Lights out

I think I'm going to wrap things up here at ol' Clarity.  When I started this blog in January 2005 I wanted to create an outlet where I could write and try to record the significant and small moments of life that seemed worth remembering.  Through 550 posts, that idea carried me through law school, getting engaged, getting married, having two careers and having two babies.  I am so thankful that I've had this record of the changes that occurred from age 24 to 32 -- it's hard to imagine a more momentous period of my life.

Things change, though, and for a number of reasons I think it's time to wrap things up here.  As more loved ones began reading the blog I felt compelled to change the way I wrote or what I wrote about.  I began to feel pressure to memorialize everything that seemed significant.  And perhaps most importantly, the blog began to feel like a source of guilt rather than an oasis.  Now I just feel guilty about about not writing or posting more.  

Maybe it's just a function of life with work and two kids under three, but it's hard to muster the energy to think and to write a lot of the time.  Of course, in the last few days I've been thinking about what to do here, and new things to write about seem to appear all around me like shiny coins on the sidewalk: Barrow smiling at me the other day as we sat on the couch, a moment of union and synthesis that in some ways feels like the beginning of my fatherhood of him; my great day on Friday, when I picked up some stationary and the Best American Short Stories 2012 at the bookstore and then entered Chipotle to hear a song I love on the sound system.  Also the fact that I feel more aware than ever of a certain stratification among my friends as all of our careers and life choices seem to push us in different and undeniable directions.  Not to mention what I read this year (the "Game of Thrones" books, the latest LBJ volume by Robert Caro, and not much else) and what I listened to (Drake, Frank Ocean, a lot of dance & pop music).

If I continue writing this blog, I'll feel guilty about not writing more; if I stop writing this blog, I'll feel guilty for stopping.  Because of course, a blog I began in 2005 should continue in perpetuity.  I feel guilty Barrow won't have as many posts as Alice.  I don't know.

So with that in mind, I'm turning out the lights for the time being.  I will certainly find another outlet to write when the time comes, but I don't know if it will be here.  But maybe it will.  

One last thing: over time L and I have developed a silly nickname for each other, "blabe," which comes from one time when I meant to say "babe" but it came out "blabe."  This is like how George W. and Laura Bush call each other "Bushie."  When Alice was in the womb we started calling her "Little Blabe," or LB, which we still sometimes call her.  And when we first started talking about the idea of Barrow, we identified him as "Baby Blabe."  A while back L and I were talking about those six-word biographies that are popular these days, and she asked what mine would be, and I responded: "Blabe, blabe, Little Blabe, Baby Blabe."  

What a life.  So much to be thankful for. 

New perspectives

 

 A few days ago I wrote a self-pitying blog post about how I don't feel like I have time to think anymore.  Can't afford the gym and am compelled to graze all night, so I feel like a fat-ass. Can't find new music to listen to.  Can't find a book compelling enough to finish.  Can't even fathom the idea of sitting down to write something meaningful.  Between work and home I feel like I have nothing else to give, so I was becoming accustomed to the idea that this was just how life would be, that you just kind of give up on everything else and keep your head down and watch your body become that of an old person.

I've been revisiting that draft post in the last few days, and I think I've done a pretty good job of taking concrete steps to combat it.  To wit:

1. I joined the gym at work and signed up for two classes on Sunday.  I went for the first time yesterday and it kicked my ass.  My body is sore all over the place now.  I felt so happy to be moving and sweaty.  At one point we were doing push-ups and the floor around me was slick with sweat that I could barely keep my bearings.  The last time I was in this gym was in 2005, in a boxing class that I loved, and it was a very odd sense memory to return to this place in a completely different life.  While I feel guilty about being away from the family during that chunk of time on Sundays, I think it's worth it in the long run, especially since A is usually napping and L can use the time to herself.

2. I bought "David Copperfield" at the bookstore and so far I'm loving it.  I was trying to read all these contemporary books that just felt very transitory and slight.  I like reading something that has endured, and Dickens is weirdly accessible to me -- it is popular entertainment, after all.  I'm excited to have one big fat book to chew on for the next two months.

3. Alice and I are doing a dance class at Alvin Ailey on Sunday mornings.  Bringing Alice to the studios where I used to do hip hop is hilarious.  Yesterday I could hear a hip hop class thumping in the room next door to us and it broke my heart (as we ran around with jingle bells tied to our wrists and sang songs about butterflies).  But I like having our own little thing together, and Alice enjoys it and I think it's helpful to teach her the basics of rhythm and movement.  L noted that Alice has been nicer to me since we started doing the class together -- it's our own little adventure, her and I.  The funny thing is that I feel weirdly competitive with the other little kids and their parents (mothers), like I want the teacher to be impressed that I've mastered these exercises designed for 2 year olds.  See me twirl the scarf!  I know what sound a froggy makes!  Watch me gallop!

4. Yesterday we also went to see the big new public art spectacle down at Columbus Circle, in which a Japanese artist has built a living room around the statue of Christopher Columbus on top of a six-story obelisk in the middle of the intersection.  I found the piece more powerful and compelling than I expected.  It was neat to see this old hunk of marble up close, and the views were great.  It raised interesting questions about private ownership of public art/spaces.  And it was amusing to watch Alice ignore the tremendous statue dominating the space so she could flip through the coffee table book at its feet. 

And that's it.  Right now I'm just trying to fight entropy and reclaim some things about life that I enjoy.  If it doesn't happen now, before this new baby comes, then I think we're in trouble.

The summer

2008

2012

It was the summer of "Call Me Maybe," a song that I didn't know but seemed to like anyway.  There were downsides, of course, like the drug-related triple-execution that took place in a car parked a few blocks away from our home, but the evenings were so long and sweet that we could often stroll through the neighborhood after dinner, taking note of the flowers that had been duct-taped to a tree in memoriam of the three murdered drug dealers.  As the days multiplied the flowers began to wilt and droop in the remembered heat.

I would leave work on Fridays at 1 and then head to Lincoln Center to watch movies and eat popcorn in the solitary dark.  In the afternoons at work I would take a break to walk down to Chipotle to buy a Coke Zero, a concession to time and metabolism that I told myself I enjoyed.  Each day we waited for our nanny to give birth to her baby, but she usually didn't and so life continued normally. 

One Saturday I had to work for much of the day, and when I was finally released into the weekend I went to Five Guys to eat a burger and drink a real Coke and read a New Yorker article about the President's early years.  As a college student he had been no less self-serious than any of the rest of us.  Later we all went to the playground, where Alice enjoys dangling from any horizontal bar she can find, holding her feet in front of her.  Sometimes she and I hang simultaneously from the bars, myself well aware of the embarrassing effort required to maintain the position.

We all went to a Thai restaurant on Amsterdam Avenue, testing fate by actually dining at a restaurant rather than scurrying home with our meals cooling and congealing in their styrofoam.  The menu featured text in Thai and grainy photos of Thai markets.  Looking at it, smelling brief pockets of aromas from other people's entrees, brought me close to the memory of what it had actually been like in Thailand, those four years ago.  I was on the verge of remembering something real about it -- the sweat, the confusion, the happy blind confidence, the age -- but it disappeared before I could grasp it.

No time for reflection.  On the way home we stopped at Columbia so that Alice could clamber among the steps and the fountains, resolutely independent and insistent that we keep our distance.  As the day dissolved around us we returned home.  When we walked by their street I thought of the men who had been murdered there weeks earlier; the street where their ghosts remained, where their ghastly car was long, long gone.  

Books of the year, 2011

In chronological order, here are the books I loved most in 2011:

• The Naked and the Dead by Norman Mailer
• Raymond Carver: A Writer's Life by Carol Sklenicka
• The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Master of the Senate by Robert A. Caro
• Too Much Happiness by Alice Munro
• Something is Out There by Richard Bausch
• Blue Collar, White Collar, No Collar edited by Richard Ford
• The Optimist's Daughter by Eudora Welty
• The Lonely Polygamist by Brady Udall
• A Visit From the Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan
• Ladies and Gentlemen by Adam Ross
• 1Q84 by Haruki Murakami

Themes of this year's reading: more short fiction; more biography; bloated long novels; and starting things without finishing them.  New batches of short stories from Alice Munro and Richard Bausch were as enticing and flawless as their previous efforts.  Adam Ross wrote stories that made me jealous.  And the Ford-edited collection, a gathering of stories dealing with work, achieved an unexpectedly elegant cohesion with its subject matter.  It made me think about how we relate to our jobs and vocations in a new way, and to see diverse writers grapple with this fundamental source of identity and purpose was inspiring.

This year I also found myself getting stuck in long novels that could have used some decent editing, particularly Paul Murray's Skippy Dies and, as much as it pains me to say it, 1Q84.  It frustrated me to wade through bloated prose that deserved to be leaner and finer.  I am usually very lenient with big ol' doorstops, but these books tested my patience (even if I enjoyed the ride, as in the Murakami).  

This year I also ended reading chunks of books and then dropping them, for various reasons: The Imperfectionists, Love and Summer, Madame Bovary, and others.  This was embarrassing but unavoidable.

I think my favorite novel this year was The Lonely Polygamist, a sprawling look at a polygamist in contemporary Utah.  The writer juggled multiple voices and created a universe all his own.  It was moving, funny, exciting, and unpredictable.  It's a long novel that justified its scope and breadth.

I'm currently reading Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now (as I said I would in last year's annual book round-up, oddly enough).  I've been pleasantly surprised so far - Trollope knows how to maintain the reader's interest, and his characters are well-developed, complicated, and profoundly, irredeemably selfish.  It makes for great reading (more on this soon).  Other books in the queue for 2012: The Steve Jobs biography, Game of Thrones, and who knows what else.  I'm hoping the final volume of Lyndon Johnson comes out in the fall, and then we'll see whatever comes my way.  Hooray for reading!

Best books of 2010

In chronological order, here are the books I loved most in 2010:

• The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit by Sloan Wilson
• Cheever: A Life by Blake Bailey
• The Years of Lyndon Johnson: Means of Ascent by Robert A. Caro
• Zeitoun by Dave Eggers
• The Beautiful and Damned by F. Scott Fitzgerald
• Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
• Game Change: Obama and the Clintons, McCain and Palin, and the Race of a Lifetime by John Heilemann & Mark Halperin
• The Unnamed by Joshua Ferris
• A Gate at the Stairs by Lorrie Moore
• Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned by Wells Tower
• Freedom by Jonathan Franzen
• The Privileges by Jonathan Dee

This list does not seem very long, for an entire year's worth of reading.  I read a lot of books that weren't that great this year (here's looking at you, Wolf Hall and Freedom (see more thoughts on the latter book here)).  I switched from buying books to going to the library.  I read some more short stories (including Mavis Gallant, Deborah Eisenberg, Lorrie Moore and others) but Wells Tower was the only one I loved.  Game Change was practically perfect, in its gossipy political way, but I didn't read as much history as usual.

Fiction-wise, Moby-Dick frustrated me as I read it but left me reeling (more thoughts here).  The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a book that captivated me since I was a little kid, turned out to be almost prophetic (more thoughts here), and bookended nicely by The Privileges.  But my favorite novel of the year would have to be Lorrie Moore's A Gate at the Stairs.  Although the plot of this slender book is modest and direct, I thought she wrote very ambitiously about the post-9/11 era through the lens of a small cast of characters.  I actually think she accomplished what Jonathan Franzen tried to do in a much more bloated way.  Moore's writing was impeccable, and besides from one far-fetched episode with the protagonist's mysterious boyfriend, I thought this book was flawless.

(While on the subject of Lorrie Moore, let me note that she wrote the most fantastic simile I've read in a long time, from her story "Charades" in Birds of America: "She is also having an affair with a young assistant DA in the prosecutor's office, but it is a limited thing--like taking her gloves off, clapping her hands, and putting the gloves back on again. It is quiet and undiscoverable.")

The best non-fiction I read -- just beating out the salacious popcorn of Game Change and the ongoing train of biographical perfection that is The Years of Lyndon Johnson -- was Cheever: A Life.  After discovering Cheever's fiction a couple years back, I was very interested to read about his sad and troubled life.  I had a lot of sympathy for him, for his demons, for the suffering he inflicted on himself and on others. His was a fascinating life, and Blake Bailey created an exemplary biography, as well as a great literary study of Cheever's works.

Right now I'm read Norman Mailer's The Naked and The Dead, a great book for these dark winter days.  Coming up in the queue: a new biography of Raymond Carver and -- finally -- with baited breath -- Master of the Senate.  I'm hoping those will get me through the winter, and then who knows what's next.  I'd like to read some older, more classic short stories (maybe Chekhov or something) and am thinking possibly about Anthony Trollope.  And hey, there's always Decision Points.

Book review: "Freedom"

I was rabidly excited to read Jonathan Franzen's new novel, "Freedom."  I loved his previous novel, "The Corrections," and am a long-time fan of his non-fiction pieces in the New Yorker.  He writes with a strain of effete east coast snobbery that I sadly recognize in myself, but he doesn't seem too burned up about it.  As if his past work wasn't enough, Franzen was being proclaimed The Great American Novelist on the cover of Time, Oprah picked his book for her club, and he was the subject of many long, fawning reviews that I wallowed in reading, sometimes twice.

Of course, I should have been warned when those same reviews contained sentences like this: "Franzen cracked open the opaque shell of postmodernism, tweezed out its tangled circuitry and inserted in its place the warm, beating heart of an authentic humanism."  My thought was: Wait a second, did he write a book or build a robot?  I was also irritated by the use of the verb "tweeze."

Despite this, I forged ahead.  To read this book I broke my own personal rules about waiting until the paperback edition, and about not spending unnecessary amounts of money during this age of austerity.  I even returned the first copy of the book that I purchased because I realized that I could save $2 if I ordered it online.  And so, late last night, after purchasing in total two copies of this book, I finished the damn thing.

How do you describe the sound of the air leaking out of a balloon?  I kept waiting for the brilliance, the cohesion.  Franzen is an undeniably compelling writer, and I devoured this book -- but I never saw it as a masterpiece.  The main characters and plots were described opaquely, elliptically -- through the perceptions of the neighbors, through an interminable autobiography of 200+ pages.  I kept waiting for a strong narrative voice to come in and unify the characters, the ideas.  Instead it felt like a negative portrait of the characters -- Franzen stuffed the margins with contemporary ideas and name-droppings, filling in the excess with riffs on war profiteering or mountain-top removal mining, and what remained, silhouetted in the middle, were the main characters. (Perhaps the previous sentence is as bad as the one cited above, but then again, this is not the NYT Book Review.)

I appreciate a writer with ambition, and Franzen plotted the hell out of this -- intricate, complicated, with dynamics that emerge once and resurface again later -- but the structure and episodic nature of the book made it difficult to embrace as a unifying work.  The characters seemed flat, caricatures of actual humans: the aging rocker; the desperate former athlete/housewife, the "Republican" son, who never did anything remotely Republican; etc. 

Although Franzen nodded to contemporary events and motifs, he seemed to just throw them all against the wall in the hopes that the mere mention of Sarah Silverman or YouTube would somehow transform the book into an engrossing portrait of the era.  As if mere reflection and recitation were enough, instead of the deep digging I was hoping for.  The characters were ciphers, vessels to carry these labels, yet they never engaged with them.

Personally, it was interesting to read about Franzen's idea of UVA during 9/11, which I was present for, or of McLean, Virginia, which is my hometown.  He was sort of right and sort of wrong about both.  His writing often fell flat for me -- none of the casual poetry of Ian McEwan or Lorrie Moore -- and there were some sentences that seemed as if they had been dashed off in an email, rather than as part of this year's Great American.  Too much dialogue in ALL CAPS.

But did I enjoy reading the book?  Yes, I did.  I couldn't put it down.  There were a few emotionally resonant scenes, and I enjoyed how he toyed with the idea of freedom -- its blessing and its potential danger in our modern society.  The opening and closing sections were strong, steered by an omniscient narrator who could survey a broad community of characters and ideas, who could describe the sunset falling over a lakeside community, who could write with biting wit.  If only Franzen had not ceded the book to so many other, lesser voices.

As far as the chorus of ecstatic reviews go, I think I have been burned by the literary hype machine.  Once again I asked L if perhaps I'm just a lazy or shallow reader, but I don't think so (I've got David Brooks and B.R. Myers in my corner).  Perhaps the overwhelming praise is for Franzen's ambition, if not his execution; perhaps it's for our own self-indulgence as we read a novel about liberals with irony and Twitter streams; or perhaps this is a round of literary self-congratulation to which outsiders are not invited.  The final disappointment came when I realized that the people to whom the book was dedicated were Franzen's agent and publisher.

Book report: "Moby Dick"

I spent most of July reading Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, Or, If Thou Preferest, The Whale.  I can't recall a book that was so incredibly tedious to read, yet left me with so much to consider after the reading was over.  After a month-long trudge through chapters and chapters of cetology, the study of whales, and the historical and mythological overviews of the roles of whales and whaling in human history, I find myself thinking a lot about cetology and the historical and mythological overviews of whales and whaling in human history.  I mean, damn.  Maybe this was a good book!

Be warned: what follows is a book report, not for the faint of heart.

I think I spent too much of the book worried about themes I wasn't understanding, or symbolism I was missing.  What is it all about?  Nature and man?  Vengeance?  Obsession?  What does a big white whale represent?  How big is a whale, anyway?  What does the boat look like?  I was never quite sure of any of it.

Melville wrapped the entire novel -- which includes digressions into history, satire, and drama, as well as a few postmodern winks and some oddly bogus science -- in sprawling, languid sentences, long sentences like the horizon on the sea, sentences whose intricacy would be lost below their placid, boring surface, as well as by my own inattention.  I often found myself realizing that something was happening -- there is a whale hunt occurring; men are dying; wooden boats are destroyed with the flick of a tail or the seizure of a jaw -- yet I had missed the action in the thickets of Melville's language. Only when I closed the book to think about what occurred could I appreciate the magnitude of these events: desperate or unbound men gathered on a boat, acquiescing to a madman's wish for revenge against a legendary white whale, the leviathan, chasing the beast around the world until the madman's appetite was satiated, whatever the cost.

But there were a few surprising things I pulled from the book; a few discrete notes from Melville's awesome cacophany.  I really liked Ishmael, the narrator.  He was more prominent early in the book, and later he would mysteriously disappear for long stretches so an omniscient narrator could take the reins.  But as I read Ishmael's voice I felt like he would have been a friend of mine.  He was naive but earnest; friendly, curious, observant, unruffled.  Driven to the sea by his restlessness and frustration with humanity, he easily accepted the exotic people and places he found.  He seemed like a good guy. 

Along a similar vein, I thought this was a very cosmopolitan novel, in its way.  The crew of Ahab's ship, the Pequod, came from all corners of the globe.  Many were Americans fleeing shady circumstances or unhappy lives, but there were others, particularly the harpooneers, from Asia or Africa or the Middle East.  Although the book is rife with the racism of the time, on the ocean no one claimed citizenship or pride of place; they were in a no man's land, where they could not afford the luxury of prejudice, and were forced to work and live together. 

The last third of the book is the pinnacle of the voyage, when Ahab finally finds the white whale, and chases it for three long days (three days of danger, three days of death, three days of Jesus in the grave) until the final confrontation.  And here's the ending of the book (SPOILER ALERT!!!1!): the whale defeats Ahab and destroys the Pequod.  All of her crew is killed, yet none are granted the honor of a described death.  Everyone, all of the characters we have known, and all of the ones we have not, are sent to an anonymous, watery grave.  Save one: beloved Ishmael, the sole survivor of the battle, who floats in the water for two days before he is rescued.  Rescued in order to tell the tale.

A couple of things about this: although the violence and drama of the final days was muted when I first read this section, it amplified as I thought about it and returned to it.  Ahab's death was fitting yet tragic.  The loss of beloved characters like Queequeg and Starbuck was all the more powerful for its understatement (no final words for them, no last memories of home or cries of anguish).  And finally, the cataclysmic end of this book reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude.  In both works, the entire universe of the novel is utterly destroyed in the final pages.  The characters and the setting are obliterated, as if they had never existed.  Here, the Pequod and her crew are dashed, except for one.  And of course, Moby Dick presumably survives to barrel through the seas and face other battles.  Maybe that's it, then: none of it remains, none of it matters, save the water, the whale, and a voice to tell the tale.

Moby Dick: I didn't enjoy it, but maybe I love it.

"The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit" by Sloan Wilson

"'I was my own disappointment. I really don't know what I was looking for when I got back from the war, but it seemed as though all I could see was a lot of bright young men in gray flannel suits rushing around New York in a frantic parade to nowhere. They seemed to me to be pursuing neither ideals nor happiness -- they were pursuing a routine. For a long while I thought I was on the side lines watching that parade, and it was quite a shock to glance down and see that I too was wearing a gray flannel suit.'"

When I was little, when we would go spend summer weekends at my grandparents' place in Rehoboth Beach, I was always drawn to the few old hardbacks on the bookshelves. I distinctly remember two of them, always found in their same alcove every year, next to an old photo in a plastic frame and a few hardy seashells: Sloan Wilson's "The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit," and a book by Ian Fleming on Jamaica. The Wilson book in particular stood out; the cover was old and tatty, a relic from the 1950s or 60s, and featured a man in silhouette wearing a fedora, hands clasped behind his back. Why didn't he have a name? Why was he in shadow? Like most objects and events of my childhood, I was vaguely afraid of this.

I was thinking about this book recently and bought it online on a lark. I found an edition from 2002 with an endearingly ugly cover -- preserving that iconic silhouette man -- and featuring a new introduction from Jonathan Franzen.

Reader, I loved this book. I don't know if I've ever read a book that so closely matched my own life and circumstances. I was expecting another typical post-war suburban angst book: man and woman in bitter marriage, loathed or ignored children, drunken escapades, casual violence, sullen train rides into the city. And yet: the protagonist here was a decent young guy with a smart, beautiful wife. He changed jobs in an effort to find meaningful work that challenged him yet allowed him time with kids. He was loyal to his old grandmother. He treated people fairly. He was honest with his boss when he could have been a yes-man. He struggled with his past in World War Two, with the violence and infidelities that had somehow made sense in a senseless place. Ultimately he reconciled his shameful past with the future he wanted to build for himself and his family. He did it with integrity.

I found this book to be so inspiring and appropriate for me right now. The author's afterword from 1983 highlighted how young people have always been very responsive to the novel; how they have understood, unlike the critics who caricatured the book as yet another backhanded slap at postwar life, that this is actually a story of unironic aspiration and resilience. I was surprised by the sourness of Franzen's introduction which highlighted some of the weaknesses of the book (notably its rushed, pat conclusion).

I consider it a real gift, and a funny little curlique of life, that I happened to read a book I've been toying with since I was a little kid at this particularly apt moment of my life. The edition that I just read was published almost 40 years after the original hardback I eyed for all those summers, yet the man remains, waiting to be read, waiting to be understood. The passage I highlighted above really bowled me over, and the lines that followed resonated as well:

"'I needed a great deal of assistance in becoming an honest man. If you hadn't persuaded me to play it straight with Ralph, I would be thinking differently now. By a curious coincidence, Ralph and a good deal of the rest of the world have seemed honest to me ever since I became honest with myself...I would have gone on, becoming more and more bitter, more and more cynical, and I don't know where that road would have ended. But now I'm sure things are going to be better. I've become almost an optimist.'"

"Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters"

I just read a really interesting book that was recommended to me by Ryan, husband of L's cousin Kristen (thus making him basically my brother): "Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters" by Meg Meeker. I have thought a lot lately about the kind of family life I want to build for the three of us: a specific architecture of values, traditions and habits that requires some purpose and forethought.

I was excited to read this on Ryan's recommendation, even though he warned me about some of the God stuff in the book. I felt like the author was writing from a very solid conservative Christian background, which is not exactly the environment in which we will be welcoming this kid. The approach to sexuality was drenched in horrifying statistics about HPV and other sexually transmitted diseases, as well as earnest hypothetical anecdotes about one day discovering that your own daughter is the centerfold model in your hunting buddy's new issue of Playboy. Statistically, this is very improbable. They only have 12 centerfolds a year!

On the other hand, though, nothing riles up my inner social conservative like the prospect of guiding my daughter through the next 20 years of our increasingly degenerate pop culture. I think about the TV shows L and I thoughtlessly watch, the winkingly obscene music I enjoy (see below), and I wonder how you can protect a child from that stuff when she sees the world innocently and genuinely, without that shield of irony and cynicism that we adults grasp instinctively. The book had some excellent instructions and reminders about a father's role in his daughter's life: his centrality, his moral authority, his modeling of the way men and women interact and how a young woman should expect to be treated. I found myself agreeing with much of it, and feeling a renewed confidence in my own instinct and the way that L and I can complement each other in raising our girl.

There was excellent stuff about the need for fathers to say "I love you," to show affection, to establish boundaries, to make yourself known, to truly listen, to take your daughter on special outings. I particularly loved the chapter on humility, which really resonated with me and seemed to go hand-in-hand with the value of empathy. The book made me excited to raise our girl and thankful to be able to look back and see so many ways that my parents did all of these things, all of these traditions and simple ways of living that I can't wait to pass along.

As expected, the book hits hard with the God stuff, which I did not really enjoy. One big question L and I are grappling with is the role of religion in our kid's life, and in the life of our family. We're not actively going to church these days, and I'm struggling a lot to find a resolution that seems to carry some integrity with it. I want my kid to have a firm moral grounding, but I have so much doubt and anger towards the church's own moral authority. I don't want my daughter thinking she has to submit to a church that doesn't treat her as an equal. I don't want her assuming some of the chuch's toxic attitudes towards women and sexuality. On the other hand, I think the church has done a lot of good in the world, I think it maintains a strong intellectual tradition that I want to pass on, and I think its message about love, charity, sacrifice, forgiveness, and devotion is fundamental and something that a kid should begin to wrestle with. I don't know. Doubt is a part of faith, I know that. I'm just trying to reconcile all of this so that we can figure out what to do with our girl with some measure of integrity. Integrity, and not superstition.

Anyways -- "Strong Fathers, Strong Daughters." I really enjoyed it and I gave it to L to read, too. I mentioned architecture before and I think that's really what I'm trying to do: I want to think about this purposefully, to enter fatherhood with an idea of our compass and our goals for our life together. Now I'm just working on the blueprint.

Best books of 2009

In chronological order, here are the books that I loved the most in 2009:

The Stories of John Cheever
The Beautiful Struggle by Ta-Nehisi Coates
A Free Life by Ha Jin
American Wife by Curtis Sittenfeld
Lush Life by Richard Price
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America by Rick Perlstein
Netherland by Joseph O'Neill
The Other by David Guterson
Cathedral by Raymond Carver
The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York by Robert A. Caro
The Stories of Richard Bausch
The Years of Lyndon Johnson: The Path to Power by Robert A. Caro
Fine Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3 by Annie Proulx

I didn't read as many books this year as usual, but in my defense there are some real door-stoppers on this list. I continued my exploration of the short story, starting with the master, John Cheever, and continuing through my second Carver collection (even better than What We Talk About When We Talk About Love) and read the stories of Richard Bausch. Discovering Bausch's work was a revelation; his writing is a synthesis of the writers who came before with a modern, literally Virginian sensibility that immediately felt familiar yet utterly new. I loved his stories passionately and they almost felt within my reach. The idea that my friend John actually studied short fiction under him is boggling.

Besides short stories, this was the year I discovered Robert A. Caro. The Power Broker is one of the best books I've ever read. It changed the way I look at New York, at government, at urban planning, at the use of power. More than once I have found myself in a sticky political situation at work and asked myself, what would Robert Moses do? It made me think about ambition and happiness and the tensions between the two. I also started reading Caro's unfinished four-volume biography of LBJ. Johnson, like Moses, was a real bastard, so it makes for fascinating reading. I am excited to continue the LBJ saga (he's not even a senator yet and I've read 700 pages about the man) in the new year.

I think my favorite novel of the year was David Guterson's The Other. Beautifully written and artfully structured. I wrapped up the year with a volume of Annie Proulx stories, including a stunning piece originally from The New Yorker, "Tits-Up In A Ditch." The book also included "Them Old Cowboy Songs" and "Testimony of the Donkey," which were nearly as good. Now I'm devouring Stephen King's Under the Dome, which I requested for Christmas, and I'm loving it.

Looking ahead to 2010, I want to continue my trek through the life of LBJ, courtesy of Robert Caro, and I might tackle Moby Dick, too. I can't wait for Blake Bailey's Cheever biography to come out in paperback in mid-March. And then, of course, the baby arrives, and my reading life will change too -- I'm trying to do consume as much as I can before my attention is redirected.

Stella on Sunday

One of the most decadent ways to spend a Sunday afternoon must be sitting outside at a bar drinking a beer while you read for pleasure. Who gets to do that? Rich people? Although I felt sort of guilty taking up valuable table space with my used UK copy of "Rabbit is Rich" (which included a French train ticket stub from 1991 tucked between its yellowing pages), that did not stop me from enjoying a Stella or two while L sipped on tea and read her book across from me. Walking inside to use the restroom, I saw other readers enjoying their books and newspapers at the bar, and people lounging at tables snacking on french fries and bar food and sipping on drinks. It felt like a conspiracy of leisure: the lazy afternoon sunlight filtering through the warren of rooms, voices raised in slow-paced laughter and conversation, all of us sharing in the seemingly illicit pleasure of entering a night space and claiming it for the beautiful, unhurried day.

Inside the fortress of solitude

I haven't said very much this weekend. L went down to Florida to see her grandma, so I've been on my own since yesterday afternoon. I have taken this time to briefly withdraw -- from the world, into myself. I feel like I needed time to regroup. Today I only left the house to go to the farmers market, and then again to eat lunch and read "The Power Broker," and finally I went on a walk around the block a couple of hours ago. I have spent a lot of time reading and watching television. I watched "Sophie's Choice" and "The Contender." I thought a lot about writing, which I've put on the backburner after a couple of daunting weeks at work. I've been listening to a lot of music, too, and when John Mayer's song "Home Life" came on, I felt that strange feeling of nostalgia that music can provoke. It is almost palpable, like drunkenness, like feeling something rolling over your shoulders and consuming you. Hearing that song made me think of how much my life has changed in three years, made me think about how I live and what I have now. It was one of those nights where I was just shuffling through all the music on my ipod, rediscovering old stuff and cobbling together a strange and rich medley of stuff, enough to put me in a reflective mood.

Throughout the day I wondered if I should call somebody up or try to meet anyone for a meal or a drink, but I decided not to. Not to mention that the list of potential invitees now seems pathetically small. It was a beautiful day and I felt bad for not running or spending more time outside, but it was enough to run my errands and feel the breeze coming inside, through the plants and the herb garden perched on the fire escape. I didn't even shower today. But that was my choice, and I figure tomorrow when L comes back I can get all spruced up and be sociable. Today it felt good to dig in.

Also, last night I went to an intermediate hip hop class and really got my ass handed to me. It was pretty tough, intricate stuff and I realized I was out of my league about twenty minutes in. There were only a handful of us in there. Two of the other people had clothing with dance studios' names on them, which was a bad sign. Somebody else was some high school prodigy who had learned choreography from our teacher's DVDs. And there I was in my running t-shirt and sneaks, knowing this may have been a mistake. The teacher, who is a pretty accomplished dude, taught really quickly and didn't break things into eight counts. Instead everything tracked the lyrics of the song, so it was tough to place it within the music. Once I realized that he was really hitting the bass notes, things made more sense. By the end of the class I was about 70% there, I would say. It was fun but also very trying. He was calling me out at times during the class, telling me to not think too much and get stuck in my head. There were moments when I would feel those first hot pangs of stress and panic and embarrassment, and I tried to push it as far away as I could. Beneath the immediate knowledge that you alone are very conspicuously not doing something correctly is a deeper and more gnawing realization that you are not as good as you think you are, Mr. Hot Stuff. It was not fun in those moments. And frankly, if I want to feel bad about myself and get yelled at, I just show up at work. No need to extend that into my...hip hop life, as it were.

Maybe that class is what set me on this course for the last twenty-four hours. Quietness, minimal talking, books and the tv, a few strangled verses of old nostalgic songs. Yet for one day it's enough.

'The Stories of John Cheever'

Impeccable. I have been reading these stories for weeks now, and I finally finished them tonight. As I read I tried to think about what kind of holistic picture Cheever was creating; what this body of work (representing more than thirty years of a writing life) was conveying. The quick answer, boiled down to a near-cliche, is "suburban angst." There was plenty of that (men in desperate affairs with their neighbors' wives; women crying out for a life beyond the kitchen and the nursery; the patter of conversation waiting for the morning train; the alcohol-soaked evenings) and I loved it. Many of his stories took place on a few streets in the Manhattan suburb of Shady Hill, featuring a familiar litany of family names ("The Farquarsons, the Beardens, the Bentleys...").

The greater thing, though, was his portrayal of universal emotions in such a specific time and place. At our present cultural moment the domestic life of the 1950s is treated with a knowing wink and nod, but Cheever won't let you escape with that kind of pat analysis. His characters are the same tangled mess of contradictions, jealousies, desires, aspirations, and disappointments that we are today. This book made me think of my grandparents and their young adulthoods. Although at times Cheever veered into the coldness and near-irony of "Revolutionary Road," over the course of this volume he was able to flesh out something richer, more alive, more true.

I can't imagine what it's like, as a writer, to have thirty years of work in one fat, proud volume. I wished I could have known when each of the stories were written, for a better sense of context. Appearing chronologically, the first half of the book seemed stronger to me. The stories were set in New York apartment buildings with elevator men and servants' entrances, and then moved to the post-war utopia of Shady Hill. In the last section of the book, Cheever the technician was in full force, with stories frequently set in Italy, with disarmingly explicit sex and unmannered cursing -- it was a shock. It seemed as though Cheever's moment had passed, and that he knew as much.

I was tempted to devour this book, but I tried to pause between each story, to take a moment to consider it as its own independent thing, before diving in to the next. Individually, these stories are impeccable and beautifully written and jarringly true; collectively, they are miraculous -- dozens of voices crying out for something more or something genuine, cacophonous yet harmonious. I really loved this book. Cheever was the genesis.

Best books of 2008

In chronological order, here are the books that I loved the most in 2008:

The Mistress's Daughter by A.M. Homes
Let Me Finish by Roger Angell
The Appeal by John Grisham
What We Talk About When We Talk About Love by Raymond Carver
Supreme Conflict by Jan Crawford Greenburg
Unaccustomed Earth by Jhumpa Lahiri
The Post-Birthday World by Lionel Shriver
On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
House of Mirth by Edith Wharton
Close Range: Wyoming Stories by E. Annie Proulx
The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
The World Without Us by Alan Weisman
The Abstinence Teacher by Tom Perrotta
The Nine by Jeffrey Toobin
The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer

I was particularly enamored with short stories this year: Carver, Lahiri and Proulx blew me away with their particularity, economy, and narrative force. On the other hand, Mailer's sprawling, forceful narrative, boggling in its breadth and specificity, seemed to nearly encompass everything there is about this nation. Angell's memoir was unexpectedly moving and made me ache with a certain kind of nostalgia for old New York. Parts of Homes' memoir seemed as if she had written them specifically for me. The last ten pages of McEwan knocked me for a loop and gave me a new mantra for marriage and life: love & patience. Rushdie's novel journeyed from the quotidian details of late-century London to the epic themes of fairy tales and myths.

The upper echelon, then: Let Me Finish, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, On Chesil Beach, Close Range, The World Without Us. And the very best book of the year, for this reader: The Satanic Verses. It was worth the wait.

Now I've picked up The Stories of John Cheever and am looking forward to a new year of reading. I might try Bolano, although I haven't enjoyed him yet. I have War and Peace on my list, perfect for some late-winter Russian. And who knows what else may come down the pike. A new story for a new year.

"Like men betrayed"

From the new issue of The New Yorker, an excerpt from James Wood's assessment of Richard Yates' amazing novel, Revolutionary Road, describing the main character, Frank Wheeler:

Frank works in New York for Knox Business Machines but prides himself that he takes his job ironically, that he cares nothing for it, and that his real life is elsewhere. Yates was playing a morbid joke on himself when he created Frank Wheeler, because Frank is Yates without the writing: he is saving himself for an invisible “creative” life that he is too unimaginative to envision.

This is definitely one of my greatest fears for my future, or my present. The idea of wrapping your external life in irony and disdain to protect some genuine core that you are ultimately unable to bring to fruition -- too feeble or scared or (yes, let's go there) impotent.

Amazing that Yates was able to capture this wariness that seems so typical of the professional male; amazing how it rings true through the decades. And with that, back to work.

Travel journal

This was when we were in Koh Tao, Thailand. We stayed in a little bungalow perched on top of a pile of large rocks. All we could see from our rickety bamboo balcony was the open sea, occasionally cut by a water taxi making its way around the island. There was a small oil lamp near the door and I spent a good amount of time trying to light the wick, but it never took. Instead we sat under the yellow bulb and watched the night settle in around us.

In this photo I was writing in my travel journal, which has come to be an essential part of any trip. Before I got this volume I would write what we did in the margins of guidebooks or scraps of paper, trying to remember the names of restaurants and tour guides, and the results were always cryptic and useless later on. Once I got smart and got a journal, I started writing more and taping in small relics of the trip: ticket stubs, postcards, etc. This particular volume accompanied me to Italy, Spain, California, Montana, Hawaii, and ended its career in Asia. I read something by Italo Calvino in college about how the cities we visit both ask us questions and answer our questions. So I always find myself wondering what a particular place is asking of me, and answering for me. (New York asked me everything.)

Anyways, so that's my travel journal, and here's a photo L took of me slumping over to write in it. In the photo you can see the oil lamp to my left, along with a thick copy of Thomas Wolfe's "You Can't Go Home Again." To my back is the wine-dark sea. The first chapter of the Wolfe book had me energized and feeling young and literate and alive, but unfortunately it went downhill from there. But for that brief moment it was spectacular.

I love the New Yorker

One of the things that has propelled me through this week of extreme heat and bar exam hysteria is the current issue of The New Yorker. I love this magazine, a lot, but I want to sing its praises now that the week is drawing to a close.

This is the annual Summer Fiction issue, a double-week behemoth that landed with a thud in the mailbox last Monday. The first thing I do when I get a magazine is rip out all the ads, especially the ones made of cardboard or burlap or whatever material some genius "creative" decided to throw at magazine readers so we can't roll up the magazine or actually carry it around without having to crease those extra-stiff ads they're so enamored with. (You know what I'm saying?) This issue looked great from the start: the cover is by Adrian Tomine, one of my favorite illustrators and someone who is doing New Yorker covers that are as clever and vibrant and beautiful as anybody else these days. (One of his previous covers spent several happy months on our refrigerator a couple years ago.) This cover has grown on me the more I've looked at it.

Inside, there was a newly translated story from Vladimir Nabokov that was eerie and haunting. There was a hilarious review of "Sex and the City" by Anthony Lane, who clearly hated it. There was a great review of Jeff Koons' installation on the roof of the Met, which we saw a couple weeks ago. There was an interesting, surprisingly personal review by James Wood of some new books wrestling with faith, theodicy (whatever that means), and suffering. One of my favorite music critics, Sasha Frere-Jones, had a piece on Auto-Tune, the technology used by T-Pain and others to create many songs I love. There were short reflective pieces by great writers like Tobias Wolff and George Saunders on faith and doubt.

Haruki Murakami, one of my favorite novelists, had an essay on his passion for distance running and how it has impacted his life as a writer. I find him to be so brilliant, yet so accessible -- I was tickled to see the slightest connection between him and me, at least on the running front (although he seems to be a much better runner and writer than me, so what are you gong to do).

Best of all, though was the fiction. The issue lived up to the hype. I stayed at Chipotle for an awkwardly long time to finish up Annie Proulx's story, "Tits-Up in A Ditch." Reader, it was brilliant. It started off as the story of a young girl growing up unloved on a ranch in Wyoming, and went to some unexpected and grueling places. I actually, almost, sort of, got emotional reading the ending, which I was barreling towards relentlessly (and it took me 2 refills from the Chipotle soda fountain to get there, I might add). I've been thinking about this story a lot in the last few days. Please read it -- I wanted to link to it but those savvy dogs at newyorker.com are hoarding it for the print version.

I've saved myself the last major story in the issue, fiction from Mary Gaitskill, for tomorrow. How I have loved carrying this issue around, reading snippets during breaks from lectures or enjoying it over lunch. I love this magazine so passionately, and am such a nerd for it. Sometimes I have dreams where I am reading an article in the magazine, yet the words are being written as I read them -- I see the letters flying onto the page, in the familiar font into their familiar columns -- yet my dream-self is consciously reading and understanding what's being written, and understanding that it's all coming from somewhere deep inside my subconscious. The most striking thing about the dreams, though, is the fact that I'm writing something that's appearing in the New Yorker (my bizarre dream-world New Yorker, but it counts). Sometimes I find myself musing on what it would be like to be published in there. It's definitely a goal for my life.

So, I'm the kind of person who blogs about a particular issue of a magazine because he loved it so. All I can say is: thank you, David Remnick and the gang, for giving me some beauty and wisdom and brilliance to carry around with me and read for two whole weeks. Can't wait til the new issue on Monday (which will probably include something insanely boring to balance out, like the time they had a major feature on chalk production, which I really struggled with and ultimately abandoned). But that might be the best part of a weekly magazine: no matter what you get this week, hope springs eternal for the new issue coming down the pike.

End of the week

This weekend my brother-in-law Henry came into town. We had a very good time, despite being homebound for most of Saturday due to torrential rainfall. Other people might have been discouraged by the prospect of sitting in a small apartment, staring at each other as the rain pours and as we wait for our damp jeans to dry on top of the radiator, but not us!

On Friday Henry and I went to Chipotle for a late lunch. Massive lines of people waiting for their burritos. We went to the one on Varick, which is like a ghost town when I go at night for dinner; the lunchtimes hordes were kind of shocking. Later, like any two normal dudes, we went up to McNulty's on Christopher Street to buy some tea. That night we went to John's Pizza for dinner, where we had a great time until Henry felt something brush against his foot and it turned out to be a mouse. We were standing up, preparing to exit the place after our meal, and there was the lumpy brown mouse sitting perfectly still. Was it dead? Was it cowering? L was uncharacteristically shocked by the grossness and wasn't moving. I tried to steer her to the side, and then a restaurant guy swooped in and covered the mouse with his foot, and I thought OH SHIT DO NOT CRUSH THE MOUSE, so at that point I darted away to the side to miss the carnage, nimbly dodging tables until I met up with L and Henry at the front of the restaurant. Delicious pizza, though. Four stars, all the way.

Saturday we woke up to the driving rain. It was coming down in sheets, pounding the pavement and turning the air white. No one was outside. We spent a lot of time reading, doing homework, trying to find something new on the internet, staring at each other blankly. During a lull in the storm in the afternoon we ventured to Five Guys for some burgers and complimentary peanuts (I always eat too many peanuts, end up feeling sick later on) and went up to Three Lives to check out the new books. Five Guys, Three Lives. Hmm. As the rain picked up again we headed home.

Around six o'clock it seemed to let up once more, so I decided to go for a run by the river. (During those horrible witching hours of 5-7 pm, for some reason, I get so antsy and just can't be cooped up in the apartment -- I have to get out). As I ran along the river the clouds were billowing up into the sky, creating a broad gray band dividing the lapping water below and the surprisingly clear night sky above. Quite pretty. Two thirds of the way through it started raining again, cold flecks hitting the t-shirt on my back. A few minutes later the hard rain had returned, soaking through my clothes into my skin. I could feel the soppy weight of my pants against my calves as I ran. I sprinted for the last couple miles, whooping with cold as I tried to get home as quickly as possible. When I finally made it I was drenched and shivering, stripping in the kitchen and heading directly to the shower. Another great run!

That night we headed up to Rickshaw for dinner, after the rain finally abated around 8:30. Went to the Strand, and I got Raymond Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love." Excellent short stories, very spare and sharp and whittled down. I can definitely see the line connecting him to Richard Ford, one of my favorites. Henry met up with some friends so L and I watched a surprisingly good SNL with Ashesh and Mona.

Today I got up and spent a couple hours at the gym. As we left my teacher told me that I was getting stronger, since I was making it through the full set of push-ups. Humiliating compliment to receive. I immediately tried explaining how we don't do push-ups until near the end, when we've done a lot of upper body work already, how we do them extremely slow, how I'm focusing on form, etc. After Chipotle, where I was stuck in line behind some clueless Europeans who were mystified by the idea of selecting from a menu of salsas, I met everybody to head up to Union Square for various shopping and browsing adventures. We also ate lunch at the saddest Subway ever, which we should have recognized immediately based on the sign in the window advertising "FRE COFEE." Ultimately we made it home exhausted and Henry headed for the bus.

Despite the weather, it was an excellent weekend. I was glad Henry made it up, and he was a really good sport about our limited range of activities (hampered by the rain and our own weird proclivities -- three bookstores in two days? Really?). He is one of those people who I just wish would live up here, nearby. That list is distressingly long.

Armenia journal: January 3-4

1/3. A decadently lazy day. We stayed home all day, protected from the cold and the snow, and read books and watched "Big Love" on DVD. During the day the only time we went outside was to walk around the back of the house to the cellar to do laundry. To walk outside in jeans and longjohns and a sweater, boots loosely tied up as you slide and mince along the patio and the pathway to the laundry room, quickly gauging the snowfall and the cloudy gray oblivion of the sky as you go, and knowing there's a nice warm house and a cold Coke waiting inside for you -- it felt like the best of winter. We eventually geared up to walk to a restaurant in town, Cactus, the only Mexican place in Yerevan, for dinner. The Nepali host greeted us with a "Namaste" at the door. We had really good margaritas and mexican fare as the fashion tv network blasted at us from the wall -- the models strutting around in bikinis would not be ignored. It was nice to walk through the city at night, and to feel like I'm starting to get my bearings a bit. Everyone here is dressed in all black outside, fur coats are de rigeuer for the women, along with spiky stilettos; in our baggy winter coats and hiking boots we looked like granola-crunchy hippies from a completely unimaginable world.

1/4. Another wonderful, ridiculous day of idleness. To our credit we did leave the house to venture out for some food -- we walked through the light snowfall to a couple of grocery stores to pick up cheese and salami for lunch, as well as lavash (bread) and some other items. At one grocery store the employees wore garish orange blazers. We passed a street of very nice and well-tended houses, which was a stark change from what we usually see as we meander into the city.

Also, finished Crime and Punishment. Good but not as mind-blowing as I hoped. Got lost in some of the philosophy. Still left with embarrassingly basic questions like, "Why did he do it again?" "Why did he confess?" "What am I supposed to glean from this whole thing, really?" I see how this book could persuade or dissuade someone on the verge of criminality; as a law-abiding citizen who plans to keep it that way, I didn't feel like I gained a lot there. Except maybe if I am mugged I'll have more empathy for my assailant, if that's even something I should want in the first place.

Also, L woke me up early to check out the Iowa caucus results. Shocked and overjoyed to find my man Obama with a decisive victory. Surprised Hillary was way back in 3rd, but Edwards won't last. Happy that Huckabee came in first, too, since that's bad news for my mortal enemy, the plastic automaton Mitt Romney. And of course don't forget Rudy lurking in the shadows, with his mafioso associates and children who hate him. I'd really like to see McCain get the nod, and he's looking great for New Hampshire, although he's competing for the same moderates as Obama. Also, Obama's speech this morning was amazing and inspiring. I want him to be our president.

Patriotism, from half a planet away! David Brooks summed it up best -- it's an exciting day to be an American.

Best books of 2007

This year had a lot of great books in it. I discovered Joan Didion and read a bunch of her stuff; I read three Richard Fords, whom I have loved since college; and I read a bunch of books from the middle of the century that showed that there is never really anything new under the sun. And of course The Road, which was utterly harrowing and technically amazing. Of all the books I read, these were my favorites (in chronological order):

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami
Love and Other Impossible Pursuits by Ayelet Waldman
The Cold War: A New History by John Lewis Gaddis
The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion
Slouching Towards Bethlehem by Joan Didion
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Team of Rivals by Doris Kearns Goodwin
The Interloper by Antoine Wilson
The Emporer's Children by Claire Messud
Fiasco by Thomas E. Ricks
Stoner by John Williams
The Lay of the Land by Richard Ford
Butcher's Crossing by John Williams
Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates
The Innocent Man by John Grisham

Of those, my absolute favorites would be Stoner, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, and Wind-Up Bird Chronicle.

I hadn't heard of John Williams until New York Review of Books started republishing his novels in extremely good-looking editions. I read two of his books this year and both made it to my list. He writes so cleanly, with such economy, about things I don't know a thing about. Stoner was about the life of a man who grew up in the midwest and became an English professor out there in the first half of the 1900s, adopting a career that his farmer parents can't understand. The book is short, but swiftly covers events in his entire life. To tell the truth, his life is somewhat sad in many ways -- bad marriage, alienated from his kid, thwarted at work by academic politics. But his stoicism, and passion for his work, and sheer resilience become admirable, and by the time the book ends you're left a surprising affection for this poor old sack of a man, who by then seems no less than heroic. This book reminded me of The Namesake, and I devoured it over three days in August. Amazing.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem was better than all the other Didion stuff I read this year; she was reporting on the counterculture of the 1960s as an open but skeptical observer, writing with such intelligence and humor and creativity. I've tried to copy her style at times here, like when I wrote about the JT concert over the summer. The highlight of the book was the final essay, "Goodbye To All That," about her departure from New York -- when she realized her time as a young adult in the city was inevitably winding down. It rang extremely true and seemed like an prophesy as well as an elegy.

Wind-Up Bird Chronicle was simply amazing. I wrote about it in January when I was reading the book. I admired Murakami's gutsiness and bizarre creativity -- who knew you could be so weird in mainstream fiction? Yet the work is consistent and believable and emotional. I find his protagonists so easy to relate to, despite their troubles and dabbles in magical realism. I'm really glad I found him and have plenty of books to catch up on.

A great year of reading. For our trip to wintry Armenia in a couple weeks, L and I have stacked up on the Russians: she'll be tackling the new translation of War and Peace, and I'll be filling an embarrassing gap in my knowledge by taking on Crime and Punishment. I hear both books are breezy and hilarious. Happy New Year!