It has been a while.

First, I have been posting weekly at Substack. Bianca inspired me, and it has been a really great exercise; I am writing about Italy, and it takes a lot of my creative brain. Please subscribe for free if you can!

Sunny came to visit over the last few weeks. Last night, we had a conversation, and a few things clicked into place in my mind.

1. I’ve known people in the past who aggressively dismissed reading in favor of television, and who argued that television was an excellent way to get information. These people were not people who I would trust to talk about…well, anything other than television; I’ve never met someone who talked a lot about the immense amount of TV that he or she watched and who came across in any way as well-educated. I have, however, met people who read a lot of really trashy books and who came across as…well, pretty interesting people. And I’ve met a lot of people who read excellent books (fiction, non-fiction, and usually a mix) and who come across as the kinds of people we should be trusting with leadership of our world. Correlation is not equal to causation, of course, but I’m grateful that I have had the last 28 years without television, and that we are raising Daniel and Nick without one in the house.
2. I have tried to read a lot over my life – thank you mom and dad for this love of books! – but I have always felt as if I was horribly behind, as if I had so much left to read, as if I had only scratched the surface of all of the books I aspire to consume. Last night, though, I thought: I’m on my way. At 45, I’ve been reading some really great books – I am focusing on Pulitzer winners again this year – and I feel as if I am learning a lot about both myself and the world, and that I am much more intelligent than I was a few months ago, and certainly a year or ten years ago. I am nowhere near done, but I suddenly felt as if my time had not been wasted.
3. Something that came up when I was living in Cleveland: cities are made up of buildings and people. If you have people without buildings, you have a bunch of people who might die of exposure; if you have buildings without people, you have a ghost town. People can build buildings; buildings can’t make people. Between the two, people are the more important thing (and Cleveland still has the best people I have ever met, and is still the best place I have ever lived for that reason).
4. I read a guide book last week; it took about 30 minutes. I hate guide books, because they only tell the reader about the places that the reader might be going to. Of course, that’s the point: to tell the reader what they will see. I only realized, when talking to Sunny, that the problem for me is that when travelling somewhere, I only partly care about what I am going to see; I’m far more interested in who I might meet. Guide books can only rarely discuss people, because people change; however, they can discuss history, which tells peoples’ stories. History is a rather poor substitute for encountering a living, breathing human, but it is…well, I guess it is better than nothing.
5. Television, though, can give an introduction to people in a place. I think that was what Anthony Bourdain may have been so good at – bringing people and places together for the viewer.
6. Because I hate television, though, I am doomed to both read books about places – history is fine, but literature is far better – and to travel to places and meet people myself. Jesus wept.

Some of the books I have read so far this year:

1. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Michael Chabon. This is, in my opinion, close to a perfect novel; the main problem I have with it is that I can’t read it again with unknowing eyes. A beautifully wrought story, well-told, with so many revelations that it can’t help but affect the reader. (Recently, Daniel has also started reading comic books and writing his own, and I think of Sam and Joe and cheer him on.)
2. The Iliad (Emily Wilson translation). I’m thinking of devoting a year or two to reading classics, and one could do worse than start here. It is, of course, epic. Wilson’s language sparkles on the page; I found myself contorting my body in sympathetic pain, holding my breath waiting for a plot twist to resolve itself, and pulling for both sides, sometimes at the same time. If you think you might want to get immersed in the battle over Helen, read this.
3. The Odyssey (Emily Wilson translation). Emily Wilson is an American treasure. This translation is also excellent; I had to read it immediately after the Iliad, because the Iliad was so engrossing and I was not yet ready to leave the Mediterranean. Again, this is a brilliant translation that is easily readable and helped me see so much complexity in the Greece of two thousand years ago…and also to realize that of course it was complex, they were human beings just like us and their world was still the world of people competing for the same things we compete for.
4. The Science of Storytelling: Why Stories Make Us Human, and How to Tell Them Better, Will Storr. This was not as good as any of the first three books, but it did explain something that has been bothering me. Pixar/Disney seems to have a sequel problem: Moana and Frozen were both good first movies, but the sequels were absolutely terrible. Storr explains why: in the first movies, we can watch the main characters grow and change and adapt to the problems they face, but in the second movies, they fall flat because they don’t have obvious flaws, and the journey they take doesn’t help them overcome those flaws. The growth required in Moana 2 seems to be that she learns teamwork (except she gets to her goal alone, defeating the implied lesson); Frozen II relies on a series of bizarre deus ex machina contrivances that don’t require the sisters to learn anything new from the first movie (other than that Elsa gets goddess-like powers over the world). In contrast, Toy Story 1-4 has Woody grow in new ways with every movie as Andy and Bonnie grow; Finding Nemo and Finding Dory Dory have Dory, Nemo, and Marlin all develop in new ways; Inside Out 2 deals with new emotions during puberty (which I am dreading having to deal with in seven or eight years); Cars started and ended strongly, with a strange diversion in Cars 2. For sequels to be successful, they can’t just follow the first story line; they demand new challenges AND new, clear growth and faults by the lead character. So this wasn’t a great book, but it was helpful in helping me understand stories better.
5. A Day In The Life of Abed Salama, Nathan Thrall. Back to Pulitzers. Shocking, painful, and, while it is too horrific to call beautiful, exceptionally well-written. I consciously read this in order to better understand Palestine, and I can’t recommend it enough.
6. Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead. This was far less painful a read than I expected; the twist at the end was brilliantly done. It helps that it was based on a real place. For anyone already constitutionally predisposed to dislike Florida, this will not help.
7. Ad Hoc at Home (The Thomas Keller Library). I’m including this because it is the most accessible of his books for a home chef, and there are a lot of excellent tips and ideas included in the passages and the recipes. Unlike many cookbooks, this can be read from cover to cover to great benefit.
8. Frederick Douglass, David Blight. This won a Pulitzer but it is not even close to the same class as Robert Caro, the Paynes, or Manning Marable’s winning works. Frederick Douglass is extremely repetitive and dry, and in several places, it reminded me of the way Mary Beard will spend page after page telling the reader what she intends to prove, and then, without actually proving anything, will go on to pretend that she has offered some incontrovertible evidence for her position, and will then move on to do the same for a different point. If you are looking for a good biography, you can safely leave this one on the shelf.
9. Emperor of Maladies, Siddhartha Mukherjee. Years ago, I had the opportunity to host a discussion with Mukherjee about this book in Cleveland. I hosted the discussion, but never read his book. That was a completely amateurish and idiotic thing to do, and, for the week or so it took me to tear through this, I regretted my idiocy on every single page.
   My friend Scott was recently diagnosed with an aggressive lymphoma, and I wanted to better understand cancer, generally; not only does this book give an excellent explanation of what cancer is and how different cancers work, it explains why it is so difficult to treat. Mukherjee has a gift for taking complex subjects and explaining them without dumbing the language down so that you suspect he is leaving something out; I did have to read several passages twice, but I realized that it was because I really wanted to understand what he was saying and the connections between different points, not because he was unclear. He is exceedingly clear; his words are perfectly picked in every place. It is absolutely astounding.
10. The Path to Power, Robert Caro. I decided to re-read all of these while the world waits for the fifth book. It is no less brilliant than it was the first time.
11. Leadership: Six Studies in World Strategy, Henry Kissinger. If you had told me a few years ago that I would be and admirer of both Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, I would have furrowed my brow and stopped responding to your idiotic utterances. Now…well, I’m not an admirer, but I have a grudging respect for them both. Kissinger describes six people who he thinks changed the world through exceptional leadership, and he does so both with excellent writing, inside knowledge, and brilliant analysis. The stories of Lee Kuan Yew and Charles de Gaulle were particularly enlightening. It’s a dense book, but worth it; the analysis of leadership at the end is worth ten times the price of the book, especially the section on deep reading, social media, and the state of leadership in an “image” age. Actually, Sunny helped me here: I expressed concern that, without a thorough grounding in social media and the immediacy of images, the boys would grow up with, perhaps, Kissinger’s vaunted ability to read and think, but without the ability to understand and communicate in the languages that are currently being used in public discourse. Sunny’s response: “power to the code switchers.” He told me that he has several friends who have apparently lost the ability to read books because they consume information in such brief snippets that their brains can’t digest anything longer or larger than a paragraph; such an ability is, it seems, subject to revocation by the media. It’s better that the boys be able to read; they can pick up the art of short statements later.
12. Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel. This was not a Pulitzer winner; it lost to James, which was excellent. However, I read the New York Times piece on the behind-the-scenes voting arguments, and decided to read the judges’ actual first choices. Mice 1961 and The Unicorn Woman seemed less interesting, so I decided to start here, and it is simply, unbelievably, stupendously astounding. The use of the character’s thoughts to create so many simultaneous worlds, and the way she dips in and out of each head so effortlessly to describe not only a boxing gym in Reno but so much of America as a whole, is well worth the short time that it takes to read this masterpiece.

Time is changing. It is literally speeding up minute by minute for me. I think I first started feeling this in February or March – I would set a timer for five minutes, and then, as soon as I had turned around, it would go off. I would start microwaving leftovers, start the kettle for coffee, and then suddenly the timer would go off and my food would be steaming. Daniel goes to school at 8 a.m. and then, an hour later, I have to go pick him up at 3:15 p.m. I recognize that time is supposed to speed up as one ages, but I thought it was the years that flew by faster – not the seconds, the minutes, the hours.

It has been 100 years since Gatsby was first published, and this is year 21 or 22 of reading it every summer. I’ll get to it in July or August, and will feel that pain in my chest for a few days, that bliss of getting a glimpse of something perfect. I’ll finish the last page again and breathe deeply to clear my head, and sip the ale that I will have opened when Tom and Daisy are sitting in the kitchen. I’ll go into my own kitchen and listen to The Submarines. I’ll have a drink. And, as always, I will remember how much I love words.

And on drinking…

I’ve been thinking a lot about baseball. I never really loved it, and never had a team I followed, but for some reason the older kids at Daniel’s school are playing it in PE, so I watch them for a few minutes every time I go to pick him up. It’s strange watching British children playing baseball; they don’t have diamonds here, so they construct them in a sort of haphazard fashion, using hula hoops for bases and ignoring foul lines. They also have adjusted the rules so that it’s a simpler game – for example, the runners all run as soon as the ball is hit, and if a ball is caught, they don’t go back to tag up. British games also don’t train young Brits to perform physical actions in the same way that might be expected of young Americans; holding a baseball bat, for example, is not something that they do from age three, so their stances are always a bit awkward, and they don’t seem to track a pop fly with the same felicity as a seven-year-old American child would.

And because of these differences, they make a lot of what might be called “unforced errors.” So really, I wrote “I’ve been thinking a lot about baseball,” but what I meant was, “I’ve been thinking a lot about unforced errors.” If sports can provide metaphors for life, i think that one of the things that might contribute to a successful life might be avoiding “unforced errors,” things that we don’t need to do that are stupid. Smoking cigarettes, for example, or eating tons of sugar, or doing drugs, or drinking – all of these are unforced health errors. Gambling, meme stock purchases, overextending credit – these are unforced financial errors. I’m probably making unforced fashion errors right now. Maybe there are unforced education errors.

And I’ve been thinking: what if the big improvements in life were not in actively doing smart things, but by not doing really stupid things? What if there were a list of these things somewhere that could be referenced easily?

Maybe that’s what all of the religious texts are meant to be?