This list has evolved from pure cardinality (hey, look at my library backlog) to a graph of reading connections and referrals. Any time you promote content for a decade, it shifts from update and cadence to professed allegiance to content creators. With the increased competition for attention, content spend and the scarcity of proper marketing for books, my low-gain amplification of authors’ signals is my contribution to the cause. And if it helps those authors earn a living wage, or explore their next projects, it is rewarding in multiple aspects.
I’ve also tried to move from medically unhealthy doses of sci-fi into music, sports, business, non-fiction, biographies and topics outside of my historic comfort zones. Recommendations from friends, authors whose work I enjoy, and the annual Locus awards list inform my selections.
This quarterly recap is a strange one – it includes a run of vacation reading where I didn’t hit my book every day average, and then I finished exactly one book in September (a long and dense one, but work travel, late nights and competing interests had me dropping the Kindle before I turned a dozen pages).
23. “Translation State,” Anne Leckie, sci-fi, finished July 1
Leckie’s work makes you think about gendering (yes, the verb, not the noun), power structures, and what it means to be human. A tri-partate story of finding self, meaning, empathy and care, Leckie weaves in time-space disruptions, our fear of the all-powerful aliens who will (literally) eat us, and a good political thriller to further extrude the worlds from her previous books.
24. “Tricks of the Mind,” Derren Brown, non-fiction, finished July 4.
A reference of a reference (forgotten in the four months since I ordered a used hardcover and had it sitting on my office desk until it became beach reading) – this 15 year old book exposes and explores Brown’s vocation as a mentalist and magician while dismantling the mental manipulation of mediums, healers and psychics. He is brutal in his honesty, and takes an Annie Duke-like level of analysis in how people’s perceptions can be viewed (and I think the one-two punch of Annie Duke’s poker books and Brown’s descriptions of suggestion make for a better poker face).
25. “Hopeland,” Ian McDonald, sci-fi, finished July 16
Danny Hillis and Stewart Brand’s “Clock Of The Long Now” fascinated me when first published as an exercise in resiliency and long term thinking. Hillis revealed to me in a private conversation that anything designed to run for 10,000 years runs the risk of becoming religion with its ceremonies and attendants. In “Hopeland” Mcdonald deals with ecological disaster and survival, long-term community development and synthetic families; intentional or not I can find source parallels ranging from the Hillis-founded Long Now Foundation (who insist on using 5-digit years) to the synthetic families of the Agohozo Shalom Youth Village. It is a long, deeply detailed book that is beautifully written as it traces one synthetic family through two centuries and the end times of the Anthropocene. Fantasy elements, religious (new and old) elements, elemental elements and as inferred from the title, always the beacon of hope intertwine and interact. There are paragraphs that feel like poetry in their use of words and meter and so make the book a delightfully slow read, a fine wine decanted over hundreds of pages.
26. Amazon “Far Reaches” collection, sci-fi, finished July 19
Six stories by a number of my favorite writers tackling the questions of human existence, our place in or among the stars, and what universe-scale time means. All of them were single night reads, about an hour each, and each one delighted in the way a superb sci-fi novella does, leaving more for you to explore than was detailed in exposition. James SA Corey (“The Expanse”), John Scalzi, Rebecca Roanhorse, Ann Leckie, Nnedi Okorafor and Veronica Roth contributed to the collection, and each story is stand alone as well as furthering the thought experiment.
27. “Titanium Noir,” Nick Harkaway, sci-fi, finished July 21
A truly dark detective story about life extension, amnesia, love and revenge, and the weirdness in their intersection when real life intrudes on our theoretical fantasies. Fast paced, full of subtle twists (most of which I did not see coming) and the kind of gritty, dirty, South Chicago meets South Philly street action that outlines the weirdly familiar world.
28. “Crook Manifesto,” Colson Whitehead, fiction, finished August 5
The sequel to “Harlem Shuffle” set a decade later in the 1970s New York of crime, decay, corrupt politics and all of the things that made my sister and me cower in the back seat every time we came through the Lincoln Tunnel. Whitehead conveys the story in three parts that go horribly wrong, despite the characters’ attempts to sort out their Shakesaperean plights. For some reason, I didn’t get into this as quickly as I have his other books, and while I appreciated the historical and title cross-references (it reminded me of first reading EL Doctorow’s “Ragtime”) it took a good quarter of the book to get into the pacing.
29. “Into the Void,” Geezer Butler, music/biography, finished August 15.
Autobiography of the Black Sabbath bassist, following the major storylines of most British post-War rockers – growing up poor, finding bandmates from town, breaking the norms of the time concerning music and culture. Much of the drama focuses on Butler’s repeated firings and searches for singer/front man to replace a reeling Ozzy Osbourne, as well as the on-going issues with management, royalties and labels. Perhaps I’m jaded after reading multiple musician biographies, but the common threads appear in the same weaves: The labels treated the bands horribly; their management frequently skimmed cash flow for benefit of everyone but the band; the band was in too much of a haze to recognize the issues; they didn’t really make money until {big live album, major US tour; 401(k) tour during 3rd reunion} and the much-celebrated debauchery and wildness usually was snowballed, over-glorified reporting of one or two incidents.
30. “Mother Noise,” Cindy House, non-fiction, finished August 19.
House’s collection of essays about motherhood, addiction, recovery and writing takes its title from making a “mother noise” while watching her son. We discovered House when she opened for David Sedaris at a recent NYC show; one of her essays describes how her friendship, mentorship and professional relationship developed over decades and made me appreciate both writers that much more. The stories are raw, unnerving at times, but always hopeful and directional - a melange of Anne Lamott’s writing about motherhood and Josh Eppard’s “Drum Set Confessional” series about addiction.
31. “Yes: The Tormato Story,” Kevin Mullryne, music, finished August 23.
This was a parallel (dead tree softcover) parallel read with my last two Kindle books, purchased direct from publisher as part of my effort to consume everything Yes-related. The title is a play on both the story of how the album was conceived, written and recorded as well as the now apocryphal stories about how the Hipgnosis cover ended up with a splattered tomato. The first third of the book, discussing the songs, the recording and the instruments was fun and useful for certain kinds of prog rock nerds. There is enough skepticism about the intent and direction of some lyrics to steer the opening from blind faith to a fair assessment of the musical craft. The middle third covers packaging, the story of the tomato splashed cover and the tour, while the last third includes variants, media reception, and notes. In its entirety it reads like an exhaustive brain dump about the album and the broadcast notes from the author’s podcasts, which is not a bad thing if you have a personal relationship with Yes and/or this particular album at the end of the “classic lineup” sequence. “Tormato” remains a very personally important album, landing in the middle of my high school years when it was clear Yes and some of the older prog bands were either going to evolve or fade; “Don’t Kill The Whale” got played on the cafeteria juke box almost daily. I remain faithful to “Release, Release” and “Silent Wings” as the best composed songs, and reading about Squire and Howe’s tone engineering (Howe: almost none; Squire: lots of Eventide effects and hard picking to get that roiling, swirling sound) was worth the price of the book alone.
32. “Retail Gangster: The Insane, Real-Life Story of Crazy Eddie,” Gary Weiss, non-fiction, finished September 3.
I grew up with Crazy Eddie commercials bombarding my brain with promises of bargain audio gear. When it was time to buy my first “real” component stereo – cassette deck, amplifier, speakers – it was off to Crazy Eddie in New Brunswick where I was subjected to the bait and switch, the teasers, and the upsells that this book covers in gory detail. I may or may not have gotten a “lunched” amplifier (one repacked in its original box); the gear served me well for five years and then I bought a real-real component system The experience – of high pressure sales, of leaving with a good but not Sony-quality component, of feeling that you likely paid too much in cash – is the above water narrative of Weiss’s take-down of Crazy Eddie Antar. The cash skimming, sales tax fraud, inventory inflation, cash float payments and insane family dynamics fill in the rest of the story and vindicated my 40-year old feelings about shopping experiences in their stores. The book is detailed, well researched and clearly separate the different family lines (despite their overlapping names). Unlike The Sopranos, where Tony is a criminal whom we kind of admire, Crazy Eddie is just a huckster and a cheat, which makes the book sit somewhere between forensic accounting and true crime drama.