2022: Books that strained my back on moving day

​The latest in a now-annual tradition of intending to review the preceding year in books, neglecting to do so throughout the holidays, and finally capitulating to the creative guilt monster sometime in January. (What’s that? No, I don’t own a calendar, why do you ask?)

But apart from the onslaught of personal and life changes that dominated 2022, which curtailed my reading hours and decimated my writing minutes, there were only a handful of books that really got my humors bubbling. In fact, I think this feels like a crisp and concise “Top 5” year.

---

Project Hail Mary - Andy Weir

Having loved The Martian, I was worried that Andy Weir’s follow-up would be a re-hash. Blame that on the marketing, and the drifting tethered space man on the cover. Project Hail Mary is neither a sequel or a retread of The Martian’s story, aside from the fact that they both involve space exploration and things going awry, which is where things tend to go in space. It’s a fresh take on a familiar pattern of high-tech problem-solving porn, and if that continues to be Weir’s oeuvre, I’ll rejoice and keep him on the shelf next to my Crichton shrine.

Admittedly, some of Crichton’s later work got a little stale, rarely deviating from the cast of stuffy academics confronting science run amok. Avoiding that rut, Weir took a big tonal turn for his follow-up, apparently aiming Project Hail Mary at a younger audience than The Martian. Some of the humor is corny, and junior high teacher-turned-astronaut Ryland Grace has a big Ted Lasso vibe, but it all works to frame the hard science wizardry as something relatable and achievable by regular people who are in the habit of scientific thinking. If it becomes the Jurassic Park of gen alpha, the kids will be alright.

​​The Sun Also Rises - Ernest Hemingway

We moved to a house in the hills north of LA in August. Out here the country unrolls from the Grapevine to the valley, with little family farms and sleepy cows along the Aqueduct. The dirt roads and dark nights would have looked no different in Hemingway’s day, I thought to myself more than once as we moved in, reading The Sun Also Rises with my coffee, in a folding camping chair in this empty farmhouse while the sun also rose.

(As foreshadowed, this is about the time I trashed my latissimus dorsi trying to lift a heavy box of books, about 3 minutes into moving day. Anyway.) 

The Sun follows journalist Jake Barnes as he and a few society friends travel, fish, fight, simp for a mutual lady friend, and drink their way across Spain. Jake, the inadvertent moral center of the group, grows increasingly disillusioned by the decadent, petty, and inauthentic behavior of his companions.
The book encapsulates Hemingway’s view of the social liberations and values of his post-WW1, Roaring Twenties era. His characters and their carousing represent a burgeoning dilettante class that stretched its legs to step from the drudgery of their parents’ day and into something more comfortable.

I read it in the two-week interim between jobs and houses, feeling as itinerant as its cast of Lost Generation jabronis. Hemingway endures because of his skill at putting you in the scene. He resonates. I joined the crew, and our gulf of a century was immaterial. On my last morning of unemployment, my folding chair pulled up to the table in that café in San Sebastian, Jake and I languished over coffee, waiting for his holiday to end and my first day of work to start. “The fiesta was over.”

​Going Postal - Terry Pratchett

To call Discworld a comfort series seems unjust. The prose is immensely comfortable, practically pillow-topped and feather-stuffed. It slides affably into the nook next to Harry Potter and Hitchhiker’s Guide for tea. But “comfortable” is sometimes used to mark down a work’s value, and that would be an error. One could lead a wise and happy life reading only Discworld novels. A writer could study Pratchett’s style - visual as a screenwriter’s dream, economical as a screenwriter’s budget – in lieu of schooling. Every line is a setup, punchline, observation, or indictment, and they all land like guided missiles.

​Discworld novels mostly take place in an intricate, satirical, disc-shaped fantasy world balanced on the backs of four elephants standing atop the shell of a turtle – though it is functionally no different from our marble-shaped world. You will recognize the royals, the tyrants, the authoritarians, the people with power. You are much acquainted with the peasants, the scoundrels, the small folk doing their best and worst. There are also wizards, werewolves, vampires, zombies, golems, and Igors, though they mingle more publicly in Ankh-Morpork than they tend to do in most of our towns.

This one’s about a post office, the surprisingly mad world of letters and stamps, the simple small townies who write them, and the people who move them from place to place. There’s also magic, murder, and mayhem. Just grab this or pretty much any Discworld novel and jump in.
​

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories - Ken Liu

When asked for reading recommendations (it’s happened), lately I jabber about Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and Homo Deus - visions of the near future, the onslaught of technology, and the ascent of AI-enabled human hybrid hyper-minds. Now here’s some fiction to pair with that meal. Ken Liu’s short story collection imagines the human condition in an increasingly transhuman world, vignettes of fragile mammal voices calling to each other across the winds of unfathomable change. If The Sun Also Rises encapsulated a generation, The Hidden Girl captured a moment – that moment being something like late 2019, when nascent techs like Neuralink and ChatGPT were just starting to wriggle. It’s all happening, man.

​Every story in the collection is a mindblower. Netflix thought so, too – at least one of the stories was adapted for Love, Death, and Robots, and the throughline story is the basis for the series Pantheon on AMC+.

Stories take place in a variety of epochs, planets, and modes of consciousness. That old Earth is broken and desolate or on its way there is par for the course, but the lives and livelihoods of its revenants are original and riveting. The heart of the collection is the relationship of parents and children, the things we inherit and the things we leave behind, and the connections we cherish through chasms of space and time.
​

​The Gormenghast Trilogy - Mervin Peake

Gormenghast is a deep cut - a dark, dense tome of exquisite design, wrought by a unique mind. My feeble adjectives do no justice for its ponderous, luxuriant descriptions and immersive world-building. I found it, after many years on my mental buy-list, in a majestic hardback edition at an Eden of SFF called Dark Carnival in Berkeley.

​ I didn’t vibe with many books this year. Mostly I ruminated on writing styles and authorial habits that put me off. But from the first florid chapters, Gormenghast reminded me of the qualities of writing and of fantasy that used to pull me in for 10+ volume marathons. Peake’s creative substance seems drawn from the same dark well as Bradbury, but even more macabre. He just goes for it, unleashing salvos of simile and metaphor that modern authors wouldn’t dare submit to a creative writing class, spinning mad dendritic sentences that modern editors would shoot on sight. The page-long constructions are a high-wire act. There is a 6-page chapter that is nothing more than a group of professors walking through a doorway.

It’s an incredibly personal fantasy of dreary corridors and hidden passages, of lambent passion and oppressive ritual, of needful people and unavailable love. It is a house constructed around an author’s mind, or maybe the mind is the stone and mortar, filled with servants, retainers, and small folk, all revolving around one peculiar family and their foibles, baggage, and anemic relationships.  
The third book, Titus Alone, is a stark departure that casts a disquieting shadow on the previous two. It’s much shorter, almost a coda. Peake struggled with the ravages of Parkinson’s disease as he wrote it. Maybe knowing this colored my reading, but it seemed like Peake strove to show honestly how that grim intruder was corrupting his mental world, his Gormenghast. Characters seem to personify the antagonisms of the disease. Others seemed to represent his own diminishing faculties, pitched against a dark fate of nebulous injustices, pursued by obscure authorities. Familiar faces from the series become mocking apparitions. The style is almost dream-like, less concerned with narrative flow or pacing, full of impassioned Shakespearean dialogue and soliloquys. There is an abrupt animosity for ‘scientists’ - an off-screen cabal who arbitrarily conspire against Titus, the natural world, and all that is good. Where the early work is measured and meticulous, the later work is full of outrage and disarray.

Near the end, Titus is given a book – one copy of many that the author carries in a sack, unsold remainders of a forgotten opus. Titus asks the author what it’s about.

“Everything. Everything I know of life and death.”


Other books I loved but don’t feel the need to write in-depth about

I mentioned Yuval Noah Harari’s Sapiens and Homo Deus, and his 21 Lessons for the 21st Century is the same currency. Same story with Jared Diamon’s Guns, Germs, and Steel, the spiritual predecessor to Harari’s work. All are fascinating, enlightening; all the good -ings.

The list goes on:

• Neil Degrasse Tyson - Astrophysics for People in a Hurry
• Neil Gaiman - The Ocean at the End of the Lane
• Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart
• Various - World Treasury of Science Fiction
• James Joyce - The Dubliners
• Nalo Hopkinson - Skin Folk (I read this for a “book club” meet-up at Lightning in a Bottle. The organizer, a DJ, one or two people who I think were friends with the organizer, and Lizett and I sat around a rustic side-stage at noon and chatted about race and death, ad-libbed alternate endings, and moulded literary symbols out of play-dough.)
• Chuck Klostermann - The 90s
• Michael Crichton - The Great Train Robbery
• Neal Stephenson - Snow Crash
• Adrian Tchaikovsky - Elder Race

 
 And because I bothered to take the notes, 
some notes on the books that didn’t really do it for me.

Isaac Asimov - Foundation I

Underwhelming. It read like a series of stilted conversations. I do love the retrofuture décor.

Natalia Zina Walschots - Hench

I don’t really get into modern fiction that’s written like a screenplay - sequences of action and dialogue that clip along and project a cinematic, easily adaptable story sprinkled with cultural memes but little insight or subtext. It’s like a blueprint for a story that’s waiting to be filled with substance – if not by the author, then by a director, actors, cinematographer, etc.

Walter M Miller, Jr. - Saint Leibowitz and the Wild Horse Woman

This turned out to be a pale riff on the original with nothing new to say. I had suspicions going in, considering A Canticle for Liebowitz is a celebrated classic and this is a little-known, little discussed appendage. Some of what I love about Canticle is present – the post-apocalyptic reframing of Christian orthodoxy, timeless human conflicts playing out in the ashes of the pre-deluge civilization, societies reforming and refracturing with varying levels of recovered technology, the stage of the American Midwest shattered and reimagined as a wasteland… but it’s all pretty boring here.

It’s a standard narrative, unlike the first one which was more experimental and discontinuous. Where Canticle is an awe-inspiring high concept tour of a post-apocalyptic world, this one is a tedious account of an unremarkable conflict, written more like a historical text than a novel. Major action is often described offhandedly and with so little punch that I had to reread a couple sentences to realize a central character has been stabbed or something.

JD Salinger - The Catcher in the Rye

Did young derelicts really talk like Holden Caufield or Kerouac characters in the 1950’s, constantly repeating the same phrases over and over? Did people really say “what I did was…” before telling you what they did, or add “and all” to the end of every sentence? Did they constantly say, “to tell the truth,” “the truth is,” “if you want to know the truth?” Wouldn’t our parents and grandparents who were young in the 1950’s talk like that then? Is it a figment of fiction, like the transatlantic accent?

Great book though.