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theletterunread · 2 years

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Books in 2021

So, after the madness of 2020, the world went back to normal. Some of the time. For non-consecutive intervals. Interrupted by flashes of familiar old madness as well as brand new madness. (Do you remember the first time you read the term “NFT” and realized, with dread, that was just something you were going to have to deal with now?) And obviously, “normal” in this case only means “what our society has chosen to accept as normal.”

But at least the libraries were up and running. And even though my selections from them yielded a pretty typical ratio of winners to losers, the experience of returning to something typical casts a warm glow over all of these books. This might have been the best year of reading since I moved to LA.

The Body: A Guide for Occupants, Bill Bryson (Jan. 7-17)

This may turn out to be Bryson’s last book. It’s a good one to go out on. The history of physiology, the explanations of the body’s functions, and the stories of the scientists behind our developing understanding of our own species are all neatly told. I found it intelligent and was always compelled to keep reading, but I did recommend it to a doctor who found it unengrossing, so it may be a book for dummies.

The Kids in the Hall: One Dumb Guy, Paul Myers (Jan. 18-24)

A history of the comedy troupe from their formation up until the present. It’s weighted too heavily to their five years of stage shows at the expense of their five years on television. But there are lots of good behind-the-scenes anecdotes, and I was touched by love they obviously have for each other. Bruce McCullough, who, as a kid, I always thought of as “the grouchy one,” turns out to be the sweetest.

Is This Anything?, Jerry Seinfeld (Jan. 29 - Feb. 7)

I, naturally, had already heard and committed to memory most of the jokes in here, but the book is so exhaustive that there was lots that was new to me. And his method of formatting jokes like poems occasions a fresh look at even the familiar stuff. I was also happy to see him use the word “existential.” I’m sure that Seinfeld would taunt anyone who applied a ponderous word like that to his silly career, but I really think that the existentialism that’s just under the surface of his comedy is crucial to its intelligence, and probably accounts for why it’s resonated so much with the public.

Lodger, David and Maria Lapham (Feb. 7-8)

A crime and revenge story of a woman tracking down the drifter who wrecked her family years before. It’s well drawn and the plotting is okay, but it needed more depth and originality to the characters. The personalities of The Avenger and The Killer never get beyond level one.

A Pale View of Hills, Kazuo Ishiguro (Feb. 7-11)

His first book. A Japanese woman living in England tries to sort out the difficulties that life has presented her with, but is hampered by a difficulty in being emotionally honest, even with herself. It presses a lot of the same buttons as The Remains of the Day and is never quite as good as that one, but taken on its own, it’s very moving and haunting. I have been likened to an Ishiguro protagonist before, which is a real red alert, but maybe if I keep reading his books, I’ll find a way out.

Area Code 212, Tama Janowitz (Feb. 12-22)

These essays show the version of Janowitz’s life that I wished for her when I read Scream the preceding year: frivolous adventures in New York City, where everything goes wrong, but everything works out. There’s a lot of social satire and self-deprecation in the book, which you’d expect, but Janowitz is also capable of surprises, like in her recollection of a trip to MoMA that turns bloody. I believe this is also the collection where she sheepishly admits to once declining payment from Andy Warhol in the form of an original painting.

The Eternal Smile, Gene Luen Yang and Derek Kirk Kim (Feb. 13-15)

Three separate stories by two different authors. What connects them is the nearly identical twist that ends each story. I won’t spoil it, but I’ll say that I was not very moved by it in the first story (a medieval fantasy), but I was in the second (a greedy anthropomorphic frog starts his own religion) and the third (an office drone lets a scam email incite dreams of a better life). I’m not convinced the stories gain much by being bound together, but there’s enough good material here to easily recommend this collection.

This One Summer, Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki (Feb. 20-22)

Two girls coming of age during a summer at a beach house. (It’s always at the beach in these stories, isn’t it?) You’ve seen all the elements before – two friends diverging, the terror and allure of older teenagers, the dawning awareness of one’s parents as flawed people – but it’s still perceptive and touching. The book is often challenged or banned from libraries for the usual moronic reasons, so do the authors (cousins, by the way) a favor and check it out.

Waiting, Ha Jin (Feb. 23 - Mar. 2)

In the 1960s, a doctor in the Chinese army seeks legal permission to divorce his wife, so he can remarry a nurse at his hospital. I’m not sure how to convey how good this novel is. It’s effortless and simply told, but very deep and very beautiful. Ha Jin uses this extremely specific story to draw out broader questions about how to be happy, or even how to just satisfy the challenge of being a human being at all. I was very moved by the last pages of the book, when the doctor’s sorry appraisal of himself is given a little nudge by his daughter that casts everything in a brighter light. The doctor’s reaction was mine: “He was upset and touched at the same time.”

Uzumaki, Junji Ito (Feb. 23 - Mar. 3)

In every chapter of this book, people suffer some spiral-related horror: hypnotized by the evil shape into unspeakable acts; drained of energy by curls in their hair that have grown and taken on a life of their own; transformed into giant snails with spiral-shells. In the third act, there’s an explanation given for what has caused this curse, but I was less interested in that than in seeing how many new horrors Ito could come up, keeping to his limited theme. He racks up quite a few, and they really are freaky. One terror in particular kept me awake one night.

Last Look, Charles Burns (Mar. 4-9)

A trilogy of mind-bending comic books, all ostensibly creating one story. There are dreams and flashbacks and recurring symbols and nested narratives. I can’t say I understood any of it, but I enjoyed reading it.

Slumberland, Paul Beatty (Mar. 6-21)

The weakest of his four novels, but still very, very good. Who else is funny right from page one? I just went back and checked, and his first paragraph has, at a conservative estimate, three you’ll-never-see-them-coming lines. Though I was slightly underwhelmed by the plot (about an American DJ in Berlin – maybe the European location threw him off his game? Maybe descriptions of music are a little too elusive to be the backbone of a novel?), I was totally satisfied by the endless original sentences. Read it, read his other three, and count down the days until Beatty publishes a fifth.

The Thrilling Adventures of Lovelace and Babbage, Sydney Padua (Apr. 2-6)

An alternate history in which the title mathematicians’ theoretical work on computers was actually realized in their lifetime. In these stories, they’ve successfully constructed a primitive, but working computer (The Analytic Engine, to be precise) and show it off to various historical Victorian characters. It’s cute and educational, and it does make you think about how astonishing it is that human beings successfully devised anything as complicated as the computers we use today, but my enthusiasm is sort of muted. I may just have a tin ear for steampunk and efforts to make history cool.

The Moviegoer, Walker Percy (Apr. 8-15)

This is the book I read while getting my COVID vaccination. Percy deserves our thanks for getting A Confederacy of Dunces published, but as far as his own writing goes…the book’s not bad, but it’s dated: a young man drifts through life, unable to find meaning in the conventions of society, for they are inadequate to the spiritual needs of humanity. That’s all well and good, but at this point, we’ve seen it all before, and we’ve seen deeper iterations of the premise.

Through the Woods, Emily Carroll (Apr. 9-10)

Five spooky, fairy tale-inspired stories. They’re not much more scary or sophisticated than the tales in those Short and Shivery anthologies of horror stories you’d read in middle school, but the art is very good. Gift it to your precocious child, and flip through it yourself.

Monsignor Quixote, Graham Greene (Apr. 16-23)

A small-time Catholic priest and the communist mayor of his town go on a Quixote-like road trip through Spain. Innocent fun, and some ready-for-TV scenes where the two characters compare and contrast their ideologies. Not anywhere close to the best of Greene, though. Salman Rushdie lamented that this book was marked by “Don Camillo-like flatness.” Yeah, okay, well: whatever that means.

Play It as It Lays, Joan Didion (Apr. 24-26)

The only fiction of hers I’ve ever read. Not very much happiness in this story of a woman who finds people who disappoint and abuse her wherever she goes. But the misery isn’t lurid or pornographically presented – in fact, it’s hard to even call it misery, because the sharpness of the heroine and the sharpness of the style keep the story from every seeming desperate. I was dismissive of unornate writing when I wrote about Get Shorty, but the way Didion uses it works.

Three by Box, Edgar Box (Apr. 28 - May 8)

Three formal mysteries written pseudonymously by Gore Vidal while he was blacklisted: Death in the Fifth Position, Death before Bedtime, and Death Likes it Hot. Totally traditional in format, but with just enough specificity in the set-ups and characters to let Vidal slip in some individuality. My favorite was Fifth Position, about a murder in a ballet company. (Has there ever been a bad backstage story?) I was reading these while traveling on the Metro Gold Line, and was so engrossed that I ignored the “Hellos” of another, increasingly angry passenger. He was looking for friendship, I guess, and when I didn’t respond, he called me an asshole and loudly hoped that I would “die slowly.”

Don’t Look Now, Daphne du Maurier (May 9-15)

Nine spooky stories, all of them good. I particularly liked “Don’t Look Now,” where a father lives a waking nightmare in Venice, and “Kiss Me Again, Stranger,” a story of a weird meet cute that reads very modern. Even when she deploys a now-familiar trick (“My god, she was dead all along!”), du Maurier makes it elegant and satisfying. Maybe it’s the pristine edge of her style. You feel that if you don’t resonate with the story, it speaks more to your own shabbiness.

Show and Tell, John Lahr (May 28 - June 6)

Profiles of a dozen people in show business. The best one is about Roseanne. Seriously. She comes off funny and tenacious – you want to cheer when reading about how she pushed back early and hard against producers and executives trying to soften her show – but there are strong indications of the thoughtlessness and anger that would eventually bubble over into…well, whatever. It’s also interesting the way Lahr gushes over Frank Sinatra. I’ve got nothing against the guy, but it’s fascinating to see how seismic an impact his music had on people of a certain generation. They go into a kind of religious trance talking about him.

The Mask, John Arcudi and Doug Mahnke (May 29-31)

Jamie Kennedy released a set of admirably candid YouTube videos talking about the experience of making his widely despised, career-killing film Son of the Mask. Those sent me down a rabbit hole that led to digging up these original comics. They’re okay. The drawings are awfully frantic, and the antics that the mask inspires in its wearers are gruesome and cruel, much more so than in the Jim Carrey movie. It veers towards tasteless territory, but I think it stops short. With just a little generosity (maybe a lot of generosity), you can read this as a legitimate “cursed object” story, and take away from it the old-fashioned moral not to let base motives consume your soul. Look, I’m not saying it’s the best version of that story, but I’ll say it works.

The Adventures of Tintin, Hergé (June 9 - Nov. 24)

After winning an Amazon card in a drawing, I splurged on this beautiful box set and read all the adventures over the next five months. (All but one. This collection doesn’t include the one early book that all Tintin fans, including Hergé himself, wish had never been written…) It was my first time reading them since I was a child, and I had to do some reappraisals: Tintin in America is much lamer than I ever realized, while The Red Sea Sharks, which I had always undervalued, is stupendous, building to one of the best action sequences in any comic ever. It was great to see the development of an artist across a career. (And also easy to see, since it’s totally contained within one series). First is his early shedding of casual racist attitudes in favor of a global view of humanity – maybe a little sentimental and simple-minded in execution, but sincere and emphatic. Then there’s the development of craft, both in the increasingly beautiful illustrations, and in the increasingly sophisticated writing. And lastly there’s the self-reflection, as Hergé, after sending Tintin to the moon, realizes the only place left to explore is the interior life. The last quarter of the series is dedicated to dismantling and reinventing its own formula, so in the phase when most artists rest on their laurels, Hergé was pushing himself into uncharted territory. Rereading these was a pleasure. I should treat myself more often.

Proceed With Caution, Patricia Ratto (June 10-15)

There were a couple stories in here that worked – “Black Dog,” about a nosy neighbor, and “Chinese Boy” about a bullied kid – but the collection was mostly too obscure for me. This book was originally written in Spanish, and I wonder if stories like this (surreal, elusive) don’t translate well. Maybe that process adds one layer too many to penetrate.

Mr. Palomar, Italo Calvino (June 25-28)

There’s an ingenious mathematical structure to this book that I only subconsciously grasped and won’t even try to explain, but trust me: it works. And leaving that aside, the observations and ideas presented in the book are as smart as ever, whatever format Calvino puts them in. He writes about the world of objects and the world of ideas with equal clarity and originality, and he finds a tidy, comfortable box for everything.

Timbuktu, Paul Auster (June 29 - July 4)

“It’s told from the perspective of the dog,” is a joke in a comedy bit I’ve performed a few times. It’s also the hook of this novel. A dog accompanies his dying master on a trip to Baltimore, and then must find himself a new life. It’s not really about being a dog, it’s about existentialism and death and what happens inside one’s mind…but since I’ve seen all of those things grappled with in Auster’s other books, this one is, for me, the one about being a dog. It’s still good though. There’s a lot to be learned by considering things from an animal’s perspective. As Leopold Bloom observes in one of the few parts of Ulysses I appreciated, “They understand what we say better than we understand them.”

Kafkaesque, Peter Kuper (July 4-5)

When I complained about that other Kafka adaptation I read in 2019 being too obvious, this was what I was stacking it against. Kuper’s drawings are more expressionistic and inventive, and his interpretation of the text is less flat. There’s still the question of whether anything has been gained – or even could be gained – by affixing drawings to Kafka’s words (it’s the Fantasia question), but this is a good effort.

Stiff Upper Lip, Jeeves, P.G. Wodehouse (July 13-16)

Somehow, I found a Jeeves novel I’d never read before. I felt a little hurt by the jokes about vegetarians, but enjoyed it all the same. Lots of laughs when Bertie has to hide behind a sofa and listen as Jeeves tactically slanders him as a kleptomaniac to his unwanted fiancé. When she sees the statuette Bertie has allegedly stolen, she exclaims, “But that belongs to my father!” and Jeeves sorrowfully responds, “If I may say so, nothing belongs to anyone if Mr. Wooster takes a fancy to it.” Well, it makes me laugh, anyway.

The Golden House, Salman Rushdie (July 17-23)

A rich man and his three grown sons come to America, and through the eyes of their neighbor, we witness the changing of the family across a decade. It’s kind of like some ancient story retold in an extremely contemporary setting. There are good scenes and characters here, and the golden house itself, tucked into a secret courtyard in Greenwich Village, is a dream dwelling. But the ripped-from-the-headlines details are a little tedious. Rushdie tries to manage Trump’s presence artfully, but like pretty much everyone, he struggles to come up with anything original to say about the man, and it’s just the same bleating we’ve all heard and expressed ourselves since 2015. Trump imposed himself on our lives, and it’s natural to want to express our feelings about that, but I think everyone’s going to be pretty frustrated in a few years when we look back at this era and see how monotonously we dealt with him in art, how we allowed him entry even to the places where we could have kept him out.

Aurora Borealice, Joan Steacy (July 22-26)

A sort of memoir in which a Canadian woman embarks on a long education, both formally and privately. I liked the personal details and was excited when the main character made it across Canada to Victoria (it’s fun when you a place you’ve been appears in a book), but things kept grinding to halts for Steacy to praise seminal figures in her education, like Marshall McLuhan. I’m not arguing that he doesn’t deserve the praise, but it’s not obvious to me that it adds anything to the book.

Gothic Tales, Arthur Conan Doyle (July 26 - Aug. 8)

500 pages of gold. Lots of proper, well-behaved Victorian characters coming upon ghastly terrors: unexplained disappearances, mummies, hasty surgery, booby traps, man-eating cats. It’s formulaic, but what’s not to like? I suppose some of these stories here must have interested me less than others, but I don’t remember ever being bored. It reads as though Doyle believed all of these ghoulish things to be true, but wished that he didn’t. The idea that the author was being haunted by his own silly stories makes the whole collection funnier, but also more worthy of serious consideration.

Cartwheel, Jennifer duBois (Aug. 11-16)

Some reviewers knocked this novel for being too close to its inspiration, the Amanda Knox case, but I hadn’t followed that story, so it was all fictional to me. The story of the accused murderer is told in chapters from the perspective of her family, her friends, and the prosecutor working on her case. Everyone’s pretty well observed (particularly the sad, smarmy rich boy next door, who inspires first annoyance, then weary pity) and the plot moves along efficiently. But it’s a greenhouse book: there’s no fresh air getting in. It’s very formal, without much of a unique voice. The sort of thing you can admire, but wouldn’t love.

The Golden Age Is in Us, Alexander Cockburn (Aug. 18-23)

Diary entries, essays, and articles from the late grouch. He includes lots of angry letters from readers who didn’t like what he printed in the newspaper, which is great. Writing by non-writers is worth preserving, and I don’t mean that in a derisive way: there are original sentences that can only be written by a totally unconscious and undeliberate mind. What Cockburn has to say is good too. Mostly he argues (quite well) for conventional socialist ideas, but he’s also capable of surprising you with some heterodox ideas. He lays out an economic proposal for a flat tax system to aid the poor – arguing that progressive outcomes are more important than progressive methods – that I found uncomfortably convincing.

The Human Comedy, William Saroyan (Aug. 27-30)

Saroyan was an author recommended to me in 2009, as reference material for my first decent script, but it took me until last year to pick him up. A nice young man works as a messenger boy in his small California town. We see him at work, at school, and at home, where’s he’s obliged to be the man of the house. It’s all sweet and sentimental, but never cornball, because the book is smart enough to present all this goodness as a choice that a person can make, and not always an easy one. It’s a nice miniature novel. Even the edition I had was pocket-sized.

Shake Girl, The Stanford Graphic Novel Project (Adam Johnson and Tom Kealey, Editors) (Aug. 27-30)

A collaborative project. A handful of Stanford students wrote and drew this story of a Cambodian smoothie seller trying to escape poverty and being mistreated by corrupt and disgusting elites. Page by page, there are startling moments and thoughtful images, but nothing too impactful. Probably the collaborative nature of the project had the (unintended but unavoidable) effect of flattening any depth that might have come from a more individualized approach.

Commute, Erin Williams (Aug. 31 - Sep. 1)

My gut reaction is to give it a thumbs down. To be dismissive of the drawing style. To say that the self-aggrandizing scenes needed to be cut with deeper introspection. To point out that the author’s efforts to convey the wrongness of being reduced to an object are undercut by a number of offhandedly reductive insults towards others. But I think that sort of criticism winds up being a way to avoid addressing the real experience of reading the book. It’s a book about harassment and addiction and trauma, and Williams conveys her feelings about those things honestly, and does a fair job of forcing the reader to grapple with those feelings. To stand back and suggest that this could have been expressed more “effectively” seems to miss the point, because what is the “effect” being sought? I can feel the ice cracking beneath my feet: this type of appraisal could render any piece of art immune to all criticism. And yet, applying any other type of review here would seem inadequate.

Last of Her Name, Mimi Lok (Sep. 1-5)

This one’s easier. It’s a fine collection of short stories. The first seven average out to be pretty good, and the last one, “The Woman in the Closet” is better than the rest put together. It’s about an old woman who’s removed from her home and finds new lodgings…well, in a closet, but there are specific details beyond that to make it a very rich story. It’s natural and breezily written, and I can’t think of anything else like it.

The End of the End of the Earth, Jonathan Franzen (Sep. 6-10)

Franzen is always better than the internet would have you believe (although some of that hostility seems to be abating, doesn’t it?), but never quite as good as you’d hope. Every essay in here is good: well written, readable, sincere, sufficiently intelligent…but there’s never anything surprising, and by the end, you’re starving for even a single, fleeting moment of humor. Look, I’ll read any future essay collection he writes (eventually…within ten years of its publication), and I do like his advocacy for birds, but wouldn’t it be more fun if he wrote about some left-field, totally bananas subject? Like an anime convention? Just put that brain to use on something new and see what comes out. He wrote The Discomfort Zone, so let’s see him face it.

Gabriel’s Gift, Hanif Kureishi (Sep. 21-24)

Surprisingly warmhearted. Also pretty conventional. Gabriel, a teenager who aspires to an artistic life, has a hardworking mother and an immature washed-up father. He tries to keep them both happy. There’s also a famous rock star character (the dad used to play in his band) who’s reminiscent of David Bowie, though it doesn’t really matter. It’s decent, and I did feel fondness for Gabriel when he managed to swing a happy ending for everyone, but it’s nothing special.

The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 2, Alan Moore & Kevin O’Neill (Sep. 21-24)

Finally got around to continuing this series. This one draws heavily on The War of the Worlds, though my favorite part was a subplot involving a visit to the animal village populated by Dr. Moreau’s critters. There’s a lot of fun here, but there’s also a scene of a horrific, disproportional, and distasteful violence (I know, Alan, I know: “That’s the point”), and I have to reduce its score for that. It’s just so needless.

The Clasp, Sloane Crosley (Sep. 25-29)

Three college friends who’ve drifted apart reunite at an acquaintance’s wedding. One of them leaves with a family heirloom, sparking a ridiculous adventure that spans America, and eventually France. Intentionally ridiculous, that is. It’s a little sluggish, and one of the three leads was too conventional for me (confident and successful on the outside, rife with doubt and fear on the inside, hiding these feelings behind rote sarcasm…there’s a guy like that in every Millennial novel), but overall, the book is a success. What I liked most about it was what I most expected to like: it’s comfortable being funny. It’s not laugh-out-loud hilarious, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s steadily wry and willing to let its characters be silly, and how often do you get even that much humor in a novel?

Eleven Hours, Pamela Erens (Oct. 1-4)

The eleven hours is the time that one character is in labor, tended to by a coincidentally pregnant nurse. The book flits between present and past, filling in these women’s backstories. As you might have predicted, there’s a reason these two characters wound up in each other’s lives: their experiences complement each other and ulitimately illuminate something or other for the reader. I don’t mean that to sound dismissive. It is a good book – smart and evocative and good at dodging melodrama – but it ended too suddenly for me to fully understand what I had been reading.

Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe (Oct. 5-8)

I meant to pick up his other book, No Longer At Ease, but got the titles mixed up. It worked out for me. First in his village (in what would become known as Nigeria), then in exile, then returned to a home he no longer recognizes, the hero Okonkow can’t ever put a foot right. Sometimes, he commits despicable acts, but you feel more pity for him than anger. His choices are shaped by anger towards his dismal father, by the rigidity of his fellow villagers, and by the thoughtless destruction the European missionaries bring. It’s the story of a sad, failed life, but told so empathetically that what you’re left with isn’t gloominess, but a sense that we must not let ourselves or each other have lives like this.

Crash, J.G. Ballard (Oct. 9-13)

Not the feel-good movie about American racism, but the feel-bad novel about car crashes. The narrator is in an accident and is subsequently drawn into a creepy world of fetishists who are sexually excited by car crashes and their aftermaths. There are endless, lascivious descriptions of wreckage and broken bodies. It’s pornographic, except that it doesn’t resemble any kind of sex you’ve ever encountered before. Ballard gives you no quarter. He even names the narrator after himself, removing a layer of fictionality that might have given you a little comfort. It’s an unpleasant and challenging read, and I can’t say that I enjoyed it…yet I am glad I read it. It’s masterfully written (there couldn’t be any better way to render this material), it’s unlike anything else I’ve read, and I was transfixed the entire time. If you asked me point-blank, I would recommend it, although I should report that its overall reception was mixed. When Ballard submitted it for publication, one reader returned it to his or her boss with the note, “This author is beyond psychiatric help. Do Not Publish!”

Love Is an Ex-Country, Randa Jarrar (Oct. 14-17)

This memoir is aimless, tedious, and full of endless self-affirmations. Those are fine in and of themselves, and I am sure that writing these words was healthy and helpful for Jarrar personally, but there’s nothing in here for a reader.

Everybody into the Pool, Beth Lisick (Oct. 18-27)

NPR-ready essays about the funny things that can happen to you when you’re a human. So you’ll smile more than you’ll laugh, but you will be entertained. Lisick describes herself as being too weird for her suburban upbringing and too normal for the fringe worlds she discovers later, but I think it’s the opposite. I think she’s normal enough for the mainstream and strange enough for the rest. She seems to slot in comfortably enough in either venue, which means there’s not too much at stake in her anecdotes. But they are amusing and well-written, particularly the one where she volunteers at a Catholic fundraiser and steals from the nuns to pay for a punchline I won’t spoil.

On Ajayi Crowther Street, Elnathan John and Àlàbá Ònájìn (Oct. 24-29)

A Nigerian melodrama. Various secrets and betrayals and crimes and upheavals play out through a large, intertwined cast, at the center of which is an evil patriarch. It’s a bit shallow, but not from any lack of intelligence. More that there’s so much to get through that everything is spread a bit thin. It’s engrossing, even if I never took it too seriously.

The World According to Garp, John Irving (Oct. 27 - Nov. 6)

A good balance of realism and outrageous invention. T.S. Garp grows up, goes to school, gets married, has children, and has a career, but every moment, from his conception to his death, is marked by something ridiculous. Sometimes there’s a bizarre supporting character, sometimes a sequence of events is wild. Putting it that way might make it sound like it’s overly satirical, a book about human relationships that sneers at human relationships (I’ve seen it criticized on those grounds), but I didn’t find that to be so. Garp’s relationship with his mother and his experiences of fatherhood are very moving.

‘Salem’s Lot, Stephen King (Nov. 7-21)

The first third of the book introduces a couple dozen characters living in a small town. The rest of it has almost all of them turning to vampires, one by one. There are good action set-pieces, some nasty humor, the pulpy fun of seeing bad people get what’s coming to them, the dime-store tragedy of seeing the innocent suffer, and some surprises in the fates of the main characters. This is only King’s second published book, but it’s one of his best. It has everything you like about him, and none of what you don’t.

The Metamorphoses of Tintin, Jean-Marie Apostolidès (Nov. 25 - Dec. 4)

After I finished the 24th and final Tintin album, I picked up this academic appraisal. It was too academic. It’s a psychological study of the symbols at play in the comics, and of the archetypical roles (father, foundling, bastard) the characters fulfil. I liked one observation: Tintin’s metamorphosis from being specifically Belgian to being rootless and international was a transformation that allowed Hergé to discard any limitations to his hero and turn him into a mythic figure. But the rest of the ideas were rigid and not particularly illuminating.

Shovel Knight, David L. Craddock (Dec. 27-30)

A book about a video game. Unlike Earthbound, the only other book I’ve read in this series, this installment doesn’t bother with any artistic interpretation of its subject; it’s a straight-up history of how Shovel Knight was made. That’s a fair choice. Shovel Knight is a great game, but it’s so formal and deliberately designed that I’m not sure there’s much to analyze. It’s inspiration was only other video games, so that’s the only lens through which it can be viewed. The upshot is a book that’s interesting, but more like a press kit than a piece of criticism.

***

Here’s a story about Boss Fight Books, the publisher that released Shovel Knight. I submitted a book proposal to them. I wanted to write about the N64 platformer Banjo-Tooie, and how that sequel fit into and represented the angry, adolescent era of video games and video gamers. My proposal was turned down.

Many months later, I was talking to somebody about video games developed by Rare. When the conversation turned to Banjo-Tooie, I said, “I have something embarrassing to tell you about my serious interest in that game.” She winced and said, “Oh no…you didn’t read a book about it, did you?” I had to tell her that my life was even more undignified than that.

To have visited the libraries freely and to have been embarrassed by my own passions: yes, 2021 was truly a return to normalcy.

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