Steve(n) is a tough-as-nails old bat who doesn’t take guff from anyone. His cantankerous facade keeps strangers at an arm’s length, but his scrumptious down home cooking endears him to close friends and family. If you rankle him, you may get an earful of his scathing catch-phrase, “You’re full of puddin’!”
His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman
These books just missed me as a child, but, when urged to read them as an immature adult, I had no trouble in immediately losing myself in the fantastical, sprawling multiverse of Philip Pullman’s epic trilogy. Winding through many crisscrossing realities, His Dark Materials weaves a complex tapestry of children, demons, bears, and witches sewn together by the common struggle for personal freedom and the transformative power (on the cosmic scale) of love.
That Is All by John Hodgman
The conclusion of John Hodgman’s complete compendium of world knowledge takes us into the not-too distant future, cataloging the harsh reality that is the impending super-apocalypse. We are treated to a glimpse of the Ragnarok that quickly approaches, the machinations of which have been ratcheting up to catastrophe since the beginning of time. Be warned: there is nothing you can do to stop the Blood Wave.
The Essential Dykes to Watch Out For by Alison Bechdel
For twenty-five years, Alison Bechdel spun the mundane dramas that fueled the lives of a loose-knit friendship collective into cartoon gold in her weekly comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. Collected in this essentialist and gorgeously-bound volume, the awkward, funny, heartbreaking, and heart-rebuilding story is finally told from start to finish between the covers of a single book. Though I am admittedly not the target audience for this comic book, I loved every self-deprecating page. Alison Bechdel is one of my personal heroes.
For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway
The verdant imagery and ascetic narration of Hemingway’s definitive novel of the Spanish Civil War immersed me in the sights, sounds, tastes, and many drinks of the atmosphere of resistance. The journey of Robert Jordan and the entrenched guerrilla unit in the mountains of Spain is so beautifully wrought that I went out looking for fascists to dynamite after reading the immaculate final line: “He could feel his heart beating against the pine needle floor of the forest.”
Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality (33⅓) by John Darnielle
John Darnielle is the singer/songwriter responsible for my favorite band, so I was predisposed to like this book, regardless of its actual content. It should have come as less of a surprise to me that, instead of the humdrum production story that reads like an album’s liner notes, which characterizes other entries in the 33⅓ series, Black Sabbath’s Master of Reality is a novella in two parts about the victimization of a young heavy metal fan by impassive authority figures. Told with the same compassion and regret that makes Darnielle a great songwriter, this book reads like a hundred-page-long Mountain Goats song, and, if you incidentally learn something about Black Sabbath, then the author has earned his royalty check.
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