Novels Read, 2023

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

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I read a lot more than novels this year, but these are the 30 novels I read. I have several more I’m almost done with, but that I won’t complete until early 2024. The books with the + signs next to them are the ones I particularly recommend. (I kept a list last year, too.) This is the order in which I finished reading them:

1: Carole Stivers: The Mother Code
2: Lauren Belfer: And After the Fire
3: Daniel Nieh: Take No Names
4: +Amor Towles: A Gentleman in Moscow
5: +Elmore Leonard: City Primeval
6: +Malka Older: The Mimicking of Known Successes
7: +Benjamín Labatut: When We Cease to Understand the World
8: Stephen Blackmoore: Dead Things
9: Fernanda Melchor: Hurricane Season
10: +Charles Cumming: Box 88 (Box 88 Book 1)
11: Annalee Newitz: The Terraformers
12: Weike Wang: Chemistry
13: Lauren Wilkinson: American Spy
14: +Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451
15: Charles Cumming: Judas 62 (Box 88 Book 2)
16: Hiron Ennes: Leech
17: Yeo-sun Kwon: Lemon
18: Kristin Chen: Counterfeit
19: Alan Furst: Night Soldiers (Night Soldiers Book 1)
20: John Darnielle: Devil House
21: +Alan Furst: Dark Star (Night Soldiers Book 2)
22: Yukito Ayatsuji: The Decagon House Murders
23: Lauren Oyler: Fake Accounts
24: Charles Cumming: Kennedy 35 (Box 88 Book 3)
25: Richard Powers: The Overstory
26: Lawrence Block: The Sins of the Fathers (Matthew Scudder Book 1)
27: Lawrence Block: In the Midst of Death (Matthew Scudder Book 3)
28: Lawrence Block: Time to Murder and Create (Matthew Scudder Book 2)
29: +Lawrence Block: A Stab in the Dark (Matthew Scudder Book 4)
30: +Sean Michaels: Us Conductors

Scratch Pad: Noise, Agent, Home

From the past week

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

I do this manually at the end of each week: collating (and sometimes lightly editing) most of the recent little comments I’ve made on social media, which I think of as my public scratch pad. Some end up on Disquiet.com earlier, sometimes in expanded form. These days I mostly hang out on Mastodon (at post.lurk.org/@disquiet), and I’m also trying out a few others. I take weekends and evenings off social media.

▰ Synth patch experiment: process audio so it sounds like when you call the banh mi shop with an order and the cashier answers but puts the phone face down (rather than hitting mute) so as to first complete an earlier order and you hear everything including a muffled conversation with another customer

▰ My current favorite retronym is “live agent.” When one contacts tech support one is informed that one’s interlocutor isn’t a chat AI reared on repair manual PDFs and episodes of The Big Bang Theory, but in fact an actual human. One is not told “This is a human.” One is told “This is a live agent.”

▰ I worked in an office once where it seemed like Pandora eventually resolved to a song by Fleetwood Mac, no matter where we started.

At home, my YouTube often resolves to Brian Eno’s Thursday Afternoon.

This is my argument in favor of working from home.

“A Piano That Plays the Echoes of Whales”

From Sean Michaels' Us Conductors

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

It’s safe to say I’ve been enjoying the novel Us Conductors, written by Sean Michaels. It tells the story of Leon Theremin, of his namesake instrument, and of Clara Rockmore, one of the instrument’s principal virtuosos. This moment occurs on a ship that Theremin is taking back to Russia after tumultuous years in the United States.

Interviewed for Experimental Trash

A conversation with Nat Lyon

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

Final interview of the year — I had the great pleasure of being invited to speak with Nat Lyon for his excellent Experimental Trash podcast on listen.camp. We talked about field recordings, and sound studies, and the Disquiet Junto, and digital publishing, and the creative process, among numerous other topics. Nat has a post up on his website outlining the episode.