2021, it's been real
Hi, friends!
This is the last newsletter of 2021, can you believe it? It’s been a very newslettery year. I’ve sent forty-five total newsletters to your inboxes; nearly twenty of those, beginning in April, were The Dark Age letters. I want to thank you all for spending a little time with me this year. I’ve heard from some of you that these letters have been useful to your own projects, or just your own peace of mind during a fractured year. Well, hearing from you has been the same for me.
It’s time to look back at a year of reading. The pandemic has changed my reading habits in unanticipated ways. I’ve gone through stretches of time where I simply couldn’t handle books with serious subject matter, and other stretches where I couldn’t handle books at all, and just read comics. I’ve veered from nonfiction to novels, from novels to craft books, from craft books to memoirs. It’s been an all-over-the-place kind of year.
In 2021, I began reading 117 books. Surprisingly, I only abandoned 22 of these. That’s only .0003472%! (Don’t check my math.) Most of the books I quit reading fall into the “now’s not the right time” category, not the “this book is 100% not for me” category; I’ll circle back to them and give them another try, perhaps even in 2022.
These books really stood out to me this year:
- Welcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube: Chasing Fear and Finding Home in the Great White North, by Blair Braverman
- In the Quick, by Kate Hope Day
- The Office of Historical Corrections, by Danielle Evans
- Weather and Dept. of Speculation, by Jenny Offill
- Light From Uncommon Stars, by Ryka Aoki
- Naomi, Season One, by Brian Michael Bendis
- Factory Summers, by Guy Delisle
- Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro
- Several Short Sentences About Writing, by Verlyn Klinkenborg
- Severance, by Ling Ma
- Superman Smashes the Klan, by Gene Luen Yang
Over on my web site, I wrote a bit about each of those books, if you’re interested in learning more about them. (And you can see everything I read this year, and in previous years, right here.)
Finding books to read was a little harder this year. Even while some parts of the world were trying to reassert some form of “normalcy” in 2021, particularly after the mass availability of COVID vaccines, our family stayed home. It’s been a couple of years now since I’ve been in a bookshop or library. I used to visit Powell’s Books in Portland on a regular basis, where I’d wander with no objective, and return home with a sack or two of new things to read, often things I’d never have stumbled across otherwise. Without that ability this year, it wasn’t always easy to find new authors to try out.
But I did find some! I read Hiromi Kawakami’s People From My Neighborhood, a collection of surreal vignettes about a Japanese village and the strange things that happen to the unusual people who live there. I found Jason Schreier’s books about the gaming industry, Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made and Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry, just before the big news about bad behavior at major game studios broke this year. I discovered Escape Routes, a book of short stories by Naomi Ishiguro, and Shady Characters: The Secret Life of Punctuation, Symbols, and Other Typographical Marks, by Keith Houston. I read some terrific Superman books, like Superman for All Seasons by Jeph Loeb and Secret Identity by Kurt Busiek. I read Tamara Shopsin’s little novel about working in a ’90s-era Mac repair shop, LaserWriter II, and Jonas Karlsson’s weird little book The Invoice. I went from Claire L. Evans’s Broad Band: The Untold Story of the Women Who Made the Internet to John Feinstein’s Where Nobody Knows Your Name: Life in the Minor Leagues of Baseball to Oliver Burkeman’s The Antidote: Happiness for People Who Can’t Stand Positive Thinking.
Writing has alternately been a significant challenge and a steady effort this year. When early in the year a finished novel didn’t move forward, I switched my focus to The Dark Age, a novel-length adaptation of a short story I wrote in 2014. A ghostwriting project I’ve been working on also sold recently, so I’m enjoying a completely new experience at the same time, adapting a story from another medium to a novel. The pandemic has, as it has for all of us, thoroughly upended my most reliable writing habits. I am still trying to find new routines that will carry me steadily forward. And hey, sometimes that’s the whole point of this newsletter: To work through those challenges, and share what I’m learning as I go.
There are a few days left before the new year arrives, and while it promises to be more of the same global uncertainty, it’s also the year I anticipate I’ll finish two books, and start a third. And who knows what the third one will be? I have an idea file where I jot down little snatches of stories that might one day be worth exploring further. Let’s pick one at random:
Self-driving car is programmed for trip across the U.S., but driver dies. Car delivers occupant to hospital, then continues the journey alone.
There we go. A poignant story of an autonomous vehicle and the sights it takes in as it travels solo cross-country. Maybe until its battery runs out, though, since without a driver, it would have no one to plug it in at a charging station. But at its heart, this is just the story of the one unique robot among a fleet of drones, isn’t it? It’s The Iron Giant or Wall-E or Ron’s Gone Wrong or A.I.: Artificial Intelligence or any number of other things. (I love all of those stories.)
Okay, here’s another random one:
What is the inner life of a sign twirler?
Oh, I don’t want to write that story. I don’t even remember writing this one down. When did I write it down? Lemme see…2013. Hey, 2013 Jason, nobody wants to read that story. (If you can think of someone who wants to read that story, the idea is yours. Have at it!)
Instead, how about:
A woman who cuts her own hair can’t see the back of her head, so she clones herself.
I sort of love this one. Someone going to extreme lengths to solve a mundane problem is always interesting. What do you do with the cloned self when it isn’t helping you cut your hair? Is it even moral to believe you get to choose what it does? Was it moral to create a new person solely to serve you? There’s some interesting complexity here. (And all of it was answered years and years ago by Calvin & Hobbes, wasn’t it? Or by Multiplicity or Orphan Black or Westworld or something.)
Well, whatever I write after The Dark Age and my ghost project, I’ll think about it later.
In the meantime: I hope you and yours have wrung as much joy as possible out of an unruly year, and that you’ll do the same to 2022. Thank you again for spending a little of your time with me. It’s been my pleasure to spend it with you.
✏️Until next time,
Jg
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