2020 In the Rear-View

For most of the Years of this Blog, I had several standard posts on the first of the year -- a listing of my favorite books of the prior year, a meme-ish thing where I linked to the first and last sentences of each month, and occasionally other things (launching or ending a Book-A-Day run, the weekly Reviewing the Mail post when it was a Monday). That hit a peak for the Book-A-Day run of 2018, but last year's beginning saw just one white-flag-waving post to say that I wouldn't post a list of favorites, since I read too few books to feel comfortable doing that.

This year was slightly better, but (as I type this on December 28th) it still looks like I'll end the year having read about 75 books, which is about half of what I thought of as my latter-day nadir. In the '90s and Aughts, I usually read 300+ books a year, topping out at 419 in '93. That dipped into the 140-180 range mostly for the last decade, with bumps for the Book-A-Day years of 2014 (383) and 2018 (433).

So I'm still not comfortable saying, "I read six dozen books, and here are the one dozen best ones!" And I will not be doing that here.

But I also neglected to do my monthly lists of books read this year, for all of the same ennui and way-too-much-work and did-you-notice-it-was-2020? reasons. So instead I will list everything I read last year, linking to their posts, and maybe include a sentence or two about the ones that would be Favorite Candidates in a better year.

So my favorite books of the year are contained in the list below, and it may even be clear to the reader which they were. But you're probably better off checking out someone who read more books (particularly new books) during 2020 if you're looking for serious recommendations.

(You may also note that I began the year rather, um, slowly. And it may be quite obvious what days I was on vacation this year. Reading during working days was a thing that basically didn't happen in 2020.)

Adam Hart-Davis, Eurekaargh! (2/6)

Gideon Haigh, The Uncyclopedia (4/20)

Joseph Heller, Catch-22 (5/3)

Charles Burns, Free Shit (5/4)

Doug Gray, The Eye of Mongambo, Book One (5/5)

John Allison, Christine Larsen, & Sarah Stern, By Night, Vol. 1 (5/6)

Jason, O Josephine! (5/7)

Rick Geary, The Wallace Mystery (5/8)

Jaime Hernandez, Is This How You See Me? (5/11)

I'm glad I don't have to calculate the Top 5 Jaime Hernandez L&R storylines, because that's a thankless task. These days, I think "Love Bunglers" is #1, but does "Death of Speedy" come next? Or "Flies on the Ceiling?" Or something else? The main story in this book tries its best to muscle into that company, and arguably does so. Jaime's one of the few whose "Top 5" needs about ten entries.

Box Brown, Tetris (5/12)

Landis Blair, The Envious Siblings and Other Morbid Nursery Rhymes (5/16)

Kevin Huizenga, Glen Ganges in: The River at Night (5/25)

A masterwork of comics and of literature in general, from a creator who keeps finding new ways to get better.

Caitlin Major and Kelly Bastow, Manfried Saves the Day (5/29)

Ian Frazier, Hogs Wild (6/28)

Kim Deitch, Reincarnation Stories (6/29)

Martha Wells, Network Effect (7/3)

An actually new SF novel that I read quickly and can highly recommend. Pity you've all already heard of it....

Ulli Lust, How I Tried to Be a Good Person (7/5)

Ken Jennings, Because I Said So! (7/10)

Jasper Fforde, Early Riser (7/26)

Another excellent, and still reasonably new, book from a quirky author. He might not need my recommendation, either, but he does have it.

Calvin Trillin, Killings (8/6)

Steve Erickson, American Nomad (8/23)

More people should read Erickson's two non-fiction books about American presidential campaigns, Leap Year and this book. They won't, but they should. Erickson's visionary style gets at essential truths in a way nothing more straightforward can.

Jonathan Bernstein, Knickers in a Twist (9/1)

Kage Baker, The Anvil of the World (9/2)

Jason Lutes, Berlin, Book Three: City of Light (9/3)

Rick Geary, Carrizozo: An Illustrated History (9/4)

Lawrence Block, The Night and the Music (9/5)

John Allison, Bad Machinery, Vol. 8: The Case of the Modern Men (9/7)

Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado (9/13)

P.G. Wodehouse, Uncle Fred in the Springtime (9/26)

Nick Hornby, Juliet, Naked (10/2)

John Kessel, Corrupting Dr. Nice (10/11)

Daniel Pinkwater, Adventures of a Dwergish Girl (10/18)

Lawrence Block, A Time to Scatter Stones (10/24)

Vera Brosgol, Be Prepared (10/29)

Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, This Is How You Lose the Time War (10/31)

Another book I got to slightly late (post-several award wins). Just about as good as everyone says, but I may be souring on the entire idea of "these people are really good at violence, which is wicked kewl, and so now they will kiss."

Brian Fies, A Fire Story (11/7)

Bill Griffith, Nobody's Fool (11/8)

John Allison, Max Sarin, Liz Fleming, & Whitney Cogar, Giant Days, Vol. 7 (11/9)

Brian K. Vaughan and Cliff Chiang, Paper Girls, Vol. 6 (11/12)

Roger Rapoport and Marguerita Castanera, editors, I Should Have Stayed Home (11/16)

Jacques Tardi, I, Rene Tardi, Prisoner of War in Stalag IIB, Vol. 2: My Return Home (11/21)

Michael Kupperman, Tales Designed to Thrizzle, Vol. 2 (11/22)

Aaron Renier, The Unsinkable Walker Bean and the Nights of the Waxing Moon (11/23)

Raina Telgemeier, Guts (11/25)

Paul Kirchner, the bus 2 (11/26)

Lavie Tidhar, Central Station (11/27)

Gina Siciliano, I Know What I Am: The Life and Times of Artemisia Gentileschi (11/28)

Tom Gauld, Department of Mind-Blowing Theories (11/29)

This probably would have made it onto my list -- Gauld's writing is smart and funny and his art is stylish and precise, all things I love.

Rich Sparks, Love and Other Weird Things (11/30)

If I wasn't doing the only-one-book-per-month thing I usually do -- which would have been unusually punishing in 2020, where I had three separate months where I didn't finish a single book -- this might have also made it onto the list. Sparks is both unique and consistently funny, in his ideas and his drawings, which is a really big deal.

Guy Delisle, The Handbook to Lazy Parenting (12/2)

Jack Vance, The Dying Earth (in Tales of the Dying Earth, 12/2)

Ben Sears, House of the Black Spot (12/3)

Craig Hurd-McKenney and Rick Geary, The Brontes: Infernal Angria (12/4)

Tillie Walden, Are You Listening? (12/5)

A book both quieter and more impactful than it seems at first, and another big graphic novel from one of the strongest (and most prolific) new talents in the field.

Gou Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness: The First Volume (12/6)

John Allison, Max Sarin, Liz Fleming, & Whitney Cogar, Giant Days, Vol. 8 (12/7)

John Allison, Christine Larsen, & Sarah Stern, By Night, Vol. 2 (11/9)

Riad Sattouf, The Arab of the Future 3 (12/11)

Jon Rivera, Gerard Way, Michael Avon Oeming, & Nick Filardi, Cave Carson Has a Cybernetic Eye, Vol. 1 (12/12)

Gou Tanabe, H.P. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness: The Second Volume (12/13)

Riad Sattouf, The Arab of the Future 4 (12/19)

John Baxter, A Pound of Paper (12/19)

John Allison, Christine Larsen, & Sarah Stern, By Night, Vol. 3 (11/20)

John Allison, Max Sarin, Liz Fleming, Jenna Ayoub, & Whitney Cogar, Giant Days, Vol. 9 (12/21)

Cecil Castellucci, Marley Zarcone, Ande Parks, Marguerite Sauvage, & Kelly Fitzpatrick, Shade the Changing Girl, Vol. 2 (12/22)

Herge, The Adventures of Tintin, Vol. 4 (12/23)

Ryan North, Erica Henderson, & Rico Renzi, The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl, Vol. 7: I've Been Waiting for a Squirrel Like You (12/24)

Susanna Clarke, Piranesi (12/25)

Proof that 2020 was not entirely horrible (as, in its own way, was November 3rd). I hope writing this gave Clarke whatever she needed to keep writing more stories -- Jonathan Strange was a great book, but I'm greedy enough to think she could be a great writer, with many more books in her. Piranesi is a fine signpost, giving me reason to think that's true.

Seth, Clyde Fans (12/26)

Jeff Lemire, Royal City, Vol. 3: We All Float On (12/27)

Jeff Lemire, Frogcatchers (12/28)

Lawrence Block as Jill Emerson, Threesome (12/29)

Barry Blitt, Blitt (12/29)

Edward O. Wilson, Jim Ottaviani, & C.M. Butzer, Naturalist: A Graphic Adaptation (12/30)

Michel Rabagliati, Paul at Home (12/31)

If I did have a Favorites list, this would certainly be on it -- a great new book from a master of cartooning, grappling with life in later middle age when the troubles and changes start to stack up hard and fast. And the fact that I read it on the last day of the year is something I'd call out to validate my eternal "the year's not over until it's over" instance.

As I type this, I have seven books that I've read and haven't written about, though a few are in series that I will clump together. And I have posts scheduled through mid-January, on my new, weekdays-only standard. So I expect I will come back and fill in the missing links (ha ha) once those go live.

I also note that I read more books in November and December than the previous ten months. That seems to be a good sign, but I have no idea if it means anything.

But this is what I read last year, and, if there's any lesson, it's this: unexpected crap happens. Life is weird and twisty. You can figure out how to deal with it and head in the direction you want. You may not get as far as you want. You may not go as quickly as you want. You may suddenly be hit by a nasty unexpected disease, as nearly 20m Americans have been. You may even die from it, as almost 350k Americans have. (I don't want to be a Pollyanna here: we will all die, some sooner than others, and everything we want to do past that point will be gone.) But you can at least adapt and keep your goals in mind in the time you have.

This lesson is more widely applicable than to your reading life.

My Team Is Hiring!

In case any of you reading this are also in the marketing business, my immediate team in Thomson Reuters is expanding right now. The jobs are listed for the Minneapolis-St. Paul and Dallas metro areas, but, given the world we currently live in, there may be some flexibility on more remote locales.

And when I say "my team," I don't mean "working for me" but I do mean "doing the same thing I'm doing for different products and/or working with me on a daily basis." So take that as a positive or negative as you wish.

(One last note, "Manager" in TR is a slightly higher level title than bog-standard "Marketing Manager" anywhere else -- I moved from being a Marketing Manager at Wiley to a Senior Marketer here, and that was basically a lateral move.)

The jobs are:

JREQ138330 – Sr Marketer, Content Creation (Corp Legal)

https://thomsonreuters.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/External_Career_Site/job/USA-Eagan-610-Opperman-Dr/Sr-Marketer--Content-Creation--Corp-Legal-_JREQ138330

JREQ138327 – Manager, Content Marketing (Corp Tax)

https://thomsonreuters.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/External_Career_Site/job/USA-Eagan-610-Opperman-Dr/Manager--Content-Marketing--Corporates-Tax-_JREQ138327

JREQ138329 – Solutions Marketing Manager (Corp Practical Law)

https://thomsonreuters.wd5.myworkdayjobs.com/External_Career_Site/job/USA-Eagan-610-Opperman-Dr/Solutions-Marketing-Manager--Corp-Practical-Law-_JREQ138329-1

Low Content Mode = Time for a Personality Quiz!

Yes, I'm still here.

(Like all of us, I'm stuck here for the duration, sheltering in place even more than I was a month ago.)

About a week ago, Tor.com linked to what purported to be a more-serious version of the Internet staple, the "which tree are you?" quiz. (Tor post, actual link to the pompously named Open-Source Psychometrics’ Project’s Statistical “Which Character” Personality Quiz.)

And we all want to know which fictional characters (or tree, or small furry creatures, or Pirates of the Caribbean movies, or whatever) we are most like, don't we?

I know I did. And it was a Sunday where I couldn't really leave the house, so I ran through the quiz.

And (you have a to imagine a drumroll here, I'm afraid -- though some '90s homepages would have embedded a tinny sound of a drumroll, and who would have thought that era would have any web functionality that we'd want to keep?)....

I am most like a character whose movies I have not seen:

But I like ol' Green Goliath -- I followed the Peter David run of the comic, more years ago now than I want to admit, and am fond of the Gamecube video game -- so that's fine with me.

The site gives an exhausting -- no, literally exhausting; it runs to 540 entries down to 22% matches -- list of also-rans, but who's got time for that? I took a quick screenshot of the top 10, which is what the site creators should have done (and put the rest behind a "obsessives click here" jump link).

Several of those characters are familiar to me, and I even agree with a couple of them. (Not totally thrilled with Flitwick as such, but happy to see my self-identification as Ravenclaw is confirmed.)

Anyway, I am hereby recording this for posterity, in case I ever want to know how closely I matched Lucius Fox (81%) or Mr. Darcy (80%) or Hermione Granger (80%) or Homer Simpson (26%) in the year 2020, sometime in my own indefinite future.

I hope this quiz gives you an equal amount of frivolous momentary amusement in this dark time.

Metaphorical Love

Here's a song I'm liking a lot recently. I gather from the comments on this YouTube version that the singer/songwriter, Kate Davis, has been playing it different ways for years, but this is the first time I've heard her stuff.

I am a sucker for tricky, sneaky metaphors, and I love that about this song. But she also sings it compellingly, and lets the song do its own thing without getting in its way.

The video is oddly more impactful than just listening to the song -- visuals are pretty simple, but it really leans into the heart of the metaphor.

Anyway, here's "Open Heart" by Kate Davis. I gather it's on her new record, Trophy.

Another Year Hornswoggled: 2018 in the Rear-View

In the annals of pointless rituals, this is certainly one of them.

Once, far too long ago, there was a dumb meme to make an end-of-year blog post out of the first and last sentences from each month of the year on that blog. I liked the way it randomly summed up a year, so I've been doing it ever since. And now I'm doing it again.

January

The whole point about teens is that they're not done yet. 

And Frakes makes that real; reading this book is a lot like listening to a good storyteller talk about her life and adventures.

February

I know cliches only get to be that way because they're durable and common, but, boy howdy! does this book rely heavily on a very cliched cliche for its premise.

Writing this post, I realize I consistently dropped one of those pesky "e"s in my post about Let Me Be Perfectly Clear, and that no one noticed for several years. It's correct now. I think.

March

This is the most over-the-top version of Beowulf since the silly 2008 movie, but that might just be what inevitably happens when you let comics people get their hands of a story about a guy who kills monsters and dragons.

But it all does feel faintly pointless, as if Moore can write these everybody-else's-characters-fight stories in his sleep, and is now doing so.

April

Well, this is going to be difficult to write about..

Ollmann shows us that's not all that bad, even for a cannibal sadist alcoholic suicide.

May

The storms of crossover have (briefly?) passed in this book, leaving Kamala Khan to actually live her own life for a while -- and that's good, both because that's supposed to be the point of this series, and because her life is plenty busy enough all by itself.

This is a Morrow book, and he's not about to change now -- if you can come along on that journey with him, you will have an fascinating and unique ride.

June

Just because all of 2018 is Book-A-Day doesn't mean that I can't have smaller reading projects in the middle of the big one! 

So it's only right that I share with you the first single from Okkervil River's new record, In the Rainbow Rain, which sounds very sunny indeed.

July

I don't want to oversell my expertise here: I've never worked in a law firm, and my professional work is generally marketing to attorneys within companies rather than firms. 

No, not the one you're thinking of. Not that one, either. Definitely not that one. The one who's getting a movie.

August

How far back am I looking today?

Take that word in whatever sense you like.

September

I should note that this book doesn't say that it's volume one: I got a copy from the library, which is the 2006 edition and came out several years before there was a Volume 2.

Gudsnuk is funny and smart and tells good stories with good people. I hope she does a lot more comics, so I can read 'em.

October

This week, I Love (And Rockets) Mondays leaves behind the lands of carefully tended and curated reprints and heads into the off-road weeds of messy serial comics. 

I'm hoping McNeil eventually explains the governance of this world, because so far I see nothing to keep one clan from eliminating another, or any mechanisms other than violence to solve inter-clan disputes.

November

I'm pretty sure this has been published in one volume, at least once. But the current edition is two volumes, and that's what I read. 

Now, I suspect my standards of a likable-enough protagonist may be more strict (or just different) from others', since I just read a couple of graphic novels today with an absolutely appalling set of young heroines who I think I was supposed to root for. So you may sympathize with Resnick more than I did -- and this book is definitely funny, though often in the cringe-laugh manner.

December

OK, the original Ghost in the Shell is not as wonderful as some people say, but it's a solid cyberpunk story in comics form: crisp and understandable and visually interesting and a good example of a particular era in manga and science fiction.

It's been going thirty-five years so far, in various formats. I can hope for thirty-five more, can't I? To see what ninety-something Jaime and Gilbert will be doing?

This Was 2017: How the Year Was Hornswoggled

Every year, I do this post for New Year's Day, linking the first and last (with some wiggle room for comprehensibility) sentences of each month of the past year to the posts where those sentences appeared.

Yes, it was once a meme. No one else does it anymore, which means it belong to me, now. Surely adverse possession can happen virtually as well?

January

A week ago today, I hied myself off to a local purveyor of comical funnies, and walked out with a stack of colorful entertainment vehicles.

Our world is very much not better, but at least we have this.

February

There are more than eight billion people in the world, so it shouldn't surprise me that I lose track of some of them now and then.

So, if you like stories about superheroes, and think you might like reading about a penciller and a journalist finding each other against a backdrop of capes and fights, you should definitely pick this book up.

March

The idea has gone from unknown to exciting to cliche and then all the way to passe, but there was an era where "choose a minor superhero-universe character and get a British writer to take him seriously" was brilliant and new.

Lemire tells great stories and Nguyen makes great images.

April

I normally credit comics to the writer and the artist, but colorists are really important, too, and Laura Allred's color work is so much part of what we think of as "Michael Allred art" that not mentioning her is a big oversight. Hence, the title of this post.

And, having read it, I'm ready to jump back into anything else.

May

I had no idea what this would be.

But it was an interesting experience along the way, and Wolfe is never boring -- confusing sometimes, baffling occasionally, and quirky always, but never ever boring.

June

The second collection of the Unbeatable Squirrel Girl series is titled Squirrel You Know It's True, and, yes, that does mean it's just as silly and frivolous as the first one.

I'm hoping to find the rest of it, and find out just what this Aama thing is, and if any of these characters will make it out the other side of their encounters with it.

July

Ian Frazier is a long-time New Yorker writer, and one of the few who straddles the line between the two kinds of writing they're known best for: serious, boots-on-the-ground reportage full of checked facts and quotes, on the one hand, and whimsical, throw-these-two-odd-facts-together-at-high-speed humor pieces.

It's also about a robot that got self-awareness (or maybe self-direction) through a glitch and calls itself (secretly) Murderbot, which appeals to the John Sladek fan in me.

August

I have no idea why someone said, in the year 2016, "Hey, what this world really needs is a Betty Boop comic book!"

You can get this book from Tachyon Press -- well, more likely from an intermediary -- and it was released on August 22nd, so you can get it right away.

September

I was on vacation this past week, and that generally means I get some book-shopping in.

Still: a major capitalist who gave up his entire fortune and business to build a massive philanthropic vehicle for a very particular and personally important purpose. I suspect Bill Gates knows this story, but not enough others.

October

My current working situation has started to seriously affect my reading, which is about the silliest and most counter-productive thing in the world to complain about. (So don't think I'm complaining.)

That's the most positive thing I can say about it.

November

It's not unreasonable that a book that took a year to live and some significant time afterward to write would also take a substantial time to read.

And it can be fascinating to a Block fan, or to a student of cultural/sexual history.

December

Michael Swanwick's last big collection of short stories was 2007's The Dog Said Bow-Wow, which somewhat explains the title of last year's Not So Much, Said the Cat.

Look for a similar post covering the thirteenth year on October 4, 2018...or possibly somewhat later than that.

The Belated and Unnecessary Twelfth Anniversary Post

This blog came into existence on October 4th, 2005, and I keep forgetting that exact date as each Fall rolls around and it's time to look back on the past Year in Blogging. This year, as you can plainly see, is another example.

I decided, after only realizing I'd overrun the date two weeks later, that I'd give myself a month's leeway, instead of trying to bash out this post on the day I noticed I'd missed it. I had no idea if you folks would see any difference -- even more, how can you see a difference between this post and the one I didn't do? -- but it was a reasonable plan, and I love plans.

Then, when I overran that deadline, I figured what trouble could another month do? And when that deadline loomed, well, the end of the year was in sight, and isn't that time more suitable? Of course it is. And so here we are now, in the cold dark of late December, exactly the right time to look backwards and wonder where the hell we went wrong.

Following last year's precedent, this year's post will have SEO-friendly bolded keywords rather than headings, because we're in Internet 3.0, goddamn it. Perhaps this will aid you as you scan the trackless sea of text ahead of you and heave a sigh, or even entice you to read a bit instead of immediately moving on to that next cute picture of a cat or explanation of why {insert opposition political party} is the very worst thing that has ever existed in the world.

In case anyone out there is bad at math, let me say for the record that I've now been doing this for twelve years. And I thought I would be better at it by now, or at least managed to keep up a routine.

I always begin this post about looking back by looking back: so here are links to the previous anniversary posts: the plain first, the hoopla of the second, the hullabaloo of the third, the excitement of the fourth, the missing fifth, the razzamatazz of the sixth, the fantabulous seventh, the gala eighth, the splendiferous ninth, and the delayed and rushed tenth and the muted and melancholy eleventh. Among them, they represent a massive amount of time-wasting, which you will certainly not need unless you are the Chris Pratt character in Passengers.

Next up, always, is the legend of the founding of the blog. Long ago, in the before-time, the great warrior Hornswoggler delved deep into the Swamp of Google, seeking the Blog Template that would grant him vast fame and riches and the hand of the king's daughter. Sadly, he didn't find it, and so Antick Musings instead came to be. But that mighty warrior is still using that template that he did find on October 4, 2005, perhaps in hopes his constancy will prove an acceptable replacement for good taste and usefulness.

Then we need to get into the ritual comparing of post counts, which is exactly as much of a dick-measuring contest as you fear it will be. (I'm deeply sorry.) Since I had the bad judgment to begin a blog in the middle of a year (October 4th, in case you've forgotten), each year is substantially disjoint from the calendar.

• 2016-2017 -- 263 posts
• 2015-2016 -- 144 posts
• 2014-2015 -- 258 posts
• 2013-2014 -- 434 posts
• 2012-2013 -- 285 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 332 posts
• 2010-2011 -- 445 posts
• 2009-2010 -- 711 posts
• 2008-2009 -- 880 posts
• 2007-2008 -- 834 posts
• 2006-2007 -- 841 posts
• 2005-2006 -- 809 posts

Then I have to complicate the matter by throwing in my second blog, Editorial Explanations, which ran for nearly three years (February of 2011 through the end of 2013), since it started as a series of posts on Antick Musings.

Editorial Explanations:

• 2012-2013 -- 560 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 802 posts
• early 2011 -- 760 posts

And that means, when you put all of it together, you get:

• 2016-2017 -- 263 posts
• 2015-2016 -- 144 posts
• 2014-2015 -- 258 posts
• 2013-2014 -- 434 posts
• 2012-2013 -- 285 + 560 = 845 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 332 + 802 = 1,134 posts
• 2010-2011 -- 445 + 760 = 1,205 posts
• 2009-2010 -- 711 posts
• 2008-2009 -- 880 posts
• 2007-2008 -- 834 posts
• 2006-2007 -- 841 posts
• 2005-2006 -- 809 posts

While we're waiting for the highly-paid stats experts to explain what that all means -- spoiler alert: they never will -- we can see clearly that this blog has been diminishing and going into the West. (Though there is a bit of a bounce this past year -- perhaps a dead-cat bounce, but a bounce nonetheless.) But I hope that it has remained Antick Musings and will always continue as it began: random, desultory, odd, unreliable, and defiantly un-pigeonholed.

Antick Musings was meant to be the place where I wrote about things other than books, because I did books for a living. Well, I haven't done books for a living for a while, and haven't done the books I really liked for a living for a decade now. So it's probably not surprising that it turned into a book blog along the way. I do miss writing about movies (and watching them, more than a few times a year), and I do wonder why I keep rotating the places I dump large clusters of words. (Most of the '90s were Usenet, specifically rec.arts.sf.written. Then came the Straight Dope Message Board, then here. Most recently, I seem to be typing stuff into web boxes on Quora. One might think I would keep those clumps of words here, in a place I control, but one would evidently be wrong.)

So, then, to make up the bulk of this anniversary post, here are some of the sentences I wrote about books in the past year, linked to the longer collections of sentences about those books:

I don't know if comics needs another chronicler of low-key business failure and despair, but we seem to have just gotten one.

We all know That Guy: the one who always has a plan to get ahead, a scheme to get rich, a quick shortcut onto Easy Street, and a boundless optimism that he can do it all with just the tiniest bit of help.

Um, we all know what it means when a middle-aged creator does a book-length story about a body part, right? OK, maybe it could be some thing thrillingly obscure, like body integrity identity disorder, but 99 times out of a hundred, it means The Big C.

All of these are unpleasant people who do dull things in annoying ways and are both deeply horrible and deeply boring.

The four Eltingville lads are deeply horrible people, but they're verbally horrible in that pop-culture way, all references and insults and mean-spirited trivia contests and in-group insults. Each story is draining, as it must be -- the expression of another year's worth of anger at the stupid things that comics/SF/gaming people do to each other and the world.

I like to think I'm a thoughtful reader.  Not perfect, of course -- who is? -- but good at working out metaphors and allegories and fictional schemas of all kinds. If I can see that there's a shape moving under the surface of a book, I can usually make a decent guess at what kind of leviathan lurks down there. 

There's a standard for autobiographical comics: they have to be about "you," obviously, but that "you" must be larger than life. Whatever your actual flaws are, make them bigger and funnier -- your cartoon avatar must be a cartoon, in all of the senses of that word that you can manage.

A metaphor has to become concretized in a story, to be something other than the words that make it up -- it has to mean actual things that happen in the story or underpin it.

I don't know if I completely understood it -- I'm the kind of reader who wants to know how worlds work, and this isn't a world that can be clearly explicated -- but I liked it, and respected it, and cared about the people in it.

But there may be something like an ending not too far in the future, and not just an endless stream of cliffhangers for as long as people keep buying the book. I hope so: I like stories that have endings. It makes them stories.

You might have heard that Alan Moore does not have the best relationship with DC Comics recently. (For values of "recently" that include the last twenty-plus years, and values of "not the best relationship" that include Moore hurling actual attempted magickal spells at them from his secret base in darkest Northampton.)

In every group of close-knit friends, there's always one -- at least one -- not as tightly connected as the others. That's the friend who would be thrown out of the sleigh first when the wolves get closer, the comic relief who the slasher picks off before the opening credits, the one who was always there and dependable but somehow no more than that.

Something in this world does not want you to read Miracleman stories, and each one must be snatched from the claws of that something and dragged out into the wider world.

I wish I could just hand this book to you so you could go into it as ignorant as I was.

Hellboy was dead: to begin with. There was no doubt whatever about that.

(Look, folks: dressing up in colorful clothes and running around beating up people is essentially silly. Please stop calling attention to how silly it is!)

I like to think I'm good at talking about narrative -- I was an editor for a long time, and have been deconstructing stories in my head since I learned those tools. I'm not necessarily right, or even in the right neighborhood, since no one ever is. But I'm usually plausible, which is what talking-about-narrative game aims for.

(And "near the end," for a strip that ran fifty years, still means there were four years to go. And four years, as we're all about to learn, can be a really long time.)

In a world overrun by dirty hippies, grubby hicks, P.C. killjoys, sickos, ex-wives, and today's angry teens, we all need someone to tell us what is right and true.

I've been giving the various Hellboy books a pass from one of my core reading rules -- I don't like to read books that murder me or my family just to make a dangerous background for the heroes to wander through -- but I'm having less and less patience with each new story.

Friendly comedy is "look at what a goof I am," while hostile comedy is "look at those jerks over there."

If you're looking for the usual superhero fare, where violence solves problems...well, you probably should read Plutona, because that's not what violence actually does.

In retrospect, this set the tone for a lot of writer Grant Morrison's later work: portentous superhero operas, with characters emoting in high style, skating by on charm and flash and eye-candy to distract from the fact that the moments of the story don't entirely track and that sensible human beings would never actually act in these ways.

But it does seem to me that every Moebius epic inevitably ends with a big-nosed Everyman on the run from a totalitarian strongman in a dream world, pursuing the image of the perfect woman, who is not so much a character as an idea, even if she's supposed to be a real person.

It was as weird and exhilarating as it sounds, and if it made it difficult for anyone to follow, well, that's the problem with metafiction. It's difficult to step back down to plain old fiction afterward.

I do not think I'm doing a good job of making this book sound appealing. Maybe I should come in at this from a different direction.

If Jim Ballard had mellowed into a gentle wryness in his extreme old age, he might have provided a script for a book like Mooncop, the story of a man left behind by a now-fading space age, one guy left to do a pointless job in a place beautiful and hard and cold and alien.

This is not a story about the interstellar war, or the unlikely economy, or the sail-powered globe-trotting ultra-luxury cruise liners that are nevertheless repeatedly attacked and conquered by murderous pirates.

If you're not willing to deeply believe in this neurotic young woman, and insist along with her that blogging about clothing is a serious and worthy pursuit for an adult, you will be left cold, grumpy and entirely outside the story.

And, since time wounds all heels, I'm chagrined to realize that Akiko ended a good decade ago, and that Crilley, who I thought of as a young guy, is actually a couple of years older than me (and so is young slightly less than I am, which is already not much at all).

This is no way looks like a step forward from what she used to do.

There are times when you can't merely resign, for whatever reason. No, you have to make the bastards kick you out.

At some point in your life, you either realize that punching people is not the solution to problems, or you become a full-blown psychopath.

I really do not want to be that guy.

His world is more Phildickian, if you want to reach for a prose SF equivalent: full of people just scraping by, slaves to their obsessions and circumstances, capable of love but often hobbled by it, human in the most basic and humbling ways.

Forty years in the MU has ground him down enough that he can appear in Secret Wars, or whatever bullshit crossover it is this year, and make a few more cents for his corporate masters.

The great thing about life, though, is that it's never too late to read a good book as long as you can read: any book that is worse read later is not that good to begin with.

You goddamn asshole, P.J. O'Rourke.

So the fact that any one of us is not diagnosed with autism doesn't mean we're "normal" -- it just means we think in ways that haven't caused this particular kind of problem yet, or that our differences are less diagnose-able, or just that we're functional enough that it's not worth the resources to investigate us.

I've tagged this book as "Fantasy," but I don't think it really is. But it's a book about the fantasies that we have, and about how fantasy creatures can make real life bearable.

That's just one example: death and pain and destruction lurk around every corner, and the people who are responsible so often skate on blithely while the people around them pay the price.

It's good to know our limits. If this is outside yours, good for you.

But, still, the spectre of English Fascism in 1937 is a creaky, anachronistic thing to read a long screed against, and Wigan Pier is more than 50% screed by volume.

It's important to check your assumptions against reality regularly: we often find that what we think is true actually has very little do with with what really happened.

If you're the kind of American whose conception of "comics" is entirely filled by people in bright colors punching each other, this is very much not the book for you. I hope there aren't actually that many of you, but -- since I'm a pessimist -- I tend to assume you're the majority, you thick-knuckled vulgarians you.

In Murderbot, Wells has created the first slacker killer-robot, which I deeply love.

There are immediate meanings, the implied history of this world, deeper satires of academic life and the foibles of humanity in general, plus silly pictures that have circles and arrows pointing to places where a dragon is lurking unseen.

Every so often a reader needs to take on a masterpiece. You can only bump along with decent or pretty good books for so long: once in a while you need to open the floodgates wide and let a writer at the full tide of his powers wash over you.

The great thing about history is that it never stops being history. It might technically get older, but, realistically, a hundred years is the same as a hundred and twenty. Old is old, dead is dead.  

As I noted above, this has basically turned into a book blog. One major part of the book-blog is the criticism of what one has read; I just listed far too many examples of that. Other major parts of a book blog are the author interview (but I don't like talking to people), the book giveaway (which, again, requires talking to people), and the regular Presentation of The Swag (which I can actually do). In my case, I call those posts Reviewing the Mail and run them every Monday morning. I used to make a rigid distinction between books I got for free, which went into that post, and books I bought, which went into different posts, and books from the library, which I mostly neglected to mention until I read them, and books given to me as gifts, which...yeah, it was too complicated. Everything is now going into the same Monday-morning post, for my own sanity. 

I have mostly avoided writing about politics here, for which forbearance I'm sure you thank me. But when politics wanders into places where I used to live, such as the publishing world, I sometimes toss out some ill-informed opinions. And so I did back in January, about Milo Yannopolous, who we've probably all forgotten about already.

I wrote about the record Charming Tales by the Brooklyn-based musical act Charming Disaster back in April, and I'm still listening regularly to songs from that record. And I'll repeat that their densely allusive lyrical style and often-genre subject matter is just the kind of thing that a lot of people who read the kind of books I read would also enjoy a lot.

I had an annoying computer issue with my work laptop this year, and complained about it. (The alt-tab switcher would default to the older, less useful style after sleeping.) After that post, I figured out how to fix it: use Task Manager to kill and restart Explorer every time it happens. The solution to every computer problem, I think, is to stop something and restart it.

That was what I was nattering on about during the Twelfth Year of the Blog. Look for a similar post covering the thirteenth year on October 4, 2018...or possibly somewhat later than that.

Well, Isn't This a Charming Disaster?

I occasionally get things other than books in my mail, and I'm supposed to be telling you people about them as well. (If this sounds entirely new to you, it's because I'm not very good at it.)

But one thing -- the new record Cautionary Tales by the Brooklyn-based chamber duo Charming Disaster -- has been rolling around my head quite a lot lately, so I wanted to actually make an effort to mention it and recommend it here.

Charming Disaster is made of up of the leaders of two other bands I've never heard of -- Ellia Bisker of Sweet Soubrette and Jeff Morris of Kotorino -- plus some other musicians, I guess. (If you have heard of either of those bands -- they are likely better known than I realize, since I am out of so many loops it's a wonder I know anything -- this may intrigue you.)

And they play music that I think other SFF folks, and readers in general, will like a lot: chamber pop/cabaret influenced by folklore, mythology, pulp fiction, murder ballads, and similar odd corners of Americana, sung duet-style by two excellent singers. At the moment, I'm particularly fond of the songs "Ragnarok" (guess what it's about) and "Days Are Numbered" (two competing spies), but I've only been through the record a few times, so that may change.

Cautionary Tales was officially released April 21st (last Friday), and is available via the links above and below from Bandcamp, and from the usual corporate stores as well. It's their second full-length album -- do we still call them albums? -- after Love, Crime, & Other Trouble, which I have not heard yet.

Anyway, I think a lot of you would like this sort of thing. And, if I did it right, there will be a widget below allowing you to listen to the songs right here -- not sure if it's just snippets or the whole thing, but we'll find out together, won't we?

I Look 47 But I'm 24

Too much of my brain's processing-power was taken up this morning by a stupid dilemma: why does the title of this book seem so familiar?

I knew it was a song lyric, but it just kept repeating itself in my head, which wasn't much help.

Finally, I realized: that's the way the song goes, and I finally powered through to the chorus and remembered it was Tom Waits's "Cold Water."

So, for anyone else reading Bookgasm today and having that tickle in the back of your head...you're welcome.

And, in case you're somewhere where you can have sound playing, here's a video:

P.S.: the title of this post is inaccurate. I actually am 47, which is why I look 47. Please forgive me.

A Near-Perfect Sentence

"Although the police called in a SWAT team, because this is apparently necessary whenever something happens, even though regular police have guns too and are perfectly capable of killing people with them if necessary, or even if not all that necessary, they did not in fact kill this guy."
 - Kevin Underhill

A Look Back at 2016: The Year in Hornswoggling

Many years ago, this was a meme. Everyone else gave up on it -- that's how memes work -- but not me! So it's become a tradition here at Antick Musings, to have the year-end post, linking to the first and last sentences of each month of the year.

I have to cheat slightly sometimes, since so many of my posts have boilerplate in them these days, but here are the first and last significant sentences of each month of 2016, helpfully linked to the posts where they originally appeared:

January

Zenith is quite likely the best possible revisionist superhero comic series told in five-page chapters.

Hope the rest of you are having a more pleasant January. 

February

Hello, and welcome to February, the typically dreariest month of the year (if you live in my hemisphere).

None of that was planned; it just sort of happened that I acquired most of the SFF from the other end of the world -- perhaps I was just upside-down in my thinking, and thus connected better with those books.

March

Books are good things. Oh, wait -- look! I have two new books right here in front of me to tell you about!

Cartoonists are as prone to inadvertently assuming their audiences are morons as any other storytellers, I suppose.

April

There's no time for existential doubt -- I have a stack of books to tell you about!
 (Eek, I accidentally rhymed. Oh well, leave it be.)


I might be repeating myself there: is corn grass?

May

It's a long list this week, so that's my official reason for keeping the introductory stuff short this week.

Today, remember those who fought in the wars of the past, but also work to avoid wars of the future.

June

I've been working as a marketer for long enough that words and pictures and video and audio are all just "content" to me -- or, at least, I aspire to that level of world-weary cynicism.

The next book is supposedly the last one, so perhaps Valente is tiring of the world -- there's a feeling in this book that may be the case.

July

For my American readers, remember to be particularly patriotic today, so as to live up to our international reputation.

Not from me...just in general.

August

Here we are at Monday once again -- it's not the best day of the week, but let me share with you some books that came in my mail, to see if that eases the pain.

So: female-focused writing, with believable people and real-world situations and some of the best dialogue available in comics anywhere. What are you waiting for?

September

It is definitely not fair to say "Peter Bagge is a libertarian, and so of course he's obsessed with the Founding Fathers."

City of Truth is a quick read, and a bracing one, from Morrow's early angry period. It's a great introduction to his work, particularly for those who don't want to dive right into the anti-God books.

October

No one can write memoirs forever: there's only so much life to work from.

I'm sure many of you will be happy about that, even if I can't tell you anything meaningful about who's in what story and how they connect to their respective novels.

November

We all knew that Charles Stross wouldn't be satisfied writing secret history forever.

But, since it's supposed to be for people a third of my age, I can't fault it -- it's very good at doing what it sets out to do, and is a lot of fun as it goes along that path.

December

You got a kid named Jack. You got some beans. But it don't go the way you expect, see?

I hope so: I like stories that have endings. It makes them stories.

November Was White

I've just posted the index to the books I read in November, for those of you stalking my reading life.

My post title comes from this bleak but utterly captivating Say Hi song:

Multiple Nights in a Not-All-That-Lonely October

Hey! I've just finally posted the list of books I read in October, since I've just now finished up posts for all of those books. (I have a system going, I guess -- it's a weird system, and one I don't want to talk about, but it still counts as a system.)

If you want to go to that list of links, here is the path. But do remember: it's dangerous to go alone.

That August Time

The year is accelerating; I just finished all of my posts about books read in August, setting them to post over the next two weeks.

And so the index post for that month is now live, back in the archives on the first day of the next month, where it belongs. It will fill with links as those other posts go live.

Again, I'm not talking about the process, so there will be no forecast for September. But seven of the eleven books I read then have already had posts published, for what that's worth.

The Muted And Somewhat Melancholy Celebration of Eleven Years of Blogging

Hip hip...hooray?

Yes, I have been doing this for eleven years. No, I didn't expect to. Yes, I did expect it would either go away or turn into something more interesting -- or, rather, stay something more interesting, when I worked in the fields of skiffy. But this is what I got.

(There's only one thing that I know how to do well, and I've often been told that you only can do what you know how to do well, and that's be you, be what you're like, be like yourself. And so I'm having a wonderful time but I'd rather be whistling in the dark.)

Anyway, here's what I wrote on previous anniversaries: the plain first, the hoopla of the second, the hullabaloo of the third, the excitement of the fourth, the missing fifth, the razzamatazz of the sixth, the fantabulous seventh, the gala eighth, the splendiferous ninth, and the delayed and rushed tenth. Between them, they contain the whole history of this blog, suitable for wasting a day at work when your boss is off at a conference.

Once again I ruefully note that I missed the day of two of my anniversaries so far, and those were the "big" ones -- the fifth and tenth. I'm enough of a lapsed Poe scholar to recognize my own Imp of the Perverse, and to salute him -- with one finger of each hand, as appropriate.

You may have noticed that this year I am eschewing old-fashioned headers for my sections in favor of bold, shareable-content-like bolded passages, which a speed-reader will pick up and directly apply to his or her business career for untold riches. I do this because it amuses me, and it seems to be the state of the art for blogs in this fallen era. (And it saves time doing that rather than the annoying headlines.)

I usually turn here to the ritual discussion of the origins of this blog, which is pointless. So I'll leave that off this time, and instead note that I'm still using the template that I chose on October 4, 2005, which might be some kind of record. (Not a good record, mind you, but a record nonetheless.) I do periodically look at the blog, dive into Blogger's interface, and search for a new template, but always get distracted and give up. So this likely will be what this blog looks like forever and ever. But I've learned not to try to predict what I'll do in the future, so who can tell?

At this point in the blogaversary proceedings, I get into the historical number of posts, which is both boring and pointless, and so a particular favorite of mine. Since I had the bad judgment to begin a blog in the middle of a year (October 4th, in case you've forgotten), each year is substantially disjoint from the calendar.

• 2015-2016 -- 144 posts
• 2014-2015 -- 258 posts
• 2013-2014 -- 434 posts
• 2012-2013 -- 285 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 332 posts
• 2010-2011 -- 445 posts
• 2009-2010 -- 711 posts
• 2008-2009 -- 880 posts
• 2007-2008 -- 834 posts
• 2006-2007 -- 841 posts
• 2005-2006 -- 809 posts

But I also had a blog called Editorial Explanations for almost three years (February of 2011 through the end of 2013), which started as a series of posts on Antick Musings. So it needs to be included in the full accounting of Hornswoggler blogging:

Editorial Explanations:

• 2012-2013 -- 560 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 802 posts
• early 2011 -- 760 posts

And that means, when you put all of it together, you get:

• 2015-2016 -- 144 posts
• 2014-2015 -- 258 posts
• 2013-2014 -- 434 posts
• 2012-2013 -- 285 + 560 = 845 posts
• 2011-2012 -- 332 + 802 = 1,134 posts
• 2010-2011 -- 445 + 760 = 1,205 posts
• 2009-2010 -- 711 posts
• 2008-2009 -- 880 posts
• 2007-2008 -- 834 posts
• 2006-2007 -- 841 posts
• 2005-2006 -- 809 posts

So the peak of Antick Musings was in the depths of the financial crisis, when I'd been at the fine house of Wiley for about a year. (And the asterisked peak of both blogs was two years later.) The nadir is....well, right now. So things can only get better, he said brightly, ignoring the fact that sentence is never literally true.

That, along with about five dollars and a loyalty card, will get you a flat white. (Note: your blogger has no idea what a "flat white" is. Please don't ask him to explain himself.)

Antick Musings is now a book blog -- that surprised me when I realized it, but it's been obvious for years now -- as the other things I wrote about have mostly withered and died. I will try to link to them below, but the book-blogging is clearly the main event, as much as anything is.

So here are some of the posts about books -- you could call them reviews if you wanted to, and that would be basically accurate -- from the past year, linked from sentences that I'm particularly fond of on the day I assemble this post. Because that's the way blogs work, the quotes are in reverse chronological order.

What was so enticing that they could die doing it?

Everything can be turned into a Batman story. Everything can be turned into a Lovecraftian story.

And didn't the Inhumans used to be a family that lived on the moon? I miss those Inhumans; these road-show mutants are dull and derivative by comparison.

Writing an autobiography the normal way is just so boring -- a tedious forced march through the details of a bland childhood, early struggles, and then the inevitable grand success.

Being of the moment can be a big advantage -- but only so long as that moment lasts.

I can't say every family goes through something like this -- some have it much worse, and some have enough money and privilege that hard choices never come into the picture.

Gather 'round, children. I'm going to tell you a story of the dark days Before the Internet.

Luckily, I can't remember what that book is, so I'm not even tempted to name it. But any book can be The Wrong Book if you pick it up the wrong day, or are in the wrong mood, or just come to it after the wrong lead-in.

I feel guilty about my reading pretty regularly.

If I knew more about the history of Japanese publishing, I would pontificate here on their place in literary history and try to connect them to the modern "light novel." But I have no idea about any of those things.

There is a contradiction at the heart of this excellent graphic novel, but I don't know if I should point it out to you. Perhaps I can hint at it.

Against those nightmare horrors stands mostly government bureaucracy: underfunded, neglected, full of misfits and time-servers and the odd competent person, organizations that are at least as dysfunctional and soul-destroying as the place you work.

It's a Powers novel, so it's about love and regret, families of blood and circumstance, old secrets and obligations, and, inevitably, about doing the right thing even when that is the hardest thing to do.

And his story is about no less than free will and control, freedom and necessity, and of course the struggle against a cruel imperial power.

And Little Dribbling is thus the "all the stuff I used to like is gone, you rotten younger generations you" book that inevitably must follow the "all of this stuff is wonderful" book.

But he's still the same writer, with the same concerns: the man who said the happiest humans are bare-assed is always going to be most concerned with the poorest, the most marginal, the ones on the edges and margins.

The latter would be particularly useful if, as I assume, one purpose of Contact! is to induce the reader to buy more books by Morris.

One of the biggest potential dangers of working at home out of your own head all of the time is becoming a crank from lack of interaction with normal people on a regular basis.

The bad news is that there's just this one book, and that the world has not provided more opportunity for Brown to make her great comics, as it was supposed to.

We will never get away from the image of the killer robot, despite all of the hard work by Isaac Asimov during his long career.

So the book I was hoping for -- a clear-eyed look at death and how we deal with it in the modern world -- only appears in The Undertaking in flashes, interspersed with sub-Thomas Merton thoughts about the meaning of life and how we'll all be enfolded in Jesus's hand and lovingly placed in sunlight uplands to live forever.

This is the book that broke me, broke the Vintage Contemporaries reading series, broke it all to hell.

The flourishing of self-publishing over the last decade or so has brought a lot of those stories into print, if not into the marketplace, as a thousand family elders write down their memories in hopes that the grandkids will actually read them. (Spoiler: they mostly don't read them.)

Because if there's a girl running around ripping off other girls' clothing and spraying them with various thick viscous substances, the thing to do is declare the closest man responsible, right? This series finds new and different ways to fail feminism on nearly every page -- it's quite breathtaking.

Zenith supposedly is a slacker superhero, and these stories are old enough that Generation X (my generation) was the one filled with young lazy layabouts who couldn't be bothered to work -- whereas now we know that really describes millennials, who have the bad grace to be young now, when so many of us are sadly no longer so. (We may all know different in another twenty years, but we'll need to think up a new derogatory nickname for yet another generation first.)

Perhaps so you can have it out while feeding your infant, and wipe it clean when the strained peas go awry.

I don't think Hall has really identified anything specific here; his book is so full of caveats and qualifications and explanations of the levels of particular elements in particular books that there are no rules here.

Any prediction that contains "and then it goes on just like this for a long time" is bullshit.

No, this time Chaykin is closing things down -- this is the story of the Shadow's last case, in 1949, as he decides to give up on the harvesting-bitter-fruit business entirely and disappear.

If you say something is necessary, and then don't do it, you undercut your own argument.

Miller tells this story in the best example of '80s style I know of, all stream-of-consciousness narrative captions from multiple points of view and overlapping screamed dialogue. He throws hints into the air to have them hit targets perfectly sixty pages later, and weaves it all together seamlessly. And this is Sienkiewicz at the height of his visual ambition, right before Stray Toasters, painting like a demon and shifting from photorealist to a child's scrawl to slashes of color instantly to support Miller's equally quick changes of mood.

In short: Langridge! Weird vaudeville-inspired comics in a variety of quirky modes, about various things that used to be pop culture a long time ago, drawn impeccably. Go get it.

Superhero comics have been a friendly home for purple prose since at least Stan Lee, with captions cluttering up pages to declare things that we should be able to figure out by looking at the pictures.

Speaking of books, this year, like all of the years of this blog, I posted at dawn on the first of January about my favorite books of the prior year. Feel free to insist my tastes are horrible.

(Even more self-referentially, I also posted that morning a set of links to the first and last sentences of the posts of each of the months of 2015. It was a meme once, and I have a hard time giving up "traditions.")

I've also written about other things on this blog. No, not often, but I have done it. Some of those things follow.

The most common post here is the Reviewing the Mail series: each Monday, I gather up the books that came free in the mail the prior week (I know! for all my grumping, blogging has some excellent perks) and try to talk about them mostly positively without having read them.

Somewhat related -- in that they're long lists of books that I haven't read, with covers to illustrate them, is the series of Incoming Books posts, which lists stuff I paid for. I keep these two categories separate because I have a mind devoted to keeping things excessively tidy in usually less-than-useful ways. (Note: books I bought sneak into Reviewing the Mail all the time, usually because I'm too lazy to do two posts. And there may be serious disagreements about how tidy is excessive.)

Twice in the past year, I've complained here about my commute. (My wife gets it much worse; you should pity her.) There's no reason you should care; this is a blog, so it's about what annoys or interests the blog-writer on a daily basis.

Speaking of my commute, a series of drug-war hysteria posters I see there have been annoying me for some time. There's actually a worse one than the one I photographed, but life is too short to complain about the same things too many times.

This invites infinite reflection, like two mirrors set up facing each other, but I've been posting on Quora (an Internet site, optimistically designed to increase knowledge, in which people ask and answer questions with varying levels of expertise and honesty and objectivity) for a little more than a year, and linked to some of my answered questions there from this blog. The second time I did so was even in this blog-year.

You still have the opportunity to help Send My Boy to Europe. Donate now!

I post about music inconsistently. This year, I remembered Pink Floyd's great "When the Tigers Broke Free" in time to post it on Memorial Day. And I posted the Pogues's "Tuesday Morning" on a dreary Tuesday morning in mid-Spring.

In a textbook example of one's work bleeding into what one cares about, I engaged in a Twitter rant about the ownership of law firms, and posted the result here. I'm as surprised as you are.

On a related note, I had a badly informed opinion on attorney-client privilege, as well.

I provided a remedial social media lesson with I Will Not Add You On LinkedIn If.

I had a now-rare commentary on the SFF world when I weighed in on the clamor to change the World Fantasy Award statue.

When bad theme-park rides have their last day, I and my sons will be there. Well, we were there, once.

And those were the things I blogged about in 2015-2016, the tumultuous eleventh year of Antick Musings. Will we ever see their like again? Well...probably so. It looks like I'll keep blogging, most likely about the same mix of things.