2024 read #146: So Far So Good by Ursula K. Le Guin.

So Far So Good: Final Poems: 2014-2018 by Ursula K. Le Guin

90 pages

Published 2018

Read November 30

Rating: 4 out of 5

Rhyming descriptive poetry about nature and spirit has been a mainstay for so long that you could, at best, call it a worn-out cliché. Yet Le Guin's deep compassion and enduring humanity infuse these short poems with the urgency of life. 

Seemingly simple lines stagger, as in "Come to Dust": "All earth's dust / has been life, held soul, is holy." Everything connects; the universe flows from star to spirit and out again.

Her meditations on mortality, aging, and the business of being alive transcend old forms and invest in them something vital: "the grace / of water to thirst" ("Lesser Senses").

2024 read #145: Songs of a Sourdough by Robert W. Service.

Songs of a Sourdough by Robert W. Service

99 pages

Published 1907

Read November 30

Rating: 1ish out of 5

Maybe I first heard of Robert Service through a stray reference in a Robert Macfarlane book, or maybe “Service poem” cropped up somewhere as a shorthand for manly-man-in-the-manly-wild poetry. Either way, I found a pdf of this book under its American title, The Spell of the Yukon. Now, I haven’t read much old poetry, and almost none written before 1970. (When you reach the era of obligatory rhyme, it all gets a bit musty.) But I want to change that, so here we are.

Some of the poems are almost okay, especially in the early pages. I can put myself in a mindset to appreciate what its original audience found in it, even if, for me, it reads like a calculated grind of commercial exotica, peppered with clichés, exemplified by the opening of “The Heart of the Sourdough”:

There where the mighty mountains bare their fangs unto the moon. 

There where the sullen sun-dogs glare in the snow-bright, bitter noon,

And the glacier-glutted streams sweep down at the clarion call of June.

If I thought I could escape with nothing worse than some over-wrought description, alas, I was wrong. “The Law of the Yukon” is multiple pages of Social Darwinism, with the land, personified, ranting about how virile men are awesome and should rule, and how much the “enervated” urban poor suck and should die. That poem singlehandedly brought down my opinion of this book from bemused indifference to active dislike. Subsequent poems extolling Empire and the glory of colonial warfare and the like served only to reinforce this.

2024 #144: Black No More by George S. Schuyler.

Black No More: Being an Account of the Strange and Wonderful Workings of Science in the Land of the Free, A.D. 1933-1940 by George S. Schuyler

Introduction by Danzy Senna

195 pages

Published 1931

Read from November 27 to November 29

Rating: 2.5 out of 5

Black No More is science-fictional satire of race written by a onetime Black socialist and full-time misanthrope, who in later years would become a member of the John Birch Society. If, from that trajectory, you guessed that Black No More’s ideology would be a bit of a mess, you’d be right. Schuyler eagerly lampoons Black and white targets, esteemed Black leaders and Atlanta Klan wives alike; everyone is in it for the con.

When Schuyler’s jabs land, they land hard. His depiction of the Givens family, and their newly founded Knights of Nordica, could be a snapshot of Trumpists today, reminding us how deep into history our contemporary problems run. There’s also some depressingly evergreen material on how capitalists use “race consciousness” to strip away class consciousness from the workers. But then Schuyler will turn around and spend far more pages mocking Black liberationists as grifters, all of them happy to profit from white violence and maintain the status quo.

One gets the sense that the suburban white boys who loved to quote the Dave Chapelle Show would adore this book. Which is unfortunate, because in many ways it’s an important read to this day. I never knew, for example, how the modern Republican policy of “attract businesses with low taxes and minimal regulations, putting the burden of taxation on an impoverished working class” dates back to the postbellum South. The continuity (or rather, the long stagnation) of racist white thinking is both astonishing and depressing. 

2024 read #143: The Fires of Vesuvius by Mary Beard.

The Fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii Lost and Found by Mary Beard

337 pages

Published 2008

Read from November 21 to November 27

Rating: 4 out of 5

Remember a couple years ago, when there was that meme of asking young men how often they think about the Roman Empire? Rome has been a playground for the fascist imagination since, well, the invention of fascism. (It’s right there in the name!) What should be studied as an era of culture contact and movement of trade and peoples between continents is, instead, a minefield of shitty takes and the hard-ons of contemporary would-be authoritarians.

Mary Beard’s Roman histories are among the few that I would trust for this particular subject. Always no-nonsense, Beard’s prose is fluent and a touch wry, cutting through the later bullshit that often adheres to Roman history. She never romanticizes or fetishizes the Roman world, and doesn’t shy away from the heinous inequalities, vile sexism, appalling hierarchies, or autocratic tendencies of Roman society.

Vesuvius is splendidly constructed. Beard takes us step by step through life in Pompeii, beginning with the roads and taking us through personages, trades, government, religion, and so much more in between. 

2024 read #142: Cunning Folk by Tabitha Stanmore.

Cunning Folk: Life in the Era of Practical Magic by Tabitha Stanmore

232 pages

Published 2024

Read from November 15 to November 21

Rating: 3 out of 5

Reading this book immediately after Magic: A History wasn't serendipity; I had Cunning Folk checked out from the library and waiting. It provides some of the depth I had longed for when reading Magic. As a history, Cunning Folk offers a Peter Ackroyd-like sampler of primary-source anecdotes from aristocrat and commoner alike, spanning from the Medieval through the Early Modern period. It isn’t memorably well-written or especially eye-opening, but it’s solid enough.

2024 read #141: Magic: A History by Chris Gosden.

Magic: A History: From Alchemy to Witchcraft, from the Ice Age to the Present by Chris Gosden

465 pages

Published 2020

Read from October 15 to November 15

Rating: 3 out of 5

It's been a long time since I regularly read nonfiction. When I say I struggled with this book, that’s entirely on me. (And on the election. And on life stress before that.) Gosden’s prose is dry and a touch academic, but should be quite readable to anyone whose attention span hasn’t been fried by the last four, eight, twelve years of ~everything~.

And right in the middle of reading this book, we got set back so many decades, and have so many decades of work ahead of us to undo the damage, if it can even be undone.

Magic is a broad overview (perhaps too broad) of the role and practice of magic in human societies over the last forty thousand or so years. The scope of Gosden’s thesis tends to crowd and minimize each region and time period, with sometimes unfortunate results. It’s one thing to say that life during the Ice Age is beyond the conception of modern minds; it’s quite another to write “Understanding Chinese thought and action requires considerable imaginative effort, but is definitely worthwhile.” Wild to see something that amounts to the cliche of the “inscrutable East” get published in 2020.

Gosden’s occasional otherization aside, I would love for any of these chapters to get expanded into a full length book. My own bias would be for Paleolithic, Mesolithic, or Neolithic cultures, or perhaps for Early Modern learned magic, but I would adore a more in-depth examination of anything in here.

2024 read #140: A Dream of Kinship by Richard Cowper.

A Dream of Kinship by Richard Cowper

239 pages

Published 1981

Read from November 9 to November 12

Rating: 2 out of 5

Eight long years ago — maybe three or four subjective lifetimes ago — I was reading the first book in this series, The Road to Corlay, on a fateful Tuesday in November.

I already owned A Dream of Kinship, but in half-conscious superstition, I avoided reading it afterward, packing it up in moving boxes as I spent the following eight years bouncing from New York to Ohio to North Carolina and back to New York. Now that the worst has happened again, and Trumpenfascism has thrown open the door to Christian Nationalism, I figured: Fuck it. Might as well go ahead and read the book I’d irrationally been avoiding this whole time.

In a future of melted ice caps, sea level rise, a militant church, and a return to feudal polities, the Kinsmen are a standard-issue love-and-brotherhood movement founded by a standard-issue white guy messiah in The Road to Corlay. Kinship picks up a few months after the death of Thomas the piper, with the church and its secular enforcers moving in to destroy the heretical Kinsmen, even as a child is born and grows up into another white guy messiah in his own right.

Sci-fi authors of this era couldn’t get enough of the idea that a very special white boy would convince the world that cosmic love held the universe together. The setting’s gender norms are straight out of the 1950s. Women characters who start out as fighters either die or live long enough to become madonnas. The faith of the Kinsmen is little more than hippy-ish Christianity, spiced with some far-out clairvoyance. Such powers are hereditary — meaning the messiah, whether the author consciously thought it through or not, has a stink of eugenics around him.

There’s also a through-line that the church’s officials are attracted to boys, which isn’t presented in the sense of “men in power like to abuse power,” but more in the gross old “haha, priests are gay” line of bullshit. 

Cowper’s prose was the highlight of The Road to Corlay, but even that was a disappointment here. Much of Kinship is couched as a historical review looking back on the events of the novel from the perspective of the religion they promulgated. That can be a fun narrative device, but it’s applied inconsistently here, and, in my opinion, not done well.

I don’t think I’ll bother to persevere into The Tapestry of Time. Well, probably not. Maybe four years from now, if I’m still around.

2024 read #139: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 14 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 14 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

191 pages

Published 2023 (English translation published 2024)

Read November 9

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 1 was the very first book I started reading after my partner R and I moved into our house, back in April. We had moved to New York in part to position ourselves for a potential return to Trumpenfascism, planning either for blue-state protections or for proximity to Canada, should that prove necessary. But as we settled here, and the Harris campaign became the can’t-possibly-miss-it choice for America’s future, those anxieties quieted. I dared to imagine a life of humble satisfaction and community joy instead of mere survival. Dungeon remained a fixture through all of that summer into fall, as I finished the first season of the anime and spaced out the manga.

I finished Dungeon in a different world, a darker and meaner and shallower world. This week, I sped through the last few volumes to wring out what comfort I could. I’ll miss it, going forward.

Volume 14 serves as a loving coda to the characters, quickly but thoroughly tying up loose ends and giving each of the central cast a lovely moment of farewell. Kui’s storytelling continues strong even in this victory lap, doling out just the right amount of closure for the characters and their story. After the unrelenting gallop of the final climax, I’m so happy Kui gave us this last little time with characters I’ll never forget.

2024 read #138: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 13 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 13 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

175 pages

Published 2023 (English translation published 2024)

Read November 9

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Continuing Kui’s unparalleled run with another incredible installment. Stunning art, gorgeous layouts, satisfying storytelling, thematic continuity, payoffs rooted in all the patient character work she put into this series — truly, what more could you want from the penultimate volume of this story? Absolutely wonderful.

2024 read #137: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 12 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 12 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

239 pages

Published 2022 (English translation published 2023)

Read from November 8 to November 9

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

What began as a fun adventure with a clever hook — eating the monsters on our way through a dungeon! — has broadened and deepened into an exploration of desires, consent, grief, and what it means to be alive. Kui’s art and storytelling continue to be astonishingly dynamic, twists and developments conveyed in amazing compositions. At the heart of everything are the characters we’ve gotten attached to, even the secondary and tertiary characters from various factions, all of them drawn together in an extended climax that never feels overwhelming. And as always, the loving central emphasis on food, on cooking, on feeding one another as an act of care.

An excellent installment of a superlative manga. When I began it, I never imagined our world would be what it is here near the end, never expected the comfort I would find in these monstrous times. I’ll be so sad to reach Dungeon’s end.

2024 read #136: E.T. the Extraterrestrial by William Kotzwinkle.*

E.T. the Extraterrestrial in His Adventure on Earth by William Kotzwinkle*

247 pages

Published 1982

Read from November 7 to November 8

Rating: 1-ish out of 5

* Denotes a reread.

This was not the world I expected to be living in when I reread this book.

E.T. was a staple of my youth. Not the movie — this novelization. I found it in a thrift store when I was like 11 or 12, and while it never approached Jurassic Park or War of the Worlds on my list of compulsively-reread novels, I read it quite a few times. I read it so often, in fact, that as an adult, I didn’t realize I had never seen the movie until my partner R and I watched it last year.

I found it again last month in a used bookstore, and thought it might be a nice winter season comfort read. I imagined a cozy winter in our little house, secure in the knowledge of incremental social and economic progress under the coming Harris administration. Instead, here we are, right back in the raging shit river of the Trumpenfascist timeline. Instead of gentle winter blues, I’m fucking devastated, crying over everything, scared for the future. I’m so very tired.

But we keep going, because we cannot stop.

Anyway. This book.

I was surprised to learn that E.T. was novelized by William Kotzwinkle. I haven’t read anything else of his, though when I briefly contemplated reading all the World Fantasy Award-winning novels, a few years ago, his name stuck in my head as the author of 1977 winner Doctor Rat. The writing definitely feels like a literary fantasy prose-smith (or at least the 1980s idea of a literary fantasy prose-smith) signing up to cash a check. 

A bit of personal trivia: This book was my first exposure to Dungeons & Dragons, which is portrayed in all its Satanic Panic glory as a gateway to teen hooliganism, drugs, and depravity. Divorced suburban mom Mary frets: "Have I raised my babies to be Dungeon Masters?" I don't think it was intended to be as absurd as it reads today. Though maybe it was a satire on Reaganite family values pearl-clutching, for all I know. 

The book is grotesquely Eighties in other ways. The movie, wisely, leaves out the subplot of E.T.'s attraction to Mary. An actual line from the book: “How ironic it was that the willow-creature, the lovely Mary, pined for her vanished husband while in a closet, close at hand, dwelt one of the finest minds in the cosmos.” The straights should never be allowed to write anything monster-fuckery.

The film is also free of Kotzwinkle's Eighties-man-writing-a-woman flourishes. Every other sentence from Mary’s POV may as well be: “I’m horny and I’m desperate and I’d fuck the first man who looked at me, and also I’m a terrible mother who can’t stick to a diet.” There are a lot of jokes about roving perverts for a novelization of a kids' movie.

It’s like what America proved to be on Tuesday: a lot worse than I remembered.

2024 read #135: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 11 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 11 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

215 pages

Published 2021 (English translation published 2022)

Read from November 6 to November 7

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

The last 36 hours have felt like two weeks. I'm exhausted, in mourning, filled with fury. I've lived through so much despair, clawed my way back to grim determination, over and over again. And hardly any time has gone by.

This is another excellent installment of Delicious in Dungeon. Kui's compositional skills are simply astonishing as we hurtle toward the climax of the Winged Lion arc, and with it, the climax of the series. We get some of the best storyboarding and artwork of the series here, and some big plot developments that are well-executed and pay off on all the character groundwork. It’s really good.

2024 read #134: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 10 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 10 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

223 pages

Published 2021 (English translation published 2022)

Read from November 5 to November 6

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

What are we even doing here?

Joy is inherently antifascist. We have to keep taking care of ourselves. Etc. etc. All important words, but in the moment, they feel like the tritest of truisms. I don’t feel the point of anything right now. I don’t feel much of anything beyond despair, rage, grief, fear. Futility.

That’s precisely what the fashies want. So I try to keep hope (and myself) alive. They voted knowing they won’t get anything tangible out of their dear leader beyond spite for the people they hate. So I try to spite them back, by living. By finding my own joy. But it’s so difficult, and I’m so tired.

I’ve been trying to distract myself from the horrifying outcome of the election, but it’s impossible. Focusing on even my favorite manga for more than a page or two at a time is a chore. Inevitably, I find myself crying, or numb, unable to concentrate.

What the fuck are we doing here?

Look at me, I read another volume of Delicious in Dungeon. Yay. Go me.

It’s an excellent installment in an excellent series. There are dungeon bunnies and necromancy and cooking and character development and foreboding tension in the plot. There’s heartbreak and a cliffhanger. Kui exceeds even her high standards for artwork and storytelling. I cried. The book is good.

But none of this feels important anymore. Not the reading, not the blogging. I’ve always maintained this blog for me — no one else reads it, aside from the fucking plagiarism bots that scrape every word left unprotected on this dying web. I keep going because I don’t know what else to do.

I keep going, because otherwise, I stop.

2024 read #133: Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 9 by Ryoko Kui.

Delicious in Dungeon: Volume 9 by Ryoko Kui

Translated by Taylor Engel

207 pages

Published 2020 (English translation published 2021)

Read from November 4 to November 5

Rating: 4.5 out of 5

Another fucking election coming up. Time to distract myself as best I can, by checking out every single remaining volume of Delicious in Dungeon from my local library. Truly the most 2024 way I could compartmentalize my anxieties.

I had been looking forward to the succubus arc — who doesn't love a sexy monster? But in Ryoko Kui's hands, not only do we get sexy monsters, we get an astonishingly well-constructed arc with emotional stakes, ending with my favorite character moment ever for Izutsumi.

Perhaps it's just the contrast with the pretty but flat art of Tsukasa Abe in Frieren, but Kui's art is absolutely phenomenal in this volume. Her storyboarding and storytelling, too, are at their finest here. We learn more about the dungeon, and that all might not be what it seems with everything we had learned before. Top notch stuff.

2024 read #132: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 7 by Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 7, story by Kanehito Yamada and art by Tsukasa Abe

Translated by Misa ‘Japanese Ammo’

187 pages

Published 2022 (English translation published 2023)

Read November 3

Rating: 3 out of 5

This is my library’s last volume of Frieren, so it’ll be the last one I’ll be able to read for some time.

After the extensive arc for the magic examination, this tankōbon brings us back to the series’ more typical episodic structure. We wrap up loose ends with the other mages, head back out into the northern wilds, help a village or two, and find a hot spring. It’s an understated entry, but I’m fond enough of the characters that it didn’t feel at all like a waste of time. It’s as good a stopping place as any.

I do think the series has won me over enough that I do want to continue it, whenever that might be in the cards.

2024 read #131: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 6 by Kanehito Yanada and Tsukasa Abe.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 6, story by Kanehito Yamada and art by Tsukasa Abe

Translated by Misa ‘Japanese Ammo’

189 pages

Published 2021 (English translation published 2022)

Read from November 2 to November 3

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Any disgruntlement that the magical exam storyline continues from Volume 5 (and in fact comprises all of Volume 6, as well) is mollified by the fact that the second test is an extended dungeon raid. Yamada hits an excellent balance of action, character moments, and clever dungeon encounters, setting this volume a nudge above the rest of the series so far.

I’ve been wavering about whether to continue this series or not; this volume lands me solidly in the “continue” column. Which is almost unfortunate, because my county library only has copies of Frieren up through Volume 7. Just one more book after this one, and I’m stuck having to buy them if I want to keep going.

2024 read #130: Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 5 by Kanehito Yamada and Tsukasa Abe.

Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End Volume 5, story by Kanehito Yamada and art by Tsukasa Abe

Translated by Misa ‘Japanese Ammo’

188 pages

Published 2021 (English translation published 2022)

Read November 2

Rating: 3 out of 5

From the start, the most intriguing element in Frieren was the light touch of melancholy and loss that pervaded its story. Frieren, a seemingly immortal elf, didn’t realize how much her adventuring friends had meant to her until almost all of them had passed away. The idea of drifting through time, watching the world change and those you love wither away, is an obvious outcome of the standard post-Tolkien fantasy setting, yet not one I’ve seen explored that often. Even if I had middling opinions regarding individual volumes, Frieren as an overall story arc had promise.

Jump ahead to Volume 5, and Frieren’s side quests have brought her to a magical qualification exam, randomly assigned to a team with two young mages — one tightly buttoned up, one in hot pants — who can’t stop bickering long enough to perform their sorcerous tasks. It inevitably leads to a bunch of mages with main character syndrome settling into a battle royale. It feels so forgettably generic, so bog-standard for fantasy manga, so… Harry Potter. (Shudder.)

It’s especially frustrating when you recall I only began reading this series to fill the Delicious in Dungeon-shaped absence in my heart. Now that is a worthwhile manga series. Frieren? I get less and less convinced that I’ll make it to the end with each new book.

The magic exam storyline takes up this entire tankōbon, and continues into the next. While I felt it didn’t fit the series’ vibe (or at least wasn’t the vibe I wanted from it), I did get into it, sorta, eventually. Populating a battle royale with brand new characters is a difficult task. Abe’s art contributes many dynamic character designs for the rival mages; easily half a dozen of them look cool enough to star in manga of their own. I’d certainly read an entire series of Übel flirtatiously fighting with everyone.

There are even some scraps of character development and backstory for our dear Frieren, squeezed in between all the mayhem. That appeals to me more than the magical violence.