By Nic Lindh on Saturday, 20 February 2021
I’m pretty sure this is the first book roundup that doesn’t have a single fiction book in it. Seems that for me fiction was one of the casualties of the pandemic—I just can’t concentrate enough to enjoy make-believe right now. Which isn’t to say I didn’t read any fiction.
I am nothing if not pig-headed and this Kindle I paid good money for is not going to just sit there and gather dust, no sir.
But nothing grabbed me enough to finish the novel, and it’s certainly not fair to slam a creative work because my head was in the completely wrong place.
Perhaps the next installment. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.
The McElroy brothers run a stable of successful podcasts, including the flagship My Brother, My Brother and Me.
Everybody Has a Podcast (Except You) covers most aspects of getting started with a podcast, and is written in their expected easy-going, banter-y voices. There’s nothing earth-shaking in here, but the information seems solid and it’s presented very well.
If you’re thinking about starting a podcast, reading this book should be step one. It will save you a lot of time, a lot of deep-dives in weird forums, and a lot of annoying YouTube videos.
I’ve never tasted Pappy Van Winkle bourbon, and I don’t think I ever will. That is, unless something very unexpected happens like I win the lottery.
This is not a big concern for me: I don’t drink a lot of bourbon, so I don’t have the palate to really appreciate what many people have called the best bourbon ever made, and there’s no way I’m spending the energy and ludicrous amount of money required to taste this magic brew.
Pappyland is the story of Julian Van Winkle, heir and curator of the Van Winkle name in bourbon, his life story and his relationships. With his father, with his grandfather, with his wife, and now with his son. And the crushing burden of carrying on and rescuing a family legacy.
It is also about the romance and cold reality of the bourbon industry, and of Kentucky, and by extension about the South.
So there’s a lot going on. Thompson also brings in his own family history and relationship with his late father.
Van Winkle and Thompson represent a whole different idea of masculinity than how I live, drenched in ties to family and place, with raw nerves and high anxiety, and Pappyland sometimes gets uncomfortably close to maudlin.
Which perhaps is appropriate, since one of the arguments Thompson makes is that the myth of bourbon at its heart is about maudlin homesickness.
As the saying goes:
Vodka is for the skinny and scotch is for the strivers and bourbon is for the homesick.
At the end of the book Thompson shoehorns in an info-dump about his own life growing up White and decently well-off in Mississippi and the values he wants to pass on to his daughter:
Being Southern means carrying a responsibility to shake off the comforting blanket of myth and see ourselves clearly. I was bringing a child into this world, and into our long history of trying to do the right thing while benefitting mightily from the wrong thing, and I wanted her to love our home and our family, but to see it clearly and without the nostalgia that so often softens my anger and desire to tear it all down and build a new world in its place.
Pappyland sets very ambitious and laudable goals for itself, but ends up feeling a bit hamfisted and bro-ish. Nevertheless, it’s an interesting addition to the myth of America. And of course, if you’re one of the people who took out a second mortgage for a bottle of Pappy, you’ll want to learn more about the man behind the drink.
Outside England, not-the-author David Mitchell is probably best known for the wonderful Are we the Baddies? sketch, but he’s had a long career in comedy and is always ready to unleash a rant on one of the island nation’s ubiquitous panel shows.
If you are in the market for watching a flustered upper-class British person going off about the small inconveniences of life, David Mitchell is most assuredly your man.
Backstory, as you’d expect, is the story of how he grew up and become what he is, and it’s told with charm and wit and self-awareness.
It’s a quite nice way to avoid the news for a few hours.
John Hodgman is extremely good at being John Hodgman and inhabiting a world of being somewhat famous, which has given him some access to the world of the truly famous.
As usual, he comes across as a smart, affable and well-meaning strange nerd, and reading him is like floating in a warm bath.
Medallion Status isn’t as tight as his previous work, Vacationland, which is totally OK since Vacationland might be the ultimate collection of pudgy, NPR-adjacent stories of White middle age ever written. It’s hard to top.
But his struggles with leveling up on what he calls Beloved Airlines, trying to fit in at a very fame-attractive Los Angeles hotel, and his utter loathing of Donald Trump, makes for worthwhile reading.
Bonus: I didn’t realize his Deranged Millionaire character on the Daily Show was a direct attempt at making fun of Trump, an attempt he gave up on when he realized there was no way to exaggerate and satirize Trump.
If you want to experience the mind of a person of some fame, a person who is a corporalized NPR show, then Medallion State is for you.
Note: The links are Amazon affiliate links. If you purchase through them I get a tiny kickback, which motivates me to keep writing these reviews. It’s appreciated.
Includes Doppelgänger, Be Useful, Rose/House, System Collapse, and Empire of the Wolf.
Includes Friends, Lovers, and the Big Terrible Thing, Extremely Online, Number Go Up, Mercury Rising, The End of the Myth, and The Big Break.
Includes Hello World, A Frozen Hell, Powers and Thrones, Dead Country, Blitz, The Hope that Kills, and Worth Killing For.
We pour one out for The Expanse and Sandman Slim, and we raise our glasses for a sequel to Malazan. Also, an extra-bleak Holocaust tour and a discussion of how cults control their members through language. Includes Cultish, Nein, Nein, Nein, Driven, Happy-go-Lucky, The Nineties, Fargo Rock City, The Scholast in the Low Water Kingdom, King Bullet, The God is Not Willing, and Leviathan Falls.
Why your body hurts, lots of politics, and some truly demented grimdark fantasy in this installment. Includes Reign of Terror, Evolution Gone Wrong, The Cruelty is the Point, How to be a Liberal, The Splendid and the Vile, Deep Work, A Desolation Called Peace, Black Stone Heart, and She Dreams in Blood.
Some very good history, some very strange novels and some slick space opera. Includes Enemy of all Mankind, A Very Punchable Face, Confederates in the Attic,Ballistic Kiss, Harrow the Ninth, The Library at Mount Char, Children of Time, The Last Emperox, and Cage of Souls.
Back once again with the sci-fi and general calamity. Includes The End is Always Near, Eat the Apple, A Memory Called Empire,Gideon the Ninth, Infinite Detail, Permafrost, Fallen, and The October Man.
A sci-fi and fantasy heavy installment that includes The Valedictorian of Being Dead, The Mastermind, Broadsword Calling Danny Boy,Tiamat’s Wrath, The Raven Tower, The Liberation, The Light Brigade and Cryptonomicon.
Includes The Incomplete Book of Running, Aching God, The Murderbot Diaries, Lies Sleeping, The Consuming Fire, and Rendezvous with Rama.
Includes Hollywood Dead, Tales from the Loop, Things from the Flood, The Court of Broken Knives, and Port of Shadows.
Includes The Storm Before the Storm, White Trash, Calypso, Tell the Machine Goodnight, Prince of Fools, and Provenance.
Mostly excellent non-fiction in this installment. Includes Fantasyland, The Miracle of Dunkirk, Das Reich, The Undoing Project, Waiting for the Punch, Vacationland and Points of Impact.
Lots of sci-fi in this installment. Includes Retribution, Boomerang, The Collapsing Empire, All Systems Red, and Ninefox Gambit.
Includes a mea culpa, Hillbilly Elegy, Gulp, The Stars are Legion, and The Kill Society.
Lots of fiction series in this one. Includes Grunt, 1177 B.C., Louder Than Hell, Smarter Faster Better, The Hanging Tree, Death’s End, Chains of Command, and Who Killed Sherlock Holmes?.
This installment features grimdark fantasy, peppy astronauts and the Roman Empire. Includes SPQR, And On That Bombshell, The Code Book, Schiit Happened, Beyond Redemption, The Severed Streets, The Martian and Veiled.
Includes The Antidote, One Nation, Under Gods, Losing the Signal, The Todd Glass Situation, The Last Policeman, The Three-Body Problem, The Dark Forest, Beacon 23, Killing Pretty and Queen of Fire.
Lots of fantasy and sci-fi in this installment plus a book about sports! Includes Boy on Ice, Difficult Men, Restaurant Man, The Red Line, Cunning Plans, Seveneves, Nemesis Games, Bitter Seeds, The Mechanical, Angles of Attack, and City of Stairs.
Nic is sad about Terry Pratchett's passing. Includes No Land’s Man, Idiot America, Something Coming Through, The Burning Room, Foxglove Summer, and The Dark Defiles.
Things go dark and magical in this installment. Includes So, Anyway…, Yes Please, The Mirror Empire, London Falling, Broken Homes, Perfidia, The Peripheral, Burning Chrome, and the Bel Dame Apocrypha Omnibus.
Lots of good reads in this installment. Includes All Hell Let Loose, Metallica: This Monster Lives, 10% Happier, Onward, Echopraxia, Cibola Burn, The Getaway God, Lock In, The Red: First Light, Terms of Enlistment, and Lines of Departure.
Solid reads abound in this installment of the roundup. Includes Console Wars, Your Inner Fish, Flash Boys, Digital Wars, The Perfect Storm, Tower Lord, By Blood We Live, I am Pilgrim and Lexicon.
Some great reads and a huge disappointment in this installment. Includes The Loudest Voice in the Room, Hatching Twitter, Dogfight, Ancillary Justice, KOP Killer, The Circle, Working God’s Mischief and Where Eagles Dare.
Some solid reading awaits you in this installment. Includes The Outpost, Masters of Doom, How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, The Everything Store, Bomber Command, Gods of Guilt, and Low Town.
A slimmer-than-usual book roundup is heavy on the non-fiction, including several must-read titles.
Another book roundup, including some stellar athletes and soldiers, what might be the most jaded, soul-weary protagonist ever, and some grimdark fantasy.
Nic reads a book about the processed food industry and is incensed.
The Core Dump is back! Books were read during the hiatus. Includes The Coldest Winter, Oh, Myyy!, Tough Sh*t, The Revolution Was Televised, The Rook, Mr. Penumbra’s 24 Hour Bookstore, Gun Machine, Fortress Frontier, Standing in Another Man’s Grave, and The Memory of Light.
From a true patriot to a world-weary detective, a dead god, and a civilization about to sublime from the galaxy, this book roundup spans the gamut. Includes Where Men Win Glory, Wild, Inside the Box, The Black Box, Three Parts Dead, Red Country, and The Hydrogen Sonata.
From the heights of athletic excellence to the depths of depravity, this roundup includes The First 20 Minutes, Double Cross, The Heroin Diaries, Tattoos and Tequila, Dodger, Farthing, and Devil Said Bang.
Includes Wabi-Sabi, Making Things Happen, D-Day, Tallula Rising, Blood Song, The Americans and Amped. All in all, a happy romp through the meadows of literature.
Includes Search Inside Yourself, The Information Diet, Redshirts, The Gone-Away World, Wool, Leviathan Wakes, and Prince of Thorns. One of these may very well change your life.
Includes Shadow Ops: Control Point, The Night Circus, The Hunger Games, Quiet, The Science of Yoga, and Kitchen Confidential. Lots of good stuff in this one.
Includes Angelmaker, The Magicians, Magician King, Iron Council, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Distrust That Particular Flavor, and Talking to Girls About Duran Duran. One of these is the most important book of 2011.
Includes The Drop, Ready Player One, Moon Called, Among Others, Excession, Inferno, The Paleo Solution and I am Ozzy.
Includes Sandman Slim, Snuff, The Cold Commands, Reamde, Goodbye Darkness, Steve Jobs and The Psychopath Test.
Some books you might enjoy reading.
Matt Taibbi’s Griftopia is an important book, and it will make you angry enough to froth at the mouth.
The Heroes is an intense, wild ride into a maelstrom of violence, brutality and flawed human beings. You should read it.