Tsundoku is a Japanese word for acquiring reading materials and letting them pile up without reading them. Welcome to my weekly reading blog, Halloween Edition.
OooOOoooOOOoooOoooOOo!!!! [said like ghost]
Happy Halloween! Best holiday ever! Long live the dead!
This week, we consider my favorite horror novel from 2023, some great Halloween-y medium pieces, a perverted stoner cartoon witch, and my coveted Favorite Pile of the Week Award… goes to rocks?!
Need a Halloween read? How to Sell a Haunted House is perfect. I couldn’t put it down! When parents die, splitting an estate sounds like a living nightmare! In Grady Hendrix’s newest novel, estranged siblings figure out how to sell their dead parent’s house, but things are complicated because demonic puppets haunt the house! Aunt Honey says, “There’s always drama once money’s involved.” And that’s true, relatable, and scary without the puppets. The sibling relationship was perfectly rendered, how their childhood and parent traumas impacted their adult lives. I appreciated the smaller cast than Final Girl Support Group or Vampire Bookclub because Hendrix dug deep and considered family, death, free real estate, and all the excellent horror novel stuff. It’s also got a clear moral: beware of Pupkin!
Zachariah Bassett’s visualization of Pupkin: Credit — Zachariash Bassett
Comics
Megg, Owl, Werewolf Jones and Jaxon Jones, by Simon Hanselmann — Credit: Fantagraphics
Megg and Mogg are a Halloween treat! A witch, a werewolf, a cursed black cat, a boogeywoman, but they’re all normal and have relatable mental problems. You can read tons of strips on his Instagram. Plus, all the collections are on Hoopla.
But be forewarned!
These funny comics evoke a horrific sense of dread, of the hopelessness of 21st-century life, how trying to be a person who feels monstrous. Funny, vulgar, sad, relatable: it’s those good comics!
Pile of the Week
This weekend, my partner and I stranded ourselves on an island. Here, you can see a pile of rocks used to block the wind for a fire pit. Now that’s a helpful pile! It received the Pile of the Week award.
A pile of rocks for making a fire — Credit: Author’s Photograph
Did you read or write anything about Halloween this week? How about a pile? Do you want me to show me a pile? Go ahead, show me in the comments!
Tsundoku Book Piles 003, originally posted on Medium, 10/22/2023
I read some books about 1970s paranoia. Stick around until the end to see my new pile this week.
What did you read this week? I’m legit curious! I’m not just saying this for engagement baiting! Tell me! Comment below.
Books:
Two books about hippies and intense paranoia.
Agents of Chaos Sean Howe 2023, Hachette
Wild read! Easily a personal favorite of mine for 2023. Tom King Forçade was a lot of things, most famously the publisher of High Times, but also a drug smuggler, hippie, radical subversive, cannabis advocate, First Amendment crusader, and possible federal agent or criminal informant. Fans of CHAOS: Charles Manson, The CIA and the Secret History of the 60s by Tom O’Neil, and Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream by Dave McGowan (RIP!) must check this out. I’ll write a longer post about the specifics soon.
I grew up loving “subversive” stuff: rock music, pot, High Times, William S. Burroughs and Alan Ginsberg, hippie things. The above books reveal everything “subversive” might be a calculated attempt to reify power by the US military. It’s destabilizing. Beliefs I hold deeply (free speech, for example) were used for pro-market propaganda in an abstract fight with the Soviet Union. And that fight extends to the battle for oil rights, the blood that keeps empires running.
Agents of Chaos by Sean Howe — Credit: Hachette
Inherent Vice Thomas Pynchon 2007, Penguin
With that context, I had to pick up Inherent Vice again.
I never really understood Pynchon’s pessimism until now. Are the paranoid narrators paranoid if they correctly intuit every bad thing about to happen? The eternal question.
But do any of our paranoiacs (Zoyd, Doc, Slothrop) make out better than where they start? Nope.
P.I. Doc Sportello is funny but also a bummer, man. Stuck in the past, a mental cloud of smoke, confused and hapless, singular in his purpose of forgotten love.
This book makes me feel bad for baby boomers. People often mock the generation because they often had material opportunities and yet remain resentful about nonsense culture wars. But that might be because they were psy-op’d into the intense confusion of 1967–1971. When some Americans tried organizing for a better society, the police state crushed them and the chance for a better world.
Of course, there are strange synchronicities to contemporary violence: housing projects in the desert, the quest for power, and free real estate.
This might be my favorite novel. Here’s a line that always cracks me up.
Inherent Vice — Credit: Penguin
Killers of the Flower Moon: David Grann 2017, Vintage
Everybody’s talking about Martin Scorcese’s three-and-a-half-hour epic western crime drama! I saw it this week and enjoyed it. I sat motionless for 206 minutes! I never do that! I also read the book earlier this year and reread it this weekend to write a piece about what the movie left out. Follow me if you want to see it sometime this week!
Robert DeNiro as Bill Hale in Killers of the Flower Moon — Credit: Apple
The New Pile
I cannot help myself. Prime Day had a sale on some books I’ve meant to read or reread, and even a virtuous library user like me gets tempted when the devil offers good books for under $10.
My latest pile — Credit: photo, the author
Thank you for considering my piles. As always, I pine to know what’s on YOUR pile! Comment below! Let’s see those piles, people!
Don’t be shy! What did you read and enjoy this week?
Tsundoku is a Japanese word for acquiring reading materials and letting them pile up without reading them. Welcome to my (second) weekly pile recap blog.
Stick Around To The Conclusion To See My Raw, Unadulterated Piles
Books/Audiobooks
A Philip Marlowe mystery, some strange horror, and a work of Marxism.
The Second Murderer By Denise Mina 2023, Mulholland Books
Raymond Chandler’s been dead for 69 years, and The Second Murderer is the sixth “authorized” Marlowe novel. Chandler wrote seven. How does Denise Mina’s new rendition stack up?
I liked The Second Murderer! A twisty story told by a voice-y Marlowe in a steamy, political 1940s LA. Mina does a fantastic imitation of the Marlowe voice. Her Phil’s still dry, quippy, mean, honest, and fiercely loyal to unspoken ideals.
Marlowe is summoned to a mansion on Santa Monica Boulevard by a rich, wealthy oil-drilling family. They want him to find their missing daughter and offer good money plus expenses. Marlowe’s too smart. He sees their motive. They want to hire a two-bit, one-man private eye outfit because they don’t want to find the girl. They think he’s a bum. That’s the perfect motivation for Marlowe to prove them wrong!
That is, until a familiar fling from Farewell, My Lovely, gets in Marlowe’s way. It’s more fun if I don’t tell you who it is. She started her private eye firm with Daddy’s police contacts in Bay City, and the rich jerks hired her, too. Marlowe and her compete to find the girl and also maybe fall in love? She was my favorite part of the book, and if there’s a sequel, I hope she returns. Marlowe also visits some LA neighborhoods he never frequented much, Skid Row, South Central, and a little lesbian bar Raymond Chandler would have never known existed.
It’s interesting to see how Marlowe adapts over time. This book seems written with women readers in mind, with a romance subplot, a majority of women cast, and historical discussions of lesbianism. Marlowe’s stories were initially published in men’s fiction magazines (Black Mask). It’s impressive how the character’s voice is so enduring it can appeal across time and audiences.
Mina’s interpretation also makes much more sense than Chandler’s original novels. Chandler would combine three stories into one book, so they don’t really make sense. The twist in The Lady in the Lake is so silly you’d think it was a joke. The best one, A Long Goodbye, was not a story-combination novel; ithas a “literary” plot (i.e., no plot). It’s mostly drunk people talking. It’s fantastic, one of my favorite novels of the 20th century.
In his letters, Chandler said he obsessed over the Marlowe voice and character, not the plot. He was exactly right to do that. That’s why people are still reading and writing Marlowe almost a century after publication (well, 75 years). If you like Marlowe or mysteries, check out Denise Mina’s The Second Murderer.
The Second Murderer by Denise Mina (2023) — Credit: Mulholland Books
Negative Space By B.R. Yeager 2020, Apocalypse Party
I find B.R. Yeager’s writing intoxicating, like a weird new drug your friend told you about that you can weirdly buy at the gas station, even though this drug is hardcore and messes you up. Reading him feels like being possessed by a language ghost. His two novels get at the strange suburban feeling of liminal loneliness, and the less you know, the better, but I have a longer piece about both that I’ll post this week.
Negative Space by B.R. Yeager — Credit: Apocalypse Party
Marx’s Literary Style by Ludovico Silva 2023, Verso
I loved this 1973 essay about Marx by Venezuelan poet Ludovico Silva. His close reading of Marx brings the 150-year-old books to life. Silva suggests we consider the way Marx wrote, not just the topics and ideas he wrote about. If you are a Marx reader, this is a must-read, and I give it my most dialectical recommendation.
Marx’s Literary Style by Ludovico Silva — Credit: Verso
Conclusion: Raw, Unadulterated Piles
This is a blog about piles. But where are the piles?
Where are the piles? I Haven’t Seen Any Piles.
OK, let me show you some piles.
A Tale of Two Piles — Credit: Author’s Photo
The books on the left are the ones I’m writing about for Medium.com. The pile on the right is for a fiction project about boxing, all to be read.
And yet, there are more piles no one can see. Digital piles of audiobooks on Libby and Hoopla, NetGalley ebooks, posts, and internet articles: a beautiful, mountainous pile of the mind. I’ll keep thinking about piles, but I want to see your piles in the meantime!
Thanks for reading! Follow for more writing about books.
Do You Keep Your Books In Specific Piles? Show Me The Piles! I Want To See Your Piles!
NickyAdmin: This is the second reading piles newsletter from Medium, 10/08/2023
This is the first Book Pile, or Tsundoku, reading recap from 10/1/2023. It was inspired by the word Tsundoku. Wikipedia defines Tsundoku this way,
Tsundoku (積ん読) is the phenomenon of acquiring reading materials but letting them pile up in one’s home without reading them. The term is also used to refer to books ready for reading later when they are on a bookshelf. A stack of books found after cleaning a room.
That is what this newsletter seeks to describe. My book piles.
Books/Audiobooks
Doppelganger
by Naomi Klein 2023, Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
What a strange book. half memoir, half manifesto with a premise that sounds like a joke. Naomi Klein is often confused for Naomi Wolf, and that launches an exploration into the double in culture, latent fascism, and COVID-19 denialism.
I wrote a longer post about this book for From the Library and this site. Check it out here.
LINK
Credit: Santa Monica Press
Freewaytopia
By Paul Haddad 2021, Santa Monica Press
A history of Los Angeles through our highway system! This book is amazing. I learned so much. During and after WWII, the government of California, through the Department of Transportation (Cal-Trans), built highways as possible to move tanks and jeeps to the Navy ports. In the 50s and 60s, white communities LA communities welcomed highway expansion and development, but Black and immigrant communities were frequently displaced and had their houses taken from them. By the 1970s, with expensive gas prices, terrible traffic congestion, lingering construction, and no more Federal funding, everything changed. Even white communities soured on freeways. By the 80s and 90s, they outright rejected them. Cal-Trans officials told the author they would never build another freeway in Los Angeles again. This great non-fiction book has so much to love, and I hope to read more histories that thoughtfully consider planning and urban development. If you’re interested in Los Angeles history, this is a must-read.
Credit: Beacon Press
Villains of All Nations
by Marcus Rediker 2005, Beacon Press
A class-conscious exploration of pirates! Rediker argues that pirates were villains of all nations because they disrupted capital flows and colonialism. The Golden Age of Piracy coincides with the truces between Britain, Spain, and France. Pirates didn’t just pillage booty. They also burned British warships, freed slaves, and took revenge against Navy officers who wronged them. On British Navy ships, rations were small, and generals were abusive. When the Dutch, British, and French Navies pillaged Africa and sold slaves, they were not seen as pirates, and the sailors on the ship were paid a flat wage. Pirates offered an alternative. They flattened hierarchies. Every pirate got a share of the booty, even the injured ones, in an early form of social security insurance! Pirates even had their own pigeon argot for communicating with sailors at port. The author carefully considers how pirates might have been villains to nations and capital flow, but they were proletarian and a more egalitarian alternative way of living for soldiers of the eighteenth century. This book is amazing. If you like pirates and class-conscious history, you gotta read it.
Short Statement of Purpose
I always wanted to write a newsletter where I briefly write about the books I read that week and share my passion for what I’m reading with others. If that’s of interest to you, this is such a newsletter! I welcome you into my book piles. Hello.
