The Menace from Farside by Ian McDonald

It's a homage, of course - or maybe a riff or variation. Ian McDonald is "doing" Heinlein here, with a novella that references and maybe comments a bit on the classic 1957 story "The Menace from Earth."

I also understand that this is a sidebar to a trilogy McDonald is writing set on the moon - actually, The Menace from Farside is a 2019 book, so I think that trilogy is complete now. 

So that's two sets of references: to a sixty-year-old story by someone else, relatively famous and well-known, and to a recent trilogy by the same author. I haven't read the trilogy yet, and haven't read the Heinlein story for years, so I'll be vague about those references. But I can at least signpost them here.

Like the Heinlein story, Farside is told in first person by a young Lunarian, unhappy with a flashy, exciting rival who has just barged into her life. In Farside, that's Cariad Corcoran, and the interloper is Sidibe Sisay. Cariad's mother Laine and Sidibe's father Gebre are part of a ring marriage - just what it sounds like, with everyone having two equal partners, one to each "side," on and on around in a circle until it connects back up, a chain of throuples with presumably all the drama that implies - and that ring is in the middle of a major adjustment, with Gebre coming in to Laine's "right" to replace the previous husband. [1]

Cariad is unhappy, but the marriage is fast-approaching. Mostly because of that - she doesn't seem to be trying to stop the marriage, or to get Sidibe sent back to outer darkness Farside, but her preferred endgame is unclear - Cariad hatches a plan for those two, and their two closest sibs (Jair and Kobe, both living in Laine's household for complex reasons) to make an epic trek across the Moon, ostensibly for a wedding present.

Cariad wants to go the the Apollo 11 landing site, take a picture of the four of them at the "first footprint," and present that as their present. To do that, they need to secretly get suits and supplies, use unapproved access to get transportation, and sneak away before the adults notice. After the necessary planning, they do so.

The trip has dangers and upsets and surprises, as it must. But they reach the landing site - finding it not quite as pristine as they had hoped - and start back, more or less on schedule. Then everything goes to hell, as Cariad tells us on the first page.

This is a novella, so it's entirely focused on the trip: it starts with Cariad meeting Sidibe, runs through the preparation, and then mostly the actual journey. Cariad is telling this story to someone, so we know, from the beginning, that she survives.

I think McDonald stuck pretty closely to the Heinlein plot in its larger structure - the story beats rather than the who-did-what moments - which is fun to see and trace. It's less specifically about romantic rivals than the Heinlein, though Cariad does admit to a bit of that. And it's a voice-driven story, like a lot of the best of Heinlein: McDonald creates a believable, quirky, specific young woman to tell us about this journey, and Cariad is a lot of fun to spend a hundred and fifty pages with. I've always been on Team SF Is Best at Novella Form, and this is a nice brick to continue building the wall of that argument.

[1] It's sort-of implied that everyone has to be bisexual for this work, since one link is same-sex and one link is opposite-sex, but maybe that's just this chain. Frankly, an all-same-sex ring would more likely be stable, so there may be some of those lurking in the background. The other option is that this is much more of a dynastic marriage than a romantic one, and that sex is secondary at best - it's also implied that a ring marriage is basically a corporation, with business interests and specific expertise. Either way, Cariad, as a tween, has roughly zero insight into the actual sources of the drama in her mother's ring.

Portions for Foxes: Courtney Barnett

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

I think this song is atypical: most of what I've heard from Courtney Barnett is in singer-songwriter mode, regularly in that one-person-and-a-guitar sound. But this is the first song of hers I heard, and it's different.

The song is about that, too, in a way. I gather Barnett was something of an initial critical darling, and then, as critics do, they turned to other darlings and started finding flaws in her work.

To be blunter: I think the title is a direct quote. Pedestrian at Best.

This song is loud, insistent - complaining, demanding, complicated. Self-loathing mixed with loathing for others. The voice of a creator who isn't sure what she's doing - like all of them! - and isn't sure what comes next and isn't sure how to do this and is getting a bit stressed by all the unsureness.

But she can turn that into a song - that's what a creator does. And this is a great, brash, pushy, space-filling stomp of a song, with a killer chorus:

Put me on a pedestal and I'll only disappoint you
Tell me I'm exceptional and I promise to exploit you
Give me all your money and I'll make some origami honey
I think you're a joke but I don't find you very funny

The way Barnett drags out "funny" at the end of that, each time, is just perfect. Somewhere between squawking and growling - digging in the knife and waggling it around, just to make the insult that much stronger.

This is the way to respond to criticism: do something new, something stronger, something that shoves back harder than you were pushed. Show them all. Make it new, make it loud. It's a great song, from a fine songwriter.

Books Read: December 2023

The monthly index post is back; here's what I read last month. Links will follow when my posts go live over the next weeks.

Dan Nott, Hidden Systems (12/2)

Koren Shadmi, The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television (12/3)

Adam Sisman, The Secret Life of John Le Carré (12/3)

Roz Chast, I Must Be Dreaming (12/9)

Zach Weinersmith and Boulet, Bea Wolf (12/10)

Jack Vance, Rhialto the Marvelous (in Tales of the Dying Earth, 12/10)

Liniers, Macanudo: Optimism Is for the Brave (digital, 12/16)

Chris Ryall, Tony Akins, Ilias Kyriazis, and John Livesay, Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency: The Interconnectedness of All Kings (12/17)

John Scalzi, The Kaiju Preservation Society (12/17)

Michael Sweater, Please Destroy My Enemies (digital, 12/22)

Jason Shiga, Adventuregame Comics, Vol. 2: The Beyond (12/23)

Regis Loisel, Mickey Mouse: Zombie Coffee (digital, 12/24)

Paco Roca, Memoirs of a Man in Pajamas (digital, 12/25)

Neil Gaiman, P. Craig Russell, and others, The Problem of Susan and Other Stories (12/26)

Daniel Clowes, Monica (12/27)

Walter Jon Williams, Quillifer the Knight (12/27)

Jake Thompson, The Book of Onions (digital, 12/28)

Daniel Pinkwater, Borgel (in 4 Fantastic Novels, 12/28)

Gilbert and Mario Hernandez, Children of Palomar and Other Tales (12/29)

Emilia McKenzie, But You Have Friends (digital, 12/30)

Martha Wells, System Collapse (12/30)

Brenna Thummler, Lights (digital, 12/31)

More will follow, as always.

Quote of the Week: Don Wollheim, Destroyer of Skiffy Clubs

It was a small world - by one estimate, there were fewer than fifty active fans - that magnified certain personality traits. The most devoted members were usually young, obsessive, and confrontational. Disputes between clubs were driven by personal grudges, and a lone player like Wollheim could exert a disproportionate influence. The dynamics were much like those of modern online communities, except considerably slower, and a pattern was established in which a club would be founded, persist for a while, and then implode, either because of internal tensions or because Wollheim came in and dissolved it.

 - Alec Nevala-Lee, Astounding, pp.100-101

The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television by Koren Shadmi

When I was a lad, the standard bio-for-young-people format was a small hardcover, heavily illustrated but written in prose, in short, punchy chapters and topping out at maybe a hundred and fifty pages. There were a lot of them: I recall shelves in classrooms and school libraries full of the things, some of them in specific series from particular publishers.

At some point since that dim misty past, the format seems to have shifted - or maybe a new format has been added, but I think the old style is at least declining if not dead - into a graphic novel that covers roughly the same territory but in a more visually exciting (and reluctant-reader-appealing) way.

Now, let's be clear: the new style is not just for middle-schoolers who need to do a report on Random Famous Dead Person a couple of times a semester. But that is a large and powerful audience, with vast collective library and school budgets seeking books to buy all the time, so it's not surprising that things tend to be published that will fit that model, even if they were conceived for different purposes and audiences.

The Twilight Man: Rod Serling and the Birth of Television, a 2019 book by Israeli-American cartoonist Koren Shadmi, fits pretty comfortably into that category: it covers Sterling's whole life, with a Twilight Zone-ish frame story where most readers will guess the payoff very early (which is very Twilight Zone, and so deeply appropriate), tending to play up the drama and struggle to give a clear arc of a life.

It's crisp and clear and sweeping, covering Serling's fifty years with a central focus on what every reader really wants to know: how he got to create Twilight Zone, what those years were like, and how it affected him afterward. To be reductive: he was an award-winning writing superstar for the then-popular TV anthology-show format; super-busy and stressful, with increasing network trouble over the five-year run; he didn't live long enough to get a real third act, and his second act was all reaction and scrambling for any, usually tawdry, work as the anthology-show format entirely disappeared.

Shadmi has been doing this sort of historical non-fiction book fairly regularly the past few years - I'd previously read his Lugosi: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Dracula, which came out two years after Twilight Man. He's good at it: it takes a lot of research and synthesizing to present wads of historical context and full conversations (or large chunks of TV-show dialogue) in an engaging way, and Shadmi does that consistently here.

He tells this story in Serling's voice, which is appropriate for the man who so intensely narrated his most famous production but presents certain potential pitfalls. As far as I could see, Shadmi avoids them all: Serling comes across as understandable but clearly a man of his time, with the right cadence and style in his speech. Shadmi also keeps his trademark cigarette in hand consistently - I wonder if that was less of an issue in this book because it came out from Humanoids, a dedicated GN publisher, rather than the young-readers division of a major house? I would not be surprised if some school districts avoided buying it because it has a cigarette on the cover.

Twilight Man aims to tell the story of this one guy, and somewhat show what writing for TV was like in his heyday of the '50s and '60s - it does the former well, and gives at least a Serling flavor of the latter. The second half of the subtitle is more expansive than the book itself; it really is just about Serling. I see Shadmi has a couple of other similar books I haven't found yet; I'll be looking out for them.

Hidden Systems by Dan Nott

What makes the world work?

You could take that question any number of ways - politically, existentially, emotionally, literally. Dan Nott went physical, following in the tradition of The Way Things Work to explore three major systems that underpin all of human civilization today. It's not the only possible answer, but it's a good answer, well explained and detailed.

The subtitle of Hidden Systems explains it: Water, Electricity, the Internet, and the Secrets Behind the Systems We Use Every Day. Nott spent the last roughly five years researching and creating this book, in those three big chunks: first the Internet, then Electricity, and finally the most fundamental of them all, Water. 

Hidden Systems was published by a line aimed at young readers - RH Graphic - and there are some accouterments of the book that hint at that, from the "Junior Library Guild Selection" on the inside back flap to the ad page with other juvenile GNs from the publisher. But the book itself isn't obviously for young readers, except in the sense that young people are learning about everything, and are more likely to be looking for a book like this to begin with. (On their own, or as part of an assignment.) It's straightforward and detailed, diving into history and current state to explain just how all three of these systems work, and how modern human society relies on each of them - and, somewhat, how inequalities in modern society both were caused by differences in systems and how those inequalities affect the systems.

It is a vaguely ecological book, as it has to be: both the Internet and electrical power generation have outsized impacts that Nott needs to mention, and the water cycle, as he makes clear, underlies all life on Earth. But it's not strident, or pushing a specific goal - Nott seems to be aiming to be even-handed here, taking about trade-offs and options and signposting the path to better rather than proclaiming something specific as best.

A GN is a good format for this explanation: it lets Nott show schematics of all of these cycles - how data packets and clean water and electricity are created, move around, are transferred, make their ways to the end-users. Comics are visual, which is a tremendous leg up in the Explaining Things sweepstakes. Nott has a clean modern look, slightly illustrative, with light colors on top of cool mostly blue-black lines, mostly thin and single-weight.

The only thing I wanted more of is integration. These three systems interlock, and the way Nott made the book means he treats them each basically separately. The Internet takes massive amounts of power, power generation often outputs massive amounts of water (heated or polluted or just falling from a great height), and so on - he says all this in context, but I would have liked a bigger, more expansive conclusion, about how human societies need to be more planful and purposeful in their systems going forward. (But that's the old SF editor in me: I want the Big Picture, the look at tomorrow.)

This is a well-organized, intriguing, fact-filled journey through three hidden-in-plain-sight systems that underpin all of modern society. The publisher may think that's primarily of interest to twelve-year-olds, but I hope people much older than that care just as deeply.

Super Trash Clash by Edgar Camacho

Dul loves videogames - we see her first in this story as a young woman, maybe mid-twenties, and spend most of the time with her as a pre-teen, but that's the one thing we know from the beginning and hold on to as central. Her hard-working single mother, on the other hand, has no time or energy to spare for frivolity like that, and worries that Dul is spending too much time on them. (She isn't: that's clear. She's a hard worker, doing well in school. She has a hobby, and it's '90s fighting games, which is entirely reasonable, because it the flashback section is set in the '90s.)

Super Trash Clash is the name of Dul's story. It's also the name of a game she gets, unexpectedly, from her mother, for her birthday. Unfortunately, the game she wanted - the good one - is Super Encounter Champions 2. Super Trash Clash, the game, is famously lousy.

(Super Encounter Champions is Street Fighter, more or less. Super Trash Clash looks more like Bad Dudes on levels from The Simpsons, and made me wonder if I was the crazy one for being a huge Bad Dudes fan who never played any Street Fighter games. On the other hand, Trash may also be referencing some famously bad real game that I'm forgetting right now.)

Dul plays the game with her best friend Misa, but it is lousy. So they decide to trade it, and get Super Encounter Champions 2, the one they really want to play. That works, and they play the good game and everything is fine.

Until, very soon after, Dul has an attack of conscience. Her mother went out of the way to get her that specific game, and probably remembers its name. Dul really wants to swap back - but Trash is very rare, and the copy she traded away has, she quickly finds, gone through several other hands already.

I haven't done more than mention the frame story, which is small: adult Dul starts us off by finding a copy of Trash, buying it, playing it, and then flashing back to her childhood for most of the story. It's not a big frame, but it is important: this was a major event for Dul.

Edgar Camacho (whose first book was Onion Skin) tells all of that in a quirkily specific drawing style - his eyes are particularly interesting, expressive and believable while sometimes being at odd angles and not quite matched - that references a lot of '90s videogames along the way. It's the kind of thing that gets called a "love letter" to the underlying material, which is true here: I think Camacho loves these games as much as Dul herself does, and that comes through in the story.

Astounding by Alec Nevala-Lee

This book has the longest subtitle I can remember seeing outside of academia: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. But that does explain the book pretty comprehensively: it's a group biography of the "Golden Age" of SF, focused on the central editor and three of his biggest writers, though Alec Nevala-Lee does tell us about a lot of other writers, editors, business people and others along the way.

The book is Astounding because the magazine was Astounding, and at the time - the early Thirties through at least the war years - is was the SF magazine, in an era when SF was magazines. Campbell's Astounding was the center of gravity for a genre in a way that nothing else was before, or could be afterward. (Maybe Harlequin, at the height of its dominance, had a similar position in romance, but, even there, a book publisher is vastly different from a magazine in terms of audience engagement and continuity.)

There have been biographies of Heinlein, I know. Asimov chronicled his own life, and I think others have as well. Hubbard has probably had a non-hagiographic biographer (and definitely a few of the other kind), and certainly has been a focus of many books on Dianetics and Scientology. But this is the closest we've seen to a biography of Campbell, I think. Nevala-Lee has a long and extensive bibliography, and his notes make it clear he talked to nearly everyone still alive - this is a 2018 book, so those conversations were close to a decade ago, and some people no longer "still alive" were consulted.

I used to work in this field, but that's both quite some time ago and not nearly as long ago as the Campbell years; he died when I was two. So I have a vague knowledge of some things in Astounding, but mostly as stories I heard told, second- or third-hand, in my early days in the field - legends retold in con suites and editorial gatherings. Given that, if I say that Astounding matches my knowledge and experience of the field doesn't mean much, but I'll say it anyway: this is recognizably the SF field I worked in for a decade and a half, thirty to fifty years later. Some of these people, or their successors, were still roaming around in those days, and this is what they were like.

Nevala-Lee has set himself a gigantic task, but he basically accomplishes it. I thought Astounding moved quickly a lot of the time, and covers more ground more often in a single paragraph than you'd expect, but it's all well-sourced and clear and, as far as I can judge, true. Nevala-Lee is even-handed, and has the double advantage of fifty years of history and his position as an Analog writer (that's the title Campbell changed Astounding to in the early '60s; it's still running today): he's inside the in-group, not just the general SF in-group but the cadre of writers that still look up to Campbell specifically.

The four central figures don't come across as admirable figures, which some readers might expect: they were real people living in their times, and all did things we might consider unforgivable. Asimov was probably the nicest, most positive person of the group, and he was a massive sex pest for decades. Hubbard was a phony in nearly every way possible, from the very beginning, though he fooled lots of people for long stretches of time. Heinlein was a grumpy overly-opinionated semi-recluse (some of that, admittedly, partially caused by long-running and recurrent health problems) who dumped a wife and his former opinions when a new model came along.

(Nevala-Lee could have - but didn't - organized the book around the wives each of these men abandoned. They all have at least one; I lost track of how many Hubbard dumped.)

And Campbell was many of the things Heinlein was, but even more so: more opinionated, more prone to lecturing in conversation, more prone to pseudoscience fads, more full of himself, more enamored with the idea of the "competent man," more blinded by his own ideas and prejudices. He comes across as an interesting person that you absolutely would never have wanted to spend much time with: a hectoring, tedious, obnoxious windbag who can't be argued with and just will not shut up. (I'm sure many people have said this many times, but he's clearly the model for so many of those tedious overexplainers in Heinlein: Heinlein had those tendencies himself, but Campbell, in this as so many other things, was just more so.)

Nevala-Lee tells his story chronologically, jumping around a bit to cover all four men roughly equally, and running through quick chapters on everyone's childhoods to get to the meat of the book: how they all worked together and bounced off each other, starting with Campbell's sudden assumption of the Astounding editorship in 1937. He gets a lot of facts and figures and dates into the book; he manages to mention dozens of other people - from semi-central figures like George O. Smith to the next generation like Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg - along the way, to tell what is basically "what SF was like in the Golden Age."

He also clearly explains that these four men had the usual support structure of their era: several of them had accomplished wives who did more of the work than was clear at the time. Doña Stewart and Leslyn Heinlein in particular are fascinating figures that we can only see obscurely at this distance, but Nevala-Lee at least signposts what we do know and what can be known about their contributions.

It's a good sign when you wish a book was longer; I wished this one was. There's lots more material and even a second tier of writers Nevala-Lee could have spent more time on - van Vogt and de Camp and Williamson and Clarke and so on. But Astounding chose its figures well - correctly, I'd even say - and tells a clear story of when science fiction realized it had a Golden Age and made as much of it as it could.

Favorite Books of the Year: 2023

Every year, I post something like this on New Year's morning - a listing of the books I liked best the previous year. Some years I've read less, and keep 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 had a really slow patch a few years back - coming off a Book-A-Day year in 2018, my reading dropped to nearly nothing afterward - but I'm back to what I think of as a sustainable level. The numbers aren't what they were back when I was an editor, or during my periodic Book-A-Day binge years, but I read 197 books in 2023, which is enough to find some themes and favorites.

First, though, I feel the need to link back to those past posts: 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:

• 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.
• These are favorites, not "best." I can't define "best." I can definite "favorite."
• This is not separated or compartmentalized by genre; it's everything I read all in one stew.
• Each month gets some also-rans; the bolded book is the favorite.
• I try to chose to newish books for the favorites, so this is roughly similar to other lists; it doesn't always work. I'm not focused on newly-published books, for example - that would be nice, and the part of me that used to work in publishing wants to do that, but I just don't read enough, or in that focused a way.

January

I usually start these monthly squibs with old stuff, so I'll kick off the year by mentioning The World of S.J. Perelman, a collection of great funny pieces by a master - count that as a general recommendation to read something, anything, by Perelman when you get the chance.

Newer was Figures in a Landscape, the recent collection of miscellaneous short non-fiction - a lot relating in some way to travel, but not all of it - by Paul Theroux, one of the world's great travelers, writers, and grumps.

And I start the year with one of my eternal problems: two books that are both worthy, when I can only pick one under my rules. So I think the also-ran will be Sunburn, a smart, moody historical graphic novel by Andi Watson and Simon Gane, which is brilliant and beautiful and deep and thoughtful.

Then the first favorite for the year is another GN - even bigger, even more ambitious, from a new creator from a different part of the world: Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed, a djinni story like no other that is also three stories of real people in an intricately constructed alternate world.

February

Something old: both the taut, tough fantasy-detective novel Finch by Jeff Vandermeer, whose work I need to read more of, and Joan Didion's 2000-era essay collection After Henry, another deep, circling collection of views into people and places and, more than anything else, the American penchant for self-admiration and self-delusion.

Something new: a great, very different linked collection of comics stories, Animal Stories, from the newer sibling team Peter and Maria Hoey, with a distinct visual style and a chilly viewpoint.

Something borrowed: John Porcellino's graceful evocation of his own life and grapplings with Zen practice in From Lone Mountain. (No, it doesn't fit the schema that well - Porcellino isn't really "borrowing," Zen; he's trying to live his life, and it's part of that.)

And my favorite of the month was the monumental graphic novel Ducks by Kate Beaton, large in size and personal in scope, deeply touching and darkly ominous, personal and real and true in all of the best ways, mostly happy like any life but with inescapable darkness at its core.

March

I finally read the '30s thriller Rogue Male by Geoffrey Household, a captivating, taut little book that exquisitely balances the narrator's voice and external action - and builds its thrills out of mostly small moments and places in a story supposedly about an attempt to assassinate a major world figure.

Also towards the "old" end of the spectrum was The Shelf, a wonderful book by Phyllis Rose in which she read through an entire library shelf of books and wrote about all of the things she found there. I love reading stunts, and this was a glorious one.

Somewhat newer: Stewart O'Nan's just-post-WWII thoughtful thriller City of Secrets, set in what would become Israel among the Jewish militants who were trying to make that happen. Similarly, the mostly quiet collection of stories Nocturnes by Kazuo Ishiguro.

I again have two graphic novels battling to be my favorite. This time, I think I'm going for the smaller book, unlike January. Sammy Harkham's Blood of the Virgin is big and expansive and full of great characters and moments, set in an interesting moment in Hollywood history and telling a great story - it's the kind of book where everything is on the table, where Harkham puts it all in and it all works brilliantly.

But even more impressive was the deeply personal It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood, the story of six months in her life and (to put it reductively) her struggles with depression. There's a moment near the end - one line, one page - that has lived in my head since I read the book; those are the ones that have to be listed as favorites, the ones that change how you think and feel and look at the world.

April

This one was a tough choice - the kind of month where I look at the list and wonder "did I read anything new that I really liked?" I dove back into three great classic SFF stories of different eras - John Sladek's great satire Tik-Tok, the Nebula-winning planetary odyssey Stations of the Tide by Michael Swanwick, and the picaresque far-future adventure Cugel's Saga by Jack Vance.

And I found the wonderful Dog Butts and Love. And Stuff Like That. And Cats., collecting the single-panel cartoons of Jim Benton, but I got to it quite a few years later than I'd be comfortable putting it on a list like this.

But then I realized I'd read Macanudo: Welcome to Elsewhere that month: the first collection of a wonderful, varied, interesting daily comic strip by Liniers, and that would be a perfect choice.

May

The oldest "old book" yet - The Golden Ass of Apuleius, in the Robert Graves translation (which I suppose makes it only seventy or so years old, not two thousand) - was a great picaresque, maybe one of the type specimens of the genre.

I read P.G. Wodehouse's Full Moon again - I read several Wodehouse books a year, these days, so I don't mention all of them. But this is one of his best, and a book everyone should read at least once - maybe starting on a day when they really need something to cheer them up.

It's a bit more melodramatic than maybe it needs to be, but Blue Is the Warmest Color by Jul Maroh is a great love story and an impressive first graphic novel.

Favorite for the month is another strip collection - two in a row, in this era of zombie strips? maybe the field isn't quite doomed - in Will Henry's Are We Lost Yet?, standing in for his whole Wallace the Brave strip, which I've been reading avidly (both daily and in the collections, like this one) for the last year or two.

June

I got to a second Stewart O'Nan book this year - the elegiac, quiet West of Sunset, telling the story of F. Scott Fitzgerald's twilight years in Hollywood and making a deeply readable, thought-filled novel out of daily life with an ending everyone already knows.

On the graphics side, I saw Hayao Miyazaki's Shuna's Journey, one of his few excursions into art on paper rather than on celluloid - it's a bit compressed, but very Miyazaki-esque and full of great moments.

Also of note: Will McPhail's first collection of cartoons, Love & Vermin. I was a big fan of his graphic novel In. the year before, and his single-panel stuff is just as well-drawn and often even funnier.

I finally got to Mark Alan Stamaty's Macdoodle Street, in the somewhat recent edition collecting not just that 1980-era strip from the Village Voice but also a long comics afterword about what he did later. It's weird and fun and random, a fine and-then-this-happened story told in comics form.

Favorite of the month was the monumental new graphic novel from Julia Wertz: Impossible People. It's personal and specific, conversational and detailed - and, as always with Wertz, much more carefully constructed than it appears.

July

Old things you should read someday, and I did this year: Mark Twain's Life on the Mississippi, Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts.

Recentish things you should read someday, and I did this year: The Elegance of the Hedgehog, a fine French novel from about fifteen years ago by Muriel Barbery; The House, a family-focused Spanish graphic novel, of about the same vintage but more recently translated, by Paco Roca.

Other things I want to mention: the third Ralph Azham book, You Can't Stop a River, continuing some of Lewis Trondheim's best fantasy work; Unholy Land, a Lavie Tidhar novel that crams three viewpoints and at least one alternate universe into a short, zippy package; and Finder: Mystery Date, possibly my favorite piece of Carla Speed McNeil's thorny, compelling, distinctive SFnal graphic novel series.

The one that almost made the list was the lovely, zippy, madcap About Betty's Boob by Vero Cazot and Julie Rocheleau, a graphic novel about one woman and one bad situation that opens up to a vision of inclusion and love and happiness for all.

But I ended up picking Tsalmoth by Steven Brust, as his Vlad Taltos fantasy series steams towards its end in just a few more books, and he still finds new ways to complicate his story-telling and throw in new morsels of information about his people and world and past events.

August

Some frivolous things: Snoopy Vs. the Red Baron, collecting all of those related strips from Charles M. Schulz's fifty-year long run of Peanuts, and I Am Providence, a mystery novel by Nick Mamatas set at a horror convention that gleefully attacks everything within reach.

Somewhat more serious: Political Fictions, yet another collection of Joan Didion essays, as I got up to the modern day; Call for the Dead by John le Carré, as I made my way back to his very first novel; Onion Skin, a rollicking and wonderful first graphic novel from Edgar Camacho.

And my favorite for the moth was the new book from Peter and Maria Hoey: The Bend of Luck, a unified graphic novel told in chilly, distanced chapters. They have a unique visual style and a storytelling stance to go along with it, and I love seeing the things they can do with that. 

September

The token old book this month is Dawn Powell's 1948 The Locusts Have No King, a social satire set in the New York writing world, full of great lines and interesting insights and cruel but accurate characterizations.

For newer things, I was really impressed by Josh Rountree's debut novel, the historical fantasy - almost a Weird Western, but not quite - The Legend of Charlie Fish.

And, after reading a few Katie Skelly books that didn't quite click with me - but kept me interested and intrigued - I got to her most famous book, Maids, the story of two French sisters in domestic service and what they did to their employers nearly a hundred years ago.

The easy favorite was Jordan Crane's magnificent, major graphic novel Keeping Two, the story of one couple and one relationship that is universal and all-encompassing in its scope.

October

This month is a parade of "almost," starting with Michael Blumlein's final novel Longer, an exploration of life extension that I wish its creator lived longer to expand on.

The Second Fake Death of Eddie Campbell & The Fate of the Artist brings together a new Eddie Campbell graphic novel in the same vein as his brilliant 2006 Fate with that original, but the new one, with all its pandemic-era complications and upheavals, suffers a little in comparison.

Ashes is a well-crafted graphic novel from Alvaro Ortiz: smart about people, drawn with verve and energy, telling an interesting story and doing it all well.

Another piece in a very impressive edifice: Dungeon: Zenith, Vol. 5: Fog and Tears gathered two recent bande desineé in the central piece of this multi-threaded series, with great work from Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, and Boulet.

My favorite was a biography in comics form - more than that, in the form closely matching the way its subject worked, a brilliant concept that worked really well for Luca Debus and Francesco Matteuzzi in their Funny Things, a comic-strip format telling of the life of Peanuts creator Charles M. Schulz.

November

To start with the parade of old - I finally read Patricia Highsmith's 1950s noir, The Talented Mr. Ripley, which is sneaky and fun and a lot like many other things from that era I've already read. (Not that that's a bad thing.)

And then there were two very different books about twenty years old: Jeffrey Ford's historical thriller The Portrait of Mrs. Charbuque, the story of a society painter and one very unusual commission; and Paris to the Moon, Adam Gopnik's bestselling collection of New Yorker essays about spending the late '90s living in Paris with a new baby.

Do I count Paco Roca's Wrinkles as old? It's about fifteen years old, in the Spanish original, and I think the English translation was only a year or so later. Either way, it's a light-hearted look at a group of old people in a retirement home, and I think the creator's vastly most-popular book.

Alec Nevala-Lee's account of the Golden Age of SF and several of its most important figures, Astounding, was full of details and insights, particularly about that central, controversial (and often deeply annoying) figure of John W. Campbell.

And my favorite was the new biographical GN from Bill Griffith, Three Rocks, the story of Ernie Bushmiller and his Nancy comic strip, told in an almost collage-like way that repurposed Bushmiller art every single time his creations appeared in the book.

December

The token old book is Daniel Pinkwater's Borgel, a 1992 YA novel from an inimitable writer, full of weird ideas and culminating in one of his best moments of love and positivity.

Somewhat more recent were a couple of very nice SFF novels from a couple of years back: John Scalzi's wonderfully frivolous and deeply entertaining The Kaiju Protection Society and Walter Jon Williams's mid-trilogy picaresque fantasy Quillifer the Knight.

From the comics side of the world, I have three very different things to mention. Dan Nott's Hidden Systems was a thoughtful, well-informed, carefully constructed look at three of the major infrastructure pieces undergirding the entire modern world. Bea Wolf was a retelling of, yes, Beowulf for younger readers, written in alliterative meter by Zach Weinersmith and drawn in high-energy mode by Boulet. And Emilia McKenzie's But You Have Friends is a deep memoir of friendship, starting in their teen years, about that one person you just click with about nearly everything - and what it means when that person dies.

For the last time this year, I have two books to choose from for the favorite. I think the also-ran is by Paco Roca (him again! I read three of his books this year, and mentioned them all here, which is a good sign, I think) - Memoirs of a Man in Pajamas, collecting three batches of strips about a cartoonist who is not quite his creator, telling stories that are sometimes drawn from his life, and making a complex stew out of modern life while keeping it both funny and informative.

But the last favorite of the year is a novel in one of my favorite series, the book I was reading right before the end of the year: System Collapse by Martha Wells, the latest in the Murderbot series, a smart, voice-driven SF novel that spoils me for any other medium-future setting and makes me wish there were a half-dozen more books in that voice already.

So let me pull out the favorites into one list, in the time-honored way:

Top 12 of 2023

• Are We Lost Yet? by Will Henry
• The Bend of Luck by Peter and Maria Hoey
• Ducks by Kate Beaton
• Funny Things by Luca Debus and Francesco Matteuzzi
• Impossible People by Julia Wertz
• It's Lonely at the Centre of the Earth by Zoe Thorogood
• Keeping Two by Jordan Crane
• Macanudo: Welcome to Elsewhere by Liniers
• Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed
• System Collapse by Martha Wells
• Three Rocks by Bill Griffith
• Tsalmoth by Steven Brust

And that's what I read this past year that was worth remembering and sharing. I hope you have similar books in your own lives, and, more so, that something I've mentioned will sound intriguing or compelling to you. Have a great 2024, in reading and otherwise.

Portions for Foxes: Allo Darlin'

"Portions for Foxes" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song by a woman or a band led by a woman. See the introduction for more.

Let's start the year, and this series, with a mostly happy song from 2010 - My Heart Is a Drummer by the London-based band Allo Darlin'.

And when you call me on the telephone
My fingers will twist through the cord
And I'll slide my feet up and down the wall

I always love songs with concrete images like that - that are specific about moments, giving physical descriptions that explain better than talking about emotions directly every could.

Singer/songwriter Elizabeth Morris has a clear, open, lovely voice on this song - bright and cheery and again very specific, with an Aussie accent that's really noticeable several times in the song and deeply endearing when it is.

I said mostly happy - Morris's voice is light and precise, and there's a smile in her singing, but the relationship in the song isn't entirely sunshine and rainbows. But what is? 

Do I have to say I'm sorry for my happiness?

I hope not, in any kind of relationship. But asking the question is its own kind of answer, isn't it?

But I know that I'm stronger than you are
But I know that I'm stronger than you are

The singer is in love, we think, but not overwhelmingly so. She's happy, but not blindingly happy. I may be an old middle-of-the-road grump, but I think that's a great way to be.

Quote of the Week: Women, Amirite?

There was something in Marge's eyes when she was very serious that made her look wise and old in spite of the naïve clothes she wore and her windblown hair and her general air of a Girl Scout. She had the look of a mother or an older sister now - the old feminine disapproval of the destructive play of little boys and men. La dee da! Or was it jealousy?

 - Patricia Highsmith, The Talented Mr. Ripley, p.69 in the 1999 Everyman's Ripley omnibus

Quote of the Hour: Limelight, Hogging of, Examples

Claudia [Schiffer], though, is not what you would call a team player. While the other models only occasionally respond to the photographers' pleas for more, Claudia stands at the end of the runway for what seems like ten minutes at a time, making love to every camera in sight. The other girls, held up at the head of the runway and waiting for her to get through, give her exactly the look you see on the face of an impatient commuter at the Holland Tunnel who is stuck in the exact change lane behind a woman who has entered it on a hunch.

 - Adam Gopnik, "Couture Shock," p.143 in Paris to the Moon

Quote of the Hour: His Whole Life Ahead of Him

There are a lot of towns like Lakewood in California. They were California's mill towns, breeder towns for the boom. When times were good and there was money to spread around, these were the towns that proved Marx wrong, that managed to increase the proletariat and simultaneously, by calling it middle class, to co-opt it. Such towns were organized around the sedative idealization of team sports, which were believed to develop "good citizens," and therefore tended to the idealization of adolescent males. During the good years, the years for which places like Lakewood or Canoga Park or El Segundo or Pico Rivera existed, the preferred resident was in fact an adolescent or post-adolescent male, ideally one already married and mortgaged, in harness to the plant, a good worker, a steady consumer, a team player, someone who played ball, a good citizen.

 - Joan Didion, Where I Was From (p.1028 in We Tell Ourselves Stories in Order to Live)

Quote of the Hour: Knows What He Likes

I've seen his pictures, and they are like nothing on earth. So far as I can make out what he says, they aren't supposed to be. There's one in particular, called "The Coming of Summer," which I sometimes dream about when I've been hitting it up a shade too vigorously. It's all dots and splashes, with a great eye staring out of the middle of the mess. It looks as if summer, just as it was on the way, had stubbed its toe on a bomb. He tells me it's his masterpiece, and that he will never do anything like it again. I should like to have that in writing.

 - P.G. Wodehouse, "Concealed Art," (p.211 in Enter Jeeves)

Quote of the Hour: Great Sideswipes of Our Time

Like most science-fiction writers, Trout knew almost nothing about science, was bored stiff by technical details. 

 - Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (p.598 in Novels & Stories, 1963-1973)