The Patreon Letter - 1st December, 2018 (Patreon)

Hi everyone! It's December now, finally, which means I'm in total clockout mode about this whole stupid year. We're done with Abnormal Mapping game clubs, I'm gathering up the last of the music for our end of year podcast, and am in a full list-making mood about the things I've seen/read/played this year. 

I really like best of lists, especially ones that are highly individualized. Not only do you get a good sense of a person, but also they invite you into exploring new media and interests you've never considered before. I try to read as many good end of year lists as possible. I'll spend a big chunk of 2019 listening to top album lists, for example, because I'm pretty bad about finding new music on my own. 

So for this patreon letter, I figured I'd offer you some end of year lists of my own, with some brief write ups for each entry. Me and Jackson will do a game list on the December Abnormal Mapping, as usual, and we might have another top ten list planned in another capacity, but here's some stuff that won't find its way onto either of those lists, divided into two top five lists. So please enjoy!

Em's Top Five Books of 2018

Smoke Gets In Your Eyes by Caitlin Doughty 

As everyone reading this probably knows, my father died in January of this year. It's thrown this year into a lot of tumult as I've struggled taking over the household from him, but it's also really thrown a bucket of cold water on my 20 years of extreme death anxiety. I've always been terrified of even thinking about death, but as this year has passed I've found myself much more capable of considering it without fear. I wonder if it had something to do with having elderly parents all along? A consideration for another day.

Caitlin Doughty's book is a memoir about her time working in a crematory. Part lighthearted adventure in a morbid job, and part exploration of the death industry, Smoke Gets In Your Eyes is about learning to adjust to the reality of death as an everyday occurrence and how embracing a healthy attitude about it can change one's whole outlook on life and reveal the pervasive death denial that permeates broader society.

In reading this book in this year, a thing I don't think I'd even be able to do before 2018, I found myself considering mortality in ways I hadn't before and the great fear around my heart unclenching just a little. It isn't a cure all, and it sure won't prevent your death, but this book absolutely helped my relationship to the idea.

The Odyssey (translated by Emily Wilson) 

I've read The Odyssey before, but Emily Wilson's new translation makes the story of Odysseus staying on his bullshit to the utter ruin of his life approachable in a way I wish all translated classics could be. This version of the Odyssey is light and welcoming, translated in a style that injects what can be a stuffy classic in some translations into a story of urgency and tragic comedy and no end of adventure. 

It received a lot of attention on its release as being the first time The Odyssey had been translated by a woman, and that attention isn't unwarranted. Compared to the versions I have read before, special care was directed to the story at home at Ithaca, and the tumult of Odysseus' home feels as impactful, if not moreso, than his voyages abroad. Which only serves to make his blustering trek of death and exile all the more exasperating. History's original disaster person, Odysseus' story should be an entertaining read, and this version absolutely captures the serialized adventure tale that the original poem undoubtedly was, aimed at people to be captivated by today.

You Should Have Left by Daniel Kehlmann 

A story of a screenwriter taking his family on a retreat to work on his script, You Should Have Left is a good, brief ghost story about the strange places we find ourselves in when we cannot face the truth about those we love. All haunted house stories revolve around some aspect of the family, but this one manages to touch on much of the same thematic material of The Shining without veering into abuse and psychic strangeness the way King's work did. 

I find houses fundamentally scary, the bigger the scarier, and You Should Have Left turns the house into a space of unfolding weirdness beyond your simple ghost or even the modern strangeness of House of Leaves geometrically impossible home. Also, it's very short, which is a plus, as you can easily read it in a single sitting. 

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes 

A vision of the floating world of Europe between world wars, Nightwood is about love gained and lost in the energy of people moving and living as best they can around poverty and ennui. There is a rough hewn vision of a sort of broke elegance here, a sense of people hanging onto the world they believe in long after it has died, living lives prescribed to them by the old world as they strain against the constrains and reach for ideas of something new. Nightwood is a story of messy people in a messy time, and captures the poetry of lives lived this way better than many books of this sort. 

Consider this, if you will, the queer alternative to Hemingway. It's good and necessary in the face of all that swagger. 

Yotsuba&! 1-14 by Kiyohiko Azuma 

I feel like everyone I know has seen the Azumanga Daioh anime, but most haven't read Yotsuba&!, which means it will be on this list until you all rectify the situation. From the same author, Yotsuba&! is a slice of life manga about a five year old girl who moves into a neighborhood with her lazy, work-from-home father and the adventures she gets up to exploring the neighborhood and meeting and interacting with her neighbors. Each chapter is usually a single day, all strung together into a lengthy summer that has, in recent volumes, given way to fall and approaching winter, years of masterful comics work translating into two seasons of the life of a little girl.

Yotsuba&! is a comic about quiet moments and the comedy of everyday life. It's the nicest, most loving thing I have ever read. It regularly fills me with a sense of wonder for the mundane, especially as Azuma grows into the book and spends pages filling the world of the cartoony Yotsuba with loving detail meticulously charting the most mundane domestic spaces with the care few comics can match. Yotsuba&! is my favorite comic period, and it is for absolutely everyone. 

Em's Top Five Podcasts of 2018

This Podcast Will Kill You 

A podcast about disease from two epidemiology grad students named Erin, This Podcast Will Kill You is one of the most entertaining and informative podcast about terrible things I know. Regularly horrifying but expressed with the joy of morbid curiosity, this podcast tackles the history, function, and modern realities of some of the worst viruses and bacteria in human history. Uneasy listening if you have a weak stomach, I blew through this entire show in two days and it has become the podcast I most eagerly await new episodes of. 

Revolutions 

The best history podcast I have ever heard. Revolutions is, as advertised, a multi season exploration of the major revolutions of modern human history, carefully detailed and explored with extensive research and a good sense for what makes a story work for the listener. In a podcast field dominated by battle- and atrocity-focused podcasts in the mold of Hardcore History, Revolutions instead focuses on the people struggling with ideologies and realities and the cultural fallout of when those things come to blows. I especially recommend season 4, on the Haitian revolution.

Gayme Bar 

Raucous doesn't do it just. Gayme Bar is a podcast with a sort of manic energy to it. Queer as fuck and full of the push and pull of how people actually play games when it's not their job, this podcast is worth it for the joy the hosts have for each other and the pure, enriching anger that flares up at just how bullshit video games and the culture around it can be. It is opposite in almost every way to the kind of game podcast I have, and I love that about it.

Not Your Demographic 

I still listen to a half dozen or so wrestling podcasts despite not having watched wrestling in nearly two years, and Not Your Demographic is my favorite of them all. Hosted by two women who love and hate wrestling exactly as much as it deserves, Not Your Demo is cheerful and casual and almost always very funny. They're on a month-long hiatus until January and it kills me every year, but that just means that it's the perfect time to listen to a few of the most recent episodes and get ready for their return!

Shift+F1 

What once was Giant Bomb's premium F1 podcast, Shift+F1 is now an independent podcast about the sport of extremely rich people, F1. I've never watched a race in my life, and I don't know if I ever will, but Shift+F1 has walked me through the last four(??) seasons of F1 in a way that makes me a fan of the drivers and the narrative of the sport from afar. 

This isn't a new podcast, and I feel like most people know about it, but it deserves special inclusion here for adding Waypoint's Rob Zacny to the regular hosting bench this season, a move that has greatly improved an already good show and that I don't see talked about. Even if you used to listen and fell off, I think it's worth trying again for his inclusion alone. F1 has ended for the year, and their current season just wrapped up, but that just means you can dip into the archives and get ready for its return in a few months!

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And that's it! I hope that might turn you onto something you haven't heard of before, and I hope you enjoy making your own end of year lists and sifting through the hundreds of others all about to come into this world. Thanks for reading, and I'll be back in two weeks!

- Em