2018: Year in Review

I feel compelled to summarize this year with a single word. It has been difficult, busy, full of changes, full of decisions (and revisions). It wasn’t the most difficult year of my life, but close. It was a year of growth and recovery. And yet, the space I needed for this change took up the time and energy I usually devoted to creative pursuits. So, I’ve done less reading this year than just about any other in recent memory. On the plus side, I have been regularly drawing, or at least drawing more than in the past.  

Memorable Books, Comics and Movies of 2018

First Quarter (January - March)
Phillip Pullman, The Book of Dust

Thomas M. Disch, The Businessman

Can Xue, The Last Lover

Dylan Horrocks, Hicksville

Nancy Goslee, Shelley’s Visual Imagination 

Second Quarter (April-June) 

Sarah Gilbert, The Signature of All Things

Can Xue, Old Floating Cloud

Iain M. Banks, Look to Windward

Third Quarter ( July - September)

Carl Freedman, The Incomplete Projects

Alex Garland, Annihilation (movie)
Wes Anderson, Isle of Dogs (movie)

David Auerbach, Bitwise

Masaaki Yuasa, Mind Game (movie)

Fourth Quarter (October-December)

Iain M. Banks, Consider Phlebas

This year I finished a few art projects including small comic strips, four illustrations for Blake, and an illustrated version of Shelley’s poem Julian and Maddalo that I then compiled into a single small book that is nearly ready for print. Undertaking this project required that I learn the rudiments of photoshop and Scribus, a free publishing software. If it looks like I wasn’t very active the last four months of the year it was because I was busy learning these programs. A few weeks ago I started a new project, a comic book. I’ve set myself to write about 5 pages a week. I’ve been coming close to meeting that goal. I would like to write about 60 pages. If I give myself a buffer, I should be able to finish this by April. During this time I want to read deeper in my Shelley scholarship and begin writing an essay titled “Thinking in Images.” I hope to publish this essay. In April I plan on finishing the essay while revising the comic. This may take another three months. While doing this, I’d like to continue drawing, either on the next stage of this project or something else entirely.

I’m not certain what I want to do for the rest of next year and onward, although I have some ideas. I want to write a utopian essay tentatively called, “The Economics of Hope.” I want to start reading Blumenberg again, although I’m not sure if that will happen. After I finish the utopia essay, I’d like to do another essay on Finnegans Wake and then, perhaps, an essay on Can Xue.

Here is a rough reading list for next year:

First Quarter 

Bernanos, The Other Side of the Mountain

Angus Fletcher, The Topological Imagination (critical re-reading)

Nancy Goslee, Shelley’s Visual Imagination (critical re-reading)

Marx, Capital

Claeys, Marx and Marxism

Blyth, Austerity

Goodstein, Simmel and the Disciplinary Imaginary

Second Quarter

(continue economic books from first quarter)

Juan Rulfo, Pedro Peramo

Murname, The Plains

Third Quarter

Blumenberg, Work on Myth

Nicholls, Myth and the Human Sciences

Fourth Quarter

Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov