A gorgeously illustrated little book that provides fans of the Folk of the Air series an opportunity to dip back into Holly Black’s world of magic and court intrigue while gaining a deeper understanding of Cardan’s character arc.

Like so many people, I read Brosch's first book, Hyperbole and a Half, years ago and loved it dearly, and was sad when Brosch kind of disappeared for so long. And so I met the news that Solutions and Other Problems was to be published with surprise and excitement.

It's been long enough since read Hyperbole and a Half--with the exception of isolated essays (can I call them essays?)--that I can't really compare the two reliably, which is probably good. I'm happy to judge Solutions and Other Problems largely on its own merits.

There are some similarities, of course. There are still stories about dogs doing dumb things, and there are still the intentionally grotesque illustrations that can reduce me to laughter in one panel. But this book feels like it was written from a different perspective, and I mean, it has. The family tragedy and health problems that Brosch describes are the kinds of events that irrevocably change a person.

So along with the dumb dogs and stories of 3-year-old Brosch sneaking into her neighbor's house, you get a very strong sense of an author who has come to view life as inherently meaningless. Which is fine. I agree. But when you arrive at the conclusion that life has no inherent meaning, you're confronted with a decision to either descend into nihilism or to construct meaning for your own life. There are moments when Brosch seems to have chosen to descend rather than to construct, but one could interpret the existence of this book in and of itself to refute the claim that she's a nihilist. Even if that's a claim that I think Brosch might make about herself.

"That is what it was all about, wasn't it? Promises?"

2019 is going to be a big year of short stories and essays for me, because at my current job I have only a half-hour lunch break, and thus need books that don't lose much from being read only in little chunks. (I also need titles that are available on Hoopla, because none of my coworkers bring books to work, so I read on my phone to avoid being ostracized. Sort of like middle school, except that in middle school I gave absolutely zero fucks about being ostracized. And was. Quite thoroughly so.)

Anyway. I decided to go with Joan Didion for my first essay collection of the year, for couple of reasons. For one thing, a friend of mine with whom I frequently talk about books is a fan of hers. For another, I've always felt a little inadequate for only having read The Year of Magical Thinking, and that some ten years ago. It was assigned to my Creative Nonfiction class in undergrad, and I remember not really appreciating or understanding it, probably because I was a kid in my early twenties, and thus ill-equipped to read memoirs about marriage and loss. Because I didn't understand those things at all then, and understand them only slightly better now.

I picked Slouching Towards Bethlehem because it was deemed a good place to start in a Book Riot article I read sometime last year, rather than out of any affinity for the subject matter. I was born in 1988 and have never been to California. For those reasons a collection of essays focused primarily on the West Coast in the '60s perhaps should have seemed as vaguely unnecessary to me now as Didion's writing was to me in college, but that wasn't the case.

What struck me about the essays in Slouching Towards Bethlehem is Didion's strong voice. And by "strong voice" I don't mean the inescapable ego present in most essays I read now--and hell, in this rambling thing I'm writing at this very moment. Didion's voice is characterized by clear observation and a shrewd eye for revealing details, a watchful perspective that spans all of her pieces regardless of her subject matter. But there were times in the first section of the book when I forgot that, by necessity, she as a person was present in the situations she was describing. She allows her subject to occupy the reader while she fades to the background, essential but unseen, and it's impressive.

She's also adept at creating a sense of place. (All of the writing workshop terminology that I haven't been able to use much since 2011 is coming out tonight, apparently.) Again, the details. Her descriptions come in long, winding sentences that verge on the poetic, lulling you into a clear image of places you might never have seen in real life. The effect is great whether she's describing Honolulu or Alcatraz or Sacramento, but I think that it's displayed at its finest in "Goodbye to All That," the concluding personal essay in which she describes moving to and from New York. I read it at home, with rain pattering on the window and Simon & Garfunkel playing in the background, and honestly, I can't recommend a better reading setting, at least for this particular essay.

Up next for me and Joan Didion will be The White Album.

Sometimes I buy slim volumes of poetry at McKay’s on a whim, a handful at a time, because they’re $1.50 and I feel that I can afford to take a chance on serendipity. Anesthesia was one of those books. I had never heard of Kenny Fries, but something about the medical title caught my eye and seemed relevant in 2020, a year in which I thought a lot about bodies, medicine, sickness, and surgery, for a variety of reasons. The poems in Anesthesia deal with physical disability and AIDS, and with sexuality and love shared between gay men. They are physical, sensual pieces of writing that complicate ideas of what a sick or disabled body can do; they contain bittersweetness, acceptance, joy, and violence.