlighted this book as a serious guide to not dying. It reminded me of the joke that Joel Chasnoff makes when the Israeli Army handed him dog tags with his name mis-spelled: “So don’t die while you have them.” Meant to be a prequel to thinking about your own morbidity, it was decidedly light on facts, data driven examples or practical advice and more an enumeration of the things that go (increasingly) wrong as you age into your 80s.

3. “A Conventional Boy,” Charles Stross, sci-fi, finished February 10.

   “Wicked” meets “The Laundry Files” if you haven’t already read the Laundy shorts embedded as parts two and three. Stross’s Laundry series has been a favorite since he began lambasting the Twilight and James Bond stereotypes, and this feels like a peek behind the curtain as well as the requisite race to the brain-eating terror finish (in triplicate). The book is three views to the state secrets, with the first novella length story representing a new take on the “D&D as Satanic Rites” panic, and the latter majority of the book being re-issues of Laundry short stories.

4. “An Instrument Maker’s Guide to Insanity and Redemption", Michael Gurian and Dick Boak, music, finished February 21.
   Picked out of a Fretboard Journal promotional email.
   About one hundred luthiers share their tale of mistakes, intense customers, beautiful work and the bond of musician and instrument. Stemming from my fascination with how guitar pickups work (and there are many Les Paul and Leo Fender hat tips) I’ve longed to couple my love of wood and woodworking with guitars — this is the story of how that particular wood-bound sausage is made.

5. “Above Head Height,” James Brown, sports, also finished February 21.
   Referenced in David Hepworth’s “I Hope I Get Old Before I Die”
   A few dozen stories about playing small pitch/small team soccer (football for the intended audience) and the weak van der Waals force of team mates, organizations, the sterotypical players it attracts, and how aging betrays your love of the sport. There are snippets of playing beer league with your now adult sons that resonated strongly from my late night hockey “inhaler league,” as well as sympathy for the purple badges of courage that come from imitating your heroes on whatever field of play. Read in parallel with Gurian/Boak’s guitar book as both are serialized email chronicles, with whatever plot you choose to overlay or interpret.

6. “Meeting Across The River,” various authors, fiction, finished February 23.
   Discovered while researching a research-y paper on Springsteen’s song.
   Now twenty years old, a dozen recognized authors put their spin on Springsteen’s dark and mysterious “Meeting Across The River” to discover more about Eddie, Cherry, and the song’s narrator. Some bordering on the absurd, some very dark, all of them thinking about a song that almost didn’t make “Born To Run” fifty years ago. Highly recommended for Boss fans and those who go down the shore or over the Jersey state line.

7. “Space Oddity,” Cathrynne Valente, sci-fi, finished February 24.
   Sequel to her “Space Opera” that left me smiling for days.
   It took me two tries to get started; I found I needed a good stretch of reading time to make it through the first few chapters with their run-on adjectives and glorious descriptions of the mundane. I’m egregiously happy that I did, because “Oddity” picks up on the prickly torn edge of “Opera” and then throws everything into a Douglas Adams-infused, Ziggy Stardust terminal, punk rock and “why are we here” story that had me alternately laughing, sniffling and wishing it had just one more chapter. Valente writes the rock and roll story that really does save the world.

8. “Hampton 98,” Peter Pidgeon, music, finished February 26.
   Touted in various jam band newsletters/mailing lists.
   Pidgeon was a jaded Phish tour vet in 1998, less than 15 years into the band’s existence. This 4-day travelogue highlighting his physical injuries, transportation mishaps, lot economics meltdowns and ticket acquisition strategies is bordering on quaint today: cell phones, GPS systems and mobile payment systems make the economics and logistics of the book less foundational. There isn’t enough written about the show, and flashbacks (sometimes literally) to other related shows and experiences are delineated quite well enough. As a Phan, it was entertaining and felt that it filled in some of the Phish canon.

9. “The Feather Thief,” Kirk Johnson, non-fiction, finished February 26.
   Mentioned in Bruce Schneier’s “Crypto-Gram” (and highly recommended reading)
   Johnson dissects the theft of nearly 300 rare bird specimens from the British Museum, involving fanatical salmon fly tiers, a well-played set of court appearances, a flute prodigy and a lot of sketchy characters at NJ trade shows. His trek to find the missing bird skins and feathers, and to reconstruct attempts to hide electronic tracks, makes for a fast moving detective story prefaced with the background of natural history as a discipline, the world of fly-tying and the quest for Victorian era materials, and the short history of plumage as fashion accessory. It’s well researched, well written and has far too much action in NJ for a global story.

10. “Reckless,” Chrissie Hynde, music/biography, finished March 1.
    Suggested through my trail of music biography history.
    It’s not a kiss-and-tell, it’s not a history of the Pretenders’ rather short discography, and it’s not a classic rock book. I loved the story for its strengths: an unfettered look at the Vietnam War protests, the Generation Gap, the inherent sexism in rock (yes, mostly in the 70s and 80s but still to this day), and the birth of punk rock. You’re in the homestretch of the book before the Pretenders are formed, and then the excesses of drug use quickly bring the story to a close but do not define it.

11. “Four Lost Cities,” Annalee Newitz, non-fiction, finished March 17.
    Suggested because I’ve read all of her other work.
    Newitz discards the myth of “lost” cities and focuses on how and why they were abandoned, impacted or damaged by exogenous events like volcanic eruption (Pompeii), cycles of drought and flooding (Angor), shfits in nomadic life or religious practices. I wish I had read this before “Cahokia Jazz” as the last section of the book is devoted to that city of indigenous North and Central American people that flourished while Europe was in the Dark Ages. She relates history through stories; you get a sense of what life was like and she disperses the myths of European and American archaeology that imply any of these cities were less complex, wonderful or critical as they were in their eras.

12. “Picks & Shovels,” Cory Doctorow, fiction, finished March 19.
    Because I am a Cory fan-boy.
    The final installment in the Martin Hench trilogy (although I hope he returns!) and a fast moving back story to the forensic accounting hero. Personally, the book captured the magic and the related “otherness” of being an early computing nerd in the mid-1970s - feelings of control, marrying hardware and software, bootstrapping anything important, and the rush of bringing something new to the non-computing world. It is, equally, a take-down of closed systems, of proprietary hardware and non user-serviceable platforms, and unfair business practices that grace Doctorow’s non-fiction work in content, copyright and culture.

13. “Coach Wooden and Me,” Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, non-fiction, finished March 25.
    Referred through Kareem’s Substack.
    I’ve now recommended this book half a dozen times in the half week since I finished it. It marries two of my favorite things: a strong sense of empowerment and social justice along with a fair but slightly lionized view of one of the greatest coaches of all time. Kareem’s reflections on how his relationship with Wooden changed from coach to mentor to friend is the template for adult friendship at its finest, when socio economic, demographic, and age differences are conversation starters.
    
    In the queue: “Talking Heads On Track,” John Scalzi’s “When The Moon Hits Your Eye” and Peter Wolf’s new biography. Music continues to over-take sci-fi in 2025.