YTTF February 2024

Author

Josh Cook
February 19, 2024

Hello Readers,

And we’re back. With some new subscribers I thought I’d use this introduction to…introduce YTTF a little more fully to those who are new to it. I started this newsletter just to find another way to talk about books outside of my work at Porter Square. Featuring a new book, a forthcoming book, an old book, and a book I haven’t finished allows me to be active in how books are discussed and promoted (Today & Tomorrow) while pushing back ever so slightly on the “Only First Week Sales Matter!” attitude of publishing (Yesterday & Forever).

Now that I have a baby and my writing and reading time has been dramatically reduced, I’ve found it’s writing that’s easy for me to fit into that compressed schedule. I can work on this newsletter in 10-15 minute bursts and feel like I’m making progress. It also helps me keeps a few books at the front of my brain which is good for my work as a bookseller.

I don’t have any formal way for choosing the books. Sometimes I start reading something and know I want to feature it. Thinking of that book reminds me of others and that month comes together that way. Sometimes I have a gap that needs filling (Forever is often a trickier section) and I have to prowl around my bookshelves and book piles looking for something. Sometimes a theme comes together, sometimes there are couplets, sometimes it’s just four random books joined only by their presence in my thoughts. I hope through this I can give a boost to some books that deserve attention and think interesting thoughts about books, the book industry, and reading.

Your can reply and I’d love to hear from you! On to the books.

Josh

P.S. The best way to support this newsletter now is to help grow the subscriber list. So spread the word! Thank you.

YESTERDAY

I don’t know if any other sci fi writer (or writer in any genre) does stories about the working schlub better than Yoss. He’s able to write about the downtrodden, the clock punchers, the anything-to-get-out-of-my-shit-towners, the just-doing-my-besters in a way that communicates dignity without romanticizing the struggles and challenges of laboring to just get by. And he’s able to do it even when said working schlub is a robot.

It’d be fair, if you were searching for a blurb, to describe Red Dust as what Raymond Chandler would write if Philip K. Dick dared him to do some shit in space, and though that’s true enough, as far as blurbs go, I think that leaves out what makes Yoss unique. There is a goofiness to his work that you don’t see enough in any genre. (Just look at the premise of Condomnauts.) This makes it fun to read, of course, but also has this strange effect where the big questions Yoss asks, about the nature of self in relation to artificial intelligence or about how definitions of “security” are inherently acts of power, sneak up on you. I would say most of the time, I only think to ask them after I finished the book, sometimes long after. (For example, just now, holy shit does Condomnauts pose an interesting fundamental definition of a “border.”) Which means the books stay with you for a long time.

TODAY

I like the term “Shelf Witch.” I think it can describe a lot of unconscious, inscrutable, almost spooky-action-at-a-distance from quantum physicsy connections, coincidences, thoughts, and relationships that can surround a life intensely lived in books. I think there are ideas about what “witchcraft” is or can be that can be descriptive of some of, maybe a lot of, the cool shit that happens when you read & care about books. But since I don’t practice witchcraft I don’t describe myself as a “Shelf witch.” (Yes, I have a bookselling demon sigil tattoo and a stave from Icelandic magic that is supposed to give you the power to read in the dark tattooed on my other arm, but that’s different.) But I pined for a copy of To the Realization of Perfect Helplessness & one showed up damaged I could take and the same thing happened with that lovely Patti Smith photo/essay/coffee table book Book of Days. So I had to make a TikTok about them. And the same thing happened with The Annual Banquet of The Gravedigger’s Guild. I pined and it appeared. So I essentially made one friend buy it and now here we are.

So far (and I’m still some significant amount of time from the big turn in the plot) I’m getting a Satantango vibe that I don’t think I’ve gotten from other works, even those more stylistically akin to Krasznahorkai’s prose. Enard is almost taunting us with the overtness of the “There’s more going on in this sleepy rural French town, muuahahahaha” trope. In a mystery or thriller the stumbling naivite of the initial narrator would be eye-roll-inducing but in a…whatever this is, it’s almost charming. Like, I just can’t wait for the little fella to get totally and completely fucked up by whatever is on the way. Which, according to the copy will happen when “And once a year, Death and the living observe a temporary truce during a gargantuan three-day feast where gravediggers gorge themselves on food, drink, and language.”

Dude is so fucked.

TOMORROW

I haven’t written a ton about genre books in this news letter mostly because I don’t read a ton of them and they often tend to have more word of mouth support on the bookternet than the weird shit I read most. But readers ask about it all the time, I’ve got to refresh my stock of go-tos and a bunch of folks at PSB really liked Johnson’s first book, The Space Between Worlds, so I picked up Beyond the Wall.

You could think of the world as a cross between the rich part of the city in Metropolis (the movie) but under a dome and Mad Max, though that elides some of the complexity of the relationship between Wiley City and Ashtown. The cultures are interesting, the tech is fun, the protagonist is charismatic, and there’s whole multiverse idea going on. Those Beyond the Wall has a lot to offer a lot of different readers of sci fi and fantasy.

It’s also woke as fuck in ways that would annoy the hell out of the worst people you know. What does this mean for those of us who do not intentionally misunderstand the history of nearly every genre of art and literature to justify racist bias? The culture of Ashtown respects the gender spectrum and is positioned against clear allegories for white supremacy in America (Wiley represents racist capitalism, the Ruralites represent the racism of evangelical Christianity.) It ain’t subtle (a whole bunch of it was written during the nonsense around the Black state Senators in Tennessee and, in a note in the ARC, Johnson says she wrote angry) , but that doesn’t mean it’s indelicate or unrealistic. In fact, too often I think in our real world we ascribe nuance and subtlety to shit that is really as simple as it looks. Do you treat people like they are human beings whose identities are worthy of respect or do you believe people need to smash themselves into a few prefabricated molds no matter how much it hurts them? It’s not really a subtle distinction and, too often, those who try to introduce subtlety, are actually just creating (intentionally or otherwise) space for oppression. Sometimes the answer to a complex and sophisticated explication of the nuances of, I don’t know, disparities in generational wealth, is a direct and simple “Fuck your racist bullshit.”

SCHEDULED FOR RELEASE: MARCH 12, 2024

FOREVER

I don’t exactly know how I hit on this, but I have decided that the Monday before I have a book coming out, I go to my local comic shop and buy a couple of things with the intention of reading some number of those things that night. Since I don’t write comics or read them all that much, I guess it’s a way to tune out from the world a bit before what are pretty exhausting (in a good way) days.

I bought Grendel because I’d never heard of it and it had an intriguing blurb from Alan Moore. Apparently it’s a classic because that’s what the comicseller said when I brought it up to the counter.

It opens with a relatively long single story arc of the character’s entire life in an art style I’d never seen before. It was also intriguing because it was all “telling” and almost no “showing.” I wouldn’t say it reads like a well executed Wikipedia entry, but that’s not too far off. It’s type of story I hadn’t seen before. Everything else in the Omnibus are short stories featuring the character that fit within that already delineated narrative arc, some by the original writer, many by others. Some elucidated the events described in that initial story, while others told stories allowed by that original arc. I’m sure eventually this was a character writers and artists wanted a shot at.

Exploring the possibilities of a strictly bounded character is actually one of the narratives I think comics are uniquely suited for (think of how many different versions of Batman there are) and Grendel seems to be a direct—and thus interesting—exercising of that ability.