Okay okay okay, this blog started out on Blogspot in 2005 and ran there until 2010 (which era's worth of posts are, unbelieveably, still out there; Just Bing It!) before I moved over to Wordpress for sporadic posting until about 2019. Then my hosting provider decided to merge with another hosting provider that I didn't like and so I was like, whatever, I'm just going to go roll my own thing! That was a delusion I had because my lady and I also had just had our second baby. (He's 2 now. What the hell.) And then anyway a global pandemic hit and, well. Well. It's 2021 now and I'm seeing if I can get this thing running again, for some reason. (Reasons like "sometimes it's nice to scream into the void for more than 280 characters at a time" and "why not, nothing matters anyway, lol".)

Anyways, I've moved over to a custom-built Eleventy-based site hosted on Netlify and I think I've actually gotten all the Wordpress content imported over (thanks, Smashing Magazine!), except for the images, because I think I forgot to download all those before my old hosting provider imploded. So if you're looking for the 2011-era typewriter posts, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

Anyways, does anyone even blog anymore? I've had a weird reading year. I might try blogging about it. Does that make me retro-cool, yet? Who knows. Nothing matters anyway. LOL.

(Also I apologize for basically everything about this site. It's May 2021 and I can't remember half of what I did last year to configure this site and anyway the world is still basically, completely fucked. So!)

I don't know that anyone randomly lands on this page these days, or whether I actually have RSS working correctly here, but if you do, or if I do: hello, I've reinvented the blog as a newsletter! I'm five issues in now, and it's actually going okay.

You can subscribe to Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks: the newsletter about books that used to be a blog about books if you are interested. Do say hello, if you do.

I still don't know that anyone randomly lands on this page these days, but I'm also definitely certain I think that I did not actually have RSS working correctly here, so on the completely off-hand chance that you're out there and you're subscribed to this blog...hello, I've reinvented it as a newsletter, and with six issues under my belt, I'm starting to feel like maybe I'm actually going to stick with it.

You can subscribe to Thumb Drives and Oven Clocks: the newsletter about books that used to be a blog about books if you are interested. Do say hello, if you do.

...and all that said, I'm realizing I actually could still use the blog, for, like, stuff. So. Who knows. We'll see.

Hi! Hello. Issue nine is now available. Which is to say: I'm still doing the newsletter. You can read the archive and subscribe over here.

Issue ten is available. Has been for a bit, actually! You can find it in the archive and subscribe over here. If you subscribe you'll see Issue Eleven in your inbox as soon as it comes out. Which should be this week. Wild times.

Issue twelve came out a little while ago and issue thirteen just came out yesterday. How fun! Find them both in the archive over here. Also go ahead and subscribe. Make me feel good.

In other news I'm thinking maybe I'll stop resisting the tides and move from TinyLetter to Substack. In other other news I also wonder if I shouldn't move back to the blog actually. I don't know.

I sent issue fourteen out over the holidays. And then I moved the whole thing over to Substack. You can find the new home here, at least, until some billionaire megalomaniac comes along and buys the internet, at which point I'll move the whole thing to a paper 'zine.

Just a quick post to say the lights are on over here, if a bit dim. I'm working some stuff out under the hood that should get the power flowing a bit more smoothly, soon, I hope.

Hello, world. Again!

I've rebooted the internals of this site—nerd business, that—and now I should be able to actually post to this site again. The way I probably should have always been able to post to this site.

Which hopefully means, yes, actually posting to this site again. Seeing as, as far as I can tell, Substack continues to decide they prefer having Nazis rather than me on their platform. (Though I guess if they change their tune someone will need to tell me, since as of sometime yesterday I turned off all notifications from the site; maybe they'll send me a "we miss you and we like you more than we like getting money from Nazis and so we got rid of all the Nazis" holiday card or something?)

Anyways! I've moved almost all of the newsletters out onto this site, though I haven't thoroughly proofed it all or anything yet, so forgive me for whatever breaks. I've also slightly adjusted the starter design of this site to something more starter-but-adjusted-slightly. I don't mind it, but I know I'm going to want to get weird with it, too, at some point.

Honestly mostly I hope what this means for me is a return to more blog-style content about what I'm reading, half-baked thoughts what's going on in the lit world, and confused hand-wringing about the youths and their tropes and their TikToks. (Newsletter-issue style content was fun but also kind of stressful.)

One thing I will miss is the comments at the end of the newsletters. It was always nice whenever I did get a comment. In the meantime if you want to tell me how wrong I am about a book I liked or a newsletter platform I have abandoned, you can chat with me on Micro.blog (to which this blog should still syndicate, I think, if I didn't break it?) or on Bluesky (which I'm still holding out hope isn't about to become a total cesspool) or Mastodon (which I'm really not very active on at all but if you say hi there I will eventually say hi back!).

I've been a fan of Steve Erickson, the literary author, for a long while now, which means that, in my earlier days, my snobbier days, not infrequently would I come across Steven Erikson in my searches for new Steve Erickson books and get briefly excited before realizing Steven Erikson was some, yuck, clown-town fantasy author, ugh god as if, at which point I'd raise my nose so far up that tiny bears would crawl into it to hibernate for the winter, and then I'd quickly move on with my snobby, superior, literary life.

Flash forward a bit and I am an old now and the world is horrible and so badly needs to be escaped from at every possible turn and I am so all in on Steven Erikson's Malazan Book of the Fallen series.

For context, I've been looking for my place in the fantasy genre for a while now. Like, I wrote a little bit in the newsletter a while back about how I really struggled with the first book of the Wheel of Time series. It was "the least fun I've had with a book in years" and I can safely say amnesia about that experience has not kicked in yet; when it does I expect to feel some temptation to go back and try to make it through another book of that series to, like, get to the good bits, at which point I expect the amnesia curtain to drop and the horrid tedium of book one will flush back into every fiber of my being like some unlocked core memory from my brief stint in Hell.

Which I reiterate just to draw the contrast with the Malazan series, which is a notoriously difficult fantasy series, so I've read, and which series I've spent quite a bit of time as I've been starting to read it not entirely knowing what was going on, and yet nonetheless I've just rolled directly from book two into book three, entirely to the detriment to the entirety of the rest of my TBR pile, as the books in this series only seem to get longer with each new volume. There's an event horizon waiting for me somewhere down this road, I just know it.

It is fun. I am having fun.

It has the quality of being deeply immersive, in the sense that there is a lot of world and a lot of lore to be discovered and combed through and picked at here, none of which is ever exactly clearly laid out; there's a lot of hinting and a lot of dribbling out of information and if I'm feeling less kind it can feel a bit gimmicky, a little bit difficult for the sake of it, but for whatever reason it is working for me a lot. Like, I really would not typically read series books back-to-back like this, because of fatigue creep, because of all the other books I need to get to right now, wasn't this the year I was supposed to read Proust straight through ACK, but the vibe is right and it is fun and I am having fun.

Books two and three are probably the right choices for this kind of thing anyway as book two splits off from where book one ended to tell this whole other story in the world and then book three returns back to the setting of the first book, more or less, to pick up threads concurrent to book two but back on more familiar ground; I'm about 200 pages in and for as much of a challenge as book two could sometimes feel like (where am I? who are these people?) book three has been a lot of fun in a sort of "ah, hello old friends" way. And a "oh, hello new friends, too" way. And also in a "oh, the prologue introduces some business that's set literally 200,000-plus years before the main action of the series, cool cool cool, what am I doing with my life right now" way. It's great.

Or to put it another way, book two, that one took most of the book for me to understand the shape of the book I was reading, either because the book is complex in shape with numerous disparate threads winding through it or because I'm a mild dummy, whereas book three has a very clear shape and direction from the start, and it works off established territory and characters, which has made it surprisingly easy to sink into. I'm really looking forward to seeing where all this is going and I guess there's always next year for reading everything else in the world, right?

The 2024 Tournament of Books shortlist is live. I've read absolutely nothing from this year's list. Do I even read books? I don't know.

Ed. note: I had this longish issue of the newsletter going earlier this year where I talked about a handful of different books but I never published it because the issue never felt right; like it didn't actually sound like me, like I was self-consciously wrestling with some interesting ideas but I never quite managed to do the words good-right. But now that I'm back in blog-land, it seems relatively harmless to share these, because I do like these books, and I think maybe I was on to something interesting here. Maybe?

So: here's a slightly edited (but still weird-feeling to me) bit from that lost issue.

-

A man goes missing and an investigator is sent to find out what happened to him. Thing is, the location's Jupiter, the investigator's a lady with a skitch more emotional IQ than Sherlock Holmes, and her Watson-like companion is her ex-girlfriend. That's the set-up for The Mimicking of Known Successes, the new novella from Malka Older.

So, yeah. I loved it. I'll admit that after having become a fan of Older through her Centenal Cycle trilogy I wasn't exactly sure the pivot to the "cozy mystery novella" genre would play out, but once in a while the right book lands in your lap at the exact right moment, and this was exactly the book I needed when it arrived. I've been feeling more than a little anxious lately, and comfort reading, reading to feel better, is alright, y'know?

That said, for being a novella, it's a remarkably expansive one. It's no mere gimmick that sets the story on Jupiter—specifically, on a network of stations and platforms set on rings that circumnavigate Jupiter; Older both finds a way to write about post-apocalyptic humanity in a way that is not overtly terrifying and in a way that serves the fundamental narrative mechanics of her story. As I'm googling around for reference notes here I'm also reminded of how much Older reps for the importance of and the joy of competence in characters, and I'll admit that while knowing her investigative duo was a strong-minded pair with complementary skillsets, that layer of competence was so smoothly integrated into the story it flew completely under my critical radar. (Ed. note: yeah, "critical radar"? Someone was trying a bit too hard here.) Which, also, I suppose, is a good thing; perhaps it shouldn't need to call attention to itself? Either way, great, fun book, and I'm already on board with the fact that she's turning it into a series, with at least one more novella on the way.

Then by sheer coincidence, I think, I had Older on the mind when for my next book I finally picked up A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine, which I'd heard described as a bit of old-school, classic space opera. Though there's some big space energy present in the book the focus skews a bit more toward the political intrigue end of that spectrum, as an ambassador from a remote, independent space station is summoned to the city on the world at the heart of a galactic empire, under mysterious circumstances.

Generally speaking, I liked it without loving it, though without giving too much away, I'm left with high hopes for the sequel, A Desolation Called Peace, which I'll certainly read as well. (Ed. note: have not read yet, still plan to, got distracted.) I think maybe what I found lacking isn't exactly fair of me to note, but I feel like if I'm reading a story about an empire I'm going to be most drawn in when I can feel like I'm mentally pushed to feel the bigness of the thing I'm reading about, and with the relatively narrow focus of the story on it's primary character and those in her orbit investigating the mysterious circumstances around the death of her predecessor it was maybe hard to ever really feel the scope of the backdrop of the empire as a true thing or setting against which the main story was being told. (Ed. note: in other words, it felt like a small story against a big backdrop; I wanted more big stuff. Or at least I think that's what I meant.)

Which is fine, of course, because, for one, I still have a reread of The Expanse series coming up sometime in my life, which nailed that whole scope thing for me so well, and because there really was much else in Memory that I did feel drawn in by. The main character is pretty delightful, there's some cool cultural and technological contrasts at play that create some interesting frictions within the story, and the story treats language as an intrinsically interesting thing.

Which, of course, it is, and which, as well, is what got me thinking again about Malka Older, specifically about her concept of narrative disorder:

This comprises both the addiction to narrative content that has made, say, Netflix such a success (and long before that serial narratives on radio and in magazines, and before that bards and other purveyors of oral history) and the sense that the narratives we ingest affect how we interpret the world, what we expect to happen, how we stereotype the people we meet and their roles in our lives, how we ourselves act.

Older works this fictional disorder into her Centenal Cycle books well, to great effect, on the personal level, with at least one of her primary characters being diagnosed with this as a disorder, in her hypothetical future. Martine seems interested in something similar, though, but at a cultural level, at the level of the idea of a nation or an empire telling itself a story about itself. It goes as deep as poetry serving as a narrative device in the plot of the book up through the gentle layer of near disassociation her galactic empire seems mired in as it perceives itself through the lens of its own near-timeless layers of storytelling, from ancient grand epics through to contemporary cheap serials; everyone seems to relate everything throughout the book to one story or another, not the least by the ambassador herself, who has pursued her position out of an odd love for the general idea of the story of the empire she's seeking to help her station resist. It's even when events become conceptually more real to a particular character—when the story starts to give way to a chilling reality—that one character has a near emotional breakdown. Great stories do need to end, but when they end wrong, the story itself is damaged in the process.

Which is all to say that if I'm not quite one hundred percent on board with the hype around this book—if I'm not quite sure I fully get it—I can say that this aspect of the story is the one that gives me a way into it, a thread I kind of wanted to pull on a bit more and more as I kept reading.

I’m not going to say it was a bad reading year, but I’m going to say I was maybe a bad reader, or not my best reader, for some portions of the back half. I think my mood got away from me for a while and some books that I either put a lot of time into or that I was really excited about didn’t land right. It happens. (And I guess that’s what perpetually saying I’m going to reread things is for, after all.)

Still, of course, there were some real hits in there that I’m not sure I’ve mentioned yet. Lojman by Ebru Ojen (translated by Aron Aji and Selin Gökçesu) was particularly memorable. Combining my low-key love for stories that set folks against raw, primal-feeling backdrops (Trilogy by Jon Fosse did this a bit) with a fairly, shall we say, less-than-rosy view of motherhood, Lojman made for a quick and unsettling read. Highly recommended if you’re in the mood to get weird. (Thanks to Rebecca Hussey for this recommendation, though I don’t know if she knew she was actually recommending it to me at the time!)

I’ve read both The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle and have loved both and have lived under the bizarre, misbegotten belief that Shirley Jackson’s previous books were not great, which record thankfully Christine set straight for me, leading to me picking up Hangsaman and loving that one, too. There were parts early on where I think I laughed out loud, which isn’t something I expected to do with a Jackson novel, one of which points was a fairly critical turning point of the book that was so upsetting but also just so well-put I couldn't help but laugh through my horror across the span of five or six perfect little words. Being in large part a campus novel the book also made for a mildly surreal read reading it over lunch breaks on the town square of the college campus where I work.

Earlier in the year I read Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont by (the writer) Elizabeth Taylor and was just knocked out of my chair by it more than once. I know I set out a big ambitious outline of things I wanted to say about it that got lost in the rust of the rest of the year. It might be one from last year I’m most tempted to go revisit just so I can try to at least point out in better detail how it actually moved me.

I ended the year with Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart which mostly left me feeling really depressed and anxious. I mean, it’s a good book, and it’s sometimes a very funny book, but, like, I don’t know. I saw the movie Idiocracy for the first time sometime last year I think and in ways the book kind of just felt like prequel fan-fiction? In the way that both works kind of hit differently when you’re coming to them today rather than when they first came out. Since Idiocracy came out we’ve had an actual literal moron television clown in the White House and since Super Sad True Love Story came out it basically became just a super sad true story about the world and also the moron television clown is somehow still around and ready to murder us all to get power back so he can murder us all some more. Which made it all kind of a tough novel to casually pick up and read for fun while I was, you know, already giving myself heart palpitations while also trying to enjoy the holidays with my kids, huh.

China Miéville is publishing a new novel. Co-authored with some cool guy named, ah, Keanu Reeves?

I’m going to need a minute to breathe, here, so go ahead and read this article about it while I, uh, breathe.

Okay, okay.

So, honestly, I’ve been mildly worried that Miéville was done with novels. Which of course would be fine! The Bas Lag series from 2000 to 2004 would be enough to cement his legacy for me forever; that The City & the City, Kraken, and Embassytown run from 2009 to 2011 is crazy to think about. Just casually dropping three bangers over three years like it's no big deal. That said things get a little weird after that, I’ve been hit or miss on his novellas and story collections, I think they got a bit more abstract on me or something, though I’m sure they’re all worth revisiting with a clear head and reset expectations.

Which is only to say it’s been a bit since I’ve had that “I’m reading new China Miéville and it is amazing” buzz. Maybe this is going to be it. Comes out in July which is good because that means I’ve got time to catch up on the Keanu Reeves graphic novels.

And I saw myself standing in my dining room holding the book, reading the opening couple lines, thinking to myself I was going to only sample it, and then I was turning past the first page, and then I was moving to the living room, sitting down on the couch, and this is what I needed right now, I saw...

...Ahem. I started reading Septology by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls, last night. I'd read Trilogy somewhat recently and loved it, and picked up Septology about as soon as Transit Books came out with their single-volume edition. Then he won a little prize called the Nobel, which is pretty cool for him.

This is one of those books I've been kind of holding on to, thinking it was going to be one of those very precise right-mood-right-moment kind of books, and I guess that moment was last night, when I did literally pick it up thinking it wasn't going to be the next book I started reading, I didn't think I was ready for another 500+ page book—I started the year with Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez, translated by Megan McDowell, and that was pretty great, I've got some draft words about that lying around here somewhere, those claws, those claws—I was just curious how it started again, and then I remembered what a spell-caster Fosse is, based on my limited previous experience with him, because dang it if I didn't find myself almost fifty pages in before I had to go to sleep. He makes this kind of thing go down so smooth, it's great.

I am no stranger to the long-sentence book; Septology, which is sort of told in an unbroken-sentence format—I mean, technically, there's no periods that I've come across, plenty of question marks and exclamation points though, and he breaks the paragraph format for dialogue, which it all feels simultaneously pedantic to point out and also noteworthy in that it does mean the rhythm of the book is much more complex and interesting and generally modulated than it could perhaps be otherwise—immediately brings Ducks, Newburyport to mind, obviously (...the fact that I haven't reread Lucy Ellmann's masterpiece honestly kind of shocks me, the fact that I wasn't blogging much when I actually read it honestly kind of bums me out, the fact that I can basically only point to a bit of addendum on this newsletter post about that book, the fact that the snake is kind of chasing the snail here because I got into Jon Fosse accidentally because of Lucy Ellmann when I ordered Miss MacIntosh, My Darling from Dalkey Archive Press because of an Ellmann comparison I picked up somewhere and I tossed a random-to-me slender volume by Jon Fosse into my cart on a whim, the fact that now here I am reading a Jon Fosse book which also features a very, very long sentence, the fact that it's real hard not to do the Ellmann pastiche, the fact that the only way out is through...), and also, obviously, it of course puts me in a Stephen Dixon mindset, in the sort of way where I want to immediately run out into the street and find all the cool kids reading Jon Fosse and start shoving copies of Frog into their hands.

And now I'm here with Septology and it feels like it's going to be another sort of what do you do with the camera in an unbroken long-shot kind of books, and part of that seems to involve just floating, floating in and out of the consciousness of the narrator, floating into the observed and back from it again, looking into the mirror and then back out from the mirror—sometimes at the narrator, sometimes at a reflected stranger, who reflects back inward on himself. The prose is elegant and rhythmic and compulsive, easily digestible, and yet still light and dreamlike in a way that feels like the right place to land at the end of yet another cold, dark midwestern day. Is there such a thing as anti-summer reading? This is perhaps that.

As for content it's so far contained both a brilliantly concise description of the need to get images out of one's self and onto canvas, and one of the most compelling uses of a seesaw in any literature I've read. Up. Down. Up. Down.

Because of the way my weeks work I tend not to read much on Fridays and then rarely ever on Saturdays and then Sunday, it depends. Which is to say that I at least somewhat semi-consciously know whatever I’m reading on Friday over lunch is going to have to tide me over until Sunday night at the earliest, often.

Septology is a hard book to take a break from, as it basically demands you sink into the consciousness of the narrator, which consciousness somewhat regularly becomes untethered; minds, they wander. For that reason, if I can offer you, curious reader, any advice, it’s this: if you know you’ve got a break coming up, don’t leave this book off mid-stream. Find the end of a section and get to it. You’ll have a much more pleasant time dipping back into the stream once you come back to it at the start of a section.

You’ll thank me for this.

But don’t worry about me, though, I’m fine, I found my way back into it on Monday, after ending Friday about 20 pages shy of the end of section three, which was an extended tale from the life of the narrator’s doppelgänger, who may also just be the narrator, on some level. Once I got past section three I slid almost effortlessly through section four, the shortest section of the book. I’m feeling good about finishing the book ahead of the coming weekend. Won’t happen again, in other words.

The book remains not hard to read, considering its length and style, but it does evince a level of subtlety that I'm afraid has crept up on me as I’ve made my way along its winding, dream-like river. The book is nothing but real until you start finding yourself wondering what real actually is, after all. It’s also deeply spiritual, or in tune with spirit, or...this is a wrong way to put it. I’m not a religious man, these days, so I'm not sure the right way to put it, and I feel even kind of icky even using words like “spiritual” and “religious” because that’s not my section at the bookstore and it's also not this book's section of the bookstore, but this book makes me get it, a little bit, how a “good” version of something spiritual could feel. If that makes sense.

Speaking of words I feel weird using: if you took a drink every time someone in the book world used the word “luminous” you'd be dead by dawn. I mean, it's too much, I mean, come on, shut up, find another word. And I mean find another word because sometimes some of us actually need to use it for real because a book like Septology comes along within which light shining in the darkness is actually a very real thing critical to the whole affair and the book itself exudes a truly real kind of luminosity and I can’t even use that word when I actually need to use it because the book world has choked on it to the point where it means nothing. Grr, I’m annoyed.

In other news I remain glad I'm back on the blog rather than the newsletter because this post would be a truly awful newsletter issue. I mean it might also be a bad blog post! But at least it exists.

The ending of Septology was, to further dip into book-review cliche, quietly devastating; in related news, Cleveland just got through one of the cloudiest Januaries of the last 70 years, which is only to say that my emotional pump was certainly primed for a slow, rhythmic, ruminative meditation on art and life and, of course, death, on a lot of things that may or may not have explicitly been on the pages in front of me but which I was certainly ready to read into them at a moment’s notice, as I’ve been thinking about art and life and, of course, death, and of the holes or lack of holes left behind by those who leave us behind, of what holes or lack of holes I’ve ever left behind in the wake of my own life, of hope and faith or lack of hope and faith in something better to come, of what it’s all for, in the end. Primed. Pumped.

To say that January might be the worst time to intellectually engage with this book but absolutely the most perfect time to emotionally engage with this book might imply some kind of inverse relationship to how one would experience the book in, say, July, but I literally can not imagine having read this book any other way or any other time than I just did. Like, quite possibly, here, the worst summer book ever.

Great stuff. Five stars. Bummed me absolutely the hell out so hard.

Now I’m going to cheer myself up by reading Wanderers by Chuck Wendig. See you in March!

I didn’t actually intend to not come back until the end of February, but, hey, here we are: time flew by as I flew through Wanderers by Chuck Wendig—which was fun in the exact way I needed something to be fun when I picked it up, fun in a “Stephen King, but different” way; as a slow reader, typically, swallowing an 800 page novel whole over the course of a week is a rare treat—before starting in on Lies and Sorcery, by Elsa Morante, which I am now absolutely slogging my way through, which is not for one second to say I don’t like it—I’m actually really rather into it, otherwise I’m sure I would have given up on it quite a while ago; I just, for whatever reason (distraction, fatigue, a Wanderers-shaped hangover, distraction) can’t seem to get through more than a handful of pages at a time.

Did I say distraction?

To be sure, I’m sure this is a me problem, and it’s not without precedent. The pitch that got me on to Morante was NYRB publishing it and then leaning back against the nearest brick wall and, lighting some cheap, unfiltered Italian cigarette, mumbled something like "Hey, you like Elena Ferrante," under their breath, no question mark, and me being like, well, yes, yes, I do, and then I owned the Morante book with no memory of ordering it, weird. And but so when I read the Neapolitan quartet I ultimately loved it but boy oh boy did it take me a while to get into it, really, I think, if I remember correctly; like, maybe it just took a couple books for the shape of the thing to really come clear to me? And now I’m at the midpoint of the Morante book and I’m hoping for that same sort of turn, that same sort of sense of churning momentum to kick in to start carrying me down the far side of this hill. We’ll see.

Because I do feel more interested in the book as the scope expands—as we go further back in time, as more vantages are opened up and more connections are made between the characters, all of which feeds into the narrator’s story, and my curiosity increases as to how and in what ways that history informs, well, her, the narrator’s, existence, life, decision to tell the story. How much of it is, shall we say, lies, and how much else, sorcery. Because I find that narrator really interesting in a way that goes beyond the Ferrante connection. Because what’s cool is that for all the obvious and known reference points cited in the marketing around the book—Ferrante, Tolstoy, Proust, yes, yes, of course—I’m also getting this waft of Dickens, which is cool if you're into that, and but also Shirley Jackson? Like, the narrator is maybe a Shirley Jackson character, given access to a ghostly time machine? And I’m not nearly expert enough on Jackson to draw that connection out for you and I don't know how much of that's just me reaching and how much it's going to feed into the story's resolution but I swear I swear it’s there. Something of the narrative misfit, something of the enthralled loner. Something? Something.

This just in from Dalkey Archive Press: "Miss MacIntosh, My Darling has shipped from the printer."

I pre-ordered this a little over two years ago when Dalkey relaunched, about two years after I read Ducks, Newburyport, after which I subsequently listened to the Two Month Review podcast's read-along, during which I believe theoretical parallels were drawn from the latter book to the former, at which time I learned Miss MacIntosh was completely out of print and that it was essentially impossible to get one's hands on a copy of it. Now here's to seeing if it takes me another two-odd years to actually get around to reading the thing (which might be how long it takes me to finish Lies and Sorcery, despite how much I seem to think I like it).

To be clear, this is a zero-shade-thrown post: there was a good 2022 update on the struggles of bringing the press back to life. I have to imagine getting this beast of a book out into the world feels real good.

I've been reading The Power Broker by Robert Caro this year, more or less along with the 99 Percent Invisible Breakdown series, and it's honestly going pretty well. I've been playing a bit of fall-behind-and-catch-up with the episode releases over the summer; I just caught up with the August episode and it's looking like I'm about to fall behind on the September episode (I just started reading Megan E. O'Keefe's Devoured Worlds trilogy, which I've been saving up for the right moment when it made perfect sense to do the whole thing in one frantic gulp).

The August section was surprisingly rough, so it was pleasant to have the podcast episode to turn to afterward, where they straight-up admitted, "Hey, this section is surprisingly rough." That made me feel better about suddenly feeling like a complete gibbering idiot trying to keep up with whatever was going on in that block; it was the part for me where, were this a novel, I think you'd definitely be the most, like, yeah, I get it, this dude sucks. But the good word is the September chunk should be much smoother, so I am looking forward to that, and then we start moving into the loss of power, and that's going to be good, I suspect.

I think the highest praise I can give this book is that is confirms I am in fact actually interested in reading the LBJ books, too.

Anyways. I don't think I even realized this was the 50th anniversary year of the book. So that's cool.

Also, no, I haven't started Miss MacIntosh yet. I'll get there. Right now I'm listening to the Blank Check episode about Dune (1984), which has me thinking maybe now's the time to finally start my planned reread of Dune. I first read it a couple years ago and it left me feeling oddly cold. Even now having seen all the movies I'm like, am I still trying to crack Dune? I think so. My goal this time out will be to read it and not feel completely exhausted by it the whole time. Which makes me think I should probably wait until after I run that marathon I'm planning on running in a month. Oh boy am I tired!