2020 HINDSIGHT

Strange to reflect, as we say farewell to the past year, on how many iconic "futuristic" years I've lived through: 1984, 2001 and...

...if short-lived '70s-era Hanna-Barbera cartoon show titles count as iconic, 2020. I doubt I'll make it to The Year 2525 of which Zager and Evans so memorably sang, at least in my current incarnation.

Anyway, here's one more list for January; my books for 2020. Even granting that it doesn't count short stories, articles, blog posts, poems, comic books, shopping lists, factory warranties, skywriting, banners towed behind airplanes etc etc, it's disgracefully short; I'm a ploddingly slow reader, and there are a couple of longish ones on there, at least by my standards, like Death's End, part three of Cixin Liu's astonishing Three-Body trilogy, and David Mitchell's Utopia Avenue.

Friday the Rabbi Slept Late by Harry Kemelman

Wild Wives by Charles Willeford

The Iron Dream by Norman Spinrad

Catch and Kill by Ronan Farrow

Becoming by Michelle Obama

Apropos of Nothing by Woody Allen

Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother by Barry Sonnenfeld

Death Comes as the End by Agatha Christie

Death’s End by Cixin Lui

Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott

Utopia Avenue by David Mitchell

I didn't include it on this list, because I was only about halfway through it on New Year's Eve, but in December I also finally cracked a book I've put off for a long time, Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year, his 1722 chronicle of the 1665 Great Plague of London.

As you might guess, there's plenty about 1665 that's perfectly recognizable in 2020, although the response of the city's government, as described by Defoe, puts this country's federal response utterly to shame. But it's also instructive reading for anyone who thinks that 2020 was the worst possible year.

THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY

RIP to the beguiling and funny Mary Tyler Moore, passed on at 80. She was a significant and influential presence in my childhood, but that’s only saying what most people of around my age who grew up watching TV can say.

Many of the encomia that have been offered to her since the news of her death broke have focused, rightly, on how The Mary Tyler Moore Show pioneered the image of an independent single woman. Important as this was, I think the show’s magic and originality ran even deeper.

It wasn’t just that Moore’s character, Mary Richards, was a career woman, or even that her career wasn’t just something to do until a husband came along. The show depicted how Mary Richards built, from her coworkers and her neighbors, a true family that was entirely sufficient to a fulfilling life. This seems commonplace now—indeed, it’s the basic dynamic of most sitcoms—but if there was an earlier TV series that hinged on it, I can’t think of it.

There was no real sense that Mary Richards was a lonely person. She wasn’t averse to marriage, but even if it never came along, the lyrics of the theme song weren’t just a platitude—the pleasure of the series was Mary’s discovery that love really was all around, and there really was no need to waste it.

Time for one more 2016 list, Your Humble Narrator’s annual rundown of the books I’ve read over the past year (as always, excluding newspaper and magazine articles, short stories, poems, comic books, blogs, facebook posts, shopping lists, owner’s manuals, graffiti, etc.):

Slade House by David Mitchell

The Mommy Dearest Diaries by Rutanya Alda

Communion by Frank Lauria

Almost Interesting by David Spade

Night of the Trilobites by Peter Leslie

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell

The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick

Close to Critical by Hal Clement 

Kramer’s War by Derek Robinson

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ by Lew Wallace

The Green Man by Kingsley Amis

Alpha Centauri or Die! by Leigh Brackett

Frankenstein Unbound by Brian W. Aldiss 

Nightmare Abbey by Thomas Love Peacock

A shorter-than-usual list this year—I’m a ploddingly slow reader even with short books, and the ponderous Cloud Atlas and Ben-Hur slowed me to a crawl this year. Both were wonderful, however. In Ben-Hur, for instance, Wallace offers this bit of 19^th-Century wisdom that the 21^st Century seems to be having a hard time with: “A certain facility of accommodation in the matter of religion comes to us after much intercourse with people of different faith; gradually we attain the truth that every creed is illustrated by good men who are entitled to our respect, but whom we cannot respect without courtesy to their creed.”

Note to Milla Jovovich: 

I know how you feel about me, so if there’s no review of Resident Evil: The Final Chapter on this blog Friday morning, please don’t be hurt: It’s not because I didn’t want to see it. It’s because the movie wasn’t screened for critics, at least not here in Phoenix. All the same, I did watch your convenient video recap of the series on Youtube, and greatly appreciated the refresher course.

In Milla’s honor…

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week we acknowledge the Popokarimu… 

…a bioengineered flying abomination from the movie.

VOLUMES, VOLUMES, VOLUMES...

Here, so that you’ll have some idea of who to blame for my warped worldview, is my annual list of the books that kept my lips moving this past year (excluding as usual magazines and newspapers, individual shorts stories, essays, poems, blogs, etc.):

  Prehysterical Pogo (In Pandemonia) by Walt Kelly

Mr. Mercedes by Stephen King

Blood and Kisses (Vampire Love Book 1) by J.T. Blackfriars

I Must Say: My Life as a Humble Comedy Legend by Martin Short

Silver Screen Fiend: Learning About Life from an Addiction to Film by Patton Oswalt

The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy

The Realms of Gold by Margaret Drabble

The Casual Vacancy by J.K. Rowling 

The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell

The Runaway Robot by Lester Del Rey

Food: A Love Story by Jim Gaffigan 

Feral by Berton Roueché

Dr. Who and the Genesis of the Daleks by Terrance Dicks

 Clans of the Alphane Moon by Philip K. Dick

Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee

Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami

Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives by David Eagleman

The Martian by Andy Weir

The Gods Hate Kansas by Joseph Millard

A Feast of Freedom by Leonard Wibberly

  

Ratman’s Notebooks by Stephen Gilbert

That last selection was a real surprise. It’s the Irish novel on which the 1971 American film Willard and its 2003 remake were based. I had long been curious about it, but I wasn’t expecting it to be a real work of literature. It’s whimsical, witty and poignant, and the rats trained by the (unnamed) narrator of the title are vividly characterized. Both movie versions are pretty pedestrian by comparison.

Anyway… 

Monster-of-the-Week: …this week the nod goes to the tentacled horror from the wonderful cover art of another book on this list, Joseph Millard’s vintage sci-fi tale The Gods Hate Kansas:

Unexpectedly, this picture isn’t a cheat, or at least not too much of a cheat—no such attack on the spaceship takes place, but there are, at least, creatures answering this description in the tale. Better yet, it turns out [spoiler alert!] that they aren’t bad sorts, once you get to know them.

BOOKED SOLID

While I’m in list mode, here’s my annual list of books I read (as always, this doesn’t count individual short stories, articles, essays, reviews, comics, blogs, poems and the like):

The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet by David Mitchell

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams

Dr. Who and the Giant Robot by Terrance Dicks

Praise of Folly by Erasmus

One For My Baby by Barry Graham

The Betrayers by Donald Hamilton

The Cool Man by W.R. Burnett

The Judas Goat by Robert B. Parker

Switch Bitch by Roald Dahl

The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner by James Hogg

The Caine Mutiny by Herman Wouk

The Summer of Katya by Trevanian

The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins

The Kreutzer Sonata by Leo Tolstoy

After Worlds Collide by Philip Wylie and Edwin Balmer

Untouched By Human Hands by Robert Sheckley

Night of the Auk by Arch Oboler