Where is your sting

book notes & things worth sharing

Some Book Notes:

• I tried reading BEE’s new book The Shards, I’ve mentioned on here a few times, and it was a little too graphic for me, like Bret was trying to be over the top, shock value, etc, which is his right, please write the book you want, but I was 200 pages in and really the plot had moved very little, though he’s such a good writer, and I used to listen to his podcast on occasion, back from 2017-2020, and I still could hear his voice in my head, I just wish sometimes that he wasn’t so self-indulgent that every (recent) story wasn’t about him and his hang-ups, but I like metafiction, but not his metafiction? IDK he could write a phenomenal horror novel every year and just cash in the money if he wanted to

• My Audible credits were at 4, and I kept paying for them even though I swore I cancelled it, and so I downloaded 4 books and then cancelled. These are the 4 I bought:

  • "Dangerous Jesus” by Kevin KB Burgess

    • Phenomenal wordsmith with a fascinating backstory, enjoying this so far

  • “Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Guile and Greed Upended TV” by Peter Biskind

    • Biskind has traditionally written about film, his book about the 70s new cinema era was great, his one about Miramax was also great, and now he turns his gaze towards prestige TV. I read all of these, the recent HBO one, the Difficult Men one. This one combines those together, the HBO parts I know a lot about (David Milch was supposed to be a novelist did you know that?) and focuses on more of the women of that scene than previous books

  • “The Creative Act: The Way of Being” by Rick Rubin

    • I’ve been writing more about the creative process over on my Medium blog, and so this just seems like a must-read. I’ve heard a lot of good things, so we’ll see. I haven’t started yet.

  • Dickens?

    • You know I cna’t find it now in my Audible library, but I could’ve sworn I downloaded an Audible set of like 10 Dickens novels, though I’m only committing to Great Expectations for this year. I feel like I’ll need to read it and listen to it to make it through

• I’m keeping a list of books I want to read in 2024 or sometime soon, and I hit the local Barnes and Noble today here where I’m traveling in Georgia (more on that below) and I’m adding “The Man With The Golden Arm” by Nelson Algren and “92 in the Shade” by Thomas McGuane to the list

• Speaking of the South, I brought along “Masters of Atlantis” by Charles Portis on this trip, though I don’t think it’s set in the South like many of Portis’ other works, I’m only a few pages in, but apparently it’s really funny and all of the comedy writers really like it.

Other Things

• “The Act” by

  Corey Smith
  on Substack

  • Sobriety, identity and more

• “The Power of Personal Experiments” at Ness Labs

• “A Brief History of the United States’ Accents and Dialects” at Smithsonian Magazine

• “Share Your WIP” by me at Medium

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Last Thing

By the time you read this, I’ll be on my way to a funeral.

My wife’s grandmother.

We flew from NYC to Georgia on Thursday and are hanging out with family until then. It’s different with kids.

With death, there’s always a lot to say as you see people you haven’t seen in a long time and you tell stories and remember.

And then there’s nothing to say as you cry and think and pray and cry and comfort.

It is a fact of life, but not necessarily the way it was meant to be.

I keep coming back to this from 1 Corinthians 15:

“Where, O death, is your victory? Where, O death, is your sting?” The sting of death is sin, and the power of sin is the law. But thanks be to God! He gives us the victory through our Lord Jesus Christ. Therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, stand firm. Let nothing move you. Always give yourselves fully to the work of the Lord, because you know that your labor in the Lord is not in vain.

Keep going,

Josh Spilker