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tropes-and-tales · 2 years

Text

Uncertain

CW: Pure angst

Word Count: 4668

Other Pieces: This is a sequel to this.

You finally feel like your life is starting. Washington D.C. is free of Marcus Pike. He’s back in Texas with Teresa Lisbon (you gave in to your misery for a weekend, and you had stalked the woman’s social media until you felt sick and deleted your profile altogether).

Then you decided to be happy. To move on. To set the misery aside, to consider your years’ long crush on Marcus Pike as a painful lesson.

You do just that. You move on. You find a semblance of happiness.

You love D.C. You love your job. You find a townhouse in Truxton Circle, a mile from work, and you bike there every day. Your neighborhood is walkable, and it reminds you of your time in Europe.

You can’t fathom how this is your life. You can’t quite believe that the girl raised in a working class home with a mechanic father and a waitress mother grew up to get her doctorate in art.

Sometimes you go to sleep worried you’ll wake up in the morning to find that it was all a dream. Love-life aside, you have a dream job in an interesting city. You have a great townhouse with a lot of old character, and the entire scene rounds out when a stray cat adopts you and moves in, just saunters in your backdoor one morning like she owns the place.

You don’t allow yourself to think about Marcus. You know he moves fast; you know he’ll probably propose to Teresa and remarry soon. Maybe this one will stick, but you don’t care to hear about it either way.

Deep down, underneath all the hurt, you know you still love him. But that love has only ever been nourished by your own fragile hopes, and it’s like a hot coal banked under cold embers. It still could burn bright, but with each day that passes, it flickers a little dimmer, grows a little colder.

Someday it will be a cinder. Someday your love for Marcus Pike will just be a burnt piece of ash.

-----

You love your work in restoration because it’s so many things at once. It’s art and history, science and economics. It’s sociology. A woodblock from feudal Japan is utterly unique when compared to an oil painting by a Dutch master…but it’s also exactly the same. It’s the same human impulse to create, to form something in their time and place.

You love the National Gallery. You love everyone who works there: your teammates, the docents, the gift shop employees. The guard who hails you each morning when you scan in, the coffee shop lady who calls you “sweet pea” when she slides your coffee across the counter at you.

But you love the work more than anything. You love receiving a new painting. You love being a steward of fine art: knowing that others came before you and others will come after you, but that you’re linked to your predecessors and successors over a mutual love of timeless pieces.

You love x-raying the paintings to see what secrets they reveal. Other paintings that the artist covered over. Sometimes it’s earlier, poor attempts at restoration or even censorship. The Catholic Church was especially famous for the latter, covering up the upsetting genitals of fat little cherubs, turning black Madonnas lily-white.

A lot of your work is collaborative. Other museums reach out to you. Galleries. Auction houses and private collectors. You help verify paintings with dicey provenances.

More rarely, you help law enforcement. It’s only been twice, so far, and both have been consulting outside of D.C. One was NYPD—a rumored Rothko turned up in a raid. Another was DEA, when a cartel capo’s house was raided and trio of unknown Tamayo paintings were found.

When you get a call from the FBI, you don’t think anything of it. Marcus is in Austin, so you get that dip of excitement in your stomach at the prospect of a puzzle to solve. There was a shipment of contraband intercepted, and there’s a crate full of art pieces. They need your help identifying some of them.

“Of course,” you tell the guy—an agent named Roberts—over the phone. “Bring the pieces over as soon as you can, and I can look at them.”

-----

It takes a couple days, and you never once think you’ll see Marcus. There’s no portents, no omens that your life in D.C. is going to turn. There’s no crow cawing at you from a tree. There’s no dark cloud following you as you ride your bike to work that morning.

Life isn’t like a movie. You have no sign that your world is going to tilt off axis. You scan in that morning, sort through some mail. You eat lunch with a coworker. And then at one o’clock, you stroll down the hallway to the workshop where the FBI’s art pieces—and the FBI agent, Roberts—are waiting.

When you open the door, it’s not one agent. It’s two. A tall man with greying hair at the temples—Agent Roberts, you assume.

And Marcus Pike, standing right beside him. Looking at you like he’s been shot. His eyes are wide, and his mouth falls open for a fraction of a second before he snaps it shut.

Goddamned, fucking Marcus Pike.

*****

It’s been almost a year since Marcus saw you last. It was that disastrous dinner when you had, he assumed, wanted to confess your feelings for him. When he instead broke your heart by telling you about Teresa Lisbon.

Almost a year. A lot has happened.

He falls fast and hard for Teresa. He proposes too early. He asks her to move to D.C. with him when the promotion comes up.

He is left, in the end. Teresa chooses Patrick Jane over him, and Marcus finds himself with the prospect of being alone. Again.

Alone, his impulse is to reach out to you. You had blocked him, however—his calls and texts don’t go through, his emails seem to go into a black hole. He could find your address but doesn’t dare.

For the first time ever, Marcus is left to be uncomfortable in his own feelings of loneliness and heartbreak. For the first time, you aren’t there to prop him up, to be his one-woman hype-crew.

He wallows. He finds a condo in D.C., but he doesn’t bother to unpack most of the boxes. His stubble turns into a beard, a little patchy, and he finds that he doesn’t care to shave it off. It makes him look roguish, on good days, and downright depressive, on bad days.

Almost a year, and then he sees you again.

Roberts is the one with the hookups at the Smithsonian, at the National Gallery. He knows all the local experts, and when their raid turns up a crate full of unidentified art pieces, Roberts reaches out to his experts.

“I know of a guy,” he says, but Marcus doesn’t realize that his partner uses the term “guy” in a gender neutral way.

The guy Roberts knows of is you.

A few thoughts occur to Marcus all at once. First, that you must be setting the art restoration world on fire to have already acquired a reputation as an expert. Second, that you’re an utter professional, because you shake Roberts’ hand and then his own, giving away none of your personal ire at him.

And third….you look good. If Marcus has fallen apart a bit, if he’s living in slightly rumpled suits and a patchy beard, you’ve pulled yourself together. You’re in dark wash jeans and a button down Oxford of sky blue. Your hair is in a low ponytail. You look casual and professional at the same time, polished and understated.

You look lovely.

You also look eager. When your eyes drift from him back to Roberts, you light up. You rub your hands briskly together and ask the other agent what goodies he’s brought you.

-----

You’re good. Marcus is good, but you’re better. He can see where you got your reputation.

There’s five oil paintings. You dismiss four of them outright. You pull on a pair of magnifying glasses, click on the small light on the frames, and you peer at the paintings closely. Marcus and Roberts stand off to the side, listening as you mutter about pigment types and aging, and then you stand up. Click off the light.

“These four were done in the style of Titian,” you tell them. “But I’m certain they are recent copies. I could run an analysis on it, but some of the aging qualities look like faking. Tea bags. Nicotine. These are no more than thirty years old, tops.”

“Okay, good,” Roberts says.

You nod and then turn to the fifth painting. Click your light back on and study it.

“Can you give me any details around the operation?” you ask them as you focus on one corner of the painting. “Where it came from might help.”

Roberts gives you the details: they are running down a smuggling ring out of Russia. The son of an oil oligarch has been stealing rare paintings from small museums and galleries and private collectors in former Soviet countries, then releasing forgeries back into the market. Allegedly.

“Huh.” You say it like you have an idea, and a moment later you whip off your glasses and stride—almost running—over to a laptop. You tap furiously on the keys, then throw a switch that projects your screen on a nearby wall.

“Okay, so this fifth one might be something,” you tell them, and your voice is shaky. It sounds like you might cry, but when Marcus looks closer, he sees that you’re trembling. You’re practically vibrating, and he realizes that you are excited.

“Just eyeballing the pigment, it looks 16th century, but I can test it and verify. But look at these details.” You point at the painting they brought you, then point at the painting you are projecting.

“See the lily of the valley in that pot there?” You point at the projection, then point to their painting. “Sure, lilies were a common motif in religious paintings of the Virgin Mary, but look. It’s almost exactly the same. The same pot of lilies of the valley. And here, in the corner of each painting, the signature. A single ‘G.’”

“What is the painting you’re comparing to?” Marcus asks, and whatever anger you feel for him has been buried under the excitement of your possible find.

“It’s Annunciation. It’s the only known, signed work by a painter called Master Jerzy. Jurek Almanus. He’s almost completely unknown. There’s been a couple of other paintings that they think might have been his, but….” Your words trail off, and you just stare at the confiscated painting from the raid.

“I saw Annunciation in Krakow when I was in Europe,” you add, and your voice has a hushed, reverential quality to it. “I fell down a Jerzy rabbit hole. I never thought I might see a second painting of his.”

“We can sign the painting into your custody,” Roberts tells you. “If you can verify it, it might help us start the trail of its provenance.”

“I can get in touch with the Czartoryski Museum, where Annunciation is, as a start,” you reply. Your eyes never leave the painting they brought you, and your face is full of wonderment.

Marcus knew that you loved art—obviously so, since you got your doctorate for the love of it—but he had never quite grasped how much. You gaze at the painting like you are witnessing a miracle in real time, and maybe to you, you are.

-----

The recovered painting is a foot in the door. It’s a way back into your life.

Marcus isn’t too proud. He asks Roberts if he can manage the possible Jerzy paining, which means checking in with you at regular intervals. It’s only phone calls, and sometimes emails, when you send him lab results from your National Gallery email. Official business only, as much as Marcus tries to pry that door open a little more each time.

The first call: he asks how you’re doing. You ignore the question altogether and update him on the talks with Krakow.

The second call: again, he asks how you are. You give a terse, “I’m fine,” then explain that you’ll be sending the x-rays of the painting that show an earlier, discarded painting underneath it. The confiscated painting is a palimpsest, and there’s a quality of excitement in your voice when you tell him so.

The third call: he’s in a low spot already. He’s heard news about Teresa and Jane, and it shouldn’t hurt as much as it does…but it does. On the phone with you, after you update him on the chemical analysis of the painting—the pigment, the canvas, the frame—there’s a beat of silence that Marcus fills awkwardly.

“I’ve missed you,” he says, weary to the bone. Wanting just a fraction of comfort from you.

He can hear your sigh. He can hear the long stretch of uncomfortable silence, and he knows that you’re probably struggling with how to reply to him. It makes him feel even worse. His best friend is a stranger to him now, and he doesn’t know how to find his way back to her. To you.

“I’ll talk to you soon,” he adds, sparing you the awkward need to reply to his admission of missing you.

Sparing you the need to lie and say that you’ve missed him too…or worse, telling him the truth: that you haven’t missed him at all.

-----

It takes a while before the painting is verified. There are a million tests you have to run, conferences and long hours arguing with other art experts. An expert from Poland flies in to examine the painting, and he helps pick up part of the trail on this painting’s long journey across time.

Marcus goes to the National Gallery, ostensibly to pick up a thick folder of your findings, though you have been emailing a lot of it to him piecemeal, as you’ve gotten it. But you’ll pulled together an impressive amount of research, and it’s an excuse to see you.

An excuse to try and push that door open another fraction.

You hand him the folder, and Marcus pages through it with an appreciative whistle. “If you ever get tired of working in a museum, the FBI is always hiring. This is remarkable work.”

The bit of praise makes you smile. “That’s the thing, though. This job is art and detective work.”

“Best of both worlds.”

“It really is.”

He shuts the folder, taps the cover in a nervous tattoo with his fingertips. This paltry exchange is the closest he’s gotten to a meaningful talk with you. It’s nothing at all, but it’s the best he’s got.

“I’ve missed you,” he says, echoing his last call with you.

You sigh again. “Marcus—”

“You don’t have to say anything,” he interrupts, hasty to not hear what you may reply with. “I just wanted to let you know that I’ve missed you. And I thought I might get a coffee with you sometime.”

You look at him, and he can’t read your expression. You’re inscrutable now. Maybe you always have been. Maybe he’s never read you right before.

“You want to get a coffee?” You ask finally. “Let’s go then.”

“Now?” You glance at the watch on your wrist. “Yeah, why not? It’s that time in the afternoon that I start to flag, so a coffee will do me good.”

*****

You don’t know why you agree to get a coffee with him. Maybe because you have missed him, despite it all. Maybe because you can’t help the way your traitorous heart stammers in your chest when you see him, despite how disapproving your head may be. Maybe you’re curious about what he might say. Maybe he’ll apologize.

Maybe you’re just high on the research, on finding a missing painting from a mysterious guild painter.

Either way, you find yourself at a nearby café, a mom-and-pop place that serves the D.C. workers, not the D.C. tourists. At two in the afternoon, it’s quiet—just you and Marcus, pretty much.

He orders a coffee. You get a honey halva latte, and when he tries to reach past you to pay, you turn your shoulder and block him, muscle memory from all the times the two of you play-fought over the check. You don’t even realize you’re doing it until his hand brushes against you, and you frown at how easy it is to fall back into the old patterns with him.

If I’m not careful, I’m going to let him break my heart again, you chide yourself. It’s your logical mind that thinks the thought—and it’s your duplicitous heart that hammers against your ribcage at the touch of his hand.

The two of you take your drinks and find a quiet table tucked away in a corner. You watch Marcus stir creamer into his coffee. He looks…less crisp than he used to. He looks a little dog-eared, a little worn down. You like the stubble, actually, but his eyes look forlorn.

All it takes is a simple, polite question from you to open up the floodgates. The usual, polite-society question.

“How are you, Marcus?” you ask, and yes…you fall right back into the old pattern.

He treats you just like he used to. He treats you like his therapist: he tells you about Teresa, and someone named Jane, and you don’t know if Jane is a first name or a last name, or if Teresa left him for a man or a woman, but his words wash over you and you stop comprehending what he’s telling you. His voice fades away and a low roar fills your head: the hot-blood of your temper being raised. The fuzzy, staticky roll of years’ worth of anger and disappointment and heartbreak filling you. Making your face and neck break out in a hectic flush of rage. Making your hands clench into tight fists in your lap.

“You’re unbelievable,” you mutter under your breath, interrupting his litany of words.

Marcus stops midsentence. Cocks his head and asks, “What?”

You’ve always swallowed your bad feelings down with him. Always. You’ve choked on disappointment, swallowed the bitter wash of unrequited love. For so long—since you were a fucking kid. You hate that he has this power to make you feel like that kid again, that unworthy, second-best kid who can’t compare to the random, disappointing women he convinces himself are the One.

“I said you’re unbelievable,” you repeat, and you unclench your fists. You realize that you’ve been slumped over—that insecure teenager again—so you sit up straight. Push your shoulders back, lift your chin and stare him down directly.

The anger must be apparent in your eyes. Marcus flinches at what he sees.

“I haven’t seen or talked to you in over a year,” you say, and you keep your voice low and steady. You’re in public and you don’t want to make a scene.

“That’s why I wanted to get a coffee…” He trails off, uncertain.

You laugh, bitter. “Get a coffee so you can unload your problems on me? Nice, Marcus.”

“We are friends,” he says. He sounds defensive, even if his eyes look sad. “Or we used to be.”

“Were we friends? Really?”

He sighs and looks down into his coffee mug. “I know you had a thing for me,” he starts to say, but you don’t allow him to get any more of that thought out.

“A thing.” You laugh again, a short bark that is mirthless. “Marcus, I was in love with you for years.”

“I didn’t know that. Didn’t know it back then, I mean. But we were friends….” He trails off again, but he raises his head to look you in the eyes.

“We weren’t friends, not really.” You shake your head and snort at how fucking obtuse he is. “You know, I’m not even mad that you never loved me back. You can’t help who you love. I’m not it for you? Well, that’s tough for me, but that’s life. I was never mad about that. Sad, sure. Disappointed? Sure. But never mad.”

“You seem really mad at me now.”

“Because you call me a friend!” You raise your voice, and you hate how girlish you sound when you’re mad; your voice is shaky with anger, and it sounds like you’re about to cry. Which, you might.

“You are a friend!” He raises his voice too, lifts his hands in frustration before letting them fall back onto the tabletop.

“I’m not a friend to you, Marcus. I’m your…your fall back plan. I’m your therapist. Your….I dunno. I’m your emotional punching bag, and I’m not going back to that place with you.”

“I don’t know what—”

“You never come to me unless you need something,” you clarify, and now your voice really is trembling. Your throat feels tight from the sobs that want to tear free, but you push through it. You need to tell him this. You’ve sat with it for years, and now it’s coming to light. It’s a festering wound that is finally being treated.

“When you have someone, you disappear,” you continue. “You lose yourself in that person, and you put me back on the shelf. And I’m just supposed to sit there and wait until you need me again, but all you want is someone to tell you that it’s okay and that you’ll find real love someday.”

Marcus seems to go pale under his tan. He wilts in his seat, slumps a little. “That’s not true,” he protests weakly.

You lean forward and fix him with a glare. “When have you ever asked about my life? Or put me first? Isn’t that what friends do, give and take? You just take though, Marcus. You take and take and take, and you save all the give for the disappointing women you date.” You snort. “Or the women you marry.”

“I—”

“You didn’t come to any of my graduations, and I had three. You never dropped me a note or got me a gift to celebrate any of the milestones I’ve hit. You barely talked to me when I was in Europe because you were married. Even my celebration dinner back in Austin turned into the fucking Teresa Lisbon hour, and how did that end up, in the end?”

He doesn’t answer. He opens his mouth but then shuts it, and he only gazes back at you. He looks so sad, it might have dampened your ire any other time. But this is the first time you’ve ever said this stuff out loud, and it feels cleansing. Like you’re bleeding out all of the poison that had accumulated over the years of loving him without receiving any love back.

You take a deep breath and will your hammering heart to calm. You lay your hands on the table.

“Just answer me this, Marcus.” Your voice is quieter now, and a lot of the anger has burned off.

He nods at you, gestures for you to continue.

“If Teresa had moved here with you…if the two of you had gotten married and moved to D.C., and then you ran into me about the Jerzy painting again. Would you have asked me out for a coffee to catch up? Or was this just you being alone and lonely again?”

The guilty look on his face is all the answer you need. You nod, once, and stand up. You could yell at him more, but you feel exhausted all of a sudden. Spent. Drained.

“Take care of yourself,” you tell him softly, but he doesn’t reply. He doesn’t even look at you. He keeps his gaze fixed on the table in front of him, an unhappy frown on his face. His eyes glassy with tears.

*****

Marcus knew he had messed up, but he never realized just how badly he’d done.

He thought it was a broken heart. Unrequited love. Maybe it was that, but it was so much worse.

He wants to argue you with. He wants to tell you that you’re wrong, that he’s always been there for you…but he can’t. As you lay your recriminations at his feet, he realizes that you’re right. That he’s faded out on you when he was in a relationship. That he pulls you back into his orbit when he needs you.

You’re right: he takes from you, but he rarely gives you anything back.

If he thought he felt low when Chloe cheated on him and he got divorced….or when Teresa chose Jane over him….neither of those moments compare to this. You’ve been his dearest friend for years and years, but he hasn’t been that for you. You had let it slide in the past because of some misplaced, blinding love for him, but he’s never been a real friend to you.

What can he possibly do to make it up to you? Blocking his number and his email, moving away without a farewell—it all feels like the end. Like you crossed that bridge and tossed a match after you, and only now he’s seeing the burnt remains between you and him.

All he can do is honor your wishes. He hands the bulk of the case back to Roberts, makes up an excuse about wanting to focus on other cases, which isn’t a complete lie.

But not before he sends you an email: from his personal email address to your work one. He doesn’t want to guilt you or put you into an uncomfortable position. He only wants you to know that he understands. He finally understands, years too late.

I’ve handed the case back to Roberts, he writes. I realize now how I failed you for so long. I don’t deserve your friendship and probably never did, but please know that I always treasured it. I want to respect the boundaries you’ve put up. I won’t reach out again, but please know that if you ever need anything from me—anything at all—you can call me. I will always want the chance to be the friend you always needed but never got.

When he hits “send,” he feels a rush of various emotions: shame at the situation with you getting to this point, to where he’s reduced to communicating via email. Guilt too.

But the most prevalent emotion: a deep melancholy that seems to sink into the very marrow of his bones. It’s more than sadness. It’s a feeling of finality, just as he’s starting to wise up to the fact that he’s lost you, before he had the space in his life to realize just how much you meant to him.

You don’t reply to his email. He doesn’t expect you to. All he can do is be patient and work on himself. He needs to not fall into the next convenient relationship; he has to stay single and really address the deep-down issues that cause him to be so clingy, so quick to move in a relationship.

He waits a few weeks, and then he finds a therapist. Twice a week, he sits and spills all of the secrets of his heart, and sometimes he feels better after, but sometimes he feels worse. It’s all good work, though—the hard work of learning who he is, what drives him.

Marcus Pike may never hear from you again, and he’s probably lost you forever. But there’s always a chance you may return to his life, and if you do, he wants to be the best possible version of himself. He wants to be well-adjusted and conscious of how he treats his friends.

In case you ever choose to speak to him again, he wants to be the man you always thought he was. The friend you always needed.

~~~Tag List~~~ @bananas-pajamas @massivecolorspygiant @imspillingcoffee @amneris21 @paintballkid711 @mad-girl-without-a-box @bestattempt @rosiefridayrogersunday @strawberrydragon @hoeforthefictional @greeneyedblondie44 @leannawithacapitala @stardust-galaxies @buckybarneshairpullingkink @harriedandharassed @thatpinkshirt @isvvc-pvscvl @mrschiltoncat @stillshelbs @girlimjusttryingtoreadfanfics @tobealostwanderer @nuvoleincielo @knivesareout @frankie-catfish-morales @prostitute-robot-from-the-future @probablybraindamage

#marcus pike #marcus pike imagine #marcus pike x reader #the mentalist

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meta-squash · 4 months

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Squash's Book Roundup 2023

Last year I read 67 books. This year my goal was 70, but I very quickly passed that, so in total I read 92 books this year. Honestly I have no idea how I did it, it just sort of happened. My other goal was to read an equal amount of fiction and nonfiction this year (usually fiction dominates), and I was successful in that as well. Another goal which I didn’t have at the outset but which kind of organically happened after the first month or so of reading was that I wanted to read mostly strange/experimental/transgressive/unusual fiction. My nonfiction choices were just whatever looked interesting or cool, but I also organically developed a goal of reading a wider spread of subjects/genres of nonfiction. A lot of the books I read this year were books I’d never heard of, but stumbled across at work. Also, finally more than 1/3 of what I read was published in the 21st century.

I’ll do superlatives and commentary at the end, so here is what I read in 2023:

-The Commitments by Roddy Doyle -A Simple Story: The Last Malambo by Leila Guerriero -The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell -Uzumaki by Junji Ito -Chroma by Derek Jarman -The Emerald Mile: The epic story of the fastest ride in history through the Grand Canyon by Kevin Fedarko -Venus by Suzan-Lori Parks -The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington -Sacred Sex: Erotic writings from the religions of the world by Robert Bates -The Virginia State Colony For Epileptics And The Feebleminded by Molly McCully Brown -A Spy In The House Of Love by Anais Nin -The Sober Truth: Debunking the bad science behind 12-step programs and the rehab industry by Lance Dodes -The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishima -The Aliens by Annie Baker -The Criminal Child And Other Essays by Jean Genet -Aimee and Jaguar: A Love Story, Berlin 1943 by Erica Fischer -The Master And Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov -The Mustache by Emmanuel Carriere -Maldoror by Comte de Lautreamont -Narrow Rooms by James Purdy -At Your Own Risk by Derek Jarman -Escape From Freedom by Erich Fromm -Countdown: A Subterranean Magazine #3 by Underground Press Syndicate Collective -Fabulosa! The story of Britain's secret gay language by Paul Baker -The Golden Spruce: A true story of myth, madness and greed by John Vaillant -Querelle de Roberval by Kevin Lambert -Fire The Bastards! by Jack Green -Closer by Dennis Cooper -The Woman In The Dunes by Kobo Abe -Opium: A Diary Of His Cure by Jean Cocteau -Worker-Student Action Committees France May '68 by Fredy Perlman and R. Gregoire -Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher -The Sound Of Waves by Yukio Mishima -One Day In My Life by Bobby Sands -Corydon by Andre Gide -Noopiming by Leanne Betasamosake Simpson -Man Alive: A true story of violence, forgiveness and becoming a man by Thomas Page McBee -The Artist's Reality: Philosophies of Art by Mark Rothko -Damage by Josephine Hart -Schoolgirl by Osamu Dazai -The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector -The Sex Revolts: Gender, Rebellion and Rock n Roll by Simon Reynolds and Joy Press -The Traffic Power Structure by planka.nu -Bird Man: The many faces of Robert Straud by Jolene Babyak -Seven Dada Manifestos by Tristan Tzara

-The Journalist by Harry Mathews -Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber -Moscow To The End Of The Line by Venedikt Erofeev -Morvern Callar by Alan Warner -The Poetics Of Space by Gaston Bachelard -A Boy's Own Story by Edmund White -The Coming Insurrection by The Invisible Committee -Jesus' Son by Denis Johnson -Notes From The Sick Room by Steve Finbow -Artaud The Momo by Antonin Artaud -Doctor Rat by William Kotzwinkle -Recollections Of A Part-Time Lady by Minette -trans girl suicide museum by Hannah Baer -The 99% Invisible City by Roman Mars -Sweet Days Of Discipline by Fleur Jaeggy -Breath: The new science of a lost art by James Nestor -What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund -The Cardiff Tapes (1972) by Garth Evans -The Ark Sakura by Kobo Abe -Mad Like Artaud by Sylvere Lotringer -The Story Of The Eye by Georges Bataille -Little Blue Encyclopedia (For Vivian) by Hazel Jane Plante -Blood And Guts In High School by Kathy Acker -Summer Fun by Jeanne Thornton -Splendid's by Jean Genet -VAS: An Opera In Flatland by Steve Tomasula -Sorry I'm Late, I Didn't Want To Come: One introvert's year of saying yes by Jessica Pan -Whores For Gloria by William T. Vollmann -The Notebooks by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Larry Walsh (editor) -L'Astragale by Albertine Sarrazin -The Decay Of Lying and other essays by Oscar Wilde -The Immortal Life Of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot -Open Throat by Henry Hoke -Prisoner Of Love by Jean Genet -The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia -The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx -My Friend Anna: The true story of a fake heiress by Rachel DeLoache Williams -Mammother by Zachary Schomburg -Building The Commune: Radical democracy in Venezuela by George Cicarello-Maher -Blackouts by Justin Torres -Cheapjack by Philip Allingham -Near To The Wild Heart by Clarice Lispector -The Trayvon Generation by Elizabeth Alexander -Skye Papers by Jamika Ajalon -Exercises In Style by Raymon Queneau -Tender Buttons by Gertrude Stein -The Feather Thief: Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century by Kirk Wallace Johnson

~Some number factoids~ I read 46 fiction and 46 nonfiction. One book, The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia, is fictionalized/embellished autobiography, so it could go half in each category if we wanted to do that, but I put it in the fiction category. I tried to read as large a variety of nonfiction subjects/genres as I could. A lot of the nonfiction I read has overlapping subjects, so I’ve chosen to sort by the one that seems the most overarching. By subject, I read: 5 art history/criticism, 5 biographies, 1 black studies, 1 drug memoir, 2 essay collections, 2 history, 2 Latin American studies, 4 literary criticism, 1 music history, 2 mythology/religion, 1 nature, 4 political science, 2 psychology, 5 queer studies, 2 science, 1 sociology, 1 travel, 2 true crime, 3 urban planning. I also read more queer books in general (fiction and nonfiction) than I have in years, coming in at 20 books.

The rest of my commentary and thoughts under a cut because it's fairly long

Here’s a photo of all the books I read that I own a physical copy of (minus Closer by Dennis Cooper which a friend is borrowing):

~Superlatives and Thoughts~

I read so many books this year I’m going to do a runner-up for each superlative category.

Favorite book: This is such a hard question this year. I think I gave out more five-star ratings on Goodreads this year than I ever have before. The books that got 5 stars from me this year were A Simple Story: The Last Malambo by Leila Guerriero, Capitalist Realism by Mark Fisher, The Emerald Mile by Kevin Fedarko, The Mustache by Emmanuel Carriere, The Passion According to GH by Clarice Lispector, trans girl suicide museum by Hannah Baer, The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia, Mammother by Zachary Schomburg, and Blackouts by Justin Torres. But I think my favorite book of the year was The Fifth Wound by Aurora Mattia. It is an embellished, fictionalized biography of the author’s life, chronicling a breakup that occurred just before she began her transition, and then a variety of emotional events afterward and her renewal of a connection with that person after a number of years had passed. The writing style is beautiful, extremely decadent, and sits in a sort of venn diagram of poetry, theory, fantasy and biography. My coworker who recommended this book to me said no one she’d recommended it to had finished it because they found it so weird. I read the first 14 pages very slowly because I didn’t exactly know what the book was doing, but I quickly fell completely in love with the imagery and the formatting style and the literary and religious references that have been worked into the book both as touchstones for biography and as vehicles for fantasy. There is a video I remember first seeing years ago, in which a beautiful pinkish corn snake slithers along a hoop that is part of a hanging mobile made of driftwood and macrame and white beads and prism crystals. This was the image that was in the back of my head the entire time I was reading The Fifth Wound, because it matched the decadence and the strangeness and the crystalline beauty of the language and visuals in the book. It is a pretty intense book, absolutely packed with images and emotion and ideas and preserved vignettes where reality and fantasy and theory overlap. It’s one of those books that’s hard to describe because it’s so full. It’s dense not in that the words or ideas are hard to understand, but in that it’s overflowing with imagery and feelings, and it feels like an overflowing treasure chest. Runner-up:The Mustache by Emmanuel Carriere. However, this book wins for a different superlative, so I’ve written more about it there.

Least favorite book: Querelle de Roberval by Kevin Lambert. I wrote a whole long review of it. In summary, Lambert’s book takes its name from Querelle de Brest, a novel by Jean Genet, and is apparently meant to be an homage to Genet’s work. Unfortunately, Lambert seems to misunderstand or ignore all the important aspects of Genet’s work that make it so compelling, and instead twists certain motifs Genet uses as symbols of love or transcendence into meaningless or negative connotations. He also attempts to use Genet’s mechanic of inserting the author into the narrative and allowing the author to have questionable or conflicting morals in order to emphasize certain aspects of the characters or narrative, except he does so too late in the game and ends up just completely undermining everything he writes. This book made me feel insulted on behalf of Jean Genet and all the philosophical thought he put into his work. Runner-up: What We See When We Read by Peter Mendelsund. This graphic designer claims that when people read they don’t actually imagine what characters look like and can’t conjure up an image in their head when asked something like “What does Jane Eyre look like to you?” Unfortunately, there’s nothing scientific in the book to back this up and it’s mostly “I” statements, so it’s more like “What Peter Mendelsund Sees (Or Doesn’t See) When He Reads”. It’s written in what seems to be an attempt to mimic Marshall McLuhan’s style in The Medium Is The Massage, but it isn’t done very well. I spent most of my time reading this book thinking This does not reflect my experience when I read novels so I think really it’s just a bad book written by someone who maybe has some level of aphantasia or maybe is a visual but not literary person, and who assumes everyone else experiences the same thing when they read. (Another runner-up would be The Hero With A Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell, but I think that’s a given because it’s an awful piece of revisionist, racist trash, so I won’t write a whole thing about it. I can if someone wants me to.)

Most surprising/unexpected book: The Mustache by Emmanuel Carriere. This book absolutely wins for most surprising. However, I don’t want to say too much about it because the biggest surprise is the end. It was the most shocking, most unexpected and bizarre endings to a novel I’ve read in a long time, and I absolutely loved it. It was weird from the start and it just kept getting weirder. The unnamed narrator decides, as a joke, to shave off the moustache he’s had for his entire adult life. When his wife doesn’t react, he assumes that she’s escalating their already-established tradition of little pranks between each other. But then their mutual friends say nothing about the change, and neither do his coworkers, and he starts spiral into confusion and paranoia. I don’t want to spoil anything else because this book absolutely blew me away with its weirdness and its existential dread and anyone who likes weird books should read it. Runner-up: Morvern Callar by Alan Warner. I don’t even know what compelled me to open this book at work, but I’m glad I did. The book opens on Christmas, where the main character, Morvern, discovers her boyfriend dead by suicide on the kitchen floor of their flat. Instead of calling the police or her family, she takes a shower, gets her things and leaves for work. Her narrative style is strange, simultaneously very detached and extremely emotional, but emotional in an abstract way, in which descriptions and words come out stilted or strangely constructed. The book becomes a narrative of Morvern’s attempts to find solitude and happiness, from the wilderness of Scotland to late night raves and beaches in an unnamed Mediterranean city. The entire book is scaffolded by a built-in playlist. Morvern’s narrative is punctuated throughout by accounts of exactly what she’s listening to on her Walkman. The narrative style and the playlist and the bizarre behavior of the main character were not at all what I was expecting when I opened the book, but I read the entire book in about 3 hours and I was captivated the whole time. If you like the Trainspotting series of books, I would recommend this one for sure.

Most fun book: The Emerald Mile by Kevin Fedarko. This book was amazing. It was like reading an adventure novel and a thriller and a book on conservationism all wrapped into one and it was clearly very passionately written and it was a blast. I picked it up because I was pricing it at work and I read the captions on one of the photo inserts, which intrigued me, so I read the first page, and then I couldn’t stop. The two main narratives in the book are the history of the Grand Canyon (more specifically the damming of the Colorado River) and the story of a Grand Canyon river guide called Kenton Grua, who decided with two of his river guide friends to break the world record for fastest boat ride down the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon. The book is thoroughly researched, and reaches back to the first written record of the canyon, then charts the history of the canyon and the river up to 1983 when Grua made his attempt to race down the river, and then the aftermath and what has happened to everyone in the years since. All of the historical figures as well as the “current” figures of 1983 come to life, and are passionately portrayed. It’s a genuine adventure of a book, and I highly recommend it. Runner-up: Summer Fun by Jeanne Thornton. It asks “What if Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys was actually a trans woman?” Actually, that’s not quite it. It asks “What if a trans woman living in poverty in southwest America believed to an almost spiritual level that Brian Wilson was a trans woman?” The main character and narrator, Gala, is convinced that the lead singer of her favorite band, the Get Happies, (a fictional but fairly obvious parallel to the Beach Boys) is a trans woman. Half the book is her writing out her version of the singer’s life history, and the other half is her life working at a hostel in Truth Or Consequences, New Mexico, where she meets a woman who forces her out of her comfort zone and encourages her to face certain aspects of her self and identity and her connection with others. It’s a weird novel, and definitely not for everyone, but it’s fun. I was reading it on the train home and I was so into it that I missed my stop and had to get off at the next station and wait 20 minutes for the train going back the other way.

Book that taught me the most: Breath: The new science of a lost art by James Nestor. In it, Nestor explores why humans as a general population are so bad at breathing properly. He interviews scientists and alternative/traditional health experts, archaeologists, historians and religious scholars. He uses himself as a guinea pig to experiment with different breathing techniques from ancient meditation styles to essentially overdosing on oxygen in a lab-controlled environment to literally plugging his nose shut to only mouth-breathe for two weeks (and then vice-versa with nose breathing). It was interesting to see a bunch of different theories a laid out together regarding what kind of breathing is best, as well as various theories on the history of human physiology and why breathing is hard. Some of it is scientific, some pseudoscience, some just ancient meditation techniques, but he takes a crack at them all. What was kind of cool is that he tries every theory and experiment with equal enthusiasm and doesn’t really seem to favor any one method. Since he’s experimenting on himself, a lot of it is about the effects the experiments had on him specifically and his experiences with different types of breathing. His major emphasis/takeaway is that focusing on breathing and learning to change the ways in which we breathe will be beneficial in the long run (and that we should all breath through our noses more). While I don’t think changing how you breathe is a cure-all (some of the pseudoscience he looks at in this book claims so) I certainly agree that learning how to breath better is a positive goal. Runner-up: The Sober Truth by Lance Dodes. I say runner-up because a lot of the content of the book is things that I had sort of vague assumptions about based on my knowledge of addiction and AA and mental illness in general. But Dodes put into words and illustrated with numbers and anecdotes and case studies what I just kind of had a vague feeling about. It was cool to see AA so thoroughly debunked by an actual psychiatrist and in such a methodical way, since my skepticism about it has mostly been based on the experiences of people I know in real life, anecdotes I’ve read online, or musicians/writers/etc I’m a fan of that went through it and were negatively affected.

Most interesting/thought provoking book: Mammother by Zachary Schomburg. The biggest reason this book was so interesting is because the little world in which it exists is so strange and yet so utterly complete. In a town called Pie Time (where birds don’t exist and the main form of work is at the beer-and-cigarettes factory) a young boy called Mano who has been living his childhood as a girl decides that he is now a man and that it’s time for him to grow up. As this happens, the town is struck by an affliction called God’s Finger. People die seemingly out of nowhere, from a hole in their chest, and some object comes out of the hole. Mano collects the things that come out of these holes, and literally holds them in order to love them, but the more he collects, the bigger he becomes as he adds objects to his body. A capitalist business called XO shows up, trying to convince the people of Pie Time that they can protect themselves from God’s Finger with a number of enterprises, and starts to slowly take over the town. But Mano doesn’t believe death is something that should be run from. This book is so pretty, and the symbolism/metaphors, even when obvious, feel as though they belong organically in the world. A quote on the back of the book says it is “as nearly complete a world as can be”, and I think that’s a very accurate description. The story is interesting, the characters are compelling, and the magical realist world in which the story exists is fascinating. Runner up: trans girl suicide museum by Hannah Baer. This is a series of essays taken (for the most part) from Baer’s blog posts. They span a chunk of time in which she writes her thoughts and musings on her experience transition and transgender existence in general. It is mostly a series of pieces reflecting on “early” stages of transition. But I thought it was really cool to see an intellectual and somewhat philosophical take on transition, written by someone who has only been publicly out for a few years, and therefore is looking at certain experiences with a fresh gaze. As the title suggests, a lot of the book is a bit sad, but it’s not all doom and gloom. A lot of the emphasis is on the important of community when it comes to the experience of starting to transition and the first few years, and the importance of community on the trans experience in general. I really liked reading Hannah Baer’s thoughts as a queer intellectual who was writing about this stuff as she experienced it (or not too long after) rather than writing about the experience of early transition years and years down the line. It meant the writing was very sharp and the emotion was clear and not clouded by nostalgia.

Other thoughts/commentary on books I don’t have superlatives for:

I’m glad my first (full) book read in 2023 was A Simple Story: The Last Malambo by Leila Guierrero. It’s a small, compact gem of a book that follows the winner of an Argentinian dance competition. The Malambo is a traditional dance, and the competition is very fierce, and once someone wins, they can never compete again. The author follows the runner-up of the previous year, who has come to compete again. It paints a vivid picture of the history of the dance, the culture of the competition, and the character of the dancer the author has chosen to follow. It’s very narrowly focused, which makes it really compelling.

The Hearing Trumpet by Leonora Carrington could have easily won for most fun or most interesting book. Carrington was a surrealist writer and painter (and was in a relationship with Max Ernst until she was institutionalized and he was deported by the Nazis). In The Hearing Trumpet, an elderly woman called Marian is forced by her family to go live in an old ladies’ home. The first strange thing about the place is that all of the little cabins each woman lives in is shaped like some odd object, like an iron, or ice cream, or a rabbit. The other old women at the institution are a mixed bag, and the warden of the place is hostile. Marian starts to suspect that there are secrets, and even witchcraft involved, and she and a few of the other ladies start to try and unravel the occult mysteries hidden in the grounds of the home. The whole book is fun and strange, and the ending is an extremely entertaining display of feminist occult surrealism.

Sacred Sex: Erotica writings from the religions of the world by Robert Bates was a book I had to read for research for my debunking of Withdrawn Traces. It was really very interesting, but it was also hilarious to read because maybe 5% of any of the texts included were actually erotic. It should have been called “romantic writings from the religions of the world” because so little of the writing had anything to do with sex, even in a more metaphorical sense.

Every time I read Yukio Mishima I’m reminded how much I love his style. The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea almost usurped The Temple of the Golden Pavilion as my favorite Mishima novel. I’m fascinated with the way that Mishima uses his characters to explore the circumstance of having very intense feelings or reactions towards something and simultaneously wanting to experience that, while also wanting to have complete control and not feel them at all. There’s a scene in this novel where Noboru and his friends brutally kill and dissect a cat; it’s an intense and vividly rendered scene, made all the more intense by Noboru desperately conflicted between feeling affected by the killing and wanting to force himself to feel nothing. The amazing subtle theme running through the book is the difference between Noboru’s intense emotions and his desire/struggle to control them and subdue them versus Ryuji’s more subtle emotion that grows through the book despite his natural reserve. I love endings like the one in this book, where it “cuts to black” and you don’t actually see the final act, it’s simply implied.

In 2016 or 2017, I ran lights for a showcase for the drama department at UPS (I can’t remember now what it was) that included a bunch of scenes from various plays. I remember a segment from Hir by Taylor Mac, and a scene from The Aliens by Annie Baker. In the scene that I saw, one of the characters describes how when he was a boy, he couldn’t stop saying the word ladder, and the monologue culminates in a full paragraph that is just the word “ladder.” I can’t remember who was acting in the one that I saw at UPS, but that monologue blew me away, the way that one word repeated 127 conveyed so much. This year a collection of Annie Baker’s plays came in at work so I sat down and read the whole play and it was just incredible. I’d love to see the full play live, it’s absolutely captivating.

Narrow Rooms by James Purdy was a total diamond in the rough. It takes place in Appalachia, in perhaps the 1950s although it’s somewhat hard to tell. It follows the strange gay entanglement between four adult men in their 20s, who have known each other all their lives. It traces threads of bizarre codependency, and the lines crossed between love and hate. The main character, Sidney, has just returned home after serving a sentence for manslaughter. On his return, he finds that an old lover has been rendered disabled in an accident, and that an old school rival/object of obsession has been waiting for him. This rival, nicknamed “The Renderer” because of an old family occupation, has been watching Sidney all their lives. Both of them hate the other, but know that they’re destined to meet in some way. Caught in the middle of their strange relationship are Gareth, Sidney’s now-disabled former lover, and Brian, a young man who thinks he’s in love with The Renderer. The writing style took me some time to get used to, as it is written as though by someone who has taught themselves, or has only had basic classes on fiction writing. But the plot itself is so strange and the characters are so stilted in their own internality that it actually fits really well. Like The Mustache, this book had one of the strangest, most intensely visceral and shocking endings I’ve read in a while. It was also “one that got away.” I read it at work, then put it on my staff picks shelf, and only realized after someone else bought it that I should have kept it for myself.

The Passion According to G.H. by Clarice Lispector blew my mind. I really don’t want to spoil any of it, but I highly encourage anyone who hasn’t read it to do. The build in tension is perfect and last 30 pages are just incredible. Lispector’s style is so unique and so beautiful and tosses out huge existential questions like it’s nothing, and I love her work so much.

Moscow To The End Of The Line by Venedikt Erofeev was another really unexpected book. It’s extremely Russian (obviously) and really fun until suddenly it isn’t. The main character, a drunkard, gets on a train from Moscow to Petushki, the town at the end of the line (hence the title), in order to see his lover. On the way, he befriends the other people in his train car and they all steadily get drunker and drunker, until he falls asleep and misses his stop. Very Russian, somewhat strange, and I was surprised that it was written in the late 60s and not the 30s.

Dr. Rat by William Kotzwinkle was what I expected. Weird in a goofy way, a bit silly even when it’s serious, and rather heavy-handed satire. The titular Dr Rat is a rat who has spent his whole life in a laboratory and has gone insane. The other animals who are being tested on want to escape, but he’s convinced that all the testing is for the good of science and wants to thwart their rebellion. Unfortunately, all the other animals who are victims of human cruelty/callousness/invasion/deforestation/etc around the world are also planning to rebel, connection with each other through a sort of psychic television network. It’s a very heavy-handed environmentalist/anti-animal cruelty metaphor and general societal satire, but it’s silly and fun too.

Confessions Of A Part-Time Lady by Minette is a self-published, nearly impossible to find book that came into my work. It’s self-printed and bound, and was published in the 70s. It is the autobiographical narrative of a trans woman who did drag and burlesque and theatre work all across the midwest, as well as New York and San Francisco, from the 1930s up to the late 60s. It was originally a series of interviews by the two editors, who published it in narrative form, and it includes photos from Minette’s personal collection. It’s an amazing story, and a glimpse into a really unique time period of gender performance and queer life. She even mentions Sylvia Rivera, specifically when talking about gay activism. She talks about how the original group of the Gay Liberation Front was an eclectic mix of all sorts of people of all sexualities and genders and expressions. Then when the Gay Activists Alliance “took over”, they started pushing out people who were queer in a more transgressive or unusual way and there was more encouragement on being more heteronormative. She mentions Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson, saying “I remember Sylvia Rivera who founded STAR – Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries. She was always trying to say things – the same kinds of things Marsha P Johnson says in a sweeter way – and they treated her like garbage. If that’s what ‘order’ is, haven’t we had enough?”

Whores For Gloria by William T Vollmann was exactly as amazing as I thought it would be. I love Vollmann’s style, because you can tell that even though the characters he’s writing about are characters, they’re absolutely based on people that he met or saw or spoke to in real life. The main character, Jimmy, is searching for his former lover, Gloria, who has either died or left him (it is unclear for most of the novel). He begins to use tokens bought from sex workers (hair, clothes, etc) to attempt to conjure her into reality, and when that doesn’t work, he pays them to tell him stories from their lives, and through their lives he tries to conjure Gloria. This novel’s ending had extremely similar vibes to the ending of Moscow To The End Of The Line.

Prisoner Of Love by Jean Genet was a lot to take in. It was weird reading it at this moment in time, and completely unplanned. It’s just that I have only a few more books to read before I’ve made my way through all Genet’s works that have been translated into English, and it was next on the list. Most of the book focuses on Genet’s time spent in Palestine in the 70s and his short return in the 80s. He also discusses the time he spent with the Black Panthers in the US, although it’s not the main subject of the book. Viewing Palestine from the point of view of Genet’s weird philosophical and moral worldview was really interesting, because what he chooses to spend time looking at or talking about is probably not what most would focus on, and because even his most political discussions are tinged with the uniquely Genet-style spirituality (if you can call it that? I don’t know what to call it) that is so much the exact opposite of objective. It’s definitely not a book about Palestine I would recommend reading without also having a grasp of Genet’s style of looking at the world and his various obsessions and preoccupations, because they really do inform a lot of his commentary. It was also written 15 years after his first trip to Palestine, partly from memory and partly from journal entries/notes, which gives it a sort of weirdly dreamlike quality much like his novels.

Blackouts by Justin Torres was so amazing! It blends real life and fiction together so well that I didn’t even realize that most of the people he references in the novel are real historical figures until he mentioned Ben Reitman, who I recognized as the Chicago King Of The Hobos and Emma Goldman’s lover. The book follows an unnamed narrator who has come to a hotel or apartment in the southwest in order to care for a dying elderly man called Juan Gay. Juan has a book called Sex Variants, a study of homosexuality from the 1940s which has been censored and blacked out. Back and forth, the narrator and Juan trade stories. The narrator tells his life story up until the present, including his first meeting with Juan in a mental hospital as a teenager. In turn, Juan tells the story of the Sex Variants book and its creator, Jan Gay (Ben Reitman’s real life daughter). The book explores the reliability of narrative, the power of collecting and documenting life stories, and of removing or changing things in order to create new or different narratives.

Again, Clarice Lispector rocking my world! Generally I can read a 200-ish page novel in somewhere between 2 and 4 hours depending on the content/writing style. Near To The Wild Heart took me 9 hours to read because I kept wanting to stop and reread entire paragraphs because they were so interesting or pretty or philosophical. The story focuses on Joana, whose strange way of looking at the world and going through life makes everyone sort of wary of her. This book is so layered I don’t really know how to describe it. So much of it is philosophical or existential musings through the vehicle of Joana. Unsurprisingly, it’s a beautiful book and I highly recommend it.

I’m just going to copy/paste my Goodreads review for Skye Papers by Jamika Ajalon: This book had so much potential that just…fell short. I could tell that it was written for an American audience but the way the reader/Skye is “taught” certain British terms and/or slang felt a bit patronizing. The characters were fleshed out and interesting and I liked them a lot but the plot crumbled quickly in the last half of the book Things sped up to a degree that felt strange and unnatural, the book’s pacing was inconsistent throughout. Perhaps that was deliberate considering the reveal at the climax, but if it was, it should have been utilized better. If the inconsistent pacing wasn’t deliberate, then it just made the book feel strange to read. There were moments were I felt like there should have been more fleshing out of certain character relationships. Even with the reveal at the end and the explanation of Pieces’ erratic/avoidant behavior, I wish there had been more fleshing out of the relationship or friendship between her and Skye at the beginning, when Skye first arrives in London. Characters who seemed cool/interesting got glossed over and instead there was a lot more dwelling on Skye walking around or busking or just hanging out. I could have gone without the last 30 or so pages after the big reveal, where Skye went back through everything that happened with the knowledge she (and the reader) had gained. It dragged on and on and at that point I felt like the whole story was so contrived that I just wasn’t interested anymore. A friend who read this book before I did said she thought it was an experimental novel that just hadn’t gone far enough, and I completely agree with her. I think if the style with the film script interludes went further, into printed visuals or more weirdness with the interludes, more experimental style with the main story, or something, it would have been really good. It just didn’t push hard enough.

The Feather Thief by Kirk Wallace Johnson was a fun little true crime novel about a young flautist who broke into a small English natural history museum in 2009 and stole hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of preserved rare bird skins dating back to the 19th century. He was a salmon fly-tying enthusiast and prodigy, and old Victorian fly designs used feathers of rare birds. The book first goes through the heist and the judicial proceedings, then examines the niche culture of Victorian fly-tying enthusiasts and obsessives, and then chronicles the author’s attempts to track down some of the missing birds. It was a quick, easy read, but fun and an unusual subject and I quite enjoyed it.

In 2024 I don’t plan on trying to surpass or even reach this year’s number. I’m going to start off the year reading The Recognitions by William Gaddis, then I’m going to re-read a number of books that I come across at work or in conversation and think Huh, I should reread that one of these days. So far, the books I am currently planning to reread: Sometimes A Great Notion by Ken Kesey, As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner, The People Of Paper by Salvador Plascencia, Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf, The Mustache by Emmanuel Carriere, McGlue by Otessa Moshfegh, Long Day’s Journey Into Night by Eugene O’Neil, Acid Snow by Larry Mitchell, and Nightwood by Djuna Barnes.

#reading list #book list #book roundup #reading list year in review #books #squash rambles #reading year in review #book list roundup

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