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!

Still working my way through The Power Broker and my thoughts are two-fold:

1. How can we know this book exists and yet still let anyone, ever, anywhere have power?
2. Why does the loss of power section suddenly feel like it got ripped out of one of my fantasy novels?

I dunno, gang. I dunno.

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.

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.

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.

So, on the one hand, I guess the least I can do right now is start blogging more about what I'm reading again, because reading is good and writing is good and writing about reading and reading about writing is good, and we can use all the good we can get right now, and what a good time to do some good thinking, right?

On the other hand, I'm currently reading Sarah J. Maas.

Here's the thing: I like contrast.

The other night I watched the movie Ouija (2014). I'm a big fan of the podcast Blank Check (I have been vibing extremely hard on the David Lynch series this fall) and they're doing a Tabletop Games series on their Patreon feed and Ouija was up next on my to-listen-to feed and wow was the movie not good. Like I was watching the movie evaporate in front me across its run time. Like if cotton candy was a movie except the sugar has no flavor and you have a low-grade fever and then you wake up on the couch and one of your socks is missing, that kind of thing. I am no stranger to watching bad movies and I enjoy watching bad movies because bad movies can be a lot of fun but this one was really a stiff breeze blowing past the other side of a brick wall.

The next night I watched The Green Knight (2021) and it was like I had died, like I had died a real death and was reborn a newborn babe in a foreign land, a babe who was seeing film for the first time in his life. There was more visual interest in any ten frames of The Green Knight than there were in all the frames of Ouija combined. Skill! Craft! Creativity! Had I ever experienced these things before that night? Perhaps not!

It's obviously an unfair comparison, more a cosmic bit of coincidence in timing, leading to insight. Watching a movie that was legit one star out of ten essentially back-to-back with a movie that was ten hundred stars out of ten made for revelatory viewing. In seeing what cinema truly could not be I was reminded afresh what cinema could be.

I do not think I will experience a similar moment of enlightenment after reading Sarah J. Maas?

This is not, I'll say, right now, for the record, intended to be a hit piece on Maas. I've read like 250 pages of Throne of Glass, her first published novel, and it's not terrible. There are some sincerely terrible sentences, there's some confused pacing, there's some things I go into it knowing clear and damned well I'm not the target audience for, but there's also some hints of greater world building and a willingness to get gross and honestly a little weird, and if the net result so far is that I'm maybe a little bit bored, I can say safely that at least I'm not bored to pain, the way I've felt when I've read some very long fantasy novels written by some very big men. (I'm looking at you, Robert Jordan.) I'm a little bored and maybe I'm fantasizing about reading Dune again (I book I did not actively enjoy at all when I read it a couple years ago but which maybe the amnesia's kicked in after a couple movies and I'm willing to give it another shot?) but overall I'm not being actively hurt by the book and I can see getting myself on to the part of the series when my trusted advisors advise me it "gets good" (which, yes, let's admit, when a series comes with the caveat that it only "gets good" after a significant initial investment of time, is not exactly a ringing endorsement for what I should be doing with my limited time on this planet) all of which means maybe it's actually just fine for right now?

Just wanted to clear that up before I press ahead with whatever point I'm trying to make my way toward, here.

To be clear, if I'm not yet, I'm not exactly expecting enlightenment-through-contrast after reading Maas; it's not exactly what I'm seeking, though, in a way, I'm always kind of looking for something approximating that, across everything I read. My reasons for turning to Maas right now, my reasons, as a heterosexual adult male who should and maybe even does actually know better, are a little more complex and a little more simple all at once.

One the one hand it really is just about needing a moment to sort of check out of reality for a bit, to give the old sad brain a chance to floss itself out, to do a clean reset on the synapses and what have you. I had a streak of things I didn't really connect with in the weeks leading up to this marathon I ran in October (no, no, it's no big deal, they give these medals out to anyone who runs 26.2 miles, pretty much) because I was kind of anxious about the marathon the whole time leading up to it, and now I'm kind of trying to find my way out of that funk, and then well you know how the entire nature of reality kind of shifted on us a week or so ago, and it seems like as good a time as any to read some books that maybe don't exactly entirely count for much, for me. It's less a time for lingering with a glass of fine wine and a plate of fancy cheese and more a time for slamming a six pack and eating the entire—the entire—god damned bag of chips.

On the other hand there really are some other more complex thoughts at play. There's sincere curiosity; I mean maybe I don't need to read the books with the two-foot-long schlongs or whatever but there's clearly something else going on here that's got me wondering. There's my own honest desire to not be a total snob. And there is this consistent desire I have to read broadly across a spectrum of higher to lower and lower to higher art, to swim with the fishes and fly with the birds, to take a little from the broad array of experiences available to me as a reader and see what happens with them when I rub them together against each other over time. Reading nothing but deeply wrought, piercing philosophical inquiries into the nature of humanity sounds as awful to me as getting forever lost in the weeds of pulp dragon-story nonsense. These are both straw-man extremes of course which is fine (I'm wrapping up my second read-through of all the original Oz books with my boys, spoiler alert, the Scarecrow turns out fine) and if anything I'm struggling to push myself too far in either direction these days and so maybe getting through a couple of these books will prompt me to pick up Miss MacIntosh, My Darling, finally. (Well, maybe after I put down The Power Broker. What am I doing over here, weight training? Get out of here.)

So yeah, all that said, I've been lazy over here, and I need to be less lazy, and I'm going to try, again. It's probably going to be as semi-coherent as whatever this post was but whatever it's fine, everything is fine, it's fine.

My next post is going to be about how I'm starting a book club, and how you can be in it, if you want to be, and how I don't even ever even need to know you're in it if you don't want me to know you're in it. It's going to be cool.

My dirty secret is I'm terrible at assigned reading. Like, I don't like it. I like to read what I like to read in whatever order I like to read it. Adding deadlines to a thing I do for otherwise generally selfish reasons is a sure way to dampen the flames of my enthusiasm. And yet I know it's good to connect with folks over items of shared interest, and it's a lot easier for me to do that when a book is fresh in my mind. But how to do so in a way that doesn't make me feel kind of itchy about it?

To that end I'm going to try something. I'm starting a book club. But it's not really a book club. Maybe it's more like a reading society? An alignment of readers. A tome-aniac fellowship? I'm not sure what to call it. Maybe we just don't call it anything. Or maybe we absolutely call it something even more stupid than "The TDAOC Tome-aniac Fellowship" and we make secret lapel pins for it. I don't know.

My thought is this: I want to blog a little more about what I'm reading again, because if it's going to be the end of the world at least I can go down blogging, and it would be nice to share the ride with some other folks. To that end, here and there, with no real schedule or rationale, I'm going to shout out a book I'm about to read before I read it. And then a bit after I read it I'm going to post something about it. It'll be low-key, nothing super formal, certainly more bloggy, but it'll be something. It won't be nothing.

And so in doing this if it seems like I mention a book you might be interested in reading, like a book you might want to talk about, or at least read me talking about it, or even read while ignoring whatever I say about it, you can read the book around the same time I read it, totally on your own time and schedule, and then you can engage with me on it as much or as little as you like, when you like. If you want to talk back to me about it, either by e-mail or blog post or social media or whatever, that's cool. If you want to silently judge me, that's cool too. It's all good.

There's lots of stuff like this out there, plenty of cool group read projects and the like if you look around for them, so I know I'm not up to anything innovative here, but if I can occasionally add another option onto the pile, I figure that's one good thing I can toss out into a universe that can use a few more good things in it.

The First Pick

To that end, hey, here's my first not-really-a-book-club pick: Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America, by Talia Lavin. It's brand new, just came out last month, so I don't know much of what buzz there is around it; it across my line of sight out there on the socials last week, around the same time I was starting to think both about reading more things about things like this and reading more things like this in public. I've got a copy from the library, it's about 260 pages once you lop off the end matter, and I think it's going to make for an interesting read.

My current plan is to finish up The Power Broker this week (I'm down to the last 60 pages!) and then I think I'm going to jump into Wild Faith right after that. So, figure I'll read that next week, and get something up here hopefully before Thanksgiving. Which is really cool timing on my part I am sure. If nothing else I guess it gives you something really cool and chill to talk to your family about over cranberry sauce and stuffing.

Here’s a post about Talia Lavin’s book Wild Faith: How the Christian Right Is Taking Over America, the first book I’ve picked for my not-a-book-club book club; kicking things off with a nice, light, breezy read, yes?

As I think I mentioned, this book was not on my radar, rather, it slid across my line of sight at the exact moment I had started thinking that I should be doing more deliberate reading of this sort to either help me better understand the situation we find ourselves in or help me think through what can be done about it. This book—I’m not well-versed enough to place it or rank it in the greater picture of literature of this sort, of which I am woefully under-read—did help deepen my understanding, though I think it leaves the ball in the reader’s court when it comes to deciding what to do about it.

If literally nothing else: while post-election analysis all points at the economy as why things went the way they did, that hasn’t sat right with me, and this book helped remind me about the longer-running complexity that’s gotten us here. I mean, I don’t know, maybe it’s that simple, maybe it was the price of eggs. But I don’t think you neatly get from “gas prices are kind of high” to “let’s give an authoritarian rapist felon the nuclear codes” in a single hop. Things have been in motion for a long time and I think there’s a lot reasons, possibly 70-odd million reasons, why votes went the way they did. I’d like to try to do a better job, even if only for my own sense of reality, at facing these realities head-on.

One of the primary insights I took from this book, and shame on me if I should have already had more understanding about this going into the book but whatever, is that, for as much as I’ve naively presumed Christian nationalism was hypocritical to its core, a cynical sheen of religious veneer slathered over an otherwise transparent need for power at any cost, it’s actually much more complicated than that, in that there really truly is a disturbing amount of true belief across certain swaths of the U.S. population, true belief in things that to me simply read as patently, obviously crazy, which helps inform my intuitive sense that pointing out the hypocrisy of the actions of the right hasn’t worked nearly as well as it should have; with hypocrisy and faith acting in concert as two sides of a loaded coin, the challenge of combating it is significantly more challenging than I may have realized, or than I may have been able to put into words before reading this book. Obviously, yes, but. This toxic strand of faith can absorb or repel criticism in equal measures. What the fuck do you do with that, against that?

The first half of the book acts as a thematic history of the Christian right’s efforts to screw up everything for the rest of us, touching on topics like abortion and sex and gender as they are being attacked through means of literal faith and money and end-times prophesying. It’s a broad, topical primer on the last fifty years or so of Christian nationalist efforts to gain national power and influence the nation while using its zealotry to fold just about any bit of seeming nonsense into its corrosive systems of belief. There’s so many points where my eye just started to slide over the stories in the book because, again, I like to think I’m well-educated and I find it easy to reconcile the fact that my freedom shouldn’t come at the active expense of someone else’s; it’s hard, from that vantage point, to try to look at some of this stuff directly, in a new light, an exposing light, and to take it seriously. But it’s necessary.

From there the back half of the book turns the focus inward, toward the lives and social constructs of many evangelicals, in large part in terms of how fundamentalism impacts the lives of families, specifically women and children, both emotionally and physically, and how it’s all intertwined with blatant racism and patriarchal power structures. It’s all informed by direct interviews with former evangelicals, and was simultaneously easier and harder to read than the first half, with the increase of anecdotal reporting that, when it came to the issues of how these strains of religious communities are both supportive of and supported by child abuse, was really hard to stomach. Again, shame on me, my bubbled view of the world, but—spanking isn’t really a thing to me? I mean, like, I’ve been a dad for nine years and I’ve never considered it an option? Because it intuitively seems like a very terrible thing to do? To be reminded that some not only entertain it as a possibility but actively endorse it, even require it, makes for a horrifying gut-check.

All of which leads me back to—what do we do about it? When a powerful minority of the country has managed to seize power through violence and fear under the umbrella of religious and personal freedoms, when pointing out that their governmental leader is a straight-up heathen only serves to reinforce beliefs that the prophesied end-times are upon us and it’s great that the Jews are killing all the Palestinians because then it means Jesus can come back and kill all the Jews, and, again, they seriously believe this…where do you go from there?

I know there are no easy answers, I resist the urge to believe in easy answers, and yet I want to believe none the less that there’s still room to improve our marketing around these issues; looking hard at the thing and calling it out for what it actually is, better explaining the issues at play and helping anybody who can see to see what’s actually going on here. If some of this is missing from the conversation, we’re probably not doing the conversation right, even if the mere conversation feels like an impotent attempt at striking back, at this point. In some sense I’m a bit of a choir ready to be preached to on this and I’ve already voted Democrat up and down the tickets because again duh, I didn’t even need to know this stuff in this level of detail to know that it’s all bad, but if there are other folks out there who don’t understand what’s at stake and what one segment of one side of the country is enabling—how do you get that message to them? Isn’t there a better line of attack, here?

Anyways I’m struggling here and I’m sure I’m exposing weaknesses I’m unaware of; I’m interested in what other folks have to say, about this book, about whatever. No comments section on the blog these days but you can find me on the socials (links up top) if you want to point out my blindspots or share your thoughts.

I picked up Vurt by Jeff Noon before Thanksgiving, looking for something I could dip in and out of freely across the choppy waters of the holiday schedule. I haven’t read it in a decade, longer than that, and it’s impossible for me to read it or talk about it with objective dispassion, as it's a book that ran with the pack of my favorites for a long while, and even now, coming back to it after time and with distance, I still find it mirrored under my skin, an invisible tattoo inked into my reading DNA.

This much I can say, coming back to it now—it’s a strange book, a Cronenbergian take on virtual reality that came out half a decade before eXistenZ, channeled through an alchemical mix of Beat longing and Trainspotting addiction. The love affair at the core is incestuous, for still no good reason I can pick up, and the dog sex will always be a bit off-putting, but the desperation of the quest remains compelling, and the very 90s prose retains its propulsive rhythm, and the severing of the lovers’ droidlocks will never not be tragic. And there will always be a delight to be found in the picture of a reality on the edge of another one, a time falling apart under its own weight and weightlessness, like comic panels melting down a page, the colors along for the ride.

It’s a high I chased into the sequel and the prequel over the years without ever quite finding its match, though I look forward to revisiting both those books someday (say “play to win” and I’ll respond with “win to play” before I even know the words have left my mouth); I think Noon’s later non-Vurt novel, Falling Out of Cars, was a more mature work, a road trip into a linguistic meltdown, and I know I loved it, and is probably the better book to start with. But.

I guess I wonder what a strange kid finds in here, thirty years on, finding a copy of Vurt in a half-priced hallway, attracted by the color of the cover.

Someone talk me out of trying to read all the books on the shortlist (for once) ahead of the competition; remind me I'm a horribly slow reader and I already have reading plans and the idea is crazy anyway.

I finally read American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, which I bought sometime after Barbenheimer weekend, which feels like about a million years ago now, and reading it now, I kind of can’t help but wonder, what would Oppenheimer have thought of Oppenheimer? What would Oppenheimer have thought of Barbenheimer, for that matter? And I have no idea and have no idea how to even begin to generate an idea here. Other than to note, well, Barbie was introduced in 1959, which. I don’t know. There’s something.

I’m not going to pretend I gained deep insight from the book; there’s a lot of names, there’s a lot of manipulations and events, and I wasn’t reading in a strictly academic sense here, I wasn’t trying to keep all the threads straight. But it still made for an interesting read, if for nothing else than to see how much of the movie did come from the book, and what from the film might have involved a little bit of license-taking, that sort of thing.

The book was more a vibe check, for me, on Oppenheimer, on who really he was, a corrective against my more naive understanding of what he represented or did as part of the Manhattan Project. It’s easy to think, well, okay, father of the atom bomb, he must have done all the science, or whatever, and while he was certainly involved at that level, that wasn’t exactly what he was doing there; he was more a synthesist, by nature, and an administrator, by sheer force of will, a bit Samwise to the collective’s Frodo. (ed. note - bit of a stretch there, bub.)

The book also provides a clearly much more clear sense of his polymath nature—his philosophical ideals and his wide-ranging interests, and the like; wouldn’t it be nice to go read Proust and come out of it feeling like you’ve cured yourself of mental illness? (Apropos of nothing, maybe I’m actually finally going to read Proust in 2025? Maybe?)

It’s also…look, I know everything is terrible right now, and I know everything is about to become more terrible, but…has anything ever been good? Reading any kind of history I tend to walk away thinking: no, not really. I think maybe now we are reaching a point where it’s objectively possible to say things are about the worst they’ve ever been, but, I don’t know. I have so many gaps in my knowledge that I want to keep filling in, and maybe someday if the world lasts long enough I’ll have the opportunity to draw some conclusions, or to at least start. Maybe.

I don’t usually track or talk about what I read to the kids at night because honestly there’s only so many times I can read a fucking Dog Man book before I want to ka-shook my way through the roof and fart-chunk my way into an early grave but with my youngest on the verge of turning six he’s at least getting more interested in things with actual story, and my oldest is old enough now that I can finally pick books I want to read to him without me feeling like a truly horrible person, so things are looking up!

Like, I read the first two Wild Robot books to the younger kid recently and that actually went pretty well? He was into them, and I didn’t feel like I was going into a complete dissociative state the entire time, I could maybe actually tell you a little bit about what happens in those books. They're good; makes for a nice change of pace! I’m annoyed that he’s decided to put a hold on book three for the time being while we, you know, read books with poop jokes in them, though at least we’ve also got some Jenny books in there for good measure, so I guess it’s not all bad.

And then I’ve also started reading The Hobbit to them, and it’s going surprisingly well. I’m primarily targeting the older kid with it but the younger’s seemingly more along for the ride than I’d expected him to be; he actually got the answer to one of Gollum’s riddles the other night, oh my gosh. I’d considered it but I’m not getting full-throated with my voices or anything—I think any time I’ve tried to do true voice acting when I’m reading to the kids, the kids kindly tell me, to, like, not do that, while my wife laughs quietly from down the hall. Still, I feel like a remarkably better reader when I’m actually into what I’m reading and I sure hope my wife down the hall at least somewhat appreciates the situationally appropriate shifts of tone and pace in my oration.

This is all set up for going into The Lord of the Rings next, which is what I’ve really actually been wanting to do for a while. It’s been a surprisingly long time since I’ve seen the movies and I’ve only read the book once, shortly after the movies first came out, and I’m interested in reading the book with slightly less of the movie version arguing with the books in my head. I recently tried to do the audiobook while running and it was going okay, I liked it, but it’s so much, and I’m way more inclined to run to music most of the time, so it’s hard to make it stick; and as much as I know I could just of course read the book myself, there’s also so much else I want to read, it’s hard to justify or find the time for a reread of something of that magnitude.

All of which sets me up for a question that I clearly won’t need to answer for myself anytime soon, all things going well: what other good long big fantasy/sci-fi books would I actually enjoy reading to my kids, without having to skip over too much? I'm probably going to be reading books to them until they both can literally get into cars, turn them on, and drive away from me, so I should probably have some more options in my back pocket for when the time comes.

I’ve been going back and forth on this for a bit and at least for now I think it makes sense to stay more or less on-topic, so for my next not-really-a-book-club book club pick I’m going with Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart. From the jacket copy, it sounds like it relates to the reporting I read about in Wild Faith by Talia Lavin while placing the subject in a different or more-broad scope in potentially interesting ways.

The book is not out yet, it’s scheduled for publication on February 18. I’ll be pre-ordering a copy shortly and plan to read it soon after it lands on my porch; once I get a sense of how it’s going to go I’ll update with a better idea of when I’ll have my post up about it. Like with the Lavin book I really don’t have any special insight into whether this is going to be a good book or not; it’s the on-topic book that skated across my line of sight at just the right moment, though, so I’m interested to dig in. And while I haven’t read Stewart before she clearly has been writing about this subject for a while now so if nothing else I feel like we’re in good hands here.

As a reminder—these not-a-book-club picks are intended to give you the occasional heads up about books I’m planning to post about, in case you want to read along at home and not worry about spoilers. Though I guess that will make more sense if I do a novel for one of these entries. (Which I do intend to do. I think. Eventually. It would be fun to read something fun with y’all!) It’s also meant to let you chat with me about these books, by whatever means you want, ahead of, during, or after me posting about these books.

…

Anyways, I have to believe reading books and talking about books still matters, yes? So I’d like to keep doing the former every day and the latter at least slightly more often. Cool? Cool.

Just before all this happened I read a little book called Dune by Frank Herbert. It was alright! Funny story, I only just read Dune for the first time recently. (Or at least I’d thought it was recently until I looked it up in my reading log and found it was actually six years ago, oops, yikes. Time: rude.) I hadn’t really cared for it much at the time; I remember feeling like the whole thing felt like one long string of Paul whining about how he’s going to do a terrible purpose someday. It kind of annoyed me and I wondered if I’d just missed the boat by coming to the book later in life instead of when I was a whiny little brat myself and I kind of just didn’t really get it, I guess.

But I also know it’s, you know, Dune; it’s a whole thing. Maybe it was the wrong book at the wrong time. It happens! Since then I’ve seen not one not two but three whole Dune movies, one of which was by David Lynch and had a weird happy ending, two of which could have been thirty minutes shorter if you’d cut out all the parts where Timothée Chalamet looked at the camera thinking about how he’s going to do a terrible purpose someday, and all that gave me a better sense of the basic structure of the story, and so I finally gave the book another shot and, and yeah, it’s alright? I certainly had more fun with the book this time through, not that I think the story is particularly emphasizing fun; there just isn’t as much “it really puts the whoa in sandwhoarms” for me as I think maybe I’m supposed to take away from it. (Ed. note: “Darby.”) But I did enjoy myself more knowing how things fit together and what to expect and also really there isn’t nearly as much of the terrible purpose whining as I’d remembered there being, it not really kicking in until the latter half of the book, which I think was kind of the more-dull half of the book anyway, so I guess I can understand why it maybe annoyed me so much when it did happen my first time through. For as much as the book is about these Fremen getting ready to rise up and run riot I’m not sure the book makes them as interesting as I expect them to be? Or, to put it another way, I was more interested in watching the houses and factions of the galaxy all being really bored and causing trouble for themselves because they had nothing better to do, like late-stage capitalist entities crumbling upon themselves because what the hell else are you going to do, I guess?

Or am I still not getting it? I’m probably still not getting it. (Subtitle of my memoir.)

This time through I made the wise choice to roll straight from Dune into Dune Messiah which I had come to understand makes the supposed meaning of Dune a bit more crystal clear and I’m both glad I did and also how the heck are you going to make that a whole movie? I thought I had an idea about what the second book was going to be like but then it kind of zigged on me from Paul being like “I’m gonna be a bad boy someday” to Paul being like “I’ve sure been a bad boy." (And also “Pretty weird my dead friend is a meat puppet now.” Weird.) It’s all so much…smaller, somehow? And yet I’m actually cautiously optimistic for the third movie because my wife and I have been working our way around through Denis Villeneuve’s pre-Arrival movies (which, by the way, I didn’t know he directed Sicario, what, now I have to go see that one, too) and I’m kind of thinking Messiah could be the most Villeneuve-y movie, the most like those early movies—smaller, personal, contained. Something. I don’t know, this ain’t a movie blog, I just show up for the laser beams and the fight scenes, hashtag the one friend, am I right. (Podcast joke. Sorry.)

Anyways, yeah, I generally like Dune now, but I’m not a true head, I suppose. I’ve checked the price on that Lego ornithopter set; I’ve promptly closed the tab. And I guess you already didn’t need to tell me twice that faith-based-leaders ain’t great. But. Maybe thirty-six years from now when Chalamet actually finally looks 12 years older than he does now (I cut a lot of bad jokes from this post about him being pretty, you’re welcome) and we get the third movie I’ll revisit it all again and that time’ll be the charm, who knows. I’m also on the fence about whether I need to read the rest of the original series; I’m curious but also deeply distractable.

Long story short, Money, Lies, and God: Inside the Movement to Destroy American Democracy by Katherine Stewart is a good book, well reported and written, and is worth your attention; It’s a bracing read, a sobering read, a depressing read, that seeks to convince us that there is an actual, literal, present threat to our current political system and to provide a clear framework for understanding the context of our current crisis, while also beginning to provide some direction for us as to how we can begin to claw our way back out of it. This book is more interested in the economic, political, and social machinery which makes use of, and is made use of, by Christian nationalist adherents, making it strong complimentary reading alongside Wild Faith, which itself interrogated the toxic mix of belief and hypocrisy that said nationalists bring to the table, and the ramifications of that mix on those both inside and outside that particular worldview.

…Okay. That’s the beginning and end of the semi-well-written review-like portion of the post. Now here comes the rambling part where I’ve dumped some thoughts about this stuff and my hopes and despairs about it all but mostly oh gosh do I wish there was something concrete going on right now that I could point toward to show that the knowledge found in this book and others like it is catching, catchable, and that countermeasures are having, can continue to have, an effect; that learning more about this stuff and taking this stuff more seriously matters. (I know it does, I know it’s a long game, I just wish I knew what to point at to draw the line from “this matters…” to “…and here’s how,” if that makes sense.)

One of the things I was thinking about while I was reading the book was…reading the book. Specifically, why read books like this, right now, or ever. We know it’s a shit-show out there (right?). We’re seeing the results of the causes this book highlights, right now, and they are depressing. When you’re watching a couple billionaire heathen dunderheads bull-in-the-china-shop their way through the government, what good’s to be had from thinking about Christian nationalists? It doesn’t take much for me to know right now that there’s this “other side” right now that sucks so hard and is making everything suck for everybody else; why wallow in it, when I feel like I can do so little about it?

Aside from the fact that I’m trying to do what I can to just be a decent and well-informed person (it’s not much but it’s not nothing) there’s something—nice is absolutely the wrong word to use in this context, but…soothing? empowering? something…quote-unquote nice about reading a well-laid-out summary and argument about, waves hands wildly, all of this. Thinking a lot about how I consume information these days and the wormhole of sick coming through social media and news alerts, seeing a thousand disjointed crises every hour of every day, it’s good to step back and be reminded that there is a whole to this, a picture that can be drawn here, a way to frame this all into a narrative that is awful but at least understandable. Which doesn’t exactly translate to easy solutions, not by any means, but which does at least help establish some boundaries around the problem, makes direction and next steps and needs feel at least like there’s something for them to latch on to.

Which is not to say the book argues that we’re facing a monolithic opposition force—far from it; one of the key points the book argues is that there’s a weirdly big tent over on that other side, one that accommodates a strange variety of views, views which entwine both hypocrisy and true belief, highly strategic and educated strategizing with base wants and under-informed, selfish reactionary delusions. In looking toward the future, toward what “our side” needs to do to reverse the tides away from crumbling at the edges (or heart) of democracy, Stewart notes this as one of several areas of the opposition’s tactics that we can learn a thing or two from; how do we limit the fractures in our perspectives from giving way to the other side, here. (Glaring at disjointed, unaligned, limp-noodle Democratic leadership right now.)

And of course one of the things she also specifically dives into is the way there’s big money going into making big money into bigger money through all of this; that other side is disturbingly well funded, and is making effective use of its dollars, up and down the ladder (even if it’s ultimately going against their actual best interests). The way that money specifically funnels into causes that are directed toward getting people to do shit is eye opening.

I know that one of the hints she gives at the end of the book is to get involved at the local level and to work from the ground up to fix or defend what we have and want, and I know I am not good enough at that to be one to comment much, but seeing the way the other side is really directing forces in large part through its, yes, religious network to accomplish real-world things is…I don’t want to say disheartening, but, like, it’s disheartening. Do we really lack such unity or structure on our side? I would like to believe that things I do could move needles but I don’t know that we really have clear views of what those things we could do are or who has the reach and resources needed to help make us move those needles in the right direction.

Which is kind of to say that in my darkest moments I worry it’s a bit like climate change, a situation in which my paper straw isn’t actually doing a damn thing about anything, a situation in which major systematic change needs to happen at a global scale; in the political sphere I just don’t know that we can local politics our way out of this mess. Which is not for a second to say that we should not try to local politics our way out of this mess, because that sounds horrible and defeatist and I don’t want to be that guy, especially as a guy who knows he doesn’t do enough to really begin to comment. But I worry, and it’s my blog and I’m going to say this is a safe space for me to say what I worry about as I do what I can to figure this stuff out for myself. (And maybe sharing my worries is helpful, in some way, as I work to overcome them. I don’t know.) (And also to everyone who is doing more than I am, jeez, thank you, seriously.)

The last thing I want to touch on is the way Stewart really posits the whole situation we’re in as almost a sort of mass psychosis, if not literally actually a mass psychosis. It’s so easy to want to believe that there’s just this one monolithic side on the other side and it’s actively choosing something for itself but it’s kind of not that at all; it’s this divided big tent of people making lots of decisions in a general sort of concert of weird alignment with each other, and those decisions often don’t make sense; they’re not actually good decisions. (Obviously! Literally.) And this is one area that does give me some loose sense of hope, some glint of belief that maybe somewhere down the line some of that lifts, maybe some light creeps in and folks see that maybe steering around the black ice is actually better than gunning straight for it. I don’t have a lot of optimism here but it’s at least something, some quiet hope that maybe crazy isn’t permanent, maybe we’re not actually literally trying to end everything here. (Cue cheesy orchestral strings soundtrack? I don’t know.)

There’s plenty more to say here but I’m going to stop here for now. Check out the book. It’s worth it.