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My Four-Star Books in 2018
Dec 31, 2018
I rate the books I read (I finished 72 in 2018, my fourth-highest number since I started keeping track in 2003). I had “resolved” on Jan 1 to read 80 this year (and set a new record), but building a house and moving into it distracted me too much. I will try again this year.
Four stars is Highly Recommended; and five stars is “Drop whatever you are doing and read this book NOW!” Here are my 24 four-star books from 2018 (alas, no five-star books this year). The ones in boldface were particularly memorable.
The world of yesterday, Stefan Zweig (Jan 20)
Gratitude, Oliver Sacks (Jan 24)
Reservoir 13, John McGregor (Jan 26)
Awesome, Jack Pendarvis (Jan 27)
Ties, Domenico Starnone (Feb 8)
Rough translation, Molly Giles (Feb 10)
After the plague, T. Coraghessan Boyle (Feb 18)
The black album, Hanif Kureishi (Mar 24)
Ghachar Ghochar, Vivek Shanbhag (Mar 31)
The answers, Catherine Lacey (Apr 22)
Recall, Ken Grimwood (May 5)
Cluny Brown, Margery Sharp (May 9)
The dinner party, Joshua Ferris (May 27)
The nix, Nathan Hill (Aug 5)
The ghost road, Pat Barker (Aug 20)
Train dreams, Denis Johnson (Sep 2)
As I lay dying, William Faulkner (Sep 9)
Sick puppy, Carl Hiassen (Sep 16)
Vernon God Little, DBC Pierre (Oct 7)
Moby Dick, Herman Melville (Nov 18)
Germinal, Emile Zola (Dec 6)
Dear life, Alice Munro (Dec 22)
What to read and why, Francine Prose (Dec 25)
Red clocks, Leni Zumas (Dec 29)
Comments and recommendations welcome! Happy reading in 2019!
Taking Care
Nov 04, 2018
Driving to work the other morning, I realized we do a pretty good job of taking care of our roads. Perhaps a less good job of taking care of our other infrastructure, though at least we repair most bridges after they collapse under us and water mains after they burst their worn-out seams. And we do a really excellent job of taking care of our one percenters, albeit they pay a pretty penny to make sure we do.
However, we are really crummy at taking care of ourselves.
We graduate functionally illiterate children by the millions each year.
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121374125
https://www.creditdonkey.com/illiteracy-in-america.html
And how many of them do you think could recite one complete poem, tell you anything about the Somme, or begin to explain photosynthesis?
We don’t pay most of our workers enough to live on.
https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/
http://fortune.com/2015/04/13/who-makes-15-per-hour/
And nearly 40% of our work force neither work nor are looking for work.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2016/article/labor-force-participation-what-has-happened-since-the-peak.htm
The failure of most of us to see even modest appreciable income gains over the past 30-40 years, while the wealth of the wealthy has ballooned to enormous proportions, is the stuff of more media reports than I need to document here.
Fifty-seven percent of Americans have less than $1,000 in savings, and 39% of them have none at all.
https://www.cnbc.com/2017/09/13/how-much-americans-at-have-in-their-savings-accounts.html
We are rapidly becoming a nation of very few haves and a huge majority of have-nots. This cannot in any way be construed as a good job taking care of ourselves. And that is what a democracy is supposed to be about.
We don’t need to reproduce the social welfare model of Scandinavian countries and much of the rest of Europe in order to turn around the deplorable conditions under which we condemn ourselves to live. We are a hearty people, in love with the notions of liberty, independence, and self-reliance.
We need the tools, however, to assure ourselves of the opportunity to live those lives of self-reliance. And those tools are to be found in two places: Education and employment. We need to turn our full attention to both of them and reform our ways, so that we can get on to addressing our primal existential danger--climate change--that threatens to bring us all hurtling toward extinction.
Tuesday is our next chance to begin that process. Will we?
Hail and Farewell
Jun 10, 2018
I met a producer who worked for 60 Minutes at a high school graduation party yesterday. I found a moment to castigate him for what his program did to Greg Mortenson. He said they were intending to do a very complimentary piece about Mortenson before all that terrible stuff came out about him. I left it at that and spent the ride home thinking of what I should have said to him.
Go back to Casanova’s memoirs and examine every memoir written since then, and you will find errors, omissions, exaggerations, telescoped incidents, invented dialog, and all manner of “fictions” in every one of them, without exception.
Jon Krakauer, author of Into the Wild and Into Thin Air, tales of other people’s bravery gone wrong, and the most vociferous accuser of Mortenson’s literary missteps, may very well be consumed by envy for the success of Mortenson’s book, and, more importantly, his life. Krakauer has not, to my knowledge, done anything to benefit anyone besides Jon Krakauer. Mortenson’s life work creating schools, educating girls, creating infrastructure, and training teachers, all in the most dangerous and poorly functioning countries on earth, makes him perhaps the greatest hero of our time.
I said that ten years ago, when I started All Together Now, and awarded Mortenson the blog’s first Golden A for Achievement, and I say it again today. Since the death of Martin Luther King, I can think of no one who has given the world more of themselves to better purpose and greater effect than Greg Mortenson.
So, ending as I began, I hail a great individual, one whose message and whose efforts, properly understood and appreciated, could, would, and should bring us all together now.
Note to “The Base”: Trump Hates You
Jan 06, 2018
On second thought, “hate” is too strong a word. To hate someone you have to know something about them, and Trump knows nothing about you, save that you are as angry as he is (though you have good reason to be and he has none) and you’re as gullible as all get-out. That’s all he needed to know to demagogue his way into the White House and precipitate four anxiety-rich years of chaos and nihilism.
“Contempt” would be a better word to describe Trump’s attitude toward you and the rest of his base, and, in fact, his attitude toward everyone who didn’t have the good fortune to be born Donald Trump. You come in for a larger helping of his contempt than I do, because you don’t know very much and you are ruled by your anger and by your ignorance.
Please don’t get me wrong and think the last sentence in any way expressed contempt on my part for any of you. I feel sorry for you, indeed I do, for more and different reasons than you may imagine. I am angry at you for what you have done to our country, our children, our world, and the future that you and I will not be around to see or, lamentably à la Jacob Marley, to fix. I am appalled that there are enough of you out there to have preferred Trump to just about any other imaginable opponent, although, on that point, the Democrats could not have come up with a weaker candidate than the one they chose.
Feeling contempt for another person is stupid. As some wag said (I thought it was Damon Runyon, but I can’t find it), “Put any two human beings into the ring, and there’s no such thing as 3 to 1.” Feeling contempt for another human being is making the mistake of underestimating them, as well as denying them their humanity. Stupid and hateful at the same time.
And this is where Trump loses out on what it is to be a person in the world. He holds everyone in contempt, not only denying us our humanity, but also, in his solipsistic narcissism, denying our existence. Something is very wrong with our president, as listening with an objective ear to any of his more outrageous pronouncements cannot fail to evidence.
And something is wrong with his followers, those who do know better and those of you in his base who don’t. To fix what is wrong is the first order of business for 2018 and beyond. Can it be done within the current political establishment? Maybe. Maybe not. Whether inside or outside that establishment, there must be a sea change in our polity. For we have strayed so far from what was marginally adequate before the cataclysm of November 2016 that we must now settle for nothing less than what is right.
Copyright © 2008 All Together Now.