The Year In Reading: 2023

This year, as I do most years, I set a goal of books read, and made it a few titles over. 

But seriously, who cares? "Books read" lists are akin to notches on a palm tree during your desert island isolation. It marks the time; it's an accomplishment, but a rather arbitrary one. 

For starters, "titles read" encompasses longer works, like Nicholas Nickleby, and children's books, like The Value of Believing in Yourself. It does not distinguish between books I did a deep-dive into for the first time (Barry Lyndon; Lauren Brownstone's Enabling Enablement) and those I sailed through for perhaps the thousandth time in my life (The Hobbit; Stephen King's The Dead Zone). 

I'm reminded of magician Harry Lorraine's anecdote about the performer who bragged he knew a thousand tricks. "That's marvelous," the skilled professional responded; "I only know five." The implication being, of course, that he actually knows the tricks he performs. Sure, I may have read Zadie Smith's The Fraud, but there's a momentous amount of subtext and nuance that completely escaped me. Did I really read it? 

"Can we ever truly reread a book, since we, the reader, are not the same when we come back to it?" Joyce Carol Oates mused in one of her diaries (quoted from memory). No, I don't think we can. 

So the number read doesn't really matter; the reading does. And in 2023, I found myself strangely preoccupied with a few topics, and I found myself developing a few habits. 

Upon the morning of January 3, for example, I happened to find an online copy of W. Somerset Maugham's The Constant Wife, and devoured it in one sitting. I've been a pretty big Maugham fan ever since I discovered Of Human Bondage in my twenties, and wound up rereading it once every ten years or so, but honestly, it's not even his best work. Maugham has a wonderful ear for dialogue and domestic conflict, and pairing this play immediately afterwards with L.A. Theaterworks' dramatic performance was an experience. So I wound up repeating the experience monthly: one play, one audio production. 

In February, it was Disgraced, by Ayad Akhtar. In March, Michael Frayn's Make and Break. (I discovered him when I found out he was married to Claire Tomalin. I found that out when I read her account of Ellen Ternan, which was fantastic.)

April found me devouring Viet Gone by Qui Nguyen; May, however, was a side route with Gore Vidal's The Best Man, a play I've seen live but never actually read. 

Then in June, July and August, with the exception of Bryony Lavery's Frozen, I was mostly wallowing in the works of Noel Coward, and by September, with Design for Living under my belt, I lost the play-plus-production habit. All of these titles were free, by the way, either available in the common domain or, in the case of dramatic productions, free for download at the local library. 

It's a good way to read this stuff. I recommend it. 

The winter did not only lead me towards an immersive audiophile avenue of drama, alas. It was dark and cold; it was mostly just me and the dogs, slugging through the school days. And by sheer chance, I came across Clare Pooley's The Sober Diaries, her online account of giving up drinking and reacclimating herself to an alcohol-free life. Engaging, though not particularly prosy, I was hooked once I found that her deep dive into the subject had unearthed all kinds of revelations about her own life, life in general (why does our culture celebrate the imbibing of poison so readily, anyway?) and the nature of addiction vs. habit. That, in turn, revealed wonderful titles like Kerry Cohen's Lush and Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking. It also led me to Ron Livingston's Amazon seriesLoudermilk and Judd Apatow's Netflix series Love, all stories involving some kind of addiction and the people in the addict's orbit trying to navigate the waters and figure things out. "We ain't living; we're just trying to survive," as Ben Rogers sings. Utterly fascinating. 

In July, for my birthday gift to myself, when I wasn't packing or arranging to move across country, I read and took to heart No Plot? No Problem! by NaNoRiMo founder Chris Baty, and Stephanie Vanderslice's The Geek's Guide to the Writing Life. Those titles, plus the rather chaotic schedule I was keeping at the time, led me to start another novel and get farther than I ever did in my life. It's a comedic horror story about a pandemic that turns the population into zombies; the only way to avoid infection, paradoxically, is to socially congregate. The first draft is a mess, but by God it was fun to write. I inch ever closer to checking "write a crappy novel" off my bucket list. Maybe next year. 

Of course, I wallowed in Victorian literature, like I always do; this year I rediscovered W.M. Thackeray, and I'm angling towards Anthony Trollope for next year. Clare Carlisle's The Marriage Question was an intriguing deep dive into George Eliot's marriage with G.H. Lewes, and a much more critical approach than anything I'd read about her relationship before. 

But I did stretch my legs and take in some other titles besides. Leila Mottley's Nightcrawling was harrowing; Kimberly Harrington's But You Seemed So Happy is a title a husband trying to do better can only appreciate. 

I didn't read as many new titles this year as I'd have liked, but R.F. Kuan's Yellowface, Emma Cline's The Guest, Nathan Hill's Wellness and Annie Abrams' Short Changed were stalwart, challenging, thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding books. Stop reading this. Go read them instead. 

Wait, before you go...

How will you read the new year? I always say I'm going to read more outside my comfort zone; I rarely do this as much as I plan. I always say I'm going to abandon Reading for Pleasure so as to Read For Work. I'm going to find the titles that will give me the intellectual equipment necessary to fight the fights that need fighting. The horrors of Gaza. The continual heating of our planet. The war on education. Yes, it's nice that I got to reread Silas Marner but what about boning up on late term capitalism? How about knowing the ins and outs of the electoral process well enough so that, if necessary, I can step up where needed to push for sanity and rationality? 

How about reading for others, for the world, instead of just for one's self? 

I'll try. 

Read on, all. See you next year. 

They beckon me still...

Tips on Writing AP Essays: Using Evidence

What are we learning today? 

When writing any kind of persuasive essay, it's very important to include some kind of evidence that backs your point up. Otherwise, you could just tell people stuff, and they'd believe you! For no reason! I mean, you could say stuff like "Our president is a socialist" or "The poor are leeching money out of your veins and using it to buy heroin and condoms" and people would be all "Wow, I didn't know that! How much should I make this check out for to your super PAC?"

Well we don't want that. So today's lesson will teach you how to include evidence to write college-level essays that fairly leap off the screen and choke the reader with their awesomeness.

A Valuable Point: Make sure you have a lot of evidence. A lot. 

Consider the following assertion:

George Carlin swears a lot. 

Now who's going to believe that? No one, right? For one thing, George Carlin is dead! How can you swear when you're not even alive? For another thing, just because you say he swears a lot doesn't mean I'm going to believe you. You could be lying. You could be from another planet, desperately trying to blend into our Earth culture and just making stuff up about George Carlin and swears. And what's a swear? How am I supposed to know a technical term like that? And who are you? What language are you speaking? How am I able to read this? I'm totally lost! Agh!

So, in order to keep me from whaling you over the head and giving you an anal probe to determine your species, you need to embed quotes or facts of some kind to back up your assertion. Like this:

George Carlin, a dead comedian, swore a lot while he was still alive. Swears are words that are taboo in civilized society, and Carlin tended to say them a lot. For example, in a concert performance in New York, he once said, "Damn." That's a swear. It shows how he used to swear when he was alive. 

See? It's very important to include details the reader already knows, so they know you're human.

An Even More Valuable Point: Quote as much material as you need to, and then some. 

If one were to actually write an essay about George Carlin, you'd have to include some material about him, what he talked about, his beliefs, gender, race, shoe size, birth sign and dental hygiene. All of these are relevant details when discussing his use of language. So, let's pretend that your teacher has asked you to analyze his use of metaphor. Consider this excerpt:

Carlin's use of metaphors was very good because it allowed him to get his point across. For example, once at a nightclub he said, "Have you ever noticed how everyone who drives slower than you is an idiot, and anyone who drives faster than you is a maniac? You're like 'Hey, look at that idiot!' and 'Whoah, slow down, maniac!' That's crazy. People are crazy, man. Like this woman I once talked to at a book store. I asked her where the Self-Help section was and she said that would defeat the whole purpose. Crazy, man. This world is a freak show. A real freak show. When you're born, you get a ticket to the freak show. When you're born in America, you get a front row seat." That "freak show" part was a metaphor, which really helps George Carlin, an American comedian who is not an alien and knows what swears are, get his point across, which is that capitalism sucks. 

Did you see how that worked? You need to have long, rambling quotes that say absolutely nothing about the main point. It's even better if you don't have a main point at all, because that way, you can pick pretty much whatever evidence you like and link it to your thesis. That way, when your teacher OD's on Dramamine and passes out on the floor, you can always visit her at the hospital and tell her, "Look, I used evidence and a citation! What more do you want?"

One more very very valuable point: Repetition works. It works. Repetition, that is. 

I think we can all agree that people are vapid, unthinking automatons who shuffle aimlessly through life at the expense of independent thought. So we need to write accordingly and stress our evidence through repetition. That way, our point will sink in even more effectively. Here's an opening to an essay about George Carlin's style of speaking:

George Carlin was a comedian who was very funny. In his speech, he used a lot of figurative language, like metaphors, similes, personification, words, syllables, Volkswagens, butter and mayonnaise. This figurative language, which was used by George Carlin in his speech "The Seven Dirty Things People Say With Words," really was useful in his comedy, because, since he was a comedian, he needed to worry about making people laugh. And they did laugh, because of his figurative language, which I mentioned earlier. 

Notice that at this point, a followup comment on my part isn't even necessary.

Concluding Thoughts:

So, there you go. Evidence makes the argument, facts make evidence, you don't need to understand facts in order for them to be true and you're about to get an anal probe. Now go write that essay. And remember me when you get into Stanford.

This man is the perfect metaphor for like, you know, whatever.