My hope is that I will get this sent to you this weekend. Today, actually. I’m writing this on a Saturday, so if this hit your Inbox on Monday, or even after Christmas, well, you know how that sort of thing goes with me.
At the beginning of this year, I set a goal of sending this newsletter every two weeks. Then, I changed that to once a month. Other than writing to you about Rémy, I believe this is only the second newsletter I’ve sent in five months. Hey, life moves pretty fast, as a great fictional character once said.
A few years ago, a person (Consultant? Professor? Influencer?) wrote a piece for the New York Times in which she measured how she spent her time over the course of a month. She discovered she actually had plenty of time to do everything that she wanted to do; she just had a lot of waste with all her unscheduled activities.
(I think this is called “being human”?)
When I look online, there are many writers like me who seem to have plenty of time to write newsletters—as well as their books, or stories, or poems, or op-eds, or all of the above—and can still tweet or skeet or post, and have time to go to conferences and take pictures with their famous writer-friends or hang with Oprah, and so on. (Okay, I’m not like these people AT ALL. I sometimes get recognized at a writing conference, maybe…)
There is always someone, somewhere, doing more, achieving more, getting recognized for more.
Believe it or not, I don’t say this with much bitterness. No, really. Good for them! I wouldn’t say I’m happy for them; I would say I don’t give them much thought or spend much energy Having Feelings about them. What we post online is fairy dust (to quote another great fictional character): it’s filtered, it’s a foogaze, it’s a fugazi, it’s a woozy it’s a wazy, it’s not real, it’s only sunny side up. Oh sure, some of us write/post some “woe is me” but that has always struck me as being a bit of a call for attention and sympathy, which is not a bad thing. All of this *waves at this paragraph* is a call for attention, isn’t it?
We write because we believe we have something to say. And I have a lot of avenues to try to write and say these things, probably too many, and this is just one of them. To write these newsletters well (and what you are currently reading is not particularly well written) takes quite a bit of time. For me, at least. Others might be able to bang these out pretty quick, but I am not that guy. My first drafts are trash and it takes me a long time to get a novel, or stories, or a newsletter into a version that I’m satisfied (enough) with to get out in the world.
There’s just a lot going on. There are several writing projects I think about and work on. There is also Story. There is also making dinner for my family and taking my daughter to school. There is also the laundry to wash and fold, the kitchen to clean. Oh, and the day job requires a lot of writing, as well as other administrative asks, and paying attention to that does, you know, create the income I need. Oh, and family and friends and exercise and, well, you get the idea.
(Digression: I wonder if Donna Tartt worries about when her next book comes out. I wonder if Donna Tartt wastes time online. I wonder if Donna Tartt couldn’t care less about what other people are writing and just sits down and writes fiction.)
I’ve always felt a big part of writing is thinking, and my mental space to think about fiction has considerably shrunk over the last few months. This is more of an observation than a complaint. And I’m not interested in a hack. Just that I need to be more deliberate and less wishy-washy about how I spend my time. This year, I’m much faster to think, this is wasteful, when looking at almost anything online: social media, news, sports, all of it. My walks with Rémy were a time to think, and I need to figure out how to get more thinkin’ time into 2025.
I’ll start by saying this is definitely not a list made up of books published this year. In 2024, nearly a half a million new books were published. Let’s say 90% of those are rubbish. That’s still 50,000 books that I might be interested in one day reading. And that’s every year! Great googly moogly. I mostly read books from … well, I usually don’t pay much attention to what year the book was originally published. Good books last! Anywhere, this year I read for the first time, and now heartily endorse, these three books:
1. Help Wanted by Adelle Waldman. I heard Waldman on Brad Listi’s podcast, and everything she said about people, low-wage work, and systemic exploitation was fascinating. She puts it all into this novel, yet also has both narrative and character humor that made this a page turner.
2. The Known World by Edward P. Jones. It was great to read a novel that felt like a complete immersion. One of the things that struck me about reading this book—which was originally published in 2009—was the pace. Everything in modern life, including literary novels and prestige television, seems to move very, very fast, a response to our inability to pay attention. This required, and welcome, my whole attention.
3. Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris. This nonfiction book is all about the five films that were nominated for Best Picture in 1967, and how they signaled a shift in the Hollywood machine. An absolute fascinating look at the coming of a new era.
A few months ago, I drafted a response to the Times Best Books of the 21st Century (thus far), but I sorta of lost interest in the project. I have been going back to that list, as well as LitHub’s counterlist of 75 Non-Boring Books, to look for things to read. It’s not a bad way of being more deliberate about reading.
I’m not quite done with 2024, but I always post the books I read in a given year on my website. For the last four years, I’ve averaged about 40 books read per year, which, all things considered, is not bad. In addition to what I’ve read this year, I have also been chipping away at Robert Caro’s The Power Broker, which is 1300 pages. I hope to be able to add that to the completed list in 2025.
But, when I look back at my list of books read in a given year - and I’ve been keeping a list since 2009 - I can always see the lull, the point where I slogged through something I didn’t much care for. Even looking back at 2024, there were a handful of books I had almost no memory of reading. One thing I’d like to do in 2025 is read better books with more regularity. “Better” of course is subjective, but even in categories like, say, Beach Reads, there are “better” books.
I’ve gotten mildly better at giving up on books I don’t enjoy. But only slightly. I need to think more about why completing a task like “finish reading a book” is so gratifying in the short term even if it is ultimately not gratifying long term (and often downright perplexing).
Last I checked, my Twitter had about 4400 followers. I started posting in 2010 during my second year with Missouri Review, and building the TMR account as well. Elsewhere on the Internet you can find more elegant accounts of personal relationships with Twitter and finding people, building an audience, and engaging with readers than I’m going to get into here (this message is already quite long!). But in the last two years, I’ve mostly given up on Twitter.
Since the election, Bluesky has become a bit of a haven for ex-Twitter users. It looks and functions basically like Twitter used to. And I just can’t sustain any interest in it. Here on Substack, the platform’s main site and app look and function … well, like Twitter used to, with lots of the same people from Twitter’s heyday having the same “arguments” and building the same brand, etc. And, all of these things sorta function like Instagram and Facebook and TikTok, all with the same faces and places and infinite scroll and yada, yada, yada.
I have leaned into Cory Doctrow’s idea of enshitification and Jarod Lanier’s anti-social media arguments of exploitation and entertaining ourselves to death. I do not feel anger or frustration with these platforms; I’m just finding they don’t do much for me anymore. Down the road perhaps they will be tools in the toolbox for promoting books. Maybe? I’m not sure it matters. Anyway, I prefer to get text messages and emails from people I do know rather than social posts from people I do not know.
1. A firsthand account of being homeless in America, by a novelist and reporter who has been living out of his car for years.
2. Jan Harayda on why “best books of the year” lists are nonsense and should be ignored, while also suggesting a way to write them better.
3. Malcolm Gladwell doesn’t seem to think deeply about, well, anything.
Until the next time,
Michael
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