September Readings

...began with Zusak's heart-tugging memoir about his pets & what it means to have pets as part of the family, instead of mere ornamentations. Then I rolled through retired LAPD detective Rick Jackson's true-crime memoir of a memorable murder case, followed by a revisit of Vonnegut's "autobiographical collage" in Palm Sunday. All 3 books are highly recommended.

But then my nephew challenged me to read Infinite Jest with him. It would be my 3rd trip through DFW's magnum opus, and it took me more than 2 weeks. But it was worth it. I had forgotten how laugh-out-loud funny this book is. And it was sobering to see that what was once absurd when Infinite Jest first came out is now a little too on-the-nose.

Maria Ressa's book, which came out shortly after she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, is must-reading for anyone trying to grapple with today's weaponized surveillance economy and how journalism, as the 4th Estate of any working democracy, must adapt. Orwellian is almost too-tame a word for what Ressa went through and is warning us about.

And Harp's true-crime dive into the criminal underworld of Fort Bragg serves as further evidence of something I've known for a while: secrecy is inherently poisonous. It is a breeding ground for the worst of our impulses. A secret may be a situational necessity, but it should always be a temporary condition. Otherwise, it is deeply corrosive, providing cover for all sorts of atrocity, even from people who would otherwise not be capable of such.

Attica Locke's Guide Me Home is the conclusion of her Highway 59 trilogy, and it's a book that almost requires a reading of the first 2 novels. But I did enjoy it.

And Mary Roach is a national treasure. All of her books should be required reading, and Replaceable You is a strong addition to her catalog. She is funny, informative, and she writes in an infectiously conversational style that makes her subject matter truly delicious to digest.

Finally, a prompt from someone online (a para-social contact, if you will) led me to revisit Powers's The Yellow Birds as an audiobook. I have a deeply ambivalent relationship with audiobooks, but they're just so damned convenient. More on this later, but The Yellow Birds is such a lyrically-written book, so full of emotional authenticity, that it's hard to criticize. It begins with a well-worn trope: a young man going to war. But then the book goes somewhere (forgive me) completely novel. I recommend it.

 

August Readings

August’s readings started with another Chandler, because why the hell not, which led me back to Pynchon’s Inherent Vice, a book that channels Chandler through a 70’s post-hippy haze of conspiratorial shaggy-dogs, as if it were an origin story for the Dude in The Big Lebowski.

Then came The Meth Lunches, a book I cannot advocate for enough. Foster does heroic work here, both as a writer and as a human being. And, as I considered Foster’s particular form of community activism, I recalled the voice of James Baldwin and thus revisited his The Fire Next Time, which, like The Meth Lunches, should be required reading for anyone who considers themself an enlightened human being. Both books articulate a worldview that I wish was more prevalent: that of “loving rage” towards all. “Angry Generosity” may be a better term. It’s profound empathy coupled with righteous indignance that the society we’ve created is not better.

I then shifted gears and blazed through the anthology Eight Very Bad Nights, which was so wonderfully entertaining. I have always enjoyed well-curated anthologies, and Goldberg has assembled a dazzling variety of voices here, all based on mixing crime and Hanukkah.

After finishing & digesting Choy’s sharply-argued history, which spoke deeply to my own familial past, Amazon’s algorithm threw me a wild recommendation: a contemporary cozy mystery set in a Filipino-American restaurant! I went with it, and I was not at all disappointed. Talk about authenticity! Manansala gets the culture, the comedy, and the cuisine perfectly, all while crafting a plot that kept me riveted.

Abrams’s oral history of hip-hop was a lot of fun, and it caused me to revisit Questlove’s own consideration of the history of the genre, after which I finally got around to reading Penn Jillette’s novel, Random, which is both a wonderful manifestation of a conceit *and* a nice vehicle for some offhand philosophical asides. Jillette has always been a fascinating & accomplished entertainer, and Random is a great addition to his body of work.

Walker’s Why We Sleep is an eye-opening survey of the current state of sleep research. I like reading about actual scientists doing actual science, and Walker dispels more than a few popular myths about slumber and its effects. He even provides a set of rigorously-tested recommendations we should all follow.

And finally, I got to Carlin’s Last Words. He, like Vonnegut, is a patron saint of mine, and Last Words is Carlin at his most autobiographical and aspirational, if you can believe it. It’s infused with an elegaic sensibility, which you’ll especially understand once you read about Carlin’s dissatisfaction with how his career played out. I miss him very much, as we all should.

 The Meth Lunches by Kim Foster

I was on my third go-around with this book before I really started to enjoy it.

Don’t get me wrong. It’s an enjoyable book, and Foster is an engaging and talented wordsmith. But this story is an exercise in a kind of brutally-honest, hand-to-mouth empathy that hit me hard, more for Foster’s fearlessness than for the fact that I know the people & places whereof she writes. In the time chronicled by this book, Foster puts her money where her mouth is by putting food in lots of other people’s mouths. And some of those people are difficult to feed, to say the least. Feeding them becomes complicated for Foster, but it also becomes an enrichment.

Moving into a fixer-upper in downtown Las Vegas just as the Covid pandemic hits, Foster & her family are on the frontlines of the battle between the have-nots & the housed. And, by stationing a fridge in her front yard for anyone to take from, she wields food as both a salve and a bridge as she moves from encounter to encounter, sinking roots deeper & deeper into the unforgiving caliche we call soil. But, unlike those chroniclers who parachute into Las Vegas with entrenched preconceptions, Foster is both perceptive & invested in the city she’s writing about.

It’s not easy helping people. Anyone can hand someone a sandwich or a few bucks and move on. But really helping someone? It costs you. It cost both Foster & her family. But Foster makes & nails the argument that it should cost — that this cost is necessary — because paying that cost is what turns us from mere humans into people who are humane.

To belabor a critic’s cliche, I think The Meth Lunches is required reading, not only for everyone who lives in Vegas, but also for anyone who wants to learn about the complicated relationship between ideals and policy, between what it means to have good intentions and what it actually takes to produce good results.

The Meth Lunches: Food & Longing in an American City

By Kim Foster

https://a.co/d/7Rmu48g