Books I Read in 2020, Part 1

With not much else to do last year but hunker down, hoard toilet paper and wait out the apocalypse, I managed to get some reading done. Here are quick recaps of the books I read for the first time in 2020. 

"Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary"
Justin Green's 1972 autobiography remains one of the truly legendary comic books ever published, and one that still has the power to astonish almost 50 years after its first publication. Brilliantly, imaginatively drawn and deeply (deeply) personal, it's a genuine work of troubling, transformative art. (You can listen to Ben Tiede, Zack Kruse and me discuss "Binky Brown" on our Pictures Within Pictures Podcast by clicking here.)

"Astounding"Alec Nevala-Lee traces the roots of science fiction in these United States through the lives of four groundbreaking, generally screwed-up guys: John Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and L. Ron Hubbard (I'll leave it to you to guess who was the most screwed up out of that quartet). Fun stuff, with crazier behind-the-scenes stories than you might be expecting.
"The Downtown Pop Underground"
Kembrew McLeod traces the pop cultural history of Manhattan in the 1960s and 1970s through the musicians, poets, actors and artists who made it all happen. I'd heard plenty of tales about the Ramones, Blondie, Lou Reed and others, but whole sections of the book -- especially the off-off-off-Broadway stages where groundbreaking theater was born -- were a revelation. Highly recommended.
"Outrageous Conduct"
The background on the horrifying helicopter crash on the set of the "Twilight Zone" movie that took the lives of Vic Morrow and two children is told in painstaking detail. No one comes out looking good, especially director John Landis, anyone at the studio or even producer Steven Spielberg, who distanced himself from the whole mess as soon as he possibly could.

"Antkind"
My dear wife snagged me a copy of Charlie Kaufman's debut novel from her library's advance copies table, and since COVID hit soon after and the actual release date was delayed by months, this copy turned out to be very advanced indeed. I'm a huge fan of Kaufman's screenplays, and this movie features the same sort of hyper-smart writing and endlessly twisted plotting, but I have to admit, it lost me in parts. Maybe a two-hour time limit is a good thing for a guy like Kaufman. Seven-hundred-plus pages turns out to be a little too much. Still, there are enough flashes of brilliance and laugh-out-loud moments to make it worth a look.
"The Box"
I've had Jeff Kisseloff's oral history of TV for years, but something made me finally pull it down of the shelf, and I'm glad I did. It's full of fascinating anecdotes about the development of television, from the early pre-radio days to the last hurrahs of live TV. My favorite bit might be when engineers would stand on a yard-wide platform atop the Empire State Building and shimmy up a pole to grab a crossbar 10 feet up. That was the initiation into their little club. It's amazing TV ever survived in the first place.
"Consider This"
I've read almost everything Chuck Palahniuk has written, and though I run hot and cold on his fiction, I found this fairly straightforward autobiography/writing guide to be top-notch. Full of anecdotes from his own experience in writing classes and on book tours, it's full of surprisingly concrete (especially for Palahniuk) advice regarding the nuts and bolts of fiction writing. I'm sure I'll read this one again soon.
"The Stars My Destination"
When I read Alfred Bester's "The Demolished Man" a few years back, I couldn't believe how good it was -- smart, funny, exciting, epic -- everything you look for in a science fiction novel. And this one was just as good. In the future, people develop the ability to "jaunt" -- to teleport, in other words -- and it changes everything about society. It took me forever to read this (it was first published way back in 1956), and I wish I'd done so sooner. Don't you make the same mistake.
Up next: Soccer hooligans, Dick and Perry, two new graphic novels and more writing advice, this time from Kurt Vonnegut.