Stuff I Loved in 2024

My Internet friend Ben Werdmuller had a lovely idea for wrapping up what has honestly been a pretty wretched year for those of us who don't coat our faces with weird orange makeup every morning. I had originally been persuaded by my Own Dear Personal Mom to do a favorite books of 2024 post when Ben shared this post of his on Mastodon (aka the best alternative to the cesspool that once was our beloved bird site). What a fantastic idea! After all, even I occasionally do things besides reading.

But let's be honest: this is mostly going to be about reading. Because I've given up most other forms of recreation for various reasons, many of them medical but many because I realized a few years ago that I'm well past the likely midway point in my lifespan and likely do not have enough time left, even if I gave up sleeping (which I already do very little of), to read everything on my ever-growing To Be Read list.

But anyway, enough preamble. On with what I liked from this year. 

Television 

What? A big long paragraph about how all I want to do is read and I'm starting with TV? Something I resentfully sit through while still sneaking a page or two, just for the sake of spending "quality time" with my family? Yes. The Imp of the Perverse built a mansion on my shoulder and is very hard to coax out of it. Almost as if it has been sentenced to house arrest there or something! Which, you'll see what I did there in a moment. 

A Gentleman in Moscow 

Showtime's excellent adaptation of Amor Towles' wonderful novel was the only TV show I watched this year that I hadn't already seen before (the only other thing I watched, besides pretending to pay attention to some Buffalo Bills games with my mom and sister, was the BBC's 2000 adaptation of Mervyn Peake's Gormenghast trilogy) and I just watched it over the holidays with my family and I loved it. Ewan McGregor was in no way who I imagined as Alexander Rostov when I originally listened to the excellent audio edition of the novel narrated by Nicholas Guy Smith; as is usually the case when I imagine a Russian male character, my mind casts Anatoly Solynitsin in the role. But McGregor was great, as was his gorgeous and intelligent wife Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Anna Urbanovna and the young women who played Nina and Sofia. This story of a Russian count who escapes the fate of most of his peers in the Russian Revolution via a misattributed poem that convinced the new regime he would be useful to them if kept prisoner in Moscow's famous Metropole Hotel could easily have been dominated by the production design but the show's creators wisely focused very tightly on Towles' amazing cast of characters and their stories. The show is worthy of the novel, and of all the hype it has received.

 

Music

I'm a middle aged fuddy duddy who has tried to keep myself open to new music, but I'm afraid this year was very much dominated for me by "legacy acts" releasing brand new albums that kept true to why I originally loved them but don't sound like they came through a time portal from the eras in which these acts first gained fame.

Richard Thompson - SHIP TO SHORE

I've loved Richard Thompson since my partner on our very amateurish college radio show first introduced me to Thompson's RUMOR & SIGH back in 1991. I kept up with his new output and happily explored his back catalog with Linda Thompson, Fairport Convention, etc and he's never once bored me. So color me not surprised that his 2024 output is still great. As the cover art conveys, the album has a very nautical feel. It never descends into just "Richard does sea shanties" though that would be fine. Thompson explores many themes that have little to do with the sea along with those that do, balancing the jaunty nautical stuff with his traditionally atmospheric guitar work and his unique and shiver-inducing voice.* My favorite track on here is "Singapore Sadie" but there isn't a skippable cut on here. 

John Cale - POPTICAL ILLUSION

John Cale is one of my favorite musicians of all time. The Velvet Underground without him feels incomplete; his solo work is spectacular and varied and he has impeccable taste in collaborators (his albums with Brian Eno, for example, are exceptional) as he demonstrated just last year with his album MERCY, which is how I discovered one of my new favorite singers, Weyes Blood. MERCY is so good that I took it as a capstone to an amazing career and was grateful to have it, but Cale isn't done yet. POPTICAL ILLUSION is loaded with absolute bangers that I can't stop listening to, especially "Shark-Shark" (which, check out this bonkers music video) and what I insist is a brand new classic, "How We See the Light." This. Is. Pop.

Laurie Anderson - AMELIA

Laurie Anderson's art is always an event in my world, and her 2024 concept album dedicated to the story of Amelia Earhart is an exceptional example of how affecting her work can be. Even if you set aside her incredible cast of collaborators, the atmosphere of mystery, wonder, adventure and tragedy she conjures out of ordinary instruments and her deep and meditative voice as she narrates her version of Earhart's experiences is absolutely riveting. I'm guilty a lot of the time of using music as a secondary experience -- I blast really complicated prog rock as pain relief, filling my mind with other signals to block the constant neural spam my chronic illnesses constantly harass me with, and I also read a lot while playing music for similar reasons -- but stuff like Amelia occupies me entirely. And it's educational, too!

The Cure - SONGS FOR A LOST WORLD

I mean, you knew this was going to be on here, right? I'm a white Gen Xer from the United States. The Cure was my everything for the 1980s and 1990s.** And as everybody knows, they came into 2024 with an album destined to own it. I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this. The entire Internet is raving about this album. For good reason. 

Winter's Blue and Radiant Children - NO MORE APOCALYPSE FATHER

I swear I'm not putting this here just to lay claim to a tiny sliver of hipness or prove that I actually do listen to music that comes from this century, but of course that's the message this really sends, isn't it? I only know of this album because Jordan Holmes, co-host of the Knowledge Fight podcast, mentioned this album as his "bright spot" on an episode -- which is how I've found a lot of "new to me" acts in recent years, including Godspeed! You Black Emperor and Helado Negro, to name two others.*** And yes, a member of G!YBE is in this ensemble. Anyway, this is just great, moody, atmospheric and noisy music that combines a wintry bleakness with environmental sounds, heavy distortion and a painful beauty that stays with me long after the last sounds of "White Phosphorus" fade out.

Books

Ok, I mostly write about books on this blog, and I only write about books that I really really love and that I either think haven't gotten enough attention from the general reading public or I'm obligated to write about in exchange for an advance copy (a habit I'm trying to break but having a hard time with), so really, if you want to know what books I loved in 2024 you could just read my 2024 entries and call it good, but I did read some other excellent books that I didn't write about on here either because I was too ill at the time or because I thought they were getting plenty of coverage elsewhere. So that's what I'm going to focus on here.

CAHOKIA JAZZ, by Francis Spufford

CAHOKIA JAZZ was on a few "most anticipated" and "best of early 2024" type lists but then sort of disappeared from discussions about what was an exceptional year for new books. I'd really hate to see this get lost in the shuffle because it is hands down my favorite book that was published this year. I like a good alternate history milieu and CAHOKIA JAZZ has a great one: It's the Roaring 20s in North America, but it's a North America in which the indigenous population largely survived the germ warfare imported by Europeans and went on to flourish, standing up to enough of the waves of settlement to establish urban centers like the city-state of Cahokia, and maintain a melange of Native culture while still adapting with the technological developments and other historical currents of the 20th century -- and welcoming other races and ethnicities. The world thus established is rich and convincing and a spectacular setting in which Francis Spufford enacts a classic crime noir plot that could hold its own against classics like Chinatown. Except instead of clueless white boy Jake Gittes, though, we get Joe Barrow, an accomplished Black jazz pianist who is also a detective on Cahokia's city police force. The grisly, possibly ritualized murder case he catches, in a city where an Aztec pyramid occasionally hosts human sacrifices, turns out to have huge implications for the city-state as a whole. I'd love to see this made into a prestige miniseries. It could be a season of Fargo. Don't skip this one.

Percival Everett - JAMES

Again, I'm one tiny voice in a global chorus of praise. It's a bestseller. It won the National Book Award for fiction. It should have won the Booker Prize. It retells a classic and makes it better and richer. You've probably already read it and loved it. So did I.

Alan Moore - THE GREAT WHEN

I've come to love Alan Moore's prose fiction as much as I do his graphic novels, comics and magazines (yes, I have a stack of early issues of Dodgem Logic and no, I'm not ready to share them with anybody yet), so I eagerly awaited this first novel in his new Long London series that is projected to be a quartet. His most expressly magical work since, say, Promethea, THE GREAT WHEN establishes a dual London slightly remeniscent of China Mieville's THE CITY AND THE CITY but Moore's other London that is contiguous-but-separate from the London we know is utterly bizarre and one hundred percent magical. Or rather, magickal, because this sphere owes more to the likes of Alastair Crowley and Austin Osman Spare than to Gandalf or Dumbledore.

Our hero is a lowly teen who rejoices in the utterly batshit name of Dennis Knuckeyard, who is only surviving post-WWII London through the grudging good graces of Coffin Ada, a second-hand bookshop owner who employs him and let's him live in a room in the flat above the store where she smokes, drinks and knows things. It's a mostly miserable life for Dennis and looks to be made only worse when a mysterious book that shouldn't exist turns up in some new inventory he's been sent to fetch. His adventures in both Londons are bizarre, creepy, fascinating and occasionally tug at the heart, if one still has one. And Coffin Ada is even more magnificent than she sounds.

Audio Dramas & Podcasts

Observable Radio

This "found audio" drama in which a  broadcaster, who just might be the last human alive on earth after a weird comet's disastrous fly-by, tries to reach out to his missing friend, is also a cool exploration of many alternate earths. Does that make it an anthology series? Kind of.

The comet, in addition to disrupting ordinary life on what I *think* is meant to be our good old ordinary planet Earth but might not be, also has somehow thinned the boundaries between different universes just enough for our broadcaster to receive bursts of radio signals from alternate Earths that all slowly seem to be succumbing to some kind of slow invasion. Our man has started recording these intercepted transmissions and shares curated segments of them as he tries to reach a friend? lover? mentor? relative? whom he believes might still be out there and listening and willing to help figure out what the hell is going on. 

Meanwhile we learn of the existence of worlds in which the entire world is an oligarchy still firmly in control of historic dynasties like the Hapsburgs, who routinely enact elaborate assassination plots against one another; in which Christmastime is known only as The Holiday and involves the military mobilization of a child army known as The Naughty to defend the U.S.' northern border from the annual incursion of an eldritch horror that says "ho ho ho"; and, my favorite episode, in which large language models have been allowed to take over entertainment, municipal and emergency services and pretty much everything else, with entertainingly horrible consequences. I'm still waiting for my Paper Street Psychics tour tee shirt.

The show has a large, diverse and ever growing cast of terrific voice actors and singers to play out the collection of snippets of news broadcasts, advertising and recorded proceedings of the government and corporate bodies that make all of these worlds the bizarre, tragic, fascinating and occasionally funny ones they are, while the frame narrative maintains the air of tension and mystery that makes all of this cohere. I've listened to every episode multiple times and I'm still discovering little details in this lovingly crafted weirdness.

Weird Little Guys

I have to really, really love a show to put up with I Heart Media's terrible, terrible advertising, so Molly Conger's fascinating little show had a huge strike against it from the start. And I still sometimes let the new episodes pile up on my podcatcher just because I can't face the awfulness, which, the subject matter is bad enough! But Conger is such a throrough researcher, a candid and self-reflective presenter, and a pleasant and thoughtful personality that Weird Little Guys has become can't-miss listening for me. It just sometimes takes me a few days to steel myself to listen.

Sort of a companion piece to the famous Behind the Bastards, Conger goes small where Robert Evans goes big. She's interested in the lesser known but often just as awful people without whom most of the big bads Evans covers would be much less damaging and dangerous. Conger digs deeply into the backgrounds of the kind of guys who haven't yet made headlines, or have only made very niche headlines for things like burning crosses on other people's property or building pipe bombs for terror projects or creating small but terrible media ecosystems that celebrate mass murderers and urge viewers and listeners to join their ranks and become terror "saints" by planning and executing their own attacks on the unsuspecting public. She's the kind of woman who knows her way around a courtroom and a court filing hundreds of agonizingly dull pages long, and has a true storyteller's instinct for the illustrative details and anecdotes that bring these weird little guys to life and remind us that they live among us and maybe, just maybe, we can prevent one or two of them from going postal on us with a little more kindness and empathy? Maybe? But probably not. By the time they're on Conger's radar, we probably need to duck and cover on sight. 

Fourth Reich Archaeology

Hosted by two "noided" lawyers podcasting under the pseudonyms of Dick (as in Cheney) and Don (as in Rumsfeld), this show is as weird and disturbing as its title suggests. The general premise of the show is that the much-imagined Fourth Reich (as in the successor to Hitler's Third) is not a thing of the future but of the past and present, and Dick and Don are here to dig out from under decades of propaganda and obfuscation as many clues as they can to prove that the Fourth Reich is an almost seamless continuation of the Third and is better known to us as the international corporate regime that is what really governs the so-called Free World. It's a notion that seems far-fetched and overly paranoid to many, even today, but this pair has a lot of information on their side and are both, as one might expect, very good not only at constructing complex arguments but at effectively communicating them as well.

So far, the gents are focusing on making their case through the lens of the life and career of our 38th President of the United States, Gerald R. Ford. You know, the one nobody outside of the state of Michigan ever got to cast a vote for until he was running for re-election as POTUS and got beat by the late, much lamented, Jimmy Carter. Ford had a much more interesting life than I had ever imagined, as did his wife Betty, who is much more than just a name on rehab chain. While Ford was the first president I was old enough to know my name (just barely!), I knew next to nothing about him except that he'd pardoned Nixon. I now know that this is one of the less interesting facts about the guy. 

The show -- which also boasts a killer playlist of interstitial music skillfully deployed to drive home various points -- is currently taking a bit of a detour into a deep, deep dive into the Warren Commission and the men who served on it, one of whom was one Gerald Ford. It gets a bit out there at times but it's never not interesting and, like I said, it's full of facts that I have encountered nowhere else except maybe in Gravity's Rainbow.

There's more, and doubtless stuff I'm forgetting, but it's already 15 days into 2025 and I'm tired. BUT, is there something you think I missed? Let me know over on Mastodon!

*The first song of his that I ever heard was "Psycho Street" and so I always feel echoes of that in his voice.

**I'm one of those weirdos who prefers KISS ME, KISS ME, KISS ME to DISINTEGRATION, by the way.

***Both of whom also released new albums this year, by the way. They're great, but I'm trying to keep this listing on the short side.

Alex Pheby's WATERBLACK (And the rest of CITIES OF THE WEFT)

Hey Kate, tell us about the weirdest trilogy you've found since Brian Catling's Vorrh series, why don't you. Pretty please? Is it Jeffrey Ford's Well Built City trilogy? What about Tade Thompson's Wormwood books? Or Vladimir Sorokin's Ice trilogy (wrong, I haven't read that yet. But stay tuned!)? Well, close, but no: it's Alex Pheby's Cities of the Weft, and yes, Mordew, Malarkoi and Waterblack (also the names of the cities in the series title) are weird as hell.

And yeah, just like happened with Jeff Noon and Steve Beard's Gogmagog/Ludluda diptych, I didn't post on here when I read the first two books last year, in glorious audio book form as narrated by the idiosyncratically excellent Kobna Holdbrook-Smith*, but again, not because I didn't love them. I just don't post about everything I read anymore because I don't have the stamina I used to and typing still really hurts. Anyway, once again, I saw the final book on Netgalley and didn't want to wait, so now I'm honor-bound once again to share my thoughts about it. Which I have to talk a little about the earlier books to do at all well. So.

A warning to start: Alex Pheby is not here to meet your expectations. He's not writing any kind of fantasy that your average Big Publishing House marketing team would have any idea what to do with (so let's hear it for the brave and tasteful souls at Galley Beggar Press!). He's not giving a master class on world building, not here to give fan service to people who have come to care a lot for the kid who seemed to be the series protagonist in the first book, Mordew, nor to lovers of his urchin pals who take over most of the action in the second, Malarkoi, nor even for the incredible magical dogs who steal the show in both of those books.

We start Waterblack full of questions about what's next for Nathan Treeves, Prissy, Gam, Anaximander and Sirius (well, we kind of feel like we know what happened to the Goddog but Pheby has taught us to maybe not take certain endings very seriously). Nathan's mother, Clarissa, seems to have achieved her ultimate end already and has nowhere to go but down; is that what we're going to watch here? Nathan's enemy, Sebastian, the Master of Mordew, is still kind of kicking around though he was pretty disappointed at the end of Malarkoi, what about him? What about Portia, the Mistress of Malarkoi, "goddess of gods," who gave little Prissy quite a gift last novel? 

Cue pitiless laughter from our author, who doesn't give a fig for our expectations, but who knows that he's got us hooked anyway because the kind of people who enjoyed the first two volumes of his Cities of the Weft trilogy want to know where the hell he's going with all of this weirdness way more than we're invested in any particular character. Although, them, too, somewhat. I mean, there's still an untold number of "Nathan flukes" loose and wreaking havoc in the topologically distorted ruins of Mordew, after all, and Clarissa, who's been powering all of her mighty spells in the single most ruthless manner I've ever seen a not-quite villain employ in a novel of any kind, ever, still has... something going on and hey, does she care about her son, like, at all? And speaking of offspring, there's still a puppy of the Goddog's running around somewhere.

There are some very weird and intriguing and mind-blowing plot threads that have yet to be properly woven into this here narrative textile, is what I'm saying.

However...

Waterblack starts off by posing an extended philosophical argument as to how a whole bunch of stuff we've just been taking for granted as "true" within the universe of the Cities of the Weft... is ontologically impossible. This undermines almost everything we've come to understand about the hundreds of pages and dozens of hours we've devoted to exploring his creation.

And then he launches into a deep exploration of the background of a minor antagonist who had maybe two scenes in Malarkoi and wasn't even mentioned in Mordew.

But, because Pheby is a hell of a gifted storyteller, we're immediately interested in this girl, Sharli and her defective firebird companion, Tinnimam, anyway. Even before it's hinted that her back story may allow us to learn, at long last, what the hell the Women's Vanguard of the Eighth Atheistic Crusade is all about. I mean, this isn't Philip Pullman, here; as the jacket copy on Mordew discloses before we've even read a page of this series, God has already been dead a long time, here. But there are definite echoes of Pullman's work in the Cities of the Weft; there's even a Subtle Knife, though the person who gets it puts it to very different use than sweet young Will does in the book named for it 

But wait, Pheby isn't done trying to talk you out of loving his trilogy. He still has many logical arguments to make as to why everything he's shared with us through hours of narration/hundreds of pages is really kind of bullshit, and he makes these arguments in exhausting detail (there's more than one reason why people refer to these books as the most Platonist since Susanna Clarke's Piranesi). And, as he starts warning us about halfway through the book, a lot of our pressing narrative questions will not be answered in the text of Waterblack proper; we'll have to wait for the appendices, which, Lord of the Rings-like, take up a good chunk of this last novel.

 

But that's really the only thing these books have in common with Tolkien, I assure you. 

What this ultimately comes to is the most fascinating yet frustrating read I've encountered in a long, long time. Waterblack does my favorite thing a series' final volume can do, which is make me want to go back and re-read the whole trilogy because it has fundamentally changed what the earlier books even mean. This is a particular achievement in this case, since I just re-read Mordew and Malarkoi last month in preparation for this! 

But so, despite Pheby's best and most perverse efforts to the contrary, I still love this series. I still love its characters, especially the magical dogs (and especially especially the new magical puppy introduced in Waterblack. I absolutely want a sequel devoted to the further adventures of Anaximines. I am also absolutely sure I'm never going to get one. But that's ok, I have this.); I still love its strange cities and its stranger creatures (especially the very cerebral and civilized Person-Headed Snakes). And I love most of all how it made me question pretty much everything I'd read before, both in and out of the fantasy genre. You might, too. Give the first book a try!

*Who commits pretty much every sin I hate most in an audio book narrator but makes it all work. Even his artificially high and breathy female character voices somehow work. But that doesn't mean I'll accept this from anybody else, you hear?

Marcy Dermansky's HOT AIR

Nobody I can think of can write such absolutely despicable characters and make me want to spend hours in their heads like Marcy Dermansky. And her hour may yet be approaching.

I have to confess, though, that she's kind of a low-dose author for me. I enjoyed the hell out of her debut novel, Bad Marie, many years ago, but it left me feeling just icky enough not to want especially to indulge in that very specific kind of pleasure again for a long time. Which is to say that I haven't read any of Dermansky's work since Bad Marie. And her newest, Hot Air, hasn't changed my view of her work one bit -- even though I really liked it. 

Dermansky's subject is, at bottom, class envy, and it's a subject about which she is wickedly funny. The titular character of her first novel is a delightfully trashy person with whom to spend a few hours, watching her unhinged schemes go awry as she goes on a one-woman/one-child crime spree. Well, more of a misdeeds spree, although she happens to commit a few petty and one decidedly un-petty in the process. She has been badly used by her upscale friend who made the mistake of hiring her as a nanny, and feels perfectly justified, she tells us over hundreds of pages, in committing whatever malefaction she likes against that friend. We are happy to be persuaded, over and over again, even if she never really convinces us.

For Hot Air Dermansky has expanded the perspective she gives us to that of several characters, though pretty tightly focused on her signature distressed bourgeois heroine, Joannie. Joannie is somewhat recently divorced and rents an unsatisfactory-to-her apartment* in a neighborhood dominated by what sounds like a lot of McMansions. She has a daughter, Lucie, a tween who is well on her way toward becoming even less tolerable than her mommy is and for whom Joannie is about to set a whole lot of bad examples in one disastrous weekend-and-change.

Joannie lives next door to Johnny, a decent looking divorced guy with a son, Tyson, who is Lucie's approximate age. Johnny owns a very nice house with a very nice swimming pool, more or less next door to Joannie's apartment complex. Johnny is so nicely set up that he even gets along well enough with his ex-wife to have her living in the very nice house across the street from him, so he even has an easy time sharing custody of Tyson. Are you humming the Brady Bunch theme right now? I was. And so are Joannie and Johnny, as we quickly learn when the novel opens with Joannie on a pseudo-date with Johnny. To save on childcare expenses, Joannie has manipulated Johnny into having the date over at his house, with Tyson and Lucie banished to the basement with their various screen-equipped devices. So far, so good.

Except, as Joannie informs us pretty much right away, she is not feeling like their boy-girl Lego is ever going to click (I love that phrase, which I stole from William Gibson, because of course I did), and while it's mostly because their names will sound dumb together, Joannie and Johnny, it's also because she's just not feeling it with him, especially after he rather inexpertly kisses her. And kisses her. Oh noes! She forgot to make arrangements with someone to send a fake emergency text to get her out of this!

Fortunately, the plot happens. In the form of a hot air balloon that a rich, brash techbro type rented to celebrate his wedding anniversary after only having had a few lessons. As in not enough lessons to responsibly be allowed to pilot a balloon unsupervised, but when has that ever stopped a rich and famous and handsome billionaire?

As you already would know from a glance at the jacket copy, the billionaire's balloon comes crashing into Johnny's swimming pool and hijinks and sexcapades and a whole bunch of other bad decisions ensue. We're barely acquainted well enough to dislike Joannie and Johnny and here's Marcy Dermansky, serving us up an even more annoyingly privileged couple to dislike even more. One can never accuse Dermansky of being stingy with us; Jonathan (yes, there is a Johnny and a Jonathan in this awkward little bottle-book) and Julia have fallen out of love with each other, believe the world has done them dirty despite being billionaires, feel entitled to absolutely everything including Jonathan's personal assistant, Vivian (whom Julia wants to adopt as their own Vietnamese orphan despite Vivian being an adult with perfectly good parents of her own, and Jonathan just wants to bone, basically) and, once they get a load of Joannie and Lucie, to Lucie. They stop short of offering to buy Lucie, but only just.

BUT, lest we start feeling much in the way of sympathy or empathy for Joannie, who has barely gotten over her sick envy of Johnny's swimming pool and ridiculously over-equipped kitchen before being given people to really envy (and it turns out Jonathan just happens to have been Joannie's first kiss, at a summer camp when they were kids, who then ghosted her the day after Joannie's first kiss), she kind of seems like she'd maybe be down for selling Lucie, or at least renting her out for a little while? In exchange for a chance to share, just a little bit, in Johnny and Julia's fabulous lifestyle? But no, that would probably be too icky.

We have only this slight and kind of token assurance that Joannie has a firm line on what is and is not too icky, by the way. Because there are so many other icky things that she doesn't really even need to be pushed into doing. So many. So icky. But at least she is somewhat redeemed, as Bad Marie was in her novel, by her deep and true love for her little girl. Even though the little girl is a whiny brat.**

And all we can do is point and laugh and wait for consequences. Which, since this is fiction and not the actual world, do happen somewhat, at some points. See why I'm saying Dermansky's big moment may only just now be arriving? Despite what looks like has been a pretty decent literary career?

Just, you know, life sure do like to imitate art, don't it?

Anyway, I'll read some more of her back catalog someday, probably. If nothing else, it might soon be my only safe outlet.

*That, I dunno, sounds pretty nice to me, but I guess I must grudgingly admit that after living a nice, somewhat prosperous married life in a nice house, it's the kind of come-down that would sting some. Still, if we want to talk about class envy, this woman is living in a nice and safe area with good access to schools and shopping and is able to support herself and her daughter in pretty decent style off a literary career. Um. Where's my micro-violin?

**Really, the only character with even a pretense of likeability is Johnny's son, Tyson, but he doesn't get a lot of ink and would probably show obnoxious true colors if he got much more. Dermansky isn't about winning you over with loveable characters, you guys.

Matt Lee's THE BACKWARDS HAND: A MEMOIR

My E-ARC copy of Matt Lee's The Backwards Hand: A Memoir has, presumably as an anti-piracy measure, undergone a blanket text edit in which all "fi" and "ff" letter combinations have been replaced with two taps of the spacebar. So, for example, "film" has become " lm" and "effect", "e  ect" through the whole book. It's jarring at first, but shortly my brain adjusted to it and just took it in stride. 

The possibility has occurred to me, of course, that this is not just a factor in my copy from Netgalley but an intentional gimmick in the text as a whole, to make a point about neuroplasticity or human adaptability or something, but probably not. Lee isn't interested otherwise in being either subtle or gimmicky; he is here to tell you, very plainly and without sparing anyone's fee-fees, what his life with a very unusual congenital difference has been like.

Lee was born with bilateral radioulnar synostosis; the two bones in his forearms, which actually rotate and cross over when an unaffected human rotates their hands front to back, are fused together in the crooks of his arms. Surgically un-fusing them, at least back when this was offered to him, would unavoidably damage a cluster of nerves located right where the bones are fused, leaving him with constant pain (something I know all about and wouldn't wish on Elon Fucking Musk, for all that he wants to put chips in the brains of people like Matt Lee and myself and maybe all of us because of reasons) and a still-deeply limited range of motion that wouldn't even approach "normal." Not exactly a win-win proposition.

There are notes of existential terror in this text, much of which is devoted to famous disabled people and other "freaks" from history and how they were depicted in art and treated by their families and, most importantly, by the authorities. Lee spends a lot of text, for instance, to the Nazis' euthanasia program, which targeted the mentally and physically disabled; eugenics is never far from the discussion when societies discuss policy toward us. This fear has only grown with the results of the recent U.S. election, of course, but that development was still in the future when this book went to press. 

Lee's own story is far less bleak, however. He has married and has a child who does not share his disability, has had an acting career and has developed a clear and concise prose style and a dedication to thorough research that should serve him well moving forward in life -- and, as he takes care to emphasize in The Backwards Hand, he doesn't owe all of the setbacks he has encountered on the way to this state to his disability. Some of it is attributable to his own immaturity, infidelity, or general assholery. Disabled people are neither monsters nor saints; it just took him a while to realize that his disability did not automatically make him a monster. 

But man, this book has made it a little harder to go into 2025 with anything like a sanguine attitude. But, like that was going to happen anyway, amirite?

Who knows, maybe we'll end up in the same camp and I'll get to tell him in person that I appreciated this book and told all my friends to read it. Except I'm housebound because nobody will take basic precautions against diseases that could kill us, so instead of actual friends, I'm telling whoever still reads this blog. Read this!

Michel Houellebecq's ANNIHILATION (Tr Shawn Whiteside)

Michel Houellebecq is an author I don't particularly like but I add compulsively to my towering, teetering TBR pile the way I often shake a few drops of bitters into my plain soda water. It's just not the same without it, though it tastes like ass by itself.

I don't read a lot of him in a row, is what I'm saying.

But when he publishes a new book, I'm never not interested. 

But so, since I have Houellebecq filed in my head as an unpleasant but necessary man to read, not as bad as Robert Silverberg or Albert Cossery in that I never want to read anything else by either of those authors ever again but still as someone I kind of need to brace myself for, imagine my surprise to discover that his latest novel, Annihilation is moving, human and lovely!

This is not to say that Annihilation is not bitter or bleak -- I mean, just get a load of the title! -- as I was expecting; there's still plenty to grit one's teeth through in this story of a prosperous civil servant enduring the disappointments of middle age in 21st century France. But our man Paul, whose image first really came into focus for me in a scene straight out of my favorite Editors song, depicting him smoking outside the hospital where his father has just been admitted as a coma patient, is the most sympathetic character I've seen Houellebecq create, and it's not even close.*

We first meet him as he's beginning to tackle a worrisome problem at his job, where I imagine him as a sort of colleague of Bug's father at Not-Nutella. An unknown entity is releasing very provocative video clips on the Internet, designed to stir maximum fear and unrest in French society. One even depicts the head of Paul's department, Bernard, who is the French Minister of Finance and a potential candidate for the next President of France, being decapitated. For a while, then, Annihilation feels like it's going to be a fancy high tech thriller/crime investigation, as Paul calls in personal resources to help him unravel who is doing this and why. For instance, an old friend who founded one of the best cinematic special effects companies in the world reviews the footage so far and quickly informs Paul that nobody, not his own firm, not Industrial Light and Magic, nobody, is currently capable of creating what they have been reviewing at the level of detail and realism they are seeing.

And then things get weirder and worse.

In the midst of all of this intrigue, Paul's elderly, widowed father, a retired intelligence agent who still retains some files that his former masters have asked Paul to get back for them (possibly, somehow, related to the case Paul is currently working on, meaning dear old Dad may have one last chance to be a hero), has suffered a medical emergency that has left him in a coma. And Paul, whom we've seen so far as something of a typical cold and bitter Houellebecq character, is landed in a whole mess of family drama, involving his father's "companion" Madeline (originally a live-in nurse but now a romantic partner that it's easier to just regard as a wife), Paul's devoutly Catholic sister Cecile and her easy-going husband Herve and their daughters**, their much-younger brother Aurielle and his insufferable wife, Indy, and a whole host of compassionate but firm medical professionals who are there to ease them all through the transition from having a busy and still-active father to having one who will probably never walk or talk or do things for himself again.

All of these characters are richly realized and sympathetically portrayed enough to give the scenes between them considerable emotional heft without ever drifting into melodrama.

But lest I sound like Houellebecq has gone completely soft in his old age, there are still a few passages like this, which could have been lifted from The Elementary Particles, to remind us of with whom we're dealing: 

For some years, it's true, the balls of shit had been copulating in smaller numbers, they seemed to have learned to reflect one another, they were aware of their mutual stench, and disgustedly parted company; an extinction of the human race seemed imaginable in the medium term. That left other trash like cockroaches and bears, but you can't sort everything out at the same time, Paul said to himself.

This as he contemplates the recent destruction by the mystery terrorists of a Danish sperm bank. A golden star to you if you can guess what the balls of shit are in the above.

But all of this is just camouflage for the book's true nature. Houellebecq lies in wait for us at the bottom of a sandy funnel to which he has baited us with illusions of technothrillery and heartfelt family drama. We've traipsed along these fascinating and moving edges like an ant on a patch of sand, not noticing the funnel shape the sand is gradually assuming until abruptly the sides have gotten too steep. We fall into Houellebecq's waiting jaws; he will drain us and toss our husks back onto the pile of corpses above, the pile that we also did not notice while we were distracted by Paul's rediscovery of his marriage, by his father's apparent holding of the key to the mystery. 

And at last the title of the novel, heretofore seeming maybe an ironic joke at our expense, makes sense. I won't call Annihilation a shaggy dog story as such, but it shares some of that thing's qualities, though in service of a point a shaggy dog story lacks. I will caution you that,  for a little while after finishing Annihilation, I felt a bit disappointed in it. So might you. But I suspect that on further reflection you might overcome this feeling, as I did a few days later, when I realized what Houellebecq had, in fact, achieved. 

I suppose if anyone was, with his (probable) last book, going to reveal himself as a literary ant lion, it would be Michel Fucking Houellebecq.

Now excuse me; I am dealing with my own issues with aging and also with unhipness. I have only just discovered that Houellebecq is in a film with Iggy Pop. How the hell did this escape my notice????? Oh yeah, there was a presidential election and stuff going on, even way back then.

*Not that I've read all of his novels; just most of them.

**One of whom has an encounter with Paul out in the world that is possibly the funniest passage I've ever encountered in Houellebecq.

Jeff Noon's and Steve Beard's LUDLUDA (With a few remarks on GOGMAGOG)

"What's wrong with him?"

"A demon is wanking off inside his head."

"Oh, I hate it when that happens."

One of the things I love best about the genre that we still tend to call "the New Weird"' is how just plain funky it is. The best work of its major propagators -- Jeff Vandermeer, China Mieville, Alastair Reynolds, et al -- oozes with fluids and crusts, seepages, saps, slimes, scabs, but never gets too too gross. Though your mileage might vary. 

Another master of the New Weird, though not traditionally as enraptured by the Grand Guignol as the guys I mentioned above, is Jeff Noon, who in his diesel punk/steampunk/biopunk (at what point do we just drop the modifiers and call it plain old "punk?") (but then an even better catch-all term occurs to me: Analog Punk) diptych with Steve Beard, gunks it up with the best of them from the very beginning of the first of the two novels. 

I'm here officially to talk about the second book, Ludluda, which I was so excited for after loving the first one, Gogmagog, back in April that when I saw it on Netgalley I realized I didn't want to wait any longer than I had to. I didn't review Gogmagog on this here blog back in April, though, mostly for health reasons, but I'm going to make up for it here, or try to.

Just, you know, it's Ludluda I'm honor-bound to review. I just don't think I can talk coherently about it without also talking about Gogmagog.

Which, Gogmagog is so richly imagined, baroquely plotted and populated with so many bizarre variations on what constitutes a person, a natural phenomenon, a creature or a monster, and is chiefly concerned with wild hybridizations of any or all of these, that I had to quickly read it again to recall what all was going on and who everybody was and which kinds of people have little wings of varying degrees of functionality and which sprout cute little psychic antennae at puberty but only after a ritual that involves fusing themselves with funny little insects and how many different ghostly entities (with very different priorities and personalities and orientations toward the world) were spawned when an enormous, as in 60-mile-long, dragon was killed by a heroic king from outer space. Yep.

So, you see, it's not that Gogmagog isn't vivid and memorable, just that it's a lot, and I read a lot of books every year, and I'm happy to re-read good ones anyway so, why not? 

But so, Ludluda. Which picks up the day after most of the events of Gogmagog as the ragtag crew of the steamship Juniper, after traveling upriver through the ghost body of the ghost dragon to the great capital city of Ludwich for a great festival and the chance for one passenger to maybe experience her strange psychic bug puberty and for the ship's captain maybe to get her about-to-bloom flower buds pollinated by the city's king's very special flower so the captain can finally reproduce after centuries and centuries of life.

Buckle up. 

Gogmagog kicked off as our protagonist, Cady Meade, retired steamboat Captain, met a strange pair who desperately wanted her to resume her trade and take them to Ludwich in time for The Hesting -- a festival when tons of people flock to the city to celebrate and trade while scores of young members of the tribe/species that has the weird puberty in which they grow their psychic antennae undergo their rite of passage. The pair are Lek, a glitchy old robot of a decidedly low tech/magical kind, and his tiny young charge, ten year old Brin, who is due to "Hest" there in just a day or so.

Cady, a character I just adore, is crusty, gross and cranky, a belching, farting, pooping, smoking, drinking and coughing old sea dog (river dog), who doesn't seem to have much left to look forward to except a dwindling life of cadging cough drops and rotten food (she prefers it when her vittles have gone a bit off -- we kind of learn why later) from local shopkeepers and friends, but of course has a heart of gold and lets herself be persuaded to make the trip despite the dangers she operatically warns about.

And off they went through many bizarre adventures, sailing up a filthy river and through the ghostly body of the dragon Haakenur.

A sort of semi substantial dragon Griaule is Haakenur, dead but still very much a force in her world and inhabited by all kinds of supernatural and mundane creatures, and very much a resource for all kinds of magical energy and effluent around which entire weird ecosystems and economies have grown up. But nobody calls her Haakenur anymore; Haakenur was the living dragon, and her physical body is long gone. What Cady and co. must steam through is her ghost, Faynr. And occasionally they must deal with incursions from her other, more evil ghost, the Gogmagog that gives the first volume of the dyptic its name.

What I liked best about these books is a central idea they embody that I don't see in a lot of weird/fantasy fiction: that magic and magical processes have byproducts and produce waste and leave scars on the land, like industry does in our world. So the landscape through which the Juniper chugs is blighted with various effluvia and junk and hazards left behind by a recent war (including unexploded bombs; the war that took place here is very much a parallel with World War II, and we learn in Ludluda that the story takes place in the 1950s of this world and ours), and the inhabitants of that landscape are grudgingly living with the effects of this, with varying degrees of success. 

This is all exacerbated by the fact that Faynr, the ghost body of the great dragon through whose body the ship is also traveling, is very sick and getting sicker. My favorite illustration of this comes when they pass the ghost dragon's gall bladder, which is developing gallstones in the form of great chalk cliffs to either side of the water, from which chunks have fallen. The chunks accrete more and more chalk and become serious navigation hazards until the river's course is almost entirely blocked and the Juniper is in danger of becoming another "chalkberg" as the material starts building up when the ship finally grinds to a halt.

Within the ghost organ of a ghost dragon. As one does.

But of course, since there is a sequel, we knew our heroes would get through this somehow, and they do, hence Ludluda.By the time the party reaches Ludwich, by the way, it has grown a bit with the addition of one Numi Tan, a sort of clay golem magically animated by the spirit of a dead girl who seeks the long lost lover with whom she romantically drowned herself (but the lover has never turned up among the clay golem people for a joyful reunion) and Pok Pok, another Thrawl that Lek rescued from a decrepit factory that used to churn out their kind. Pok Pok is too damaged to be a fully independent crew member but happily serves as a new figurehead and navigation assistant for the Juniper and utters gnomic observations in between steering directions.

As Ludluda gets underway, a few of the crew's quests are meeting successful ends, or at least apparent resolutions, even as others begin or continue. This results in the sundering of the company, who, after all, were newly met traveling companions who have reached their destination. Will we ever see some of them again? Will they appear as friends or foes? 

We also gather some new companions, like Jed Yeomanson, a promising young man (if he does say so himself) who attaches himself to the group just before everybody splits off, helps one achieve a stated end by dubious means, and signs on as the Juniper's cabin boy. And Leopold Hill, half of a famous cartography house, co-author of the river navigation charts that are Cady's most prized possessions, and possible holder of the secret Cady most seeks: the location of the flower that will allow Cady to seed a new generation of her plant-hybrid people!

Cady and her new friends are no sooner acquainted then sent off on a new quest that is only kind of a continuation of the original one; Brin has been revealed to be something other than the gormless little innocent she appeared to be and now must be stopped from pursuing her true aim, which threatens not only Cady's world but the good old mundane world that we know, too, kind of, meaning that yes, this second volume manifests as a sort of reverse portal fantasy for a little while when Cady enters the world of postwar London in pursuit of insights and artifacts from her old friend (remember, Cady is really, really old) Doctor Dee. Like you do.

I will confess to not having been at all prepared for this development, but I can't complain that it's not an organic one within the story. When fantasy is weird enough, it can go anywhere it pleases, after all, and Cady's adventures in de-mob London are every bit as tense and involving as those along the river Nysis or in the various districts of Ludwich. As are her experiences after this visit, which take her to incredible (and gross; it might seem hard to top the levels of disgust flavoring Gogmagog but Noon and Beard would very much like you to hold their funky, murky, smelly beers, please) depths and heights and leave her with as satisfying an ending as an ancient nature spirit-cum-river hag could ask for.

Noon remains a writer whose work is on my automatic buy list; Beard is not one I had heard of before but I will be seeking out his work soon, starting with his other team-ups with Noon. Meanwhile, they have my enthusiastic permission to continue this partnership and take it wherever the hell they want. I'm here for all of it. But then, I have a strong stomach. Do you?

Bartle Bull's LAND BETWEEN THE RIVERS: A 5,000 YEAR HISTORY OF IRAQ

My home only celebrated its centennial as a U.S. state when I was 20 years old, so it's quite a thing to contemplate a land with over 5,000 years of recorded, settled history. So for me to read Bartle Bull's extensive and exhaustive history of Iraq was to regard our planet's oldest civilization from one of its youngest. 

Then, too, while I am slightly knowledgeable or in a few cases fairly so about certain periods of the region's long history -- chiefly the Sumerian and Alexandrian eras -- I've been largely ignorant of great swaths of it between then and my first personal awareness of Iraq, when the modern nation fought a war against Iran in my childhood. And, of course, when my college campus erupted in "No Blood for Oil" protests when the U.S. took it upon itself to rescue tiny little Kuwait from its big, bad neighbor. 

And then when the second President Bush and his ilk maneuvered us into "finishing" the fight the first one didn't, of course.

And I've read the Koran (in an English translation, of course; I have the merest smattering of Arabic, chiefly picked up while studying Urdu in grad school when I should have been doing my actual course work) long ago, always meaning to read it again sometime as a more mature and better informed adult, but my grasp of the origins and nature of, say, the Sunni/Shia schism was tenuous at best.

It's always bugged me, this barely-more-than ignorance of mine, so when I saw Land Between the Rivers: A 5,000 Year History of Iraq available on Netgalley, I gladly grabbed it, thinking it would serve my purpose well.

 

I had underestimated just how well it would serve, though. Or how compulsively readable it would be. Bull, I knew, is chiefly a journalist, rather than a historian, so I expected a better than average narrative out of this book, but what I got was a truly exceptional as well as informative read! There's something that feels very illuminating about a history that takes in all of the great figures, all the different peoples and cultures, who had an impact on this part of the world, in a single big narrative, Ur to Babylon to Baghdad.

There's a section where Bull makes a choice I find peculiar, though. When it comes time to discuss the Ottoman Empire, sometime opponent of the then-Persian/Iranian powers that held most of Iraq and sometimes that power itself, he chooses to do so thorough the lens of one Ogier de Busbecq, the Hapsburg Empire's marginalized ambassador to the Ottoman court of Suleiman the Magnificent. Heretofore mostly devoid of explicitly European perspectives in favor of sources much closer to the experience of the actual denizens of Iraq and its many conquerors, it seems weird to me to do so at this point in history, where surely a modern scholar has access to more direct sources about life in this fascinating period, especially since Busbecq never visited Iraq. But I am just a humble blogger who's never been anywhere, so who am I to pick this nit?

Except it happens again in later chapters, which are more about European archaeologists digging up the ruins of cities we visited earlier in this history. This is less jarring since it is through their efforts that anyone even knows a lot of what we do about places like Mosul and Nineveh, and this figures like Sir Austen Henry Layard are quite legitimately figures in Iraqi history. But Busbecq?

Anyway...

After years kicking his heels in Constantinople, Layard finally gets funding for a proper dig in what was then Ottoman-controlled Iraq.What Layard encounters as he approaches the likely site of the ancient, Old Testament city of Nimrud is very much the kind of information I hoped to find in these pages: 

"The tiny party alit in the gloaming and made their way on foot to the local village. It was empty, deserted, a "heap of ruins," without even the dogs that Layard was used to seeing in Arab villages. Then, through "the entrance to a miserable hovel," Layard saw the glow of a small fire. 

Inside the ruined house was a sight typical of the devastated country around. An Arab family - a father, three wizened wives, some half-naked children, and "one or two mangy greyhounds" - had taken shelter in the abandoned village. When Layard entered, the family cowered, thinking he and his party were "Osmanlis." Seeing that the newcomers were not Turks but Europeans, the Arabs relaxed. Layard heard their story from the father. "Plundered by the pasha," their sedentary tribe had dispersed across the countryside. This family had taken refuge alone in the abandoned village.

One man's archaeological site is another man's refuge, and the father of the family becomes the nucleus of the European's workforce. How very colonial.

And so begins a long history of locals being employed to dig up amazing artifacts, possibly the work of their own ancestors' hands, to be exported to fill Western Museums and private collections (Hi, Hobby Lobby).*

As I've said, this is an exhaustive work of historical writing, including biographical details of figures from Cyrus the Great through Alexander the Great through Suleiman the Magnificent and King Faisal I of (first) Syria and (later) Iraq in plenty of context. This may be more than most readers are looking for, who want to understand the modern nation of Iraq and its ancient ancestor states a bit better, but I suspect that most readers will not notice that while they're reading. I found no point in this book when I got exhausted and wanted to know how much further I had to go, for instance.

This was a particularly illuminating read in concert with Emmanuel Carrere's V13, in which some of the West's sins with regard to this region of the world were forcibly brought home to roost, meaning this is also an excellent book to which to refer when trying actually to understand "why they hate us" or how Islam can both claim to be a religion of peace and inspire brutal terrorism; indeed, it is the best exploration of many of the divides and schisms in that religion that I have yet found.

Bartle Bull has done us all a great service in producing this outstanding book.

*Of course, it is only due to this colonial extraction that I have ever been able to look at such things with my own eyes at places like the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC.