I was talking with my friend Iain, who has a daughter about Daniel’s age, and he asked me how Daniel was doing.

“He is getting really into singing,” I said. “Like, he is starting to memorize the lyrics, and he likes singing along with them.”

Iain said his daughter was into singing, too, and loved Let It Go, from Frozen. It was a moment I will always remember, because it of how it made me feel remarkably different as a parent. During the pandemic, it has been hard to gauge how he has been doing in contrast to other kids, or to see what other parents are doing that I might want to do (or not do). But I immediately realized that I had separated, diverged, from the norm of childrearing. Other kids are learning movie songs, or things from television; Daniel is going through a big Johnny Cash phase, and is also really into OK GO, and occasionally gets really close to my face and says, without smiling, “Daddy, I want to listen to ‘Why Does It Hurt When I Pee‘.” Listening to him sing “Nobody Move, Nobody Get Hurt” by We Are Scientists” is one of my great joys, and every time he sees the number “9,” he raps, “Engine engine number nine, on the New York Transit line, if my train falls off the track, pick it up pick it up pick it up YO.”

Maybe we should let him listen to Disney songs sometime.

Maybe when he is older.

For now,

Books in April:

Normal people – I was once passing a classroom where my favorite professor, Al Wachtel, was lecturing on Shakespeare. He was telling the students that Hamlet and Othello were only good because they were the wrong characters in the wrong situations. If Hamlet had been in Othello’s shoes, he would have hemmed and hawed and demanded more proof, and Desdemona would have stayed alive. If Othello had been a Dane, Claudius would have been killed in the third scene, max.

I was reminded of this in Normal People so many times, because of how the plot is propelled forward by a mismatch between the two main characters. Rooney picks the perfect words for them, and I couldn’t put it down – I started it when I got COVID, and, on a night that was really difficult, flipped open my Kindle and finished it at 4:30 a.m. because it was so compelling. For a book that doesn’t have quotation marks, it is rich with believable conversations, and the characters and story line are so well executed that even the BDSM angle, which would have been kitschy in the hands of a lesser talent, felt reasonable and right. These characters were beautifully rendered and both perfect and terrible for each other. Also, I have huge respect for her ability to craft the perfect ending. On finishing it, I thought it was one of the best things I have read in a long time.

Over the next two days, I read Conversations with Friends, and thought, “Holy shit, I want to read everything she has ever written.” It was a bit less mature, a bit less polished, but still good. On finishing it, though, I was left with something in the back of my head: is she limited to describing poor relationships between people who can’t communicate well?

Then I tried to read Beautiful World, Where Are You? I got through the first chapter, and three pages of the second, and put it down, never to be picked up again. It might have been the editing, but it was absolutely dismal.

I am not sure where that leaves me. Rooney strikes me as a talented wordsmith who relies on miscommunication and titillating kink to tie her plots together. The more time passes, the less I think of her ability and staying-power in the pantheon of great writers. Her first two books were enjoyable, but ultimately unfulfilling.

I had to switch to some non-fiction, just for an emotional break, so I picked up The Perfect Storm. I had tried to read this several times, and hated it every time. I was looking for a story of the crew on the boat that went into the storm and died; The Perfect Storm had a tiny bit about them, but then went off on these annoying non-crew tangents, and never got back to their story. Eventually, I put the book in a Little Free Library for someone else to take, and returned a week later and it was still there; evidently everyone else hated it, too. Something made me take it out again, though, and I picked it up after the Rooney spurt and just didn’t put it down. I realized a bit late that it wasn’t a book about the crew; if it had been, it would have been called “The Crew of the Andrea Gail.” It was a book about the Northeast United States, about fishing, about commerce and regulations, about work, about life and death and what it is to live and die on the fringes. The pages about drowning are some of the most riveting I have ever read; when it finished, I was suddenly struck by how much I fear death by water when maybe I didn’t need to. It is truly an excellent book, and one that I want to revisit, soon.

A Random Walk down Wall Street – I picked this up mostly for its reasoned condemnation of gambling on bitcoin. It was a solid book that, in the end, boils down to: just buy ETFs. (Coincidentally, we watched The Big Short at the end of the month; I had read the book, and remember laughing so hard I had an asthma attack, and wanted to see how they dramatized it, and was impressed.)

A Million Miles in a Thousand Years – Alice picked this up for me after I talked to her about a new theory I had about life. I didn’t plan on reading it immediately – I am trying to get through another doorstopper about great powers – but I read the first page and it took me about two days to read the rest. This is one place where Amazon reviews hit the nail on the head:

• It is brilliant in its simplicity;
• It will change the paradigm about how you think about life;
• The parts about God are not annoying to non-Christians.

The premise is that life is a story, and that if you want to live a better life, you have to tell a better story. Part of that, though, is that you end up having to LIVE a better story, which is where things get interesting – he realizes that he is the main character in his own book, and that he has to change over the course of the book in order to make his story good, and so…he does. And his story improves.

It is a simple read, an uncomplicated read, but it is not simple. I put it on my shelf with all of the books I have related to Wisdom, and plan on re-reading it regularly – maybe even every six months.

And now my dad is about to visit for the first time in years. It struck me the other day that Britain is generally years behind America in a lot of ways – music, movies, fashion – and most of America is at least a year behind California, and when my dad comes, for maybe the first time in my adult life, I will be looking at him to see what the fashion trends will be. My dad…is cooler than I am. But perhaps it is like that Mark Twain quote, where I will be surprised at how much he has always been cool.

Good luck, Daniel.