What are you reading in 2025?

[Autumnal]

Tynion really is amazing.

The Cold Vanish by Jon Billman could have been a five-star read but isn’t. It’s about people who vanish in the wilderness. A lot of people do - many thousands a year, in the US and Canada - and there’s no centralized records on them. Billman writes for magazines like Outdoors and Bicycling, and built this book around essays he’s done in the subject. A lot of it is fascinating and well-done.

But he indulges his favorites. He lets a guy who works with bloodhounds go on a lot about how much other tracking dogs suck and don’t work, in flat-out contradiction to the facts. The father of a missing adult son, the man he spends most time with, spends a lot of time in dangerous denial of some day to day realities, and throughout there’s a lot of idolizing people who dump their lives in a whim and go off to do something else. Some work very hard at helping others despite personal costs, and I respect that, but others need someone to staple them down for a bit.

Recommended with significant reservations.

 

[Whizbang Dustyboots]

Tynion really is amazing.

The Cold Vanish by Jon Billman could have been a five-star read but isn’t. It’s about people who vanish in the wilderness. A lot of people do - many thousands a year, in the US and Canada - and there’s no centralized records on them. Billman writes for magazines like Outdoors and Bicycling, and built this book around essays he’s done in the subject. A lot of it is fascinating and well-done.

But he indulges his favorites. He lets a guy who works with bloodhounds go on a lot about how much other tracking dogs suck and don’t work, in flat-out contradiction to the facts. The father of a missing adult son, the man he spends most time with, spends a lot of time in dangerous denial of some day to day realities, and throughout there’s a lot of idolizing people who dump their lives in a whim and go off to do something else. Some work very hard at helping others despite personal costs, and I respect that, but others need someone to staple them down for a bit.

Recommended with significant reservations.

If you like this, you probably would enjoy Desert Oracle -- the magazine, the resulting book and the radio show/podcast. I just listened to the audiobook of the book recently -- I love Layne's voice and it would be weird to read it without that -- and really enjoyed it. A+ version of his content.

On Amazon, there are people who find it's too political because the Mojave Desert enthusiast is mad at government folks who want to open up the desert to mining and exploitation, which raises questions for me about what sort of book they thought they were picking up.

Environmentalism, UFO/cryptid/conspiracy theory (the fun kind), weird tales, desert rat stuff.

 

[Autumnal]

I’ll check that out, thanks.

 

[Clint_L]

Finally reading Atonement. I kinda thought I had already read it because it was all over the place a few decades ago. But I have a student starting their extended essay on it so I decided to re-read and…nope. Hadn’t read it previously.

I’m pretty far into it and it’s really leaning into a very British version of the metatextual postmodernism that was very much in trend at the turn of the century. I’m not usually a huge fan. Sadly, Atonement does not look to be one of the exceptions.