Art and the Grind
What gets me through the gauntlet
2025 hasn’t been as productive as previous years when it comes to reading. Until late 2019 or so I might read close to a hundred books a year, thanks largely to audiobooks at work. For a while I was effectively a long-haul driver in 2020, and would knock out a book per day. (That’s when I started supplementing more podcasts and videos in my consumption.)
Since then I’ve had a rather steady diet of books, but burnout comes for us all, and this year I’ve really felt it. I read 170 books in 2023, 140 in 2024. As we close out May of 2025, I’ve read 38. Of those 8, 2 were full-on print books, one of which I finished with an audio supplement, the other one I had to speed-read to finish. The rest were comics or graphic novels.
And that’s fine, the last two years or so I’ve aggressively ramped up my comic reading and I wish I had done it sooner. If I’d integrated more artwork into my reading, the stuff I created for my writing over the years would have improved faster. In the end, it’s all a trade-off, which is the point I want to emphasize here: when I have downtime from work, I gotta be picky with how I use it.
I’ve been reading less. I’ve been writing more. That’s mainly what it comes down to. I’m actually creating instead of consuming (and you’ll see the fruits of that in the coming years.) I’m not bothered by slowing my reading because I am making more art.
But there’s also the factor of burnout: even with all the time I’ve had at work, and the TBR pile of ones and zeroes that comprise my audiobook library, I haven’t been all that motivated to listen. I’m just not finding things all that frequently that tickle me. I’ve been rereading stuff I liked in years past, which is good, but I’ve also spent time just…pushing through the grind.
The last few months I’ve been on a big music kick and that has revitalized me a lot more than I thought it would. I’ve made a point of letting the algo play stuff I haven’t heard before, instead of just relying on the same playlists I’ve had since 2019. Avril Lavigne and Simple Plan dropped a single this year that is pure nostalgia fuel for graying Millennials like myself, and I’m all over it. I’m coming up on middle-age now. (I don’t really know what the number is, I always assumed 50, but whatever.)
Anyway, as I climb out of the miasma that has been the last couple of months at my BS job (I racked up 53 hours in four days) I’ve found a few more books to add to my best-of-year list, and that feels good. I like what I’m doing, and when I’m in this zone, what I make ends up better for it. Good books, good music, good daydreams—all of it makes the inanity and mundanity manageable, especially in a job like mine where for 95% of it, I’m not dealing with other people. (Just their stupid decisions.)
So here’s what I’ve read this week:
LAW OF THE DESERT—L’Amour. A collection of short westerns from the master. I’d read some of them but not all. Always a reliable palate cleanser.
RETURN TO SENDER by Johnson. A new Longmire mystery that didn’t go the way I expected but was still a wonderful return to a lineup of characters that I’ve really come to love since I picked up this series in 2018.
THE BOOK OF LOST TALES vol.1 by Tolkien. The wife got me this for Christmas as a supplement to The Silmarillion which I adored. It’s basically a collection of longer treatments of each chapter in that book, containing material from previous iterations that Christopher Tolkien left on the cutting room floor. This is the book that I blitzed because I didn’t get a whole lot of value out of it, after having read the more concise (and complete/final) book last year.
THE NEW TRAIL OF TEARS by Naomi Schaefer Riley. Hell of a book, it examines the root cause of all the poverty and crime on Indian reservations and what kind of unpopular steps are needed to fix it. This book will largely be rejected by the exact kind of people enabling the suffering at its current levels. It’s also an ironclad argument against UBI, but that’s a discussion for another day.
COMICS
I canceled my pulls for Void Rivals, G.I. Joe, and Hornsby & Halo. The first two were kind of middling and the latter was fine, but all three have lost their focus. I’ll be honest though, the final nail for all of them is that my library has them on digital every month, so I can get them there. I love comics, but if I’m not careful I’ll end up dropping sixty bucks a month on this medium alone, and I’ve gotta be ethical with my money.
ROGUE: THE SAVAGE LAND has been my main focus for this week. Oddly enough it started earlier this year, I grabbed the first issue, added it to my pulls, and then…waited. It’s a miniseries and the final issue just dropped this week so I figured I would read it in one go. I liked the start of the story and the art is very Frazetta-esque.
While I’ve never subbed to the mainline X-Men books, this gives you what information you need to understand what’s happening and why. Then it goes full-on Jungle Boogie from there. I could see myself picking up more minis like this as long as they’re well-executed.
I’ll give you a final verdict when I’ve read it all. I just went out into the shop this morning to read comics in my chair with the fan on and some music going. I knocked out a few issues and then fell asleep for an hour. It was delightful and I look forward to doing it again.
It’s nice to have things to anticipate. Life is a grind, art is part of what gives it purpose.