DECEMBER READINGS
…started with another physics primer, this one by Helen Czerski, a physicist who uses ordinary phenomena like popcorn and coffee and ketchup to explain how the universe works. And, since my understanding of the underlying mathematics is largely metaphorical anyway, I always enjoy books like this.
Next was a revisit to Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams, after it was mentioned by a friend. I had appreciated it when I first read it years ago, but, wow, this time it really hit me. What a masterpiece.
Then I dove headlong into the latest thriller by Tod Goldberg. The man knows how to entertain, and here Goldberg imagines a truly novel setup for a caper whose repercussions ripple across entire communities. Sure, there are lives at stake, but Only Way Out is also hilarious. I turned every page either laughing out loud or shaking my head ruefully. Highly recommended.
Michael Harriot’s retelling of American history with a focus on African-American culture is the dirty-mouthed cousin to The 1619 Project, and I consider both books a necessary antidote to the kind of washed-out mythology that permeates American discourse, especially at the street-level, low-info-voter level where I live and work.
Then I read Freaks of a Feather after realizing that I somehow own a copy. I do not remember ever purchasing it, but owning a book that I have not read makes me itch. Turns out that Tellessen’s memoir of his time in the U.S. Marines is both comprehensive and idiosyncratic, with a deeply authentic & ultimately winning voice.
Konnikova’s The Biggest Bluff is more than an account of learning how to play competitive poker. It’s also an examination of the ways in which chance rules our lives and how an understanding of this fact can be empowering. I hear she’s working with Goldberg on a TV series based in a Las Vegas casino. I have high hopes.
I leavened my previous 2 readings with another small novel by Denis Johnson. Nobody Move was originally serialized in Playboy magazine, and it’s the best kind of slumming for an artist like Johnson. It’s a raunchy screwball caper that, like Goldberg’s book, is powered by crisp dialogue, and I enjoyed every line.
Power and Progress, along with Applebaum’s Autocracy, Inc., are sobering examinations of the ways in which capital once again finds insidious ways to exploit labor, through outright deception and brainwashing. Both books offer solutions to the current stranglehold that billionaire autocrats have on world power, but I’m not all that optimistic that mere votes can overpower money.
It’s just as sobering to ponder the history of tuberculosis that popular novelist John Green has published. Green is an engaging storyteller, expertly moving from a cruising altitude to street-level and back again. TB has been with us since at least the beginnings of what we call civilization. Yet, despite knowing what it would take to eradicate it (and actually possessing the means), our species chooses other priorities instead. If I weren’t already jaded, Everything Is Tuberculosis might push me over the edge.
I ended the month by revisiting two old favorites. The first was Driven, by James Sallis, his sequel to the novel which spawned a really fun movie starring Ryan Gosling. Sallis has always been a kind of guilty pleasure of mine, executing genre tropes with a poet’s sensibility and a serious economy of movement. The second fave was A Confederacy of Dunces, a comic masterpiece whose origin story is every bit as interesting and poignant as the story it actually tells. And the story of Ignatius Reilly is a whopper.
All of these books are recommended, though, again, I must remind you: Your mileage will vary.
