What I've Read Halfway into 2026

Aberrations in the Heartland of The Real - Wendy Painting

This is probably one one the most fascinating and gripping books I’ve read in a while. Wendy Painting wrote this book after meticulously researching the thousands of documents that Timothy McVeigh’s defense team donated to a university library. What she puts together is a narrative of the Oklahoma City Bombing that is as close to the truth as we will probably ever get; it differentiates significantly from the narrative that the prosecution, defense, and media all presented. 

What follows is a retracing of McVeigh’s movements in the years up to the bombing and written correspondences between McVeigh, his family, and subsequently... his defense team. While never presenting a definite statement on how the Oklahoma City Bombing came to be, Painting establishes that the narratives presented by the federal government and McVeigh were a convenient compromise for both parties. The reality appears closer to this: Timothy McVeigh spent years moving through white supremacist circles that were saturated with federal informants from multiple agencies, and possibly at least one foreign intelligence asset. Because those agencies often failed to communicate internally, let alone with one another, the record becomes so muddled that it is difficult to separate the role fringe groups played in the Oklahoma City bombing plot from the role, negligence, or interference of the federal government itself. The book reads almost as if the US Federal Government inadvertently found a solution to the Byzantine Generals Problem in 1994.

Amid the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, I was struck by the overlap between the tactics, failures, and institutional reflexes that appear in both the Epstein case and the Oklahoma City bombing investigation. In each case, federal agencies that are supposed to be among the most meticulous record-keeping and intelligence-gathering institutions in the world somehow always conveniently lost, destroyed, withheld, or mishandled key evidence at the exact moments when that evidence mattered most.

That pattern is what makes the ending of Aberration in the Heartland of the Real so unsettling. Painting closes by pointing to the case of Kenneth Trentadue, a federal inmate who died in August 1995 at the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City. His death was officially ruled a suicide by hanging, but the condition of his body, the government’s handling of the scene, and the later fight over records have kept the case alive for decades.The connection to the Oklahoma City bombing is the allegation advanced by Trentadue’s brother, Jesse Trentadue: that Kenneth may have been mistaken by federal authorities for Richard Lee Guthrie, a suspected co-conspirator in the bombing who also died in federal custody, also allegedly from suicide by hanging.

The Allagash Abductions: Undeniable Evidence of Alien Intervention - Raymond E Fowler

I decided to pick up this book after finishing Jesus Before The Gospels This book is awful. Not “I disagree with the conclusion” awful; structurally and evidentially, just outright bad. The entire abduction story (which has been retold time and time again on the History Channel and Sci Fi Network) hinges on memories recovered under hypnosis. Memory recall under hypnosis is not a thing. “Recovered memories” under hypnosis aren’t pristine recollections (no memories are), they’re reconstructed narratives, shaped in real time by suggestion, expectation, and leading questions all given by the hypnotist. It's emotional abuse, and in this book, I’d argue it’s torture. 

Bluntly: the guys in this book were not “confirmed abductees,” they were participants in a process that’s extremely good at generating vivid, emotionally convincing false memories. Whether you want to call that manipulation, suggestion, or outright abuse, the book never earns the confidence it demands from the reader. The author was an established “UFO researcher” that needed another notch in his belt and book to publish.

It blows my mind in a frustrating way how many TV show episodes were made in the 90s based on the claims made in this book. Once you read it, it’s horseshit. Inconsistencies in narratives from the separate men are never investigated, instead it’s mostly transcripts of hypnotic sessions where the hypnotist badgers and bullies the men to recall traumatic experiences they didn’t have. The only person who would have use for this book is a sadistic hypnotist. 

I read this book before the preceding one in the list as I had always known this book was the primary source on the Allagash Abductions, but I was never able to find a copy. I actually needed to buy a new copy from the publisher to get my hands on it. I’m not stuck with a book that I want to throw out, but have been holding onto because it’s so hard to find.

Abducted: How People Come to Believe They Were Kidnapped by Aliens  - Susan Clancy

This is a book Ehrman mentions by name in Jesus Before The Gospels. Clancy’s core argument is straightforward: people who believe they were abducted by aliens generally aren’t lying or delusional in the way skeptics assume; they’re working from memories that feel completely real, but were constructed through a mix of sleep paralysis, cultural narratives, suggestion, and crucially, techniques like hypnosis.

My only knock on this book is that it reads like pop psychology and has the trapping of other books I’ve criticized in that genre for treating one social psychology study as if it represents anything at all statistically meaningful; especially when the studies are conducted by the author themself.

Some Girls: My Life in a Harem -  Jillian Lauren

I first heard about this book after the news broke that the wife of the bassist from Weezer was shot after firing a handgun at police officers outside her home in LA. He’s the author of this book. That alone sets expectations for something chaotic, revealing… maybe even psychologically interesting?

It mostly isn’t any of these things.
 

Instead, it hovers in this middle space where things happen, but they’re rarely unpacked. There are flashes where Lauren gets close; moments of insecurity, competition between women, the weird emotional economy of being “chosen”, but she doesn’t push hard enough on them. It feels like she’s reporting from the inside without fully examining what being inside actually did to her. 

At a surface level, the book delivers exactly what it promises: Lauren’s time as part of the Prince of Brunei’s rotating harem. There’s money, excess, travel, and the kind of detached luxury that borders on parody. The Prince flies women in from around the world, spends obscene amounts of money, and intermittently sleeps with some of them. That’s the engine of the book.

For example, one thing the book skirts around, and arguably its biggest missed opportunity, is how Lauren’s own history shapes her decision to enter and remain in that environment. She alludes to past trauma, but never fully interrogates how that intersects with the dynamics of the harem itself.I think that absence matters, because without it, the experience risks being framed as purely circumstantial or opportunistic, rather than something psychologically patterned. The book gets close to that question, but almost in what feels like a non-conscious way, pulls back before it has to answer it.

We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda - Philip Gourevitch

This book is about the Rwandan Genocide. Despite what I was taught growing up, I had no idea that UN intervention in Rwanda didn’t stop the genocide at all, but that they managed to assist it through complete incompetence. I had no idea that the year given in history books, isn’t when the systematic killing of people stopped, its the year that the Rwandan government was overthrown, therefore the only thing that stopped was that the wanton state-sponsored killing continued, it just ceased being state-sponsored. 

This book will make you want to kill yourself. 

Searching for The Sound - Phil Lesh

After reading the last book about Rwanda I decided that I needed something lighter. I had recently seen the son of of the bass player Phil Lesh of the Grateful Dead put on a free show in the panhandle in San Francisco. I knew that Phil Lesh wrote an autobiography and so I queued up this book next before I was even done with Gourevitch’s book.

It turns out that Lesh was a classically trained musician before he was asked to join the Grateful Dead. That he is able and willing to talk about the structure of music, and early in the book, is surprising, interesting, and refreshing even for musicians’ autobiographies. His stark and vivid recollections of specific early performances is impressive. I wish that there was more of this from later shows, but I think that reflects the relentless touring the band did at the time to support the industry they had built under themselves, pushing themselves to the point of exhaustion. I always got the impression that the band found the touring energizing in a way that other bands didn’t; it makes more sense that’s not the case in retrospect. 

 Deal - Bill Kreutzmann

After finishing Lesh’s book I was hungry for more, and this was the next band autobiography I jumped into, one from one of the drummers of the Grateful Dead. I don’t think it’s as well written as Lesh’s book, but it’s still entertaining nonetheless. It’s interesting the specific things that Lesh does not mention that Kreutzman does: Lesh never mentions the attempt to kick Weir and Pigpen out of the band, Kreuzman mentions that Lesh had led the charge here. In his book, Lesh does mention that he was roughed up by Kreutzmann at least once before. I was kind of surprised by this because in most photos and videos Kreutzmann kinda just looks like a dad that’s a drummer.

Turns out Kreutzmann is true to his profession as a rock drummer: a little wild, and was the guy in the band that ended up being the one  to rough up promoters who would try to stiff them on the road when management didn’t step up. This book has a lot of those “rock and roll autobiography” stories that you’d probably expect or maybe hope to find in a book like this.

I was surprised at Kreutzmann’s frankness and directness about certain things; he didn’t want Micky Heart, the other drummer to return to the band after a hiatus. Or that he really didn’t like the Weir/Barlow songs and much preferred the Garcia/Hunter songs.

Deep Work: rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World - Cal Newport 

Deep Work annoyed me. As someone who has been working since he was 16, there was nothing new here for me to learn. I thought this book was going to be a thought provoking analysis on labor. It’s not. Newport writes as if the main obstacle to meaningful concentration is personal weakness: too much email, too much social media, too little being locked-in. But for a lot of people, the real obstacle is that their job is structurally built around interruption.

If your day is ruled by tasks, chats, hand-offs, other people’s timelines, and the constant need to look responsive; that person does not have a ‘monastery’ problem, they have a class and labor problem. The book keeps treating fragmented work like a bad habit when, for a huge chunk of workers, it is the job and they do not have autonomy over their schedule in the way Newport suggests. Albeit about 100 pages in the author acknowledges this briefly, the book never fully grapples with this reality.

The advice mostly is tailored for the people who need it least: professors, writers, founders, senior technical people, and anyone with enough autonomy to carve out long, protected blocks of time and then call it “virtue”. Frankly, I’m of the mind that anyone who would benefit from the book would end up utilizing their time in a way that would make the world a worse place for other people.

Deep Work flatters the already empowered by telling them their protected working conditions are evidence of superior values, while offering everyone else a kind of aspirational guilt. Read it and you come away feeling like focus is a character test, when in reality it is often a status marker. As universal advice, this book is self-congratulatory, and way less honest about modern work than it thinks it is. This is the trashy self-help book that people think of when they think of trashy self-help books. This book went into the recycle bin.

Others Unknown - Stephen Jones 

Stephen Jones was Timothy McVeigh’s lead court appointed attorney during the Oklahoma City Trial Bombings. I mean it when I saw that Aberrations in the Heartland of The Real is one of the most fascinating and interesting books that I’ve read in a while. This is really just an opportunity for me to spend more time talking about that book instead. About 30 pages in, Jones lets us know that attorney-client privilege still exists and that he’s not going to tell us anything that McVeigh has said to him. He could have done this in the intro, instead leading up to that information, a significant amount of the book telling us a bunch of boomer stories about the attorneys in his family before him. 

As a result, Painting’s book is better because it utilizes this book as a primary source to show a broader picture Anything important in this book is going to be cited in Painting’s book and crucially analyzed from every perspective imaginable. As far as how Jone’s inside perspective goes, despite his crucial position in the case, really isn’t the best narrator. True to his profession, throughout the book he tries to poke holes in the prosecution’s case even when he probably doesn’t need to for our sake, or in places where his argument seems flimsy.

The title comes the federal grand jury indictment of Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. In Count One, the indictment charged that McVeigh and Nichols “conspire[d]… together and with others unknown to the Grand Jury” to use a truck bomb against the Murrah Federal Building. Ultimately, Jones believes McVeigh was involved, but he was not the mastermind. Jones says McVeigh exaggerated his own role to protect others and explicitly says he is not claiming McVeigh was innocent, but that McVeigh’s self-contained confession story is false or incomplete.

 

The Identity Trap - Yascha Mounk

 

The Identity Trap met me where I’ve been at with intersectionality for a long time, which is to say: I understand the basic idea, but I have never fully trusted the way it gets implemented in the real word. My first exposure to the concept was at UMass in a conversation where a Black woman used the concept less as a tool for understanding other people and more as a way to position herself above the room; privilege as a pissing context. I do not remember the exact topic, and honestly I do not think the topic mattered as much as the power move itself. What stuck with me from that experience was the implication that empathy had hard racial limits, and the idea that you can't fundamentally have empathy for another person because of their race. The other thing I later learned that switched something in my brain was that this person came from a very wealthy family. She grew up with horses in a wealthy Eastern Massachusetts town, but it was important in that moment for her to identify as being more oppressed than anyone else in the room. I appreciated that I found a book that would explore these paradigms with me from a liberal point-of-view and not some shit-head American conservative Charlie Kirk-esque point-of-view. 

in American public discourse, intersectionality often talks about every form of power except class. When class is discussed, it's done in a vague decorative way, as if money, family background, institutional access, and social hierarchy are secondary details rather than central facts of life. This is just me still yapping by the way. Mounk's argument is that the “identity synthesis” as he calls it, undermines the liberal tools and ideas that made real pluralism possible in the first place. He argues that the framework built around the identity synthesis can become a moral shortcut that is just as discriminatory as the systems it is trying to replace. It flattens people into categories, ignores the actual distribution of power in the room, and asks working and middle-class people to defer to people who may be more protected, more connected, or more institutionally fluent than they are; while the shaming those social class while patting the upper class on the back. That is the personal nerve The Identity Trap hit for me anyways.

With all that said, Mounk’s book is not primarily about class, and honestly I wish it was more interested in that relm. His argument is not that racism or sexism are fake, or that America already achieved some colorblind liberal paradise. The argument is that a this style of identity politics has become powerful precisely because it sounds morally serious while encouraging people to use racist group identity as the deepest truth about any person in every situation.

Mounk is good at explaining how ideas that may begin as subtle academic claims become crude social rules once they enter institutions. I 100% agree with this claim. A theory that says identity shapes experience becomes, in practice, “stay in your lane.” A claim that universalism has often been applied hypocritically becomes, in practice, suspicion of universalism itself. A desire to correct exclusion becomes, in practice, a new hierarchy of who is allowed to speak, who must apologize, and who is presumed to understand the world correctly.

Phone Losers of America - Brad Carter

Phone Losers of America is a collection of stories documenting the twenty-year (at the time) history of the Phone Losers of America. Brad Carter, co-founder of the group, is the sole constant of the group over the years. PLA originally started out as a BBS zine that Carter write for and edited, today it mostly exists as a prank call community. Chapters of the book are outlined here, with links to the actual content in question that is being covered. As a result I would recommend reading through the companion first, and then read the book if you still find it compelling.

What I've Read in The Second Half of 2025

Part one can be found here.

The Terminator - Randall Frakes & Bill Wisher

I heard online multiple times that the novelization of the first Terminator film was very good and I got around to reading it this year. Back in the day before home video was widespread, it was common for novelizations of films to exist. I was hoping to find some more insight into the backstory of the Terminator films, specifically around the creation of Skynet, but there’s not much here other than action scenes. The book is well written, however reading it makes you realize how well certain scenes in the film ended up being shot and that it’s the camera-work that makes a lot of these scenes more than anything else. 

Otherwise, there’s not a whole lot else to say. The majority of differences between the book and the film likely would only be interesting to super fans of the franchise. The book does include a scene where Cyberdyne is founded after two engineers discover a chip they’ve never seen before after the final showdown where the Terminator is destroyed. The book then goes on to suggest that time is cyclical as a way to build in this time travel paradox into the story.

The Prisoner in His Palace - Will Bardenwerper

 

 

This book explores how Saddam Hussein, very likely a malignant narcissist, managed to charm and befriend the young American soldiers guarding him in the days leading up to his execution. If you lived through the Trump presidency, the mechanics of this kind of narcissist might not feel like new information. However, the book finds its footing when it examines the deep failures of the process of policing Saddam.

Even though Saddam arguably deserved his fate, Bardenwerper highlights how far the proceedings fell short of a fair trial. The most haunting (interesting?) aspect of the book is the psychological toll on the guards. Unsurprisingly, the Army took zero precautions to prevent these soldiers from bonding with their prisoner, leaving them to deal with the trauma of watching a man they had grown to like be handed over to a "two-bit operation" execution. While the book skips the specifics of how the execution video was leaked, it vividly captures the chaotic, unprofessional atmosphere of Saddam's final days.

Black Rednecks and White Liberals - Thomas Sowell

 

In this collection of connected essays, Thomas Sowell presents a probably controversial thesis regarding the roots of cultural disparities in America. His central argument is that the behavioral patterns often associated with the "urban ghetto", what he terms "Black Redneck" culture, actually originated with the "cracker" redneck culture of Scots and Northern British immigrants in the American South. He argues that this culture was adopted by enslaved people and later carried to Northern cities, where he claims it was preserved and even encouraged by "whitelLiberals" as a legitimate form of authentic identity, and then descends into the consequences of this world view of seeing problems of race in what he sees as problems of culture.

Beyond his thesis on "redneck" culture, Sowell spends a significant portion of the book on "middleman minorities" - groups like the Jews in Europe, the Chinese in Southeast Asia, and the Lebanese in West Africa. He observes that these "merchant peoples" often face identical patterns of resentment and violence across different centuries and continents. His argument is that their success isn't based on privilege but on specific cultural traits: high literacy, frugal living, and community cohesion that allow them to thrive in hostile environments.

The final section shifts to the history of black American education, specifically focusing on the success of schools like Dunbar High School in Washington, D.C., during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Sowell uses these historical case studies to argue that high-performing black schools existed long before integration or modern welfare programs and  that the decline in these standards was caused by the "redneck" culture he described earlier becoming the dominant social norm, displacing the older, more disciplined educational traditions.

While the book has absolutely challenged the ways I’ve thought about the world, Sowell takes a lot of liberties with the sources he uses and claims he makes. At one point he states as a fact that fact that only black people play bridge, and this comes from British aristocracy. I’m not black, and all my grandparents played bridge, so I’m not sure where that comes from... At handfuls of times I looked up the sources Sowell referenced only to see that he completely misrepresented what the author said or just cherry picked his information. So while his ideas sound interesting, I’m not really sure how grounded in reality they might be.

Jesus Before the Gospels - Bart Ehrman

Bart Ehrman is a secular New Testament scholar, in this books he focuses on the Historical Jesus from the perspective of the social memory and context of the people who told his stories after his death. Ehrman explores the roughly thirty-to-sixty-year gap between Jesus' death and the writing of the first Gospels, investigating how oral traditions functioned in a world without written records or mass literacy. Rather than simply debunking myths, he uses cognitive psychology and studies on memory to explain how stories naturally evolve, sharpen, or distort as they are passed from person to person.

Ehrman shows how the Gospels aren't verbatim transcripts, but rather reflections of what the early Christian communities remembered and needed to believe about Jesus decades later. For example, Ehrman points out that given Jesus and his disciples spoke Aramaic and were almost certainly illiterate, use of pivotal words with double meanings in Greek (which the Gospels were written in) show us that these particular entries in the Gospels almost certainly didn’t happen - they’re absolutely metaphorical stories.

Ehrman ends the book by saying that the gospels are no more a historical document than a painting is. It’s not the painting’s job to be a perfect, photorealistic reproduction of a moment in time. Instead, a painting is an interpretation designed to capture the essence, the emotion, and the significance of the subject through the artist’s specific lens. In this sense, the Gospel writers were not acting as objective reporters, but as "artists" who shaped their narratives to address the specific needs and theological questions of their own communities. This book is absolutely fascinating on one of my favorites of 2025.
 

9 ½ Years Behind The Green Door - Simone Corday 

I go to a lot of shows at The Great American Music Hall in San Francisco. On the corner a few building away there is a boarded up strip club that says Mitchell Brothers on it and has a large sign that says “Where The Wild Girls Are” that has a group of women posing together in colorful bodysuits. I think the sign is supposed to be a reference to the eponymous children's book? All in all it’s an odd building that does look to be in place in the Tenderloin. I wanted to know about the history about the building, which lead me to this book after a quick Google search.

The author of 9 ½ Years Behind The Green Door, Simone Corday, was a dancer at the club for almost a decade. The building in question is the O'Farrell Theatre, and the Mictchell Brothers who owned it have a bit of a history in the city as I learned; often banging heads with local politicians like Diane Feinstein who were trying to get rid of strip clubs in the city. The book title is a reference to an adult film the Mitchell Brothers produced before Simone started working for them.

The core of the book ends up being Corday detailing her long, tumultuous relationship with Art Mitchell, a narrative that often reads like a textbook on domestic abuse. Despite his behavior, Corday remains steadfast in her love for him to this day, offering a raw, sometimes frustrating look at the psychology of a survivor. Although, I don’t think she would describe it that way and might even get upset at that description? The memoir reaches its climax with the the 1991 murder of Art by his own brother and business partner, Jim. Jim Mitchell’s defense team successfully argued a "diminished capacity" plea, suggesting he only intended to intervene in his brother’s self-destruction rather than commit cold-blooded murder. Even though Corday presents compelling evidence that the shooting was absolutely premeditated, Jim was convicted only of voluntary manslaughter, eventually serving a relatively short sentence before returning to the O'Farrell Theatre.

I think one of my favorite parts of the book is that Hunter S Thompson shows up in it as a character and becomes close friends with Corday. Out of everyone in the book, Thompson at times seems to be the most level headed and fair person. It looks like later editions advertise on the cover very heavily that Thompson is in this book as a means to get it to sell better. The last part worth mentioning is that Corday documents how the Tenderloin got progressivly more dangerous over time. I found it a little amusing how interactions she had on the street that were concerning for he by the late 80es, are now just typical and expected on O'Farrell & Larkin Street in 2025.

 
South End Syndicate - Anthony Arillotta

 

In 2003 a mob boss named Al Bruno was shot and killed outside Mount Carmel Church in Springfield Massachusetts. I was in middle school in Springfield at the time and it blew a lot of people’s minds that organized crime was a thing still. This book chronicles the history of the Genovese crime family in Springfield, Massachusetts from the 80s to about the 2000s when the Springfield Genovese crime family began to unravel.

One of the biggest complaints I saw about this book publicly is that the author is a snitch. He addresses this at the end of the book by basically saying there is no honor among thieves. In a sort of way, the omerta that mobsters took died with when protectionism was protection against the systemic racism Italian immigrants faced. I believe this creates a Catch-22 situation where we will never have first hand accounts of those times. It also means the people who complain about snitches in this situation are tools. A criminal is an untrustworthy person, that’s how it works.

There’s a lot of interesting contemporary Springfield history here. It’s a good book that kept me hooked and I read it in one day, staying up late to finish it. The author affirms, from his point of view, how the rumors that former Mayor Albano was connected to the mafia were true. He also calls out many locales in Sprignfield where certain events and crimes happened. If you’re from Springfield, it’s highly fascinating if you know the area well.

The forward to the book is written by a former Springfield police officer named Joe Bradly who reflects on an interaction he had with Al Bruno with what feels like nostalgia that ends with him eating at Buno’s restaurant for free for months. My grandfather always warned me that you don’t do any favors for anyone connected, and you don’t let them do any favors for you. Anyone with two cents knows that former officer’s story doesn’t end where he ended it in that intro. I left Springfield as soon as a could. This book doesn’t do the city any favors when it comes to Springfield’s reputation of being an absolute shithole. 

Solaris - Stanisław Lem

 

 

I picked this up as a cheap science fiction paperback. The premise was really interesting: a sentient-like plant is being studied by scientists who just can’t understand it. I love the ideas like this that come up in cheap paperbacks like this book. Despite its short length, the book is a bit of a slog. It is an interesting book, and I liked it, but I didn’t like reading it. It is translated from French and at times the translation can feel disjointed. Lem spends a lot of time talking about the VERY specific ways in which the planet interacts with the humans studying it, but ultimately one of the messages of the books seems to be that what we are looking for out there in outer space is ourselves (think Star Trek where ever other race that is encountered is just other humanoids with shit slapped on their foreheads); that when we eventually do encounter something out there resembling what we consider sentience, we will fail to fathom it or know what to make of it. That is an interesting idea on its own, but it takes a lot of investment in this book into having to follow along about all the weird stuff this planet does that has no other pay off.

There’s other ideas in this book that are fascinating, but only the surface is scratched on: one thing that happens in the book is that the planet constructs other people based on the humans’ memories, and the idea of how we don’t remember people; we remember versions of them is explored. So is the idea of identity as a construct and loneliness on a cosmic scale. Like the issue of the planet, these ideas are left there to hang out in the air, with one of the lessons of this book being there’s not an answer for everything. 

The Last Victim - Jason Moss 

 

 

This is a book written by a college kid who started corresponding with serial killers in prison, most prominently John Wayne Gacy. The book is ok. The first 50 pages of the book are completely skippable, and are about the author himself. The book itself is not well written, there are jarring tone shifts where you can tell the psychologist co-author Jeffery Kotter took over. Overall the book would have been better if it was only transcripts of the letters and phone calls between the author and the killers that he corresponded with.  

The author himself writes about women in a really jarring way, even for a college student. At one point he calls his college women softball team’s uniforms ‘skimpy’? As the author has intimate correspondences and phone calls with the inmates it’s hard for me to not think of the quote at the beginning of Vonnegut’s book Mother Night; “we are what we pretend to be” and that maybe some of the energy going into this book is misdirected sexual energy. I’m dead serious.

There is an untold story that is written between the lines of this book that is fascinating. Years after this book the author would eventually kill himself. As he talks about his upbringing, it is patently obvious that he grew up in an abusive household. He writes about his mom giving him money to buy shoes after he’d completely worn out his current pair, only to yell at him for spending the money when he gets home.

The climatic in-person meeting with Gacey at the end of the book is a bit interesting, though he ultimately just ends up being what I think most informed readers would expect; he’s manipulative and violent. And given the intimate conversations he had with the author, he want’s to fuck him and pulls his dick out several times in front of the author - to, what I felt like, was only to the surprise of the author himself. The co-author writes in the closing: what is interesting about this book is that Jason was able to document the “point of transaction” between the killer and victim where the victim is reeled in right before the crime took place. 

Overall however Jason Moss just doesn’t seem like a reliable narrator. He cites Faces of Death claiming a group of men were arrested for committing a ritual sacrifice of another man. After meeting with Gacy the book ends with a story where he was able to pull one over on Gacy with with answering machine “accidentally” catching a recording between Gacy and an associate. It just seems all too clean and pasted together to tell a cohesive narrative. 

The Year of The Boar and Jackie Robinson - Bette Bao Lord

 

 

I first read The Year of the Boar and Jackie Robinson back in elementary school as part of a group reading assignment. I remember having fond memories of the book, and it still holds up for a children’s novel. I was surprised to see that today the book was nominated for few, if any, awards. The genre of the book is a mix of realistic fiction and autobiographical elements; it is about a young Chinese girl who moves with her family from rural China to New York City in 1947. The author, Bette Bao Lord, immigrated to the United States from China at the age of 8.

The book starts in China and is written from the perspective of the protagonist who is a child known as Bandit in her home village. These first chapters carry with them the sort of childlike wonderment and amazement that come with childhood at that age, and then bleed into her perceptions of New York City and the US as an industrialized nation. The rest of the book deals with the protagonist’s assimilation into the US and into her school friend groups, she’s able to connect with them through learning baseball, and following Jackie Robinson in his rookie year in the MLB and the Dodger’s eventual post-season run.

The book does end with elements of “in America, you can be whatever you want if you try hard enough”. It perpetuates the American Dream, and I think that alone will alienate a lot of Americans today, and if anything, would facilitate classroom discussions about how that’s not necessarily true - conversations that likely should happen some time after elementary school. The ending is a bit saccharine; with the protagonist meeting Jackie Robinson and presenting him with the key to the school. Nevertheless, I think this is a good book. I enjoyed reading it again, and if anything it shows what Americans thought of themselves at one time, and I think later generations might find that interesting on its own.