My Favorite Books That I Read in 2018

Books! Why would you bother living without them? Even slowed down by life and depression, this turned into one of my favorite reading years thanks to some stunning debuts and absolute gems in my backlog. In the post-Christmas haze I've gathered up some scary stories, a Pulitzer winner, a New York Times favorite, and novellas and a lovable killing machine for you. Let's read.

The Poppy War by R.F. Kuang

This is an Epic Fantasy about the real world destroying your adolescent notions of what matters. For the first chunk of the book, Rin throws herself into life at a military academy, exploring connections between drugs and the gods. The worst things in her world are an unfair teacher and her equivalent of a Draco Malfoy bully. But then she graduates and has to serve alongside her classmates in a brutal war with civilian death tolls and a nightmarish parallel to the Nanjing Massacre. The book lets us take Wizarding School tropes for granted and then rips them in half with reality. Hopefully one one reading this ever has to deal with the horrors of war, but Rin's revelation is an extreme version of the experience of so many people who hide from reality inside education systems and then have to confront the world. From this conceit, Kuang creates one of Fantasy’s greatest origin stories, showing us how Rin grows from desperate, to ambitious, to vengeful, to ruthless. We see all of the social pressures and life events that forge her into one of her world's great villains.

My Favorite Things in Books, 2016

The longer the live, the less I believe in objectively good literature. Even subjectively good literature is a concept deserving some scrutiny. When we listen to someone "love" a book, they're generally gushing about one part of it. Too Like the Lightning's plot twists, or Uprooted's dauntless quirkiness.

So this year I don't want to tell you about the "best books" I read. Instead, let's talk about my favorite things in books. Those things that define our memories of the book long after we've put it down. Come with me. Let's enjoy things together.

The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps by Kai Ashante Wilson

There is this theory that all Secondary World Fantasy is told to us in translation. The people of Wizard of Earthsea and Sword of Truth don't actually speak English - they live on planets where there was never an England. So all such works are in a contrived translation to us. But that translation has almost always default to a nigh-facsimile of Proper British or Chicago Manual Style English. Thus Sorcerer of the Wildeeps is jarring because its dialogue is relayed entirely in levels of African American Vernacular. Consider:

“Y’all do what you want,” said Mosteyfa called Teef. “But this nigga here?” They called him that for the obvious reason: long, snaggled, missing… “Is going all the way to Olorum.”… pewter-black, moss-green, yellow… “My ass ain’t tryna go right back up to the desert.”… cracked, carious, crooked. “A nigga need some rest behind that motherfucker!”

Demane felt much the same, crudity notwithstanding. A unanimous rumble rolled across the gathering of brothers.

“Anyone?” said the captain. His right hand pantomimed a man walking away, left hand waving goodbye.

“Come this far,” said some brother, “might as well go on.”

“I ain’t never seen Olorum, noway,” said another brother.

“Silver full-boys, y’all!” said a third. “Much as we can grab, y’all!”

There is nothing any more contrived about any of this language than Lord of the Rings's Middle Earth having tobacco and potatoes, or all the Fantasy novels that use the words "aphrodisiac" and "volcano" in worlds where worship was never held for Aphrodite or Vulcan. Wilson mentions "volcanic" in his first chapter, which has to be deliberate. This is fiction highly informed by cultures ignored by too much of mainstream American Fantasy. And while it has great contents all the way to the monster stalking the heroic party at the end - and that monster is the freaking coolest Fantasy monster this side of Helene Wecker's Golem - it's the language that allows access to so much character and culture. After this and The Devil in America, Kai Ashante Wilson has proven one of the most promising voices in our genre.

Everyone's Angry About the Hugos

John Scalzi has argued that the Hugo nominations shouldn't be announced so close to Easter since too many people are busy to get caught up in them. Cleverly, the voters circumvented that this year by nominating people that would piss everyone off.

The most outrage is about Vox Day's novelette, Opera Vita Aeterna, published in The Last Witchking. Everyone was furious without having read the story. Why? Because Vox Day is also a cartoonishly bigoted blogger, most famous for writing unforgivable things about N.K. Jemisin. Here his fiction has been nominated, not the person, but liberal voters have a difficult time extricating the two, or even seeing why they should bother. It's the most brazen example yet of Hugo voters copping to the awards not being exclusively about the works nominated.

The nomination presents a fascinating problem for WorldCon. We knew about 10% of SFWA members voted for him to be their president before he was kicked out of the group. Now we know enough WorldCon members are willing to vote in his work, and it feels like there's a reactionary element here, hoisting him up in retribution for his booting.

But what do we do about this? Kick out anyone who votes for him? Go make a new club that doesn't let "the wrong kind" of people in? For all the negativity flowing right now, I don't see any reasonable solutions proposed.

The 4 Ways Marvel Really Got Thor Wrong

Recently, Marvel Comics released their second movie about Thor. It’s part of their Avengers franchise of movies, which show very little scholarship about mythology. Many of us wonder if Marvel cares about anything more than making lots of money by way of vapid movies that are a lot of fun to watch. In doing so, they've utterly ruined the character forever. This must be remedied. Here are their four greatest transgressions.

Why would they do this to him?

1. Thor Speaks English At All
Some critics have pointed out that, historically, Marvel made Thor speak in a bad impression of Shakespearean English. A Norse god wouldn’t sound like Shakespeare. But this ignores the real contention: a Norse god wouldn’t be speaking English at all. He should be bantering in a dialect of Old Norse that’s unrecognizable even to modern Scandinavians. It would seriously help the authenticity of Marvel films if everything Thor said was utterly incomprehensible to any typical American moviegoer.

They didn't have contact lenses, either.

2. The Race Card
Some people have complained that Heimdall is blackwashed in the Thor movies, played by Idris Elba. Idris Elba is blacker than the average American imagines the average Icelander is. The average American doesn’t know much about how many ethnicities spread across Europe by the 13th century, and the average theologian has barely cracked why gods do anything, much less why they pick a specific skin tone or bone structure. However, Idris Elba has an amazing gravitas that we can all agree every god should have. Because Idris Elba is only one actor, most of the gods in the Thor movies don’t have this gravitas. Marvel screwed this up big time by not cloning Idris Elba.

No one asks if Tom Hiddleston is the right race to play a trickster god.

3. Thor Coexists With The Hulk
Look, it’s not that hard. The pre-Christian Nords didn’t know about radiation. There is nothing in their lore or cycles that references gamma waves or their implausible relationship to human emotion. The Incredible Hulk is simply irreconcilable with any of Thor’s mythology. Any modern science has no place in a shared universe with Thor, even science as miraculously bad as what supports the Hulk’s existence.

Yup. Pride, Instagram and Haar.

4. Thor Wasn’t a Comic Book Character
Our primary sources for the Norse gods are the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda, and the Gesta Danorum. While some of the manuscripts in the Prose Edda were illuminated with beautiful imagery, the stories of Thor were never relayed in screen-printed sequential art. Frankly, everything Jack Kirby ever drew looked entirely inaccurate to visual stylings of the 13th century Scandinavians. Worse: they didn’t have movies. Making the things into movies is fundamentally inaccurate. If Marvel had any cultural sensitivity, they would force audiences at all their premieres to starve around camp fires in the middle of a blizzard and have Stan Lee recount the tales orally. He’d probably do it. He loves cameos.

This is actually 100% historically accurate.

It's my hope that by starting a dialogue about Marvel's failure to accurately capture their source material, that we will bring about change. By forcing blockbuster movies to be entirely accurate to someone else's vision, and by stripping anything that anyone was having fun with, we will create films that no one wants to see. And once no one will go see them, no one will ever complain about them again.

The future is in your hands, True Believers.

Bathroom Monologue: Wolfman Op-Ed

To any well-meaning bodies at NASA,

Ever since humanity grew tired of hunting down werewolves for sport and pretended to give us human rights, it's been suggested that we ought to play our role. To do our part. To contribute to man's world. The most recent evidence of this thinking is a suggestion at the TED Talks that we go into space where more mortal man has difficulty. This is a plainly racist presumption.

To be a werewolf is to suffer the curse of immortality. I myself still attempt to take my life on an annual basis even though I can't. Do you think this makes me durable? Well immortality is not invincibility. And just as I feel the sting of the knife, so I would feel my ass freezing off in the depths of space.

Have you ever seen one of us transform? It's hard on the wardrobe. Any space suit is going to rip and then you turn us into immortal ice cubes floating around the Sea of Tranquility.

What galls me is the suggestion that we're doing this because we're forgiven. The proposal acts like we're supposed to be happy to get a supply of oxygen. Suffocating and starving still suck even if they don't kill you, and there's no guarantee all of us won't wolf out on the shuttle or on the surface. Trust me that when you arrive expecting me to have built a space station, my hairy ass will have been in no mood to greet you.

On behalf of the damned among you: we politely decline.

Sincerely,

Jonathan Talbot

My Foot Stopped Working: Nothing I Can Do, and, The End of Blogging

The worst is over. Not the A-to-Z Challenge - that's been fun - but the worst of the lung infection. Three times this week I was able to walk downstairs and make myself lunch. Whine about ablism all you want, but I do not handle immobility well. It's my big emotional vulnerability, especially when my body is so taxed that it can't move anymore, while my nerves as so shot that they're begging me to adjust for relief that can't come. I'd say I was a proper mess this time last week.

It got so grim that my neuropathy became unimportant. The loss of feeling hasn't progressed beyond the previous level in my feet for about two months, and there's been no suspicious loss of motor control. After one last set of tests and fruitless meeting with a neurologist, I've given up. Unless I get another sign on the neuropathic front, this is just something I'm going to deal with. In the scope of my medical life, numbness isn't scary. And while the last set of tests were utterly useless, I did get this funny and racially insensitive label from the hospital paperwork:

In case you were wondering: I'm officially not Hispanic.

The A-to-Z Challenge and my recent illnesses have also led me to question my posting habits. I've posted daily for several years now, and this month's theme hasn't done anything unusual to me, other than demand more of my time. As I prepare the next slate of submissions for magazines and agents, that time feels like it's dwindling, especially on those days when I haven't had the strength to lift head from pillow.

So, beloved readers, how would you feel if The Bathroom Monologues finally ceased daily publication? The new routine would remain consistent. I'm thinking of running a Friday Flash every Friday, and something non-fiction every Monday. Twice a week feels more manageable, though it's not set in stone. I'm seriously curious for what readers think about this, and what they want from the blog.

So: what do you want from The Bathroom Monologues?

Bathroom Monologue: The Segregation of the Best Man

Finally, here comes the bride. I didn’t know they wore white, too. Looks funny against her… brown. Why don’t they call them ‘brown’? You should call a thing what it is.

Think better thoughts, man. Think warm thoughts; look like you’re thinking warm thoughts. Look at Jasper; look how he’s looking. Okay, less lust than he’s got. What a perv. You can ogle her later tonight, dude. Her parents’ are in the front row.

Front row left. Front row right are Jasper’s. White on right, or, I guess kind of beige. His dad is kind of turnip-colored now. Souse.

Why are my guts churning? Why does this feel wrong? Jasper’s so happy he’s rocking on his heels. The perv looks horny as hell, which is as close to happy as he gets without pot in hand and baseball on TV. He isn’t wrong. My guts are wrong. Look at her.

Am I wrong?

Rainbows. When we were really little and I drew rainbows, I’d have all the colors in their own bars. Nobody said that was wrong. I’d look out and see a real rainbow and all the colors would mix into each other, and I go, “Oh yeah, that’s what it is.” But the next time I got out my Crayolas, damned if I didn’t scribble all the colors in their own lines. That wasn’t wrong. Everybody draws rainbows like I did, except sometimes I forgot orange.

That’s just how people work. Jasper knows this. Akeelah knows this. You jump rope during Gym, and you draw rainbows during Art, and then you put all your papers together in a binder. You have a sock drawer, and a shirt drawer, and a pants drawer. If the economy isn’t crapping on you, you have a bed room and a kitchen. You put kitchen things in the kitchen, and bed things in the bed room, and socks in the sock drawer. Akeelah didn’t get that dress from a pile of crayons and used books. She bought it off a rack of dresses at a store that sells dresses, because that’s how order works. Wish she’d bought a looser one.

Okay, smile. Smile. Yes, smile for Akeelah like you don’t think this is weird. A little nod. Let Jasper make the big gesture. Don’t make it seem weird that she’s not wearing a veil at a freaking wedding.

Think of sports. Think of all the players in all the teams in all the cities in all the divisions in all the conferences in all the leagues in all the world. Number 67 from the Red Sox can’t just join the White Sox because he feels like it, or because he loves the shortstop. They’d holler at him, just like my mom would have hollered at me if I tied a red sock and a white sock and called them a pair. People have sock drawers for a reason.

Is the room dizzy?

I am not going to pass out. No, I am not. Jasper will never forgive me. Okay, he’ll forgive me a minute later, but he’ll never let me live it down. If I pass out on top of the groom, or worse, fall onto Akeelah’s side. Onto the black side. The brown side of the wedding. Then I’ll be the one messing up the order of all things, and Jasper will never stop making fun of me.

Jasper! Stop eye-banging her like that. She’s a person, not a pair of floating mams.

She’s a person. He’s a person. They want to be together. Isn’t like I’m going to scream, “Rainbows!” when the pastor asks for us to speak now or never yadda-yadda. I know I’m wrong.

Do I know I’m wrong? My guts know one thing: sock drawers, baseball, Gym class and English. Separating things is the way. It’s human nature. Can I go against it? Is that possible? I mean, if I know that what I know is wrong, then don’t I also know another thing that is right, and isn’t that also in me? Am I right and wrong, stowed away in the same brain drawer?

I mean, I don’t have to marry her. I don’t even have to touch her. Jasper will take the ring and then he’ll touch her. They’ll handle all the touching themselves. God, she looks so happy.

I will not pass out. I will not pass out.

Say your vows already! I need to sit down. About now, I need a bottle of Grey Goose and the head off of that ice sculpture.

Not that ice sculpture heads go in drinks. Cripes, she’s getting to me.

They’re not even listening to this priest. He probably cost a lot of money, and all you’re doing is salivating. Jasper, your mom is watching. Your bride is watching. And Akeelah, you, you…

Man, she is watching. Has she been looking in his eyes like that this whole time? Why isn’t she mad at him? Don’t they get mad? How can you not be mad at such an obvious perverted fuck? I mean, he is my friend, but he wouldn’t be if he stared like that. I even want to slap him, and I’m not on her side. I mean, the best man is never on the bride’s side, but that’s only… fuck it.

Did she wink at me? Is she happy I’m here? Lady, you would not be winking if you could hear my thoughts. Unless you can hear them. In which case… I mean, why didn’t you wear a veil? Also, is his horniness funny to you, or do you actually love him? Because I don’t know if I can handle this. I’m really sorry if I pass out at your wedding. You look very nice, as Jasper is making obvious. I think I wouldn’t mind red and white socks going together if they looked as happy for it as you do.

God, please make them say their vows already so I can get drunk.

Bathroom Monologue: Beats a Neon Sign

What punk it was that set the cross ablaze in their yard, none of them knew. There were guesses, with only so many people so low in Fleetwater, and fewer spotted fleeing neighborhood as the Cartwrights desperately tried to beat out the burning symbol of salvation. The old Cartwrights were studied Methodists, but the young were new to the game and didn’t quite grasp symbolism. The young Cartwrights went about with oil and wood, and that next morning every potential offender awoke to burning letters in his yard. A fiery ‘HE’ stood in Fords’ yard, and a minute later another ‘HE’ lit up in Kip Gotch’s. They all got at least one letter, and none of the Klan understood the message, but if you tried to read it, starting with the burning cross in the Cartwrights’ yard as a ‘t,’ you could read the message across the street: “tHE HEll Is WRoNG WITH YoU”.

Bathroom Monologue: Only Middle Easterner in America

You know what's worse than being the only Middle Eastern fighter in an America? Being the other only Middle Eastern fighter, the one whose record is so unimpressive that people forget he exists.

You're great, Teth. You're strong as a bull, and you get men's shoulders to the mat quicker than anyone else in your weight class. But you got gifts from genetics, and you have great training partners and facilities and live in a nice house. The last match I had? The night before I slept on my cousin's sofa because the month before, my apartment building was shut down on suspicion of meth.

I can't afford to live in a nice place, or to fly to Las Vegas or Sarajevo whenever I want to learn a new approach to grappling. I get the same looks of suspicion on the street that you do, but I spend more time out there. When's the last time you had to walk to the arena because you couldn't afford a cab? Never mind the jokes about me driving one.

Nobody makes those jokes on commentary when you're fighting. It's all shit-talk how you're going to knock a guy out while he's still standing. Meanwhile, I'm lucky if my fight makes it to television. And sure, you're better than I am, and so you deserve to have it better. But I want you to think about this the next time an interviewer asks how it is being the only Middle Eastern fighter in America.