Forgive the absence, this was to be the year I started taking this blog Seriously Again. However, I find myself in an odd place — too many half-baked ideas, too few real accomplishments. I feel that of the books I read truly stand out; there are new albums that I’ve enjoyed but few have moved me to write. What I have been thinking about is an old half-finished essay that I’ve had knocking around my head since before I started this blog — the idea of a history without heroes. 

Recently I finished the sweeping The Right of the People by political journalist Osita Nwanevu. It argues forcefully in favor of democracy against a tide of elite skepticism and autocratic; but it also argues just as forcefully that we have never had democracy in this country.

The constitution, Nwanevu argues, was the product of an economic elite terrified of too much democracy. The system was created to defend wealth, power and privilege and has done a good job of exactly that. By taking the founders off the pedestal and treating them as historical actors responding to a historical moment, he says, we can imagine a better world for ourselves. Historic heroes stunt our imagination of what the future could hold. It is not a new or even particularly radical argument, but with the fast approaching 250th anniversary of the United States it feels like a useful one to reiterate. 

What has surprised me this year is the comfort that I find in history without heroes, which I noticed most prominently during a recent read of Ron Chenrow’s biography of Ulysses S. Grant. 

Chenrow paints a portrait of Grant as a brilliant tactician, a compassionate man and loving father and husband who struggled with alcohol, kept a close circle even when outside advice would be beneficial and was easily taken in by those he decided to trust. Physically courageous and unbending in his personal scruples, he also casually accepted major gifts from a grateful public as his right and lost what fortune he had accrued through terrible personal judgment. In a fit of pique he tried to expel all Jews from the territory under his control during the war; an egregiously antisemitic act that marred his legacy and which was promptly reversed by his superiors.

On the key issue of his time, Grant disliked slavery and apparently annoyed his slaveholding neighbors by hiring free Black people to work his farm before the war. When he was gifted an enslaved man Grant promptly freed him. But he married a woman who grew up on a plantation and held people in bondage until the Civil War. Grant was not an abolitionist.

During the war, however, Grant became a strong advocate of enlisting and using Black troops. When the Confederacy refused to exchange Black troops, Grant shut down prison exchanges completely — calculating in part that the North could afford to lose men to prison camps better than the South could, but also because he refused to treat any of his soldiers as expendable.

There is something comforting in reading about historical people with both their flaws and virtues. Grant, for all his many faults, made great strides against a treasonous, evil conspiracy built on systematic kidnapping, abuse, rape and murder. Whatever his personal beliefs on slavery, and his personal tolerance for enslavers, he flatly refused to treat the Black men in his army as disposable. He repented publicly of his anti-semitism and formed political alliances with Jewish Americans. He appointed a Native man as Commissioner of Indian Affairs. For a time during Reconstruction, he used the full force and might of the American military to defend the rights of freed Black citizens. 

Much of this was imperfect; Grant often fell short. But as a flawed resident of the 21st century I find more comfort, more to emulate, in the good that a man of imperfect ideals and personal character was able to achieve than in a hagiographic view of the past that refuses to admit the faults of those who shaped our world.

Wild Faith, like a lot of works, is a project that makes the critical error of trying to approach a book like a piece of journalism.

There is a great book — or at least a great piece of journalism — buried in these pages, for which author Talia Levin interviewed hundreds of people about their experience growing up in Christian nationalism.

The issue, however, is that journalism is a medium of qualitative data, for the most part. As one professor told my class in graduate school, in qualitative data extrapolating anything may not be the point. Documenting what one community or group experiences is valuable in its own right.

If there is one case of abuse in one town and a reporter finds it, it is useful in and of itself as a report on abuse. A pattern of abuse might be extrapolated, but journalism tends to concern itself with the specifics of one case, one incident, one miscarriage of justice.

Journalism can in fact cause problems when it throws up so many data points that people start drawing extrapolations. A newspaper is likely to report on every single murder in a city; but the fact there is a murder on the front page of the paper every week does not mean the city has a high murder rate necessarily, it means that murder is such an extraordinary and horrific event that it is important to document it regardless of how common or uncommon it is. “If it bleeds it leads” journalism, however, feeds directly into people’s perception that murder and crime is far more common than it actually is.

Levin’s book is a “if it bleeds it leads” approach to the issue of the religious right. The number of evangelicals in the entire country is brought up for the first time in the book 67% of the way through. Most of the contents prior to that are interviews with professors or experts (not, tellingly, citations to their scholarly works — an extremely journalistic approach that works on short deadlines but feels slapdash in a book) and a medley of horrific incidents of abuse or overreach by evangelical officials.

Are these issues worth noting and raising up? Absolutely. Are the voice of abuse victims Levin brings in to the book worthwhile even if those voices were the sole examples of abuse among the Christian right? Clearly.

But the book is not framed around the interviews, which would be a good and valuable book to have written. It’s not framed around statistical analysis of disproportionate political power by evangelical lawmakers, which would also be an intriguing read. It’s framed as a scrapbook of incidents, with much attention devoted to finding clever ad-hominin epithets for various political figures and not much to doing what the book claims to be doing: explaining their power.

The number of evangelicals, by the way, is 14% — not exactly an overwhelming majority. There could be interesting arguments about how this 14% has grown to have significant power over right-wing politics, more so than, say, libertarians. But instead the author parades a set of context-less images saying to the reader again and again, isn’t it awful? Isn’t it just terrible?

I wanted to like this book, not least because I did enjoy Levin’s first work (although in retrospect I do think it suffered some of the same issues). Even this book could have been a really excellent work of journalism if the author stuck to centering personal experience. But instead it is a book that largely tries to extrapolate trends from qualitative data that cannot support the assertions; a crime-beat explanation of a movement in American politics that deserves better analysis.  

This blog has been sorely neglected over the past year, much of which is due to chaos outside my control. Some of it, however, I can chalk up to reading several exceedingly long books.

            The most recent entry into this collection is the Count of Monte Cristo, which I began rather on a whim — it was a free classic on my phone and I was looking for something to occupy me during a long car ride.

            The length of the book put me off for years. Over a thousand pages, or nearly 40 hours of audio, seemed far too much trouble for a somewhat archaic book. I should have known that a serialized novel that has been captivating people for over 150 years is, in fact, incredibly readable — in fact at the beginning I couldn’t figure out what was going to fill up all the other pages, given how fast everything important seemed to be happening. As the book increased in speed and the Count’s vengeance began to take form, the plot seemed to ramp up like one of the story’s horse drawn carriages run wild; I was genuinely on edge to see what happened next. Even as I saw the ending begin to take shape in the final chapters, I found it unexpectedly moving as the book concluded.

            Not all classics worth reading are enjoyable. The great and out of date can be an interminable slog (so far I have been unsuccessful in finishing the Brothers Karamazov, although I intend to — eventually). But I’m also, a bit to my chagrin, pleasantly surprised at how rarely that is the case. I really should expect it at this point.

            Something in my brain clicked while watching a live production of Romeo and Juliet in middle school, and I’ve loved Shakespeare ever since. Shortly thereafter I found myself delighted and, at times, genuinely creeped out by Dracula. I found the Iliad and the Greek tragedies far more moving than two-thousand-year-old prose had any right to be. Last year I thoroughly enjoyed the audio book of Moby Dick. The side notes about whales and whaling and life aboard ship were less tedious than I was prepared for; indeed I found them rather charming — a bit like being cornered at a party by a slightly inebriated but good natured enthusiast, the sort of person whose love for the subject is more entertaining than the subject itself.

            The more history I read the more I realize how profoundly different people’s view of the world has been throughout time, with fundamental beliefs so different from my own it is hard to imagine the world in which they lived. But the emotions still resonate, even if they are caused by circumstance utterly alien to our own century.

            When I was young, my family visited Library of Congress and saw a Gutenberg bible on display.  My mother and I, with our limited Latin, could work out the first line of this book that had shaken the globe to its foundations — it was opened, as I recall, to the opening passage of the Gospel of John. We could still understand these letters, inked on lead type at the dawn of the information age.

            Every time I find genuine pleasure in a book written before the 20^th century I get an echo of the same feeling I had as I stood before that open Bible; and the thrill of recognition that I still draw meaning from it today.

Hello to you, my non-existent readers. As you likely don’t exist I won’t apologize for the absence, but let me say the most recent months have coincided with a truly chaotic, although overall good, moment in my life. I’ve had little time to breathe, and am just in the past month or two returning to my hobbies of handi-crafts and writing. I’ve kept up my reading, although not as thoroughly as last year when I hit five hours a week every single week for a year and read 104 books. This year I’ve decided to read fewer books, picking up some tomes I avoided as they might slow down my count; and I’ve been more relaxed about the hours – although I still aim for five a week, I’ve missed a few here and there. There are lots of thoughts that I would like to share here, and still hope to, but for now here is a long-delayed reflection on what I read in 2023.

I intended this to be a top-10 books, but it felt more like I had a few individual standouts and then tranches of books that I enjoyed. So on the theory that I can do whatever I like with my own blog, here is my review of last year’s reading.

1. How Far the Light Reaches

This is probably one of my favorite books of all time, let alone this year. Sabrina Imbler is a writer I’ve followed for years, and their ability to take complex scientific concepts and explain them in a way that is both entertaining and clear is one I am deeply jealous of. How Far The Light Reaches is on another level, however. I’m a sucker for a good essay, but these are transcendent. It never feels like anthropormism as Imbler puts strange sea creatures alongside their experiences with race, sex, gender, family and love. Instead the nature writing forms an analogy, shedding light on their life rather than projecting human experience onto the creatures.

• A Fistful of Shells

I’ve written frequently about history and reading as gaps and spaces — filling in or writing around. Perhaps the thing I love best about history is when my view of a period that was previously terra nullis is filled in: so that is what Europeans were doing as Rome receded, or this is how certain communities native to the Americas organized their governance. A Fistful of Shells adds stunning detail an era it is easy to see in broad strokes, the early modern history of West Africa. It is an economic history that carefully documents how early European contact with West Africa was a meeting of equals, at least among elites; how the inflation of incoming goods (especially cowerie shells) against gold and enslaved labor shifted economic power away from Africa, and how those on the receiving end of this unequal exchange responded. It truly gave me a new perspective on history.

• The summary history

Most of the history I have read has been early-modern, often focused on the United States. The past year or so I’ve tried to expand out into eras I know less about, particularly medieval history. This year I read several good summary histories that gave me a much better sense of medieval history — The Inheritance of Rome and The Bright Ages, on the early and early-high middle ages in Europe, respectively; African Dominion and Caravans of Gold, Fragments of time on medieval West Africa; Children of Ash and Elm on the Viking world; SPQR on the rise of Rome and, incongruously, the Penguin History of Canada. They were all good introductory books (although African Dominion is one I wish I had read after some of the others), focused more on informing than arguing specific points.

I also read an abridged translation of the Travels of Ibn Battatuah, which was my first foray into primary texts in some time and I found fascinating – reading the description of a mango from a North African Islamic judge of the 14^th century was a wonderful and surprising thrill. This year I continued the exploration with a collection of translated Arabic writings about West Africa, and enjoyed spotting the primary sources behind much of the history I’ve read.

• The Political History

These are more in line with the kinds of books I’ve read generally – deep dives into (usually more modern) topics. Among the best of these was The Jakarta Method — a deeply disturbing and incredibly well done history of right wing Communist extermination campaigns in the “third world,”  often with the tacit and support of Washington. I also read Race for Profit, on housing policy, Debt: The First 5,000 years on the creation of currency and ethics of debt, Late Victorian Holocausts on a famine I had never known existed, Blood in the Water on the Attica uprising, and Upbuilding Black Durham on the history of a city I loved but knew little about. All helped me understand the world I live in better.

• The full genre sweep

This past year I realized I had read an unusually wide variety of fiction, and decided to go for a clean sweep: literary/realistic, historical, fantasy, science fiction, mystery, thriller, romance and horror. For all that I insist that I don’t read much fantasy these days, I read a lot of it this year – including the Lord of the Rings for the first time as an adult, which was wonderful. I enjoyed some deeply weird novels, including the surrealist historical fantasy The Vorrh, and the linguistics focused sci-fi concept novel Embassytown. And I read Jo Walton for the first time, and found her Philosopher King novels, and especially Lent, to be wonderfully intriguing concepts I continue to contemplate.

I can remember the moment I decided I was done with history. It was probably in early high school, and I was researching an incident where a union supporter had been killed by a local veteran’s organization. The conflict had produced two directly contradictory narrative of events, one from the union supporters, one from their opponents; nothing else remained to provide some outsider perspective.

History had always been my favorite subject, with its narrative sweep and storybook feel. But I found this wildly frustrating — sources contradicted themselves, or were biased, or were missing. Nothing could be known, nothing was uncontested. What then was the point? I certainly continued learning about history after that, but never pursued it academically; never took a history department course in college.

As an adult, I’ve returned to history as a hobbyist. Much of it has been a semi-professional interest in American history, particularly the history of political and social movements — as a journalist this history is often quite relevant. Recently though, and as occasionally documented on this blog, I’ve pursued quite a different autodidactic track, delving into the medieval history of Europe, Africa and Western Asia. This was prompted in part by a realization there were significant gaps in my knowledge of what people were doing for most of recorded time. What were residents of the Sahel doing in 1325, anyway? What about all those Visigoths, once they had finished raiding Rome? I, embarrassingly, had very little idea.

Much of this history — “The Inheritance of Rome,” “The Golden Rhinoceros,” “African Dominion,” “The Bright Ages” — is fragmentary at best. Handfuls of coins, outsider travelogues, scraps of writing; from these entire cities are summoned from the past or in some cases not summoned at all (“Inheritance of Rome” has one stunning line where several decades of history in part of Italy is glossed over because apparently nothing survived to tell us what was happening).

One of my favorite works has been “Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange across Medieval Saharan Africa,” which serves as a catalog and accompaniment of a museum exhibit, a collection of scholarly articles, an art book, and more. The book not only acknowledges but embraces the fragmentary historical record. Many of the photos in the book are of shards of potter or scraps of cloth, when these are not available contemporary objects stand in for what historical precedents might have looked like. Most of the book is micro-focused academic essays digging a single process of gold manufacture or a few words in Arabic. To frame this assemblage of history, the book opens with an essay not by an archeologist, but a creative writer; reflecting on the nature of fragments.

Here is history that is joyfully without certainty. Glimpsing a shard from a world that is unknowable to us but unquestionably existed in all the full glory of human experience is frustrating; but it is exhilarating too. Amidst a fog of lost history, any sharp image, no matter how small, feels like a revelation.

In many ways, “Ministry for the Future” “by Kim Stanley Robinson is the opposite of Terra Ignota. Painfully realistic, it is, in many ways, exactly the kind of narrative I wrote previously would be difficult to write — a narrative of political change that avoids great-man politics. The question is, does it work?

“Ministry for the Future” is slow and deeply wonky. It assumes a certain familiarity with things like recent Indian political history and blockchain currency, and a great deal of the rest of the book is explication of more complex ideas. To the extent the book has a main character it is Mary, the former foreign minister of Ireland and the head of the eponymous Ministry for the Future,  which is tasked with preventing environmental collapse in a near future Earth.

Mary’s husband has died, of what it is never entirely clear, and her time as foreign minister is entirely glossed over. In order for some of the explication to work, Mary sometimes seems hopelessly naïve — ignorant of fairly basic concepts and realities that her staff have to explain to her (and thus the reader) step-by-step.

It’s never entirely clear why Mary specifically got the job, and in hyper-realistic fashion most of her narrative is taken up with internal meetings and international conferences, where she is usually frustrated and achieves little (the exception, a terrorist attack that she must flee from over the Alps, proves the rule — the perpetrators of the attack are never found and the incident has almost no bearing on the rest of the book). The only other truly developed character, Frank, lives through a fatal heatwave, becomes a failed eco-terrorist, and kidnaps Mary starting, eventually, an unlikely friendship. Their stilted relationship is the most novelistic part of the whole lengthy book. In the background of these endless meetings and conversations, the world slowly stops unraveling and little victory by little victory claws its way back towards a better, if still imperfect, future

Because so much happens offscreen, the novel mostly consists of scenes summarizing problems and later, what has been done about them; there is much less coverage of the doing itself. The exception is a series of first-person narrations by unnamed residents of the changing earth, and these are often the most interesting and touching chapters. The anonymity, perhaps gesturing at some universality is instead frustratingly vague, but overall these little windows into a world careening towards crisis and away from it again are affecting and effective.

If the book frequently feels less like a novel than meeting minutes, however, the dull normality of it all also makes it all feel real and possible. Solutions are diffuse, scattershot, a mix of disaster-led political shakeups, ground-up organizing, terroristic violence, technological developments, self-interest and creative policy making. A few key solutions led by the Ministry make the economics of societal reform sustainable, but even these are implemented by other, usually reluctant agencies.

So does it work? In a way, yes. The novel does work at conveying the sheer depth and breadth of any movement to reshape the world, although I feel like a collection of the interludes without an attempt at novelistic plot, a pastiche pseudo-history (which half the novel is already) might have worked better. Is it the answer to how to write a fictional story of political change? It is one answer, certainly. Still, I remain convinced there is a better balance that can be struck.

After devouring it as a child, I find that I no longer read much sword and sorcery.

This is not to say that I no longer read fantasy — I do, and enthusiastically at that. But I find the kinds of things that epic fantasy tends to be creative on, like magic systems and pantheons, always seem to do so in societies that more or less all resemble each other.

An example is perhaps in order. At the insistence of a friend, I read “The Way of Kings” several years ago, and will admit to enjoying it well enough. I understand why Brandon Sanderson gets praise for world building. The intricate magic systems and unique religions are truly very interesting, but much of the rest of the world still seemed replete with tropes, perhaps tweaked but not undone. Women are restricted to specific roles, aristocrats squabble over land, there are soldiers and slaves, good lords and bad. This seems true throughout much epic fantasy: when it comes to governance, the same themes appear again and again — a sort of variant monarchism or theocracy, often with strict gender, class and caste rolls, rarely that far off from those we perceive as historical to a vaguely conceptualized medieval era. Even narratives that choose non-Eurocentric historical settings (Black Sun and the Dark Star Trilogy both come to mind) lean into what feel like variations of the same political settings.

I understand why this is the norm — there are narrative advantages in this deference to centralized authority, alongside traditions. A single Dark Lord allows a few compelling characters who are extraordinary wizards or warriors to alter history for the better (and any army such a Dark Lord leads will hopefully crumble once the fatal blow is struck against this single leader). On the other hand, a good king can usher in an era of Eden with a few decrees. In this sort of novel, the fate of the world turns on a few people, which lets the protagonists have plausible sole authorship of world-shaking events.

This is, I hasten to stress, not inherently a bad thing, if executed in a fun or different way it can highly enjoyable.[1] That being said, one reason I love the social sciences, particularly political histories and sociology, is learning all the myriad variations of what human society could look like. Other books mentioned in prior (and perhaps future) posts lay out visions of our own world that are vastly different from those found in the heirs of Tolkien. Kings with absolute authority but no ability to delegate that power to any lackey, societies that moved from egalitarian to authoritarian and back again annually, nations where rulers were constrained by independent judicial and poetic classes, councils, parliaments, and anarchy were all as historical as Charlemagne and King Richard.

It is in science fiction that I have most often found this crucial part of the human experience speculated on — Ursula K. Leguin’s “Dispossed,” Ada Palmer’s “Terra Ignota,” Octavia Butler’s “Earthseed,” Malka Oldman’s “Infomocracy,” Arkady Martine’s “Teixcalaan,” Jo Walton’s “Just City.”[2] These books are excellent for a host of reasons — characters that are compelling and develop in interesting ways, world building that is inextricably intertwined with the plot, real world issues addressed in innovative ways. But it is also that the society itself is vibrant and fascinating; not the same society with a different set of monsters and magic imposed over it, but truly different worlds to explore. I hope someday to find epic fantasy that is as creative in all aspects of its world.

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[1] As an aside, for this reason I like the “Mistborn” series by Sanderson much more, it is effectively a high-fantasy heist novel and I’m a sucker for a good con — and have enjoyed most of the rest of the epic fantasy cited here

[2] I do not know why political science fiction seems to be written disproportionately by women, but I cannot avoid the observation that it is

Note: the following contains heavy spoilers for the Terra Ignota series through the end of the final book

“One point eight! We did it! One point eight!”

This line, delivered by Tully Mardi in Ada Palmer’s Terra Ignota series, marks the emotional denouement of a four book lead up to and through a worldwide war. The war is over, communications are back online, it is time to tally up the total casualties. After more than a year of global conflict, of a population of 10 billion people only 1.8 million have died — victory.

Without having read the books, it is difficult to appreciate how sweet this moment is. Rereading it for this blog, I found myself shedding a tear. The joy is as infectious as it is perverse. There is of course nothing to celebrate about 1.8 million people dead — except for the fact that it could have been so, so much worse. And Mardi has spent their entire life working towards the brutal goal of a war with as few causalities as possible. They can plausibly claim credit for singlehandedly lowering the death toll, their life’s work has not been in vain.

Palmer puts her work into the realm of hope punk, and writes far more eloquently about the goals of that ethic than I am able to. It is a genre dedicated, in her view, not to the easy drama of dark lords and righteous rebellions but the far messier prospect of making a flawed world better. It is a celebration of the grinding, life-consuming work of putting one’s shoulder to the wheel and pushing the arc of history a little bit further in the right direction.

The world of Terra Ignota is in many ways utopian, compared to our current world — the oppression of religion and gender have been put aside without (fully) banning them, prisons are archaic and rarely used, until the events of the novels, war and hunger have been distant memories for centuries. There are compromises, to be sure, but not only do all the characters think they live in the best era Earth has ever seen, they are arguably correct.

And yet.

The entire series is about how such a system can crack, where the compromises are necessary and when they are unbearable. It is about a lot of other things as well — theodicy, Greek mythology, Enlightenment philosophy, ethics, hope, gender, vengeance, scientific advancement, linguistic ambiguity and a host of other topics. But the core tensions are the points at which this system has failed to meet the aspirations of those living within it, and, crucially, how they make the system better.

The ability to sell a war of 1.8 million dead as an emotionally satisfying victory is impressive. But for me it also raises a related question. If you can sell small victories, can you also create a narratively compelling story where one character — in this case Tully Mardi — is not responsible for so much bloodshed avoided?

While Terra Ignota has a massive cast, it wavers at times into being great man fiction, with a few characters playing all the key roles in a world of ten billion people. Palmer does undercut this in some ways in later books — the cast of “great men” at the end is significantly different from that at the start, and is more expansive than at the start. There are moments that truly celebrate the vast number of unknown people working across a world at war to provide comfort and aid and minimize the casualties.

Still, the series focuses largely on the actions of a few key players even in a narrative that self-consciously looks incremental political and social change, not total revolution, for salvation. By the end the key players have changed, but several have gathered together more power in a single person than any Roman emperor or modern authoritarian. Meanwhile, the most radically decentralized, anarchic system of governance at the start of the books is revealed to have been manipulated by a few powerful key people; for it, progress is reform into more of a traditional democracy, a consolidation of power, not a distribution of it.

To be perfectly clear, the Terra Ignota series is one of my favorite books in recent memory. It is a paperback fulgurite, the energy of a lightning bolt frozen in text, and will likely crop up in many future blogs to come. It makes marvelous use of its form — a novel with (largely) one viewpoint — and it is a form that demands a reasonable group of people to follow. It is difficult to imagine a compelling novel that documents political upheaval both in full and from the perspective of someone laboring at one corner of a mighty project.

Still, I feel a novel that can make 1.8 million dead in a world of 10 billion an emotionally satisfying narrative might be able to do so without giving power over those 10 billion to just a handful of people.  

The year after I graduated college, I read Ulysses.

I had always been more of a reader in my ambitions than in actuality. I tried to tackle Don Quixote and Moby Dick before high school, burning out rapidly on both. All through childhood I would abandon books, half-read, for months, years, or forever.

In college, after finding myself reading less and less, I decided to make a point of it. During that renewed commitment, I got about half way through Ulysses. But eventually I put it down and simply did not pick it back up again.

The year after graduation, I bludgeoned my way through James Joyce’s epic at last. It felt like a victory. There was no need to explain or even recall it —  I could just let Joyce’s language wash over me, enjoying what I enjoyed, remembering what I remembered, for the sheer pleasure of the words and the satisfaction of having done a difficult thing.

Rarely, now, do I pick up a book and do not finish it. I read few books on a whim, if I’ve picked it up there is usually a good reason and therefore a good reason to soldier through. I do occasionally abandon books, but with an intentional finality, not the vague drifting away of my younger years.

The one thing that I have found remains difficult is making time to sit down and read a book in the first place. Particularly long or dense books take me weeks or months to finish. I may pick up a lighter read instead, or simply only read a few pages at night on the nights when I don’t scroll myself to sleep on Twitter. But there are so many good books, and not all of them are easy reading.

This year, my New Year’s resolution is to physically read books five hours a week. News articles do not count, no matter how literary, nor do audio books (although I enjoy them immensely). No, I have determined I will look at a page, in a book, for at least five hours.

This feels, admittedly, like a rather tame goal. It is most likely dwarfed by the time I spend on social media or watching television. And yet, a few weeks in, it has been a joy — a source of the same satisfaction as finally finishing Ulysses.

I find myself looking forward to setting my phone down and digging in for an hour at a time, staying up, perhaps, too late. I know I must carve out time for it, and the temptation to dawdle as I head to bed is dampened by the knowledge I still have an hour of reading to do. The reading list thus far has been dense, and yet I’m finishing books with ease. One night, finishing a rather brief novel with fifteen minutes to spare, I felt a nagging need to open up the next book in the stack and keep going.

This resolution is not my only one for the year, another is posting to the blog at least once a month. Last year, some time I had to use on the blog was taken up with other things, including other, rewarding creative pursuits. But just as I hope to read more good books this year than last year, I hope too to use this platform to share my thoughts with the empty void more frequently.

Happy New Year, all – here’s to the joys of discipline, and of finishing hard things well.

Seeing Adia Victoria perform live is a little like watching a vampire say mass.

Certainly, the gothic blues singer has a vampiric glamour and intensity that is almost impossible to ignore. When I saw her she appeared arrayed in her vestments, a floor length black dress with bright red cowboy boots flashing underneath, and with the blues as her church, began the ancient ritual of singing — standing, kneeling, entwined with her fellow performers and flat on her back, the heel of one boot to the South Carolina sky.

Her music is shot through with ghosts, holy and otherwise. There is something deliciously eerie about much of it, particularly songs like “Devil is a lie” and “Clean.”

First of all, there is no god
‘Cause I went out and killed my God
And laid his body in the dirt
I killed him clean, so it did not hurt…

Not all of her tracks are so metaphysical, “Head Rot” has a grungy, rock ‘n roll feel, while “South Gotta Change” is a straightforward political anthem. But none of them quite feel like anything else you’ve ever heard.

The lyrics are accentuated by Victoria’s voice: almost falsetto, but never strangled — a haunted breeze whispering through Spanish moss. She can, and does, sing full throated blues, like on her single “Ain’t Killed Me Yet,” but it is her high, quavering tracks that make the hair on the back of your arms stand up.

Victoria takes to heart the old blues message that when you accept you were born to die, it’s easier to get on with living. In her congregation the end is a given, it is what happens now that matters. In place of bread and wine she offers gin and weed, for tolling bells the tap-tap-tap of a tambourine on her thigh. She looks the South, blood soaked and Christ haunted, dead in the eye, blasphemies tin gods; not a rejection, but a reckoning.