The Factual Opinion

Red Flowers, Buddy!

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Bigelow 2: Near Dark

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Our Favorite Comics Of 2021

After the break, check out the latest episode of Comic Books Are Burning In Hell, with Matt Seneca, Joe McCulloch, Chris Mautner & Tucker Stone!

The Best Books Of 2021, Which Is When I Read Them, But Not When They Came Out

 

Sense & Sensibility
By Jane Austen, 1811

I reread this one because I find Jane Austen to be about as effective as Call Of Duty or the much-missed co-op feature on Resistance 2: Fall Of Man when what is required is absolute brain immobilization. Is the world outside ping-ponging back and forth between disease-ridden nightmare and tedious, dipshit-bred annoyance? Jane's when-will-these-people-get-it-on romantic comedies never fail to save the day. I quite nearly fucked myself out of enjoying this one somewhere near the 2/3 mark when I thought "gee, I wonder what people on Goodreads who gave this a negative review have to say for themselves": I almost immediately wanted them all to die, humans, to be clear, all of us, the entire race. You think these books would be better if they were updated enough so that all the characters said things like "like" all the time? You don't recognize Captain Brandon as one of the straight up original master-killers, you piece of human shit? I hope your entire bloodline gets wiped off the face of the planet. (This time around I did think that it would have made more sense for Captain Brandon to get with Elinor Dashwood, but I'm allowed to have that opinion.)

Wolfstongue
By Sam Thompson
Published by Little Island, 2021

I read a lot of children's books, and it's rare to read one that assumes such a traditional, classical point of view--I believe the comparisons to something like Watership Down are initially made due to a commonality with the way animals have an intricate, engrossing world built around them, but those comparisons are actually more justified by the serious, thoughtful and "timeless" tone that the story is told with. The subtlety of the one human characters social anxieties--which are never clearly defined or diagnosed, but seem to be some type of autism--is never a focus, never a magic trick or superpower, but merely another tone and color to the narrative. The finality of the book's rare violence--one twist near the end was so abrupt and perfect that I was legitimately startled by how much it affected me--showed far more courage than I expect out of most contemporary works aimed at this audience, an audience it well knows is heavily populated with adults, adults who will then go on to control the narrative surrounding the book because 8 to 12 year olds have better things to do than hyperbolize the shit they're hyperconsuming for an audience of same-brain lunatics referred to as "their community". Real magic stings, and the conclusion to this book may set up a sequel, but it doesn't require one. 

When We Cease To Understand The World
By Benjamin Labatut, Translated by Adrian Nathan West
Published by NYRB, 2021

I hated the end of this book, which is a rambling verse thing that meant about as much to me as any rambling verse thing that isn't about arrows piercing ballsacks: which breaks my heart, because I loved, loved, loved the first 4/5 of this messy, messy, MESSY thing about contradictions, insanity, math, poison, craziness. The guy who changes the way the world using nitrogen, giving life to billions while also coming up with the gas in the Nazi showers, his wife shooting herself at his birthday party to show him how bad a call it was to start up a chemical warfare programs in WW1. Then, after all that messy stuff, some of which probably isn't even true, we get into the Holy Grail of a certain kinda cool boy writer: "math shit". Remember Gleick's Chaos? (That new Chaos book can suck my ass). Remember when DFW wrote about infinity, and they were going to make more books, books where Franzen or Lethem were going to explain quantum mechanics? I love it. I love them all, in all their unreadable glory, in all their pretentiousness, in all their "why is this writing thing my job, why couldn't I have danced amongst the spheres". Remember Proof? Remember Copenhagen?! Before he sold out and took the money, remember Tom Stoppard? He wrote Hapgood! This one though--I think old Benjamin might have fucked them all into oblivion. I think he actually gets this stuff, and in a fun, smarter-than-your-average-bear way, not in the way that the guy who wrote The Martian with his reddit friends gets it, in a fantastic broken brain kinda way. What a read. You can't blame him entirely for trying to make poetry work at the end. Michael Jordan probably would've gone for the Heisman if he'd won a World Series. Ego is a hell of a drug!

I Was Dora Suarez
By Derek Raymond, 1990

An editor puked on his desk when he read the manuscript, that's the legend. He walked away from our best criminal-turned-writer instead of publishing the thing. (Jean Genet is for grad students, sorry!) It's the fourth in a series about a cop who everyone hates, a guy who is fearsomely, awesomely mean to everyone around him to an aspirational degree, a cop who is never named, a cop who can never really win. It's enthralling, the agreed-upon masterpiece of the series. I loved this book as much as you can love something that will legitimately have you moving your thighs back and forth over and over again because the entire lower half of your body is convulsing with panic at the prospect of, deep breath, attaching the tip of your penis to a bike tire/chain that you then pedal as part of your "training". I read it! Now you can't unread it!

Fat City
By Leonard Gardner, 1969

Halfway through this book, I told my wife I hated it. I didn't hate it. I hated how accurately it describes the pain of feeling like a failure, and how that feeling, when it lands on you in the right way and at the right time is indistinguishable from being a failure. I think this is one of the strongest books I've read about a certain kind of struggle, a certain hellish bottom, and I came away with a huge amount of admiration for it. But it was not an easy road.

A Bridge Of Children's Books: The Inspiring Autobiography of a Remarkable Woman
By Jella Lepman, 1969

I took over as the President of the US chapter of the organization founded by this book's author this week, so I'm biased about its contents, because the level of expectation that the book presents is so staggeringly disproportionate to anything I could realistically (or fantastically) accomplish during my upcoming two year tenure. I don't mean that in a self-deprecating way. I am factually unqualified to follow anywhere near this woman's footsteps, and even if I were to stop the things I am doing for work, for pleasure, and abandon my family, I would fall short of her achievements. Jella Lepman was a German woman who returned to Germany after World War II and decided to make the world a better place by focusing on the children of Germany, on children's literature. She faced off against the same Nazis who she had left behind (and her brief description of Nazi mothers who had zero regrets whatsoever is more chilling than anything I've ever read about post war Germany), she faced off against the bureaucracy of the American military machine, and she succeeded. While this book seemed to me to run completely out of steam by the end, the gravity of the work she was doing at the time of writing it gives her a pass. It is easy to believe people like this do not exist, because they operate at a level that embarrasses those of us who are then permitted to rest upon the treasures of their achievements.

In The Distance
By Hernan Diaz
Published by Coffee House Press, 2017

This was recommended me too highly for it to ever achieve what its recommenders were hoping for--it's not long enough to be the epic that I would have liked its lead to be the star of, and survival-by-hiding is an extremely difficult subject to maintain excitement for, especially when you use it twice--and yet I think that after I stopped resenting the book for not being what it had been sold to me as, I came away with a lot of affection for it. It's a good contemporary Western thing that could've used a smarter ending instead of a loop-back-around thing. Big guys gotta do more big shit though. That's why you make them big!

Kiss Or Kill
By Mark Twight, 2001

These are Mark Twight's pre-Gym Jones essays about climbing, being an asshole, I read it before going out to train with him at his new gym in Salt Lake City. I had read some of these before--"Twitching" isn't as important to me as Henry's "The Iron", but it would have been if I had read it when I was 20 years old. I can't imagine coming away from these essays without feeling challenged to go and do something, anything, to push it a little bit. I also wonder what somebody like Twight would have gotten to do if there were other people in the fitness/training/masochism space who could actually think, or write. There remains a mountain of valuable and intelligent writing on how out there, and almost nothing of value on why.

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival
By John Valliant, 2010

Matt Seneca sent me some quotes about this book's main (human) character, off the strength of those, I bought the first copy I could find. A phenomenal piece of survival non-fiction, animal & human relations history, and brutally upsetting portrayal of yet another way that we have failed this planet by our addiction to money. Nearly every piece of human and animal suffering that goes down in this book, nearly every injustice, can be traced back to the failings of the modern system of leaving our poor to figure out not starving to death when that is cheaper than helping them. I loved this book, and I think if I'd read it when I was younger and believed that we were heading towards a better world, I would've loved it without any hedged bets. The lengths to which some people will go just to make the world a little more right, a little more safe, a little less scared--this one inspires awe.

Hard Rain Falling
By Don Carpenter, 1966

Can't even. I read this with a book club I'm in, it was my recommendation, some great points were made about the racism in it, all those points were right, I'm ashamed to say that some of them eluded me until they were raised. The sections in here about solitary confinement and prison life and human failure--those are like pure, painful diamonds. This book hurt my feelings.

Your Money Or Your Life
By Joseph Dominguez & Vicki Robin, 1992

Nina got me the new version of this, it's got a foreword by Mister Money Mustache, who I have a lot of fondness for. I think this is a book they should make you read as soon as you can understand it, if only so that people can have some tangible language to fight against the way capitalism and the presentation of money will pour its way into your mind while you aren't looking. I have never taken the time to use the somewhat complicated system in this book to dismantle my own finances, and I don't actually know anyone who has. But the simple, constant philosophical battle it presents--the way it crystalizes mortality against monetary--has never left me. It's impossible to completely detoxify oneself from this language, it didn't land for me until the pandemic how much of my own psychological structure had been colonized by it. 

Father Of Lies
By Brian Evenson, 1998

At least in Dora Suarez, you're on the side of the guy going after the other guy, and you see enough genre trappings around you to know which guy is going to win. But in this--an occasionally POV style experience of a child molesting serial killing provost--you're in for about as tough sledding as it is possible to find. It's well written, sure, it's scary, yes, it's upsetting, okay. There's something--I don't want to say respectable, that's not the right word--but this book restores depravity to its place as depravity. Everything in this book has been depicted in movies and television shows and books, but unless you read something like Father of Lies from time to time, I think one can very easily forget the soul-blackening world-destroying apocalypse that is any single one of the acts it describes, because in those other versions, it's part and parcel of an entertainment product, it's a genre, it's a category of story, and its victims do not feel real, they feel like paint, panels, things. (Even in the case of mega popular true crime podcasts, where the victims are, actually, real). What Evenson does here is a work of fiction--I don't think he'd say to entertain, if he would, he fails at that--that is like a work of magic in its extremity. It's a terrifying, uncomfortable suffocation, engagingly written. 

American Tabloid
By James Ellroy, 1995

I found a mass market edition of this for next to nothing, bought it so that no one else could have it, read it again. I think i'll read it again tomorrow and the day after that too. Why not? Tiger Kab today, Tiger Kab forever.

-Tucker Stone, 2022