Clayton's Notes

Books of 2024

Last year, I was 2 months late on my end-year books review. This year, I thought: Those are rookie numbers man. You gotta up your game. So I’m putting this out a solid 4+ months late. I am looking forward to eventually publishing these with 5 and even 10 year delays. I apologize in advance for the brevity of most of these. Some of these, I don’t have fresh in my mind, and many others, I don’t have the motivation to take an hour to get down what I really think about it and why. Too, I read a lot of books I didn’t actually like last year. Side note: don’t do that. Read what you enjoy, what brings you life.

There is an epilogue on reading at the end.

España: A Brief History - Giles Tremlett
I read this while living in Seville, Spain, and it was a wonderful companion to that time. It is exactly what the title says: a short history of the country of Spain. The author has been a foreign correspondent for The Guardian and The Economist for most of the last 30 years, based entirely in Spain during that time, and has written 4 other books on periods of Spain’s history: He is a consummate historian. He writes well, and the history of the country fascinates me. The briefness of the book is a godsend: there are many volumes written on small portions of Spain’s expansive recorded history, and Tremlett gives us a birdseye view of the last 2000 years without getting bogged down in any specific period. Spain has had so many warring groups contest it over the last two millennia. This is undoubtedly true of every other slice of regularly inhabited territory on this planet, but still.

This is a fantastic short history, and I would recommend it to anyone who has even a passing interest in world history or Spain.

Sun Eater Series, Books 1-6 - Christopher Ruocchio I read these one after another, buying the next one to my Kindle as soon as finishing the previous, like compulsively unwrapping and shooting 6 Reese’s in a row on Halloween. Like the Reese’s, this series is tremendously satisfying in a perfectly-engineered sugar-rush kind of way, and also essentially devoid of humanity and communion with the world, which is what I would call “nutrition” in a book. It is somehow extremely fresh and unique while drawing on a bazillion tropes of fantasy and science-fiction. The sci-fi elements are light at best: Sun Eater is essentially Star Wars, a fantasy series that happens to take place in the far future with technology so advanced it is presented as magic to both the protagonist and the reader.

I enjoyed the series, and I’m sure I will re-read it at some point in the far future, but it frustrates me to no end. I would finish each reading session thinking “god this writing is awful, I’m done with this book”, and then pick it up the next day when my mind began wondering about the unresolved story points. I found myself wanting to have a pen at hand to edit and revise the book. To re-write the fumbling phrases, to cut the profusion of inane and not useful sentences. Compounding this, the main character, especially after the first book, is almost completely impossible for me to identify with as a fellow human. The way he interacts with the universe around him is beyond paper-thin: paper at least has two dimensions. Hadrian Marlowe has one.

Please keep in mind after I have just shit all over the writing: I did read all 6 of them.

I’d recommend these only to avid fantasy readers, and possibly avid sci-fi readers if they enjoy the lighter, Star Wars-esque end of the sci-fi spectrum.

The Archipelago - HR Hawkins
Political sci-fi. Sort of wild writing style, reminded me of a combination of a few people I used to follow on Twitter, combined with a human/computer interaction researcher whose work I follow via Patreon. The political systems the author sets up in this book were a lot of fun to think about. The main character has the personality of a slug, and should be salted.

I’d recommend to avid sci-fi readers who enjoy thinking about alternative political systems.

100 Years of Solitude - Gabriel García Márquez
This book made me laugh out loud multiple times, and also made me remember why I find magical realism infuriating and empty.

The writing in this book is second-to-none, and I’d recommend it to anyone who knows they like magical realism and won’t be totally put-off by a frankly baffling surplus of incest and sexual assault, or anyone who actively enjoys post-modernism, god rest your necropolitan soul.

Stormlight Archive, Books 1-4 - Brandon Sanderson
I read these purely in an attempt to connect with a now-ex-girlfriend. I already knew I didn’t like Sanderson’s writing, having read his stuff prior.

I strongly recommend not reading books you know you don’t like, for someone else. If you don’t like the books, you don’t fucking like the books.

That is all I have to say.

The Ruin of Angels: A Novel of the Craft Sequence - Max Gladstone
Four Roads Cross: A Novel of the Craft Sequence - Max Gladstone
I no longer remember enough about these to say anything substantial about them. I enjoy Gladstone’s novels. They are smart and tight novels set in a finance-tinged fantasy universe that sticks in the mind. I still vividly remember some of the characters and locales of the other books in this series. Just not this one.

Recommend to fantasy readers, after you read the other first few novels that he published in this universe.

When Things Fall Apart - Pema Chödrön
This is the most important and impactful book I read last year, and I re-read chapters of it over and over and over again. It took me months to read it, and then I started over again from the beginning for the same cycle.

I don’t know how to talk about this book, so I’m going to put an excerpt here. This excerpt will either connect to you the reader and make you want to read it, or it won’t. If it doesn’t, this book probably has nothing for you. If it does, pick up a copy, and start to read it and then come talk to me about it.

When things fall apart and we’re on the verge of we know not what, the test for each of us is to stay on that brink and not concretize. The spiritual journey is not about heaven and finally getting to a place that’s really swell. In fact, that way of looking at things is what keeps us miserable. Thinking that we can find some lasting pleasure and avoid pain is what in Buddhism is called samsara, a hopeless cycle that goes round and round endlessly and causes us to suffer greatly. The very first noble truth of the Buddha points out that suffering is inevitable for human beings as long as we believe that things last—that they don’t disintegrate, that they can be counted on to satisfy our hunger for security. From this point of view, the only time we ever know what’s really going on is when the rug’s been pulled out and we can’t find anywhere to land. We use these situations either to wake ourselves up or to put ourselves to sleep. Right now—in the very instant of groundlessness—is the seed of taking care of those who need our care and of discovering our goodness.

I remember so vividly a day in early spring when my whole reality gave out on me. Although it was before I had heard any Buddhist teachings, it was what some would call a genuine spiritual experience. It happened when my husband told me he was having an affair. We lived in northern New Mexico. I was standing in front of our adobe house drinking a cup of tea. I heard the car drive up and the door bang shut. Then he walked around the corner, and without warning he told me that he was having an affair and he wanted a divorce.

I remember the sky and how huge it was. I remember the sound of the river and the steam rising up from my tea. There was no time, no thought, there was nothing—just the light and a profound, limitless stillness. Then I regrouped and picked up a stone and threw it at him.

When anyone asks me how I got involved in Buddhism, I always say it was because I was so angry with my husband. The truth is that he saved my life. When that marriage fell apart, I tried hard—very, very hard—to go back to some kind of comfort, some kind of security, some kind of familiar resting place. Fortunately for me, I could never pull it off. Instinctively I knew that annihilation of my old dependent, clinging self was the only way to go…

… Life is a good teacher and a good friend. Things are always in transition, if we could only realize it. Nothing ever sums itself up in the way that we like to dream about. The off-center, in-between state is an ideal situation, a situation in which we don’t get caught and we can open our hearts and minds beyond limit. It’s a very tender, nonaggressive, open-ended state of affairs.

To stay with that shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path. Getting the knack of catching ourselves, of gently and compassionately catching ourselves, is the path of the warrior. We catch ourselves one zillion times as once again, whether we like it or not, we harden into resentment, bitterness, righteous indignation—harden in any way, even into a sense of relief, a sense of inspiration.

Every day we could think about the aggression in the world, in New York, Los Angeles, Halifax, Taiwan, Beirut, Kuwait, Somalia, Iraq, everywhere. All over the world, everybody always strikes out at the enemy, and the pain escalates forever. Every day we could reflect on this and ask ourselves, “Am I going to add to the aggression in the world?” Every day, at the moment when things get edgy, we can just ask ourselves, “Am I going to practice peace, or am I going to war?”

The Orchard Keeper - Cormac McCarthy
This is Cormac McCarthy’s first novel. I had read nearly every other novel of his before this one, and it was fascinating to me to see how different his first work is, how much his style evolved even between this one and Outer Dark, his next novel. Limited or absent vision into the motives and minds of the characters is a McCarthy staple, but there is genuine explicit interiority in The Orchard Keeper. There are other differences, but I no longer remember what they were, since I read this well over a year ago. Suffice to say that every other McCarthy novel feels, to me, 100% McCarthy. This one feels 65% McCarthy. You might read that as saying that it is lesser, and that’s not what I mean, at all. It is a fantastic book.

I’d recommend this to anyone who enjoys McCarthy’s other works. If you haven’t read a lot of his other stuff, I would never tell you to read this one.

The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
I thoroughly enjoyed this book. That’s all I’m going to say. Pick it up for yourself, if you fancy it.

Crescent City Trilogy - Sarah J. Maas
House of Flame and Shadow - Sarah J. Maas
House of Sky and Breath - Sarah J. Maas
House of Earth and Blood - Sarah J. Maas
After years of seeing these books plastered across the front-shelves of every bookstore I’ve ever walked into, I finally asked myself: What exactly are the housewives reading these days?

Well, now I know.

These books are stupid as fuck and I read all 3 of them.

Childhood’s End - Arthur C. Clarke
Quick and fun classic sci-fi that I read for a book club with friends.

I’d recommend to avid sci-fi readers, but only the avid, as there are far better sci-fis out there.

Sidewinder: Creative Missile Development at China Lake - Ron Westrum
If you have any interest in anything even remotely technical, I think you would find this book absolutely engrossing. I am actively planning to re-read it in a couple of years.

Children of Ruin - Adrian Tchaikovsky
This is the second book in a series that began with Children of Time. Fresh and quick, I enjoyed this book a lot, though I love Children of Time with a fiery passion that this book didn’t engender. I still would recommend it to any sci-fi readers, and anyone who enjoyed Children of Time.

Shards of Earth - Adrian Tchaikovsky
I had previously read two books of Tchaikovsky’s (Children of Time & Children of Memory) that I found wonderfully refreshing and unique. I was hoping for the same from this one. Unfortunately, it was a clean miss. I don’t recommend it, though I still would heartily recommend Children of Time to anyone with a pulse.

The Hydrogen Sonata - Iain M. Banks (reread)
I adore this book. I reread it and The Algebraist (same author) every few years. Anyone who reads sci-fi should take a deep-dive into Banks’ work at some point in their life.

Thin Air - Richard K. Morgan (reread)
Brutal abrasive violent near-future sci, would not recommend to probably anyone, but I’ve reread it at least 3 times in the last 6 years. What does this say about me, I wonder?

East of Eden - John Steinbeck (reread)
In a holy trio of my favorite novels ever, I reread this every couple years.

All the Pretty Horses - Cormac McCarthy (reread)
The second book in the holy trio of my favorite novels ever. This novel contains sections of untranslated Spanish, and it was a rush to be able to read and perfectly understand those sections this re-read around.

Shadow and Claw - Gene Wolfe (reread)
If you enjoy sci-fi, at some point, you’ve got to read Gene Wolfe. His works are complex, literary, allusive, and are a vision of what could be in sci-fi, if the writers by default gave a shit about the English language and the infinite things you can do with a tale.

Hyperion - Dan Simmons (reread)
Olympos - Dan Simmons (reread)
Ilium - Dan Simmons (reread)
Dan Simmons was an English teacher, and it shows: I do not find myself wanting to re-write every other sentence of his, like so much other sci-fi. In fact, I don’t think about his writing at all. It is seamless, fluid. I love these books.

Epilogue

Last year was a strange year for reading. This is probably because life itself was strange and in flux. I read a few books that I truly loved, and many other books whose actual writing I didn’t enjoy but kept reading for various reasons. Boredom. Escapism. Futile attempts to connect with a now-ex-girlfriend.

Writing this retrospective feels even stranger now, as I am only starting to emerge from a slump in which I read almost nothing from December till now. No, not a slump. A burn-out. A burn-out of reading and most other things, too. A burn-out of enjoyment. I am only just beginning again to able to sit down with a book and enjoy it. But something has changed. I no longer believe in books the way I did before. I believe in a precious few of them far more than I used to, but most of them, I don’t believe in at all. This is a seismic change for me: I used to strongly believe in books by default. Now, I disbelieve by default.

I am not sure that I understand what I mean by believing in a book. But I’m going to try to explain it anyway.

I used to pick up a book with the belief that it would give me something. That I would discover something about myself or this maddeningly indecipherable universe within its pages. That whoever had written it had figured something out, however infinitesimal, and was going to share that. Perhaps something true and real and good, or perhaps it would be mere entertainment: a portal to another reality with actual fucking rules, understandable, tractable. Somewhere to watch a character navigate their path through that reality.

I don’t feel that way when I pick up a book today. Whatever a book used to represent to me, that promise of what was inside, it no longer does.

My tastes in writing have certainly drastically narrowed, so perhaps I’ve only become an insufferable hipster in my reading tastes: sophisticatedly esoteric. Or perhaps I’ve inevitably wandered into being sclerotic in what I like as I get older. Perhaps they are the same thing. I don’t know.

Some of it is in how I think about existence at all, and how it relates to the scribbling of words on paper. I would hazard that I learned more about living in the last 18 months of life than I did in the entirety of the 10 years prior. Most of those lessons did not come from books. The bits of that learning that did arrive via written word came from reading chapters of the same two pieces of non-fiction over and over and over again, trying to transfer their wisdom into my mind by repetition, the way a religious person might pore over the texts of their holy books, trying to get at the essence of what is being said. Words, after all, merely imperfectly describe the core object itself. The core thing can only be known via experience. There is no other way to knowing it. If you read about it and then afterwards think you know about it, you don’t. That is like seeing a charcoal sketch of a person and thinking that by having seen that sketch, you know the person it depicts. The sketch outlines some aspect of the person, and for someone who does actually know them, it can evoke their being, but at root, it is just a sketch. The same is true for words, books.

“You’ve mistaken the stars reflected in a pond at night for the heavens.” - Vilgefortz, from The Witcher.

Perhaps it’s that I used to believe in books because I believed they were the thing itself, and that I’ve only now woken up to the fact that books are mere reflections of the heavens in a pond at night. Whatever the case, I don’t want the reflections anymore. I want the heavens.