The decade of the 2010s happens to begin with the year I turned 35, which makes for an interesting endpoint here. Sometime in the late 2000s I’d got around to reading two authors for the first time: Graham Greene and John O’Hara. I loved them both, but O’Hara particularly blew me away because although I was more or less aware of Appointment in Samarra and Butterfield 8 (though I’m not sure I knew they were by the same author), I knew nothing about this writer who was right in my sweet spot – a slightly younger contemporary of Fitzgerald and other Lost Generation writers, who was explicit in his aim to be the best portraitist in American fiction of the first half of the 20th century.
I used to have a sort of obsessive bent in my reading (it’s still there: it operates at different scales and speeds now, I think). In college, when I read Fitzgerald and Mark Twain for class, I proceeded to read everything else they’d written – novels, short stories, unfinished manuscripts, letters. (My first paid work outside of fiction was writing the introduction to a collection of Mark Twain essays that I wrote more or less off the top of my head, because I was just so frontloaded with Twain info.) That Fitzgerald phase had spilled out into reading about a lot of the other writers of his generation – so while O’Hara was slightly outside the frame (his career was just beginning as Fitzgerald’s relatively brief career was winding down), it still surprised me that I wasn’t familiar with him, especially since there was a lot of overlap (the cultures of New York City and Hollywood, an investment in social trends, egos big as houses).
*
So that spurred a train of thought: what else hadn’t I read yet?
Not, like … everything I hadn’t read yet.
I started thinking of a narrow kind of canon: the books that you’d figure I’d be into, given the other books I was into.
It took on another dimension, the more I thought about it: the books “a writer like me” could be expected to have read. I write fantasy, science fiction, and horror – more or less – which sounds like a lot, but like, I never write hard sci fi and I can’t imagine I ever will, nor YA or urban fantasy as they’ve come to be thought of in the 2010s. And there were entire genres like mysteries where I knew I’d never feel like playing around, so I didn’t need to worry about reading all the significant mystery authors.
Eventually I had an actual plan: five years to read “the books I ought to have read by the time I turn 40.” It turned into six, and it left out a lot of the stuff that had made it onto my list early – I still haven’t finished even the first volume of Proust, for instance, nor read as much foreign fiction as I’d originally planned to, and there were a lot of authors like Updike or Mailer who I set out intending to read all the Major Works of (along with the Underrated Works or Minor Classics) but jumped ship from real quick.
See, because there were too many fucking Updikes. Too many fucking Mailers.
I mean, thank God I’ve never had much of an investment in contemporary fiction, so I didn’t feel the need to litter this list with all the Suggested If You Like Dave Eggers guys, because as it is, I ran into a problem quickly: this curriculum was way too male and way too white.
It makes sense in hindsight. My list was an accumulation of things that had been recommended to me, authors I knew of but hadn’t read, authors I’d read only one work by in some class or another. It wasn’t “the western canon,” but it shared space with it. It was shaped by it. I had made no explicit effort to reflect the canon, but my criteria still drew from it, because of my experiences as a white guy with a lot of college. If anything, this was reinforced by my nonfiction choices, because I wanted to get more up to date in religious studies – my field – and to broaden my understanding of history from the pockets of European and American history that I’d covered in grad school to fill in the chronological gaps. But that meant reading, for instance, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation and Veronica Wedgwood’s Thirty Years War – both very good books! But books very much about the lives and worlds of white men. Deepening my knowledge of religious studies similarly meant reading about more western male-dominated disciplines, and gradually coming to a better understanding of how western frameworks had shaped the discipline and our understanding of non-western cultures and faith communities.
It’s the sort of thing I could have paid lip service to – of COURSE religious studies was a field dominated by white male thinking – but that isn’t the same as seeing specific examples of it over and over again.
All of this said: I’m not saying I didn’t read anything good in that first five/six year reading list! And, obviously I hope, I am not dismissing the work of white men. (This isn’t Twitter, hopefully such clarifications are unnecessary.) I loved Walker Percy, of whom I had only previously read The Moviegoer. I finished off John O'Hara, apart from a handful of short stories; his novellas are exceptional, and there are half a dozen novels I'd put in a favorites list. I finally circled back to Salinger after reading Catcher a million years ago, and though you can certainly tell that you’ve already read a stack of books that internalized him, he’s still pretty great. P.G. Wodehouse immediately became one of my favorite authors, especially his Blandings series and various heist stories. Cheever and Dos Passos were as good as I expected. Angle of Repose, amazing, though I’ve since read about the controversies surrounding it. I knew of Raymond Queneau but hadn’t actually read him, and it turns out Zazie in the Metro is a perfect book.
There were disappointments, too – it turns out I almost can’t stand Nathanael West, despite every one of his books being recommended to me personally or algorithmically at one point or another, and the same is true of Jose Saramago. I found Roberto Bolano and Booth Tarkington to be merely okay, and rereading The Last Temptation of Christ, which I hadn’t read since shortly after the movie came out, I was startled to realize it’s a little bit shitty. Richard Yates is great in a way, except that every Richard Yates book feels like every other Richard Yates book, so maybe you’re fine with just Revolutionary Road.
Nor did I only read male authors, it’s just that I realized I was reading too many of them. Marilynne Robinson, Carson McCullers, and Ursula Le Guin (specifically the Earthsea books and some of the Hainish Cycle) were all names that had gone on my list immediately, and have become favorites. I've reread each of them at some point in this decade.
On some level, that last year I may have actually read more male writers deliberately, if unconsciously, in order to “get it done” so I could move on to my next reading list – a sort of counter-canon of “books by an author who is either not white or not a man, or which was translated from another language,” the latter criterion because I hadn’t read as much translated fiction in those first six years as I meant to. (I still haven't.)
So the second half of the decade was spent on that second curriculum, which doesn’t have a real endpoint yet. I’ve discovered more favorite writers, chief among them Barbara Trapido, a South African born writer now living in England, whose books have never made much of a mark in the United States. They’re not quite farces, in that they are generally more serious than that and more introspective, but they borrow from the structures of farces and Shakespeare’s comedies, especially the use of coincidence or unlikely connections between characters. That’s a description that’s accurate without being helpful, but at the end of the day, how do you recommend a book? It’s your thing or it isn’t. This could be your thing, if you like this kind of thing.
I read or reread Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings series, a sixteen book series of five connected trilogies (one of which is four books, fine). I’d previously read the first trilogy, but it was only as I got into the meat of the “things a writer like me could be expected to have read” stuff that I circled back, having gotten particularly interested in “why do I like what I like about fantasy, and where is more of it.” Hobb needs to be read in order, and everything pays off in the final trilogy, but apart from that, this isn’t a sixteen book series in the same sense that The Wheel of Time is an umpteen book series or A Song of Ice and Fire is a five book series that will never be finished. Each trilogy tells more or less a complete story, a complete event in the main character or characters’ lives. Because of this, the relationships among those trilogies are very interesting – just as Le Guin upends in later Earthsea books some of the assumptions of the characters of the first couple, each Hobb trilogy teaches you something new about the world or its characters, while also demonstrating the falsehood or incomplete view of something in the previous books. I don’t mean in a metatext, Instance of the Fingerpost, kind of way. Just that, again like Le Guin, she has the sense to realize that even the very smartest characters in a fictional world will possess a worldview that leads them to misunderstand aspects of the world they live in. I've spent a lot of time thinking about that.
I loved Lois McMaster Bujold’s World of Five Gods books, too, starting with The Curse of Chalion. I had known her mainly as a science fiction writer, and her Vorkosigan Saga had just never really been my thing – but this series, especially the second book, I’d rank very highly.
I still haven’t read as much poetry as I keep meaning to, nor many plays outside of Sam Shepard, but I loved Eve Ewing’s Electric Arches and Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds.
Meanwhile, part of my nonfiction reading program revolved around what I called “ocean studies” – a history of the Mediterranean sea, books and online coursework on marine biology, books on evolution, nature writing (Rachel Carson, mainly), about a dozen books on surfing (which led to one of my short stories, “The Last of the Real Good Days”). The best of these was Haunts of the Black Manseur, a cultural history of swimming that is difficult to describe. Oh, and How to Read Water, which is about everything from weather to navigation. I also read a variety of histories, memoirs, or theoretical works on psychology, in part because of my own experiences with therapy, and in part because one of my novels I’m gradually working on here and there is about a therapist.
There were a handful of books that sounded right up my alley that I just *could not stand*. Night Film. Tuesday Nights in 1980. Threats. Margaret Atwood’s very odd graphic novel, Angel Catbird. A thousand thrillers I’ve already forgotten with names like The Wife Woman or whatever. That French Peter Pan comic.
I read my first two Hilary Mantel books – the Tommy Croms ones – and need to read more. I finally read The Master and Margarita, No Exit, Nausea. I read some romances just because I hadn’t – Judith Krantz’s classic Scruples, and the more recent Devil in Winter, by Lisa Kleypas.
Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn was another standout – a book about four single sixtysomething office workers, it’s not the kind of thing that sounds exciting, but well-written interiors make anyone fascinating. This is my philosophy of story in general, really, and so I love running across examples that demonstrate it: everything is interesting. Every element of the human experience is worth talking about. Not every storyteller is able to illuminate what’s interesting about every subject, every character, every theme, but the interestingness is there. You don’t like football so you haven’t watched Friday Night Lights? I hate football, and it’s one of my all-time favorite shows!
Also great, and very British (as is Pym), was Rachel Ferguson’s A Footman for the Peacock, which … how do you describe this one? It’s about an aristocratic family during World War II, it’s a light comedy, and it includes a pro-Nazi peacock who is the reincarnation of a footman who formerly served at the manor.
I read Clarice Lispector, Anita Brookner, Mary McCarthy, Nella Larsen, Anita Loos, Joy Williams, Muriel Spark. All names that should have been on my original list. Madeline Miller’s terrific Greek myth retellings. Ali Smith’s incredible Autumn (I have the next books queued). Lots of Patricia Highsmith.
This was a decade where HOW I read changed a lot, too: the Kindle really changed things, especially paired with public domain books, ebook giveaways by Tor and others, and the routine sales at Amazon that let you pick up a dozen books for about the cost of a new hardcover at the mall. The Kindle Fire and digital comics meant I was reading comics more, but also made me more likely to stick to collections rather than single issues – they’re far cheaper, and these days nearly everything is collected, and virtually no single issue is a story in of itself anymore, the four-to-six-issue collection having become the base unit of story for the major publishers.
Between Comixology and the unlimited reading on DC Universe, I reread a bunch of Vertigo stuff, all of the post-Alan Moore Swamp Thing stuff (everything through Nancy Collins is worth reading; everything post-Collins ranges from awful to forgettable), Gail Simone’s runs on Secret Six and Birds of Prey, Mark Waid’s run on Flash (which isn’t nearly as good as I remembered), the first five volumes of The Complete ElfQuest (variable!), Chip Zdarsky’s terrific Spider-Man stories, fantasy comics like Monstress, Birthright, The Autumnlands, Rat Queens, and Saga, Mantlo’s Hulk (essay forthcoming 2020), Gruenwald’s Captain America, Robinson’s Starman, Ann Nocenti’s weird and underrated Daredevil, Mark Russell’s wild Hanna Barbera comics, various comics by Jason, Charles Burns’ X’ed Out (which I like even better than Black Hole), Saladin Ahmed’s Black Bolt, and all those great female-led books that Marvel canceled, like Patsy Walker, Spider-Woman, All-New Wolverine, Squirrel Girl, Mockingbird, Hawkeye. I loved Tom Scioli’s absolutely ridiculous Transformers vs GI Joe.
I started using Audible, mostly when driving or on the treadmill, sometimes when cooking. Mostly it’s a way for me to listen to usually-shitty thrillers, sometimes memoirs (Carrie Fisher, Parker Posey).
*
Outside of reading:
The most important genre of 2010s television was the romantic comedy. Sure, there were plenty of great shows outside of that, but You’re the Worst, Love, Catastrophe, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend would all be perfectly valid choices for best show of the decade. It particularly stands out because this has been one of the least represented genres on TV – partly because sitcoms and procedurals borrow from it so much, with “will they or won’t they” stuff, sitcoms about parenting couples, etc. But a sitcom that includes a couple or includes characters who are dating isn’t the same as a sitcom in which the central focus is the relationship. It’s the kind of thing that we used to get only once or twice a decade – That Girl (only kind of, I would argue), Bridget Loves Bernie, Joanie Loves Chachi, Mork and Mindy, Angie, Duet, Mad About You, Ned and Stacey, Once and Again. (“Once or twice a decade” may sound like plenty during the three-to-four network era, but I wrote about cop shows recently for work, and despite the fact that they take up twice as much space on the programming grid, this same era had periods in which every single weeknight had at least two cop shows and sometimes four.)
Most of the new shows followed the Duet model of introducing us to a couple at the same time they’re introduced to each other, and following them through their courtship etc.
Maybe one reason we had so many prestige romantic comedies is because romance played such a small role in prestige dramas. Breaking Bad is almost completely devoid of romance – Jesse has a couple relationships, and they add to the tragedy of his arc, but what love story is told there is pretty scant. Rectify’s weakest season suffered in part because of the introduction of a love interest that always felt grafted on. Mad Men’s depiction of relationships is, if not always cynical, pretty uniformly unromantic apart from a couple moments here and there. Halt and Catch Fire’s most important relationship is a friendship, and it spends more time showing romantic relationships falling apart than coming together. Maybe The Americans, centered on a marriage that is also a work relationship, spends the most time depicting romantic love – or The Leftovers.
Those four shows I mentioned at the beginning would definitely be four of my favorites for the decade – and it probably isn’t coincidence that each of them deals with mental health to varying degrees. The other best shows are pretty obvious -–Mad Men, The Leftovers, Twin Peaks, you know the drill.
*
I can’t even begin to get my head around explaining how the last decade changed what movies I watch, how I watch. The tail end of the “Netflix is mostly for DVDs” era was also my introduction to a lot of the foreign filmmakers I’d meant to watch but hadn’t got round to, and I discovered that Fellini and Godard, for instance, are extremely unreliable: I love as many of their movies as I can’t stand, and acclaim is not a good indicator. (8 ½ is a well-made movie I have no interest in seeing again, Breathless actively aggravated me; but Nights of Cabiria is probably a top ten movie for me, and Band of Outsiders was incredible fun.) I watched Claudia Weill's Girlfriends, and it immediately became a favorite -- not just because Melanie Mayron is so good, but because it's such a tonic for the problems of the New Hollywood era, an era I love but which is plagued with Updike-Mailer types.
Then movies on demand came, and streaming, and the Criterion Channel, and good lord. Plus a shitload of superhero movies came out! That was weird!
Not to mention, my first date with Caitlin, we watched a shitload of movies – They Live, Hell Comes to Frogtown, Being There, The Frighteners, Empire Strikes Back, I’m sure I’m forgetting what else [Caitlin says we didn't watch Empire until a couple dates later]. We rented both good and bad things from Netflix, she introduced me to Irma La Douce after we watched The Apartment, I made her watch My Science Project and Soul Man from my childhood, and she introduced me to Uncle Buck and Return to Oz from hers.
I’ll never remember all the movies I loved that came out this decade, but recency bias reminds me of Under the Silver Lake, Get Out, Booksmart, Spider-Verse. I’ll throw in Margaret, Tree of Life, The Illusionist, Mistress America, Midsommar, Hereditary, whatever Mike Flanagan movies came out this decade, the Paddington movies of all things, Drive, Melancholia, Another Earth, Upstream Color, The Last Jedi, Enough Said, The Handmaiden, World of Tomorrow, and I’m sure I’m leaving out dozens.
I used to have a sort of obsessive bent in my reading (it’s still there: it operates at different scales and speeds now, I think). In college, when I read Fitzgerald and Mark Twain for class, I proceeded to read everything else they’d written – novels, short stories, unfinished manuscripts, letters. (My first paid work outside of fiction was writing the introduction to a collection of Mark Twain essays that I wrote more or less off the top of my head, because I was just so frontloaded with Twain info.) That Fitzgerald phase had spilled out into reading about a lot of the other writers of his generation – so while O’Hara was slightly outside the frame (his career was just beginning as Fitzgerald’s relatively brief career was winding down), it still surprised me that I wasn’t familiar with him, especially since there was a lot of overlap (the cultures of New York City and Hollywood, an investment in social trends, egos big as houses).
*
So that spurred a train of thought: what else hadn’t I read yet?
Not, like … everything I hadn’t read yet.
I started thinking of a narrow kind of canon: the books that you’d figure I’d be into, given the other books I was into.
It took on another dimension, the more I thought about it: the books “a writer like me” could be expected to have read. I write fantasy, science fiction, and horror – more or less – which sounds like a lot, but like, I never write hard sci fi and I can’t imagine I ever will, nor YA or urban fantasy as they’ve come to be thought of in the 2010s. And there were entire genres like mysteries where I knew I’d never feel like playing around, so I didn’t need to worry about reading all the significant mystery authors.
Eventually I had an actual plan: five years to read “the books I ought to have read by the time I turn 40.” It turned into six, and it left out a lot of the stuff that had made it onto my list early – I still haven’t finished even the first volume of Proust, for instance, nor read as much foreign fiction as I’d originally planned to, and there were a lot of authors like Updike or Mailer who I set out intending to read all the Major Works of (along with the Underrated Works or Minor Classics) but jumped ship from real quick.
See, because there were too many fucking Updikes. Too many fucking Mailers.
I mean, thank God I’ve never had much of an investment in contemporary fiction, so I didn’t feel the need to litter this list with all the Suggested If You Like Dave Eggers guys, because as it is, I ran into a problem quickly: this curriculum was way too male and way too white.
It makes sense in hindsight. My list was an accumulation of things that had been recommended to me, authors I knew of but hadn’t read, authors I’d read only one work by in some class or another. It wasn’t “the western canon,” but it shared space with it. It was shaped by it. I had made no explicit effort to reflect the canon, but my criteria still drew from it, because of my experiences as a white guy with a lot of college. If anything, this was reinforced by my nonfiction choices, because I wanted to get more up to date in religious studies – my field – and to broaden my understanding of history from the pockets of European and American history that I’d covered in grad school to fill in the chronological gaps. But that meant reading, for instance, Diarmaid MacCulloch’s Reformation and Veronica Wedgwood’s Thirty Years War – both very good books! But books very much about the lives and worlds of white men. Deepening my knowledge of religious studies similarly meant reading about more western male-dominated disciplines, and gradually coming to a better understanding of how western frameworks had shaped the discipline and our understanding of non-western cultures and faith communities.
It’s the sort of thing I could have paid lip service to – of COURSE religious studies was a field dominated by white male thinking – but that isn’t the same as seeing specific examples of it over and over again.
All of this said: I’m not saying I didn’t read anything good in that first five/six year reading list! And, obviously I hope, I am not dismissing the work of white men. (This isn’t Twitter, hopefully such clarifications are unnecessary.) I loved Walker Percy, of whom I had only previously read The Moviegoer. I finished off John O'Hara, apart from a handful of short stories; his novellas are exceptional, and there are half a dozen novels I'd put in a favorites list. I finally circled back to Salinger after reading Catcher a million years ago, and though you can certainly tell that you’ve already read a stack of books that internalized him, he’s still pretty great. P.G. Wodehouse immediately became one of my favorite authors, especially his Blandings series and various heist stories. Cheever and Dos Passos were as good as I expected. Angle of Repose, amazing, though I’ve since read about the controversies surrounding it. I knew of Raymond Queneau but hadn’t actually read him, and it turns out Zazie in the Metro is a perfect book.
There were disappointments, too – it turns out I almost can’t stand Nathanael West, despite every one of his books being recommended to me personally or algorithmically at one point or another, and the same is true of Jose Saramago. I found Roberto Bolano and Booth Tarkington to be merely okay, and rereading The Last Temptation of Christ, which I hadn’t read since shortly after the movie came out, I was startled to realize it’s a little bit shitty. Richard Yates is great in a way, except that every Richard Yates book feels like every other Richard Yates book, so maybe you’re fine with just Revolutionary Road.
Nor did I only read male authors, it’s just that I realized I was reading too many of them. Marilynne Robinson, Carson McCullers, and Ursula Le Guin (specifically the Earthsea books and some of the Hainish Cycle) were all names that had gone on my list immediately, and have become favorites. I've reread each of them at some point in this decade.
On some level, that last year I may have actually read more male writers deliberately, if unconsciously, in order to “get it done” so I could move on to my next reading list – a sort of counter-canon of “books by an author who is either not white or not a man, or which was translated from another language,” the latter criterion because I hadn’t read as much translated fiction in those first six years as I meant to. (I still haven't.)
So the second half of the decade was spent on that second curriculum, which doesn’t have a real endpoint yet. I’ve discovered more favorite writers, chief among them Barbara Trapido, a South African born writer now living in England, whose books have never made much of a mark in the United States. They’re not quite farces, in that they are generally more serious than that and more introspective, but they borrow from the structures of farces and Shakespeare’s comedies, especially the use of coincidence or unlikely connections between characters. That’s a description that’s accurate without being helpful, but at the end of the day, how do you recommend a book? It’s your thing or it isn’t. This could be your thing, if you like this kind of thing.
I read or reread Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings series, a sixteen book series of five connected trilogies (one of which is four books, fine). I’d previously read the first trilogy, but it was only as I got into the meat of the “things a writer like me could be expected to have read” stuff that I circled back, having gotten particularly interested in “why do I like what I like about fantasy, and where is more of it.” Hobb needs to be read in order, and everything pays off in the final trilogy, but apart from that, this isn’t a sixteen book series in the same sense that The Wheel of Time is an umpteen book series or A Song of Ice and Fire is a five book series that will never be finished. Each trilogy tells more or less a complete story, a complete event in the main character or characters’ lives. Because of this, the relationships among those trilogies are very interesting – just as Le Guin upends in later Earthsea books some of the assumptions of the characters of the first couple, each Hobb trilogy teaches you something new about the world or its characters, while also demonstrating the falsehood or incomplete view of something in the previous books. I don’t mean in a metatext, Instance of the Fingerpost, kind of way. Just that, again like Le Guin, she has the sense to realize that even the very smartest characters in a fictional world will possess a worldview that leads them to misunderstand aspects of the world they live in. I've spent a lot of time thinking about that.
I loved Lois McMaster Bujold’s World of Five Gods books, too, starting with The Curse of Chalion. I had known her mainly as a science fiction writer, and her Vorkosigan Saga had just never really been my thing – but this series, especially the second book, I’d rank very highly.
I still haven’t read as much poetry as I keep meaning to, nor many plays outside of Sam Shepard, but I loved Eve Ewing’s Electric Arches and Ocean Vuong’s Night Sky with Exit Wounds.
Meanwhile, part of my nonfiction reading program revolved around what I called “ocean studies” – a history of the Mediterranean sea, books and online coursework on marine biology, books on evolution, nature writing (Rachel Carson, mainly), about a dozen books on surfing (which led to one of my short stories, “The Last of the Real Good Days”). The best of these was Haunts of the Black Manseur, a cultural history of swimming that is difficult to describe. Oh, and How to Read Water, which is about everything from weather to navigation. I also read a variety of histories, memoirs, or theoretical works on psychology, in part because of my own experiences with therapy, and in part because one of my novels I’m gradually working on here and there is about a therapist.
There were a handful of books that sounded right up my alley that I just *could not stand*. Night Film. Tuesday Nights in 1980. Threats. Margaret Atwood’s very odd graphic novel, Angel Catbird. A thousand thrillers I’ve already forgotten with names like The Wife Woman or whatever. That French Peter Pan comic.
I read my first two Hilary Mantel books – the Tommy Croms ones – and need to read more. I finally read The Master and Margarita, No Exit, Nausea. I read some romances just because I hadn’t – Judith Krantz’s classic Scruples, and the more recent Devil in Winter, by Lisa Kleypas.
Barbara Pym’s Quartet in Autumn was another standout – a book about four single sixtysomething office workers, it’s not the kind of thing that sounds exciting, but well-written interiors make anyone fascinating. This is my philosophy of story in general, really, and so I love running across examples that demonstrate it: everything is interesting. Every element of the human experience is worth talking about. Not every storyteller is able to illuminate what’s interesting about every subject, every character, every theme, but the interestingness is there. You don’t like football so you haven’t watched Friday Night Lights? I hate football, and it’s one of my all-time favorite shows!
Also great, and very British (as is Pym), was Rachel Ferguson’s A Footman for the Peacock, which … how do you describe this one? It’s about an aristocratic family during World War II, it’s a light comedy, and it includes a pro-Nazi peacock who is the reincarnation of a footman who formerly served at the manor.
I read Clarice Lispector, Anita Brookner, Mary McCarthy, Nella Larsen, Anita Loos, Joy Williams, Muriel Spark. All names that should have been on my original list. Madeline Miller’s terrific Greek myth retellings. Ali Smith’s incredible Autumn (I have the next books queued). Lots of Patricia Highsmith.
This was a decade where HOW I read changed a lot, too: the Kindle really changed things, especially paired with public domain books, ebook giveaways by Tor and others, and the routine sales at Amazon that let you pick up a dozen books for about the cost of a new hardcover at the mall. The Kindle Fire and digital comics meant I was reading comics more, but also made me more likely to stick to collections rather than single issues – they’re far cheaper, and these days nearly everything is collected, and virtually no single issue is a story in of itself anymore, the four-to-six-issue collection having become the base unit of story for the major publishers.
Between Comixology and the unlimited reading on DC Universe, I reread a bunch of Vertigo stuff, all of the post-Alan Moore Swamp Thing stuff (everything through Nancy Collins is worth reading; everything post-Collins ranges from awful to forgettable), Gail Simone’s runs on Secret Six and Birds of Prey, Mark Waid’s run on Flash (which isn’t nearly as good as I remembered), the first five volumes of The Complete ElfQuest (variable!), Chip Zdarsky’s terrific Spider-Man stories, fantasy comics like Monstress, Birthright, The Autumnlands, Rat Queens, and Saga, Mantlo’s Hulk (essay forthcoming 2020), Gruenwald’s Captain America, Robinson’s Starman, Ann Nocenti’s weird and underrated Daredevil, Mark Russell’s wild Hanna Barbera comics, various comics by Jason, Charles Burns’ X’ed Out (which I like even better than Black Hole), Saladin Ahmed’s Black Bolt, and all those great female-led books that Marvel canceled, like Patsy Walker, Spider-Woman, All-New Wolverine, Squirrel Girl, Mockingbird, Hawkeye. I loved Tom Scioli’s absolutely ridiculous Transformers vs GI Joe.
I started using Audible, mostly when driving or on the treadmill, sometimes when cooking. Mostly it’s a way for me to listen to usually-shitty thrillers, sometimes memoirs (Carrie Fisher, Parker Posey).
*
Outside of reading:
The most important genre of 2010s television was the romantic comedy. Sure, there were plenty of great shows outside of that, but You’re the Worst, Love, Catastrophe, and Crazy Ex-Girlfriend would all be perfectly valid choices for best show of the decade. It particularly stands out because this has been one of the least represented genres on TV – partly because sitcoms and procedurals borrow from it so much, with “will they or won’t they” stuff, sitcoms about parenting couples, etc. But a sitcom that includes a couple or includes characters who are dating isn’t the same as a sitcom in which the central focus is the relationship. It’s the kind of thing that we used to get only once or twice a decade – That Girl (only kind of, I would argue), Bridget Loves Bernie, Joanie Loves Chachi, Mork and Mindy, Angie, Duet, Mad About You, Ned and Stacey, Once and Again. (“Once or twice a decade” may sound like plenty during the three-to-four network era, but I wrote about cop shows recently for work, and despite the fact that they take up twice as much space on the programming grid, this same era had periods in which every single weeknight had at least two cop shows and sometimes four.)
Most of the new shows followed the Duet model of introducing us to a couple at the same time they’re introduced to each other, and following them through their courtship etc.
Maybe one reason we had so many prestige romantic comedies is because romance played such a small role in prestige dramas. Breaking Bad is almost completely devoid of romance – Jesse has a couple relationships, and they add to the tragedy of his arc, but what love story is told there is pretty scant. Rectify’s weakest season suffered in part because of the introduction of a love interest that always felt grafted on. Mad Men’s depiction of relationships is, if not always cynical, pretty uniformly unromantic apart from a couple moments here and there. Halt and Catch Fire’s most important relationship is a friendship, and it spends more time showing romantic relationships falling apart than coming together. Maybe The Americans, centered on a marriage that is also a work relationship, spends the most time depicting romantic love – or The Leftovers.
Those four shows I mentioned at the beginning would definitely be four of my favorites for the decade – and it probably isn’t coincidence that each of them deals with mental health to varying degrees. The other best shows are pretty obvious -–Mad Men, The Leftovers, Twin Peaks, you know the drill.
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I can’t even begin to get my head around explaining how the last decade changed what movies I watch, how I watch. The tail end of the “Netflix is mostly for DVDs” era was also my introduction to a lot of the foreign filmmakers I’d meant to watch but hadn’t got round to, and I discovered that Fellini and Godard, for instance, are extremely unreliable: I love as many of their movies as I can’t stand, and acclaim is not a good indicator. (8 ½ is a well-made movie I have no interest in seeing again, Breathless actively aggravated me; but Nights of Cabiria is probably a top ten movie for me, and Band of Outsiders was incredible fun.) I watched Claudia Weill's Girlfriends, and it immediately became a favorite -- not just because Melanie Mayron is so good, but because it's such a tonic for the problems of the New Hollywood era, an era I love but which is plagued with Updike-Mailer types.
Then movies on demand came, and streaming, and the Criterion Channel, and good lord. Plus a shitload of superhero movies came out! That was weird!
Not to mention, my first date with Caitlin, we watched a shitload of movies – They Live, Hell Comes to Frogtown, Being There, The Frighteners, Empire Strikes Back, I’m sure I’m forgetting what else [Caitlin says we didn't watch Empire until a couple dates later]. We rented both good and bad things from Netflix, she introduced me to Irma La Douce after we watched The Apartment, I made her watch My Science Project and Soul Man from my childhood, and she introduced me to Uncle Buck and Return to Oz from hers.
I’ll never remember all the movies I loved that came out this decade, but recency bias reminds me of Under the Silver Lake, Get Out, Booksmart, Spider-Verse. I’ll throw in Margaret, Tree of Life, The Illusionist, Mistress America, Midsommar, Hereditary, whatever Mike Flanagan movies came out this decade, the Paddington movies of all things, Drive, Melancholia, Another Earth, Upstream Color, The Last Jedi, Enough Said, The Handmaiden, World of Tomorrow, and I’m sure I’m leaving out dozens.
Acts 16:31, 1 Corinthians 15:1-8, 1 Peter 1:17-21, Revelation 22:18-19
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