Listmas: Books of the year
Special not-all-Chainsaw Man edition!
TOP TEN NON-COMIC BOOKS
1. Bernadine Evaristo: Girl, Woman, Other
Many reviews have written, quite appropriately, on how great Evaristo is at evoking Black British intergenerational experience in all its contradictions, pettinesses, and beauty. So let me focus on how great she is formally. This is the most serious attempt yet to wrest the leading edge of free indirect speech back from the wall o’ text Euros. Here’s a passage that isn’t especially notable plot-wise, but shows the shape of what’s she doing:
at first she was experimenting with it, until she found herself craving her next fix and sleeping with the men who could provide it for her
up against damp alley walls, behind warehouses on the wharves, inside hallways, behind bushes, on dirty mattresses
the relief when blood stained her pants, when tests came back negative
she slept with the women who took a liking to her
discovered she preferred them
More than poetry, the underpunctuated bursts are reminiscent of any number of messaging services; while the decreasing sentence length building to some kind of punchline are trademarks of Internet humor going back to Progressive Boink/The Dugout. What’s even more interesting is that Evaristo imposes this schema not just on her young characters but on her grandmas as well, so that Twitter comedy is not just The Way We Think Now, it tells us something about The Way We’ve Always Thought. This, more than any ancestry dot com test results, forms a more solid basis for the radical empathy Evaristo proposes as a way to negotiate the interconnected age without losing one’s soul. Or sense of humor.
2. Jericho Brown: The Tradition
I did a copy-paste job on this a few months ago.
3. Matt Brennan: Kick It: A Social History of the Drum Kit
Brennan, a critical descendant of Simon Frith, is most interesting discussing the origins of the drum kits in the late 19th century (hey, if we can get one guy to play all these drums we can save a bunch of money) and the rise of digital alternatives in the late 20th century (was J Dilla a drummer? Questlove says so and are you going to argue with him?) But the well-covered likes of Chick Webb and Gene Krupa and Ringo and Neil Peart are given fresh and fair treatments as well. Haven’t learned this much from a music book in a long time.
4. Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone: This Is How You Lose the Time War
The most grandly romantic sci-fi novella of the last decade, and maybe the best time travel novella ever, though “ever” is a tricky concept once you adopt non-linear chronology. Still, I’m not sure in a way that makes much sense to anyone who hasn’t kept up with the last decade of sci-fi. So go read the last decade of sci-fi so we can talk about this.
5. Joel Mokyr: The Enlightened Economy
I wrote 1600 words on books about the Industrial Revolution in the most uncalled-for column of my year.
6. Maaza Mengiste: The Shadow King
Historical novel focusing, though not exclusively, on Ethiopian women involved in the resistance against Mussolini’s invasion. There are some artsy ideas about photography, but mostly it’s brutality—racist brutality, misogynist brutality, class brutality—with the possibility one might survive all this the only relief. A major book, but approach only when you’re ready for an abyss.
7. Charles Yu: Interior Chinatown
The Asian-American experience as mediated through television: law-and-order shows, mostly. Sounds reductive, except (i) most Americans, hyphenated or otherwise, mediate their experience through law-and-order shows (ii) most second-plus gen (East) Asian-American angst has been about media representation, at least until very recently when it became about how racist our parents are. This novel does a good job of problematizing all manner of tropes and the Black-White dichotomy more generally, though the big inspirational speech near the end (irony-free except for the self-knowledge that it’s a big inspirational speech) pretty obviously fails to wrap things up thematically, meaning it has to be followed up with more kung fu. Recommended to anyone who enjoys old person karaoke.
8. Amang: Raised by Wolves (tr. Steve Bradbury)
One of the funniest poetry books I’ve read, with Amang and Bradbury chatting and sometimes bickering like an old couple between poems. The process tells you something or other about the art of translation, the photos are evocative, and I’m a teapot.
9. Martha Wells: Network Effect: A Murderbot Novel
Read the Murderbot novellas first, but even at slightly overextended length this is still the most entertaining series going. Wells uses the space to delve deeper into the meaning of not-quite-human experiences (like getting reuploaded into your own brain as killware); incremental progress is made, which given the difficulty and importance of the subject is high expected value.
10. Mark Bittman: How to Cook Everything Vegetarian
Cooked from this a lot during the first two-thirds of the year, usually resisting the temptation to reconfigure the recipes as How to Cook Everything Vegetarian with Bacon, before swinging back towards planet-burning during the fall. So not permanently life-changing, let alone world-changing, but how many things are?
Old books: Sentimental Education; Stephen Baxter: The Time Ships; Richard Wright: Black Boy; Borges: Selected Poems; the good 200 pages of La Captive (starting from Bergotte getting killed by the View of Delft.)
TOP TEN COMICS
1. Tatsuki Fujimoto: Chainsaw Man and Look Back
I wrote a lot about these, and unlike my economic history bullshit what I wrote was mostly good.
2. Kuniko Tsurita: The Sky Is Blue with a Single Cloud (tr. Ryan Holmberg)
Art manga from one of the first women involved in the scene. She’s best-known for her portraits of budding Tokyo bohemians, but the 300+ pages here, from mid-’60s works like the startling, wordless “Woman” to early ’80s stories in which her failing health is unmistakable subtext, cover a vast range of subjects and almost as many drawing styles, with a feminist (small f, she had to get published) sensibility unifying her output. What’s here makes a pretty good case for her as one of the major alt-comics artists of her era, regardless of gender or country.
3. Joe Sacco: Paying the Land
Sacco goes up to the Northwest Territories and finds the Dene, the First Nations people of the region, have diverse opinions on fracking, the Canadian welfare state, modernity. The one thing they all agree on the that the country’s forced residential school system just absolutely fucked them over as a people: when personal experiences are recounted in a harrowing middle section, “cultural genocide” at first seems like an entirely appropriate term, and then like an understatement. The portraiture is often moving, and you bet that Sacco gets the harshness of the land towards visiting Portlanders across.
4. Allie Brosh: Solutions and Other Problems
Follow-up from the cartoonist behind Hyperbole and a Half, long delayed because of what we’ll euphemistically call health problems. You know shit is going to get heavy at some point, and then it gets heavier than that. Existential despair notwithstanding, she still draws funnier dogs than anyone else who has ever drawn dogs and can illustrate the precarity of our whole system of verbal communication like she’s a language poet. Rarely has the ultimate isolation that is human existence been so amusing.
5. Derf Backderf: Kent State: Four Dead in Ohio
Meticulously researched and, as far as I can tell, fair—the overall POV is normie liberal, but that was the majority viewpoint among students on campus for whom the likes of the Weathermen were at most a sideshow. Some of the National Guard get humanizing moments, but there’s no way around the fact that some of them murdered people, and Backderf makes it very clear that spatially, the slain students could have posed absolutely no threat to them. Unavoidably affecting, not least because to the extent that anyone learned anything from this, it wasn’t anything good.
6. ONE: Mob Psycho 100 v1-6
Like the One Punch Man webcomic (which I’ve only read a bit of), this starts out consciously at odds with genre conventions, and is perhaps even more reflexive. The superpowered kid who refuses to use his abilities even when lying in a bloody pulp on the street looks like a background character some assistant artist barely bothered to slap a face on. At first I wondered if this was enough to sustain a long-term series, but then good old character development sets in, as encounters with Mob quickly transform friends and enemies, while the toll of running into every asshole in middle school and other supervillainous organizations gradually cracks Mob. Adding to the slow burn is the glacial pace at which Dark Horse is publishing this in English, so I’m gonna have to remind myself to check up on this again in a couple of years.
7. Koyoharu Gotouge: Demon Slayer #1-103
Substitute the anime if you wish; I watched the first episode and anime pacing is very much in effect. On paper, the initial eye-catching contrast is between the chibi character art style and the extreme head-lopping violence. The heart of it however is pathos, which manga and anime are better at doing without sogginess than any other media these days (the violence helps, as do the occasional dumb jokes.) Every demon slain has its tragic backstory, and every being fighting for their life just wants some sense of family, or failing that, some way of creating beauty.
8. Adrian Tomine: The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Cartoonist
Comics guy as socially inept loser has been done… a lot, but this is better than most, partly because Tomine is funnier than the guys he was ripping off in the ’90s, and partly because it’s actually autobiographical instead of pseudo-autobiographical, so we know he turned out relatively successful and married and not dead. Which just makes a joke about doing an incredibly stinky poop while an attractive woman is in his apartment more harmonious, you know?
9. Soichiro Yamamoto: Teasing Master Takagi-san v1-6
Takagi-san (f) is the master of teasing, her middle school classmate Nishikata (m) the guy who gets owned every chapter. It’s not a Roadrunner/Coyote situation: you want to see Nishikata lose over and over because the pleasure Takagi takes in his exasperated face is so wholesome. Probably the sweetest comic ever about a sadomasochistic relationship. Arguably the real star is the setting on Shodoshima, a very Mediterranean-looking island in Japan’s Inland Sea that seems to get a million hours of sunshine a year.
10. Bishakh Som: Apsara Engine
Highly uneven collection, but when it’s good, it’s very good. Her main trick is making the connection between the words and art less than literal, though when the realist elements dominate, this often reduces to insufferable people being insufferable, and there’s a reason I cancelled my New Yorker subscription once I got the tote bag (it’s a good bag!) But when Som allows herself a little artistic license, the pictures, often drawing on Som’s architectural background, can become all-enveloping. Best story by a mile is “Swandive”, an encounter between two queer Desis—a confident trans woman and a nerdy enby (at, where else, an academic conference)—that turns into a futuristic bacchanal. I’ve seen worse utopias.
TOP TEN SHORT FICTIONS
Amal El-Mohtar & Max Gladstone: This Is How You Lose the Time War
Meg Elison: Big Girl [in Big Girl]
Sarah Pinsker: Two Truths and a Lie
Meg Elison: The Pill [in Big Girl]
Yoon Ha Lee: The Mermaid Astronaut
Vina Jie-Min Prasad: A Guide for Working Breeds
John Wiswell: Open House on Haunted Hill
Tochi Onyebuchi: Riot Baby
Jason Sanford: The Eight-Thousanders
TOP TEN POEMS
Jericho Brown: Bullet Points
Dorothy Chan: Triple Sonnet Because Boy, You’re Starstruck and I’m a Wonder
Jericho Brown: Thighs and Ass
Daisy Fried: Book 13
Sally Wen Mao: Paris Syndrome
Su Cho: Hello, My Parents Don’t Speak English Well, How Can I Help You?
Rae Armantrout: Influence [American Poetry Review Jul/Aug]
John Ashbery: The History of Photography
Jericho Brown: Good White People
Crossword of the year: Paolo Pasco and “Banksy”, Tag Team. Buy it for a buck!