Friday Reads: What I Did on My Summer Vacation

I don’t have many deep thoughts to offer this week. It’s been all I can manage to get some writing done while shuttling between airports and cars and hotels and VRBOs in July.

I flew to Las Vegas at the start of the month, where I spent less than eight hours under the 107-degree sun for a consulting project before flying back to Los Angeles. I started typing madly for two days while my family started on a long-planned roadtrip up the coast.

After finishing the paying gig, I got into another plane and met my family in San Francisco, where we had dinner with friends, did tourist stuff, on the wharf, rode a cable car, and watched a guy methodically break into a series of parked cars, smashing their windows with his fist before diving into the back seats to take whatever he could grab. He had a system, and it worked for him.

From there, we went to the redwoods, where we walked among sequioas that were seedlings in the days of the Byzantine Empire and I read The Ministry For The Future by Kim Stanley Robinson.

We drove back down the coast and came home to do laundry before I went to Comic-Con with my kid and my friend Glenn and his daughter. There, we got to see my buddy Beau Smith awarded the Inkpot, a richly deserved honor for his years of work in comics.

And then we went to Vail, Colorado last week to watch my nephew get married. The bride and groom were surrounded by a crowd of people who would all tell you that they are the best people they’ve ever known. My nephew has been a perfect kid since he was born, and some of my best memories include meeting him for the first time and watching cartoons with him on the couch. He’s an exceptional person, and so is his wife. I’m glad to know them.

Oh, and I met Wonder Woman, Lynda Carter, at the wedding, too.

She was gracious and kind and incredibly nice. Genuinely a wonder.

I know I am fortunate to be able to do all this. Most of the time I stay home, hunched over my laptop, staring at a screen. It was good to get out into the wider world, and it was good to be able to do it. I haven’t always had the chance, or the choice, and I know a lot of people are on picket lines right now rather than on vacation.

As I will tell anyone who will listen: I never thought I would be this lucky. I never thought my life would be so big. And I am grateful for it.

IN OTHER NEWS

If you haven’t already seen it, I did a farewell piece on The Venture Bros., the best show Adult Swim ever produced, over at the mighty Book and Film Globe. As I’ve said before, The Venture Bros. started as a parody of Jonny Quest and soon morphed into something grander and more ridiculous with every episode. Jackson Publick and Doc Hammer created a world that resembles Philip José Farmer’s Wold Newton universe, or Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, or Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula series. It’s layers upon layers of references to comics, movies, cartoons, and pop culture, along with some really obscene jokes and unresolved childhood trauma.1 If you’ve never watched it and you like that sort of thing, you’ve got seven seasons and a movie to see now.

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FRIENDS AND WELL-WISHERS

My friend Cody Goodfellow has a new novel, Vertical, coming out from Titan on September 26, and now would be an excellent time to preorder it. The book is about a crew of urban explorers brought out of retirement for an attempt to scale the world’s tallest skyscraper in Moscow. Of course, bad things start to happen. Cody’s been praised by Stephen King and written some of the most mind-bending horror out there, so you should give this a try.

Lee Goldberg’s latest novel Malibu Burning is out September 1, but if you have Amazon Prime, you can get it now and for free as an ebook. Lee is a master of the crime novel and a smart, funny, and sharp writer, as his many, many fans will attest. Check it out now, or any of his dozens of other books.

I got to know Lee because I got to be friends with his brother (and one of my favorite writers) Tod Goldberg, who has a list of “The 75 Most Essential Books for Gen Xers” at The Arrow. (That’s a site run by the AARP because while Gen X will never die, we are getting old.) It’s sure to inspire debate and despair or even derangement, but I think Tod pretty much nailed it. (Could have included Watchmen, Tod. All I’m saying.) If you grew up when we did, you probably broke the backs of these books. And if you haven’t read them yet, you are missing out.

Yes, Ben H. Winters has another book out. This part of my newsletter should just be the Ben section. It’s a horror novel titled The Bonus Room, and it turns the usual ordeal of finding a decent apartment into real terror. It was just re-released by Quirk Books this week.

As I said, I don’t like to leave the house much, but Maggie Downs summits Kilimanjaro on her spare weekends, so I try to live vicariously through her. She has a piece in Virtuoso on hitting Vegas for the first time while sober. I say this without joking: Vegas is a hard place without something between you and reality, and I am impressed she did it.

That’s all I got this week. It’s been a lot. As always, your recommendations and reviews are welcome in the comments.