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.