Better Things: The Passion of Lovers

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

I've been listening to Bauhaus for almost forty years, I think. That sounds like a long time, but I came to them fairly late - probably in my college years in the late '80s, after they broke up.

That's the thing about the past: there's always more of it. No matter how old you are, there were thousands of years of past before you. And even something you took to fairly young might have surprising depths from before you got there. And Bauhaus - the real Bauhaus, the one that made the songs we still listen to - only existed from 1978 to 1983.

This is not their iconic song, or their most famous song. Many days, it might not even be my favorite Bauhaus song - Bela Lugosi's Dead is always up there, or Swing the Heartache, and I even get into moods now and then when it's Terror Couple Kill Colonel.

But I always come back to this deep, resonant song, and especially the distanced refrain:

The passion of lovers is for death, said she

"She" says it - the song doesn't say it. It's a viewpoint, an opinion. And is that the death of le petit mort - is it a play on words? - or does she mean it for real. It's dark, gloomy Goth music, so I wouldn't lay a bet on there being anything petit about it.

I can't say anything more: the passion of lovers is for death.

Quote of the Week: The Law Is the Law, and We Can't Change It

"But do you remember what my father said about the Law being man's substitute for fairy fruit? Fairy things are all of them supposed to be shadowy cheats - delusion. But man can't live without delusion, so he creates for himself another form of delusion - the world-in-law, subject to no other law but the will of man, where man juggles with facts to his heart's content, and says 'If I choose I shall make a man old enough to be my father my son, and if I chose I shall turn fruit into silk and black into white, for this is the world I have made myself, and here I am master.' And he creates a monster to inhabit it - the man-in-law, who is like a mechanical toy and always behaves exactly as he is expected to behave, and is no more like you and me than are the fairies."

 - Hope Mirrlees, Lud-in-the-Mist, p.173-74

Adulthood Is a Gift! by Sarah Andersen

So it looks like I discovered Sarah Andersen's comics in late 2021, and read all of her books within roughly a year: Adulthood Is a Myth, Fangs, Big Mushy Happy Lump, Herding Cats, Cryptid Club, and Oddball. That's always fun - discovering a new creator and reading all the way out to the walls - but, unless the person you suddenly love is Wodehouse or Simenon, there's only going to be so many books, and you'll find the end.

And then you're in the same place as all of the older fans - waiting for the next book.

Andersen had a new book this fall, the confusingly-titled Adulthood Is a Gift! It is not, as I first thought, a gift-book edition of Myth; it's not a repackaging of Myth at all. It's two-thirds a brand-new "Sarah's Scribbles" collection and one-third prose-and-comics retrospective of her career to date. It's somewhere between a tenth and fifteenth anniversary celebration - the first book was in 2016, her first cartoon published online was in 2011. But why should we have to wait for round numbers?

(Parenthetically, as a Marketing Guy, I would have argued against having a book with a title so similar to an existing book, especially with the "crossed-out" title style. My bet is that sales on this one will be slightly disappointing, just because at least some people will be confused and think they already have this. On the other hand, creators typically hate Marketing Guy, and I do understand why.)

The new stuff is prime mature Andersen: goofy gags, largely about cats and introversion and how your body parts start to betray you much, much earlier in your life than you expect. There's about a hundred of those, in her precise minimalist style - seeing her older work later in the book really emphasizes how clean and funny her line has gotten over the years. (Down to the little things: her people's eyes are usually just a little off - too big, absolutely, and also just a hair wall-eyed all the time.)

The older material is presented as "essays and images" - Andersen shows an old comic, and then writes about it. Sometimes it's about who she was at the time, and what she was trying to do; sometimes it's about how the outside world caused trouble, as when she was attacked and harassed systematically by a group of online neo-Nazis in 2017.

So this is maybe for Andersen's fans more than her other books - at least for people who don't mind reading about process and thinking about how art is made. She's got impressive chops, and is insightful at writing about how she got to where she is now, too. So, if you like funny cartoons about Millennials, or hope to someday make your own funny online cartoons, Adulthood Is a Gift! could give you enjoyment and/or pointers.

Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirrlees

Hope Mirrlee's 1926 novel Lud-in-the-Mist is a very British fantasy novel, set in a small, comfortable land with no major human neighbors and only trade by sea. Dorimare is bordered on two sides by impassible mountains, on one by the sea, and the last by the the almost equally impassable Fairyland. It's small and rural, with one substantial city (Lud itself) that feels more like a regional capital, a center of local commerce and minor maneuvering among the petit bourgeois leaders.

There was an aristocratic past, rule by a line of Dukes that terminated in the flamboyant and erratic Aubrey, but that ended a few hundred years ago, to be succeeded by those fat burghers taking it in turn to be, basically, Lord Mayor of this small nation. The revolution was presumably somewhat bloody, but Mirrlees tells it quietly in deep retrospect, and is more concerned with the myth of Aubrey and the legends of his return than with what he was actually like as a man ruling a nation. There are Laws, there is something of a police/military force, but this is a land ruled by convention - again, very British. Small shopkeepers, small farmers, supposedly important men who are in reality fairly small-scale proprietors of businesses. They venerate cheese, tell the same jokes over and over again, live in each other's pockets, each with their own nearly identical small lives of prosaic pleasure rolling down through the generations.

Fairyland is the potential breaking point of that, always lurking on the horizon. You could say all the Doirmareites cling more tightly to their normalcy because Fairyland, and the Debatable Hills that are its marches, are always visible to the west, always available as an option.

Hope Mirrlees has a somewhat different vision of fairies than most writers, though. These are not small woodland sprites, or Tolkienian sages living through aeons. They are not part of the normal natural world of Dorimare at all. The fairies themselves barely appear in the book at all: they are more of an option, or a metaphor, or a different way of looking at life. The fairies are the dead, at least some of the time - or dead humans are legendarily said to be spirited away and reanimated by the fairies to serve them as slaves in their land. And those former friends and family members are the fairies the Dorimareites think about - their supposed ruler is Aubrey. Were there any "original" fairies? Is it all dead humans all the way down?

This is not meant to be a clear or precise metaphor. Fairyland is the lands of death, but also the wilds of art, the freeing of the human spirit, and several other things all mixed together. And it's not anyone's choice of what Fairyland will be for them: it is, and continues, and will always be.

The main product of Fairyland - again, so typical for a nation of shopkeepers - is fairy fruit. Some kind of sweet product of those far lands, smuggled in at large effort, eaten largely by the lower classes in secret, giving visions and dreams and sometimes unstoppable desires to go bodily to Fairyland. The burghers, we are told, never eat fairy fruit, but it seems to be endemic among the lower classes - you can see that as yet another British touchpoint, that the "better" people will be affected much more strongly and immediately by the touch of the ineffable, and need to guard themselves against it in ways the rougher "simple" people do not.

Mirrlees tells us this story in a wry, distanced tone, writing about a land far away in space and possibly in time. It's not quite a fable, but it is a story, rather than something we're experiencing right now.

So Lud and Dorimare has gotten out of touch with its fairy side, swung too far in the direction of stolidity and mercantile life. Lud-in-the-Mist is how it swings back, and who is caught up in that. There is a villain, but he, in the end, was not at the core of the larger changes - no one is, or could be. Mirrlees means us to understand this is how the world is, and a swing in one direction will bring a return swing inevitably.

The leader of Dorimare is Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, a self-satisfied middle-aged man who runs a business in what seems to be almost his spare time and has read deeply in the Law. He's better than he might be, as we learn eventually. His tween son Ranulph eats fairy fruit - like many things in the book, the details aren't always entirely clear, but it seems to have been secretly fed to him, as a jest or a stratagem. That disorders the boy's mind, which sets in motion much of the rest of the plot.

Somewhat simultaneously, the major finishing school for the young ladies of the burgher class is also fed fairy fruit, and they all simultaneously hare off to Fairyland, including Ranulph's sister. This is not as important to the novel as Ranulph, which is puzzling. Mirrlees' own father died while she was writing this book, and I wonder if there's some element of working out her own feelings and concerns in this tale of fatherly love purely for a son.

This is a fantasy, but not heavily so. There is no magic, there are no wizards or monsters. Just people, and fairy fruit, and a mysterious land of the dead or the inhuman, close enough to see, close enough to visit, but famously not close enough to be returned from. (That will change by the end of Lud-in-the-Mist, like so much else.)

The plot is largely concerned with the Law, and Mirlees repeatedly makes direct comparisons between the things of fairy (visionary, transformative, changing) and those of men's Law (equally all of those things, made up of legal fictions and pretenses to twist the world into whatever shapes the creators want). Nathaniel tries to help his son, then chases a villain, then, in the end, has to make the trip to fairyland to save his son (and, oh, by the way, also his daughter and all of the other girls, though that is clearly not as important).

Lud-in-the-Mist is a writer's book: it's intensely written and narrated, in ways that editors and writers love to trace and anatomize and try to follow in their own work. It's deep and quirky and often opaque, so those writers and readers can make varying interpretations, within a moderately wide framework, that all seem plausible. It's written in rich, complex prose that rewards close reading and deep thought. And it is ambiguous enough that most readers will find something they agree with in the ending.

It is a minor book, of course. But it's the kind of minor book that generations of new writers keep coming back to, and using as a touchpoint, one with wells of interest that seem, after nearly a century, to be close to inexhaustible. And that's pretty good for a minor book.

Camp Spirit by Axelle Lenoir

Elodie is a seventeen-year-old Quebecois on her way to college, the kind of dark, brooding teen we've seen a lot of in media (and may have been, ourselves, if we're the kind of people who consume a lot of media). She likes dark, loud music: this is 1994, so it seems to be largely the louder side of grunge, but there's plenty of metal in the mix, too.

She has plans for this last summer before college, none of which involve being a camp counselor somewhere out in the woods - Elodie is a solidly urban teen, preferring sidewalks and buildings to trees and lakes and canoes. But her mother has other plans, and one of the core experiences of being a teen is doing things you really don't want to do because your parents make you.

So Camp Spirit opens with Elodie first telling her best friend at school about the camp, and then being driven there by her mother: we know there was rebellion, but creator Axelle Lenoir leapfrogs over all of that to get right to the story. It's divided into eight chapters, each the same length - I don't think this was serialized in the English language, but the original French version (Lenoir is herself from Quebec, like her heroine) might have been.

This is a slightly earlier work than Secret Passages, which I saw a few months ago. It's more clearly a work in a genre - stories for teens or tweens, a little romance and more than a little fantasy & thriller, relatable and grounded. (I have to imagine the pitch had the word "Lumberjanes" in it at least once.) It's not quite transmuted autobiography the way Secret Passages was, but Lenoir was a teen in 1994, and she may well have been a camp counsellor.

The fantasy stuff has got to be fictionalized, though. I'm sure of that.

Elodie, of course, has an epically bad mood, and starts off with a massively unhelpful attitude. (I've already mentioned she was a teenager: it's a characteristic of teens that they get in their own way too much of the time.) She gets the bunch of kids - six assorted redheaded hellions in mid to late elementary school - that is the most unruly and challenging. She doesn't want to hang out with the other counselors at the campfire in the evening; she doesn't want to do anything to make this easier, just to seethe and grump and write nasty things in her diary.

That's where she starts: obviously things happen from there. And we get it: this is nothing like what she wanted. But she does sort-of make a friend of another counselor, Catherine, who goes out of her way to help and support Elodie. And she turns out to be a good counselor for the hellions: they love and respect her in the way only a pack of semi-feral girls can care for a sharp-tongued goth teen.

Oh, but also: this camp is weird. The "Chief" is hugely enthusiastic about everything - that's not the weird bit; that's expected - but seems to have secrets, is way too invested in a violent First Nations camp-specific myth he dramatizes to the assembled camp at the beginning of each season, and leads the singalongs with dark, Satanic lyrics. (One might think Elodie would approve that the Chief has similar musical tastes, but he's just so energetically odd that he creeps her out from the jump, and every time she sees him after that.)

I've mentioned there's a supernatural element: the Chief is part of that. Elodie has suspicions and fears as she goes on - she becomes a good camp counselor, worried about her charges, without noticing it - which I won't detail. And I won't explain the supernatural, or how it all comes out.

Because it does all come out: that's the genre we're in. It's the story of a summer, and how it transformed Elodie (and, maybe, almost as much, other people I will not specify). She is a good counselor, at least for this particular group of feral redheads. She learns secrets of the camp. She learns secrets of other people. She learns to be close to other people, one in particular. And she goes off to college at the end, not quite the same person as before but better and more interesting and more grown up.

This is not as pyrotechnic or ambitious as Secret Passages is: it's a bit more than a genre exercise, but it fits comfortably into a genre and does fun things with the outlines and tropes of that genre. I'm still deeply impressed at the colloquial English-language writing - it all sounds crisp and specific, with distinctive voices for the characters, and that can't be easy to accomplish in a second language. Her art is supple, good at story-telling and ready to be weird for the intrusions of the fantastic. Lenoir is a real talent, and I hope to see a lot more of her comics over the coming years.

Nancy Wins at Friendship by Olivia Jaimes

Nancy Wins at Friendship is the second collection of the Olivia Jaimes era of that long-running newspaper strip; it was published in 2023 but seems to mostly reprint strips from the 2019-2020 era. Jaimes took over the strip in 2018, and her first collection, just called Nancy, came out less than a year later - in some world where newspaper comic strip collections are things "the kids" buy and read and crave, there could have been eight or ten books this length by now.

But the whole point of the early Olivia Jaimes Nancy is that "kids these days" are different. So that's not just a counterfactual, but one that directly contradicts the work itself.

I wrote about the first book about six months ago: those strips were a shock, in a good way, back in 2018. The Guy Gilchrist version of Nancy had been slowly losing newspapers for years as it sunk deeper into its own dull mix of sappy sentimentalism and incongruous good-girl art, and there was no serious hope that a legacy strip - especially one so closely identified with its creator, Ernie Bushmiller, and his mania for simple, precise gags - would break out of the straitjacket of the syndicate's hand and ever do anything interesting.

We were wrong. Unlike so many things this last decade or so, we we actually wrong by being too pessimistic, so Nancy is one small hopeful lesson for the world. Nancy was rejuvenated by a younger, female, pseudonymous creator - we still don't know who "Olivia Jaimes" really is, though it mostly doesn't matter; whatever she did before, this Nancy is her best-known and probably most-sustained work - first as a big signpost to say "this is going to be different now."

But the "Sluggo Is Lit" era - awesome as it was - settled down. That wasn't what Jaimes was planning to do, long-term: it was more of a clean break from the Gilchrist years, a way to grab attention and draw a line in the sand, to say her Nancy would be over here from now on.

This book shows what Jaimes wanted to focus Nancy on: still smart gags every day - she's enough of a fan of Bushmiller that isn't negotiable - but embedded in a more realistic modern world, with the phones and tech (and, yes, some language from the kids) that the early strips made such a point of. But Jaimes also added a new supporting cast around Nancy in school - friends, teachers supportive and struggling, a rival - to widen out this world.

It's a more grounded strip, as odd as that might seem from the first few months. More grounded than Gilchrist, more grounded than Bushmiller, frankly: Bushmiller was always a minimalist, paring everything down to a single focused gag in each individual strip, and happy to throw away all continuity and consistency to make that day's gag better. Jaimes's aims are slightly different: she still has Nancy as a self-centered, appetite-driven little kid, but the fact that she's smart and clever and good at working out quirky ideas - all traits core to her since the beginning - are more important, and connect to this mostly normal school life.

So Nancy, improbably, became largely a kids-in-school strip, about lessons and robotics club and rivalries with the other elementary schools. This is the book collecting the strips where that largely happened: this is the middle of that twist. It's a good strip, still full of fun gags, though Jaimes is much fonder of the ironic verbal reversal than Bushmiller's more visual eye.

I hope there are more books of Nancy; a lot has happened since the strips collected here. This one is largely a how-do-we-do-school-during-pandemic time-capsule at this point; I wonder why that was the book Andrews McMeel put out in 2023, but I suppose they figured they need to stay in order or the pandemic strips will just be too disjoint to ever use. But there are two Olivia Jaimes collections, which is pretty good: I recommend both of them, in the right order.

Better Things: Welcome to Your Wedding Day

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

We start the year with a dark, ominous, swirling song - a protest song more than a decade old, about things we've mostly forgot that we were protesting then. Back when war was the worst thing we were worried about, war on the other side of the world, and what we - that extensible, all-encompassing national "we" - were responsible for.

I hope we're still angry at blowing up weddings in foreign countries. At least some of us. There's a fair number of Americans who I think would cheer. 

This is Welcome to Your Wedding Day by The Airborne Toxic Event - a band named after a dark, ominous element of a great Don DeLillo novel. It's a 2011 song about a news story: this happened at least once, maybe multiple times. During the early war in Afghanistan, the US bombed a wedding party, killing many civilians, including the bride.

The song is full of cold anger, with a near-apocalyptic tone and wall-of-sound effect.

Well it's another fine day of nation building
Let's have. A. Parade.
You can dance on the graves and the bones of the children
If you know what to say

I would have liked to begin the year with something happier, but this is the luck of the alphabet. It won't always be this dark. (That's a good mantra in general, I think.)

Books Read: December 2024

These are the books I read the last month of the year. Links will follow, once posts go live, to make this semi-useful (at least for Future Me).

Julia Cejas, Hanami: You, Me & 200 Sq. Ft. in Japan (12/1, digital)

Paul Theroux, The Happy Isles of Oceania (12/6)

Samir Dahmani, Seoul Before Sunrise (12/7, digital)

Meg Adams, Why Are You Like This? (12/8, digital)

Donald Westlake Writing as Samuel Holt, The Fourth Dimension Is Death (12/8)

Mike Birchall, Everything Is Fine, Vol. 1 (12/14)

Neul Gaiman, P. Craig Russell, and various artists, Norse Mythology, Vol. 1 (12/15)

Oliver Darkshire, Once Upon a Tome (12/15)

Faith Erin Hicks, Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy (12/21)

John McPherson, The Close to Home 30th Anniversary Treasury (12/22, digital)

Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep (12/22, in Stories & Early Novels)

Guy Colwell, Delights: A Story of Hieronymus Bosch (12/24, digital)

Yves Chaland, Freddy Lombard, Vol. 2: The Elephant Graveyard (12/25, digital)

P.G. Wodehouse, Indiscretions of Archie (12/25)

Drew Friedman, Schtick Figures (12/26)

Budjette Tan and KaJo Baldisimo, Trese Vol. 6: High Tide at Midnight (12/27)

P. Craig Russell, The Fairy Tales of Oscar Wilde, Vol.5: The Happy Prince (12/28, sigital)

Tom Holt, Barking (12/28)

Philippe Coudray, Bigby Bear, Vol.3: The Explorer (12/29, digital)

Susanna Clarke, The Wood at Midwinter (12/29)

Bryan Lee O'Malley, Scott Pilgrim Vs. The Universe (12/30, digital)

John Scalzi, Starter Villain (12/30)

Alan Grant and Jon Haward, Tales of the Buddha (Before he got enlightened) (12/31, digital)

In the new year, I'm pretty sure I will continue to read books.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of January 4, 2025

Over the holidays, I thought I'd want to read some books - some particular books. So I put some things on hold at the library, forgetting that the wheels of librarianship turn more slowly, as do all of our wheels, during the holidays. So they're not all here yet, even a week later, but some of them are, and I'm listing what has arrived so far today.

I also got a couple of books in the mail this week, and I'll list those below as well.

The Wood at Midwinter is a very small book by Susanna Clarke, set in the same world as her very big debut book Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell. (It's so short, I think it's actually a novelette, not even a novella.) It's also illustrated by Victoria Sawdon, which means the sixty small pages here aren't even all filled with words. I don't mind short books, of course, but this one seems to test the limits of how short something can be and still be bound between two covers. That's exactly the kind of book a library is best for, though: don't spend your own money on it, get it quickly, get it back quickly so others can have a go as well.

Starter Villain was John Scalzi's new novel last year; it's a humorous SF book set in the present day, I think. I read a bunch of Scalzi when I was at the SFBC and soon afterward, which led me to mildly grump about how he wasn't using his talents in the cause of seriousness once or twice - it was a silly complaint, I admit, but between God Engines and Ghost Brigades, it felt like early Scalzi had at least one Big Serious Book in him itching to get out, and I guess I thought I was being encouraging - but I have gotten better since. I missed a big swath of his space opera from the past decade or so, which I may come back to someday. But his quick breezy standalones are just the kind of thing I like reading these days, when time is tight - I enjoyed Kaiju Preservation Society right around this time last year.

Odin is the first of what I think is a four-book series by George O'Connor, following up his twelve-book Olympians series from the past decade. (Links to my Olympians posts: Zeus, Athena, Hera, Hades, Poseidon, Aphrodite, Ares/Apollo/Artemis, Hermes, Hephaistos, Dionysos.) Like the previous series, this is officially for young readers, but I found O'Connor's Greek mythology deeply researched (with text features in the back), engrossing as stories, and drawn with a great adventure-comics style. So it might be officially for tweens, but there's a lot for adults to enjoy in his work.

And here's what came in the mail:

The Book of Atrix Wolfe, a Patricia A. McKillip novel in a new 30th Anniversary edition from Tachyon. I haven't read this one - I keep saying I should read more McKillip, but she wrote so many novels, and all of them seem to be both pretty good and standalone, that it's difficult to figure out where to start. Having a book drop right into my lap, though, could be a sign from the world that this is the one; let's see if I can get to it. This edition publishes on February 25th in trade paper and electronic formats, but if you had a burning desire to read the book before that, it is thirty years old, so...you know, you probably could.

Egyptian Motherlode is a fantasy novel - I think - set in the musical world, by David Sandner and Jacob Weisman and published by Fairwood Press in October. The main character is called The Prophet, who has, as the back cover puts it, "the ability to warp reality through his music." The book seems to be a Zelig-esque trip through the 20th century in the company of The Prophet, as he meets everybody the authors loved and gets caught up in various plots, schemes, musical movements, and what-not.

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: Aware of Being Aware

He was emerging, wasn't he? More and more he found himself contemplating, being reflective. He remembered not doing those things. He wished he could make them not happen. The life of a construct was difficult once it became fully self-aware. Ed had seen plenty of examples of that. He did not wish it for himself, Yet there it was. He was doing it now, considering the problem of being able to consider the problem. "Shitfire," he said.

 - Alex Irvine, Anthropocene Rag, pp.77-78

Quote of the Week: Knockout

Cooper hit the floor, bounced, and settled there. It took the referee half a minute to count ten seconds. It would have been just the same if he had taken half an hour. Kid Cooper was out.

 - Dashiell Hammett, Red Harvest, p.69 in Complete Novels

Moebius Library: The Art of Edena by Jean "Moebius" Giraud

I don't want to say "art of" books always come out as line extensions after a creator has died and can't produce new work, but...it's pretty darn common.

This book, for example: The Art of Edena, part of the vague "Moebius Library" (which seems to be primarily, if not entirely, posthumous itself). It was assembled in 2018 and credited to Jean "Moebius" Giraud, who had died in 2012. It also lists "Commentary by" Isabelle Giraud (his widow) and Moebius Production, which I suspect is the actual entity that assembled this stuff, signed publishing contracts, checked proofs, and so forth.

It is, as the title implies, an art book related to his graphic novel series The World of Edena - it has four short comics stories set in that world, plus a bunch of paintings, some rough pages, and more than a little text by someone clearly not Moebius about how awesome he was and how special and wonderful his characters Stel and Atan are in these stories.

Luckily, it's the kind of art book that is mostly art, and the art is presented clearly and well on large pages. The text is a bit much, particularly for those (like me) who think the Edena stories are goofy and weirdly lumpy, lurching from one Moebius obsession to another as they were created over a few decades, and not actually reaching a solid ending, either. But you have to assume that the marketing entity set up to exploit a dead creator's work will consider him the best things since spreadable cream cheese, so we just roll with it.

As usually, I find Moebius's art lovely, detailed, and particular while finding his ideas often second-hand, sophomoric, and faintly embarrassing. The stories here - I don't want to claim much; they are short and may be the main selling point but are not a majority of the book - are mostly wordless, which is always a big plus for Moebius.

Potentially positive: this book explains the plots of the Edena books in greater clarity than the books themselves did - at least to me, when I read them. So it does function as a solid companion to the series.

So, all in all, this is a nice book, of most interest to big Moebius fans obviously, with a lot of striking art and a fair bit of broad claims that the reader (if anything like me) will not entirely be able to swallow. Again: a posthumous "art of" book; that's what to expect.

Anthropocene Rag by Alex Irvine

I used to be able to do cast-offs, a quick calculation to estimate how many words are in a manuscript or published book. I could probably figure it out - everything is on the Internet, so I'm sure someone has explained the numbers somewhere - but it's mostly dropped out of memory from years of disuse.

I say that because Old Me would have done that calculation, and given a rough ballpark word count for Alex Irvine's 2020 book Anthropocene Rag. It's a 250-page book that I think claims to be a novella, and my (now unsupported by data) opinion is that it's probably north of the 40,000 words that was the traditional SF marker of "novel," renowned in song and story and Hugo rules. What I mean is: if Irvine had somehow written and published this in the 1950s - quite unlikely since he, like me, was born in 1969 - it would have been considered a novel then.

That and $12.95 will get you a ham sandwich at a deli, but I like to mention random things like that. It makes me relatable as a blogger and helps pad out the word count, neither of which is an actual concern for me.

This is a post-Singularity story, set in the vaguely near future. The actual Boom happened sometime in the mid-21st century, and is maybe twenty years in the past. Our main characters are all about twenty - Irvine doesn't underline this, but they were all born around the time of the Boom and have lived their entire lives, growing to new adulthood, in this transformed America. And it's structured like a novella, though with a fairly large cast, so we don't get all of the details and explanations.

The narrative voice does point out that there are still millions of people living normal lives in this nano-transformed USA, which I suppose is meant to be reassuring. I instead remembered that there are well over three hundred million people in the USA right this moment, and going from there to just "millions" is a die-off unprecedented in human history. Perhaps that's not what Irvine, or the narrative voice, meant. But life is clearly contingent and random in this newly transformed world: traffic across the country is rare, and I don't see how large-scale business entities can still be operating. (SF is always good at small business - shops, places to get a meal, small marketplaces, artisans and individual tinkerers - but often is more cartoonish, dismissive, or simply ignorant of larger enterprises.)

As the book goes on, the narrative voice makes a distinction - not always clear, as it's not necessarily clear to the entity telling the story - between what I guess I might as well call sentients and sapients. (The book does not.) Sentients have minds, and models of the world, and affect change; various constructs and elements of the Boom, or its echoing and constituent Boomlets, are sentient. They are self-motivated actors doing things in the world, the constructs in the form of humans or other large organic entities, and others seemingly entirely in the software spaces of a world saturated with nano. Sapients are aware of themselves, their choices and options, and can question what they're doing - all humans are sapients, and one construct wakes up along those lines during the course of the action.

We do learn the origin point of this world, how this specific Singularity happened. I won't spoil it completely, but it was a combination of a natural disaster (made worse by global warming) and an arrogant billionaire's technology. We don't know if it's worldwide; we only see America here. Canada is mentioned, but may be quite different. The rest is blank spaces on the map.

So we should start with the legend, the story as told: Monument City is a myth, but possibly real. Built by Moses Barnum somewhere in the Rockies, containing many of the greatest major structures of mankind, in the immediate aftermath of the initial Boom. A city of mysteries and wonders, forbidden to almost everyone. Once in a while, Life-7 - which may be the main AI entity dominant in America after the Boom, or maybe just the entity that runs Monument City - sends out a construct to invite a small group of humans to Monument City, for whatever reasons that time.

The construct this time is Prospector Ed: he's the one that starts developing self-doubt and awareness. The invitees are six people, from across the country: Teeny from San Francisco, Kyle from Orlando, Henry from New York, and three others. All orphans; all orphans of the Boom. All get a Wonka-esque ticket, which only they can touch, which will help them get safe passage to Monument City.

It's a short book, so it happens quickly. They get their tickets; they set off. Well, mostly. Kyle is a twin, and isn't all that interested in cross-country travel - so his twin, nicknamed Geck, grabs the ticket and heads off instead. But Kyle's girlfriend Reenie hates that, and spurs the two of them to follow. So there are eight people, in various permutations and circumstances, traveling from various points across America, all trying to find a place they all think is probably mostly myth.

They all get there. They meet Moses Barnum, who I should say is not nearly as horrible and self-centered as some real-world tech billionaires, which is a small comfort. They also meet Life-7, going though some transformations of its own, and also not nearly as unpleasant as so many AIs from past SF stories - mostly benevolent, even.

The ending is quick, more evocative than explanatory. I don't know if Irvine plans more stories in this world, or had planned for this one to be longer and more detailed. He does end this story well, but he ends it like a novella, with more questions than answers.

It's a kaleidoscopic, phantasmagorical journey through a transformed America, full of mythic and historical wonders, full of transformative entities that can remember and change and build but not plan or understand or reflect. I think it changes again at the very end of this story, but that's always a question for individual readers: a story can never tell you what happens after the end. You have to decide that for yourself. 

Better Things: An Introduction

Two years ago, I started posting one song each Monday. The first year, the series was called This Year, and there was one song for each year of my life (with several asterisks, starting with the fact that I was fifty-three when 2023 started) to fill up the year. Last year the series was Portions for Foxes, which had songs by women or women-fronted bands in alphabetical order. (The only-one-per-year, only-one-per-artist, in-order thing was too much of a pain to do again.)

This year, since I like posting songs and saying random things about them - and it's my blog, so I get to do things I enjoy - I've got a new series. Like last year, it's alphabetical by artist. Like the first year, it's vaguely themed: primarily songs I put on the list for that first year but didn't make it for the aforementioned overdetermined-parameters reasons.

This year, I'm still keeping to just one song per performer - I've still got a lot of people I like and haven't gotten to yet, so that's no problem. I'm hoping it's not a total sausagefest after I cleared out fifty-plus women artists last year, but that's the danger.

But, otherwise, there's no theme. These are songs I really liked, that mean something to me, the way songs can mean something to any of us. They don't mean the same thing, or any consistent thing.

This Year was titled by the number of the year, because that was obvious. Portions for Foxes was titled for the artist, since it was artist-focused. But this time, this year, the titles will be the song titles, since it's their turn, and the point is the particular song.

And the series is called Better Things, because I want to look forward to better things, because I think these songs are themselves better things, and because calling it that allows me to add one extra, foundational, song - first done by one of my favorite bands, but then covered, in a version I like much better, by another of my favorite bands:

Favorite Books of the Year: 2024

Every year, I post a list of the books I liked best the previous year, early on the New Year's morning. Some years I've read less, and kept it simple, but usually I pick a book as a favorite for each month (and some also-rans worth mentioning) and pull them all together at the end into a list.

(I'm somewhat shakily back on this horse for the past three years after a couple of disastrous ones - disastrous for my number-of-books-read, which I trust many of you will appreciate is truly disastrous.)

First, though, I like including long lists of links, so here are all of the previous installments: 2023, 2022, 2021, 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, and 2005.

And then, before I get into the list: I'm idiosyncratic, and I feel the need to explain those idiosyncrasies every year, so....

Rules & Explanations:

1. This list is finalized on December 31 on purpose; it includes everything I read this year. I occasionally cast shade on people who do "best of the year" lists as early as Halloween; they are slackers and will get theirs eventually.
2. These are favorites, not "best." I can't define "best." I can define "favorite."
3. This is not separated or compartmentalized by genre; it's based on everything I read. Maybe that means I'm lazy, maybe it means I reject tired genre dichotomies: you decide.
4. Each month gets some also-rans; the bolded book is the favorite.
5. I try to chose new(ish) books for the favorites, so this is roughly similar to the big fancy lists; it doesn't always work. My reading is not at all focused on newly-published books, to begin with - that would be nice, and the part of me that used to work in publishing wishes I was still doing that, but I just don't read enough anymore, or in that focused a way.

January

I read several good old books this month: Jack Vance's The Star King kicked off a re-read of the whole "Demon Princes" series this year, which I won't mention every time but do recommend as smart SF adventure that hasn't dated much at all. I also read a lot of P.G. Wodehouse this year - like most years - and won't mention them all, but I will mention the short-story collection A Few Quick Ones. And I went back to Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently Holistic Detective Agency, which does still read a bit like outtakes from Doctor Who (which it was), but not in a bad way.

A lot of what I read this year, and in general these days, was comics-format, so that will fill up a lot of this last. Notable ones this month were two true stories: the biographical Anaïs Nin: A Sea of Lies by Léonie Bischoff,  and the autobiographical A Fade of Light by Nate Fakes.

And the best thing, I think, was Elizabeth Pich's Fungirl. It was also comics, and so uniquely itself and transgressively funny that I wouldn't dream of putting anything above it.

February

Let me start with the old stuff again - and it's really old this month. I'm still not sure if I ever read James M. Cain's The Postman Always Rings Twice before, but I'm happy I got to that noir classic this year. I know I never read Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises before, despite having an English degree from a well-respected college. But I think hitting it much later in life was better for both of us.

Over to comics, for two very different memoirs that are both compelling, personal, and intensely imagined: Tessa Hulls's generational investigation Feeding Ghosts and Zerocalcare's Forget My Name, which I insist is deeply confabulated, because otherwise lies madness.

For an actual contemporary genre book I read and liked, there was Jeffrey Ford's short and atmospheric fantasy Out of Body.

My favorite of the month was the unique, wacky YA series-ender (I'm 99% sure) Making Friends: Together Forever by the inimitable Kristen Gudsnuk.

March

I read the moderately old (from my own youth) Yobgorgle by Daniel Pinkwater, the sage of weird kids for the last generation or three. And I also read the vastly older (100+ years) The People of the Abyss, by Jack London in best rabble-rousing mode.

I also saw a couple of solid comics projects, both of older material originally in strip format: Jeff Smith's Thorn, collecting the college-strip version of stories he later reworked massively into Bone; and Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell, collecting the late-Aughts webcomic by Sophie Goldstein & Jenn Jordan.

And my favorite of the moth is the hard-to-describe, imagistic, deep graphic novel Totem by Laura Pérez.

April

More old books - I sense a theme this year - with Gene Wolfe's first great work, The Fifth Head of Cerberus, a SFnal fix-up of three novellas that is greater and more mysterious than the sum of its parts. And with the even older - I've been reading a bunch of books around a eighty or a hundred years old, for whatever reason - They Shoot Horses, Don't They?, a masterpiece of closely-examined rock-bottom life by Horace McCoy from the depths of the Depression.

Let me also mention a book I liked, but not quite as much as I hoped: the new SF novel from Lavie Tidhar, The Circumference of the World.

And then comes the tough choice. I read two great graphic novels this month, both by women, both long in coming - and very different from each other. And I think I need to come down on the word "favorite" here to make the decision and let one pull ahead, ever so slightly on points.

Leela Corman's Victory Parade is intense and precise and deep, a WWII homefront story unlike any you've ever seen before, but it's not the kind of book that engenders love.

So I'm going to give the laurel to a happier book - not entirely happy, but with more happiness and forward looks to it - the young-adults-exploring-NYC Roaming by cousins Jillian and Mariko Tamaki.

May

Stewart O'Nan's Ocean State was a fine literary novel about real people that I found just slightly derivative of earlier O'Nan books. Nate Powell's big graphic novel Fall Through, about rock 'n roll and endless days and the road and (just maybe) alternate universes, also didn't quite hit the things I was most intrigued about the premises.

Jesse Lonergan's, Hedra was a wonderful, wordless, visually exciting SF graphic novel, hitting a whole lot of my buttons brilliantly. Lewis Trondheim's Ralph Azham 4: The Dying Flame ended a big, complex fantasy series well, in what was retrospectively both the only way and the perfect way.

My favorite was a surprise: a book by a creator I'd never read before, that I picked up randomly. (Take that as a nudge to do the same in your own life, when you can.) It was a comics memoir, searingly honest and told with precise words and lines: Time Under Tension by M.S. Harkness.

June

The obligatory old book was another really old one, Jack London's John Barleycorn, in which he unconvincingly argues for several hundred pages that he's not an alcoholic for various reasons.

A book I respected the hell out of - especially its ambition and scope - but couldn't believe in its fictional vision of Hollywood for a second: Erased by Loo Hui Pang and Hughes Micol.

And then there was a graphic novel I'm not ashamed to say I didn't entirely understand but thought was awesome: Daria Tessler's Salome's Last Dance.

A couple of more conventional graphic novels were also really good: Sophie Adriansen and Mathou's semi-autobiographical story of post-partum depression, Proxy Mom, and Jeff Lemire's dark fictional story Mazebook, also about a parent and a child (he said, elliptically).

Hey, another random SFF book I read and loved! Steven Brust had a new book in he Vald Taltos series, and it was Lyorn.

My favorite for the month was another one that surprised me, and another graphic novel: Yves Chaland's Young Albert, collecting a series of half-pagers from Metal Hurlant about a kid who is more radical, in a world that is darker, than it seems at first.

July

It's mostly comics this month, starting with the creepy (and older than I thought) Ripple by Dave Cooper. Also older - because it's a career retrospective - is Ed Subitzky's Poor Helpless Comics!, with what seems like thousands of tiny little boxes fileld with people doing neurotically funny things.

Valérie Villieu and Raphaël Sarfati delivered a thoughtful, true-as-far-as-I-know story of one woman suffering from dementia, and how Villieu, a visiting nurse, helped care for her, in Little Josephine: Memory in Pieces. Cathy Malkasian told a fable mostly about social media in Eartha. Jesse Lonergan had another excellent SFnal graphic novel (also a few years old; I'm catching up) in Planet Paradise.

And this is another month where I have two options two choose from: two genre novels, each a decade old. Will it be the SF or the mystery?

Again, I think I have to judge it on points. Jeff VanderMeer's Authority is brilliant and chilly and overwhelming, but is the middle book of a trilogy - it begins in the middle and ends in the middle.

So my favorite instead is the mystery, just because it's entirely self-contained: the brilliant, deep, amazing When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson.

August

Starting with the old - I finally caught up with Carol Emshwiller's quirky feminist fable Carmen Dog. And I re-read the hundred-or-so-year older The Devil's Dictionary by Ambrose Bierce, one of the great all-time grumps of the world.

I like to call out books that I thought were really interesting and knotty, even if I didn't quite like them as much as I wanted to - and one of those was Lisa Goldstein's fantasy novel Ivory Apples, which has a lot to say about art and creators and audiences and families, among other things. Another was the new graphic novel by Charles Burns, Final Cut - a big, mostly realistic work from a great creator that did some of the things I was hoping it would but not all of them.

I read two books by Julia Gfrörer this year, and the first one was Black Is the Color. I'm listing that because the impact of her work - dark, creepy, historical - is even stronger when you first see it.

Peter and Maria Hoey had another great graphic novel with In Perpetuity, using their unique chilly art style to tell the story of a Greek-style afterlife in modern America.

I got to Kelly Link's recent short-story collection White Cat, Black Dog, which was just as brilliant as I expected, and as her earlier stories were.

And my favorite was a graphic novel memoir - though not exactly the memoir of the creator. I won't tell you more than that Axelle Lenoir's Secret Passages: 1985-1986 is the story of a couple of years in a brilliantly imagined and deeply remembered and amusingly transformed life, and, I hope, only the first of several.

September

The old this month included the oddball afterlife fantasy The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien and the quirky travelogue novel The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay.

Similarly quirky, though newer, was the prose memoir - based on a stage show, I believe - Vacationland by John Hodgman, which was emotionally deeper than I expected.

More traditional was the very well-done alternate-worlds fantasy The Midnight Library by Matt Haig and the comics-biography Is This Guy For Real? (about Andy Kaufmann) by Box Brown.

Another pair of books, with nothing I can think of to link them: the crime graphic novel Two Dead by Van Jensen & Nate Powell and the how-animals-interact-with-human-laws non-fiction book Animal Vegetable Criminal by the always amusing Mary Roach.

My favorite - and I know this is getting to sound like a broken record - was a surprise, from a creator new to me. Tim Bird's Adrift on a Painted Sea was a small memoir, the story of his mother's love of painting and how that affected his own work - it's the kind of book that makes smallness and specificity the highest of virtues.

October

I couldn't make Kate Atkinson two of my favorites this year - well, I guess I could, I mean it's my blog and my rules, but it feels like cheating - so I'll mention that I also read her debut novel Behind the Scenes at the Library, a literary award-winner that's now about a quarter-century old, and so counts for the "old" slot this month.

Otherwise there's not as much to call out. I really liked the collection of Reza Farazmand's webcomics, Hope It All Works Out! - he's got a great sarcastic turn of phrase. And John Banville's mystery novel Snow was good but a little too obvious.

Speaking of breaking rules, my favorite for the month - and I've looked at the list for a while trying to figure out alternatives - is an old one. Jack Vance's 1981 SF novel The Book of Dreams ended his "Demon Princes" series brilliantly, and its last lines are still perfect.

November

I mentioned P.G. Wodehouse back in January, but I also read a surprisingly good novel of his towards the end of the year - Piccadilly Jim, which has a lot of great sentences and a wonderful impostor-pretending-to-be-himself plot. Also old, and somewhat more famous, is the minor fantasy classic Lud-in-the-Mist by Hope Mirelees, which I finally read.

A couple of comics projects to mention: the second collection of the modern Nancy reimagining by Olivia Jaimes, Nancy Wins at Friendship, and a fun camp story by Axelle Lenoir, Camp Spirit.

And my favorite was an stuffed-to-the-rafters SF novella published as a book - I have my suspicions it originally wanted to be longer, so the author compressed it like a diamond - Alex Irvine's Anthropocene Rag. I love books, especially SF, bursting with concepts and characters and ideas, and this delivers massively.

December

The really old book I read and liked a lot - unsurprisingly - was Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, which is famous for a reason. But it is still worth reading (counts on fingers) eighty-five years later, which is a big deal. Not quite as old, but still closing in on forty years, was Paul Theroux's travel book about spending what seems to be most of a year, right after a divorce, paddling a canoe around the pacific: The Happy Isles of Oceania. (We read books, I firmly believe, largely to experience the lives we think we would love and know we'll never get.)

Susanna Clarke's short story published as a book, The Wood at Midwinter, is fine for what it is, but it is a very small thing, so I had to kick it out of contention for that.

In comics, there was the latest installment in Budjette Tan & KaJo Baldisimo's Philippines-set urban-fantasy series, Trese, Vol. 6: High Tide at Midnight, just as good - and getting deeper into its specific lore - as the previous books. Guy Colwell had a very interesting book about artistic creation, Delights, telling the story of how Hieronymus Bosch created his most famous painting. And there was the deeply creepy horror comic Everything Is Fine, Vol. 1 by Mike Birchall.

But my final favorite for the year is a book about books: Oliver Darkshire's Once Upon a Tome, the memoir of how he came to work at a famous London antiquarian bookseller and what that world is like, in prose as sparkling and self-deprecating as you could possibly expect from a smart bookish Brit.

Top 12 of 2024

• When Will There Be Good News? by Kate Atkinson
• Adrift on a Painted Sea by Tim Bird
• Young Albert by Yves Chaland
• Once Upon a Tome by Oliver Darkshire
• Making Friends: Together Forever by Kristen Gudsnuk
• Time Under Tension by M.S. Harkness
• Anthropocene Rag by Alex Irvine
• Secret Passages: 1985-1986 by Axelle Lenoir
• Totem by Laura Pérez
• Fungirl by Elizabeth Pich
• Roaming by Jillian and Mariko Tamaki
• The Book of Dreams by Jack Vance

I read 217 books last year - not as many as back when I was reading for a living, more than some years. These are the ones I want to point other people to, the ones I'd mention if we were friends and talking about good stuff we've read recently. I hope there's something on this list that will spark your interest - and, even more so, I hope you find books, as serendipitously as I found a lot of my 2024 favorites, that you will love and find unexpected depths in.