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.

The only pure art form

Monday, December 19, 2022

Here is the back of a vintage mid-60s sweatshirt (Schroeder’s on the front) recently shared on the @schulzmuseum Instagram, along with this quote from Charles Schulz:

Music is what keeps us sane. Music would be equivalent to a sense of humor. Music is one of the things, like the ability to laugh, that has kept mankind going for all of these thousands of years.

And here’s a Snoopy button from the late 60s, suggesting that dancing is the only pure art form. (The panel is from a Peanuts strip published on March 16, 1963.)

Running away

Friday, December 16, 2022

A thought from my friend Mark Larson:

Advice on leaving (your place of birth, social media platforms, etc.): Make sure you’re running toward something, and not just away from something!

Made me think of Sly and The Family Stone’s “Running Away”:

Running away to get away
Ha-ha, ha-ha
You’re wearing out your shoes

Look at you fooling you

Whatever city or social media platform you run to, there’s a good chance that when you get there you’ll eventually say some version of, “Oh, no. We’re still us.”

Bum steer

Thursday, December 15, 2022

Sometimes I think they call them “idioms” because when you discover their origin you often feel like an idiot.

For years, I thought “bum steer” must refer to a cow that’s lazy or no good or couldn’t procreate or something. (The latter doesn’t even make sense because a steer is a male cow that’s been castrated. A non-castrated male cow is a bull.)

“Bum steer” actually means a misdirection, “a piece of false information or guidance” (OED) or “an instance of false or misleading information or directions especially when purposely so.” (Merriam-Webster.)

So if somebody gives you a bum steer, they steered you wrong, either unintentionally or on purpose.

(I wonder how many people who read Texas Monthly actually know this meaning? The longhorn riding a scooter on the cover makes it even more confusing…)