Don Pizarro's Manual of the Seven Wudan Tiger Shaolin Monkey Kung-Fu Style o' Death
My Brain: If you want to write more fiction, you need to read more fiction.
Also My Brain: Fuck you, have some memoirs.
What we think about food is a portal into our own personal histories, ourselves–and most lovely of all, it’s a chance to deepen our connection with others.
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!
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!
I’ll be back in the high life again
All the doors I closed one time will open up again–Steve Winwood, “Back in the High Life Again”
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…
Weeknotes–more like “monthnotes,” amirite? It’s a personal cliche by now: a spontaneous burst of posts after an extended period of radio silence followed by a hiatus where I just “never get around to posting.” If past is prologue, I’ll keep this up for longer now until I drop out completely for a few months. But if I’m not gonna be on here for a long time, let’s at least make it a good time!
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Speaking of good times, that SUPERMAN movie, huh? It’s not often a film puts an honest-to-god smile on my face.
Look, I never hated on the DCEU Henry Cavill Superman, but I can honestly say I love James Gunn’s take. SUPERMAN (2025) exceeded every high expectation the trailers stirred up in me.
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The reading list:
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Had a birthday a few weeks ago and my driver’s license was up for renewal, so I finally got the REAL ID version. Technically, I already had one in my passport card, which is set to be renewed in a couple of years, but I wasn’t too keen on carrying that around with me, or my passport for that matter.
At least now I have something conveniently on me if and when some balaclava-wearing dude in a matching camo tac vest and blue jeans carrying an AR-15 stops me on the way to my job at an Ivy League university in a Sanctuary City saying, “Papers, please!”
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Seen out in the wild, something else to file under: some ol’ bullshit. I didn’t have “spot a racist coded dog whistle on the bus ride to work” this past week, but just my luck…
I like to think the wrinkle in the upper right was someone’s failed attempt to take it down, but maybe I’m just being too optimistic about the state of humanity at this point. But you know what? After seeing SUPERMAN, maybe that’s not such a bad thing to be.
When I write my future memoirs, I hope never to include the line, “I was napping when World War III started.” I mean, c’mon, it sounds more like the opening line of an Etgar Keret short story. But if (when?) future generations ask me where I was when I heard we bombed Iran, the sad truth will be revealed.
With everything going on, I don’t know what the point of a weeknotes post would be right now. Like Charles Bradley sang, “This world is going up in flames”. But maybe that’s why I need to write one. Proof of life as resistance.
There are moments when my typical attitude of “The only way out is through” works against me. Moments when I only have one or two spoons left and it seems like everything on my list takes at least three. And so I look for ways to use the one or two I have left to get me forward anyway, even if 99% of the time all that generates is resentment which is a lousy feeling, but better than the alternatives (not really).
I’m not the only one to know this. I came across this reading Sam Lipsyte’s THE ASK:
I had learned long ago how to refine the raw guilt into a sweet, granulated resentment.
I had a burst of writing energy for the past couple of weeks which is on the usual trend downward and I know I’m there because while I know I need three spoons to working on my current short story, I feel like I need to be using use the one or two I’ve got to do what I “should” be doing. Like, reading all the stuff that’s won Nebula, Locus, or Stoker awards this month rather than 15-year old litfic novels. Or grousing about an article on AI boosterism I never expected to see in BREVITY, of all places.
I mean, c’mon…
And just as a hammer can build Habitat for Humanity or take a human life, the tool is dependent on the human user.
Yeah, except that hammer’s design wasn’t stolen off of the work of people’s blood, sweat & tears and mass-produced via a gross waste of natural resources. But I digress. After all, that’s not the worst thing going on in the world this week, is it?
(c) 1999 Harvey Pekar
Art by Gary Dumm
Fuck it, here’s one skirmish. Now, what’s my next one gonna be?
It’ll be a short one today. I’m tired, my family’s tired, it’s been A Week. While the world is on fire, our home had a couple of plumbing-related mishaps that had to be dealt with along with everything else. Still, we found the time and a little bit of energy to enjoy a tiny little pop-up carnival held for the second year in a row in the parking lot of the local almost-dead mall.
When you think about it, it really is our way of protesting. The Fam is actually a perfect intersection of about 99% of everything the current regime hates. ICE has already been through here once and they’d probably still be here if they weren’t busy handcuffing US Senators in California while “liberating” Los Angeles.
WRITING
I was only 3 days out of 7 trying to keep The Chain going. Like I said, it’s been A Week.
But I did have a couple of bright spots.
LISTENING
Last fall’s release of DANCE, NO ONE’S WATCHING by Ezra Collective got by me, but I rectified that this week!
I had a chance to pick up THE ASK by Sam Lipsyte on the cheap and the discovery of this passage made it worthwhile, hitting me in a personal way that I haven’t been since Etgar Keret’s “What Do We Have In Our Pockets.”
I’d had a hard time deciding whether to carry a knapsack, a messenger bag, a canvas book bag, or a briefcase. Each seemed to embody a particular kind of confusion and loss.
2024 was a “good enough” year for reading, but this was definitely the best year I’ve had actually documenting it, at least the book-length stuff. I even managed to finish some things (in bold). Pen and paper saves the day!
THE LONELINESS FILES by Athena Dixon
THE BODY KEEPS THE SCORE by Bessel A. van der Kolk
1000 WORDS by Jami Attenberg
PLACES WE LEFT BEHIND by Jennifer Yang
BODY WORK by Melissa Febos
THE SITUATION AND THE STORY by Vivian Gornick (reread)
UPRIGHT BONDS by Lincoln Michel
FUGUE STATE by Brian Evenson
LOVE & INDUSTRY by Sonia Huber
TRUTH IS THE ARROW, MERCY IS THE BOW by Steve Almond
FARAWAY PLACES by Tom Spanbauer
PERCHANCE TO DREAM by Charles Beaumont
CREATIVITY by John Cleese
SCRATCHED by Elizabeth Tallent
A COLLAPSE OF HORSES by Brian Evenson
WRITING ON EMPTY by Natalie Goldberg (reread)
BLOOD, BONES & BUTTER by Gabrielle Hamilton (reread)
VERGE by Lidia Yuknavitch
RIVETHEAD: TALES FROM THE ASSEMBLY LINE by Ben Hamper (reread)
MURDER AND MAMON by Mia P. Manansala
QUIET: THE POWER OF INTROVERTS IN A WORLD THAT CAN’T STOP TALKING by Susan Cain
I sandbagged on documenting the short fiction and non-fiction I’ve read, but maybe that’s a target for next year.
You all know I love Weird Fiction, so I couldn’t help but click on this article title from the LARB. I honestly can’t tell whether or not this is a put on. And that maybe tells me this piece is actually doing the genre’s work.
More often than not, weird nonfiction is intended as either comedy or horror—sometimes both. Its natural home is the internet, where disinformation and pissant humor are architectural principles. The element of unreality in all of the titles listed above is not just a fib or a joke but also an outright structural provocation, daring the audience to follow it into an abyss. Like weird fiction, weird nonfiction is built around some unknowable terror, replacing the tentacled horrors of H. P. Lovecraft with the many-tentacled horrors of being online and alive in the 21st century. It also suggests, in the process, that there is something unfathomable at the heart of reality itself, and that it is the duty of journalism to circumnavigate this terror if never speak it aloud. I humbly submit that weird nonfiction seems particularly well suited to reporting on climate change, but have not seen it done with the vigor that subject deserves.
Every family has its crucial sentences: things it loves saying about itself.
Elizabeth Tallent wrote one of my favorite short stories ever, “No One’s a Mystery” (paywalled pdf from HARPERS). I figured since I know Tallent’s work and am very familiar with the subject matter, this memoir would be right up my alley.
It’s kind of scary how right I was, which is why I can recommend this before I’m even halfway through it.
