Reading and Viewing in 2025
by Joe M. McDermott
Before I can talk about books and art, I have to talk about something unpleasant because otherwise my year doesn’t make sense.
It’s been a few years now, and my son and I are doing… mostly okay. I still can’t really get into any details. Victims of domestic abuse aren’t really allowed to talk about it. The court seals the records and inserts a clause that forbids either party from saying anything bad about the other, and this extends to things that are terrifying and may potentially have involved the police and CPS. The terror that is relived in mediation or court or counseling must suddenly not exist. Records are sealed. If the city attorney’s office decides not to prosecute, despite the urging of the police, there is nothing to discuss. If CPS decides a promise not to do it again is enough, so be it. The records must be sealed. Victims aren’t allowed to discuss anything that might disparage their abuser. It seems un-American, that victims cannot tell the truth, but it is the system we have. Too many readers know exactly what I’m describing. School and jobs and social networks must all be allowed to forget, and as domestic situations make people so uncomfortable, they will choose the charming version of events where everything is fine and someone was just making things up that happened in the privacy of home, where none of them could see. The victims, alone, do not get that luxury of ignorance and forget.
It’s been what… five years? I’m reading and writing again, a little. It took a long time to get to a place where I could read and write at all. When it comes, it comes in bursts, and it comes in strange ways and places, and it’s only recently I’ve been able to think about fiction writing longer than a few paragraphs.
I worked as a security guard for a while during the separation. It was brain-dead work, following orders and protocols and walking around. Being physically fit and strong and calm was enough. The only things I could successfully watch on television were kids’ shows with my son, and documentaries with no violence or shouting. For years, architecture became my preferred artform to ingest. I have seen every documentary about architecture or landscape design available on streaming platforms at least twice. I still set Stuart Hicks, an architecture professor who presents amateur-friendly lectures and presentations on YouTube to run when I’m alone, to learn about design, beauty, infrastructure, and how it relates to the human experience. Instead of writing books, I found myself for months at a time drawing pictures in Sketchup of imaginary houses that should absolutely never, ever be built by anyone, but it was a creative outlet that aided my transition into a place of calm when I was too brain-fried from constantly being screamed at and worse to produce anything else. (I can’t actually draw, you see, so clumsily fumbling around a 3D-modeling software that had a lot of pre-drawn resources available was helpful at creating when I couldn’t create anything else.) In my mind, I called it “Legos for grown-ups.” It was the only artform I could safely engage where I could be exposed to beauty and meaning and no one was shouting, nobody got hurt, budgets were non-existent, and everything was always okay. Beauty for beauty’s sake. Happy families. Gorgeous places and scholars talking about how awesome everything is.
I am supposed to be discussing my year of reading, and I’m getting there.
The way back into reading literature, at all, for me, was to read dead things, old things, and childish things with my kid. An interesting challenge of the modern era, I discovered as I was using an eBook reader almost exclusively, was finding actual useful and quality editions of old and translated books. I made three efforts at an eBook of the Arabian Nights on Kindle, and could not, for the life of me, find an eBook edition that wasn’t rife with issues. Before eBooks, it would have been difficult to locate a bad edition of something like this text, as every bookstore and library would have a Penguin classic or somesuch carefully and thoughtfully rendered, free of obvious typos and full of useful footnotes and annotations. Not so, eBooks. Anything public domain will slowly dissolve into formatting errors and shortcut layouts and find and replace translations. My solution was to abandon Kindle for the far superior app Libby, and my public library.
By searching only texts
available through my library, I was able to locate much better editions
of things. I tried to take these classic texts and use them as a way
back into modern works. By reading Arabian Nights, I felt more prepared
for G. Willow Wilson’s The Bird King, which I highly recommend. I read
Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book, and shared some of it with my son.
Then, I watched the (very bad) Disney movie versions, and read Tea
Obrecht’s The Tiger’s Wife, which was as good as you’ve heard.
I read The Wizard of Oz, the very first version of it, and decided against seeing or reading Wicked as a result. It is off-putting, sometimes, to see what becomes a classic with the eyes of a jaded adult. I didn’t actually enjoy it. I was fascinated by the voice of A. A. Milne’s Winnie the Pooh, and found echoes of that voice in The Hobbit and Watership Down, that too cute, too pat, British narrator almost sorry to be so bold as to speak a story. Once you hear it, you can’t unhear it. By reading dinosaur and science books with my kid, I was able to re-read Italo Calvino’s Cosmicomics, which I loved in my twenties. What a strange and delightful thing it still is!
I read many, many things with my brilliant, brilliant son, who is now seven, and tests in the top 1% of his cohort in reading. He went through a large Magic Treehouse phase, and we spelunked in used bookstores for inexpensive editions of all of those stories that we could possibly find. I enjoyed them as a grownup because I knew the children were never in real danger and I could just enjoy the quick, magical jaunt. As he's done with many young people, Dev Pilkey has taken over my son’s bookshelf, and I am quite done reading Captain Underpants, now, thanks, but I do still like the Big Jim stories. There is something inspiring to me about his earnestness and the juxtaposition with his jaded grandfather who is sort of dragged into being a hero against his will. My son is also very engaged with Pokemon, and we play Pokemon Go together often. It’s the only video game I know where you have to walk around outside to play it. I got my son the original manga based on the first pokemon game, where Red must find a way to defeat Team Rocket through hard work and training and good sportsmanship. I think the original manga may be the best tie-in media in that universe as it is well-done art (as opposed to the cheap animation of the TV series and films) and a story that sticks to a clear narrative focus. It’s an excellent first manga for young people, who will need to be taught to read from right to left.
The first films I could watch that were neither kids’ stuff nor documentaries about trivial things, were mostly anime. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End is the kind of masterpiece I had hoped to be inspiring when I wrote my strange first novel, Last Dragon, many years ago (and I’m sure they did not read my old, OOP book or even hear a rumor of it!), and I applaud the creators of the manga and the animated series for breathing new life into something that is almost too easy to turn into the same sort of thing it’s always been. It is the best of what I watched. By that, I mean I cannot watch much that is best media. Bad media is very helpful when you are recovering from trauma. By allowing the mental distance of trashiness, you can overcome the damage inside the mind by never fully committing to the things about the media that trigger a response. Suzume, a magical girl anime about doors and talking cats, was kind of terrible, but also full of gorgeous animation and an earnestness that helped me shrug away the things that would generally trigger me to turn it off and walk away. Resident Alien is like that: completely trashy and nonsensical in so many ways, but because of that emotional distance of watching something that is silly and dumb and doesn’t actually make narrative sense, I can endure the things that would otherwise be unendurable and enjoy it for what it is. I only watch trash now. I don’t want to watch anything good, or meaningful, unless it is an architecture documentary, because they are very pretty and everyone’s nice and even the few bad things that happen (like the tragedy of Taliesen, or Louis Kahn dying alone in a train station bathroom before his son really knew him) are known well in advance and discussed with precise delicacy and kindness.
I am getting better, I hope. I still have nightmares sometimes, but I don’t expect that to change. Time doesn’t heal everything. My son doesn’t remember anything that happened; he was too young. The friends that I lost when they are and were repeatedly lied to will figure out for themselves what actually happened on their own time, or not at all. My book coming out later this year is the first real steps forward since everything that happened. I hope it does well. By that, I really only mean that I hope you – yes, you – enjoy reading it and maybe think about the world a little differently because it exists. Maybe I’ll be able to write another soon.
Joe M. McDermott has a BA in Creative Writing from the University of Houston, and an M.F.A. from the Stonecoast program at the University of Southern Maine. He has been publishing in SF/F since 2008. His previous novels include The Fortress At The End of Time (Tor.com 2017), Maze (Apex Publications 2011) and Never Knew Another (Night Shade Books 2012). Aqueduct will be publishing his novel Wind of Earth, Wind of Tau Ceti in 2026.
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