Ecce Sigum

Immanentize the Empathy

Books I Read in 2020

John Winkelman

This is the list of all 86 books I read to completion in Calendar Year 2020.

I started the year focusing on short fiction, as detailed in other posts. Then the lockdown hit in March, and I was put on a crazy work project in April which had me working 50+ hour weeks, second and third shift until the end of July. In order to stay sane and balanced I switched to long-form fiction, and specifically fantasy fiction.

This was driven in no small part by a decision to write a fantasy novel. At ConFusion 2020 I spent a lot of time talking to a number of self-published authors, who have found varying degrees of success in their craft. All of them, however, were quite happy with the self-publishing route, and in reading their work I discovered for myself that which many people have known for a long time: Self-published work can be just as good, or even better, than work published through more traditional means.

These authors introduced me to the Self-Published Fantasy Blog-Off, the winners and runners-up of which are equal (at least!) in quality to the best of traditionally published fantasy.

I have been well aware of this with reference to poetry, but for some reason the blind spot around self-published prose was more difficult to, well, see.

So I read a lot of fantasy, including the first nineteen books in R.A. Salvatore’s Legend of Drizzt sequence set in the Forgotten Realms setting of Dungeons and Dragons. There are 36 books in the series, but after 19 the boundary between reality and not-reality was beginning to blur.

In October I participated in the Sealey Challenge and read 31 poetry books in 31 days, which did wonderful things for my state of mind.

In November and December I read many of the novellas I have accrued from Subterranean Press. This also did wonderful things for my state of mind.

Anyway, here is the list. Next year I will break the long-form reading list up and combine it with the short fiction lists I have posted at the end of each month.

2020.03.05: Valencia, Sayak – Gore Capitalism

2020.04.06: Gibson, William – Neuromancer
2020.04.08: Walton, David – The Genius Plague
2020.04.09: Indiana, Rita – Tentacle
2020.04.11: Mieville, China – The Last Days of New Paris
2020.04.12: Bacigalupi, Paolo – The Alchemist
2020.04.16: Steinmetz, Ferrett – The Sol Majestic
2020.04.28: Jemisin, N.K. – The City We Became

2020.05.05: Salvatore, R.A. – Homeland
2020.05.08: Salvatore, R.A. – Exile
2020.05.10: Salvatore, R.A. – Sojourn
2020.05.12: Rowland, Diana – My Life as a White Trash Zombie
2020.05.23: Wang, M.L. – The Sword of Kaigen
2020.05.26: Eichenlaub, Anthony W. – Justice in an Age of Metal and Men

2020.06.01: McGuire, Seanan – Every Heart a Doorway
2020.06.07: Shel, Mike – Aching God
2020.06.18: Pike, J. Zachary – Orconomics
2020.06.28: Hayes, Rob J. – Where Loyalties Lie

2020.07.05: Künsken, Derek – The Quantum Magician
2020.07.06: Salvatore, R.A. – The Crystal Shard
2020.07.10: Salvatore, R.A. – Streams of Silver
2020.07.14: Salvatore, R.A. – The Halfling’s Gem
2020.07.15: Hossain, Saad Z. – The Gurkha and the Lord of Tuesday
2020.07.16: Salvatore, R.A. – The Legacy
2020.07.17: Salvatore, R.A. – Starless Night
2020.07.18: Salvatore, R.A. – Siege of Darkness
2020.07.23: Salvatore, R.A. – Passage to Dawn
2020.07.30: Salvatore, R.A. – The Silent Blade

2020.08.03: Salvatore, R.A. – The Spine of the World
2020.08.06: Salvatore, R.A. – Sea of Swords
2020.08.08: Salvatore, R.A. – The Thousand Orcs
2020.08.10: Salvatore, R.A. – The Lone Drow
2020.08.12: Salvatore, R.A. – The Two Swords
2020.08.18: Salvatore, R.A. – The Orc King
2020.08.22: Salvatore, R.A. – The Pirate King
2020.08.28: Salvatore, R.A. – The Ghost King

2020.09.03: Ward, Jesmyn – Sing, Unburied, Sing
2020.09.17: Alexander, Michelle – The New Jim Crow
2020.09.24: Ashton, Dyrk – Paternus: War of Gods

2020.10.01: Rogin-Roper, Leah – Two Truths and a Lie
2020.10.02: Danos, Stephen – Missing Slides
2020.10.03: Mandelstam, Osip – Voronezh Notebooks
2020.10.04: Almeida, Alexis – I Have Never Been Able to Sing
2020.10.05: Kaneko, W. Todd – This Is How the Bone Sings
2020.10.06: Coolidge, Sarah (ed.) – Home: New Arabic Poetry
2020.10.07: Cooper, Wyn – Chaos Is the New Calm
2020.10.08: ortiz, mónica teresa – autobiography of a semiromantic anarchist
2020.10.09: Brace, Kristin – The Farthest Dreaming Hill
2020.10.10: de Alba, Cassandra – habitats
2020.10.11: Le Guin, Ursula – Wild Angels
2020.10.12: Matthews, Airea D. – Simulacra
2020.10.12: Meltzer, David – San Francisco Beat: Talking With the Poets
2020.10.13: Rogal, Lisa – Feed Me Weird Things
2020.10.14: Amezcua, Eloisa– On Not Screaming
2020.10.15: Stafford, William – My Name is William Tell
2020.10.16: Stack, Garrett – Yeoman’s Work
2020.10.17: Brandt, Emily – Sleeptalk or Not At All
2020.10.18: Olszewska, Daniela – Answering Machine
2020.10.18: Sizemore, Jason – For Exposure
2020.10.19: Marinovich, Filip – Wolfman Librarian
2020.10.20: Harris, Joseph – Logically Thinking
2020.10.21: Harrison, Jim – Collected Ghazals
2020.10.22: Bettis, Christine – Burnout Paradise
2020.10.23: Gleason, Rachel – New Kind of Rebellion
2020.10.24: Khayyam, Omar – The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam
2020.10.25: Cáceres, Omar – Defense of the Idol
2020.10.26: Chang, Kristin – Past Lives, Future Bodies
2020.10.27: Goff, Nichole – Aluminum Necropolis
2020.10.28: Gurton-Wachter, Anna – Blank Blank Blues
2020.10.29: Porter, Bill – Road to Heaven
2020.10.29: Burns, Megan – Sleepwalk With Me
2020.10.30: Trier-Walker, Amy Jo – Trembling Ourselves Into Trees
2020.10.31: Harrison, Jim – Letters to Yesenin

2020.11.10: Gevers, Nick (ed.) – The Book of Dreams
2020.11.15: Palmatier, Joshua (ed.) Apocalyptic
2020.11.25: Wendig, Chuck – Damn Fine Story
2020.11.28: Vance, Jack – The Kragen

2020.12.02 – de Bodard, Aliette – On a Red Station, Drifting
2020.12.04 – Baker, Kage – Rude Mechanicals
2020.12.06 – Desmond, Matthew – Evicted
2020.12.06 – Armstrong, Kelley – Lost Souls
2020.12.16 – Bear, Elizabeth – Book of Iron
2020.12.17 – Bear, Elizabeth – Ad Eternum
2020.12.19 – Grant, Mira – Final Girls
2020.12.25 – Steffen, David (ed.) – The Long List Anthology, volume 6
2020.12.28 – Kittredge, Caitlin – The Curse of Four

Introducing Pepper

John Winkelman

On December 27, 2020, a year and a day after returning from the Upper Peninsula with Poe, we returned from the Upper Peninsula with our new three-month-old ginger kitten. World, meet Pepper. Pepper, this is the world. Or the parts of it with access to the internet, anyway.

Right now Pepper is in internal quarantine in an enclosure in my office while we wait to take her to the vet for a checkup and shots. We should be able to allow them into the same space together starting in about ten days. She and Poe have exchanged chirps and growls under the door to my office, and already Poe seems to be getting used to the idea of no longer being the only cat in the house.

Pepper is Poe’s cousin, from the same colony in a farm in Rudyard. She is sweet and crazy and affectionate, thanks to attention from the various children and grandchildren who helped to socialize her over the past two months. She weighs about three pounds, though with her fur she occupies approximately the same volume as a Volkswagen Microbus. We gave her a bath the night we brought her home, and when soaked she was about the size of a chicken drumstick.

The English language is inadequate for accurately describing the floofiness of our new kitten.

One Hundred and Eighteen Seconds

John Winkelman

Today here in Grand Rapids we will get just under two minutes more daylight than we had when I published the previous post on December 20. And those 118 seconds make all the difference.

We are on the far side of the winter solstice and also of the Christmas holidays, with three days and change left in 2020.

One book and one magazine arrived in this past week. They are likely the last of the 2020 reading material.

On the left is the 100th (!) issue of the superb Rain Taxi Review of Books, which highlights lesser-known authors and smaller, independent presses. The quarterly magazine, along with their excellent website, are hazardous to my bank account in the same way that living a hundred yards from the best pizza and deli in the city is, well, hazardous to my bank account.

On the right is Mythological Figures and Maleficent Monsters, from a successful Kickstarter run by EN Publishing. This is a sort of spiritual successor to the old Deities and Demigods rule book for Dungeons and Dragons. Though I have not yet read through the book, I can say that the artwork is beautiful.

In reading news, not much happened last week, due to long work days and prep for holidays. Ditto for writing news.

This is the last of my weekly updates for 2020. I will post a few end-of-the-year roundups over the next week. Thank you all for reading, and good luck to all of us in the run-up to 2021.

Orange Days

John Winkelman

Eleven days left to the end of the year, and tomorrow is the beginning of winter. That leaves a ten day no-man’s-land at the end of 2020, a sort of lame-duck December where we try to recover from 2020 and hope there is enough left in us to appreciate the first day of 2021.

One new book arrived this week – The Essential Ruth Stone, edited by the poet’s granddaughter Bianca Stone (a fine poet and artist in her own right) and published by the always-excellent Copper Canyon Press. Poe, of course, has mixed feelings; not because of poetry per se, but because there is only really room for one orange thing on the cat tree at once, and a book ain’t it.

In reading news, I have been working my way through my large pile of novellas published by Subterranean Press. Some have arrived as part of their annual-ish Grab Bags, and some by the more deliberate process of purchasing directly from this most excellent publisher. Since the beginning of the month I have read Rude Mechanicals by Kage Baker, Lost Souls by Kelley Armstrong, Book of Iron and Ad Eternum by Elizabeth Bear, and Final Girls by Mira Grant. I also read On a Red Station, Drifting by Aliette de Bodard, which was not published by Subterranean Press but was sold by them. Novellas are the perfect length to finish in a couple of evenings before I go to bed.

In writing news, still no new writing. Maybe after the beginning of next year.

Or the year after that.

Or after that.

2020 can go to hell.

Hot and Cold Running Books

John Winkelman

As this weird, terrible, chaotic year winds down, so does my energy, and I find myself drifting without thought or emotion from one moment to the next. The days of December are blurring together undifferentiated, as did the days of November, October, and the rest. I have not left the house for more than an hour in several weeks, and there are times where I don’t leave the house at all for two or more days in a row.

That just ain’t no way to live.

Fortunately I have my girlfriend, our cat, and a great big heap of unread books to keep me from going completely feral here at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic.

A small but most excellent stack of reading material arrived at the house this past week.

On the left is Camille Longley‘s Firefrost, from her recently completed Kickstarter campaign.

In the middle is a signed (!) copy Jeff VanderMeer‘s Ambergris, which includes the three books of the Ambergris series – City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch. This beautiful compilation arrived from Midtown Reader in Tallahassee, Florida. I read part of Finch many years ago, but at the time couldn’t really get into it. In the intervening years I read (and deeply enjoyed!) all of VanderMeer’s Southern Reach trilogy as well as Bourne, and so I think I am ready to re-enter the world of Ambergris.

On the right is the new issue of the Boston Review Forum journal. This issue is devoted to articles about climate change, climate justice, and the like.

In reading news, I am working my way through the superb sixth volume of the Long List Anthology of short fictions which were nominated for, but did not win, the Hugo awards. These books are brilliant, and I wish someone had thought to create such anthologies many years before.

In writing news…there is no writing news. Ideas, yes, but no writing. So it goes.

That’s all for now. Three weeks left in this energy-sucking vampire tick of a year. I can make it three more weeks.

The Beginning of the End of 2020

John Winkelman

It is just my imagination, or did November seem to last several weeks longer than usual? I’m sure the drama around the elections contributed, but also likely the stress of watching NaNoWriMo come and go without participating past the first week. The last time that happened was (I think) 2016. It is quite discouraging as a writer, in particular because it was NaNoWriMo 2013 which got me back into the habit and practice of writing after well over a decade away from it. I feel like I have somehow disrespected the craft.

But I am still writing. I still get out of bed at 5:00 and write as much as I can, though with the Ricochet Kitten demanding play time after breakfast it can be difficult to focus for long enough to write a thousand words before work. Or even 100, on some days. If Poe is sick on the couch cushions, well, it really kills the creative mood.

I have a list of calls for submission to themed anthologies stretching out over the next 24 or so months, and the first of those deadlines is midnight, December 31. I have rough drafts ready for editing against the end of the year, but the holidays, even in the COVID era, take up time and, worse, attention, that I would rather put to literally creative use.

Three new volumes arrived this past week at the Library of Winkelman Abbey. On the left is the magnificent Appendix N., recently arrived from Strange Attractor Press, where great literary work is accomplished across the pond. Next to it is a standalone short story, “People of the Pit” by A. Merritt, which was included as a lagniappe along with Appendix N. Appendix N. collects 17 short stories from authors whose work provided inspiration to Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson when they created the original version of Dungeons and Dragons. The book is named after Appendix N., a page of notes in the first Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Dungeon Master’s Guide, which listed source material and inspiration for the game.

On the right is the Winter 2020 issue of The Paris Review, which I will probably read as a counter-balance to the reality-warping power of large stacks of genre books. Not that literary fiction is necessarily any more grounded in reality than are books about ghosts and rogue AIs.

In reading news, I have been working my way through the various novellas in the library. In the past week I completed Aliette de Bodard’s wonderful On A Red Station, Drifting and Kage Baker’s Rude Mechanicals. And I just started Kelley Armstrong’s Lost Souls, which I am really enjoying so far.

I am close to the end of Matthew Desmond’s enlightening, infuriating, depressing, and brilliant Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City. I just…goddammit. This book, after reading The New Jim Crow and Carceral Capitalism, angers me to the point of wanting to do something rash RIGHT GODDAMN NOW, and at the same time bringing to light the complexities, interconnections, inertia, and above all the unnecessary cruelty of things-as-they-are, which is to say that complex problems do not have simple solutions, or solutions at all that would be feasible in the current neo-feudal mode of American culture and capitalism.

And now, off to start the day, after I extricate myself from under a sleeping kitten.

What I Read In November 2020 – Short Prose

John Winkelman

 

Looks like I will be ending the year as I started it, immersed in short fiction. This month was the first time since March that I put any particular effort into reading short fiction despite my plan at the beginning of 2020 to try to read at least 200 short stories. That sounds like a lot, but considering the average short story takes about half an hour to read at a reasonable pace, that number could easily be doubled without taking a lot of time out of any given day.

There are nineteen short stories in this list, from two anthologies – The Book of Dreams, published by Subterranean Press, and Apocalyptic, published by Zombies Need Brains. I am fairly certain I picked up the Subterranean Press book as part of one of their occasional Grab Bags. Apocalyptic was part of a Kickstarter, the third or fourth annual such which ZNB puts on in order to support the publishing each year of a trio of themed anthologies. I submitted a story to one of their previous calls for submission but, as you may have gathered from the lack of cheering and shouting it to the heavens, that story was not accepted.

[NOTE: That story was later accepted by a different publisher, and will be released on January 1, at which time I will cheer and shout it to the heavens.]

I won’t make any predictions about what I may read in December, which starts (egads!) tomorrow. I am writing several short stories against rapidly approaching submission deadlines, and the holidays are always chaotic, although ironically much less so this year, when everything else is so much more so. I may read a lot or not at all.

The List

2020.11.09: Silverberg, Robert – “The Prisoner”,  The Book of Dreams
2020.11.10: Shepard, Lucius – “Dream Burgers at the Mouth of Hell”, The Book of Dreams
2020.11.10: Lake, Jay – “Testaments”, The Book of Dreams
2020.11.10: Baker, Kage – “Rex Nemorensis”, The Book of Dreams
2020.11.10: Ford, Jeffrey – “86 Deathdick Road”, The Book of Dreams
2020.11.10: McGuire, Seanan – “Coafields’ Catalog of Available Apocalypse Events”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.10: Picchi, Aimee – “Solo Cooking for the Recently Revived”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.10:  Huff, Tanya – “To Dust We Shall Return”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.11: Holzner, Nancy – “End of Eternity”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.11: Blackmoore, Stephen – “Little Armageddons”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.11: Johnson, Zakariah – “Almost Like Snow”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.11: Malan, Violette – “Shadows Behind”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.12: Keramidas, Eleftherios – “A Tale of Two Apocalypses”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.13: Enge, James – “Zodiac Chorus”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.13: Ning, Leah – “Last Letters”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.14: Vaughn, Thomas – “Gut Truck”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.14: King, Marjorie – “Sass and Sacrifice”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.15: Palmatier, Joshua – “The Ballad of Rory McDaniels”, Apocalyptic
2020.11.15: Jessop, Blake – “Trust Fall”, Apocalyptic

November, Come and Gone

John Winkelman

With the election finally over and the orange idiot on his way out, November subjective time has smoothed out and though the first week seemed to last a month, the remainder of the month seemed to last little more than a week. In three days December will begin and we will be in the last month of the strangest year of my life so far.

A small stack of reading material arrived this week, in keeping with my overall reduction in purchases this year.

On the left is Dominion: An Anthology of Speculative Fiction From Africa and the African Diaspora. This one arrived from a Kickstarter campaign I backed in February of this year. The collection is gorgeous and it was absolutely worth the wait.

In the middle is Aetherchrist by Kirk Jones, the latest shipment from my subscription (via Patreon) to the Apex Publications catalog.

On the right is the December 2020 issue of Poetry, which arrives not a moment too soon as I am in dire need of poetry to sooth my soul here in the waning light of 2020.

In reading news, I finished Chuck Wendig’s Damn Fine Story which recharged my writing energies, though not in time to allow me to win NaNoWriMo this year. I also completed The Kragen, a novella by Jack Vance, published by Subterranean Press as a beautiful little hardcover. I haven’t read any Vance in years, and so this felt like a rediscovery of his remarkable prose.

In writing news I spent a few hours this past week pruning my list of themed publication deadlines. I removed all those whose deadlines had passed since I last looked at the list, and added a couple dozen from various calls for submissions in various social media groups and also the deadline calendar at Duotrope, which always has at a minimum 200 upcoming deadlines, stretching from tomorrow (always tomorrow, no matter when you look at the list) to well into 2022. One of the anthology publishers has half a dozen calls for submission on various themes, but on looking them up on Absolute Write it looks like the publisher is one terribly overworked person and the anthologies are often riddled with editorial errors. So I may have to remove half a dozen opportunities from the list.

I have notes prepared for three short stories, one of which I hope to complete two drafts, have beta-read, and finally whipped into shape by the submission deadline of December 31. The other two have deadlines several months away so I doubt I will have trouble completing the stories in time. Assuming, of course I start them in the first place.

And the starting is usually the biggest hurdle.

Fugue

John Winkelman

Oh, that I had time to read all the books which arrive at my house, and Oh, that I had the time to write all the stories which are bouncing around in my head.

A small but significant stack arrived this week. On the left is Empire of Gold, the final book in the Daevabad Trilogy by S.A. Chakraborty, I have unfortunately only read the first in the series. I now have the set, but likely will not have time to read the next until the end of the year.

Second from left is volume 6 of the superb Long List Anthology of Hugo Award finalists. Again, I have the complete set but have only read a few stories from each book. And again, I really need to spend more quality time with the books I already have.

Second from right is the latest issue of Amazing Stories, of which I most certainly do NOT have the entire set, as it has been around since 1926.

And on the far right is the latest issue of Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the excellent literary magazine published by Small Beer Press. Again, not the full set etc., though as this is issue #42 I could in theory hunt down all the past issues. Hmmm…

In writing news, there is no writing news.

In reading news, I have been catching up on short stories, and will post the list of such which I read in November, at the beginning of December. I am also making my way through Chuck Wendig’s Damn Fine Story, which is brilliant and entertaining and I am slowly working my head back into the space from which stories come, though I doubt it will be in time to make even a bit of difference for NaNoWriMo 2020.

I am also still working my way through Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, which is no longer making me angry. Rather, it is making me deeply, profoundly sad for everyone involved, with a few noted exceptions where obvious sociopaths are involved in the eviction process. Fuck those guys.

The year is winding down and, other than a few Kickstarter rewards, I don’t expect to acquire many more books and magazines before January. Just as well. I don’t seem to have time to read the ones I have already picked up.

Writing or Not

John Winkelman

Thing in my life are back to normal in the sense that I am now working long hours and weekends, thanks to a series of miscommunications at work. Each time it happens I say “never again!”, yet when circumstances conspire to require me to work until 20:00 on a Tuesday or something I do it, grumbling the whole time, and invent self-justifications to keep from feeling too resentful about the loss of another chunk of my extremely limited free time. Rinse, repeat.

Another small stack for the library this week – the new issue of Jacobin, and Damn Fine Story, Chuck Wendig‘s guide to writing, which I ordered during the run-up to NaNoWriMo, only to receive it in the middle of the month when I have given up on NaNoWriMo anyway. 2020 is just not my year.

In reading news, I am working my way through Apocalyptic, an anthology of short stories about (you guessed it!) the apocalypse, which I received as part of a Kickstarter campaign held by Zombies Need Brains. These stories are just what I need right now, and they distract me from the feelings engendered by reading Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, which infuriates me enough that I can only read a few pages at a time before I want to go out an cause an apocalypse or two of my own.

As mentioned above, NaNoWriMo for this year is pretty much a bust, unless I miraculously come up with significantly reduced stress along with vast chunks of free time over the next two week. But I am trying to keep my head in that space. I created a list of twenty (so far) possible topics for short stories, most based on past calls for themed anthologies to which I never actually submitted stories. Though this year has been incredibly stressful, I am still feeling energized by the recent acceptance of one of my short stories. Now I want to do nothing but write, but of course not one writer in a hundred thousand makes enough at their craft to support any kind of stable life. So I write code for money, and stories for pleasure.

If only it were the other way around.