Today’s respite from the world’s slings and arrows was a wander through a bookstore. I found three gems I can’t wait to delve into. Part of this is for pure enjoyment, and part of it is research. End-of-the-world scenarios and tales of vengeance are my bailiwicks, so these purchases count as a tax deduction.
Given my budget,I was pleased to find they were all available at a major discount. That allowed me to rescue them from getting returned to the publishers. I was also a little sad (nay, shocked!) that they were all available at a major discount. This is particularly true of Survival of the Richest. I’ve heard the author on a podcast a couple of times. I’m intimately familiar with the material and want to know more. I once wrote a related essay (some might say a screed) on how apocalyptic scenarios aren’t the survivalist fun some fantasists think they are. There will be no lone survivors. Either we all count, and most make it, or civilization is fucked.
Step One:
Don’t opt out of the World Health Organization, dummies!)
Fight Against This Age should also be full price and on the bookshelf of every progressively minded person. Have we given up? Are we all just going to allow the oligarchy to run us down, run us over, and run us through?Maybe. I don’t see enough fight in the general populace yet. Perhaps public outrage won’t kick in until they personally feel the kick in the teeth.
Anyway, happy Wednesday, and may Thor help us all!
Got to work early at my favorite coffee office. There are many empty chapters to fill up with entertaining brilliance, but I’m excited about what lies ahead.
Alison Bechdel breaks molds, and I’m here for it. When most people think of graphic novels, The Killing Joke or Watchmen oftenspring to mind first. Those were epic milestones of a young medium, but this cartoonist takes her creativity beyond old expectations. This is a compelling autobiography told through drawings and sharp observations.
The Secret to Superhuman Strength isn’t about making oneself invulnerable. Bechdel’s quest for health through exercise spans decades, but it’s really about confronting mortality. With humor, honesty, and, most of all, vulnerability, she chronicles her career struggles, personal failings, and a holistic view of her journey. Nothing is off-limits in this auto-biography of an artist pursuing a unique life and achieving success in an underappreciated medium.(Warning: distrust success. From her experience, it looks as exhausting as it is exhilarating, and, of course, it’s fleeting. That artistic struggle doesn’t end.)
If you aren’t already familiar with this celebrated American cartoonist, you’ve probably heard of the Bechdel test. She says now that the test began as a joke, but it spurred serious discussion. Raising awareness of the representation of women, the test is whether at least two female characters in a fictional narrative have a conversation about something other than a man.That’s all I knew of Alison Bechdel before I found The Secret to Superhuman Strength.
Full of wit and wisdom, Bechdel explores her history and those of other artists. For instance, in testing her appetite for self-destruction, she explores how Jack Kerouac’s life ended. Observing her growth through the decades is fascinating as she deals with love, loss, self-doubt, loneliness, and heartbreak. If you’re older, you’ll enjoy the little nostalgic details that cue where she sits in time and place.Her life experience might turn you on to therapy, reading more, daring more, and living more fully.
From skiing to yoga, cycling, karate, and running, Bechdel seems up for anything to make herself stronger. That’s not necessarily where this journey leads. Her quest for athletic excellence and health drew me in. It was her contemplation of Buddhism that gives readers some solace as we shiver in the cold shadow of existential dread.
What is the secret to superhuman creativity?
People talk about talent, but many may not realize how hard the talented have to work. From my own experience and what I glean from Alison Bechdel’s book, the true answer is vulnerability plus attention to detail.
What you call oversharing, I call the muse. Endemic is about a lonely, neurodivergent woman seeking safety and independence amid a plague. My novels are frequently about flawed protagonists searching for revenge and escape. That’s all me in there somewhere, confessing my sins, imagining clever vengeance, and exposing my not-so-secret resentments.
I resonated thoroughly with Alison Bechdel. Her struggle is a struggle we all share. How do we find our way? How can we live longer, better, and more authentically in a world that often values that quest? I admit I’m still struggling with the way-to-die part of the equation. Reading this graphic novel made me feel a little more comfortable with the relentless passage of time, the scary present, and the dark future.
Now that my tropical vacation is over, I’m back to the Arctic winds. I’m almost recovered from that nasty virus, so I’m back to writing. Today, after a glimpse of a Cuban beach, let’s talk about books, especially your best book recommendations.
Cuba, January 2024.Love that sugar sand.
This is a recent view from my front door. We’ve been pummeled by dangerous polar temperatures lately. In the depths of winter, I especially enjoy sitting by the wood stove or in bed and reading a book. Snowstorms outside, a good book, and hot chocolate inside make for an especially cozy reading experience.
Audiobooks keep me occupied while I work out, cycle, or do the dishes.Chirp serves up audiobooks very inexpensively. I listen through Audible, but Spotify has audiobooks now, too.You’ll find lots of classics there.
I enjoyed going through Mark Manson’s best fiction list. I’d read most of them but found a few missing from my reading history. You might want to check out his website, markmanson.net.
What fiction do you consider essential reading, and what are you reading this weekend?
I have proof She Who Must Be Obeyed is my soulmate: At Christmas, I bought this book for her and she bought a copy for me.
Last year, I rhapsodized about Taste by Stanley Tucci. It’s part memoir, some family history, and delicious Italian recipes. Stanley has a dry wit, a fascinating life and career, and very strong opinions on which shape of pasta should go with what sauce. What I Ate in One Year picks up where Taste left off. It’s a near-daily diary of the trials, tribulations, travel, projects, rewards, and feasts the Internet’s boyfriend is heir to.If you’ve watched his series Searching for Italy, it’s impossible not to hear his dulcet tones as you read.Love that!
Reading this book in Cuba was particularly poignant and pointed. It was poignant because Stanley dwells on his mortality quite a bit. His first wife died of the disease and he is a cancer survivor. Meanwhile, I was far from home, sick and waiting to die by a tropical pool. Weak, cursing, and coughing, I was reminded of my father’s telling of how incredibly ill he was at sea. Flat on his back at the bottom of a fishing trawler in high seas, Dad told me, “First, I was afraid I was going to die. Then I was afraid I wouldn’t.”He survived the seasickness, and I survived my virus.Almost ninety years later, Dad was faced with the same feeling. He chose the needle rather than endure what sadists call “a natural death.” (Jury’s still out on my eventual exit, but I hope I go with the same eagerness and dignity, instead of screaming in childish protest, as is my wont.)
Stanley’s love of food was especially pointed in Cuba because he would starve to death there. When a meal fails to rise to his standards, Stanley refuses to participate in such abominations unto the Lord. He doesn’t hold back, reporting, for instance, that a meal was not just awful, but “fucking awful.” Mostly, he dines very well. As for us on vacation in Cuba, the pork was good a couple of times. Mostly, we survived the week on buttered buns. The buns were good, but I’ve had a much more delicious and authentic Cubano sandwich from Starbucks. No matter what I ordered on this trip, I couldn’t receive the same thing twice. A cafe bombon was first a delicious ice cream treat (not what I envisioned, but great). Then, it was merely iced coffee. Intrepid and trying again, a cafe bombon became a foamy thing sort of like the first attempt, but without ice. A proper cafe bombon should be an espresso with sweetened condensed milk. (Full details here. You’re welcome.)I finally got a decent cafe bombon when I flew home and made it myself.(Note to self: Learn Spanish before heading south again.)
It’s tempting to say, if you’re traveling to Cuba, bring food. I’m being a little unfair. On my first Cuban trip to a different resort, I enjoyed the meals. Our last meal in Cuba eight years ago turned me on to Italian food. I didn’t think it was special until I savored shrimp on angel hair pasta. This most recent trip was a gastronomic disaster, but the food wasn’t the point of the escape. We got to spend more time with our kids than we get all year, and that was wonderful. The weather was great, and we needed a break. I wish we hadn’t been sick for most of the trip, but I don’t regret going.SWMBO remarked she caught the virus from me, but in deference to my long history of service, devotion, and conviviality, she agreed to never say that again.
Travel and Book Recommendations
If you plan to visit Cuba, the country has a lot of supply problems. For instance, there’s no Kleenex, a fact we lamented deeply as our illness progressed. The staff appreciate over-the-counter medicines that are often unavailable to them. Besides tips, we left the staff a miniature pharmacy. For money, they prefer American dollars, but they graciously accepted our Canadian currency.
Wherever you live, on vacation or hard at work in air traffic control, read Stanley Tucci’s What I Ate in One Year. Okay, maybe not while you’re controlling air traffic, but otherwise, I highly recommend it. I devoured this book in a couple of days. I didn’t want it to end.And I really wanted to devour the great food he wrote about.A person can survive on buttered buns alone, but after a while, you don’t want to.
Home again, I’m back to the business of writing novels. The food tastes even better than I remember. I am grateful.
One of the pleasures of a vacation is to limit your choices. In our daily lives, we have to make decisions constantly. We have to choose what to do and what to do next. How will we fit in all we’re supposed to do? It often feels like we got too much to cram into our waking hours. Gotta exercise, gotta get groceries, be responsible, shovel snow, pay bills, cook, clean, and deal with a plethora of stimuli (much of it upsetting). The world is a firehose blasting away at the teacup that is your brain. On vacation, all you really have to decide is where and when to eat.Then, it’s that rare and precious commodity: free time.
As reported yesterday, my spouse and I spent most of our time in Cuba as sick as sick dogs. The dark hours filled with coughing and night sweats were the worst. The rising sun brought some peace. We crawled out to the pool’s edge, blew our noses into napkins, and lounged. And we read books.
I’m a bibliophile, but vacation days yield more time for getting lost in books. Uninterrupted days filled with the tasty consumption of words are great days, even when you aren’t feeling your best. In today’s example of something good to read, I suggest Bunny by Mona Awad. This author was new to me, but a glance at the first few pages told me I would enjoy her wordplay. It’s reminiscent of Heathers, the 1988 movie starring Winona Ryder and Christian Slater (and 95% on Rotten Tomatoes, I might add).If you’ve ever felt like an outsider standing too close to a snooty clique, you’ll enjoy all the delicious evisceration of the in-crowd.
No spoilers. I despise spoilers.
Bunny tells the story of a young woman studying creative writing, and she’s surrounded by assholes. Anyone who has participated in a writing workshop will relate to her hatred of the worst people who show up at writing workshops. Her school has more than its fair share of fake, nasty, and cloying student writers.
Awad’s writing style is clever and hip. (Is it okay to say hip? Is that not hip? No? Okay, it’s bussin’! It’s gas! It’s buttah! Cool? Okay. Far out, groovy, and fresh!) I digress. Go read Bunny.
The keys to a great vacation are (A) not having to make decisions, and (B) a good book.Make time for reading when you aren’t on vacation, too. It’s good for your mental health.
I just finished reading Writers & Lovers by Lily King. I don’t read a lot of literary fiction. I find that many writers of the genre favor character so much that little actually happens plotwise. Things do happen in this novel. The details are so well-observed and resonant that it’s a pleasure to read.I burned through the story quickly and didn’t want to put it down.
The best description of Writers and Lovers is Portrait of the Artist as a Young Woman. King accomplishes what I love about writing. Though much of the book’s exposition is interior, the author puts a movie in your head. There’s much to admire in her writing style and eye for detail.
Writers of a certain literary bent drop ambiguous endings on their victims/readers. King doesn’t do that. This novel has a beginning, a middle, and an end. Best of all, King gives us a self-sabotaging protagonist we can root for. We want her to win, so we follow her journey, hoping things will work out okay. It works because we’re all hoping things will work out okay.
Rereading The Grapes of Wrath after many years, it hits differently now that I’m older. The novel hits so hard, it could have been published yesterday, eerily relevant to our world in the present.
John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was originally published in 1939. That is startling given its empathetic allegory about forced immigration and the dangers of unbridled capitalism. This was written long before laypeople had the vocabulary of “late-stage capitalism.” Certain passages are worth reviewing many times.
I was especially taken with how people are transformed into cogs in a machine. When the bank takes their homes, there’s no one to resist. Responsibility falls like a hammer on the most powerless. Evicted from the land they’d worked for generations, the farmers are ground under the weight of an uncaring bureaucracy.
In another passage, car salesmen take advantage of desperate people. The sole focus is money. In pursuit of profit, the salesmen’s contempt for their hapless customers is ferocious. People are dehumanized. The system only serves itself and a select, faceless few. The victims are oppressed, but they don’t understand that which uses and abuses them.
The Grapes of Wrath reflects problems that are easy to see today. You’ve watched the news. The mercilessness of the American health insurance system is evident. A health insurance company denies 32% of claims and becomes startlingly wealthy. It’s an unusual funeral they give their victims, isn’t it? The afflicted are buried in paperwork first, then they die. Kill someone with a gun, and the press goes mad. Kill ill people with paper, and all we get are shrugs of “Well, it’s legal.”
Most frustrating, I still hear media people and pseudo-intellectuals pretend to be mystified when the public shrugs off the assassination of one CEO. They aren’t discussing why people are so fed up they don’t have the spare energy to care. The media isn’t delving into the why of that stance. They aren’t showcasing any of the many cases where people in need are denied tests and treatments they need to survive. Instead, the public’s lack of empathy has become the story. We have twenty-four-hour news channels, but they make no time for the bigger story.
A bunch of pearl-clutching journalists and commentators need to read The Grapes of Wrath. Maybe they’ll glimpse themselves reflected within those pages.Maybe then they’ll better understand our wrath.
