Howdy, (mostly) humans! I spent most of December hard up with a nasty flu / cold / respiratory virus thing that I’ve seen referred to on Twitter as “Kroger Brand Illness,” to distinguish from the name-brand varietal that takes all the headlines. It was miserable, I did not like it one bit, and I’m mostly better now.
Of course, since we’re in the middle of a pandemic, cases are surging, and Nothing is Easy, our Small Human is out of day care until we see the other side of the case spike, which has left me with about an hour and a half per day of time for all professional and paraprofessional obligations. I’m spending as much of that as I can writing. What do you take me for? Someone who’s not trying to finish a novel of Brobdignagian proportions? Honestly. (Please don’t tell my agent how long this book is. Or my editor.)
(Offscreen voice: Max, you do know that your agent subscribes to your newsletter)
Ssh! Maybe they won’t notice!
All of which is to say that, unless one of you has a time turner and has been holding out on me, this newsletter will be more spare than usual for the next few weeks. But, in the interest of summing up old years and starting new ones, and perhaps baring my soul a little: here’s my reading log for 2020 (minus one or two books washi taped off for various reasons).
A few rambling notes:
I have friends who used to read a lot who have barely read during the Pandemic, and I know some people who read an average-to-low amount much March 2020, who have since gone into overdrive. I’ve shifted from a book-or-two-a-week reader to a two-books-most-weeks reader, apparently, though these numbers are a bit soft due to me single-counting volumes of Witch Hat Academia. Adding them seemed a bit like adjusting the margins on a term paper even as I was doing it—but then, I was churning through The Recognitions at the time, and it was nice to write something down on the list.
I owe y’all an essay about The Recognitions, but it will have to wait until I can chain more thoughts together in a row.
One extremely minor subtheme to my reading that I don’t think I discussed in these pages last year: I spent a bit of time on foundational texts of a particular boy’s-own brand of commercial fiction that informed pulp SF—Burroughs and Sabatini and so on. It’s amazing how much of Burroughs and especially Sabatini prefigure modern quippy adventure fiction and TV, on a beat-for-beat and stock-character by stock-character level, and it’s striking to see what changes between the old guard and the new.
Many of these changes are for the good (a lot of different varieties of yikes throughout). But, well… Tarzan, John Carter of Mars, and Sabatini’s pseudo-histories are all, it seems to me, fit answers for that odd question I hear asked every now and again, often by dude-type persons, that is: “Where are the romances for dudes?” That is to say: these books are absolutely a certain breed of boy’s-own-story—if they were Saturday morning cartoons all their ad spots would be for Nerf and various transforming murder vehicles—and yet they are romances. And not even in that weird way where some people will call any book with kissing in it a “romance!” I mean that they feel like the romances I have read, though the style and balance are different enough to mark them as of a different genre. The main characters are male persons of superlative quality, seeking their place in the world. As these boys—whatever their actual ages—meet the slings and arrows of outrageous et cetera, they encounter challenging, worthy women, often of roughly their own level of (im-)maturity, from whom they are divided by circumstance, politics, personal allegiance, misunderstandings, language barriers, and the good old fashioned standby, “sorry, turns out I’m from another planet.” The interest is mutual, even if it is not, at first, acknowledged. Their paths are entwined. They cannot be together—they must! This emotional connection doesn’t just simmer in the background. Romance drives character development, plot, tension, tragedy, revelation, and resolution. The characters grow up together, and almost always, they end up together, and that ending-up is the end of the book. Romance!
I’m reluctant to use the term “love interest” when describing these relationships, because it reduces the romances to a pure functional element, like ballast in a ship. By comparison to the romantic throughline in, say, Scaramouche, the “love interest” of its modern heirs in adventure fiction and cinema is perhaps not an altogether vestigial organ, but an underdeveloped one, textureless, bland, the “before” panel in the Charles Atlas ad. Think about the artistic effort lavished on the power fantasy elements of, say, I don’t know, Aquaman, or a James Bond flick, or Blade, compared to that budgeted for the central relationship. By contrast, Captain Blood dismisses its entire climactic sea battle in a brief summary, giving more space for the real climax, the reunion between Peter Blood (it’s! his real name!! what!!!) and Arabella Bishop.
(One major exception here, of course, is the Fast and the Furious franchise, which does put serious energy into its relationships. But that’s another essay, and not even mine to write, since it’s the point DongWon made to me when I bounced all this off of them.)
Anyway. That said, looking back on a year of reading: aren’t books great? They can give you so much, in so many different ways, on demand, in whatever minutes you have to spare. They talk to you. They offer care, and they reward it. They sneak through time—a good book can graft itself to thoughts and dreams you’ve carried with you, unknowing, since childhood. I read A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek this year for the first time, and it feels like I’ve been reading it since I was eighteen. Sometimes books feel like they read you back to yourself—you become a guest in a place of higher thought. What wonderful things to exist.
Where you can find me around the internet this week:
This coming Sunday, my fantasy story “To Make Unending” will be the debut feature on Sunday Morning Transport, an exciting new science fiction and fantasy newsletter. Subscribe now, and get one great SFF story a week in your inbox! “To Make Unending” is a high fantasy story of sorts about parents and children and the ends of ages; it felt wonderful and weird to me as I wrote it, and I hope you enjoy.
For your listening pleasure: Ada Palmer and Jo Walton and I took many hours to talk about fencing, martial arts, and various arts of writing, among other things. I could talk with Jo and Ada for weeks, and I’m pretty sure I have at least once. Listen to the first part of our conversation here!
And, of course: Last Exit is out next month! Preorder wherever books are sold, including Amazon, B&N, and your local indie, such as mine, Porter Square Books.
Take care, y’all. Happy new year!
A Year in Books
Congratulations on a year complete, and I'm so sorry about the lack of childcare right now ON TOP of your being sick :( That really really sucks. As always, let me know if I can help -- even if it's just getting you groceries delivery or anything like that. Much love for you in this difficult time!
I have read nothing like the volume you have this year, but it's certainly very inspiring to see your list! And speaking of male romances, I LOVED Captain Blood... as a small child. Seven- or eight-year-old Vlad (probably far too young to read those books) devoured them in the Russian translation. And I remember the relationships! Reading this post reminded me of how nice it was to read a romantic throughline in what is traditional regarded as a "masculine" book, and how I miss that in other fiction I've read / watched / played in the genre.
For my media consumption part, I've finally gotten around to watching the Expanse (or at least the first season and a half), and am enjoying it a great deal. A friend said that the books it is based on came out of a roleplaying campaign, and I definitely see marks of that in some of the Decisions that the characters make.
I wish to you and your loved ones no more illness, Kroger or name-brand, and much happiness in 2022!