The first quarter of the year has been very busy. I’m stepping into a new administration role at my school while also finishing my prior commitments in the classroom. I’ve had lots of grading, lots of planning and prep, facilitated quite a few job interviews for new positions, and in the midst of that, still found time to read quite a bit.

I read a lot, and I’m pretty varied in my reading habits. I wish I followed C.S. Lewis’ philosophy and model for reading that he lays out in his introduction to Athanasius’ On the Incarnation:

It is a good rule, after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between. If that is too much for you, you should at least read one old one to every three new ones.

I’m maybe on the right track (if we’re loosish about our definitions of new and old). I can expound more upon this at a later date. But suffice it to say, as I have on many previous occasions, I am an eclectic reader.

I’m starting with an overview of my reading life this year, which has been a journey filled with diverse genres and compelling narratives. I’ve delved into everything from classic literature to modern thrillers, each book offering unique insights and experiences that have shaped my thoughts. I’ll share general thoughts on most of the books that captivated my interest, as well as some quotes that resonated with me. This year, I found myself particularly drawn to books that challenge my perspectives and expand my understanding of the world around me, making my reading adventure not just a pastime, but a means of growth and discovery. I’m also loving my comfort reads.

Here’s a snapshot of my reading life from StoryGraph. This is in an effort to keep updated before the end-of-year wrap-ups.

Let’s start with January

The beauty of working at a school is that I get a decent break around Christmas and the New Year. While it’s a myth that teachers (particularly private school teachers) get summers off, our other breaks are pretty sacred. And I use them to hole up and read.

I finished a year-long reread of James S.A. Corey’s The Expanse series. I’ve had the final book, Leviathan Falls, since its release a few years ago, but I couldn’t bring myself to finish the series without a reread. I’ve been with those characters for more than a decade, and I just needed to re-travel that journey with them before wrapping it up. To sum up the whole series:

We also both know that when it comes to getting people to deny their own immediate needs in favor of a greater good, asking nicely almost never works.

It’s a self-evident truth in this series that (despite Holden’s heroic belief “that people are more good on balance than bad”) humanity is depressingly selfish and self-destructive. While we absolutely have the capacity for good, it’s despite our own natures.

All the wars and all of the cruelty and all of the violence. I’m not looking away from any of that, and I still think there’s something beautiful about being what we are. History is soaked in blood. The future probably will be too. But for every atrocity, there’s a thousand small kindnesses that no one noticed. A hundred people who spent their lives loving and caring for each other. A few moments of real grace.

We can do good things, great things, beautiful things. We just tend not to. And ultimately, we’ll have the chance to make better decisions, but the eternal question remains: Will we?

Holden, Naomi, Alex, Amos, Bobbie, Avasarala, and so many more characters are just indelibly written in my literary canon, and I will miss them greatly.

I continued my dive into the works of the brilliant Stephen Graham Jones, who I discovered last year, by reading Mongrels. It’s a coming of age story (in that one respect it’s typical of a werewolf narrative), and it’s gritty, exploring transience and found family and an unreliable narrator and his grandfather who all are telling tall tales.

I’m working on reading more non-fiction (that isn’t school related) this year. After binging Yellowstone last year, I picked up The Solace of Open Spaces by Ehrlich. Her sparse yet poignant reflections on solitude, nature, relationships, loss, and humanity are entrancing.

Everything in nature invites us constantly to be what we are. We are often like rivers: careless and forceful, timid and dangerous, lucid and muddied, eddying, gleaming, still.

Our pretenses fall away when we’re faced with something as raw and Herculean as nature. As I write this, we’ve traveled through the Redwoods and walked along the Oregon and Washington coasts and witness the incomprehensible intensity of nature. From ageless trees that rise hundred of feet into the air to the waves of the pacific that hurl themselves headlong against haystacks off the coast, few things can so readily remind us of our insignificance.

The motifs of humanity’s raw flaws echo The Expanse, in a way, or perhaps it’s just on my minds with our current socio-political existential crises, but Ehrlich so clearly says what we’re feeling:

…people are blunt with one another, sometimes even cruel, believing honesty is stronger medicine than sympathy, which may console but often conceals.

Not long ago, I had to have a talk with one of my students who was going out of her way to say cruel (albeit true) things to people, under the guise of humor. After chatting with her for a while, she said, “People’s skins are just too thin.” I agreed, they are too thin these days. Resilience is utterly lacking in our world, on nearly every front. Yet, I challenged her: “it’s not our job to thicken others’ skins. That’s not why God placed us here.” We’re living in a time in our world that is cruel, that values cruelty while calling it love. And I ask: is it our job to thicken the skins of our neighbors?

I discovered a new series this year, and I’m hooked. The Sun Eater series by Christopher Ruocchio, starting with Empire of Silence, starts off like Name of the Wind meets Gladiator and Dune. It’s thoughtfully and beautifully written at times, and our protagonist Hadrian Marlowe is telling his own story far into the future after he’s killed billions, destroyed a sun, defeated an emperor. I’m genuinely intrigued by where this series will go.

A few passages exemplify its flavor:

My memory is to the world as a drawing is to the photograph. Imperfect. More perfect. We remember what we must, what we choose to, because it is more beautiful and real than the truth.

This lays out our narrator’s unreliability, that his truth is the one he’s telling. He’s filtering things for us. That said, narrator-Marlowe is brutal toward himself at times. He’s often unlikable, making stupid choices, yet he sometimes justifies himself (as we all do, don’t we?).

We live in stories, and in stories, we are subject to phenomena beyond the mechanisms of space and time. Fear and love, death and wrath and wisdom, these are as much part of our universe as light and gravity.

This book, is as much about the telling of stories as it is about the story itself. It’s beautiful and dark and tragic all in one.

A single death, wrote one ancient king, is a tragedy, but a genocide can only be understood through statistics.

Oof. All too true and too tragic.

I have had many names. During the war, I was Hadrian Halfmortal and Hadrian the Deathless. After the war, I was the Sun Eater. To the poor people of Borosevo, I was a myrmidon called Had. To the Jaddians, I was Al Neroblis. To the Cielcin, I was Oimn Belu…

I love this world, Ruocchio’s writing style, and I’m so intrigued to see how this plays out. I have to stop with the quotes here, because there’s just too many.

I quickly read The Stardust Grail by Yume Kitasei, which is a bit like Indiana Jones in space, with a very Becky Chambers vibe. I wanted a bit more depth from it, but I really enjoyed Kitasei’s world building and the textual ruins that pepper the narrative, deepening the world as we went.

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On to February…

Notice that things slowed down a bit here…

James Logan’s The Silverblood Promise kicked off the month for me. It feels like Scott Lynch’s Lies of Locke Lamora world but written by Nicholas Eames. The world and our snarky protagonist Lukan Gardova (along with a fantastic Short-round like sidekick) is more intriguing than the plot. And that’s a plus in my book.

I listened to Stanley Tucci read his memoir What I Ate in One Year, which scratches both my foodie and film-buff itches.

Yes, hope is hard to find, but it can often be found at the table. And tables are easy to build.

Tucci maybe doesn’t break new philosophical ground, but he does have a way with words that make my brain itch and my mouth water.

Home-cooked food strengthens our bonds when we are together, keeps us connected when we are apart, and sustains the memory of us when we have passed away.

Beautiful and true. And then something that epitomizes my marriage and relationship with my extended family:

Time cooking with someone you love is time well spent.

As I mentioned, I like reading books about film. I have to say I’m just about done with modern movies. Of course there are exceptions and current movies I’m excited about. But there are decades of films that came before and influenced where we are today. Maybe that’s the classical educator in me. It’s not all deeply philosophical, but I love books that give me a curriculum for myself and my continuing education. For example, I spent a long time last year reading Tarantino’s Cinema Speculation and watching the films that informed his filmmaking, especially the films that lay the groundwork for Kill Bill. I should, I could, write something about this research I’m doing. But I haven’t yet.

Enter The Last Action Heroes by Nick de Semlyen, which delves into the biographies of the major action heroes of the 80s and 90s: Stallone, Schwarzenegger, Norris, and Van Damme in particular, though it touches upon Segal and Chan and others a bit. So, now, I have a new direction for my cinematic studies.

In the same vein as Tucci’s memoir, I picked up Phil Rosenthal’s companion to Somebody Feed Phil and Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking. Both are very funny and filled with anecdotes, but Fisher’s memoir is just uproarious.

Lastly, for the month, I read two Star Trek novels considered essential classics of the series. They’ve lived on my shelf since I was 12, and I’m sure I read them when I was younger, but as we’ve been slowly watching through all Star Trek over the past few years, it felt like the time to pick up a few books. Spock Must Die! by James Blish is the first Star Trek novel, and it feels just like a classic TOS episode. Vonda N. McIntyre’s The Entropy Effect dragged in the middle but paid off nicely.

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And now, March

Ok, I have a confession to make: it looks like I read 29 books this month, but that’s not exactly true. When I read short stories or novellas, I try to track them individually in StoryGraph. So a bulk of these entries here are really short stories that I’m not really ready to report on in their entirety. I will say, though, that I have discovered Conan the Barbarian by Robert E. Howard, and I am hooked. I fell into a deep dive (have I mentioned that I’m always looking for a curriculum or lists, yet?) trying to figure out where to start with the stories, what the internal chronology is. It started with The Last Action Heroes, which has me getting ready to watch Conan the Barbarian starring Arnold Schwarzeneggar. But I didn’t want to watch it without knowing its literary origins. So, here we are. The stories of Conan’s world are engaging, adventurous, magical, brutal, funny, witty, and just fun. I’m nearly done, and maybe I’ll write about them as a whole later.

Another sub-project I’ve finally checked off my TBR list is the bibliography Stephen King’s pseudonym Richard Bachman. I needed a few final books, and just plowed through them this month:

• Blaze is an Of Mice and Men riff if they decided to be the Lindberg kidnappers. A lot of fun, actually, with some real heart.
• Road Work is about an utterly unrelatable and unlikeable guy who makes the dumbest choices to continually ruin his life and the lives of those around him for no discernible reason.
• Thinner is fun, and obviously the book that outed King as Bachman because it feels like a Stephen King story.

Maybe I’ll rank the Bachman books eventually…but they’re definitely his lesser works.

I’m in the middle of teaching Shakespeare’s Henriad to my 10th grade Humane Letters class, so for historical context, I read Dan Jones’ Henry V. It’s thoroughly researched and really tries to put us in the shoes of the greatest King of England. I loved it.

I picked up Tucci’s Taste, which was just as satisfying as What I Ate In One Year, and just as beautifully written:

But perhaps the most precious heirlooms are family recipes. Like a physical heirloom, they remind us from whom and where we came and give others, in a bite, the story of another people from another place and another time.

In so many ways, I think that this is true–it’s just not been my lived experience. We don’t have a lot of family recipes ourselves. My parents love food, but I wouldn’t say they love to cook. There are a few that my grandmother has left me, and my wife’s family has more. I’d like to leave these intangibles for my family one day.

In the memoir and cooking vein, I picked up the inimitable Ina Garten’s recent memoir Be Ready When the Luck Happens (on audiobook, read by the author), which is really a love letter to her husband as much as it is an autobiography. Theirs is a beautiful, though not always smooth, relationship. It’s filled with nuggets of wisdom:

Your 20s are the time when you master what you think you’re supposed to do. But in your 30s, when you’ve figured out what you like and don’t like, and you’re more confident, you can move on to what you really want to do, which might be totally different.

As I near the end of my 30s, shifting roles in my career and deepening my marital relationship, I’m feeling this in many ways. Not that my imposter syndrome isn’t always in full swing, but I feel like I’m figuring out life finally and am ready to start saying something and doing something.

Ina Garten’s book brought me to another that’s been on my list for a long time: My Life in France by Julia Child. It’s inspiring and engaging, with Child’s voice shining through the pages just as clearly as our Television Screens. She lays out what could be a motto for a good part of my life:

This is my invariable advice to people: Learn how to cook- try new recipes, learn from your mistakes, be fearless, and above all have fun!

I love to cook. It’s relaxing at the end of a long day filled with people interactions. The kitchen is one of my safe, happy places where I can feed my family and friends, bond with my wife; I love having a job when we have people over or go to a party, so I cook whenever I can. I love finding new recipes, new flavors; I love recreating dinners I’ve had in great restaurants. We’ve been redoing our kitchen, and I’ve opined the time and the cost, but my father-in-law said it best: “the kitchen is your workshop–you want it to be what you need it to be to do what you do best.” He’s got a garage where he can work on his car and his model planes (seriously, amazing WWII scale models that fly)–the kitchen is that for my wife and I. It’s our happy place. Apparently I don’t even leave it in the books I read.

I continued listening to Carrie Fisher with Shockaholic and Phil Rosenthal with You’re Lucky You’re Funny–about the creation of Everybody Loves Raymond. Not sure why I’ve paired them again here, but they feel kindred, not in their subject matter but in their outlook on life: sardonic yet hopeful.

I read Suzanne Collins’ newest Hunger Games novel, Sunrise on the Reaping, which was terribly tragic and engrossing, telling the story of Haymitch’s Quarter Quell. That prompted me to re-listen to the original trilogy read by Tatiana Maslany. I loved them once again (my first whole-trilogy reread since Mockingjay came out), except I really didn’t care for Mockingjay this time around.

Finally, The Hunger Games trilogy got me hankering for some comfort re-reading, and I’ve started the Harry Potter series for the Nth time. More on that, and Conan, and my other unfinished reads later in the year.

I’m here on Spring Break in the middle of April, reading and walking and relaxing with my wife. I’m sure that I’ll have more to update as the year goes on. What are you reading? What guides your reading life? What should I read next?

Happy reading!