The writer and actor Rod Serling, best known for his famed sci-fi series “The Twilight Zone”, hosts “The Alcoholism Film” (1974). This color public service film produced by Sandler Institutional Films, Inc. was meant to spread awareness of the symptoms, signs, psychological roots, and dangers of alcoholism. The film is composed of various short interviews with alcoholics, medical professionals, recovering alcoholics, as well as colleagues and family members whose lives have been impacted by alcoholism. The film makes the point that one in ten drinkers, can be considered an alcoholic.
So, here’s my 2025 longform reading list. Books I actually finished are in bold. Not as many, percentage-wise, as last year, but I exposed myself to a lot of different stuff. And I’m still plugging away!
The Little Green God of the Library Slip. Poster by Magazine & Book Co., 1910. Prints & Photographs Division
BITTERSWEET by Susan Cain
GUILT & GINATAAN by Mia P. Manansala
LET THIS RADICALIZE YOU by Kelly Hayes & Mariame Kaba
READING THE WAVES by Lidia Yuknavitch
SPRING, SUMMER, ASTEROID, BIRD by Henry Lien
NONWHITE AND WOMAN: 131 MICRO ESSAYS ON BEING IN THE WORLD by Darien Hsu Gee & Carla Crujido (eds.)
THE CHRONOLOGY OF WATER by Lidia Yuknavitch
PRANKSTERS VS. AUTOCRATS by Srdja Popovic and Sophia A. McClennen
LOVE AND INDUSTRY by Sonya Huber
DEAD NOTE by Victor Manibo
AUTOCORRECT by Etgar Keret
THE BOOK OF ALCHEMY by Suleika Jaouad
THE ASK by Sam Lipsyte
THE BOOK OF JOAN by Lidia Yuknavitch
THE STORY CURE by Dinty W. Moore
A CATALOG OF STORMS by Fran Wilde
WHIMSY: A LITERARY DOOM AND GLOOM ANTIDOTE by Naomi Daniluk (ed.)
UNRELIABLE NARRATOR by Aparna Nancherla
POWER: WHY SOME PEOPLE HAVE IT AND OTHERS DON’T by Jeffrey Pfeffer
SOME PEOPLE NEED KILLING by Patricia Evangelista
WEIRDSCAPES: AN OTHERWORLDLY ANTHOLOGY by Kyle Thompson (ed.)
UNCERTAIN SONS by Thomas Ha
DEATH BY DUMPLING by Vivien Chien
CATCHING THE BIG FISH by David Lynch
THE SUBJECT STEVE by Sam Lipsyte
FRIDAY BLACK by Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyan
NEXT OF KIN: A MEMOIR by Gabrielle Hamilton
JOYRIDE: A MEMOIR by Susan Orlean
THE ANTHONY BOURDAIN READER: NEW, CLASSIC, AND RESDISCOVERED WRITING by Kimberly Witherspoon (ed.)
Looks like I’m going to start 2026 a little behind the 8-ball. And that doesn’t even include the stack I got for Christmas that I have yet to crack open!
Here’s an exercise I came across in Brevity the other day…
So here’s a challenge I have for each of you. Find an instrumental online of a rap song that you like. Then, freestyle to it until the beat stops. How did that feel? You might even find, if you make this a practice like I have, that you have go-to instrumentals. Why do you think that is?
You know, I do have the album ENTER THE 37TH CHAMBER by the El Michels Affair and wonder if I can go Wu-Tang on it…
Pondering the continued enshittification of just about every social media platform, I realized that I’ve got a space that I tend to forget about until I get an email reminder to renew my domain name and webhosting. With money. I bet you can look at my posting patterns and figure out when I get those emails.
So I got it into my head to work on a little platform reset, pinning potential reference material here rather than somewhere I can get a quick like or reply. Hence the recent increase in non-weeknotes posts. Sure, it’s slightly more effort but again, I am paying for ::waves hands:: all this.
Anyway, here are some things that caught my attention last week, currently marinating in my brain:
67.21% of passengers offered their seats in the presence of Batman, or more than two out of three, compared to 37.66% in the control experiment, or just over one out of three.
2
If I’ve ever seen a setup for a DATELINE episode, this is it…
Days after an Atlanta man died in a scuba diving accident in Hawaii, authorities said they found the skeletal remains of his son who had gone missing four years prior in a tree house in his backyard.
3
With the assault from the government on one side and the threat of AI from another, I’ll take all the reminders I can get that art can survive. Unsurprisingly, it takes the form of the legacy of a Black woman completely unknown to me previously.
The arts remind us that none of the current truisms are absolutes—that there are other ways of living, existing, and being. Arts can exist outside of a tech lord’s algorithm.
As you can see, I’ve been playing around with Quotebacks. Jury’s still out, but so far I’m liking the convenience. Anyway, I’m not completely off the socials–you can find me on Bluesky these days–but I’ll be shooting for more cross-over. Let’s see how this goes!
To commemorate the 45th anniversary of the release of Yacht Rock classic “Ride Like The Wind” by Christopher Cross in 1980, an official music video was finally produced!
But there are other ways to celebrate the occasion, I guess. Like live-action re-enactment:
A minivan driver fleeing police drove 173 miles across four Southern California counties Monday before escaping into Mexico in a chase spanning more than two hours.
“From 1875 to 1975, there were at least 6,000 commercial shipwrecks on the bottom of the Great Lakes,” [writer John U.] Bacon told NPR. “So that is one shipwreck a week every week for a century. That is one casualty every day for a century.”
In the past couple of months, I took my first intentional post-pandemic steps back into the spec-fic writing world. I’ve dipped my toe in the waters for a couple of years now, what with the occasional local event or online con like Flights of Foundry and a bit of Wiscon online.
Last month, I was graciously invited to take part in a local reading series, and managed to find things that I was actually not embarrassed to read out loud. Hell, at the beginning of the month, I even submitted a short story for the first time in god-knows-how-long. (I don’t know because I’ve purposely avoided that particular page of my Submission Grinder account.)
Yes, I’m officially back on my bullshit! Now, I just need to find a way to make it sustainable.
Like a moth to a flame, I’m drawn just about every year to the Friends of the Tompkins Co. Library Book Sales. They’re held over three weekends in May, which coincides with Ithaca’s Spring (W)rites festival, and in October. It’s one of those local rituals one falls into in this town, whether you’re here for four years of college or for twenty-to-life.
I always, always manage to find a few treasures, even when I saunter in on the last weekend of the sale when books are the cheapest and the shelves have been all but picked clean. It looks like I neglected to post last year’s haul, but I got a lot of stuff in 2023.
Anyway, here’s what I found this time around…
SWORD STONE TABLE by Swapna Krishna and Jenn Northington (eds.)
THE TOKYO-MONTANA EXPRESS by Richard Brautigan
NINE BAR BLUES by Sheree Renée Thomas
MY DATE WITH SATAN by Stacey Richter (which, come to think of it, I might already own…? I’ll have to look in storage.)
![Comic panel by artist Lynda Barry of a Lola telling her grandchildren, "If [the ghosts] are hungry, give them adobo and San Miguel Beer."](https://i0.wp.com/donfoolery.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/00barry-image-03-superJumbo.webp?resize=728%2C1024&ssl=1)
