by Teddy Wayne

Kind of rough – watch a man deteriorate one failure at a time, all the while listening to him blow kneejerk liberal sanctimony at every turn. Paul’s been demoted from senior lecturer to adjunct. His daughter is turning 12 and checking out of their relationship. He has to move in with his 80-something mother – and she’s started watching the fictional stand-in for Fox News. And then things get worse!

The short chapters kept me turning (swiping) pages.

I didn’t much like one of the subplots where he starts boinking a high-level employee at the faux Fox News, pretending to be a conservative misplaced in academia, in order to gain access… to what, for what? But it turns out to be key.

64 books read in 2023. Up from 58 in 2022 and 61 in 2021 and 59 in 2020. I am counting a few “Charlie Brown Cyclopedias” but why shouldn’t they count! 

Best book and best fiction was The Greengage Summer.

Best non-fiction was What’s Our Problem.

#64 for the year:

by Torie Bosch (editor)

It’s nice to read about coding. Usually in the world of books it’s like we don’t exist.

by Michael Allred

A comic book by someone with an obvious love of drawing David Bowie. Covers the years surrounding Ziggy. I particularly liked how the famous “Not only is this the last show of the tour” mini-speech was broken up over multiple pages, scattered throughout the story. I’d buy a sequel.

by Susan Neiman

This was a good defense of old-school liberalism – universalism, specifically.