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I kept waiting for the protagonist of Sandwich, the bestselling novel from Catherine Newman, to admit that she had a drinking problem.

Admittedly, as someone who has been sober for 17 years, I’m acutely aware of depictions of drinking in entertainment. And I’m not afraid to acknowledge that I can be a little bit judgey when I see fictional characters abuse alcohol in a dangerous way.

But Rocky, the matriarch of the family in Sandwich, experiences multiple instances in this short novel in which she drinks too much and admits harmful dark secrets in public at the worst possible time. There’s a scene where she blacks out drinking during game night and pisses off her whole family, insulting her husband and getting enraged at everyone. She wakes up the next morning and sheepishly apologizes to everyone. I naturally assumed the story was heading to an intervention.

Spoiler alert: There’s no such intervention in Sandwich. Rocky’s drinking is apparently supposed to be an endearing character flaw, like the romcom heroine who is beautiful and intelligent and just a wee bit clumsy.

Look, I’m not the intended audience for this book. It’s about a family on their annual Cape Cod vacation, and the humor is a slightly more ribald version of the standard sitcom variety, with lots of menopause jokes peppered throughout. And like a sitcom, there’s always an underlying affirmation in Sandwich that families and love will conquer all. That sentiment is hovering below all the characters like a safety net on a high-wire act.

So if you’re looking for a gentle and affirming story about a generic upper middle class white family vacationing on Cape Cod, I’m not one to begrudge you. It’s a summery confection. I listened to the novel on audiobook, and I was never bored.

But just promise me one thing: If you find yourself relating to Rocky’s relationship with alcohol, please consider taking a couple of months off the bottle and maybe see how you feel afterward? Like the dialogue from many of the characters in Sandwich, this warning may sound cruel or dismissive, but it comes from a place of love.

You can tell from its Dick-scented title that Dead but Dreaming of Electric Sheep isn’t the kind of sci-fi novel that hides its ambition. Paul Tremblay’s latest novel is full of all sorts of literary tricks, from authorial intrusions to House of Leaves style text art. I expect it will gather a huge and ardent following online devoted to parsing all the references and solving all the mysteries in the text.

What’s most interesting about Dreaming is that while the writing is packed with experimentation, the plot is incredibly straightforward. It’s about a gamer who gets hired to transport a corpse, only the catch is that the body is still alive (albeit braindead and comatose) and the mind has been wired up with all kinds of technology that lets her pilot the body through the world with a high-tech joystick.

Rarely have I read a book with such a simple narrative drive—literally, the goal is to get from point A to point B—paired with such a complex execution. And I’m not entirely convinced the two halves of Dreaming actually work well together. I was so invested in the story that I desperately wanted to skim some of the more highfalutin experimental tricks of the book, though I’m glad that I resisted the urge to jump ahead.

On a narrative level, Dreaming left me a bit frustrated as the taut story grows flabby and weird at the end. But on a stylistic level, I want to read the thing again to see what kind of mysteries I can solve. This was the first Tremblay novel that I’ve ever read, and it was so technically accomplished and inventive that I’m excited to read another from him very soon.

I have two new pieces up at the Seattle Times:

First is an interview with the novelist Ed Park about his fascinating new memoir, Three Tenses, which he wrote a decade before his first published book and which he re-typed by hand during the pandemic. Park is such an honest and intelligent interviewee that our conversation—about the passage of time, the rediscovery of lost work, and the span of a writer’s career—was bracing the whole way through.

And second is a profile of a bookstore up in Edison, just north of Mount Vernon. It’s called Book Shucker, and it’s one of the prettiest new bookstores I’ve seen in a long time. Based out of a former one-room schoolhouse (where Edward R. Murrow went to school and played basketball,) it’s intended to be a gathering space for the Edison community. I can’t recommend this store enough if you happen to be on your way north on I5 to Vancouver or Bellingham.

(You can read about my playlist-making methodology and philosophy here.)

I didn’t find as much great new music this month as I usually do; this month’s playlist is less than 20 songs and one hour long.

But this playlist does kinda stretch in many different directions, including a variety of country music (a rare duet from Beck, weird folky country from Angela Autumn, pretty sad honky tonk from Hannah Juanita, gay cowboy longing from Andrew Sa, and funny novelty country from Michael Prewitt;) slow jams from Mary Sue and Yaya Bey; some good Afrobeat funk from Owelu Dreamhouse; and a couple of certified bangers (“BOOMPALA,” “Kia Boy.”)

And it must be said that I am positively on tenterhooks waiting for Carly Rae Jepsen to come to my rescue this September with her new double album.

I hate myself, but I read Regime Change, the Trump tell-all from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. I usually try to avoid these kind of books because I don’t believe newspaper journalists should “save” their best scoops for months and years, until after the sweet book-deal check cashes. And also, I think books about Trump administration palace intrigue are the lowest form of #resistance-bait, a lurid soap opera for liberals desperate for shocks.

But I chose to read this one because I genuinely have no idea what it’s like behind the scenes of the White House in this second Trump administration. They all behave so oddly, and seem so divorced from reality, that I was hoping Haberman and Swan might have some insights as to what the fuck is going on, because I sure have no clue.

The answer, I guess, is they did have some insights. But Regime Change is still not a good book. And it’s probably not worth your time—it’s just as disposable as all the first-term Trump books were.

One of the few insights this book delivered is the fact that JD Vance is an Extremely Online Conspiracy Theorist. In the days after his friend Charlie Kirk was shot and killed, Vance reportedly fell down such a conspiracy rabbit hole that his wife had to intervene. This is truly bizarre—I can’t understand how a man so close to the levers of power somehow still believes in shadowy, elaborate conspiracy theories. Either Vance is a total idiot, or he’s experiencing a mental health crisis.

But in the end, Regime Change is just more of the same. Did you know that the president is an addled, moronic narcissist surrounded by some of the most damaged and evil human beings living in America right now? If you didn’t know that, welcome to Hell and here’s your copy of Regime Change to get you up to speed.

Everyone else: Please disregard. As you were.

At the Seattle Times, I wrote about some of August’s most exciting new paperbacks.

Frank Miller is an important figure for nerds my age. He created dark Daredevil and Batman stories that changed superhero comics forever. And look, it’s not really Miller’s fault that his influence changed superhero comics for the worse. Lesser creators took the wrong lessons from his work, assuming that people wanted nothing but cruelty and cynicism in their comics.

But more importantly, when Miller moved into creator-owned work, he pulled a lot of us superhero fans away from Marvel and DC and into independent comics along with him—a genuine change for the better. So it was crushing to see Miller swerve into conservatism with 300 and, most of all, the Islamophobic hate comic Holy Terror. In a handful of decades, he veered from young punk cartoonist to a champion of anti-corporate comics to a moral monster who seemed irrevocably broken by 9/11.

So I’m sad to report that Miller’s new memoir, Push the Wall, isn’t as introspective as I’d need to change how I feel about the man. He addresses Holy Terror a bit, but I found his reasoning shallow and ineffective. And in fact the book is remarkably shallow—Miller’s thoughts on his old work feel bland and perfunctory, and his recollections of important life events are vague and anodyne.

Miller is most alive when he’s talking about the process of making the Sin City movies with Robert Rodriguez, which is to me perhaps the least interesting part of his career. I’d rather hear more than a handful of sentence about the making of the Martha Washington series of comics with Dave Gibbons, or some thoughts about his contemporaries and how their careers have panned out.

Sadly, this book isn’t even a good resource for artists looking to break into comics. Aside from a few observations about the utility of tall vertical panels and the controlled chaos of using a toothbrush to spray the page with ink, there are not enough artistic lessons here to be useful. The whole time, Miller feels reluctant to share his story, giving the impression of a fawning convention panel with a tired old professional who just desperately wants to get back to his hotel so he can leave San Diego and get back to what he was doing before all this bullshit pulled him away from the drawing board.

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.