My reading year, 2022

Wednesday, December 28, 2022

I read a terrific batch of novels this year. Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow surprised and delighted me up until the very end, and I think that book deserves any acclaim that comes its way. Don Delillo’s White Noise was spectacular and also had an extra layer of meaning, as I read it right after reading Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death, an obvious influence. I liked Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven way more than the TV show, which I understand is a somewhat controversial opinion? (Every year I read a bestseller and every year I’m reminded that all bestsellers have this in common: they are page-turners, they make you want to turn the page.) Iris Murdoch’s The Sea, The Sea drove me absolutely crazy, but I have the strange urge to re-read it, which is how I know if something is good. Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth made me want to go to bed early so I could stay up reading it.

At the very end of the year I read John Higgs’s William Blake vs. the World, a book which somehow managed to connect to so much of my year’s reading: in particular, William James’s The Varieties of Religious Experience. (A wonderful book. James could write his ass off.) The sections on neuroscience and hemisphere connected with a lot of Iain McGilchrist’s massive, two-volume The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. As for Blake himself, I see his influence in Gareth Brookes’ The Dancing Plague and Edward Carey’s Plagues and Pencils: A Year of Pandemic Sketches.

My comfort reading is books about music. There is a perfect 250-page book in the 400 pages of Dan Charnas’s Dilla Time. I read an essay or two from W.A. Mathieu’s The Listening Book: Discovering Your Own Music every night at the dinner table. Craig Brown’s 150 Glimpses of the Beatles had an outstanding ending — I love it when a book sticks the landing. I was surprised I didn’t connect with David Toop’s Ocean of Sound more, as it’s full of writing about music I love. (It might be a commode book — and I mean that as a compliment — one you dip in and out of at random.) I had a magical visit to a Barnes & Noble on a trip to Philly when I took a chance that they’d have Mike McGonigal’s 33 1/3 entry on My Bloody Valentine’s Loveless and they did. Chuck Klosterman’s The Nineties: A Book was about much more than music, but we’ll throw it in here. A big nostalgia trip for me.

I read a bunch of books about movies and making movies. Kyle Buchanan’s Blood, Sweat & Chrome: The Wild and True Story of Mad Max: Fury Road made me like that movie even more than I already did. It’s a miracle it got made. I read Aljean Harmetz’s The Making of The Wizard of Oz after having an unexpectedly emotional reaction to watching Dorothy’s adventures with my kids for the first time. Matt Zoller Seitz’s The Wes Anderson Collection mixes handsome art and interviews with the filmmaker. I had been looking forward for years to Ander Monson’s Predator: A Memoir, a Movie, an Obsession, a great case for studying something you love in depth.

This is a golden age for non-fiction comic books. I thought Box Brown’s Cannabis: The Illegalization of Weed in America was a real showcase of his talents. (See also his strip Legalization Nation on his Instagram.) I also liked Darryl Cunningham’s Putin’s Russia and Billionaires. A book that seemingly came out of nowhere was Two Heads: A Graphic Exploration of How Our Brains Work with Other Brains. I admired the cartooning in Kate Beaton’s Ducks, how she managed to stay loose while dealing with a serious subject matter.

My major obsession this year was my bicycle, and I synced up immediately with the spirit of Grant Petersen’s Just Ride: A Radically Practical Guide to Riding Your Bike. I also loved reading his “Bicycle Sentences” illustrated by Betsy Streeter and published on Instagram. (They just published a riding journal of them.) I thought Jody Rosen’s Two Wheels Good: The History and Mystery of the Bicycle would be right up my alley, and parts definitely were, but I ended up wishing it was tighter and shorter and felt less like magazine pieces stitched together.

For a brief, beautiful few weeks my son and I were playing chess together every day. I loved David Shenk’s The Immortal Game: A History of Chess, especially the brilliant structure of alternating the chess moves of the famous game with the historical chapters. I also made my way through the classic, Bobby Fischer Teaches Chess.

I read some great art books, of course. Anni Albers’ On Weaving is unbelievably gorgeous. Martin Gayford’s Spring Cannot Be Cancelled: David Hockney in Normandy was a wonderful read, my first of the spring, about one of my favorite artists. Lourdes Grobet’s Lucha Libre: Masked Superstars of Mexican Wrestling is out-of-print but worth tracking down. (Fun fact: her son was the cinematographer for Nacho Libre and the second season of The White Lotus.)

I’m always interested in the intersection between art and family, and for years have been trying to figure out my own book on the subject. Ada Calhoun’s Also A Poet: Frank O’Hara, My Father, and Me was a really beautiful memoir, and it has added power and depth if you read “The Art of Dying” by her father, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl, beforehand. Julie Philips’ The Baby on the Fire Escape: Creativity, Motherhood, and the Mind-Baby Problem will go up at the top of my list of favorite books about art and motherhood.

My youngest son was diagnosed ASD this year, and while I’ve read a bunch of books about autism, Barry M. Prizant and Tom Fields-Meyer’s Uniquely Human: A Different Way of Seeing Autism is probably the first book I will recommend to family and friends. An extremely hopeful read.

And two books I liked that somehow don’t fit in elsewhere:

I love the “Little Histories” series, and Nigel Warburton’s A Little History of Philosophy didn’t disappoint.

David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5000 Years was long, but very good.

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If you liked this list, you will enjoy my newsletter, where I share what I’m reading every week.

I’ve been doing a year-end summary of my reading since 2006. You can read them all here.

I hope you read widely and adventurously, but more importantly, I hope you read what you want to read! Life is short and time is precious, and any book that doesn’t have you turning the pages is not the book for you right now.

Having trouble reading? Here’s how to read like an artist.

A two-owl Christmas

Sunday, December 25, 2022

We’ve had this wonderful drawing by Jules up on our fridge for the past week or so.

On Christmas Day in 1858, Thoreau wrote:

I hear an owl hoot. How glad I am to hear him rather than the most eloquent man of the age.

I did not hear any hooting this morning, only the maddening mobbing of blue jays, who were not only mobbing Coconut’s box, but the side of the house.

I went looking for an owl in one of the trees along our driveway. Didn’t see one. Eventually the blue jays flew off.

Later, I went out to get fireplace tools from the shed. I looked up and saw… ANOTHER owl in our extra owl box that I have hung up to try to keep squirrels out of the other one.

And just like that… a two-owl Christmas!

It’s been almost two years since we first spotted an owl in our backyard, and I’ve learned yet another lesson from the owls: What seems like a nuisance, if paid attention to, can actually be a great gift. If you know how to read it, the noise can point you to the signal…

A Christmas Sermon

Sunday, December 25, 2022

The Public Domain Review has a great collection of Christmas-related material.

Yesterday I read Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Christmas Sermon,” which was “written while he convalesced from a lung ailment at Lake Sarnac in the winter of 1887.” (I, too, am doing a little convalescing, and perhaps was in the right frame of mind for it.)

He speaks, in a sense, of a cousin of the hedonic treadmill, that of the heroic treadmill, this feeling that our life must be spent in pursuit of greater and greater things or else it is being wasted.

It may be argued again that dissatisfaction with our life’s endeavour springs in some degree from dulness. We require higher tasks, because we do not recognise the height of those we have. Trying to be kind and honest seems an affair too simple and too inconsequential for gentlemen of our heroic mould; we had rather set ourselves to something bold, arduous, and conclusive; we had rather found a schism or suppress a heresy, cut off a hand or mortify an appetite. But the task before us, which is to co–endure with our existence, is rather one of microscopic fineness, and the heroism required is that of patience. There is no cutting of the Gordian knots of life; each must be smilingly unravelled.

To be honest, to be kind—to earn a little and to spend a little less, to make upon the whole a family happier for his presence, to renounce when that shall be necessary and not be embittered, to keep a few friends but these without capitulation—above all, on the same grim condition, to keep friends with himself—here is a task for all that a man has of fortitude and delicacy. He has an ambitious soul who would ask more; he has a hopeful spirit who should look in such an enterprise to be successful. There is indeed one element in human destiny that not blindness itself can controvert: whatever else we are intended to do, we are not intended to succeed; failure is the fate allotted. It is so in every art and study; it is so above all in the continent art of living well. Here is a pleasant thought for the year’s end or for the end of life: Only self–deception will be satisfied, and there need be no despair for the despairer.

I have been thinking a lot today about the question, “And then what?”

And also of Walker Percy’s problems of re-entry.

I’ve always found the week between Christmas and New Year to be a little tricky.

“The heroism required is that of patience.”

Filed under: Christmas

3 great books I read this fall

Thursday, December 22, 2022

I get much less reading done in the fall compared to the summer. Summer here is fairly easygoing: the kids are home, everyone’s on vacation so they don’t expect much from me, and it’s so hot outside that floating in the pool with a book seems a perfectly reasonable way to spend time. Fall brings school, and sickness (from school), and emails.

One thing about going through a reading slump is that it’s easy to determine what’s really doing it for you. Here are 3 great books I read this fall. All published this year. All of them will probably go on my yearly top 10, maybe even top 5, and I highly recommend all of them:

I picked up Antoine Wilson’s Mouth to Mouth and got immediately sucked in. It’s one of those perfectly short novels that makes you want to go to bed early so you can stay up late finishing it.
Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, a novel about two friends who make video games. It surprised and delighted me right up until the end, and everyone I know who read it liked it. (The title comes from Macbeth.)
I picked up Ada Calhoun’s Also A Poet, a memoir about her father, the art critic Peter Schjeldahl and the poet Frank O’Hara, right after her father died. The book’s poignancy is doubled, I think, if you read his essay “The Art of Dying” before you start. (One of my favorite bits is when she tells him she got a writer’s residency: “My father rolled his eyes. He thought residencies were lame. He said he wouldn’t be caught dead at a writers’ colony. My mother snapped at him: ‘Your whole life is a writer’s colony.’”)

Filed under: my reading year 2022

In one word

Wednesday, December 21, 2022

At the very end of this video (excerpted here), the director Francis Ford Coppola explains how he chooses a single word for each of films to keep him on track as he makes decision after decision:

Learning from the great Elia Kazan, I always try to have a word that is the core of what the movie is really about.

In one word.

For Godfather, the key word is “succession.” That’s what the movie is about.

Apocalypse Now: “morality.”

The Conversation: “privacy.”

Megalopolis. You know what it is? “Sincerity.” That’s the word I use when I say, “What should I do?”

For each book I write, I choose a secret sentence.