The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

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🌵 Lost in the Desert

I am still sick. It is a combination of seasonal allergies and sinuses and having a three-year-old who doesn’t cover his mouth when he coughs. Illness is energy and motivation sapping, so it’s a double whammy. Even when it’s perfect rainy weather to spend all day curled up with books, I can’t seem to break the inertia to get into a reading (or writing) state.

Instead, I’ve been obsessing1 over Crimson Desert. This is a new open-world, adventure sandbox game from Korean developer Pearl Abyss. The first thing to know about Crimson Desert is that it is gorgeous.

It’s making news because it sold 3 million copies in its first 5 days, and because initial reviews of it were mixed. When a massive game like this drops (think Red Dead Redemption 2 or any GTA game from 3 onwards), it is usually met with effusive praise because there is no such thing as video game journalism. But CD caught a lot of early flak for a couple reasons.

• It looks like Witcher 3 (and similar games), but there is significantly less focus on story hooks early on. CD meanders at the start, which is fine if you’re already preparing to sink 100+ hours into the game, but not fine if you’re trying to make a good first impression.

• The controls are atrocious. Game design is iterative; this is why you can pick up any side scroller and figure out punch, kick, jump, and move pretty much instantly. It’s also why trigger buttons are used for attacks, D-pad buttons are for quick equips, et cetera. For whatever reason, Pearl Abyss said “no, fuck that” and created an incredibly unintuitive control schema. I played one day, took a day off, and when I came back a day later, I’d forgotten all the controls. I’ve been watching a professional streamer with over 30 hours into the game, and he’s still biffing the controls.

• The menu systems are labyrinthine and needlessly complex. They also launched without hotkeys for things like inventory and map. An infuriating and head-scratching decision to anyone who has ever played a game that has either an inventory or a map.

That said, in those same first few days, Pearl Abyss has unleashed a torrent of patches and updates. They added a ton of quality-of-life improvements that make the game much less frustrating (though still not perfect). Removing some of those frustrations has really let the game they made shine. I’ve barely scratched the surface after 6 hours of playing (though I did become the local arm-wrestling champion). That guy I mentioned with 30+ hours? He’s just unlocked the third (of 3) playable characters and has played 0 minutes as either of the second ones.

I’m trying to think of an apt comparison, and the closest thing I can think of is: what if someone discovered a 2,000 page near-final draft of Moby Dick 2? That’s the amount of sheer content a game like this has on offer2.

As much as I enjoy video games, they do not require the same amount of mental exertion or focus that a good book does. That is why they are my fallback when I’m feeling mentally drained or overwhelmed (which is frequently because I don’t like saying “no,” and I bite off more than I can chew). The downside of this is that, obviously, I’m not reading as much and I’m not getting through my backlog of Substack novels and reviews. The upside is that I’m not rushing through those either to tick them off my to-do list.

This is why I always add the caveat of “eventually” whenever I say I will read/review a book. You are forever at the whims and fancies of my fractured brain.

📚Book Bits

• Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman (Finished)

  • Sigh, this was great and now I’m on to Book 2, Carl’s Doomsday Scenario.

Recent Book Haul:

After last week’s MASSIVE haul, no new books arrived this week. Probably for the best.

💡Substack Spotlight:

• I mentioned this last week, but it’s been my only substantive Substack read this week: ’s profile of Bret Easton Ellis for . In truth, I have not finished it. Not because it is long (though it is), but because I am savoring my way through it. I devoured the Vollmann and Moore pieces in one sitting each, so I’m taking my time with this one. Alex is one of the best of us, and I will add my name to growing list of folks that believe he will leave all of us in the Substack ghetto behind in due time.

  • You should also check out Sorondo’s Cubafruit, an excellent political thriller that I reviewed here, and is up for the ’ inaugural Samuel Richardson Award for self-published fiction.

📰Substack Headlines

• Nah, bro.

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

🖋️Writing

I haven’t even been journaling much these past couple weeks. I’m in the process of interviewing for new roles within my company and it has ratcheted my anxiety up. I have a tendency to get melancholic when I don’t get picked, so I’m drowning in a soup of my own emotions. It’s like having too many processes running in the background, stealing all my mental bandwidth, making me sluggish. I want desperately to be on the other side of all this so I can have some of my focus back.

🌸Fleeting Thoughts

I mentioned on Notes that I had some good news to share. I suppose it’s not really news that a mediocre white man3 has failed up in America, but I did land a new role at my company that comes with a not insignificant pay bump. There had been this low-level current of anxiety coursing through my life for the past few weeks and months as I looked for a new job, and I felt it start to abate Thursday evening when the offer came in. Naturally this will come with a whole new set of problems, but it does mean that I am out from underneath a toxic manager and now reporting to one that at least understands my value.

On the horizon you can expect to get see more Substacky content. In addition to The Unmapping, I am planning to read and review pieces by and and bring back the Live with Vinny Reads interview segment with at least those two4.

Until then.

🍻+🤙,

— V

If you don’t want or can’t afford to become a paid subscriber, but would still like to support the newsletter, you can do so through ko-fi. The ko-fi money mostly goes towards beer and video games, while the subscription money mostly gets reinvested into the Substack community.

The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

Subscribe now

☔ Under the Weather

It’s that time of the year in Vermont where the seasons whiplash back and forth between spring and winter, and the inside of my head inflates like one of those water-ballon clowns you shoot at the carnival. Except instead of water, it is filling with mucus and sinus pressure.

I binged a two-year-old Let’s Play on YouTube for most of the week, because it is the closest I could be to asleep while still being awake for work. Most of the week has passed in a sort of suspended animation. I hesitate to call it wasted time, but it has not been productive (unless you count turning tissues into soiled tissues).

Yesterday, I spent some time trying to play catch-up on what dubbed the “New Cultural Criticism.” I’m a little inured to the constant attempts to name “movements” but I think Barkan makes some good points about the threads tying together folks like , , , and others1. I have a bad habit of bookmarking — and then not reading — longer reads, because I have the attention span of a hummingbird on crystal meth. There is a certain level of care and sophistication to how these folks approach a topic2 that is lost, at large, to grinding wheel of capitalism and clickbait. I have thoughts and feelings about some of the people that Substack platforms, but it is hard not to view it as a net positive because of these voices.

I also finally got around to reading Diggs’ excellent “Stop the Stream,” which was a needed wake-up call after my week in liminal limbo.

📚Book Bits

• The Unmapping by (Finished)

  • The Unmapping was a victim of the week that was; a review is forthcoming shortly. I did finish it and I did enjoy it, but I haven’t had the time and energy to coalesce my thoughts into something coherent yet.

• Dungeon Crawler Carl by Matt Dinniman

  • “Goddammit, Donut!”

  • I hate how enjoyable and fun this is. The literature snob and D&D nerd in me wants to hate this book, but it has won me over completely. Mrs. Reads is also 100% on board. This is one of our rare co-reads. Though, as always, she has zipped way ahead of me and finished the book.

Recent Book Haul:

Big book-buying binge last week that resulted into a number of packages arriving at the Reads Compound this week.

• Heaven’s Prisoners by James Lee Burke

  • Stick-tap to who turned me on to JLB by recommending Neon Rain. Heaven’s Prisoners is book two of the Dave Robicheaux series.

• The Grifters by Jim Thompson

  • I believe it was that recommended this one.

• Noir Books - I recently rewatched True Detective (season one) and wanted to dive deeper into that noir-meets-pseudo-paranormal oeuvre, so I asked Uncle Google to cross-reference old articles and Reddit threads from 2014 (!) and find me some books that fit the bill.

  • Black Dahlia by James Ellroy

  • The Bright Lands by John Fram

  • Come with Me by Ronald Malfi

  • The Boatman’s Daughter by Andy Davidson

  • Nineteen Seventy-Four by David Peace

  • Night Film by Marisha Pessl

  • The Gone World by Tom Sweterlitsch

  • LA Confidential by James Ellroy

    • Technically, this is more season two vibes.

• Devouring Time: Jim Harrison. A Writer’s Life by Todd Goddard

  • I’m not a huge biography guy but I’ve been getting into Jim Harrison recently thanks to (and others).

💡Substack Spotlight:

• , who is equal parts writer and sleep-paralysis demon, has started with a group of talented folks from Substack3. I have more to say about this below, but I’m a big fan of seeing all these new presses open.

• A couple weeks ago, I got sent a link to , and have been a devoted reader ever since. I’m a big fan of ’s approach to weekly thoughts/recaps. If you’re looking for something similar to Vinny Reads, but less *fart and explosion noises*, I highly recommend checking out The Field Review.

📰Substack Headlines

• As I was writing this, dropped a Sorondo piece on Bret Easton Ellis. There goes my weekend (and yours, if you’re smart).

  The Metropolitan Review

  The Very Good Soldier

  A portrait of the artist in 1986 finds him at Woods Gramercy, an upscale restaurant in what the New York Times is calling “the year of the column in restaurant decoration,” and it’s just about the only restaurant right now that’s trying to make a name for itself with…

  Read more

  a month ago · 5 likes · Alexander Sorondo and The Metropolitan Review

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

🖋️Writing

I want to vamp a bit on the topic of Substack-started indie publishers. It is my hypothesis that, shortly, we will see a backlash against the trend of starting publishing companies. I am here to plant a flag atop the hill and say, "these publishers are a good thing, and this is a hill I will die kill on.”

is a smarter (handsomer) man than I and has done a great job of using his Substack to dispel myths and misconceptions about the publishing industry. The industry is largely a black box with a lot of extraneous noise in its datasets. When the backlash comes and points out that these “vanity presses” (as they will be derided) will not be profitable, the retort should be: “so what?”

I do not have a problem with traditional publishing; I am not a talentless hack who blames the “woke mafia” for my inability to get my garbage published4. But the sheer volume of fiction and literary discourse on Substack leads me to believe that the major publishing houses are underserving a small but passionate subset of readers. Some of this gap is filled in by existing indie presses, but those presses are behooved to the same financial pressures as the big houses. Where I see Substack presses stepping in is to close the remaining gap, the ars gratia artis set. It is one thing to say, “write for yourself,” but every writer wants to be read. Every writer wants to hold their book, and for most of them that means a goddamn physical object.5

So, ahead of the naysayers and mudslingers I want to shout out groups like , , , , and others for fighting the good fight on behalf of artists.

🌸Fleeting Thoughts

I really worked myself into a froth there, huh? Blame the Sudafed and my unwillingness to read the warnings on medication labels. There are more than two wolves inside my head right now and they are all howling.

I really need to post an update on my TBR so I can shout-out the folks I owe readings to (off top of my head: , , , , , , but I know there’s way more). Because Vinny Reads does not pay the bills, I tend to approach it with less structure and a laissez-faire approach to what I pick up next. Rest assured, you are not forgotten; you are just at the mercy of a methed-up hummingbird with wolves for brains.

Or something.

Stay frothy🤙,

— V

If you don’t want or can’t afford to become a paid subscriber, but would still like to support the newsletter, you can do so through ko-fi. The ko-fi money mostly goes towards beer and video games, while the subscription money mostly gets reinvested into the Substack community.

The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

Subscribe now

☘️Reinforcin’ O’ the Stereotypes

I took Tuesday off to celebrate the High Holy Day, despite not being religious or having any plans besides drinking Guinness all day. I’ve been into my Irish heritage over the last few years. My family took a trip to Ireland back in 2022, and through a fluke of scheduling I had 2 nights in Dublin by myself before meeting up with my brother and driving across the country to Galway. I felt at home there.

Shortly after that trip, my son was born and things like “heritage” and “legacy” started to take on a more personal meaning.

Of course, when the Whites in this country mention “heritage” what they usually mean is back when they could murder and rape other human beings with impunity because it was good for the economy1. I stayed “plugged in” to all things Irish after my visit and found a central commonality between the Irish people’s innate sense of injustice and what I was thinking and feeling about what those Whites at the top of this paragraph voted for.

Anyways, I had an Irish Coffee read a handful of stories from James Joyce’s Dubliners, and took my family out for dinner, drinks, and (Irish step-) dancing. My Brazilian wife split the G twice. My Kiddo pooped his pants and stole shamrock decorations. It was a fine day, and no Englishmen were harmed2.

📚Book Bits

• The Revenant by Michael Punke (Finished)

  • Good, not great read. Enjoyable but kind of a popcorn novel.

• The Unmapping by

  • Yes, I’m back on my reading-Substack-novels bullshit! I’ll have a full review of this one as per usual for Substack books, but I’ll say that I’ve been struck by how competent and clear the prose is. This is as polished as any literary fiction I’ve read over the past few years.

• Embracing Vocation: Cormac McCarthy’s Writing Life, 1959-1974 & Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period by Diane Luce

  • I find myself alternating between these two books, just reading a couple pages at a time and marveling at the density of the research. It’s impressive in a way that I can barely comprehend, like people who juggle fire.

• Dubliners by James Joyce

  • I read “The Sisters,” “An Encounter” and (of course) “The Dead” on Tuesday, then read a couple more stories on Thursday. This feels like a book that would benefit from a re-reading; there’s a lot of subtlety to what Joyce does in these stories that’s worth plumbing.

Recent Book Haul:

• Poor Damned Souls by

  • Edited by your frenemy and mine, . I’m excited to dive into this one the next time I need a change of pace from my usual reading.

• The Shieldbreaker Saga, Book Two: Holiest of Cities by (ARC)

  • Tom was gracious enough to send me an ARC of his latest entry in the Shieldbreaker Saga. You can expect a review of this in the near-ish future, and likely another interview to boot.

• Statues to Silence by

  • Review copy as part of The Substack Review (see below 👇).

💡Substack Spotlight:

• I mentioned above; if you’d like to read Book Two: Holiest of Cities it is available for free as a serial on Substack now.

  THE SHIELDBREAKER SAGA

  The Shieldbreaker, Book Two: Holiest of Cities

  TABLE OF CONTENTS…

  Read more

  a month ago · 18 likes · 5 comments · Tom Schecter

📰Substack Headlines

• has launched The Substack Review. This is a project that seeks to pair Substack writers/novelists with readers/reviewers and create a pipeline of discovery for everyone on Substack to discover both writers and reviewers. I’m excited to be a part of this endeavor and will keep you updated on when my first review will go up; I’ve already been assigned my first book by a new-to-me Substack author.

  The Substack Review

  The Substack Review is the only publication that pairs authors with reviewers to have their books reviewed for a general audience.

  By Timothy Atkinson

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

🖋️Writing

I’ve been fortunate enough to have time this week. I put a new ink ribbon on my typewriter and knocked out a couple pages of a work-in-progress. Then I spent an hour the next day working through the structure of the story. This is new for me.

My writing - think Red Sky Mourning or Dead Bird - usually comes to me fully formed. There are some minor revisions, and I might allow the writing to meander if I’m feeling it, but most of the time I know what I’m going to write. This is also why what I write is usually Flash Fiction in length. Quick to write, quick to edit, quick to post, quick to read.

I’m working on allowing myself the space to be more expansive, to not just cut-it-down when something isn’t just right. I want badly for this story to be the best I’ve written so far. I don’t think that’s gauche to admit, especially since it will be the work I’ve spent the most time and effort on by… a lot. It feels like a personal hurdle I need to clear; like once this is exorcised, I can devote time to other projects (reviews, non-fiction articles I promised to write, etc.).

I understand, conceptually, that writing - serious writing - takes time and revision and the killing of darlings and/or bottles of whiskey. I have yet to cross this bridge, despite knowing that the work I want to be doing is on the other side.

🌸Fleeting Thoughts

I guess it’s Spring now, or close enough to it. The first quarter of year often feels like this liminal time where the year hasn’t really started yet until you wake up in April and realize you’ve wasted 3 months. Some of this is the shortening of time that comes with working a job, exacerbated if — like me — you work remotely. Add in a young child and your days functionally shorten to a couple hours after dinner. Something about DST “springing forward” has awakened me from a winter malaise. More than anything it’s just seeing the sun. We really are just sentient house plants.

Enjoy this song that’s been stuck in my head:

Stay frosty🤙,

— V

If you don’t want or can’t afford to become a paid subscriber, but would still like to support the newsletter, you can do so through ko-fi. The ko-fi money mostly goes towards beer and video games, while the subscription money mostly gets reinvested into the Substack community.

The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

Subscribe now

📖Living Up to the Name

I am in a liminal state at work where both I and my boss know that I’m applying for new roles internally and that I am likely to get at least one of them. My work motivation and current commitments are close to zero, and my boss just took off for a week and a half. I’ve been getting a lot of reading done.

I have a knock-off version of the Herman Millers Eames chair that is a required piece for people who make “mid-century modern” their whole personality. I’ve been using it as my escape from screens this week.

The photo above was taken from my desk, so it’s not exactly a world away but it provides just enough distance from my desk/screens/Internet1. I’m using that lapdesk in the foreground for my writing, notes and highlighting and there is a stack of books on the floor, partially obscured by the blanket (it’s still cold here in Vermont).

I didn’t understand the function of studying and learning when I was a student. I was raised in the good grades to good school to good job pipeline. Having the time now to explore the depths of literature (I’ll take about this more in a moment) is bittersweet. There’s a sense of making up for lost time; wishing I could send my intellect back in time to my younger body. Do you know how many times I’ve watched the first Transformers movie? At least enough times that I could have read Crime and Punishment and still seen Transformers too many times.

Alas, this vessel is mortal — and flabby around the middle — and such dreams are not to be. So, we make do.

📚Book Bits

• The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey

  • I enjoyed this one, but a literary masterpiece it is not. This reads like Fear and Loathing for the Sierra Club. It’s fun, but the characters are a bit grating (especially the female lead). There is fun wordplay and good humor, but no real surprises. Not a bad first read for a budding eco-terrorist.

• How Cormac Works by Bill Hardwig

  • This was great. Hardwig’s analysis made me want to drop everything else and pick up McCarthy’s works all over again. What’s special about this one, is that it is one of the few academic works that deals with McCarthy’s final diptych, The Passenger and Stella Maris. An analogy he uses is that these two novels function like Schrödinger’s cat: the protagonists of the alternate novel are alive/dead depending on which you’re reading (!). I know there’s a few Cormacians2 that are frequent/occasional readers of the Digest that might be interested in this one.

• The Revenant by Michael Punke

  • The source material for the DiCaprio movie. Now that I’m thinking about it, I have the source material for a lot of Leo movies on my shelves (Shutter Island, Killers of the Flower Moon, and One Battle After Another spring to mind). Anyway, this is a fun read that I picked up because I forgot to toss a book in my car when I was heading out for lunch. I’m about 2/3rds of the way through and our boy Hugh Glass can’t catch a break.

• Embracing Vocation: Cormac McCarthy’s Writing Life, 1959-1974 & Reading the World: Cormac McCarthy’s Tennessee Period by Diane Luce

  • Luce is one of the foremost McCarthy scholars and reading her work is like trying to cram 100lbs of knowledge into my 1lb brain. I am at the part of Reading the World where she is starting to dive into Gnosticism; I’m planning to pair that with ’s “Cormac McCarthy’s Gnostic Conservatism.”

Recent Book Haul:

• The Revenant by Michael Punke

  • Like I mentioned above, I picked this up from a used bookstore because I found myself with some time and a beer and no reading material.

• The Lord by Soraya Antonius

  • NYRB book of the month

💡Substack Spotlight:

• I am shouting-out ’s TheGreatReader extension/app again, in case you missed it. I’ve been using this to save longer articles/stories from Substack and then making it a weekend habit to spend some hours playing catch up with this app.

• I enjoyed this article from and on reading in the information apocalpyse:

  Magazine Non Grata

  The Informational Onslaught: Why I Can't Read Like I Used To

  Have been feeling a hell of a lot of informational overload lately. This short piece from Alex De Lagarde provides context for why this makes a hell of a lot of sense, and why Non Grata is so intent on print…

  Read more

  2 months ago · 66 likes · 12 comments · Magazine Non Grata and Alex De Lagarde

• had a great piece on self-editing:

  Using only the Sharpie in the first ten pages I realized that the solution for almost all of my narrative problems was to remove things I’d fallen in love with.

  big reader bad grades

  How the Sharpie Saved My Novel

  1. I’ve spent almost five years researching and writing a novel about the sociopolitical infrastructure that gave birth to Prohibition and also a gigantic monster from Cuba and this naturally required…

  Read more

  2 months ago · 102 likes · 29 comments · Alexander Sorondo

• The rest of my Substack reading this week was mostly assorted Day of the ___ Writer articles.

📰Substack Headlines

• My ability to advertise for you all was hindered this week by spending so much time away from screens/Substack Notes. As always if you have something you’d like me to promote, feel free to reach out.

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

🖋️Writing

I am experimenting with different ways to break through my inertia/resistance to getting started. One thing I want to do is upgrade my desk to one with more surface area so I can have a “permanent” space for my typewriter as opposed to having it tucked away. I’d also like to have enough room to write in a notebook with needing to stash my keyboard somewhere.

I am well aware these are minor quibbles and should not interfere with writing, but every little inconvenience is an obstacle that needs to be overcome. One of the upsides of reading so many self-improvement books is that I’m keenly aware of things like feedback loops and friction points.

Another thing I’m considering is a fold-out desk for that lounge chair so that I’m also isolated from my screens. So many deck chairs to rearrange on this sinking ship…

One last thing on writing; thanks to (aka Substack’s Favorite Skeleton) for this wonderful compliment:

❄️Fleeting Thoughts

I passed 400 subscribers this week. A number of folks expressed surprise that I had “so few” subscribers, and that’s probably because I’m such an annoying ubiquitous presence in Notes. If you’re not into dumb dad jokes and a weekly summary of a few books you may not have heard of, then I totally get why you wouldn’t subscribe to me.

That’s part of the reason I set goals for myself of writing more book reviews (especially Substack novels… which I’m way behind on) and releasing more fiction. The Weekly Digest was never meant to be the whole kit-and-kaboodle of Vinny Reads content, just something to provide regular updates because otherwise you’d just get (very) sporadic, disorganized missives.

I’m also not especially concerned with growing my subscription base. I appreciate you all and especially appreciate those of you who pay me (!!) to write this. I think one of the benefits I have over folks with wider readership is that I feel like I have a much stronger/closer connection to a majority of you. That’s one of the benefits of slow growth.

We know that each avatar and newsletter is, in theory, a full-realized human being somewhere in the world but it doesn’t always feel that way. Building an audience “brick-by-brick” wasn’t a goal I started out with, but it has been endlessly rewarding to get to know each of you brick-heads.

So, thanks. And if you’re inclined, share with someone cool.

🤙,

— V

If you don’t want or can’t afford to become a paid subscriber, but would still like to support the newsletter, you can do so through ko-fi. The ko-fi money mostly goes towards beer and video games, while the subscription money mostly gets reinvested into the Substack community.

The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

Subscribe now

🍻The Old Men Need a Place to Drink

SCARY COOL SAD GOODBYE is a newsletter by that is required reading. This week was number 87 and toward the end we meet a man who is joking and ball-busting with the other regulars at the bar. Then he starts sobbing; he put down his 15-year-old terrier earlier that day. Garvey drifts in and out of these scenes like a ghost everyone can see. They are truly wonderful.

I don’t have a local dive bar. Back when I was in my 20s, I never went in for the nightclub and college-to-post-college bar scene. I hated the music, I was too shy a dancer, and I wasn’t about to pay $10 for a drink I hated while trying to save money to move out of my childhood room. It’s amusing I developed a reputation as a beer snob despite frequenting a place that had dollar drafts of Rolling Rock (placing a bet on the ponies). But that bar was in Allston, and I was “Iced” there on more than one occasion.

There were local bars, mostly attached to mid-class family restaurants, where I could run into people I went to grade school with and they could marvel over how I either hadn’t cured cancer yet or was still alive somehow. And the boys from youth hockey that either got fat or roided up or both. Most of them probably conceal-carried and only some of them because they became cops.

I don’t need to summarize Bowling Alone or beat the dead “cure for male loneliness” horse; the old men need a place to drink. Preferably somewhere you can go while the sun is still up, and time travel to when it is not. This would normally be the point where I bemoan the evils of capitalism and gentrification, but I don’t want to sully this little elegy for those dried-up watering holes.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, my glass is empty.

📚Book Bits

• Galveston by Nic Pizzolatto

  • This was pretty good. I wouldn’t go out of my way to get it, but it’s an entertaining, if boilerplate crime noir. You can see a lot of Pizzolatto’s theme from True Detective in this, but the protagonist doesn’t rise to the level of a Marty Hart, let alone a Rustin Cohle. There’s no supernatural aspects or deep philosophy either. Still a good meat-and-potatoes story which some stylistic flair.

• The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey

  • I’m likely going to finish this one today. It’s a good yarn and a bit of offbeat 70s humor. An apropos read in this time of civil disobedience and environmental plundering.

• How Cormac Works by Bill Hardwig

  • A deep-dive into the sentences, structure, and style of Cormac McCarthy and his use of language. This deals less with the metaphysics and philosophy of McCarthy and more with how his art works at the sentence level.

• Dungeon Crawler Carl by

  • This is gonna be a co-read with Mrs. Reads. My buddy Timmy is also reading this. I’m either gonna love or date this, I can already tell.

    • Speaking of my buddy Timmy, I recently recommended him ’s Between Two Fires. I read this one years ago, but it recently caught traction on BookTok. If you like angels, demons and Medieval France, you’ll love this one. Also check out Buehlman’s Blacktongue Thief series. The Daughters’ War might be the best fantasy novel I’ve ever read.

• Love, Kurt by Kurt Vonnegut

  • A collection of love letters from Kurt Vonnegut to his wife, as compiled by his daughter. I’ve read through 1941-42 and our boy Kurt is DOWN BAD.

Recent Book Haul:

• The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti

  • I mentioned on Notes that I rewatched season one of True Detective. Apparently, this was a big influence on Nic Pizzolatto so I’m looking forward to it.

• The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. by Robert Coover

  • monthly selection. Baseball novel; paging Dr. .

• Supergod by Warren Ellis

  • On loan from a buddy of mine after I sent him ’s article on Grant Morrison and Batman.

💡Substack Spotlight:

• ’s A Happy Bureaucracy Live Read!

  THE SHIELDBREAKER SAGA

  FiC Presents: A Happy Bureaucracy LIVE Table Read

  Thank you MA Knight, Emerald Baynton, Emily S Hurricane, Zani D, and many others for tuning into my live video! Join me for my next live video in the app…

  Listen now

  2 months ago · 10 likes · Tom Schecter, Haly, the Moonlight Bard ✒️, Emily S Hurricane, Slater Henatay, and M.P. Fitzgerald

• ’s FEVERCHAIN Live Read!

  Serial For Dinner

  Feverchain, Live From The First Line: The Chapter One Club

  Listen now

  2 months ago · 21 likes · 13 comments · Alex Shifman, Wendy Russell, and Tom Schecter

• Day of the ___ Writer is a collaborative community collection put on my . You can read mine here and check out all the entries, collected here:

Tredecko

Day of the ___ Writer

This collab celebrates our daily lives as writers. Despite everything else we got going on, by some miracle, we all show up here—Substack: A monstrously beautiful, imperfect platform…

Read more

2 months ago · 72 likes · 10 comments · Trevor Cohen

📰Substack Headlines

This is cool as hell. Shout-out :

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

🖋️Writing

I partook in the Day of the ___ Writer community project. You can find my piece, Day of the Broken Writer here. This was cathartic to dump my various challenges and excuses out into the world and try to coalesce them into a coherent piece.

I am working on a story (presumable a short story), tentatively titled Final Rounds. I wrote an opening 500ish words that functioned as spec sheet for the story. I’ve been breaking down all the exposition I crafted in a first-person monologue and I’m teasing that into a rough outline.

❄️Fleeting Thoughts

I picked the right week to take off last week. Deepfakes and hate manifestos and trolls. There was other wild shit, too, but that all got lost in the whirlwind. I realize I am no troll’s primary target (white, male, straight, stunningly handsome, endlessly charming, unfathomably brilliant, etc.), so I have the ability to tune all that out and fuck off for a week. I realize not everyone has that luxury, and unfortunately there’s not a lot that can be said or done at the individual level about it.

That’s, ya know, kinda where we are in the world right now. I don’t know anyone who is psyched that Iranian schoolchildren are getting bombed. No decent people are co-signing genocide or fascist street thugs. And it sucks to come to a place where you feel you have community and face more of the same shit that makes you feel depressed and powerless.

I can ramble on for hours about any number of topics, but if you come to me with transparent vulnerability about the things that are getting to you, I turn into an inarticulate frump. “Shit sucks, man.” It’s a different kind of helplessness to recognize pain and be unable to soothe it. What can you say in the face or nonconsensual pornography or the bloodied backpack of a formerly living child or the partially redacted photos of sex crimes?

Feels gauche to promote your short story about a guy who blows his fucking brains out because he’s doing a sad.

Things will get better, or they’ll get worse, but they won’t stay the same. Whether you’re with or against the current, the key thing is not to drown.

Float on,

— V

If you don’t want or can’t afford to become a paid subscriber, but would still like to support the newsletter, you can do so through ko-fi. The ko-fi money mostly goes towards beer and video games, while the subscription money mostly gets reinvested into the Substack community.

The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

Subscribe now

🤖Vinny Battles the Robots

You can’t swing an unfinished manuscript around Substack these days without hitting some jabroni talking about AI. I’ve been around the Internet long enough to know that is this just how The Discourse™ works and it has always been banal, idiotic, and exhausting. In the words of Bo Burnham “the backlash to the backlash to the thing that’s just begun.” I think what’s been bothering me about the AI discussion is that hot takes used to be hot, and folks giving nuanced perspectives used to actually have 1. nuance and 2. perspective.

To abuse an overused term, the Discourse™ around AI is slop. Breathless, thoughtless human slop. The kind of uncritical corporate propaganda that actually should be outsourced to robots so that no man born with a living soul has to tarnish it by writing such dreck. And the vague, unsophisticated solipsism around “true art” or “real art” or whatever the fuck these people are not creating because they’re too busy tilting at animatronic windmills.

Which isn’t to say AI isn’t dangerous or disruptive; it’s just not dangerous in the SkyNet sense or disruptive in the Silicon Valley sense. A lot of people will lose their jobs in the pursuit of greater shareholder dividends, but here in late-stage capitalist hell we call that “Tuesday.” A lot of barely watchable garbage will be pumped out to various degrees of legality and success, but we also have a word for that, too: Netflix. AI will certainly “write” “books,” but how would you know unless you’re using Kindle Unlimited (and would you be able to tell the difference)?

AI’s biggest disruption will be — as with all technology — in pornography. Gooners and incels will shift their parasitic, parasocial relationship from real naked women to AI-generated naked women1 without pesky things like agency or friction or aging or imperfections or humanity. Add a Bluetooth Fleshlight2 and you can remove human contact entirely.

Of course, I accidentally deleted my Substack account for most of this week because I didn’t RTFM3 so maybe I’m not the expert on technology…

📚Book Bits

• The Way of Excellence by

  • I enjoyed this one. I feel like there is significantly less woo-woo and fluff in WoE compared to a lot of self-improvement books. Stulberg — who I recently found out is on Substack — does a good job of balancing the practical with the realistic. In a nutshell, Excellence is simple but that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

  • Similar to my fondness for ’s 4000 Weeks, I appreciate Stulberg’s focus on the tangible and achievable. You can be okay at a lot of things, or you can be excellent at a small number of important things. It is a choice and you get to make it.

• The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey

  • An enjoyable read so far, even if every character is at least 50% insufferable. This is about a rag-tag group of what the government would call “eco-terrorists” plying their craft across the American southwest. It was written in the 1970s, but all that’s really changed is the price of a jar of peanut butter.

• Love, Kurt by Kurt Vonnegut

  • A collection of love letters from Kurt Vonnegut to his wife, as compiled by his daughter. I’ve read through 1941-42 and our boy Kurt is DOWN BAD.

Recent Book Haul:

• print edition finally arrived!

• One Shot Amigo by

  • On the recommendation of

• Cherry Kills by

  • Production value on this is sick. Love the pocket-sized book and the sticker pack that came with it.

A reminder that you can send me books or ARCs via the Review Requests page. I’m hoping to continue working through my backlog over the rest of this year. Look for an updated TBR... eventually.

💡Substack Spotlight:

Like I mentioned above, I accidentally nuked my Substack account for a good chunk of the week, so that cut into my reading. I did come across some thoughtful pieces on AI (a rarity) that I figured I’d share:

• kicks us off with a full dismantling of the idiotic TwiX essay from some guy named Matt.

• is, as always, right on the money about AI. He did write the book on it, after all.

The Biblioracle Recommends

Can We Please Stop it with the AI Woo-Woo?

I have had it to up to here with what I call AI “woo-woo…

Read more

2 months ago · 59 likes · 17 comments · John Warner

• , who I’m calling Unc until he tells me to stop, intoned Philip K. Dick with his piece “Bladerunner Didn't Have Spam."

The Insomnograph

Bladerunner Didn't Have Spam

I’ve started and stopped this piece too many times to count, ever since generative artificial intelligence first reared its digital head. Anyone in a creative field has been asked for an opinion on the matter, but I’ve been hesitant to respond at length because, first, I doubted I could add much to criticisms others…

Read more

2 months ago · 31 likes · 6 comments · Craig Clevenger

• weighed in on AI as well, and I quite liked this one.

Political Currents by Ross Barkan

AI Agonistes

My new novel, Colossus, arrives at the end of April. Library Journal calls it a “challenging portrait of a thoroughly modern man.” I agree. Please preorder it now. You won’t regret it…

Read more

2 months ago · 82 likes · 13 comments · Ross Barkan

• Finally, dropped the mic on how to parry the hydra-like tentacles of AI and the algorithms. (He also talks about being a Romantic)

• says “Books Need DVD Extras” and I think I agree. Denise also sent me some Book Club discussion questions for her novel The Unmapping, so she’s walking the talk.

noticements

Books Need DVD Extras

This past month, I was ill for a week, and so, per my internal rule, I allowed myself to watch The Sopranos. I began watching it for the first time in late 2022 when I had food poisoning in India; three and a half years later, I’m still only halfway through season four…

Read more

3 months ago · 22 likes · 10 comments · Denise S. Robbins

Okay, one last AI thing:

📰Substack Headlines

• & have started a podcast.

• entered into some exclusive deal with , and I really can’t wait to see who out-grifts who.

• The third worst president of my lifetime (fuck, man) joined Substack.

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

🖋️Writing

The upside of biffing my Substack account is that I had more time for writing. I didn’t use it for writing, but I had the time! I drafted out a short dark humor crime story for that Zevon anthology I mentioned, but I’ve left myself with only 7 days to actually write the damn thing now. I am coming to the conclusion that I will never win a writing competition for the sheer fact that I will never make a writing deadline4.

Instead of writing I started rewatching True Detective and going to the gun range. Unrelated, I swear. Also: making sure my elderly dogs get their walks in despite the cold and snow and crafting workout routines that I will never follow.

❄️Fleeting Thoughts

You know how at the beginning of Whose Line Is It Anyway? they say, “everything’s made up and the points don’t matter?” Apparently, that is the rating system my bill-paying job adopted this year. Despite being told I had “leadership potential” and having a rolodex of positive feedback, I was found to only “partially meet expectations.” This of course stemmed from telling my know-nothing boss that they, in fact, knew nothing.

In hindsight, not a great strategy. I calculated in dollars how much my honesty cost me, and well, had I known I would’ve gotten my money’s worth. The blow was cushioned by the fact that no salaried employees got pay raises this year, because knowing nothing is passed around leadership like a venereal disease.

I really should know better by now. It’s not about performance or about doing things the right way or even right at all. It’s about obeisance and obedience to our leaders. Capitalism is about control; profit’s just a fringe benefit. That’s why middle-managers are all “company men.” Not because the pay’s good, but because they get to exert power over something.

“Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”5

And yes, that was a Flaming Lips reference at the top. There’s also a reference to The Clash.

Beep-boop,

— 01010110 (V)

If you don’t want or can’t afford to become a paid subscriber, but would still like to support the newsletter, you can do so through ko-fi. The ko-fi money mostly goes towards beer and video games, while the subscription money mostly gets reinvested into the Substack community.

The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

Subscribe now

💕Ransom Hearts

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day. Today is Friday the 13th. Do with that what you will.

I don’t celebrate either because I’m not superstitious or romantic (in the general way)1. I did like Valentine’s Day as a kid because it meant free candy, even if it was the little heart-shaped antacids with the ransom notes written on them. It was also my first exposure to girls liking me despite, you know, the cooties. Kiddo is going through his first V-Day at preschool and Mrs. Reads bought little stuffed animals for all the kids in his class. I dropped him off and he loved putting all the gifts into the kids’ paper bags. The kids all showed up dressed in red and hearts.

Kiddo is wearing a green sweatsuit that looks like costume design for Squid Games Jr. because his dad is an idiot who forgot it was Valentine’s Day. Meanwhile, I’m wearing red because I look good in red2.

📚Book Bits

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

  • Finished F&L in LV and man, what a fun read. I can see why people like this Thompson guy. Maybe it’s the temporal distance from the 1970s but this was an absolute blast for me. I loved the drugs, the danger, the rampant stupidity, the empty spectacle. I guess that’s the benefits of reading about a drug-fueled bender versus living through one. It’s all uppers, no downers. All euphoria, no anxiety.

• I Hate the Internet by Jarrett Kobek

  • Likely a full review of this bad boy coming. This is set in 2013, well before Trump’s golden escalator ride, and before the worst of San Francisco’s decline. It feels both prescient3, but also contemporary. There’s a bit of nostalgia we all hold for the pre-COVID times. It’s a nice reminder that shit sucked 10+ years ago, too.

  • I believe I picked up this book after reading ’s article on Kobek by .

• The Way of Excellence by Brad Stulberg

  • With apologies to : I am in fact reading “self-help” and have not, as of yet, killed myself.

  • There is an underlying sameness to a lot of self-help/self-improvement books, but part of that is they are built on each other and there’s not an overwhelming depth to any of them. Structurally, they are all the same: story of a successful person, extrapolated lesson, data points, pep talk, chapter summary.

  • One thing I am enjoying about WoE is that it pushes back on some of the well-established titles in the genre (or at least aspects of them), specifically Flow and Atomic Habits. If I do a review of this one, that’ll likely be the focus.

Recent Book Haul:

• The Man Who Fell from the Sky by Bill Fletcher Jr.

  • Forgot who rec’d this one.

• The Ice at the Bottom of the World by Mark Richard

  • Ditto

• In the Woods by Tana French

  • I have not read any French before (failed it twice in high school, wacka-wacka) and this one is set in Ireland. Sold.

• Major Works by Ludwig Wittgenstein

  • I’m not typically a philosophy reader but you all seem to like throwing these names around, so time to smarten up.

  • Also interested in Wittgenstein for the Cormac McCarthy connection.

• Eve’s Hollywood by Eve Babitz

  • 🚨 Performative male alert. 🚨

  • I believe I first heard of Babitz after the death of Joan Didion, and I think recommended this one.

• Modern Handgun Fundamentals by Brad Engmann

  • Vin, do you need a book about everything?

  • Yes, I do. Kindly shut up.

A reminder that you can send me books or ARCs via the Review Requests page. I’m hoping to continue working through my backlog over the rest of this year. Look for an updated TBR... eventually.

💡Substack Spotlight:

• dropped Eva this morning; this was my prompt to her as part of the campaign to help her and the Editor find permanent housing because landlords deserve their own special level of Hell. It just went up, so I haven’t read it yet, but she told me it’s erotic horror and it mentions Eva Green so I’m all in.

  Ether Dreams

  Eva

  This took a little over a month, the process of moving and finding a place during a snowstorm was a time. We got lucky, we found a sweet spot, on the second viewing. The place and the landlord is equ…

  Read more

  2 months ago · 1 like · 1 comment · Edith Bow and Vinny Reads

• I enjoyed ’s review of ’s debut novel, The Mind Reels. And no, this is not just me shamelessly tagging two Substack bigwigs in the hope of begging a free restack.

  • Naomi also put a request out for a catalog of Substack book reviewers and none of you mentioned me so you’re all dead to me. (I was happy to see and get mentioned. Maybe I should change my name to Michael Reads…)

    Woman of Letters

    The latest avant-garde literary trend

    Freddie DeBoer’s debut novel, The Mind Reels, is about a girl, Alice, who slowly goes crazy, gets medicated, goes crazy again, gets medicated again, etc…

    Read more

    3 months ago · 121 likes · 33 comments · Naomi Kanakia

• , one of the greatest writers alive, reviewed ’s Sheildbreaker Saga Book One: The Last of the Etela4 on YouTube. Book Two, Holiest of Cities, is also being released in installments and you can get started no that here.

📰Substack Headlines

• interviewed . Two Substack personalities I adore, but I have a low-key fear they’ll mix like matches and gasoline. 🔥

  VILE SELF PORTRAITS

  INTERVIEW #9

  My second livestream with Daniel Falatko…

  Read more

  2 months ago · 17 likes · 5 comments · C. James Desmond

• joined Substack. They’ll be releasing new work as well as pulls from the archives. There’s a Valentine’s Day gift for you lonely horndogs literary aficionados. 🐇

  • I have a goal of appearing in Playboy. Preferably my words, but I’m not camera shy.

• Knife Fight Ballet, a new workshop on violence, by of . This is a one and done, so don’t miss your chance. 🔪

  TELEVISION SKY

  Television Sky Presents Knife Fight Ballet, a Workshop from Emil Ottoman

  THE FIRST WORKSHOP FROM EMIL OTTOMAN…

  Read more

  3 months ago · 11 likes · 3 comments · Emil Ottoman

• Cherry Kills by is OUT NOW!

  Automatic Writer

  Publishing day!

  Heya, Alts…

  Read more

  2 months ago · 28 likes · 10 comments · Sean Thomas McDonnell

• Hallway by is $0.99!

  Andy Futuro

  Hallway is $0.99 TODAY ONLY 🚪

  In their cramped, rundown apartment, Tim, Jess, and their unpredictable cat Harvey are barely hanging on—struggling with money, bad neighbors, and a building with more locked doors than answers. When Tim’s only friend vanishes under strange circumstances, the shadows in the hallway seem to deepen, and Harvey’s obsession with a mysterious “nowhere door” turns dangerously intense…

  Read more

  2 months ago · 9 likes · Andy Futuro

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

🖋️Writing

Bill-paying work has slowed down. Sanity-building work begins in earnest.

• I’ve got a little less than a thousand words on a work-in-progress I’m planning to submit to . I feel like it’s going to balloon to 10k words before getting down to 2-3k. Those of you who have joined some of my livestreams have seen/heard some of my early work on this.

• I mentioned last week that I’m hoping to put together a piece of crime fiction for a Warren Zevon anthology from . My current plan is a mix of Bukowski’s hapless PI in Pulp with a little Fear and Loathing to tap into some of Zevon’s more absurdist dark comedy, while grounded in a murder mystery.

• Reviews forthcoming on I Hate the Internet and possibly one on The Way of Excellence.

• I’m working on a fiction piece, tentatively titled Final Rounds, that will likely have some cast-off bits that I can use to (finally) continue on Tallboys.

• I owe several of my Substack homies reviews of their books; I haven’t forgotten about you.

❄️Fleeting Thoughts

Ahhh! It’s 11:25am and I’m still writing this damn thing!

It’s sunny today in Vermont, which is surprising because it has. not. stopped. snowing. I’ve spent 3-4 hours this week shoveling our driveway because I keep forgetting to get a new sparkplug for the snowblower (which inevitably will not fix it and then I will need to pay $200 to someone to tell me, actually it is the sparkplug, I just installed it incorrectly because nothing I learned prior to turning 30 has been of any value whatsoever). Regardless, that was a welcome opportunity to get in some low-intensity exercise and spend some time outside; two things severely lacking from the last few months.

I’ve also been drinking less and sleeping more, so there’s a good chance I have a brain parasite. But I guess you can’t outlive your enemies is you don’t do at least a few healthy things from time to time. Spite is a powerful motivator.

I ran out of antidepressants and I’m a little baffled that suddenly I’m sleeping better, drinking less, more productive, and more active. I’m more inclined to attribute to a sudden uptick in motivation and energy now that work has slowed, but maybe it isn’t coincidental. We’ll see where we are next week, I guess.

XOXO, 😘

— Gossip Girl V

If you don’t want or can’t afford to become a paid subscriber, but would still like to support the newsletter, you can do so through ko-fi. The ko-fi money mostly goes towards beer and video games, while the subscription money mostly gets reinvested into the Substack community.

The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

Subscribe now

🎭Where Will You Go When Your Skin Cannot Contain You?

2026 is the year of disassociation. Disassociation as protection. Disassociation as self-care. Where will you go when your skin cannot contain you?1

My wife and I have been unpacking that riddle as parents of a young kid, in the wake of the Epstein Files. She’s more plugged into social media than I am, spiraling on the mix of conspiracy theories and legitimate revelations mashed together into some grotesque news-adjacent paste. Every major newspaper and network has been hollowed out2 of its actual journalists in favor of infotainers, so you’re stuck getting deep-dives from a 19-year-old with hair that looks like the weedwhacker lost power halfway through the cut.

Meanwhile, I’m watching gun videos on YouTube looking for someone who isn’t 1. crazy 2. Christian or 3. crazy-Christian, while pulling down every counterculture book off my shelves and creating a nice little reading pile beside my desk that the FBI will undoubtedly label “Exhibit A.” I’m also trying to exercise again so I can outlive my enemies for my health.

It’s a vindicating time for paranoid schizophrenics but harrowing as fuck for everyone else. Seeing the whole country is just carnies from the top on down to the TikTok kids and YouTube gun nuts, makes me think of Bo Burnham: “googling ‘derealization’/ hating what you find.”

Shit is very 1999 in an Eyes Wide Shut/The Matrix/The Insider way, and I’d really prefer more of a Boondock Saints/Fight Club/The Iron Giant vibe about now3.

📚Book Bits

• Kiss Me, Judas by

  • See: Substack Spotlight below.

• Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson

  • This is my first HST and I’m sure that comes as a surprise to some, because I give off big “this guy had a HST phase” vibes. I’m enjoying how the characters, the story, and the sentences all have a quality of barely-holding-together. Makes for fun, frantic reading.

• Paradise Lost by John Milton

  • “Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven” is one of the hardest lines ever written.

Recent Book Haul:

• The Way of Excellence by Brad Stulberg

  • I’m a sucker for self-help books, especially at the beginning of the year.

• The Lord by Soraya Antonius

  • NYRB book of the month

• Normal People by Sally Rooney

  • Little free library find

A reminder that you can send me books or ARCs via the Review Requests page. I’m hoping to continue working through my backlog over the rest of this year. Look for an updated TBR as part of the year-end wrap.

💡Substack Spotlight:

is reading through Kiss Me, Judas (first of the Phineas Poe trilogy) on his Substack. The first chapter is available at the link below; the first five chapters are all posted so far. I believe Papa Baer is planning to paywall these at some point but having read this book before, I can highly recommend you dive in. He’s also including snippets from the graphic novel and the screenplay along some additional commentary.

the velvet

if you want to live, call 911

Listen now

3 months ago · 19 likes · 8 comments · will christopher baer

📰Substack Headlines

• Warren Zevon Crime Fiction Anthology by

  • “We aim to build an anthology that captures the spirit of Warren Zevon’s work — sharp, darkly funny, emotionally layered, and just a little dangerous.”

• Knife Fight Ballet, a new workshop on violence, by of

  TELEVISION SKY

  Television Sky Presents Knife Fight Ballet, a Workshop from Emil Ottoman

  THE FIRST WORKSHOP FROM EMIL OTTOMAN…

  Read more

  3 months ago · 11 likes · 3 comments · Emil Ottoman

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

🖋️Writing

There are 4(!!) projects in the works right now. One is an essay for a Substack litmag that I am pounding my head against, trying to make it take cohesive form. It’s a reflection on boxing/violence, American culture, and our love of carny-ass conmen. Second is an essay on Paradise Lost. Three and four are fiction pieces, one for the aforementioned Zevon anthology based on “Desperados Under the Eaves.” The last is a fiction piece that tangentially involves boxing, so it’ll probably build or run-parallel to the essay.

“Desperados” is the only one with a hard deadline. “Shark closest to the boat,” as the new annoying workspeak goes4. I’ve been doing bulleted outlines as a way to get thoughts down on paper, rearranging and building off those thoughts but every time I go actually write-write I catch my “internal editor” saying how much my shit sucks shit. We’ll try plying him with booze.

❄️Fleeting Thoughts

I’ve mentioned before that I usually write these digests as the week progresses and do a final edit late Thursday or early Friday. I saved this section for Friday morning, and I’m glad I did. I’ve been listening to Frank Turner this morning and — despite the cold — the sun is shining brightly here in the mountains. The air is crisp and my home smells like a bakery (because it is).

It’s easy to spiral, especially for a natural pessimist like myself. When there’s so much dark, it’s easy to lose sight of the light. I’m leaving work early today to watch Kiddo do a presentation at his school. I’m going to dinner with friends I haven’t seen in too long tomorrow night. The Patriots are in the Super Bowl on Sunday.

It’s easy to look up at the sky and see only the vast dark. But you’ve got to remember: “once there was only dark, if you ask me the light’s winning.”

Sic semper tyrannis. 🐍

— V

If you don’t want or can’t afford to become a paid subscriber, but would still like to support the newsletter, you can do so through ko-fi. The ko-fi money mostly goes towards beer and video games, while the subscription money mostly gets reinvested into the Substack community.

The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

Subscribe now

🗳️Armalite and Ballot Box

Armalite and ballot box was a political catchphrase used to define the strategy pursued by Irish republicans, from 1981 up until the 1994 IRA ceasefire,^[1] by which Sinn Féin ceased its policies of election boycott and abstentionism and instead contested elections in Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland, while the Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) pursued an armed campaign to end Northern Ireland’s status as part of the United Kingdom.^[2]

Armalite refers to the AR-15 and AR-18 Armalite rifles… The IRA smuggled significant quantities of these rifles into Northern Ireland during the early 1970s, and the “Armalite” became a symbol of republican armed struggle.^[3]

I bought a gun this week. I am not thrilled about it, but I was less thrilled to be living unarmed in this current iteration of America. That math worked itself out, I guess. It’s a Canik SFx Rival handgun for those of you who are into such things. I don’t like the idea of holding it. I don’t like the idea of it in my house or near my family but keeping other things out of my house and away from my family is its purpose, so again: the math worked itself out.

It is a small step and will unfortunately be followed by more. I am in the market for a shotgun and a semi-automatic rifle as well. Up until recently I considered myself a pacifist; I guess I still do, just an armed one now. The bloodlust at the core of being American has finally gotten to me. It is hard to believe in the “American Dream” and the “promise of America,” and if you can no longer believe in the existence of “better angels” than you are just an unarmed sheep amongst well-armed wolves.

Make no mistake: this is a stopgap. The plan is to leave. Expatriate. I never liked this idea because I always thought that if you believed in something you should work to realize it. I’ve come to the conclusion that the America I want to live in and raise my family in will not arrive in my lifetime, if ever. The damage wrought by the neoliberalism and oligarchism of the last 50ish years is not irreversible, but I will be long dead by the time it is undone. In the interim, the seclusion of the mountains no longer feels like enough of a distance from people who might thing my wife’s name has too many vowels or that I’m the “wrong kind” of American.

I have no illusions about what happens if the jackboots come to the door. But I also know that I won’t be able to talk any of them to death either.

nationalshutdown.org

📚Book Bits

• I finished C.S. Lewis’s Preface to Paradise Lost while working (slowly) through The Essential Paradise Lost. My plan, following its completion, is to read through the whole work and then Orlando Reade’s What In Me Is Dark. Lewis’s work is wonderful. He makes no bones about his biases and still mounts a substantive defense of Milton that has enriched my reading of the text. It has made we want to delve even deeper into the work, and it is very likely you all will get book-by-book essays on Paradise Lost but also accompanying live readings.

Recent Book Haul:

• was gracious enough to send me parts 2 and 3 of his Narrator Cycle, Transcendence and Transition. In fact, I got the author proof copy of Transition because it was all he had left, so Ian: please become the next John Grisham or Stephen King so I can retire off the resale value.

A reminder that you can send me books or ARCs via the Review Requests page. I’m hoping to continue working through my backlog over the rest of this year. Look for an updated TBR as part of the year-end wrap.

💡Substack Spotlight:

has become an immediate read for me on here. His latest, to men who can't say sorry, is cutting and excellent.

Yours, Inigo

to men who can't say sorry

"We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed. A few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to pers…

Read more

3 months ago · 92 likes · 25 comments · Inigo Laguda

Likewise, 1 draws on his background in the psych ward to shed light on the twisted reality that is modern America in who the fuck are we.

Involuntary

who the fuck are we

I read somewhere that Minneapolis and its cousin Saint Paul are known as the cities along the river of two thieves. I don’t know the river’s proper name but I presume the reference is the two thieves crucified alongside the christ. The two random sinners, one of them a liar. It hits me that the people of Minneapolis like the rest of us are flashing hard to six years back when George Floyd was murdered under an open sky on the street by a gang of unmasked police officers in the laziest most heartless way imaginable and captured on a single bystander’s video. A video shot by a good samaritan bearing witness, a rough nine minute video of a white man killing a black man in public that rocked the country in a way that it hadn’t been rocked since Emmet Till or Kent State…

Read more

3 months ago · 56 likes · 4 comments · will christopher baer

📰Substack Headlines

• Knife Fight Ballet, a new workshop on violence, by of

  • A significantly more direct and impactful way to get feedback from Substack’s Editor than my usual method: waiting for him to yell at me in Notes.

  TELEVISION SKY

  Television Sky Presents Knife Fight Ballet, a Workshop from Emil Ottoman

  THE FIRST WORKSHOP FROM EMIL OTTOMAN…

  Read more

  3 months ago · 11 likes · 3 comments · Emil Ottoman

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

🖋️Writing

had this quote from a recent piece that stuck with me. I’ve been feeling that itch toward fiction, and it is drawing me away from some essays I had promised to write. It feels borderline pointless to talk about the cultural implication of something that happened earlier this month. That was several paradigm shifts ago! But also, with my skill level it feels gauche to attempt anything that deals directly with the flaming hate circus going on right now.

Of course, everything feels that way to some extent. It feels askew to read a book about angels and demons from the 1600s, or post to Notes, or play video games.

❄️Fleeting Thoughts

I removed an electrical outlet, installed a media box, rewired the outlet, and mounted a new television set this week. I enjoy doing manual labor, but nothing makes me feel more inadequate in the traditional sense of masculinity2 than my inexperience with rudimentary maintenance work. This task went significantly better than my attempts at small engine repair (I did not fix the lawnmower, but I also did not blow myself to smithereens).

I always think about education when I think about these questions of “masculine” knowledge. I bought my wife flowers this week. I know (now) that you need to trim the stems after buying them and remove any leaves that may come in contact with the water in the vase. These flowers I bought were pretty but top heavy (I have no idea what kind they are), so when I put them in a vase they flopped over, lifeless. My wife knew that the solution was - in hindsight, obviously - a taller vase that would support the stems. Would I have ever figured this out on my own? Who is to say.

The flowers look nice. the TV is slightly crooked.

Chinga la migra. ✊

— V

If you don’t want or can’t afford to become a paid subscriber, but would still like to support the newsletter, you can do so through ko-fi. The ko-fi money mostly goes towards beer and video games, while the subscription money mostly gets reinvested into the Substack community.

The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

Subscribe now

🍺Opinions, Domestic and Imported

To a certain extent, Substack is 2012 Twitter for people who can’t shut the fuck up. What I mean is: like early Twitter (and current TwiX) the bad takes are ubiquitous, but the number of characters expressing the bad takes are exponential. Someone in my feed restacked whatever Liza Libes is going on about these days. Here’s someone who could fall out of a boat and miss the ocean. To put it simply: just because I wrote a lot of words about something does not make your subjective take any closer to objectivity. It does, however, tend to make you more pedantic and annoying.

To wit1: Former friend of the Stack, of had some truly objectionable, mind-numbingly stupid, borderline sociopathic subjective takes on the preferred beverage of gods and men (beer).

I get that controversy creates cash, but have you no decency, sir?!

I tried (and failed) to reign myself in with my responses to this unforgiveable take because no matter how well-read and well-practiced one may be in the field of beer-brewing and beer-consuming, one’s “best” beer will always be someone else’s undrinkable watery piss-swill less favorite. Opinions, after all, are just passion looking for a release valve and no amount of my (extensive) study on the great art of zymurgy would make my subjective opinion any more objective.

I’ll just say that I’m glad the Magazine Non Grata events are BYOB2, just in case anyone with functioning tastebuds happens to show up3.

📚Book Bits

• My first big project of 2026 is going to be Paradise Lost. I’m starting with The Essential Paradise Lost by John Carey, and I’m going to move into the full Paradise Lost by John Milton and mix in some additional commentary with What in Me Is Dark by Orlando Reade. From there I’m going to decide if I have Lucifer fatigue or whether or not to seek out some additional reading.

• I’m planning to do the same with Dante’s Divine Comedy and Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian this year. My hope is to pull together some interesting essays for you all.

Recent Book Haul:

• Vol. 1, No. 1.

• Love, Kurt - The Vonnegut Love Letters by Kurt and Edith Vonnegut

  • This is our first selection for the “Busy Writers Book Club” being hosted by me and on the Discord.

• No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

• Friday by Michel Tournier (NYRB)

A reminder that you can send me books or ARCs via the Review Requests page. I’m hoping to continue working through my backlog over the rest of this year. Look for an updated TBR as part of the year-end wrap.

💡Substack Spotlight:

has an excellent write-up on The Departed, one of my favorite movies and the second most-mocked among my friend group. The first is The Town.

reviewed the excellent Pedro Paramo for… ugh, Magazine Non-Grata. This is a book I recommend a lot but have not reviewed because I found it difficult to capture its appeal. Brandon is up to that task, though.

📰Substack Headlines

• is releasing his debut novella Cherry Kills under ’s Tiny Worlds Publishing. This looks like an absolute blast!

  

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn. Or leave it up to the Fates.

🖋️Writing

Everyone is probably sick of me talking about my bill-paying job’s encroachment on my soul-saving “job.” I know I am. As work has started to wane ever-so-slightly, I’ve started to pick up a little additional writing. I did an impromptu Substack Live earlier this week while making notes and an outline. It was mostly me ranting about politics, but politics are tangentially related to the writing (and, well, everything).

I’ve also joined a couple coworking livestreams over on the Television Sky Discord. Per : “Performative writing is still writing.”

My in-laws are here this weekend, so if I can steal some time away from the household tasks they need addressing, I may start putting down some of my fiction thoughts in more depth.

❄️Fleeting Thoughts

The beginning of the year fog is starting to lift. Giving myself the permission to shirk all non-essential responsibilities for the month made survival possible. I’m sure my doctor and my liver will be less than thrilled with the lack of exercise and alcohol-restraint, but swapping reading & writing for video games for a little less than three weeks has my brain chomping at the bit to re-engage with challenge, depth, and literature. I’m starting to mix in some Paradise Lost and bicep curls with ARC Raiders and Heady Toppers.

Everyone comes to moderation via different paths. I’ve found that penduluming between extreme debasement and extreme discipline is what works “best” for me, mostly because it requires the least amount of time management. Am I being a piece of garbage today or not? Your mileage may vary.

See you when I see you. 🤙

— V

If you don’t want or can’t afford to become a paid subscriber, but would still like to support the newsletter, you can do so through ko-fi. The ko-fi money mostly goes towards beer and video games, while the subscription money mostly gets reinvested into the Substack community.

The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

Subscribe now

🎮Dystopias Near and Far

I’ve largely given myself the month of January “off” from reading and writing. My busy season at work is supposed to run from September to early December with a brief respite around the holidays, and then again for the first two weeks of January. Instead, it will run from September through to the end of January, with no respite. I’ve made it clear to my boss’s boss that I’m not running this circus again, but that does nothing to ease the immediate.

In addition to not using my brain creatively, I’ve also been trying to avoid “the News.” “The News” feels like little more than Real Housewives on the Potomac for the better part of the past two decades, but there’s certain things that are unavoidable. Namely, the extrajudicial execution of an American citizen by the United States’ secret police. I’m not naive enough to pretend this doesn’t happen every single day. We live in Hell and moral compasses don’t work here. Maybe it’s the blatant gaslighting or the doubling-down on the lawless state-sponsored violence, or just that I was already in the metaphorical basement when this moral sinkhole opened.

And you just go to work and pretend it’s important and you don’t talk about mothers being gunned down or children being black-bagged because it’s taboo to “talk politics” in the workplace. God Stakeholders forbid that humanity or empathy ever interfere with efficiency and the bottom-line. An appropriate term for our rat race to the nadir of existence.

I don’t know if kids are just more attuned to the world or something, but Kiddo’s been having nightmares and hasn’t been sleeping through the night. More nights than not, I’ve had to share his twin bed with him, on the floor, so that he can sleep, and I can stare into the darkness of his room and wonder what the fuck kind of world he’s going to grow up in and whether or not kindergarten is too young for a bulletproof backpack…

My escape has been a video game called ARC Raiders, which I’ve mentioned here before. It’s a different sort of apocalypse with some sort of climate catastrophe (okay, so not that different) and robots from space. Humanity is forced underground and needs to scavenge “Topside” for materials to keep the underground civilization afloat. Of course, once you’re Topside, it is lawless. I try not to think too much about shooting someone with or without provocation.

📚Book Bits

• Like I said above, I have not been reading much this month. I did, however, participate in a live reading of The Daughters of Vei with , , , and . It was a lot of fun and you can watch the replay here. Look for cameos from and .

  THE SHIELDBREAKER SAGA

  Fiction Is Culture Presents: THE DAUGHTERS OF VEI by Thomas Clark Schecter

  On Saturday evening January 10, Fiction is Culture took to the airwaves via the TelevisionSky Discord server and performed a full reading of Tom’s novella The Daughters of Vei, with special contributions from our dear friends James Worth and M.P. Fitzgerald…

  Listen now

  4 months ago · 31 likes · 4 comments · Tom Schecter, will christopher baer, Emily S Hurricane, Slater Henatay, Haly, the Moonlight Bard ✒️, and Vinny Reads

Recent Book Haul:

• Vol. 1, No. 1.

• Love, Kurt - The Vonnegut Love Letters by Kurt and Edith Vonnegut

  • This is our first selection for the “Busy Writers Book Club” being hosted by me and on the Discord.

• No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood

• Friday by Michel Tournier (NYRB)

A reminder that you can send me books or ARCs via the Review Requests page. I’m hoping to continue working through my backlog over the rest of this year. Look for an updated TBR as part of the year-end wrap.

💡Substack Spotlight:

I am playing catch-up and also trying to be more discerning about what I spend time reading. Neither are going well! I hope to have some useful recommendations for you all again, starting next week.

📰Substack Headlines

• is doing a 3-day Summit, presenting live readings from authors from 1/16 to 1/18 (this weekend!). You can — and should — find out more about that here: https://tifpress.com/tif-summit-2026/. I will be reading Red Sky Mourning on Sat, Jan 17 at 7:30 PM EST.

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

🖋️Writing

I’ve been asked to write a few things which I (desperately) want to execute on, but I’m battling against a depressive malaise that is making production difficult. I also have a couple of Substack-related projects — a series of essays — that I also want to do this year. I have initial notes on these projects, but going from ideation to execution requires fighting through a not-insignificant amount of inertia.

❄️Fleeting Thoughts

Kyle Kinane is a hilarious comedian, and he has a bit about hitting rock bottom. It goes something like “I haven’t hit rock bottom yet, but I do keep banging off the sides on the way down.” I am fortunate, especially comparatively but I have a hard time getting the chemicals in brain to recognize that. I fell asleep at 7:30pm on Tuesday while putting Kiddo down. I woke up at 8:30p, took a shower and went back to my own bed. I slept like shit. Roughly 11 hours in a bed; 14 minutes of deep sleep.

I called out of work on Wednesday. Slept from 10a-12:30p, picked up Kiddo from early release, and was back in bed from 1p-3pm. I started searching online (always a wonderful idea) for some sort of terminology so I could feel more control over the situation. “Burnout” kept popping up because of course it did since we’ve medicalized and pathologized every possible human feeling or emotion.

Mrs. Reads and I had our 10-year dating anniversary on Thursday. We celebrated by surviving the week and buying shit we don’t need in order to suppress the feeling of living through the Anthropocene and the rapid disassociation that comes with watching jackbooted gravy seals teargassing infants. Stop resisting.

Anyway, it’s Friday now. And that makes things different somehow. Enjoy the weekend and the holiday for the guy murdered by the government for asking for basic human decency. Try not to puke when his name is invoked to justify dragging a mother away from her kids, or vice versa.

See you when I see you. 🤙

— V

If you don’t want or can’t afford to become a paid subscriber, but would still like to support the newsletter, you can do so through ko-fi. The ko-fi money mostly goes towards beer and video games, while the subscription money mostly gets reinvested into the Substack community.

I wasn’t sure if I was going to do one of these year-end posts or not. Usually by the time the actual end of the year rolls around, people are sick and tired of “year-end” posts. But I needed to do my goals and planning for 2026 anyway, so why not share with the class?

Also, threatened me:

Smell Ya Later, 2025

There were 80 posts to Vinny Reads in 2025, including 28 weekly digests, 9 Substack reviews, and 6 works of original fiction. We also did over 15 hours of live reading, and that was just for the Midnight Vault II.

Along the way, we went from 11 subscribers to 378!

I would like to shout-out all the lovely folks that I’ve met (via Substack) this year, but that would take too long, make for shitty reading, and I’d probably forget and offend a great number of you. But I will shout-out my cousint , who has been my partner-in-crime for a number of live readings, a fellow Fiction Is Culture cultist, and a ‘wildly successful’ friend.

Similarly, I read and enjoyed a great amount of Substack fiction and essays this year. I did not, however, read them with an eye toward compiling a “best of” list1. Instead of trying to scrounge through the arid wasteland of my memory, here are a couple recent notes that highlight some of the work I enjoyed this year:

• Substack’s embed feature isn’t great, but this note references an essay by who is probably Substack’s foremost Cormac McCarthy scholar and has a lot of excellent Cormacian essays.

I mentioned the 6 works of fiction at the top. I’m actually proud of a good portion of them. I attended two workshops led by and , respectively. They were phenomenal learning experiences, but I found myself intimidated and blocked by the workshop structure. I have a lot of unblocking to do in order to get into a more consistent writing routine, but despite that 2025 was my most productive writing year (so far). I’m incredibly thankful to Craig and Charlene for being wonderful and engaging teachers, and to Emil for setting up these workshops. I hope to take more workshops in the future, but first I need to toil in the prose mines alone for a bit.

Lastly, I want to shout-out the Fiction Is Culture squad, who - in addition to being rad and admirable artists - are also rad and admirable people. FiC launched a number of mutual aid initiatives over the course of 2025, putting the literal and figurative money where the mouth is when it comes to supporting art and people. I couldn’t be prouder of this group and my small contributions to it.

Subscribe now

2-0-2-6

Reading

My first approach to reading is not academic. I have no MFA or PhD, and my undergrad was in Computer Science. What I have is a love of story, a burgeoning appreciation for craft,2 and a fascination with the art of literature and writing. I’m fascinated by storytelling and artistry, and my primary means of learning are deep study and practical application. Study > Try > Study > Improve. Repeat until satisfied.

I have a strong sense that 2026 will be a year of deep study. I own a number of academic texts on the work of Cormac McCarthy, Paradise Lost, and others. It’s time to crack those spines. I also have a wealth of writing craft texts. These books will be the majority of my 2026 reading and, likely, my 2026 writing.

I will also be co-hosting a “Busy Writers’ Book Club” with . The goal is a very doable 1 book per quarter, based around writing and craft. I’ll likely share more information about this in next week’s digest when work slows down and Haly tells me what to do we plan things out a bit more.

Writing

Of course, I will continue to read and review Substack fiction. I’ve set a goal for myself of 48+ weekly digests and 12+ Substack reviews this year. In addition to those, you’ll likely get my occasional essay on writing/reading/Substack and hopefully a couple on Paradise Lost, Blood Meridian, and The Divine Comedy.

I’m hoping to produce some essays for Substack publications this year both to stretch myself as a writer and the hopefully grow my reach here. This is something I’ve shied away from in the past because my “style” doesn’t always lend itself to picking a position and defending its merits3. I’d also like to contribute to some anthologies this year, but this will also require significantly more rigor and discipline than I’ve previously displayed.

To wit, my goal is either 6 pieces or 10,000+ words of original fiction produced (and shared) this year.

Reading… but Live

We’re kicking off 2026 with not one but two Live Readings.

• On 1/10/26 at 8:30pm EST I will be joining , , , and to do a full live read of The Daughters of Vei.

• On 1/17/26 at 7:30pm EST I will be reading Red Sky Mourning as part of ’s TiF Summit. I’m smack-dab between X and Y, which is really primo positioning. I hope I don’t biff it up.

Outside of that, Substack Live is something I’m going to cut back on in 2026, specifically the agenda-free hangouts. I’m going to try to refocus my Lives around reading for events like Weather Reports or Midnight Vault and possibly the occasional interview. This is mostly to impose better time discipline on myself.

Supporting Art & Artists

The Vincents aka Substack Awards

This started as a joke and picked up a little momentum, so we’re going to try it. I’m going to do an end-of-year awards based solely on my personal preferences and what I’ve been able to read in a calendar year. I’m planning to keep my ambitions modest for this year, maybe just a brief “Live” award ceremony and a handful of categories. I’ll announce more about this once I’ve got details hammered out.

Subscriptions

At the end of 2025, I have 19 paid subscribers and 16 paid subscriptions; a roughly 1:1 ratio of Substack money-in to Substack money-out. Barring some sort of overnight success, I’m never going to make money on Substack. And that’s okay! My approach to Substack has always been to pay-it-forward and if it comes back around to me, great, and if not then I’m still supporting art and artists. No-lose scenario.

In that vein, I’d like to keep that number roughly equivalent in 2026 while increasing both paid subscribers and paid subscriptions. How can you help?

• You can become a paid subscriber. I keep my subscription prices at the lowest possible set by Substack and run deep discounts. I do this to make it affordable to support my work, but also because there isn’t a lot I provide that isn’t free of charge. And oops, was that a 50% discount link?

• If you’d prefer that Substack doesn’t take its pound of flesh, you can donate via ko-fi.

• If you are a writer/author: you can send me copies of your book(s)! Alternatively, create a bundle that pairs a subscription to your Substack with your novel. does this. does, too. I also got a lifetime subscription to — along with editing services — as a bonus for signing up for ’s workshop.

Wrapping Up and Starting Fresh

I’m also trying to lose weight, exercise more, kiss hands and shake babies, you know, the usual New Year’s stuff. You probably don’t care about that, but it is on my mind. And I turn 40 this year. For real this time, and not just that I’ve been telling people I’m 40 for the past two years to ease the encroaching dread of mortality that comes with another milestone year. It’s time to either get serious about this writing thing, or buy a sportscar and start banging co-eds.

Guess we’ll see what happens.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! 🤙
- V

The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

Subscribe now

📆Shut It Down

This will likely we the last Weekly Digest of 2025; roughly 7 months’ worth of ‘em. If I find the time, I may do a year-end wrap if just to appease myself. In the meantime, we’re off to Maine for Christmas in the middle of next week.

I have very much checked out of 2025. I have let me brain start to puddle, and - to be honest - it has been kind of great. My personality bends Type-A so I tend to load up my proverbial plate with too much and then complain when I get a tummy ache. To continue that analogy: I am in a fasting state right now. Limited writing, a little low-intensity reading, and a lot of YouTube and video games.

I’ve been playing ARC Raiders which is a fairly new game — third-person, “NASA-punk”, PvPvE extraction shooter1. It has been insanely fun and surprisingly cooperative/friendly for a game with PvP elements. If you play, I’m AntiHeroV#5901 on there. Please don’t shoot me.

I’ve also been watching Let’s Play videos and streams on YouTube. If you are unfamiliar with the Let’s Play genre, it is basically like giving the controller to your friend who is way better at games than you and watching them smash through levels. It is, I think it’s fair to say, an objectively dumb way to spend your time. I struggle with meditation, but I can Zen the fuck out watching nerds talk their way through gaming. I’m drawn to the gamers around my age that seem to still be genuinely shocked and thankful that they can provide for their families by playing video games. They have that same look in their eye that I got as a kid booting up a new game2.

There’s also busty 19-year-olds, Andrew Tate-adjacent bros, and anime cat-girls that do Let’s Plays, too, if that’s more your speed.

📚Book Bits

• I started The Monster Baru Cormorant — sequel to The Traitor… — and it is, well, more of the same so far. Which is good, but I’m waiting for more. It did have a pretty intense opening, I’ll say that.

• I’m bringing Intrinsic by to Maine with me. And I’ll likely bring my e-Reader, so any of you that sent me ARCs or eBooks, there is a non-zero chance that it may get read while I’m avoiding family.

Recent Book Haul:

• The Inquisitor’s Manual by Antonio Lobo Antunes

• Blood Meridian (Hardcover) by Cormac McCarthy - a gift for my dad. I was not joking about this.

A reminder that you can send me books or ARCs via the Review Requests page. I’m hoping to continue working through my backlog over the rest of this year. Look for an updated TBR as part of the year-end wrap.

💡Substack Spotlight:

We’ve got a couple of things coming up in the near future. I’ll be joining and Friends to celebrate The Last of the Etela hitting 150 sales on Tuesday 12/23 at 1pm EST. Tom is going to tell the story of him falling, pantsless, into the East River.

I’m also working with Tom, , and others on a Live-reading project tentatively scheduled for mid-January. This one is related to Tom’s Daughters of Vei series. I’ll share more about these two events as details are finalized3.

Lastly, Haly messaged me this morning about another project. I was about to cry “uncle,” but it actually seems reasonable/doable, so instead I said “yes.” Be on the lookout for that announcement shortly as well.

And this is why I am letting my brain pickle and vegetate now, because there will be no rest for the weary in short order.

📰Substack Headlines

• None this week. The year is over.

• Please don’t release any new stuff! Let everyone catch up on their reading!

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

🖋️Writing

My busy periods at work run from September to early December and then most of December is (usually) quiet, followed by a mad dash the first two weeks of January. That fallow period in December has been slightly more active this year, and it drained a lot of my writing energy. There are three or four stories I want to work on in the very-near-term, but buckling down at this time of year is not my forte.

I have a couple quiet workdays ahead, though, so we’ll see.

❄️Fleeting Thoughts

I’m probably not gonna do that year-end wrap after all. It always feels like grist for the content machine. I think the reason that there are so many of them is that they are relatively easy (and fun) to write, but they are almost universally boring to read. Kind of like how Spotify Wrapped is really only interesting to you, but you share it with everyone anyway. Mrs. Reads and I like to take it easy on New Year’s Eve most years. In the past we enjoyed watching the normally serious CNN anchors get absolutely obliterated live on-air. It was a weird, almost taboo parasocial thing to see Brooke Baldwin and Don Lemon get verge-of-weepy drunk and talk about their dating lives at 1am. Part voyeurism, part tragicomedy.

This year we’ll probably order Chinese and read books. If I’m feeling ambitious, I may put together a co-gaming set-up in the living room so we can cozy game together. But — as has been the theme of this week’s digest — ambition is generally on hold until 2026.

Speaking of… talk to you then.

Stay frosty. 🤙

— V

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The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

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🎄Ho x3

We wrapped up the Midnight Vault II livestreams last Friday night/Saturday morning with a near-six-hour read-a-thon that finally saw us crack 100+ stream viewers. It would be hyperbole to say it was a “dream come true,” but I did not expect that many folks to turn out. Fiction is alive and well, even if it’s just in our little community.

The downside of reading through so many stories is my throat is shot. It’s likely I’ve got that flu/cold/whatever1 that’s going around and it’s negative-a-billion degrees up here, none of which helps.

On the upside, I have a brief reprieve from my busy season at work for the holidays before it kicks back up on 1/1/2026. Depending on how things shake out you will definitely not see a Weekly Digest on 12/26/25 and may or may not see one on 1/2/26.

On Wednesday evening, I tried to lift my spirits — Christmas and otherwise — by decorating our tree with Kiddo. I was upset from work (more on that below) and then more upset that work2 could make me so upset that I’m not enjoying this moment with my kid. It’s more and more difficult to focus on the positive aspects of the holidays the older you get, because it becomes more and more about logistics until they’re here.

A quick story: every few years my family gets together for Christmas, and we hit that point in the rotation where both my brothers are spending Christmas with my family instead of their in-laws. During these Christmases there is inevitably a point where the wine and bourbon-enhanced egg nog have been flowing and goofy Christmas music is playing and everyone in my family is dancing to the music — from outward appearances they are dancing to different music, but I digress — including Kiddo and his two cousins. I don’t dance and I’m sure my family has thoughts as to why that is, but instead I sit in the glow of the tree and will usually grab phones and camera and capture the moment. This is probably when I’m most at peace with the world.

📚Book Bits

• I finished a re-read of Fight Club and if you held a gun to my head in my mouth, I might tell you I like the movie better. Which is a compliment to the novel, because it functions like an outline of the movie in many ways, but Fincher is master visual storyteller and he nails some of Palahniuk’s key scenes.

• Hey, did you like ’s Shieldbreaker: Last of the Etela? Then you might like The Traitor Baru Cormorant by Seth Dickinson. I listened to this on audiobook while driving between Vermont and Cape Cod. It trades the religion and warfare tactics for economics and political cloak-and-dagger, but it is incredibly well thought out with nary a dragon or magic spell in sight.

Recent Book Haul:

• Money by Martin Amis

• Swim Home to the Vanished by Brennan Shay Basham

• Something Rich and Strange by Ron Rash

• Walking Practice by Dolki Min

  • Cover art sold me on this one

• Trainspotting by Irvine Welsh

• The Complete Plays by Aristophanes

• Piñata by Leopoldo Gout

  • More cool cover art

• A Song for a New Day by Sarah Pinsker

• You Dream of Empires by Alvaro Enrique

• The Wedding People by Alison Espach

• The Books of Jacob by Olga Tokarczuk

  • I’ve been meaning to read more Tokarczuk since Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead knocked me out a couple years ago. Apparently, she has a new book out this month, too.

• Lose Yourself by

A reminder that you can send me books or ARCs via the Review Requests page. I’m hoping to continue working through my backlog over the rest of this year. Look for an updated TBR as part of the year-end wrap.

💡Substack Spotlight:

I didn’t have a lot of reading energy this week. I played catch-up on a number of articles I had queued up, but unfortunately, I don’t have a lot to share with you all this week, because I didn’t read a lot of Substack this week.

For a twist: leave me your favorite fiction or article from Substack this week in the comments!

📰Substack Headlines

• Mutual Aid is up and running for and . You can find out more information on how to donate to keep them from homelessness, as well as about the cool shit they have on offer for donations.

  • Editing Services by Emil

  • New Year’s Cards by Television Sky

  • Stream of Consciousness Flash by Edith

• As a supporter of batshit insane ideas, and in general, I wanted to draw your attention to this one-woman, no-platform-fee crowdfunding effort:

  Speculative Fiction and Dark Tales | Nocturnal Narrator

  I’m raising $10,000 to write you more stories. Want in?

  I’m going to get straight to the point. From now until December 19th, 2025, I’m running a tiny, absolutely insane, one-woman Kickstarter in your inbox…

  Read more

  5 months ago · 15 likes · Nikki | Nocturnal Narrator

Quick note: Frequent readers of this Digest know my feelings about living in a late-stage capitalist hellscape, and part of that is why I like to draw attention to people suffering under the thumb of oligarchic greed and/or trying to carve a path out of the rat-race. I also understand that the vast majority of people are living paycheck-to-paycheck which makes helping others more difficult (this is, of course, by design). My way of saying, if you’re like me and feel guilt when you cannot contribute to every initiative: don’t.

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

🖋️Writing

The upside of work slowing down over the next couple weeks is that I get to moderately recharge my batteries, but I also get a little more energy reserved for writing. I got a deadline extension on a project I’m working on, and I want to absolutely knock it out of the park. Work began, in earnest, this week.

❄️Fleeting Thoughts

It snowed 6+ inches before I left for the weekend and then it snowed another 6+ inches while I was away. That is probably a metaphor for something, but I’ve been too busy shoveling to figure out what.

I had a 1x1 with my boss on Tuesday, and then a 1x1 with her boss on Wednesday about how I don’t want to work for my boss no more. I work in operations and basically my job is to make things work with a level of efficiency that turns a profit for the shareholders. What I actually do is find ways to improve that level of efficiency but only communicate a fraction of the improvement so that profits increase slightly but the amount of work decreases or remains the same so that they never reach a level of efficiency to spark a “reduction in force.”

The problem with being good at your job is that the reward is always more work. I assume this is true of every job. I also assume in every office job there are two types of people: those who attend meetings, and those that do actual work (and are dragged to meetings). Part of why I don’t want to work for my boss is that after almost 20 years, I’ve developed an innate sense of who falls into which category. Regurgitating my own strategies back to me as if they are your own epiphanies is a sure-fire way to get labeled a “meeting attendee.”

On Wednesday, my boss asked me to schedule a meeting. I, politely, said that - from the limited information provided - the meeting is not within our scope. She said schedule the meeting. I reiterated my point, adding additional color around our standard procedures, but decided not to press further because this was a group chat. She said schedule the meeting. I responded in private, saying that this was outside of our scope and that we shouldn’t be leading these discussions or scheduling meetings without a clear agenda or intended outcomes. You’ll never guess what she said next.

I scheduled the meeting; she attended and contributed nothing as meeting attendees do. The whole saga ruined my day and sent me into a bit of anti-humanity, depressive tailspin. All work humor is dark comedy because capitalism is hell.

On Thursday, she scheduled a meeting to “touch base,” and essentially laid out her complaints with me. It was tense and unproductive. She followed up with a written response. Those of you who are writers understand that this was a tactical error. I responded with a point-by-point refutation of everything she wrote… then forwarded it to her boss.

The dynamite is lit, we’ll see who gets stuck holding the stick.

“Nothing on my end, thanks everyone!” 🤙

— V

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The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

Subscribe now

🤪 No Adult Supervision

Mrs. Reads is in Aruba with her girlfriends. Kiddo is with my in-laws. It’s just me and the pets at the Reads Compound this week and we’re all acting like animals. I am getting a little bit of cabin fever since it snowed 6+ inches over this week and the only humans I’ve seen are the mailman and the woman at the grocery store who very clearly gave me the “buying High Lifes again since yesterday?” look.

I’ve said before that when I’m alone I’m in bad company, so to nip that in the bud I tried to mix in equal parts keeping myself busy and safely-contained degeneracy. To wit: I finished a book and wrote a review of it; I did 10+ hours of live-reading; I played 10+ hours of Anno 117; and ate an entire package of Double Stuf Oreos. Who knows what the weekend holds, but I’m going to log off for a large part of it and try to relax before the house fills back up with people, sounds, and activity.

I should also probably shovel the driveway.

📚Book Bits

• ’s the big T is one of my favorite books of the year. Read the full review below and buy a damn copy. I think Clancy has fewer than 30 left, so let’s sell him out!

• I got a small start on ’s Intrinsic novel before I fell down the Midnight Vault rabbit hole. I also queued up American Pleasure by on my eReader. Once I escape the Vault those are next on my list.

• Collin Armstrong’s Polybius was a fun audiobook while driving over the Thanksgiving holiday. Nothing groundbreaking, but a decent pseudo-scifi/horror thriller.

• After I finished Polybius, I put ’s Fight Club on audio. I think I’ve probably watched Fincher’s film a dozen times, but this is my first time revisiting the book since I originally read it in college.

Recent Book Haul:

• The Midnight Vault and Transference (which I shouted-out last week) finally arrived.

• The Morgue Keeper by Ruyan Meng

• A reminder that you can send me books or ARCs via the Review Requests page. I’m hoping to continue working through my backlog over the rest of this year. Look for an updated TBR as part of the year-end wrap.

💡Substack Spotlight:

I don’t know if this counts as shameless self-promotion or just regular shameless promotion. Regardless, I am without shame and read ~15 Midnight Vault stories so far this week:

We’ll be LIVE again tonight, possibly with special guests! I will continue reading more entries from Midnight Vault II. I somewhat jokingly posted to Notes that I’d like to get 100 viewers for tonight’s Live, and man, this community took that and ran with it.

📰Substack Headlines

• is repping The Midnight Vault for our international friends!

• Speaking of the wider world, ’s is launching a membership model that will deliver 4 books per year for £10 per month. You can read more about their announcement here. Membership is limited to 200 members.

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

🖋️Writing

It’s been a slow week for writing because of everything else going on. It’s busy season at the bill-paying job and that dominates my waking hours and all of my excess energy. I did, however, make several adjustments to my desk set-up over the holiday season that has cleared additional space for my typewriter and notebooks. I mentioned that the Lives help me hyper-fixate on reading by giving me both a set schedule and an incentive (people-pleasing). I’m hoping the adjustments will allow me to carry over that focus to writing. Of course, the large-ass monitor isn’t the easiest thing to avoid looking at, but nobody’s perfect.

❄️Fleeting Thoughts

I was chatting with and said to her “this whole year on Substack has been such a learning experience.”1 I may talk about this more as part of a year-end wrap-up, but this weekly digest will be my 77th post in 2025. Even if you knock out all the Livestreams and stuff, that’s still more than a post per week. It felt at numerous times like I saw falling behind, but you look at that raw number, and it feels pretty good.

Those Lives became a bigger part of my “brand” (ew) and caused me to learn a lot about streaming to upgrade from “guy with a phone.” We’re still 10 orders of magnitude from adding a production assistant to Vinny Reads Enterprises, but it has been a wild ride.

Thank you for tagging along and supporting me. 🧡

Yours, ferally... 🤙

— V

If you don’t want or can’t afford to become a paid subscriber, but would still like to support the newsletter, you can do so through ko-fi.

The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

Subscribe now

🦃 Gobble, Etc.

Happy Thanksgiving. I am writing this before Thursday, and you’ll read it after. Something feels oddly out of sequence about all of that, but you are full of turkey and football, and I am in anticipation of it, so let’s float on like nothing’s amiss1.

We’re visiting my in-laws who live a 5-hour-without-traffic drive away. Longtime subscribers of the blog (SOB’s) may recall that while I do not particularly love driving, I do use this time to read via audiobook. I’m planning to listen to Polybius by Collin Armstrong, which I’ve had on my TBR for a while but haven’t gotten around to starting. But Book Bits is the next section, this is one of the two unstructured sections, so let’s get back off topic.

After the holiday, Mrs. Reads is going on a vacation with her gal-pals, and Kiddo is going to spend that time with his grandparents. Just me and the dogs will be making the return trip to Vermont. We’ll be alone for about a week. I know two things about myself: I treasure having alone time like this and I will absolutely squander it. I’m planning on doing some live reads of the Midnight Vault II stories to keep myself in check, but that’s supposed to go in the Substack Spotlight section, so let’s put a pin in that.

📚Book Bits

My apologies to ’s the big T which is vying for time against Anno 117. City simulators (video games, generally) are a guilty pleasure of mine. My goal is to finish the big T before I leave on Wednesday afternoon but barring that I will finish it over the holiday.

There is a mental battle royale going on for what book I will read next. As always, I am open to both bribery and/or flattery if you’d like to tip the scales in your work’s favor.

Recent Book Haul:

• New addition to add to that shelf from :

• I bought a number of books from Book Outlet as part of their $5.99 fiction sale (which I believe is still on-going), but they have not arrived as of this writing.

• I also picked up the original Midnight Vault by , , , et al from Barnes & Noble, thanks to some gift cards.

• I had enough left over to snag Transference by as well… I’m gonna need a bigger shelf.

💡Substack Spotlight:

• Did you hear about MIDNIGHT VAULT II? Have you been living under a rock?!

  • A lot of my homies have pieces in this collection, so I’m going to be doing a live read of The Midnight Vault II. My plan is to do a read around 8 or 9pm EST Monday through Friday, 12/1 - 12/5.

  • Last time I did something like this was The Weather Reports and I got to meet a bunch of cool, new-to-me writers and had a blast doing it. I’ll be left to my own devices next week so let’s have at it! Priority will, of course, be given to writers that are present on the livestream.

• When I die, preserve my corpse for however long it takes for to write the obituary. Alan Moore is one of my favorites, ditto Sorondo so this was a real treat for me. I bought my sub to on the strength of Alex’s Vollmann profile, and it is impressive how far TMR has come in such a short period. A true proof of concept that people want a literary magazine not pointless debating that masquerades as such.

  The Metropolitan Review

  Giant of the Attic

  Alexander Sorondo is an American original, and we are thrilled to have him back in The Metropolitan Review. Sorondo’s singular and boundless excavations of the literary titans of our age have entranced many thousands of readers, and today he returns with a new subject: Alan Moore…

  Read more

  5 months ago · 13 likes · 1 comment · Alexander Sorondo and The Metropolitan Review

• ’s “the literal meaning of life” post reminded me of a Sophia Coppola movie except short, and good. So actually, nothing like a Sophia Coppola movie. It has that NYC-brand ennui and a kind of easy sophistication that a beer-swilling lumberjack like me has to gently mock so as not to feel culturally inferior2.

  my so-called life

  the literal meaning of life

  The November night was dark, the wind was moist, and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 was still throbbing in my ear. Despite the cold, I lingered out front while Alexei finished his cigarette. “Smoke that thing over there, you red square brute. Don’t get it in my hair…

  Read more

  5 months ago · 47 likes · 20 comments · Sudana Krasniqi

• ’s post My Life Is a Lie blew my tiny, little mind. This is (sadly) not fiction, it is (sadly) our American reality. Green does an amazing job of “showing the work” and math of why shit sucks so bad right now. Skip ahead to this part to get to the good (bad) stuff.

  • There’s a side-tangent here about working a 9-to-5 to subsidize a creative life that dovetails with someone’s response to a tweet by one of those white-ass, dead-behind-the-eyes hustle bros that is 27 but with a 45-year-old’s hairline. It ties back to my bitching from last week, but the long-and-short is that anyone working a job and trying to create art is a fucking hero-saint, because the idea that trying to cram a passion into the misshapen blocks of time between cooking, eating, sleeping, laundry, cleaning, kids, friends, family, commuting and responding to dizzying torrent of notifications, interruptions and distractions is somehow easy… makes me want to do a violence.

    Yes, I give a fig... thoughts on markets from Michael Green

    Part 1: My Life Is a Lie

    We’re going to largely skip markets again, because the sweater is rapidly unraveling in other areas as I pull on threads. Suffice it to say that the market is LARGELY unfolding as I had expected — credit stress is rising, particularly in the tech sector. Many are now pointing to the rising CDS for Oracle as the deterioration in “AI” balance sheets accelerates. CDS was also JUST introduced for META — it traded at 56, slightly worse than the aggregate IG CDS at 54.5 (itself up from 46 since I began discussing this topic…

    Read more

    5 months ago · 1968 likes · 118 comments · Michael W. Green

📰Substack Headlines

• I talked last week about the potential for The Vinny Reads Awards for Literary Excellence3. Another thing I’m kicking around is a new irregular series called “Why This Works” where I take a quote or a snippet and deep-dive on why it works so well.

  • Reading through and providing feedback on folks’ writing, I’ll occasionally triple-underline something or write “YES!” in the margins without further explanation. This is usually because the “why” of why that line works would take a lengthy explanation… but that doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be explained at some point.

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

🖋️Writing

I talked about taking a brain rest and Sorondo posted a reply about how Ben Stiller took a break after Tropic Thunder and just watched his kids do karate. Then he came back and did Severance. There’s never an optimal - or even “good” - time to take a rest so the best you can do is try to take one when you feel you need, and probably more often than you actually want to. I am trying strike that balance between recovering from the *gestures wildly* of it all, and my burning desire to show you all that I am not only the smartest man on Substack, but also its best writer4. It’s probably an inferiority complex thing. I’ll never touch 6-feet, but I want to leave more fire in my wake than William T. Sherman5.

❄️Fleeting Thoughts

I read this post from and this note from and it brought up a not-infrequent self-reflection that I may be abnormal in the way I process thoughts and feelings; a borderline sociopathy that inoculates me against feelings of fear and dread, especially tied to time and mortality. I may be the only person who read Denial of Death and shrugged.

“What are you going to do with your one precious life?” Drink Miller High Lifes and read Substacks, apparently.

This is, of course, not true all the time. I can be sent into histrionics because my old-ass dog gives me the “I’m tired, boss” look and next thing I know I’m fetal and weeping. But I do often feel that I don’t, uh, feel the same way the humans do. I’ve never cried at a book, and my only reactions to movies are embarrassing6. Maybe it’s the math of it all. If were in the top 99.9% of people that ever existed, that would barely be enough to get me a Wikipedia entry with a picture. The Eras Tour is just Ozymandias’s soundtrack.

While this is good for not, you know, being paralyzed by the primordial fear of death, it’s not exactly lighting a fire under my ass to write more. I’d probably be happier if I was sad more often; trade in the quarterly mental breakdown for something more streamlined. This, too, is a brain virus: attempting to optimize emotions to be more productive. So yeah, maybe I don’t think about death too often or dread the turning the seasons and years, but don’t confuse that for being mentally well-adjusted.

(Also, worth pointing out that the title of this section has an ironic twist this week. You’re welcome)

Yours, from the past... 🤙

— V

5

The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

Subscribe now

🔥 Welcome to Hell, Here’s Your Timesheet

I’m back at work after taking leave for Mrs. Reads’ recovery. I restarted at work at 8am Monday morning, and my depression restarted at right-when-I-woke-up Monday morning. What a coincidence. Not to yuck anyone’s yum, but I do not understand people who do not hate their jobs. It feels like some strange, lethal combination of self-gaslighting and capitalist Stockholm Syndrome. I gave myself a brief hit of dopamine by selecting every email in my inbox and immediately deleting them all1; Teams messages - mark as read.

If it’s actually important, they’ll follow up.

Folks expressed that they were happy/excited to have me back which I understand is an empty platitude, but it feels like what the crabs would say when they drag you back into the bucket. So much of being a good corporate drone is just faking that you’re happy to be there. It’s exhausting but it’s the only thing keeping work from being even more soul-crushing. Imagine if all your co-workers acted as miserable as you feel at work2.

I also realize that it is gauche to complain about work when I’m comparatively hashtag-blessed to have a well-paying job that allows me to not worry about impending poverty if I miss a paycheck, but that’s also the sort of mentality that keeps co-workers from discussing their salaries, kills collective bargaining in the cradle, and allows exploitative billionaires to remain in power.

So yeah, eight hours back on the clock and I’m already looking for a good cocktail recipe3.

🦀🦀🦀

📚Book Bits

I’m almost finished the big T by and it is in the running for one of my favorite books of the year. A Substack Review will be forthcoming on this one, for sure. You should go buy it and support independent writing, independent art, anti-brand, non-corporate, everything-good-about-this-miserable-floating-rock work. Clancy deserves the flowers and the dollars, and I deserve to read whatever he writes next.

I would have finished the big T this week except a friend of mine said that he could beat me at a grand strategy game (Anno 117, which I’ve never played), and I took that personally.

Recent Book Haul:

I am sitting on some full shopping carts in anticipation of capitalist new year Black Friday. Book Outlet has already started their $5.99 fiction sale and Barnes & Noble’s sale starts on the 22nd. Bookshop.org usually offers free shipping. And I’m sure Uncle Jeffrey’s Internet Emporium will also have something.

💡Substack Spotlight:

• I was a good li’l content generator this week and reviewed ’s short story collection Hallucinations; you can read all about it here:

• I also lightly roasted myself on Notes, and the rest of you brought the gasoline to make sure I got burnt to a crisp. Good on ya.

• posted this to Notes and I’ve been cackling ever since:

Again, I try not to yuck someone else’s yum (especially since Mrs. Reads has a lot of romantasy books and is capable of hurling them with precise aim) but this is an excellent dissection of a bloated genre. The romantasy novel feels like the white lady’s answer to the podcast.

• This was a fascinating article from about how society (specifically American society) has become risk-averse to the point of cultural stagnation. It’s one of the more interesting things I’ve read in a while. I’m not sure (yet) what to take away from it, but I think it’s relevant for those of us “doing art.”

Experimental History

The Decline of Deviance

People are less weird than they used to be. That might sound odd, but data from every sector of society is pointing strongly in the same direction: we’re in a recession of mischief, a crisis of conventionality, and an epidemic of the mundane. Deviance is on the decline…

Read more

6 months ago · 1545 likes · 218 comments · Adam Mastroianni

• Last but not least, the latest Trucker Journal from was a good one, and not just because I’m name-dropped:

  That’s Absurd!

  Trucker’s Journal

  My fingers are all cracked up with this first cold coming through. It’s an early freeze in Georgia…

  Read more

  5 months ago · 13 likes · 13 comments · Trey Hinkle

📰Substack Headlines

• Fiction is Culture! New mutual aid initiative is live to support . This “Jill of All Trades” is offering steep discounts on her services (Discord setups! Voiceover acting! Background music!). Check out the full list at the link below:

Velvet Guillotine

FiC: Introducing WordiGirl the BabyBard!

My name is Haly, I am the Moonlight Bard, and if you don’t know me that means you’re new here. That’s cool! We were all new once. Welcome! 💜…

Read more

5 months ago · 37 likes · 8 comments · Haly, the Moonlight Bard ✒️, Tom Schecter, Emil Ottoman, M.P. Fitzgerald, Zani D, Dylan Bosworth, James Worth, Andrew Robert Colom, Vinny Reads, Zachary Dillon, Nick Winney, Zivah, Luke Warfield, Slater Henatay, Pablo Báez, Judith Ashcraft, Keith Long, and Brent Robbins

• I’m kicking around the idea of year-end Substack literary awards. I don’t want to put something slapdash together (you know, like everything else I do) so we might be targeting 2026 for the initial launch of (tentatively titled) The Vinny Reads Awards for Literary Excellence, aka “The Vincents.”

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

🖋️Writing

got on me for making excuses for not writing and actually got me to pump out some work. I’m still getting used to my typewriter and I’m not sure what’s its best function is in my writing process. It does force me to be a little less precious about what I’m typing but it also drastically slows me down. When I’m alone, I’m in bad company so having that additional time to think isn’t always beneficial.

Regardless, I started something tentatively titled “Final Rounds” about a boxer/doorman and his dementia-suffering father. It’s an idea that had been taking up mental real estate and I’m interested to see where it goes. I also started fleshing out something called “The Retreat” about a son who is forced to clear out his father’s secluded writing cabin after his passing. As you can guess, I’m in my double-entendre-titles era.

❄️Fleeting Thoughts

I had pangs of guilt after writing that review of Hallucinations. That probably says something positive about me as a person but something negative about me as a book reviewer.

I was raised sarcastic, came of age in the early internet, and attended to an all-male high school; my “love language” is being mean as fuck. I hope my writing is more helpful and insightful and never hurtful but as I’ve learned from raising Kiddo: you don’t get to decide what impact you have on others. You do your best and live with the consequences. It’s a hard lesson to convey to a three-year-old, especially since I’m still learning it at 13x that age.

I believe strongly in constructive feedback, especially since one of the only bits I ever received was that “you should come home and jerk off before writing ever again.” This was delivered by the headmaster4 of that high school and was actually excellent advice. He meant it both to say get out of your own heads and emotions and think bigger, but also: your teenage non-sex-having-lives are boring as fuck, save the yearning for your diary.

Amazing what sticks with you for 2+ decades…

Yours, seventeen forever... 🤙

— V

The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

Subscribe now

⤵️ Rounding the Corner

Mrs. Reads is on the mend. Thursday, we dropped Kiddo off at pre-school, the dogs off at daycare and drove up to the Canadian border to willingly submit to questioning by government agents1. Once that task was done, we found ourselves in the middle of nowhere without much to do. Naturally, I suggested visiting a bookstore.

Nevermore Books in Newport, VT is (quick Google Maps check) the northernmost bookstore this side of Michigan. I got to poke around and talk with Larry the owner/operator. I asked if he had any Vollmann and he said, “not here, but at home.” He commiserated about not being able to move Nora Roberts or James Patterson faster than they come in and provided some rec’s to me and Mrs. Reads.

After that we drove through a minor snow squall to get to Hill Farmstead in Greensboro Bend. Possibly one of the best breweries on the planet, and in a cellular deadzone. Then we hit up Galaxy Books in Hardwick, and Blackback Pub in Waterbury before picking up the dependents.

It’s the kind of middle-of-the-week, seat-of-the-pants outing that we don’t get to take often.

📚Book Bits

When I’m really into a book, I’ll sometimes do things to avoid reading it. Counterintuitive, but I don’t want to miss things because I’m sleepy or distracted or otherwise not in prime reading mode. The Big T by is one of those books. I’m finding myself moved by the primary two characters in a way I wasn’t expecting. I’ve been reading it chapter-by-chapter but finally bit off a larger chunk this week. It takes a talented writer to create such an easily visualized story without it reading like a screenplay-in-prose form. I’m gonna keep my praise light until I finish it, but you’ll be getting a Substack Review in the near future.

I’ve also been working through ’s Hallucinations; looking for a Substack Review of that this weekend or early next week.

Recent Book Haul:

• The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey

  • Purchased on Thursday’s daytrip. I forget who recommended this to me, so if it was you come get your credit.

• Nevermore Books haul:

  • Babbit by Sinclair Lewis

  • The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer

  • The Cove by Ron Rash

  • Dalva by Jim Harrison

  • Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolfe

💡Substack Spotlight:

I enjoy reading — and writing — in the noir-adjacent genres, specifically anything American noir. I feel like it’s a genre that lends itself to the story of America’s reckless excesses and crippling realities, our love of the gaudy but also the authentic. There’s been a couple pieces this week that touched on this:

• is back from a road trip and he has notes.

  PEDAL STEEL

  Neon in the Blood

  Read more

  6 months ago · 14 likes · 4 comments · Brett Puryear

• profiled for The Substack Post and talked about her exploration of the “shadow America.” Begler’s got great taste and I’m looking forward to Garvey’s next dispatch from her ‘93 DeVille.

  The Substack Post

  The Highway Kind

  Editor’s note: We’ve invited a group of writers to profile their favorite Substackers. This is the first in that series…

  Read more

  6 months ago · 1082 likes · Henry Begler

• Outside of that, I’ve been enjoying ’s serialized novel To Hunt a Stranger. It reminds me a little of Gaiman’s young adult work but much more grounded. I’m excited to see where he takes it. First four chapters are up already.

  Elias Baer

  To Hunt a Stranger

  On the eve of Hobby’s sixth birthday muffled shouting leaked into his dreams and nudged him awake. Rubbing his eyes, the boy climbed out of bed to investigate the noise, more curious than concerned. Shouting was a common occurrence in his household and, at his tender age, he had yet to fully wake up to the reality of the violence. Peering through the ba…

  Read more

  8 months ago · 9 likes · Elias Baer

I posted this to Notes and I giggle every time I see it:

📰Substack Headlines:

• but call out offering craft critique. I hit him up for a look at Red Sky Mourning.

• dropped into my mentions to say he’s scouting Substack for talent. Plenty of it to be scouted. He’s also a writer in his own right, and you can check out his work like Bunny Never Sleeps on his Stack.

• is teaching a workshop for . Space is almost sold out (and likely would be one seat closer to sold out if this wasn’t my busy season). My loss, your gain. Check it out.

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

🖋️Writing

I purchased an Olivetti-Underwood 18 typewriter2, refurbished by of Typewriter Tales. Man, it is fun to tool around on. I had to finagle with and learn how to thread the ribbon and fix some issues with it (user error), and it made me miss tinkering. I’ve said in the past that I’m a Hobby Collector. I love anything that I can tweak, wrench or noodle on, whether that’s a beer recipe, a body-head-body combination, or an opening sentence.

I haven’t worked typing into my writing routine yet, but having the Underwood perched on my desk is a (nice) reminder that I should be writing… MORE and NOW.

I did start crafting an essay based on ’s In Defence of Men as well as What Did Men Do to Deserve This? by Jessica Winter of The New Yorker. I may continue it just to work through some of my thoughts of the “men crisis” and “toxic masculinity” and all that jazz. Or I may just use it to as fodder for some fiction. I guess we’ll see which Vinny shows up to the keyboard.

❄️Fleeting Thoughts

I briefly brought back Substack Live this week. Shout-out to the folks that dropped in and to for hanging out. I was able to figure out how to stream video to Live, so we watched Brick (2005) and Drive (2011). Obviously having me talk over a film is not the best cinema experience, but it was a lot of fun. I am going to try to do Lives a little more often again without, ya know, overdoing it.

Substack Live is not an ideal streaming platform. If you want to have a co-host, you need to do it via phone which is annoying, but I would like to bring back some of the shoot-the-shit sessions we did in the past3.

Usually, we listen to a lot of music on the Lives. I’ve talked before about my love of Warren Zevon4 who (finally) got inducted into the Rock N Roll Hall of Fame. The Killers gave a pretty lifeless performance of “Lawyers, Guns and Money” so here’s Zevon’s stellar live album Stand in the Fire.

Yours, gamblin’ in Havana... 🤙

— V

The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

Subscribe now

👩‍🍼 Mr. Mom

Mrs. Reads has been laid up this week. I taught Kiddo the word “convalescing” because it’s hilarious1 to hear a three-year-old ask “Mama, you con-va-lesson?” Less hilarious: the solo2 parenting. Kids are a miracle, but like, so is an absolutely devasting tornado.

So much of parenting is remembering, and I have a less-than-stellar short-to-medium-term memory. I’ll remember the Battle of Hastings took place in 1066 until the day I die, but I will never remember what that third thing was that I was supposed to grab at the grocery store. Nothing catastrophic (so far), but little things that my wife would never forget have slipped through the cracks. It is true what they say about the unrecognized mental labor of running a household, but what I’m finding is how much that also wears physically and emotionally. I inherited an Irish temper, so the Fuck-Word appears more frequently in my speech than in my writing. Thankfully Kiddo hasn’t picked that one up yet, but he does like “damn” and “goddamn.” I know you’re not supposed to tell your kid to cut the shit, but that would be a lot easier if he would just cut the shit.

It’s been a tiring, but not unpleasant week. Good/bad vocabulary lessons aside, I get to pick him up from school every day which is far more rewarding than the drop-off. He never wants me to leave in the morning, and he’s excited when I pick him up in the afternoon. It’s a closing of a loop that tickles something deep in my animal brain.

Then he’ll kick me in the nuts and laugh.

📚Book Bits

My reading pace has fallen off tremendously3 as life got complicated and busy. I’m working to get back on that horse and crack through works at the pace I was over the Summer.

I finally finished Our Share of Night by Mariana Enriquez and immediately borrowed her new-ish story collection, A Sunny Place for Shady People (great title) and plan to read her new nonfiction: Somebody Is Walking on Your Grave (also a great title). I was never sure where this novel was going to go, but I enjoyed the ride. It’s a bit of horror, a bit of generational trauma, and — if I were better versed in Argentine politics — I’d guess it is also a political allegory about the excesses and evils of the wealthy.

For something completely different, I started on The Big T by , and I’m already getting A Separate Peace-but-good4 vibes. I’m also got audiobooks for I’m Thinking of Ending Things by Iain Reid and No Longer Human by Osamu Dazai. Mrs. Reads is pushing me to read The Invisible Life of Addie Larue and God of the Woods before their respective adaptations come out, too.

Recent Book Haul:

• My first issue of County Highway arrived this week, and I’ve been savoring it, article by article. It is directly responsible for picking up Lord of the Barnyard by Tristan Egolf.

• Jesus Saves by Darcey Steinke

• Muscle for the Wing by Daniel Woodrell

• Fay by Larry Brown

• Rust and Bone by Craig Davidson

• Book Mail from :

  • The Sin Eaters Last Confession and Walking with the Sin Eater by Ross Heaven.

  • I know nothing about these books except they deal with Celtic shamanism so I’m 1000% sold.

💡Substack Spotlight:

I enjoy poetry the way Homer enjoys Twin Peaks. I still try to check in one some of the poets and prose-poets on here from time to time.

• One I’m a frequent reader of is . Waiting Is the Only Resurrection Left is an excellent example of what maddie does and includes one of my favorite lines I’ve ever read: “A single bloom against the enormity of leaving”. If I write a line as good as that I expect God to come down himself and give me a high-five.

• You know what? Let’s throw some more prose-poetry out there and shout-out ’s Rap Fiction: “Fiction, I Never Left You.” Something for all the writers in that abusive relationship with the muse, the block, the business, and themselves.

📰Substack Headlines:

• has an interview with up on his Stack. It’s one of the more conversational interviews I’ve listened to in some time, especially as they share horror stories of industry work.

  VILE SELF PORTRAITS

  INTERVIEW #7

  Here I interview writer and chef Pablo Báez. We met through Substack and connected over our shared disdain for the restaurant industry. Pablo’s BOH (back of the house, the kitchen), I’m FOH (front of the house, the floor), so our experiences differ greatly…

  Listen now

  6 months ago · 23 likes · 4 comments · C. James Desmond and Pablo Báez

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

🖋️Writing

An object at rest stays at rest. I am restless but my writing is static. I’m not a woo-woo type but I trust my intuitions and feelings. The feeling I have now is one of dormant energy, like a bear about to wake from hibernation. My hands are itchy for the keys. I was planning to do whatever we’re calling NaNoWriMo now; I think I’ll just focus on building that daily habit. Word counts be damned. I am working to break from the tyranny of the screens in hopes that will 1. focus my energy on reading and writing and 2. allow whatever grotesqueries are afoot in my subconscious to sneak into the waking realm.

Could I say that like a normal person, please? Sure: I haven’t been writing much, but I’m working on that. Stay tuned.

🍁Fleeting Thoughts

It snowed for an instant Thursday morning. The passage of time remains undefeated. I am ready to bid adieu to 2025 while simultaneously trying to hold the good that happened in memory. I’ll talk more about this at the end of next month, but Substack was good to me this year and was a welcome reprieve when life got challenging. There are any number of reasons to be down on this place: the Nazis, the mercurial design choices, the Twitterification, but I feel less revulsion for Substack than I do for any other social media. Part of that is the community of writers here. Every time a week goes by and one of these Digests goes up without an essay or a review sandwiched in between, I feel like I haven’t given enough to this community. It is, of course, entirely egocentric. You all don’t need more email.

Nevertheless, with the hope of a quieter winter, I aim to inflict more of my opinions upon you. You have been forewarned.

Yours... 🤙

— V

The Weekly Digest is a weekly (no shit?) update that captures highlights from the week that was. At the end of each week, I share a collection of thoughts, recommendations, and links. Like everything else I write, it's awesome, but it may be too long for email so make sure you click through.

Subscribe now

🤫 The Secret’s Out

As of this writing my wife has cancer. The good news is - depending on when you read this - she may no longer have cancer. Today is surgery day. I’ll be with her in the hospital today, tonight, and likely again tomorrow. I’ll have to leave to take Kiddo to a birthday party and pretend that nothing is going on, how are you?

Thoughts and prayers don’t cure cancer any better than they keep bullets out of schoolchildren, but I know that ain’t gonna stop you all from offering them, so my pre-emptive thanks. One of the “downsides” of being apatheistic is that when shit like this happens, you’re stuck just raw-dogging the horrors of existence.

Again, the good news is that this might all be moot by the time you read this, but it has been very not-moot for the past few months. The benefit of this happening on Halloween is that I’m going to get a lot of mileage out of my sexy nurse costume.

📚Book Bits

Slowly working through The Woman Lit by Fireflies by Jim Harrison. I’ll likely finish this today based on how long I’ll be in the hospital. I’m gonna bring The Big T (), To the Moon, Darkly (), and Hallucinations
() with me as well.

Recent Book Haul:

• Ablutions by Patrick DeWitt

  • A find at the supermarket free bookshelf

• Your Name Here by Helen DeWitt & Ilya Gridneff

  • Big DeWitt Week.

• Hallucinations by

  • An ARC courtesy of

• Southwest Review - The Horror Issue

  • Featuring stories by and

💡Substack Spotlight:

Tom said it better than me, so I’m stealing his words:
“is a string puller, a connection-maker, a Machiavellian altruist, a ferocious, blood-spilling storyteller, an agent of magnificent comedic chaos.

She is Five Ducks in a Trenchcoat.

She is also a mother of two with a terminal liver condition that keeps her from being able to work a regular job, so she relies on SNAP—which is not coming right now. And her state’s plan to cover that shortfall isn’t going to work effectively for her family.”

THE SHIELDBREAKER SAGA

Introducing RECIPES TO FEED THE DUCKS

We the Undersigned, who have spent the first ten months of this year promoting the work of a few of our fellow artists and authors who found themselves with their backs against the wall, now find ourselves in the unenviable position of seeing one of our own founding members in a similarly difficult situation…

Read more

6 months ago · 62 likes · 19 comments · Tom Schecter

Fuck our oligarchical two-party system of feckless cronies and spineless shit-heels keeping food out of kids mouth so they boom different kids halfway across the world. Helping one person that needs it will make you a better person than all three branches of our federal government with room to spare. So please help if you can.

📰Substack Headlines:

• has a piece of short fiction “two in one” that you should check out.

• I got to catch the tail-end of interviewing . Check it out for yourself here. And make sure you check out PM’s poetry and Andrew’s Victim which I reviewed for Substack Summer.

If you’d like to be featured in this section, you know how to find me. And if you don’t, you’ll learn.

🖋️Writing

I dredged up something I wrote 13 years ago, pretty much entirely because it was titled “Ducks” and that’s the only reason I remember it existed.

🍁Fleeting Thoughts

This is a short one this week for - you know - the obvious reasons. I’d like to say something classy and inspirational, but that’s just not my style.

Take care of yourselves, and each other.

Happy Halloween... 🤙

— V