Lewis Powell

Reading Updates

2026-03-27T15:53:01Z

Having an app for tracking my reading is nice, because I would 100% forget things if I were just listing based on my memory.

My 2026 reading thus far is about to hit the goal that I set for the year (24 books). This is in part because the goal was somewhat modest, but mostly because pressure to read libby ebooks before they have to be returned and the use of the reading tracking app conspired to substantially increase how much I am reading.

Here's what I've read this year:

January:

Piranesi (Susanna Clarke) reread
The Loop (Jeremy Robert Johnson)
Ship of Fools (Richard Paul Russo)
Far from the Light of Heaven (Tade Thompson)
The Last Astronaut (David Wellington)
The Keeper (Sarah Langan)
Mysterium (Robert Charles Wilson)
The Deep Sky (Yume Kitasei)
As The Earth Dreams (Terese Mason Pierre, ed.)
The Surviving Sky (Kritika H. Rao)

February:

I'm Glad My Mom Died (Jennette McCurdy)
Semiosis (Sue Burke)
Seven Taoist Masters (Eva Wong, trans)
The Stardust Grail (Yume Kitasei)

March:

Moonbound (Robin Sloan)
Shroud (Adrian Tchaikovsky)
I Who Have Never Known Men (Jacqueline Harpman)
Light From Uncommon Stars (Ryka Aoki)
Roadside Picnic (Arkady & Boris Strugatsky)
There is no Antimemetics Division (qntm)
The Neverending Story (Michael Ende)

Of these, the ones that stick with me the most are: Piranesi, Ship of Fools, Shroud, I Who Have Never Known Men, Roadside Picnic, and There Is No Antimemetics Division. You may notice a sort of theme in the things that I respond to.

The ones that stuck with me the most in a not quite so complimentary way are Light From Uncommon Stars and Mysterium. Uncommon Stars was just too busy and, to steal an observation from ambyr , unconcerned with morality. Mysterium I posted about previously, but it was such a waste of a great premise.

Anyway, if you can think of books that seem like they'd be right up my alley, based on that reading list, please do recommend in the comments.

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This Year 365 songs: update

2026-03-27T15:24:10Z

In a development that isn't entirely surprising to me, I had a few stumbles for daily updating part of the project, and then fell off of daily reading/posting pretty much entirely.

This is not an unfamiliar pattern for me (I do well with structure, but if the structure is too rigid, and I have enough misses, my brain just shuts off of wanting to follow the structure even a little bit).

The real barrier was posting, for me, because I often felt like I didn't have anything to say, which made some of the posts a chore, rather than just.a part of the routine. I'm planning to catch back up soon, and then continue reading the book day by day, but probably won't be posting about it (or at least, not in a daily post type of way).

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This Year 365 songs: March 8th and 9th

2026-03-09T15:26:40Z

The songs for this pair of days are "Stars Fell On Alabama" and "Red Choral Diamond Spray"

The former song concludes the Firearms Suite, and is a perfectly fine song, but I am mostly excited about the comment by Darnielle in the annotations that he had wanted to put the name of the bay in the song, and specifically wanted it to be called Half Moon Bay, but that is the name of a city in California, and "[y]ou can do a lot of things as a writer, but putting Half Moon Bay in Alabama isn't one of them"

The second track is off of an album that Darnielle didn't release, "Hail and Farewell, Gothenburg", which was unreleased for 11 years and then leaked to the internet without Darnielle's permission. Darnielle was very upset about the leak, and preferred that people not listen to leaked album. You can read a bit more about the whole situation here. Ultimately, he has taken to playing some of the songs live, and seems to have made his peace with the leak (though the album is still unreleased and the tracks are not available on the mountain goats youtube channel).

I'd never tracked down any songs off this album previously (there is a lot of released Mountain Goats that I haven't made my way through yet, to say nothing of the artist's stated preference for people not to listen to the leaked album). This song is all right (I take it that its inclusion here tacitly includes permission to listen to it, but maybe not?).

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This Year 365 songs: March 7th

2026-03-07T14:05:00Z

Today our song is Cheshire County

We get a break from firearms related songs today, for a song that Darnielle talks about mostly in terms of it landing the "is it a poem or is it a song?" style of lyric writing he was aiming for at the time. I think it's a nice song, and you can definitely see some of the more poetic elements of the lyrics, as he describes them.

If you want a song featuring a cow, this is also a good choice for you.

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This Year 365 songs: March 6th

2026-03-06T21:38:32Z

Today's song is Black Molly

This is "Firearms Suite #3". That Hippolytine feeling has the narrator under threat from someone else wielding a gun, while Going to Georgia and this track both feature the narrator exhibiting troubling behavior with firearms. The sound of the song is nice. The music is good, and the way he sings it works with the music. This narrator feels more troubled and troublesome than the narrator of Going to Georgia (maybe the fact that the narrator in Going to Georgia traveled with the gun is more troubling; but this narrator—described by Darnielle as having their anxiety turned all the way up—is engaging in much clearer violent ideation.

Darnielle's novel Wolf in White Van also features a troubled protagonist with a disturbing interest in a firearm, though the narrative is largely set subsequent to that protagonist's primary encounter with firearms, in the aftermath. I saw that Darnielle started writing Wolf in White Van almost immediately after finishing Master of Reality, and that actually helped click some things into place about the protagonist of Wolf in White Van, who shares some DNA (figuratively speaking) with the narrator of Master of Reality.

Darnielle's choice to label these songs as "firearm suite" suggests that he wants us to focus on the brief period when his writing leaned into romanticization of guns, but the actual annotations tend to be almost entirely about other aspects of the stories, punctuated by maybe one comment on the presence of firearms in the song. In this case, he doesn't really linger on the presence of the gun, except to mention that he feels nervous about whether the fish tank will get shot when he sings the song (even knowing how it turns out).

I suspect that this song didn't have the crowd appeal and staying power of Going to Georgia, and so doesn't get the same level of scrutiny or mixed feelings from him.

Darnielle's annotations did give me something else to look forward to; a date I suspect will be one of my favorite songs (March 22nd), since he mentioned buying a particular pack of peanuts that we will hear more about on March 22nd. Now that one is a song I love and don't have conflicted feelings about its role in the Mountain Goats fandom hierarchy or Darnielle's reflections on his own unfortunate narrative fascinations as a young writer.

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This Year 365 songs: March 4th and 5th

2026-03-05T21:47:46Z

It would have been slightly more fitting if I had slacked off for one more day, as March 4th, 5th, and 6th are sort of related inclusions in the book (I've only heard the song for March 5th, previously). Each annotation is labeled "Firearms Suite, Song Number n". (I've actually just glanced ahead and there is another one coming up, so I feel less bad about tackling two of them today and the others later).

The song for March 4th was: That Hippolytine Feeling.

The song for March 5th is Going to Georgia, which I did predict would be included in this volume (this was not a longshot prediction).

Darnielle obviously has some feelings about his penchant for putting guns in songs when he was younger. One doesn't need to read this book to know that, though. He stopped performing the song live for a long stretch, and has spoken about his feelings on this a fair number of times.

The thing about Going to Georgia (sorry Hippolytine Feeling, we're not going to focus on you much in this post), is that it is a really good song, despite the issues with the song's narrative and it's protagonist. I think I remember people having similar feelings about the film Hero, or more recently, film RRR, where one has ideological objections to the work, simultaneous with a recognition of its level of aesthetic quality.

What makes this somewhat surprising for this song in particular is that lots of Mountain Goats songs have morally concerning narrative elements. So the real question is: why is this song one that Darnielle feels so strongly about? It can't *just* be that it became hugely popular with the fans, as No Children fits that bill. I think Darnielle feels like this song (unlike the songs that focus on the alpha couple), romanticize guns and related violent impulses in a way that is different from how, say, toxic behaviors are depicted and explored in the alpha couple songs, but not romanticized (though, when we do get to No Children, check out the stories about people asking him to play that at their wedding; some folks are romanticizing it nonetheless).

I think the popularity of the song compounded with Darnielle's ambivalence about how it romanticizes the protagonist, combined to make him hate the song (though his attitude seems to have warmed up a bit, as he has played it at a few recent concerts without demanding anyone in the audience pay him $60 to do so).

Darnielle renders the lyrics as prose (most lyrics in the book have line breaks where you would expect, though he also did this for Song for Dana Plato), and I don't know what to make of that decision:

The most remarkable thing about coming home to you is the feeling of being in motion again; it's the most extraordinary thing in the world. I have two big hands, and a heart pumping blood, and a 1967 Colt .45 with a busted safety catch. The world shines as I cross the Macon county line going to Georgia.

The most remarkable thing about you standing in the doorway is that it's you, and that you're standing in the doorway; and you smile when you ease the gun from my hand, and I'm frozen with joy right where I stand. The world throws its light underneath your hair, forty miles from Atlanta. This is nowhere. Going to Georgia.

Anyway, Darnielle doesn't say much to address the above issues and ambivalences head on in these annotations. He talks a bit about the process of recording the song and then ends with an observation that the song's "perennial status as one of the most requested songs in the Mountain Goats catalog supports [his] longstanding claim that the people, while not actively demanding blood, would still like the occasional assurance that blood, should they need it, is certainly on the menu". I think this comment deepens my confusion, rather than helping enlighten me, though, as the song does not seem to express bloodthirst to me, even if it takes unfortunate tropes/dangerous conceptions of love and romanticizes them (that hippolytine feeling seems a bit more in line with this commentary, but as far as I can tell it's a song that was never officially recorded/released, so it doesn't have the same longevity, fanbase, or, I imagine, emotional weight around expectations to perform it, as Going to Georgia does.

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This Year 365 songs: March 3rd

2026-03-03T23:04:15Z

Today's song is Nine Black Poppies

I like this song a lot. The annotations explain that Darnielle took the name from a poem by Norman Dubie, who he was familiar with from being featured in the American Poetry Review and who he seems to have subsequently been a big fan of. This is the sort of Mountain Goats sound I appreciate, with lyrics that loosely allude to a narrative he thought of while reading a poem is exactly the sort of Mountain Goats track that I love.

The first stanza of the poem is:

The junta was jubilant around the mortised fountain.
A solemn procession of century plants going to the bridge.

A dead chauffeur in the ditch.

You thought

you watched a quetzal bird fly from the bursting tin

of gasoline. Nine enemies of the junta.

(You can read the full poem here, if you have JSTOR access).

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This Year 365 songs: February 28th-March 2nd

2026-03-02T11:14:57Z

THE TITLE OF THE BOOK IS A LIE! THERE IS AN ENTRY FOR FEBRUARY 29th!

That makes 366 songs!

It also means I am three days behind all of a sudden.

February 28th — Cold Milk Bottle
February 29th — Song for Roger Maris
March 1st — Cubs in Five

It's hard to express how little I care about sports. I once had a Canadian friend in grad school, Jen, with whom it was mutually understood that we just did not give a shit about sports, unlike most of the other people in grad school with us, who cared about whether USC made it to the Rose Bowl or about baseball or what have you. The biggest betrayal came during the olympics one year when she walked into the grad lounge and said "Canada-US game was pretty exciting, huh?" and I was like "what game are you talking about?" as I was only vaguely aware of the olympics going on at the time, and she said "Canada beat the US in hockey 2-1" or something like that, and I said "Jen, I thought we agreed we don't care about sports" and she said the most Canadian thing I have ever heard in my life: "This isn't sports, it's hockey." Anyway, these songs are nice, but that's in spite of two of them being about baseball.

The song for today is Pure Money

Darnielle's annotations are reflecting on how his career might have gone differently if he had focused on his keyboard/synthesizer compositions instead of his guitar compositions, and how he might likely have wound up a nurse in Hawaii, rather than thirty something years into a career as an indie rocker. And while I don't dislike this track, listening to it makes me think he's not wrong about what other paths would have been taken if he had been focused on keyboard only.

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This Year 365 songs: February 27th

2026-02-27T20:26:30Z

Today we have Million

I like this song a lot. It feels like we're moving into the era of Mountain Goats that feels more like home to me, even though we're pretty far from "songs I will routinely recognize and have heard previously" so it's more about just the sound becoming more familiar and the vibes feeling right. This song is from around when Darnielle moved to Iowa, but it is not my favorite song about Iowa, which was written by Dar Williams:

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This Year 365 songs: February 26th

2026-02-26T13:44:33Z

Today's song is Heights

This isn't as discordant as Blood Royal was, but there is something that feels intentionally jarring about some of the music here. I don't dislike the song, but it took a bit to get accustomed to that element of it. Darnielle's annotations are entirely about his curiosity about the narrator, which is a return to a theme that I've noted many previous times in my notes. It's not just about the elliptical nature of his storytelling, but about the way in which these partial stories are presented as things he is merely glimpsing through a telescope or uncovering. There are determinate answers to all our questions about the narrator. There is a complete story there, and yet somehow, Darnielle only has fragmentary access to it.

In some ways, it is easier for me to get my mind around the less appealing—and more dismissive—Mamet view of fiction, as propounded in an SF Gate interview:

M.L.: There's a scene in "Oleanna" in which the woman says "I never told anybody this" — and then gets interrupted by the phone ringing. What was she about to say?

MAMET: Aha! Well, we don't know, do we?

M.L.: Well, / don't know. You don't either?

MAMET: No.

M.L.: I thought, in my naive way, that you're supposed to know as you're writing the line —

MAMET: Nope. (Laughing) We never got that far. We in the audience have to believe that she's about to make an extraordinary confession. What that confession is we don't get to find out.

M.L.: But you don't know —

MAMET: The woman doesn't actually exist, Mick. She's a bunch of black scribbles on a blank page.

M.L.: But when you're thinking about it as you're writing the play you're not really thinking about scribbles on a blank page. You are thinking of some kind of person, I would think.

MAMET: No. Black scribbles on a white page, that's all it is.

So, like, for Mamet, there are no answers that aren't on the page, but that's because all there is is words on the page. And I can get my head around that view, but I don't like that view. For Darnielle, the words on the page are all we know about the characters and the story, but somehow those words succeeded at singling out a fully defined and realized character and world, that has (unknowable) answers to all the questions we might ask. Which is a more appealing view of what happens, but also a much more perplexing one.

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This Year 365 songs: February 18th-25th

2026-02-25T18:27:00Z

February 18th: The Only Thing I Know
February 19th: Duke Ellington
February 20th: Against Agamemnon
February 21st: Full Flower
February 22nd: Orange Ball of Pain
February 23rd: Blood Royal
February 24th: Going to Scotland

Of thew first four tracks, I am mainly going to write about Against Agamemnon. I liked the first two pretty well, but don't have much to say about them. Against Agamemnon has both the Mountain Goats sound that I like, and the annotations do a nice job of situating the classical reference (Sophocles's Ajax, in which the titular figure is tricked into thinking he has slain his foes but has only been battling sheep, and kills himself from the embarrassment, and Darnielle's reflection on how he is not that tragic figure, but only by dint of maturing a bit more than Ajax got a chance to.

Orange Ball of Pain is fine, especially compared to Blood Royal, which is doing discordant things that are really not working for me. Going to Scotland feels too cutesy, I think, but it may just be that I am trying to catch up on 8 songs at one go. If I had done this song by itself, I'd probably have liked it just fine.

February 25th: Going to Reykjavik

Okay, this is a song I genuinely am enjoying. Serendipity that it is the last song, and it sort of confirms my judgment that Going to Scotland was too cutesy. I still probably would have liked it better if it was on its own. But this song is landing very well, even as the eighth song of the day.

I am glad I am not a music reviewer. Sometimes I have the thought that I like reading books, wouldn't it be great to get paid to read books, but then I think about what that job would actually be and I realize I am very lucky that I am not a professional book reviewer or slush reader or anything like that.

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This Year 365 songs: February 17th

2026-02-17T20:49:46Z

Today we have a Song for Dana Plato

Something about this song's music is discordant to me, and ultimately, that was too distracting for me to enjoy the song. It just really feels like the guitar is out of tune or something, but I assume this is an intentional choice Darnielle made.

I am traveling this week and won't be bringing the book with me, so I'll have to play catch up when I get back!

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The Stardust Grail (Yume Kitasai)

2026-02-16T23:23:30Z

I liked this better than her first novel, The Deep Sky. I am a sucker for aliens with weird biologies and whatnot. It doesn’t feel like horror overall but has some cosmic horror elements. More like cosmic adventure tinged with horror. Some of the characters and motivations could have been better fleshed out, but overall it was immensely readable.

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This Year 365 songs: February 15th and 16th

2026-02-16T13:52:45Z

Yesterday's song was Hatha Hill and today's is Noche Del Guajolote

The first of these is a quieter, more meditative track, while the latter has a bit more zest to it. They're both fine tracks! The annotations for Hatha Hill are intentionally cryptic, while those for Noche Del Guajolote actually share some details about the genesis of the song. I think I prefer Noche Del Guajolote, but both songs are pretty solid.

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This Year 365 songs: February 14th

2026-02-14T13:27:49Z

Today we are Going to Port Washington

This is an uncharacteristically optimistic love song from Darnielle. He wrote it for friends who were supporters of the band, and it's just sort of a sweet, unmelancholy love song. Why am I marveling at that? Well, this reddit post sort of captures the reason pretty well:

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This Year 365 songs: February 13th

2026-02-13T11:54:49Z

"Song for John Davis" is the song for today:

This song feels like we are getting into a more familiar Mountain Goats sound than a lot of the previous ones have sounded. I've enjoyed getting to hear the range of songs that we've had so far, even the songs that didn't really do it for me, but it is nice to have the familiar, comfortable sound that I am used to.

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This Year 365 songs: February 12th

2026-02-12T15:03:48Z

Today's song is Pure Gold

I enjoyed this song, but the thing that most caught my attention relates to the annotations. "Don't touch the door" was taken from a readout on the Twilight Zone pinball machine. The annotations go into a bit of detail about the machine and Darnielle's time playing it, but what I think is most impressive to me about this track is how Darnielle took his affection for/fixation on that aspect of a Twilight Zone pinball machine and used it as a seed for lyrics to a song that is not about pinball at all. In some cases, his songs have been directly about what inspired them, but here, we get a compelling partial narrative attached to this phrase that must have been stuck in his head for some time.

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This Year 365 songs: February 10th and 11th

2026-02-11T22:52:54Z

Got behind by a day again. Yesterday's song was Whole Wide World

Today's song is Wrong!

Whole Wide World is the more appealing of the two songs to me, but they are both slower more pensive pieces. Darnielle notes that Wrong! was released on a "weird" 6 song cassette originally, and that he likes weird releases, but only if they are organically weird. This attitude towards weirdness reminded me of Susan Sontag's "Notes On Camp"; particularly this line:

18. One must distinguish between naïve and deliberate Camp. Pure Camp is always naive. Camp which knows itself to be Camp ("camping") is usually less satistying.

It's one part of that piece that has stuck with me for a long time, because it concisely captures why certain works are more appealing to me even though they are worse works; the attitude of the author towards the work is important. Authenticity is important.

The title of the first song reminds me of a better known song with the same name, which shares no other features with Darnielle's song. I do like the Wreckless Eric track, though, even as the name collision is mostly a distraction from reflecting on Mountain Goats music.

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Baseball!?

2026-02-09T11:24:57Z

I'm always saying "why isn't this sci fi short story mostly descriptions of a game of baseball?"

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This Year 365 songs: February 9th

2026-02-09T11:18:41Z

Today we are treated to Some Swedish Trees

I like this song a lot. The music reminds me a bit of the opening to Amy AKA Spent Gladiator, and the annotations return to Darnielle's meditations on his penchant for indirect narrative. The lyrics here leave one with a lot of questions, if you focus on them as a narrative, but (as Darnielle notes), the tone is not one of intentional secret-keeping. It is more like eavesdropping on bits of a story being told at a nearby table in a coffeeshop, and missing pieces as a result of only hearing the parts spoken loud enough to reach you.

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This Year 365 songs: February 8th

2026-02-08T23:12:23Z

Today's song is Sept 16 Triple X Love! Love! (Or possibly Sept 19 Triple X Love! Love!).

There is a fragment of another song at the beginning here, which is present on all the youtube uploads I could find, but which is not present if you go listen to the start of the song at the iTunes store. I don't have the album Sweden, so I can't check to see what's up with that, but I assume it is a weird artifact on all the youtube videos I can find. Weirdly, the book says the song title is Sept 19 Triple X Love! Love! but all other sources I can find list it as Sept 20. You may recall there was an earlier song that Darnielle had indicated was mistitled on the official release, but he didn't say anything about a similar issue in these annotations. I did more investigation of what was going on here than was strictly necessary, and yet I have no answers. If I were in an epistolary novel built around journal entries reflecting on this book, these sorts of discrepancies would be a good hook for "something is afoot, and the author of the journal entries gets pulled into the mystery while noticing them".

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Semiosis (Sue Burke)

2026-02-07T17:56:09Z

I can't really tell if I liked this book or not. Parts of the world-building felt underdeveloped or under-explored, and I never really felt like Stevland was as alien of an intellect as the premise suggested he was supposed to be. I think I might have preferred a narrower slice of time, with more depth, where a lot of the other details are conveyed because they are part of the collective history of the people in the story, but that would be a very very different structure for the book.

I think this book is about and raises a lot of interesting questions, but I'm not super satisfied with the way those questions were explored (it is not an enraging miss on its premise, the way Mysterium was, though).

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This Year 365 songs: February 7th

2026-02-07T17:52:50Z

Today we have Snow Crush Killing Song

We are in a stretch where the annotations are sort of short, and I often don't have a lot to say. Today's annotations are about the approach to narrative structure for this album, but I feel like I'd mostly be repeating myself to include my thoughts on this.

This is a nice sombre song, though. And I am shocked still by how much Mountain Goats I haven't heard before.

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This Year 365 songs: January 5th & 6th

2026-02-06T14:38:45Z

Yesterday's song was "The Recognition Scene" and today's is "Third Snow Song"

The first song is titled after the scene in a tragedy where the protagonist sees that they are stuck in a tragedy. The tone of the song certainly works with that reference. The second song is about Darnielle experiencing actual* cold weather as someone who had grown up chiefly in warmer, sunnier parts of California.

Both songs are nice, but I don't have much to say about either.

*Those of us familiar with winter in places other than Portland, Oregon, may question whether this really constituted "actual cold weather"

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This Year 365 songs: February 4th

2026-02-04T11:43:19Z

We are on the move again: Going to Tennessee

This is not my favorite of the "Going To..." series. It's not bad, it's just not doing it for me. Darnielle says this song (and much of the early Mountain Goats catalogue) is about sex, though I wouldn't have thought to describe the song that way myself.

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