Post-apocalyptic page-turner. It's influence can be felt on any number of other plague-catastrophe fictions, and also on the non-fiction World Without Us. Some of the author's ideas and sensibilities were ahead of his time, but they sound kind of anachronistic now (especially relating to disability, race, and sexuality). I don't completely buy that a catastrophe would necessarily erase the arts of reading and writing; I kept thinking that if the parents had only read some Fairy Tales to the kids, they would have picked it up a little more. Quibbles aside, Earth Abides is a powerful book, and a great read.

A great selection of short comic stories. A few of the stories seemed to explore some similar themes as in Shortcomings, but I found these stories more digestible. Perhaps the cringey-ness is easier to handle in a short story. The style reminded me a lot of Daniel Clowes, but I think Tomine's work is less bizarre and unsettling than Clowes's.

Story about an older Belgian guy who's only life is art museums and making reproductions of the art. He mainly interacts with art. His interest in his across the street neighbor might be mostly artistic. He's creeped out by interactions with living people, so there's some funny interactions.

These two related stories have all my favorite elements of Yang's later work, but they just don't quite go as far off the deep end as Boxers & Saints or American Born Chinese (or the Shadow Hero, but the crazy twist in that one is reality, so maybe it doesn't count). It's two coming of age stories, involving secret societies, special powers, & higher powers. The ending felt a little inadvertently ambiguous, and could have used some more deliberate ambiguity (or maybe it was deliberate?).

Comix collection. The movie reviews and the toy industry convention review are hilarious! They also made me want to see all those movies (except for planet of the apes; like me, Hanawalt finds chimps uncanny and creepy). Some of the more depressing comics would have reminded me of Bojack Horseman, even if I hadn't known that Hanawalt designed the show's look. Makes me excited to read comix again!

Fantasy page turner. Has many similar elements to Uprooted, with a setting based on fairy-tales and medieval central-eastern europe. This time, there's also elements based on medieval jewish life in the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth. Pits the king of winter against dimly-remembered slavic "evil god". Overall, Spinning Silver seemed a little less focused than Uprooted, but also had a more expansive vision, incorporating more points of view, and depicting more facets of life in the medievalist fantasy world Novik created. Certain bits of Spinning Silver also seemed more pointedly aimed at the present moment than anything in Uprooted.

Book of essays, with one from each year of Obama's presidency, as well as short essays commenting on each of those essays. In his commentary, Coates actually apologized for some of his earlier essays. A while back I read a review by Darryl Pinckney of this book complaining that Coates is too pessimistic and not activist enough; I'm not sure where that take came from. He's writing and speaking about the centrality of racism & white supremacy in America, and the importance of acknowledging that centrality before we can solve our problems. I didn't take his pessimism to mean Coates is giving up, or telling everyone else to; it seemed to me that he was saying the fight we must fight would never end. Perhaps I'm just reading optimism into his work. At first I was put off a bit by Coates's attempts to coin new terms, or new uses for words--"plunder", for instance. But thinking about it, I realized that he is using these terms to indicate concepts for which there is no widely accepted term. He uses "Plunder" to refer to white-supremacist exactions on black people both profit- & power-motivated. "The Grey Wastes" already have a term: "the Prison-Industrial Complex" but I can understand the urge to think of something catchier.

Reading these stories, I sort of feel like I really got to know PKD. Some of them I could just imagine him desperately trying to crank out something, anything, to pay the bills, while on drugs (like a psychedelic psychotic Kilgore Trout). I felt like I was getting a peek behind the curtain of PKD's renowned lifelong mental and marital problems. The ones where you could tell one his marriages was falling apart when he wrote them were the worst. "The Pre-Persons" in particular was like a short story version of a Ward Sutton "Kelly" cartoon about feminism and abortion. "Cadbury the Beaver Who Lacked" was like the Lockhorns on drugs & transformed into a fairy tale. I recommend skipping those two, unless you really want to see Dick at his most Dickish. The rest of the stories ranged from pretty great to pretty good.

Collection along the lines of my dirty dumb eyes. I especially liked the parts about Argentina & the animal sanctuary in Valley Center (w/ Otters).

A great collection with not a weak link in the bunch. Many of these stories are only sort-of science fiction; the one with the legal secretaries didn't even need to be in a futuristic setting.