Edgar has kept up with the book reviews much more reliably than I have. I believe, in the future, I’m going to move my book reviews more to social media (our Facebook Page, our Tumblr, and my own goodreads.) I don’t tend to review things immediately: I like to stew on them a bit.

I also tend to do much smaller book challenges than Edgar does, specifically so I can spend more time ruminating on things. Of course, this means that I don’t explore quite as much, and often end up picking through the remainder of their omnivorous ranging for my own reading.

So, continuing immediately from my last book roundup, I look back over my goodreads and find:

The Weird and the Eerie by Mark Fisher, goodreads here. A contributing factor to this recent piece from me, and reviewed by Edgar here. As I may have mentioned, I enjoyed it, and thought there were some very valuable things here — my own thinking is that this text is key to understanding the idea of “acid communism” that he was going to expound upon in his next book (all three of his published books Communist Realism, Ghosts of My Life, and The Weird and the Eerie being linked together in a sort of progression, with The Weird and the Eerie being a keystone text.) That being said, there are some noticeable lacunae: I think that the failure to acknowledge Lovecraft’s racism, at least in passing, is a worrisome bit of rhetoric, and I think that the failure to treat more contemporary weird fiction (see: China Miéville, M. John Harrison, Jeff VanderMeer) is a weakness.

Borne by Jeff VanderMeer, goodreads here. And we find ourselves at that last name immediately. I found Borne to be a little bit of a slog, especially because I reread VanderMeer’s Annihilation so recently (the movie was gorgeous, though I think the book is incalculably better.) I’m probably going to read its followup, Dead Astronauts at some point in the near future, but I must say that I get the sense that adaptations are a bit like the Oscars — the acclaim arrives at the wrong time. Southern Reach should be a television series (like Borne is going to be,) and his prior books, the Ambergris books (maybe even just Finch, mentioned here; though Shriek is better,) should have been put on the big screen.

In and of itself, it’s a fine book. There were elements that I really enjoyed, though it didn’t drive me with the same ferocity that the Southern Reach books did — it’s probably telling that I can’t help but compare it to the prior work by this author. Still, I generally enjoyed it.

There is No Year by Blake Butler, goodreads here. This was…hmm.

There is No Year is about…

What are you? (HarperCollins, 2011) — What *are* you? (HarperCollins, 2011)

Look, it’s a weird haunted house story, but that doesn’t do it justice. Butler is an amazing prose stylist, capable of crafting monolithic paragraphs and sprawling sentences that convey a mood better than they convey a sense. When you get down to it, that’s what a Blake Butler book is about: not about plot, not about character, not even, really, about images (though it has all of those, especially images.) A Blake Butler book, to me, seems to be about a particular affect. At the core of this book is a sort of absence, but it isn’t a negative absence: it’s not the absence of presence, but the presence of a very particular and ominous kind of absence.

Bullshit Jobs: A Theory by David Graeber, goodreads here. Swing back around to political issues. I discovered Graeber this year, with this book, and I’m a big fan. You can read the whole book here, and it developed out of a piece written for Strike magazine. I used it as part of my writing on bureaucracy.

The book isn’t perfect — there’s a lot of muddling around with self-reported testimonials and not a lot of theory, but when the theory shows up (“Managerial Feudalism” is a big part of it, as is a sort of Neo-Keynesian approach to things) it’s pretty strong. Unlike a lot of writers of critical theory, Graeber doesn’t shy away from offering solutions — of course, that might be because he’s not a Critical Theorist. He’s an anthropologist.

I’m looking forward to tackling his book Debt: The First 5,000 Years, which I’m given to understand is his best.

Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump by Gary Lachman, goodreads here. What I originally hoped Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle would be. While I’m not exactly a practitioner of “magic” with or without a “k”, I find esoteric topics to be interesting, especially from a sociological and political perspective, and this book was a fascinating and enlightening read on the current trends and occult schools of thought that contribute to our current political moment (the connection between the contemporary Prosperity Gospel movement and the New Thought movement of the 19th century is fascinating.)

How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them by Jason Stanley, goodreads here. A fairly solid book, though I must say it didn’t really stick with me; the essay “Ur-Fascism” by Umberto Eco (which I encountered independently four times last year — something’s in the zeitgeist or something’s in me) covers much of the same territory more briefly and for free. Still, a worthwhile read.

The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón, goodreads here. I have never been to Barcelona, though I would like to. It’s something of an architectural fixation of mine (La Sagrada Familia both attracts and repels me, though the attraction is much stronger than the repulsion.) The world that Zafón evokes, simultaneously gothic-gritty and sentimental, seems like the model for a new sort of detective story. Daniel is a soft-boiled detective, somewhere between a genteel, bibliophylic Lionel Essrog and a rumpled, teenaged Hercule Poirot, and I found this story to be very effecting. Admittedly, because I’m also rumpled and love books, but think about that Modernisme!

Everything Explained that is Explainable: On the Creation of the Encyclopaedia Britannica's Celebrated Eleventh Edition, 1910-1911 by Denis Boyles, goodreads here. Reviewed very capably by Edgar. A fascinating dive into the complex process of publishing an encyclopedia, full of interesting characters and amazing anecdotes. While I’m very dedicated to fiction as an art form, this book almost made me question that — though the amount of work that goes into it seems incredibly daunting. Between this and the Astronautalis song, “The Case of William Smith”, I’m convinced that the history of the Encyclopedia Britannica must be one of the most interesting topics in the history of publishing.

Fragments by Heraclitus, goodreads here. Read in an afternoon; fittingly only bits and pieces stick with me. Still, the philosophy of Heraclitus, and similar thinkers who form the shadow-canon of Process Philosophy (Nietzsche, arguably Marx, and Deleuze) is compelling to me in a way that normal Substance-oriented philosophy isn’t.

Babbling Corpse: Vaporwave and the Commodification of Ghosts by Grafton Tanner, goodreads here. Contributed to this piece. Possibly the best post-Fisher book from Zer0 books — a publisher I greatly enjoyed, but which had a serious decline in editorial quality later on (I feel like the writers were left to fend for themselves on editing, and as someone who has been on both sides of that particular desk that seems like a bad call.) Tanner has a similar stance on nostalgia to us here at Broken Hands, but takes a slightly more Marxist or Post-Marxist stance on it, viewing it as symptomatic of Capitalist recuperation. Of course, he seems to think that Vaporwave can be a sort of detournement — a redirection of the flows of desire that support the system. I, personally, disagree. The theoretical toolkit he puts together is quite interesting, though.

Who Killed the World? Solarpunk After the Apocalypse by Sam Keeper, goodreads here. Available here. Occasioned this piece. While short, and the best essay is honestly the first one — the one that Keeper released for free — it is basically an exploration of a Genre-by-fiat created on Tumblr (by far one of the less-annoying ones; people are trying to make “Hopepunk” a thing, and it’s not going to be until someone buckles down and makes an entry into its canon.) Solarpunk is an attempt to move past Cyberpunk as a genre, and while I’m kind of annoyed by the -punk suffix being used constantly, it has three things going for it that I appreciate: (1) some people who write on it actually understand that “punk” is a concept with some weight to it and using the word means they have to impute a bit of a punk sensibility on what they’re creating; (2) it’s concerned with the environment, which, let’s face it, all of us should be; and (3) I’m a sucker for Art Nouveau aesthetics (see below, where I mention a Gustav Klimt art book.)

All of this being said, Solarpunk isn’t quite a thing yet. I think it will be, but it’s going to have a strange course of development because of how it began. All of this being said, I think it’s interesting that so many people have jumped on this genre as a project and are trying to develop things in the style that’s been described. It will be a genre at some point, but I’m not sure that a genre can be said to exist when it doesn’t have a proper canon.

Horrorstör by Grady Hendrix, goodreads here. Recommended. The subject of this piece.

The Death of Truth: Notes on Falsehood in the Age of Trump by Michiko Kakutani, goodreads here. Not recommended. Occasioned this piece.

Complete Paintings of Gustav Klimt from Delphi Classics, goodreads here. Read to calm down after the last one. I have a deep affection for the Art Nouveau movement, though most of what I’m familiar with is the work of Alphonse Mucha. In honesty, it would have been far more satisfying in print than as an ebook, which is how I read it. Edgar and I have (if I’m counting right) 11 book shelves in our third story walk up apartment, all of which are packed to the gills and spilling out onto tables, windowsills, and beds, which is not even to mention those still in bags or in boxes stuffed into closets. Quite frankly, I’m reluctant to acquire new physical books at this point, at least not before I give some away. This makes looking at art books somewhat unsatisfying, because while I’m generally a fan of physical books, I feel that the large-format art book is sized and shaped a particular way because it’s trying to be the second-best way to see a work of art (the best, obviously, being to take Walter Benjamin’s advice and go soak up its aura in person.)

Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands by Michael Chabon, goodreads here. This is the second Michael Chabon book I’ve read — my first was The Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Honestly, I liked the novel a lot more, but that’s probably just my fictional orientation speaking. The first essay in the piece, arguing that the contemporary short story form (which is brief, plotless, and ends with a moment of revelation) is a genre that is just as limiting as science fiction or fantasy or horror, was the one that stuck with me the most, though the comparison of novel-writing to the creation of a golem (the last essay in the piece) was also a nice read, if a bit more of a rumination than an exploration. In my head, I class Michael Chabon as part of a passel of literary writers that dabble in genre fiction — Jonathan Lethem is also one, as is Dave Eggers, though not to the same extent, Charles Yu could be one, but I haven’t read enough of him yet (my error, honestly, I enjoyed How to Live Safely in a Science Fictional Universe) — who I can’t help but think of as deriving some of their mystique from a subdued imitation of Thomas Pynchon’s eccentricity

And, honestly, I find most of the work of this collection of writers to be perfectly fine, but somewhat unsatisfying. It isn’t salted by the weird to the same extent as Pynchon’s work, and honestly I find his stuff to be fairly straightforward most of the time.

I’m wandering. Chabon is quite a fine writer, these are serviceable essays with good insights. I recommend them.

Ways of Seeing by John Berger, goodreads here. Reviewed by Edgar in this piece. I’m still digesting this one to a degree — far from being a coherent whole, it seems more like it has a number of parts that are shiny and really draw the eye, and some parts that are there principally to support the shiny bits. I had to tackle it in chunks, because it was honestly an uncomfortable physical object to work with — all glossy pages in a paperback binding (it came apart in my hands.) Far from recommending a physical book here, I would recommend the ebook version. It will hold up better.

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