Who doesn’t love a good book? Let’s just go right to the meat of this and check out what us lovely folks at Broad Street Hockey buried our nose in this past year.
Jason M: Already read a lot each year but a few caught my attention. First was The Showman: The Inside Story That Made A War Leader of Volodymyr Zelensky by Simon Shuster. Shuster was with Zelensky from the day Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022 and has first-hand knowledge and accounts of what was behind his decision-making process each step of the way. It’s a timely and engaging read as the conflict heads into its third year.
Another was My Effin’ Life by Rush bassist and vocalist Geddy Lee. The musician offers a thoughtful and thorough look at how the band formed and his early days through to the band losing drummer Neil Peart to cancer in 2020. It also contains a sobering chapter on Lee’s ancestry, many of whom died during the Second World War in the Holocaust.
Thomas: Hockey tactics and other hockey books. Like some stupid nerd or something. Oh, look, Bryan Trottier’s story. I’ll crush it in a couple nights. That was basically my year of reading.
Maddie: Our Share of Night – Mariana Enriquez. I’m a big reader, and usually picking my favorite book of the year is a really difficult task, but this year is a pretty notable exception. Our Share of Night is SO good. It’s been a long time since I’ve found a book that had me staying up late into the night because I simply could not put it down, but this very much did.
This book is wild. It’s a horror novel, but it’s striking in its breadth – it’s a horror novel, first and foremost, dealing with magic and ghost and a cult, and while the fantastical elements are at the foreground, it’s also making clear the story’s deep embedment in the very real horrors in Argentina’s history. There’s also a family drama in here, which helps to ground the story. It’s a long one, at just under 600 pages, but it had a grip on me the whole way through.
Steve: Continuing with my grown ass man enjoying superhero stuff theme, I wanted to write some words about Jonathan Hickman’s Ultimate Spider-Man. Ultimate Spider-Man, in its original incarnation, acted as a way to reboot Spider-Man for Marvel without rebooting the character. It took place in a side universe where Peter Parker was young and inexperienced and learning the ropes. Brian Michael Bendis and his primary artistic collaborators Mark Bagley and Stuart Immonen reinvented the character without reinventing the character and were responsible for me getting back into comics as a grown ass man.
The new version of Ultimate Spider-Man works inversely to the original idea. Instead of a younger version of the character, Jonathan Hickman and Marco Checchetto’s Ultimate Spider-Man gives us the family man version of Spidey. He’s married to Mary Jane instead of torn apart by the devil or some bullshit (don’t ask). I grew up with Peter and MJ married and was colossally disappointed by the lengths to which Marvel went to keep Peter perpetually 25 years old and single.
The series has been a breath of fresh air, especially given how things have gone for Peter and MJ in the main Marvel Universe these days (don’t talk to me about fucking PAUL). Seeing Peter get to be a parent and deal with the challenges of being a hero and a husband have been really interesting. Ongoing superhero comics have a frustrating way of reverting any growth on the character. Ultimate Spider-Man has shown us just how the world would look if they allowed the character to become an adult and it is very, very good.
Matt: I almost never read brand new books—I don’t love holding hardcovers and there’s just so much literature in the world—so I’m not very good on 2024 recommendations. I did read The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers and Franny and Zooey by JD Salinger, which are probably my two best reads. McCullers’ opus is just such a brutally honest depiction of loneliness and it broke me over and over again. With Salinger’s short story-novella that combine for a kind of novelistic series of monologues on authenticity, religion, life, performance, and more, I was just as struck with the prose and turn of phrase as I was with any of the ideas present within them. It’s easy to read The Catcher in the Rye and forget that Salinger is one of America’s best prosists as he’s inhabiting the mind of an unwell, half-educated teenager. But Franny and Zooey is a solid reminder of just how talented, intelligent, and entertaining his writing can be.
I’ll also mention I finally got to George Saunders’ Liberation Day and it’s as well-constructed, funny, and thought-provoking as I expected it would be; If on a winter’s night a traveller and Invisible Cities by experimentalist Italo Calvino and Speedboat by Renata Adler which challenged my ideas of what books can even be; and Slapstick by Kurt Vonnegut, which I finished off on a single round-trip bus ride. With regards to comics, I read The Six Fingers and The One Hand by Dan Watters, which are technically two separate series but are completely interconnected, telling the futuristic story of a serial killer in one book and the detective chasing him in the other. I’ve also been picking up the new IDW run of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles by Jason Aaron, which includes the spin-offs Mutant Nation and Nightwatcher. Despite having to read a number of books I wasn’t very excited about or interested in for work, I had a pretty good 2024 in reading.
