Category: field notes

News, essays, reviews, surveillance

Novels Read, 2024

This doesn't include non-fiction or graphic novels (or novels I stopped reading)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Weirdly, I finished reading the same number of prose novels this year as I did the previous year: 30, on the nose. The books with the + signs next to them are the ones I particularly recommend. Doesn’t mean I disliked the others. There are two more + books in this list than there were in last year’s list. This list is in the order in which I finished reading the novels. A few are novellas. The list doesn’t include graphic novels or non-fiction or poetry.

1: +Alastair Reynolds: Permafrost
2: Adrian Tchaikovsky: Shards of Earth
3: +Mick Herron: The Secret Hours
4: Allie Rowbottom: Aesthetica
5: Nick Harkaway: Titanium Noir
6: +Jennifer Egan: The Candy House
7: David Mitchell: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet
8: +Colson Whitehead: Harlem Shuffle
9: Lawrence Block: The Thief Who Couldn’t Sleep
10: R.F. Kuang: Babel
11: +Rebecca West: The Return of the Soldier
12: HG Wells: The World Set Free
13: Anthony McCarten: Going Zero
14: Ken MacLeod: Beyond the Hallowed Sky
15: +Robin Sloan: Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
16: Fonda Lee: The Jade Setter of Janloon
17: +Robin Sloan: Moonbound
18: Max Barry: Lexicon
19: Kaliane Bradley: The Ministry of Time
20: Jean-Patrick Manchette: The Prone Gunman
21: James S.A. Corey: The Mercy of Gods
22: James S.A. Corey: Livesuit
23: John M. Ford: The Final Reflection (Star Trek)
24: Neal Stephenson: Polostan
25: +Charles Portis: True Grit
26: Lawrence Robbins: The President’s Lawyer
27: +Nick Harkaway: Karla’s Choice
28: +Vasily Mahanenko: Survival Quest (The Way of the Shaman: Book #1)
29: Kate Atkinson: Case Histories
30: +Dennis E. Taylor: We Are Legion (We Are Bob)

2025: Enter Quietly

It's a sign

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

On the last day of 2024, I found myself again in Muir Woods, again in the mode of “Marc walks into nature and takes pictures of signs.” Not until I was back in the car did I recognize that I had found the right way — essentially an oblique strategy, courtesy of the National Park Service — to approach 2025. There’s a useful ambiguity to the typeface, the italics a tool of emphasis, despite what they’re emphasizing being an effort at self-restraint.

Fireworks

A new Frame by Frame comic with Hannes Pasqualini

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I’m excited to be back at it with Hannes Pasqualini. He and I collaborated on a half dozen four-panel comics in 2020 at the start of the pandemic, and now we’ve got a new batch in the works. This one, “Fireworks,” is the first of them, with more to follow. We’re calling the series Frame by Frame. The next one will be published on January 13, and after that the plan is to do one on the first Monday and third Monday every month. See a full index of Frame by Frame comics at disquiet.com/fxf.

A Night at Bird & Beckett

Duncan James and company

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Caught the final concert of the year at the venerable Bird & Beckett, a book and record store in San Francisco’s Glen Park neighborhood that doubles several nights a week as a music club, mostly jazz. The evening’s event, on Saturday, December 28, was a quartet led by guitarist Duncan James and featuring Bob Blankenship, drums; Larry Chinn, piano; and Carla Kaufman, bass. Bird & Beckett streams every concert live on its YouTube channel, and then leaves them there as part of its massive archive. If you look closely at the video, you’ll see the back of my head for the full run of last night’s show. I almost moved across town to Glen Park a long time ago. In such an alternate timeline, I’d have been at this place at least one night a week.

Scratch Pad: Commerce, SDI4M, Kjartansson

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

At the end of each week, I usually collate a lightly edited collection of recent comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. I find knowing I’ll revisit my posts to be a positive and mellowing influence on my social media activity. I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. And I generally take weekends off social media. In fact, currently I’m off social media entirely (and I’m off a lot of other digital social venues, as well, including several Slacks, several email discussion lists, several Discourses, etc.), and that will remain the case until the first week or so of January. So, what follows are some notes I made for myself — a digital social network of one, though occasionally people do reply to posts I write — from the past week:

▰ I would like to meet the people who order Blank Forms publications through target.com. One-stop shopping for toothpaste, plasticware, Maryanne Amacher, and Éliane Radigue.

▰ Since I can’t solder, it’s usually not DIY but SDI4M (someone did it for me)

▰ Anyone who thinks contemporary children’s culture is too violent has not seen (or fails to remember) the Halloween sequence in the supposedly heartwarming classic Meet Me in St. Louis.

▰ Been watching the third and final season of the What If… ? series, all about Marvel alternate universe stories. I knew one episode was titled “1872” and had Kate Bishop in it, and so I allowed myself to hope it was Hawkeye as Emily Dickinson, or vice-versa, but it was a western. (There was one line about poetry, but unrelated.)

▰ Got a new household device, same manufacturer as one we already had (totally different types of device, one kitchen and the other living room), turned it on, and of course it makes the same startup sound

▰ Went to see Ragnar Kjartansson’s The Visitors for the umpteenth time at SFMOMA. I swear it is better with each viewing. Each time I go I sit focused on a specific screen, this time on Kjartansson himself. The sound at his screen’s end of the nine-screen installation is a lot more sparse, as it’s further from the drums and the two pianos.

▰ I finished reading one novel this week, We Are Legion (We Are Bob) by Dennis E. Taylor. I picked it up based on the recommendation of the owner of a local comic shop, and I really enjoyed it. It has a reputation as funny, but the funny is really just part of what’s going on. I had a blast and will definitely read the next in the series. This was the 30th novel I finished reading in 2024. I thought I might finish one more by the end of December, but with my mom in town for a week it’s unlikely, and that is, of course, fine.