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I’m a big fan of Ben Fountain’s novel Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, which was a political satire that understood exactly what it was targeting and how to target it for maximum efficacy. So I’m immensely disappointed to report that Fountain’s newest novel, Rasputin Swims the Potomac, is maybe the worst political satire I’ve ever read—and I’ve read John Lithgow’s anti-Trump poetry.

This sputtering cough of a novel is about the Trump administration. Many of the names of principals including Elon Musk are tossed into the narrative unchanged, but Trump himself is presented in the prose with a censor bar (“*****,” or “bleep” in the audio version) in place of his name. But the loping cadence and psychological hangups are clearly, unmistakably Trump, so the name gimmick feels too cute by half.

The premise is that Trump becomes intertwined with a professional wrestler who is mentioned as a VP pick or perhaps a potential opponent for Trump’s fourth presidential campaign for his third term. And I guess the joke is that only a professional wrestler can beat Trump at his own game? Except the wrestler also believes he’s a reincarnation of Rasputin and he talks in a Russian accent. And there’s a former country star in there, and a Black reporter named Clarence Thomas (no relation,) and some other stuff. But it just kind of thrashes around for a while until it finally ends in the middle of nowhere, and it ultimately feels so impotent and pissy.

Maybe the only other political novel that’s disappointed me this much in my lifetime is Nicholson Baker’s Checkpoint, which was a furious little novel about two guys having a conversation about whether it would be a good and moral idea to assassinate George W. Bush. That book similarly sputtered, feeling powerless and lost. It hasn’t been mentioned by anyone in decades, and rightfully so. I suspect Rasputin Swims the Potomac will meet a similar fate.

Wallace Stegner’s novel Big Rock Candy Mountain has always hovered at the edges of my attention. I recall stocking it as a bookseller at Elliott Bay Book Company, and I liked the title. (The song of the same name, about an imaginary hobo paradise “where they hung the jerk who invented work,” is one of my favorites.) I always figured I’d read the book one day, and last month I found a nice copy sitting in a Little Free Library on Beacon Hill. This, I figured, was my sign.

I’m glad I finally read Big Rock Candy Mountain, but it is by no means an easy or enjoyable reading experience. In fact, it is 500+ pages of beautifully composed misery porn, telling the story of an American family on the edges of society in the dawn of the 20th century. The husband is an abusive loser who keeps coming up with and abandoning get-rich-quick schemes, and his family helplessly orbits around him as he travels from North Dakota to Saskatchewan to Utah, leaving nothing but heartbreak in his wake.

I learned near the end of Big Rock Candy Mountain that it is loosely based on Stegner’s own life and childhood, and that made me appreciate the book more. As an act of processing the misery that he experienced, writing Big Rock Candy Mountain must have been a consequential experience. But it’s not the first Stegner book I would recommend to anyone—Angle of Repose or Crossing to Safety are both better for neophytes. But if you’re looking for an American saga full of desperation and hope and heartbreak, you’re in the hands of a master with this one.

Local cartoonist and comedian Brett Hamil typically produces comics in two styles. First, he’s a gag strip artist: Hamil has a pair of comic strips in local media, one dealing with parenthood issues and one satirizing local politics. And second, he has published a series of clever, inventive slice-of-life comics that are typically quieter, more contemplative, and wide-ranging than his other work.

My favorite Hamil comic is in the second register. It’s called Bald Knob, and it’s a series about being aimless and young and wary of anything resembling potential. It’s one of my favorite graphic novels of the last ten years and I think that the primary reason that Hamil doesn’t get the attention he deserves is because he illustrates all of his comics in the same style—a cartoonish simplicity.

I think if Bald Knob was illustrated in the style of, say, Adrian Tomine, it would be published by one of the major graphic novel presses. But nobody knows what to do with books that are drawn in a funny style that touch on serious topics. For myself, I love the juxtaposition. The only thing better than taking a dumb joke very seriously in my estimation is approaching serious topics with a sense of humor.

Anyway, Hamil has a new book out, and it’s in the second register, though it’s also pretty funny. It’s a collection of three short stories called Front End Loader, and it’s about secrets and religious experiences and what happens when a mundane life bumps up against the unexplained. If you’re intrigued by what I wrote about Hamil above, this is probably the best introduction to his experimental, literary side. My favorite story is the second one in the book, a tiny absurdist sex farce with a great punchline. But all three of them are worth your time and attention, if you like a little comedy in your pathos (or vice versa).

During the early days of pandemic lockdowns, I interviewed a librarian who was trying to find fiction set during the 1918 pandemic that was published shortly after the pandemic. He said that basically there was almost no contemporaneous fiction written about the Spanish flu or its impacts on society. Once that pandemic had passed, it was almost as though everyone just silently agreed to move on and forget what had happened, he said.

That’s happening now with Covid. You can feel institutions and individuals shoving the experience of the pandemic and lockdowns down the memory hole. Politicians want us to forget that government quickly acted to effectively get money into the hands of people who needed it, employers want us to forget that many people could easily work from home, society in general wants low-wage workers to forget that they were ever termed “essential.” Masking and free vaccinations and everything else is swirling down the drain of our collective memory.

As for me, I love reading about how the pandemic and pandemic-era lockdowns impacted people. In particular, I was a daily reader of Roger Langridge’s excellent five-year diary comic experiment, which overlapped with Covid. And now I’m a big fan of Seattle cartoonist Joe Alterio’s Covid diary comics, It’s Never Easy.

The book is beautiful, printed using a three-color risograph press that makes the colors on each strip look hand-applied. The comics are deeply observational, as though we’re seeing out of Alterio’s eyes. And because everyone is busy staying six feet apart from everyone else, there aren’t a whole lot of people to fix our gaze upon. A limp flag, a roof pelted by rain, a flight of stairs with no one on them. Each three-panel strip feels like a complete thought, a moment.

These comics put me back in the days of lockdowns, and I mean that in the most pleasant way possible—the silence, the contemplation, the sense that something important had changed forever. The fear and loneliness is there, too, and that’s important. Alterio captures all that nuance—the quietness and the way some things felt amplified to the point of incomprehension.

This is a book I can pull out to bring me back to those weird, unique days. While everyone is so desperate to pretend that the pandemic never happened, I’m glad to have this gorgeous book to remind me that not only did it happen—it mattered.

The Poet Empress by Seattle area author Shen Tao is not the kind of book that I traditionally read. Fantasy, particularly fantasy involving royal families, is really not my bag. I don’t like stories about destiny and preserving bloodlines and other determinative nonsense. But the book came highly recommended by Lost the Plot mobile bookshop, and so I gave it a try, and I’m glad I did. The closest comparison to a book that I can find for this one is The Hunger Games, in terms of a likable protagonist thrown into a life-or-death system that she doesn’t fully understand.

Tao’s world building is at once expansive and restrained: We’re not bored to death with acres of lore before the story starts. Instead, we’re thrown in and Tao parcels information as it’s needed as the narrative unfolds. Our impoverished hero unwillingly becomes the concubine to a sociopathic prince who can magically control knives, and she must find a way to survive and to provide for her family.

After I tore through the first two hundred pages, The Poet Empress slowed down a bit for me as the story began to follow some well-trod paths. But I’m eager to read whatever Tao writes next—if she can inspire me to eagerly read a fantasy novel, she can do just about anything.

In another universe, Olivia Wilde’s latest movie, The Invite, could have been a standard Seth Rogen comedy. The premise, about a weary middle-aged married couple (Rogen and Wilde) inviting a more sexually adventurous couple (Edward Norton and Penelope Cruz) over for dinner, seems custom-made for Obama-era Apatovian nonsense.

But I’m glad to live in the universe where The Invite desperately upends any attempts to turn into a Seth Rogen comedy. Rogen is just as funny as he always is, and he plays a familiar kind of washed-up schlub. But the rhythms of the movie resist the kind of easy comedy where Rogen seems like the hero. Instead, people are horrified by his comedic barbs. They’re annoyed by his eagerness to always have a snappy comeback. It’s like he wandered into a horror movie by accident and he’s too far into the character to notice that his usual charm isn’t working. For much of The Invite, he’s kind of the villain.

This isn’t a one-man show. In fact, it’s a pretty evenly distributed four-hander. Cruz is doing exceptional, careful work with a character who could easily be a stereotype. Norton gives dignity to his buffoonish character, and Wilde is as good as she’s ever been, both in front of and behind the camera. Because it all takes place in one apartment, the script, from Rashida Jones and Will McCormack based on a 2020 Spanish film, could practically be a Broadway sex farce.

The Invite has a lot to say about marriage and sacrifice and friendship, and there’s a good chance that if you’re in a shaky marriage you might find yourself relating closely to one of the four characters. (I’ve learned way too much about the troubled relationships of some of my favorite film critics from reviews of this movie.) But none of those themes were nearly as interesting to me as the acting. The pleasure of watching four veterans from four very different backgrounds come together, with all their histories and expectations, and making something completely unlike anything they’ve ever done before is unparalleled. I was all in on this one.

(If you live in Seattle, you should go see The Invite at Tasveer Film Center because it’s becoming a great place to see movies!)

For my monthly Neighborhood Reads piece in the Seattle Times, I interviewed Ash Hoffman, the owner of Lost the Plot, a mobile bookstore that sells books all the way from Everett to Tacoma. It’s a gorgeous little bookstore, and Hoffman is building a devoted following of book-lovers across the Puget Sound region. Hoffman can adjust her store’s inventory to better match her audience’s tastes, and you’ll have to read the piece to find out which genres sell best in Tacoma, Edmonds, and Ballard. (And I love that she named the van Plotsy.)

Before Michael Crichton was Michael Crichton, he wrote an entire shelf’s worth of thrillers under the pseudonym John Lange. Over a dozen years ago, the folks at Hard Case Crime resurrected the Lange library and republished it for the first time under Crichton’s own name.

For the weekend of July 4th, I brought one of those Lange thrillers, Binary, with me to an undisclosed quiet location where my dogs would not be terrified by nonstop fireworks. (The book is now published by Blackstone, though I prefer the sleazy Hard Case cover on the edition I read a lot more than the generic cover of the latest edition.)

I had hoped the book would be trashy fun to distract me on a noisy holiday weekend. Instead, Binary is maybe the most generic thriller I’ve ever read. It’s about a boring good guy trying to catch a boring criminal before he kills thousands or hundreds of thousands or millions of people. Aside from a compelling first chapter featuring a clever idea for a heist, it’s all so rote that it might as well have come in a black and white cover under the title Generic Crime Thriller.

Nothing was upsetting about this book, and I never felt compelled to abandon it. It’s a fast read and never boring. But I can’t really recommend it, unless you’re interested in writing thrillers and you want a very early and very flawed example of a thriller written by a master of the form before he knew what he was doing.

One of my all-time favorite audiobook experiences was the fall when I was listening to Jane Jacobs’s urbanist classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities while walking around Seattle. Very often, the audiobook would describe something I was looking directly at on my walk, and it began to feel like an audio tour of Seattle’s best and worst urban planning.

In his book 20 Minutes in Manhattan, Michael Sorkin brings up Jacobs’s book very often—to the point that it feels a little bit like meeting someone who also took a class taught by your favorite teacher. Sorkin is deeply informed by Jacobs and he applies her thoughts on urban planning and public spaces throughout this book.

I borrowed 20 Minutes in Manhattan from the Seattle Public Library as soon as I heard the premise: The book supposedly examines New York City’s urban design through the lens of Sorkin’s 20-minute walking commute through Manhattan from his home to his office. The premise of a blend of Jane Jacobs and Nicholson Baker’s miniaturist masterpiece The Mezzanine was instantly compelling to me.

Unfortunately, the book doesn’t adhere to the premise as strictly as I would like. There are plenty of Baker-like digressions on elevator codes and other forces that shape city life, but the book is instead just organized in a series of essays, using the titular commute as a way to collect and shape the argument.

Sorkin has a lot to say, and he’s a fount of knowledge about the way cities are put together, but there was no narrative thread that pulled me through this one—instead, by the end, I was ready to be done with the book. Still, my biggest regret about 20 Minutes in Manhattan is that there doesn’t seem to be an audiobook version. I would have loved to take this book with me on my commute and engage with it in conversation about the similarities and differences we find in our two very different cities.