Silver Carp at Bear Creek Lake
I’ve been a dad for thirteen years now, which is impossible, first because I never wanted kids, was dead set against it until I randomly wasn’t, and second because there’s no way it’s been that long. It was just yesterday that *** and I were fishing with sticks for invasive silver carp over at Bear Creek Lake, hauling in carp after carp and catching the occasional whale shark, which we always threw back, just yesterday that he finally learned to ride his bike on his own because he saw his little friend Kai doing it, just yesterday that he became a big brother. I don’t believe it but I am confronted with the fact of his height. I’m six feet—plus half an inch, a half-inch that God gave me to mock me, to tantalize me—in bare feet and the boy is, at thirteen, almost as tall as me now. Soon he’ll hit six foot, and I’ll still have my little half-inch to hang on to, but that will buy only so much time and one day I’ll wake up shorter than my son even though it was just yesterday that I could lift him up and throw him in the sky.
Ever since becoming a father I don’t sleep well. I don’t sleep soundly, nor for long stretches, waking up at the slightest sound, a fact my dog takes great advantage of, waking up every couple hours no matter what. Sometimes I can get right back to sleep, and other times it’s a struggle. Last night, for instance, I woke up, and I began planning an essay I need to write for the Malarkey newsletter, and then that put me on the path of planning something for Good Reads, which I’ve been neglecting. I am going to write a close reading of a poem that was published in Taco Bell Quarterly for my Good Reads column in the next issue of King Ludd’s Rag. That will be in print, but we’ll also have a PDF for sale for cheap online, and I’ll be happy to send the PDF for free to anyone who wants it. I’m keeping the title of the poem confidential until it’s out though. I’ve also been meaning to do a roundup of the books I’ve read in 2025 for the online half of Good Reads, and the rest of this space will be devoted to that. In future, these posts will go a little more in depth into the books I read, but for this one it will be mostly a list, with a little bit of commentary or memory or context.
This list will be out of order and I will most likely forget a couple titles, but here goes:
The Tragedy of Macbeth by William Shakespeare: I read this a couple times as I was teaching it in the third quarter of the school year. For the past two years I was a special education teacher, and part of my day was teaching what are called resource classes, with smaller groups of students who are not in general education classes. (I got hired as a gen ed teacher for the fall, so I will be changing roles, and changing rooms—goodybe, little closet room.) Resource classes often follow a different curriculum, but I’m very proud that we read grade-level work all year and followed the general education curriculum for the most part, with a lot of scaffolding and some modification, and I’m very proud of my students. Readers of King Ludd’s Rag might have noticed that I used a quote from Macbeth in the last issue: “Each new morn / New widows howl, new orphans cry, new sorrows / Strike heaven on the face . . . “(IV.iii.5-7). We have the full play in our textbook, but I usually read from the Arden edition, a copy I used when I taught Macbeth for the first time, as a TA for Felicia Bonaparte at The City College of New York.
Shakespeare: The World as a Stage by Bill Bryson. A delightful, and short, biography of Bill Shakespeare. I would sometimes read little bits from it in class. I remember reading a section describing all the weird things you could be arrested for in Shakespeare’s time, as well as a passage about what London would have smelled like. I got this from the library, but I need to pick up a copy to use in class again.
Winter’s Bone by Daniel Woodrell. This was my first time reading it and I mostly liked it. You would think I’d have read it before, but I never was interested, and it’s still the only thing by Woodrell I’ve read. My uncle had a brief role in Ride with the Devil, which is based on one of Woodrell’s other books, and I probably ought to read that one. One of my colleages reached out to Woodrell’s agent to see if he would speak to our students, but he declined.
Ozark Dogs by Eli Cranor. Cranor is from Arkansas, like my wife, and I wanted to like it out of solidarity, but, to be honest, I did not. The epigraph is a quote from Winter’s Bone, but the writing is not as lyrical as Woodrell’s, and the characters and plot, for me, and I’m just one guy, don’t make up for the flat prose. Sorry. I’m sorry.
Sky Daddy by Kate Folk. I enjoyed this. I first encountered Folk’s work on twitter when someone shared one of her short stories. I would like to read her story collection, Out There. Sky Daddy was funny and weird. We were discussing figurative language in my cotaught classes at the same time I was reading this, and I copied out some similes and metaphors from the book to read in class and they went over pretty well. The figurative language in the book is often amusing, and we were able to see how Folk used simile and metaphor to build character. Students didn’t know anything about the main character other than what I told them (a young woman who wants to marry a plane) and what they could glean from the handful of similes and metaphors I brought in, but from those they were able to deduce a lot, accurately, about her.
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner. I picked Sky Daddy and Creation Lake up on Independent Bookstore Day at The Literary Cat, a small bookstore/cat rescue in Pittsburg, KS. It’s a wonder to me, a wonder for which I’m thankful, that a small town like Pittsburg is able to sustain two indie bookstores, the other being Books & Burrows. It is a college town, but it’s a small college. I try to buy books at both places whenever I can. There was a magic little period where if I wanted a book I could usually just go buy it, but I had to get a new car recently, and while it’s nice driving a car that has air conditioning, doesn’t rattle, and doesn’t break down every day, this car payment is going to fuck up my TBR pile. I wanted to read this book because Brandon Taylor wrote a really negative review about it, the kind of review that I have wanted to write before, when I was younger, the kind of review where I pan the book just to show the world how clever I am, how much better of a writer I am. I would not want to write that kind of a review now. Perhaps I’m being unfair. The online literary world has its darlings and Taylor has long been one and it could be that alone that I don’t like about him. I know he’s smart and talented and I’m sure he has many great qualities and it’s also true that I, personally, am not really a fan, and that could be because I’m jealous, or because I’m stupid, possibly both. But he wrote this pretty mean review of Creation Lake and that made me want to read it. I read it. I liked it. I loved the emails from Bruno. The narrator is an asshole, but you can feel her being seduced by Bruno’s emails throughout. I have the same thought about the endings of Sky Daddy, Creation Lake, and the next book on my list, which is that I didn’t care for or about them. They didn’t ruin the books for me though.
The Perks of Being a Wallflower by Stephen Chobsky. I had never read this, but it’s fairly popular among students. One of my students told me I had to read it, so I did, and I thought it was wonderful, even if I didn’t like the ending. I read this book at the same time I was reading Sky Daddy and there were so many parallels between the main characters, both out of place people searching for connection and meaning. Aren’t we all? I sometimes wonder if there are people who feel totally at home, both in their bodies and in their communities and families and geographies, and if that is possible what it is like. I will never know.
Grendel by John Gardner. I didn’t really care for it. I wanted to.
Pride and Prejudice. First book I read this year, actually. I bought a new copy with a Books a Million gift card after Christmas, my other copy being old and with really small print. An absolute blast. I loved it. Probably been seventeen years since I first read it.
Butcher’s Crossing by John Williams. Brutal and hard and very good.
Hey You Assholes by Kyle Seibel. I actually wrote about this one: “Non-review of Kyle Seibel’s Book.” As I was thinking about this list in the middle of the night, I had this thought: say what you want about Stu but he had pretty good taste. Stu was the guy behind Bear Creek Gazette which morphed into Bear Creek Press which was going to publish Kyle’s book and a bunch of others until it didn’t. I actually preordered Hey You Assholes from Bear Creek and lost $20, like a lot of people. People have theories; I still think don’t think it was anything malicious or deliberate. I think Stu got in over his head and freaked out. I could be wrong. I actually met Stu one time. He had come to the states for love, before all the book stuff went down. As far as I know they’re still together. He came down to my house one day with Holly, who lived up around Loveland, Colorado, I think. They came and met me in Denver, and we walked up and had a really nice lunch at this place called Kahlo’s on Morrison Road. It’s named after the artist. The owner also had a place on Federal, a very small space, and Kahlo’s was much bigger. There was also a lot of turnover at this location, and I hope it’s still Kahlo’s but I’ve been gone for five years now, which is impossible, and it could be anything now. I’m not going to try to find out because I want it to be Kahlo’s still. Kahlo’s served Mexican food, with a focus on Michoacán dishes. I remember this meal because it’s still the last time I’ve had mole, and it was the last time I ate in a restaurant for quite a long time because later that week we all started doing social distancing hardcore. I was thinking about this last night, and when I finally got back to sleep I dreamed I was driving down Morrison Road, and Kahlo’s had changed ownership and was now called Motate: A Party Restaurant. I went inside and it did look very festive. I miss Denver sometimes, right now especially. The next time I went out to eat, inside a restaurant, was at Cici’s Pizza in Joplin, Missouri, which is pretty depressing.
Erasure by Percival Everett. Fantastic. If I had read this novel earlier in life I would not have wasted so much time writing and trying to sell a book called Barn Again. I’ve also read The Trees, James, and Damned If I Do, all excellent.
The Barre Incidents by Lauren Bolger.
My Ardent Love for the Pencil by Vi Khi Nao.
Detective Novel by Craig Rodgers. These three I read for Malarkey. Craig’s book actually comes out tomorrow. I’m not going to say much about them because I’m not trying to go into sell mode. I read at least part of more than 150 books (some I read entirely, others I read maybe five to ten pages, others I read pretty deep but not all the way) since people sent them to see if Malarkey would publish them. Here’s what I ended up selecting.
Intermezzo by Sally Rooney. This is my least favorite Rooney novel. I struggled to get into it but I ultimately did, even though I kind of disliked both of the main characters.
This year I’ve been trying to read more poems, but I don’t think I’ve read a complete collection, aside from Vi Khi Nao’s. I’ve dropped off a bit over the summer but as I gear up for the coming school year I’m going to be reading more poems to bring into the classroom. I have not read it cover to cover yet but I picked up Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World by Pádraig Ó Tuama after listening to the Poetry Unbound podcast. Ó Tuama has the most enchanting voice and I could listen to him talk nonsense, but the nice thing is he has a lot of very insightful and thoughtful things to say about the poems he reads, both on the podcast and in this book, and I think it is a gift to the world. I really like the concept of poetry opening your world, and I think that is a frame I will use in class. I haven’t said this aloud to anyone, but my plan for this school year is to begin every week with a poem. Something that perhaps connects to the larger text we’re working with, something I can tie in to the all-important standards, but more importantly something that has the potential to open worlds. Happy Monday, we’re going to read a poem. There’s no bell work. There’s no homework. There’s just this poem. We’re going to read it. We’re going to think about it. Then we’re going to talk about it.
Sixteen books? Is that all? It seems impossible. I know I’ve read more, but I didn’t keep track. I didn’t write it down. Anything I marked on Goodreads—you will come to see there is a bad Goodreads and a good Good Reads—is gone because I deleted my account. I’ll keep better track in here, and write some things about the books, and I hope write about some poems I like or some stories I like, or anything, when I have time. Why would anyone read this? I only have forty some subscribers so the answer could easily be they won’t. So why am I writing it? It’s not for fame and it’s not for money. It’s not for posterity. Posterity doesn’t exist for a writer like me, and probably it won’t exist for any of us. It will all be wiped out, of course, when humans go extinct, but I worry culture and literature and art will be wiped out even before that, by tech dependence, by war, by poverty, by authoritarian control, by the dissolution of civilization, so maybe that’s the reason. And unlike sleep, I can’t do it when I’m dead.