2025 Readings - Janet's List

 Janet has been unofficially recording her 2025 readings as well, although I suspect she misplaced a sheet because she definitely reads more than I do. Remember, this all started because a little over a year ago we read an alarming article on how little Americans actually read. As of 2023, if I'm remembering correctly, 46% of Americans didn't read even one book in that year - and the far end of the spectrum was the 11% who read twenty or more. Oddly, it was the only 11% who read twenty plus that bothered me more (although that plus can expand to a pretty huge number, obviously). This led to us thinking about recording our books just to see where we would fall on that spectrum, and I'm guessing around a hundred books read in a year falls into the .1% Super Nerd No Social Life category.

1) Hernan Diaz, Trust; 2) Stephen McCauley, True Enough; 3) Ann Patchett, Run; 4) Simon Van Booy, Sipsworth; 5) Donna Leon, Falling in Love; 6) Donna Leon, The Waters of Eternal Youth; 7) Donna Leon, Earthly Remains; 8) Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed; 9) Mary Gordon, The Liar's Wife: Four Novellas; 10) Mary Gordon, The Love of My Youth; 11) Elena Ferrante, Troubling Love; 12) Mary Gordon, Men and Angels; 13) Mary Gordon, The Stories of Mary Gordon; 14) Chimimanda Ngochi Adichie, The Things Around Your Neck; 15) Curtis Sittenfeld, Show Don't Tell; 16) Chimimanda Ngochi Adichie, Dream Count; 17) Donna Leon, The Temptation of Forgiveness; 18) Andrea Camilleri, The Shape of Water; 19) Phillip Holland, Hemlock; 20) Andrea Camilleri, The Terracotta Dog; 21) Ollie Richards, Short Stories in Italian; 22) Andrea Camilleri, The Snack Thief; 23) Diane Zinna, The All-Night Sun; 24) Gail Godwin, Getting to Know Death; 25) Blake Bailey, Cheever; 26) Tara Westover, Educated; 27) Taffy Brodesser-Akner, The Long Island Compromise; 28) Brian Gecko, You Must Go On; 29) Courtney Maum, Before and After the Book Deal; 30) Annie Ernaux & Marc Marie, The Uses of Photography; 31) Taffy Brodesser-Akner, Fleischman is in Trouble; 32) Will Buxton, Grand Prix; 33) Jimmy Carter, The Virtues of Aging; 34) Jimmy Carter, Palestine; 35) Brian Klaas, Fluke; 36) Noam Chomsky, Anarchy; 37) Robert Kaplan, Wasteland; 38) Dan Siegel, The Neurobiology of We; 39) Mary Ruefle, Selected Poems; 40) Mary Ruefle, The Books; 41) Alison Bechdel, Spent; 42) Mattheson & Allepuz, One Light; 43) Michelle Knudsen, Luigi the Spider; 44) Tom Grimes, Mentor: A Memoir; 45) Robert Dana (ed.), A Community of Writers; 46) Brandon Taylor, The Late Americans; 47) Olga Ravn, The Employees; 48) John McNally, After the Workshop; 49) Joe Moran, First You Write a Sentence; 50) Tim Bascom, Climbing Lessons; 51) Francine Prose, 1974; 52) David O. Dowling, A Delicate Aggression: Savagery and Survival in the Iowa Writers Workshop; 53) Olson & Schaeffer (eds.), We Wanted to Be Writers: Life, Love & Literature at the Iowa Writers Workshop; 54) Lili Anolik, Didion & Babitz; 55) Emily Adrian, Seduction Theory; 56) Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future; 57) O'Brien & Abdelhadi, Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052-2072; 58) Arundhati Roy, Mother Mary Comes to Me; 59) Francine Prose, Sicilian Odyssey; 60) Leanne Shapton, Swimming Studies; 61) F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby; 62) The Norton Critical Edition of the Great Gatsby; 63) Joe Wenderoth, Letters to Wendy's; 64) Leanne Shapton, Guest Book: Ghost Stories; 65) Leanne Shapton, Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry; 66) Peter Orner, Am I Alone Here?; 67) Leanna Shapton, Was She Pretty?; 68) Amanda Lima, CRAFT: Stories I Wrote for the Devil; 69) Maureen Corrigan, So We Read On; 70) Sheila Liming, The Great Gatsby at 100; 71) Matt Haig, Notes on a Nervous Planet; 72) Chogyam Trunpa Rinpoche, Spiritual Warriorship; 73) Lindsey Hunter, Hot Springs Drive; 74) Lily King, Writers & Lovers; 75) Julavitz & Heti, Women in Clothes; 76) Leonard Sciasia, The Day of the Owl; 77) Beppe Severgnini, La Bella Figura: A Field Guide to the Italian Mind; 78) Matt Madden, 99 Ways to Tell a Story; 79) Susan Orlean, Joyride; 80) Susan Orlean, Saturday Night; 81) Emily Prado, Funeral for Flaca; 82) Lindsey Hunter, Don't Kiss Me; 83) Donna Leon, Unto Us a Son is Given; 84) Susan Orlean, The Orchid Thief; 85) Donna Leon, Trace Elements; 86) Donna Leon, Transient Desires; 87) Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a Machine; 88) Tracy Kidder, A Truckful of Money; 89) Donna Leon, Give Until Others; 90) Donna Leon, So Shall You Reap; 91) Donna Leon, A Refiner's Fire; 92) Susan Orlean, My Kind of Place; 93) Tracy Kidder, Old Friends.

The End of 65

 Technically, the end of 65 won't be until next week, but at the very least it's a picture of me at the end of 2025. There's that old joke that if you think you look bad you should just take a picture of yourself today and look at it in five years, at which point you'll be amazed at how young and vibrant you were. I can't believe that this picture will ever convince me that the guy in it looks young and vibrant - and if I live long enough that the guy in the picture looks young and vibrant I'll be so senile that I won't know who he is. Having said all that, maybe I'll start a new tradition of including an end of the year picture, for history's sake. Janet snapped this one when we were down visiting her mother on Christmas day.

Well, at least that old guy looks happy and contented with life, which he is. He's very, very blessed.

2025 Readings - Summing Up

 Unless I decide to make a mad rush through Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, I've finished my Year of Reading. I finished at 118, although I have this sinking suspicion that I forgot something (which would make me happy, that would take me to 119, and a prime number). Seriously, I know I reread The Plague recently, although maybe that was at the very end of last year (?). Anyway, you get the point.

1) Stephanie LaCava, I Fear My Pain Interests You; 2) Sadegh Hedayat, The Blind Owl; 3) Robert Garland, God Against the Gods (Great Course); 4) Daniel Mason, North Woods; 5) Francois-Rene de Chateaubriand, Memoirs From Beyond the Tomb; 6) Charles Dickens, Great Expectations; 7) D'J Pancake, The Short Stories of D'J Pancake; 8) Yoko Tawada, Scattered All Over the Earth; 9) Rachel Quinney, Cryptids, Creatures & Critters; 10) Charles Dickens, Ghost Stories; 11) Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle; 12) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism; 13) Olga Takarczuk, The Books of Jacob; 14) Saul Friedlander, Proustian Uncertainties; 15) Farid ud-din Attar, The Conference of the Birds; 16) Marcel Proust, Days of Reading; 17) Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting; 18) Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death; 19) Robert Zaretsky, The Subversive Simple Weil: A Life in Five Ideas; 20) Flannery O'Connor, Wise Blood; 21) Mother of Books; 22) Olga Tokarczuk, The Empusium; 23) Martyn Oliver, Introduction to the Qur'an (Great Course); 24) Mark Muesse, Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, and Muhammad (Great Course); 25) James Kaplan, 3 Shades of Blue: Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, and the Lost Empire of Cool; 26) Craig Koester, The Apocalypse: Controversies and Meaning in West Civilization (Great Course); 27) Qur'an; 28) Tana French, The Searcher; 29) Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be; 30) Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner; 31) Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed; 32) Elizabeth Vandiver, The Iliad of Homer (Great Course); 33) Jayne Anne Phillips, Night Watch; 34) Homer, The Iliad; 35) Vida Scudder, On Journey; 36) Yukio Mishima, Voices of the Fallen Heroes; 37) Sarah Kendzior, The Last American Road Trip; 38) Sarah Kendzior, The View from Flyover Country: Dispatches from the Forgotten America; 39) Haruki Murakami, The City and Its Uncertain Walls; 40) Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain; 41) Fernando Pessoa, The Book of Disquiet; 42) Benjamin Labatut, When We Cease to Understand the World; 43) Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography; 44) Nina George, The Little Paris Bookshop; 45) Lawrence Ritter, The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It; 46) Elaine Dundy, The Dud Avocado; 47) Antonio De Benedetto, The Suicides; 48) Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness; 49) Dino Buzzati, The Singularity; 50) Natalia Ginzburg, Valentino and Sagittarius; 51) Luis Vaz de Camoes, The Lusiads; 52) Natsume Soseki, Kokoro; 53) Sheila Liming, The Great Gatsby at 100 (Great Course); 54) Yangsze Choo, The Fox Wife; 55) Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend; 56) Elizabeth Vandiver, The Aeneid of Virgil (Great Course); 57) Jason Stanley, How Fascism Works; 58) Olga Ravn, The Employees; 59) Ian McGuire, The North Water; 60) Genki Kawamura, If Cats Disappeared from the World; 61) Fine Grabol, What Kingdom; 62) Rose McCauley, They Went to Portugal; 63) Virgil, The Aeneid; 64) Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim; 65) Sarah Kendzior, Hiding in Plain Sight: The Invention of Donald Trump; 66) Miranda July, All Fours; 67) Vincenzo Latronico, Perfection; 68) Weston Cate, Forever Calais; 69) Anne Michaels, Held; 70) Kim Ho-Yeon, The Second Chance Convenience Store; 71) Charles Matthewes, Why Evil Exists (Great Course); 72) Mark Bushnell, Hidden History of Vermont; 73) Roger Shattuck, Proust's Way: A Field Guide to In Search of Lost Time; 74) Dino Buzzati, The Stronghold; 75) Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics; 76) Niccolo Machiavelli, The Prince; 77) Brian Mulligan, The 1940 Cincinnati Reds: A World Championship and Baseball's Only In-Season Suicide; 78) Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore; 79) Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness; 80) George B. Kirsch, Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime During the Civil War; 81) Joseph Conrad, The Secret Agent; 82) The Avengers, Marvel Masterworks 1; 83) Albert Camus; The Stranger; 84) Erik Esckilsen, The Last Mall Rat; 85) Julian Barnes, Flaubert's Parrot; 86) Albert Camus, The Fall; 87) John Treherne, The Galapagos Affair; 88) Julian Barnes, The Noise of Time; 89) Yevgeny Zamaytin, We; 90) Julian Barnes, A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters; 91) Augustine, Confessions; 92) Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (Graphic Edition); 93) Budi Darma, People from Bloomington; 94) Nick Salvatore, Eugene V. Debs: Citizen and Socialist; 94) Olga Ravn, The Wax Child; 95) Charles Dickens, Pictures from Italy; 96) Anne Applebaum, Autocracy, Inc: The Dictators Who Want to Run the World; 97) Martin Amis, London Fields; 98) Baek Sehee, I Want to Die but I wan to Eat Tteovokki; 99) Craig Johnson, First Frost; 100) Martin Amis, Night Train;101) Kim Stanley Robinson, The Ministry for the Future; 102) Frank Herbert, Dune; 103) Craig Johnson, Return to Sender; 104) James Cain, Mildred Pierce; 105) Ursula K. Le Guin, Lavinia; 106) Sigizmund Krzhihanosvsky, Autobiography of a Corpse; 107) Frank Herbert, Dune Messiah; 108) Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich; 109) Edith Wharton, Ghosts; 110) Beowulf; 111) Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine; 112) Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower; 113) Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Don Quixote; 114) Brooks Hansen, The Chess Garden; 115) Ignazio Silone, Fontamara; 116) Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol; 117) Dino Buzzati, The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories; 118) Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus.

I'm exhausted just looking at this list. As I proposed earlier, this was the first time - and I suspect the last time - that I ever record the number of books that I read in a year, although it was an interesting experiment. Next year I'm taking it easier on the reading front. I just started another reread of Proust, although the first read of a newer translation - so I'm definitely looking forward to that). 

I am going to take a similar approach with movies in 2026, which will be less of a dedication in regards to time, although I'll doubtless end up with more than 118 movies watched.

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 There should be (probably is) a literary category for authors that you passionately love/hate. My champion would be Thomas Mann. I've read Death in Venice three times, during dramatically different periods of my life, and, although loving little snippets, never warmed to it. I've read Magic Mountain twice, and am definitely looking forward to reading it a third (and hopefully fourth and fifth time), but there are sections of it which I don't like. I love Magic Mountain, and my farewell email to Champlain (which I write and edit when I'm awake at 3:00 in the morning) references it, but there are sections when I find myself thinking (sometimes saying): "Will you please shut up!?" So, I'm not talking about those sections of your favorite author which should glide through, but a much stronger antipathy. With Mann it's mainly where he's just showing off, where he's going beyond just showing us that one of his characters is painfully full of himself or arrogant or remarkably oblivious - and instead he's just trumpeting his own impressive education/intelligence or just talking to himself. In Magic Mountain the scenes that I love far exceed the scenes that make me wish that he had employed a more forceful editor. I can't say that about Doctor Faustus, his last major novel, which I finished this morning. There were scenes in it which were breathtaking, but also scenes that took the patience of a saint (no pun intended) to get through. Unless you're a true, devout Mann fan I don't think I would recommend it. It's the story, mainly, of Adrian Leverkuhn, a brilliant German composer who, as you might expect from the title, might or might not have sold his soul to the devil. When it works it's a wonderful metaphor for the Germany that sold its soul to Hitler and Fascism. The problem is that it often strays very far afield from that theme, and unless you have that metaphor in your mind it's easy to completely lose track of any sort of central theme. It's not as if there aren't a thousand things and characters in Magic Mountain, but it simply holds together much cleaner. Is it possible that I'll read Doctor Faustus again? Sure, because there were a lot of great moments, especially when the storyteller, Leverkuhn's lifelong friend, steps back to reflect upon the situation in Germany during World War II (the story is a reflection covering a couple decades).

On a somewhat related note, I just found out that there's a Thomas Mann Museum in Nida, Lithuania (Mann had a summer house there for a couple years before his exile), and that's now bum-rushed its way to the top of my travel wishlist. 

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 As I'm drawing to a close in this Year of Reading - or Year of Recording What I Read - or Year of Reading New Things - or Year of Reading Weird Shit - I've been reflecting on some of the new authors that I've experienced. One of my new discoveries is Dino Buzzati. Previously I had written about his short novels, The Singularity and The Stronghold, both of which I loved. It's amazing to me that a person who has read a hell of a lot for decades can discover new folks, not simply getting around to reading books that I've neglected, but coming across people that I had never heard of previously (again, I blame my wretchedly poor Hoosier education). Buzzati may be my most cherished new discovery from this year. This afternoon I finished a short story collection from across his long career: The Bewitched Bourgeois: Fifty Stories. Some of the short stories reminded me of The Singularity while others reminded me of The Stronghold, but they deny equal categorization. There often is a quiet, vague sense of dread, which is routinely counter-balanced by an odd humor, and he was clearly quite content to leave the reader mystified. I think my favorites were "Seven Floors," "Personal Escort," "The Bewitched Bourgeois," "Appointment with Einstein," "The Saucer Has Landed," and "The Writer's Secret," although even listing these few doesn't do justice to how much I enjoyed the entire collection, which stretched from the 1930s to the 1980s. Highly recommended.

I will, in a couple days, post a summary of the books I read this year.

Missing An Entire Country

 As is apparent, I'm always creating new challenges for myself to fuel my posts on this long-suffering blog (Proust, Pessoa, Marcus Aurelius, Faith, 2025 Books Read, next year's 2026 Films Watched). Consequently, and especially since I dropped off of Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook (a couple years ago), I've been devoting more time to the blog (and even if I'm the only one who reads the silly thing it's still time well-spent). However, it dawned on me that there doesn't seem to be anything here relating to the Netherlands (which used to be tagged as Holland for some reason). Seriously, there was only one post, from fifteen years ago, relating to an even older trip. I mean, I haven't spent much time in Amsterdam, but I have passed through there. So why don't I have anything? On Janet and my first trip to Portugal together we passed through Amsterdam on the way back, and I know I sent pictures to people, but I couldn't fine any on my phone. I popped back onto Facebook on the sly (partially for reasons relating to this summer's move), thinking that I must have posted something there, but there was nothing. Bizarre. Maybe it's locked away in a file somewhere - or on my camera, maybe? Weird. It's like an entire country disappeared. One of my goals is to try and sort out where those pictures are hiding.

By way of recompense to the Dutch here's a picture that I snapped during our crazy trip back from Portugal (matched only by the nightmare of getting to Portugal) as we passed through Amsterdam. It was a 100 degrees, and, allegedly, it was the only time it had ever reached triple digits in the country's history (which I don't necessarily believe, although I remember people talking about it at the time).

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 On Christmas Day we drove down to Pittsfield, Massachusetts to visit Janet's mom in her assisted living center, have a holiday meal, and then hang around the next day to take her on an extended Walmart shopping extravaganza. (maybe more on on that later). On the way day and back we listened to Charles Dickens's A Christmas Carol. This is hardly the first time I've read or listened to that classic, but I've been deliberate and consistent in recording all of my readings for the year, so it was essential to include this one. Every year we tend to pick out a different performance, and this year I downloaded Tim Curry's rendition. It's a very well-thought of version, although I would argue a bit too highly praised - some of the voices were a bit too similar to each other, and often Scrooge's voice was pretty whiney. I'm actually completely OK with having someone read it without giving voice to the different characters, but if you're going to do it then I suppose you should be judged for it. It's still really solid, and, well, it's Dickens, so you really can't go wrong. As I've often opined, you could make a very compelling argument that A Christmas Carol might be the most influential book written over the last couple centuries. Obviously, highly recommended, and I can't imagine a holiday season that would not include another reading of one of my all-time favorite pieces.

Holiday Breakfast of Excellence

 Going an tire month (that is, our Christmas break in the unreal world of academia) without seeing my friends is, of course, impossible (what happens next year is anybody's guess). Consequently, it was necessary to schedule a Holiday Breakfast of Excellence at the TASTee Grill. As usual, the topics of conversation were varied and excellent, including an inspired discussion of what makes a great biography.

Sanford, appearing as either an Old Testament prophet or a Marxist theorist.

Erik and Kevin, two regular members of the BofE, enjoying the holiday festivities.

A rare appearance from the excellent Steve.

Afterward I had to make a quick run by Santa's for some homemade Christmas cookies and frozen scrapple (appropriate for a Philadelphia-born elf).

Layering Up

 This series of pictures came together rather organically, as Janet and I had to laugh at the layers of CFL swag that I was naturally putting on to prepare myself to go dig out the cars after yesterday's snow storm. Seriously, why doesn't Canada just go ahead and give me citizenship already?

Winnipeg Blue Bombers t-shirt: check.

Edmonton Elks long sleeve t-shirt: check.

Toronto Argonauts sweatshirt and Hamilton Tiger-Cats toque: check.

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 After so much anguish and so much mourning, so many tears and so many tricks, so much hate and injustice and despair, what are we to do?

I just finished Ignazio Silone's Fontamara, the first book in his Abruzzo Trilogy (the second is Bread and Wine, which I reread a couple weeks ago). Much like Bread and Wine, Fontamara includes a goodly amount of humor to somewhat balance out the unrelenting misfortune doled out to the cafoni (peasants) by the townspeople and officials and the Catholic Church during the Mussolini dictatorship. Early in the book those in power, even petty power, make it clear that they're not worried about the cafoni because always suffer and the no how to suffer, which only justifies more suffering.

Jokes of that kind are not easily forgotten, even if the town loafers constantly think up new ones. So our first thought was that the diversion of the stream was a practical joke too. After all, it would be the end of everything if men started interfering with the elements created by God, and diverted the course of the sun, the course of the winds, and the course of the waters established by God. It would be like hearing that donkeys were learning to fly, or that Prince Torlonia was no longer a prince, or that cafoni were no longer to suffer from hunger - in other words, that the eternal laws of God were no longer to be the laws of God.

Sadly, what hit me while reading was how true this sentiment still was in so much of the world, and how the wealthy and powerful in America were equally guilty of believing it to be true.

This book, and this trilogy, is highly recommended. I'm looking forward to reading more books by Ignazio Silone.

Endless Swag

 And here's a present that I gave myself for Christmas, a sweet Nathan Rourke BC Lions jersey. I generally think that the Lions have the ugliest uniforms in the CFL, but I'm sold on this alternate version. I'm getting desperately close to having jerseys for every team in the CFL.

For some reason these alternate jerseys were on sale, which you find about if you're an insider for the team and you get email updates - of course, I'm an insider for nine teams.

This should really be a jersey for our entire CFL fantasy league since everyone of us chose Nathan Rourke every week (unless we went with Bo Levi Mitchell - or, sadly, when Jack and I chose a player who was sitting on the bench that week).

Another Birthday

 Friday was Janet's birthday, so we headed out of town for the day. We both like Manchester, down in southern Vermont, and so this has become our go-to place for close getaways. Mainly, I was taking her there to treat her at Northshire Bookstore, but also to grab a great meal. It was an absolutely lovely time, and we're already talking about what we'll be doing on her birthday in Sicily next year.

I've never really been a Bed and Breakfast type, although the Inn at Ormsby Hill was nice.

I ended up sitting out here in the living room reading to my heart's content. They had a wonderful collection of books. I don't think they left the great books in the Library so that the patrons in the other room could enjoy them.

We stay in what was called the Library, although all the really nice books were out in the living room. The book in the Library room were mainly there for aesthetic effect, although, if you're a book lover, it was a nice room.

The Mystico Italian restaurant is our default choice in Manchester, and, as always, the meal was fantastic. Plus, it's like a hundred feet from Northshire Bookstore. Most importantly, my lovely wife had a wonderful time.

Janet's directions were to select as many books as she wanted, and I kept sending her back to get more. She had just finished the Donna Leon Brunetti series, so she picked up Leon's book about writing and her life in Venice.

And, somehow, I walked away with three books, as usual, raiding the New York Review of Books series.

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     "You should understand, Mr. Blodget, that one thing I have come to trust is that people find what they are looking for, what they believe on some level that they either need or deserve. I think this is proven moment to moment, so I take it as more than mere happenstance that you are here. I take it as a measure of your will, which honors us and obliges me to be honest."

     Blodget looked up from the Tibetan pieces to find the doctor's eyes directly upon him. "Please."

     "Well. Something else I've come to trust is that truth is provided in precisely the measure and form appropriate to each of us individually. I find, more over, that the disposition of truth is not, as it may sometimes seem, to withdraw and then appear. That is a function of our concentration. The disposition of truth is to remain constant. That way, when a man chooses to look, directly at whatever happens to be surrounding him - whatever it may be - he will find the truth there waiting. Am I clear?"

Brooks Hansen, The Chess Garden

This morning I finish my latest, I'm guessing my fifth, reading of Brooks Hansen's The Chess Garden. As always, I sobbed. I didn't cry because the ending is sad, although it is in a way, but because of its almost crushing beauty. As I was saying to my great friend Sarah this morning, The Chess Garden is, to me, a remarkably generous gift. I mention Sarah mainly because she's the only person that I've recommended the novel to who has loved it like I do. Seriously, we can't talk about it without getting misty-eyed. Every other person I've recommended it to (and I've dragooned so many people into reading it) have either not finished it or tried to gracefully cover up how mystified they were by my love for the novel. It's on that short list with Dickens's Bleak House or Proust's Remembrance of Things Past or Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet (if that's actually a novel) or Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio for the designation as my favorite novel. I don't know if I completely understand it - or that I'm supposed to understand it - although I also feel that I come a little closer with every reread. Recently I purchased an Emanuel Swedenborg (his life and philosophy play a huge role in the novel) reader, hoping that will give me more tools for my next reread. In the spring I'm going to start my latest reread of Remembrance of Things Past, although this will be my first with the new translation, with the more appropriate title In Search of Lost Time, I recently acquired. My plan was to finish the reread so that I wouldn't feel the pressure to take all seven volumes in my suitcase this summer to Sicily. My logic was much the same with The Chess Garden, especially since my copy is falling to pieces. However, the thought that I would go anyplace without the novel is madness. Obviously, The Chess Garden is remarkably, impossibly highly, recommended, and I'll apologize in advance. I would like to point out that Doctor Uyterhoeven, who is talking to Blodget above, and I share the same birthday. Like Doctor Uyterhoeven, I plan on leaving my cane hanging from the apple tree outside the cabin when I head overseas.

Mike in Madrid

 It's funny the pictures that don't make this blog, at least until years after they should have. Here's a picture that I snapped over a decade ago on the Spain/Portugal trip that I led with my friends Mike and Kelly. We disappeared into the streets of Madrid in search of a bar with the NFL package, and, clearly, we succeeded in our quest.

I guess I had never posted this previously because we're clearly in a bar, although I can't imagine any parent who would send their kids on a student trip to Madrid and not assume that a bar (or several bars) would be in the offing. That said, that trip featured about the most nerdy, in-bed-by-ten group of students on any of the dozen trips I ran.

More CFL Swag

 And how did I not post this picture earlier? I'm signed up with all the CFL teams as an insider so I get all sorts of emails from them, including a sweet sale from the Hamilton Tiger-Cats. Sooner I will have jerseys from all CFL teams (not even counting the various and sundry supporting t-shirts and sweatshirts), so I will be empowered to attend any game without identifying myself as a southern continent rube.

That's a sweet Bo Levi Mitchell jersey, and they they threw in the long sleeve t-shirt for free. The Tiger-Cats have become the favorite CFL team of all of my friends, but, at least to this point, they remain only one of my four favorite CFL teams.

Grey Cup Excellence

 There was a time when my son and I would be making a Shaw's run on Grey Cup Sunday and we'd make some comment, parodying the mad grocery store rush for Super Bowl Sunday, that everyone must have done their shopping early. And then I began my years-long quest to bring the beauty of the CFL to my friends, although I suspect they might consider it an annual ritualistic dragooning. Now that I've brought nineteen different people to CFL games, in six different Canadian cities, the Grey Cup is a thing. For a couple years my excellent friend Craig would host an annual Grey Cup soiree (one time I drove across the blizzard in a wretched storm to buy a motherlode of TimBits for the game). This year I think  an evolving group of folks watched several games together, topped off by Kevin (who, despite his protestations, is a huge CFL fan) hosting a Grey Cup party. It was an Event of Excellence, as one might assume (and not simply because we saw a rouge). The Alouettes are our hometown team, and the Roughriders are not one of my four favorite CFL teams (although after this summer's Saskatchewan/Winnipeg doubleheader I might change my mind), but I was quite happy with the Roughriders victory.

I brought a wealth of CFL swag to celebrate the combatants: the Saskatchewan Roughriders and the Montreal Alouettes.

Erik and Kevin, two CFL game veterans, were enthusiastic participants.

Marcelle and her brother Roger are consistent attendees of Lake Monster games, but have taken blood oaths to attend their first Alouettes game next summer.

Can a game start better than 1-0? It's a testament to my success in winning over my friends to the CFL that immediately after the scoring of the rouge I received multiple texts from around the country with one word: "Rouge!!"

And then there's that magic moment when the Mounties bring down the Grey Cup. It says something wonderful about Canada that one of the Mounties was a Sikh, and that everyone, quite rightly, just viewed it as another day in the week. Sadly, in Trump's America, the racist, xenophobic rants would start firing up the social media hellscape.

And Kevin, who, as we all know, is a great cook, whipped up some killer poutine. I'm already sad that I won't be in-country for next year's Grey Cup (unless I make the most amazing secret mad dash over, because, well, it's the Grey Cup FFS).

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 If I blew through Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower in two days, my 113th book dragged itself across the finish line in dribs and drabs after months on my nightstand. This is not a condemnation of Vladimir Nabokov's Lectures on Don Quixote, but rather the recognition that it was not a book designed for a passionate reading marathon. The title of the book describes itself: it is the actual lecture notes that Nabokov prepared for a class he taught on Cervantes's classic. However, Nabokov clearly didn't consider Don Quixote to be a classic, and was dragooned into teaching it. He considered it to be a cruel book, and I think that's an interesting (and in many ways correct) interpretation. Nabokov proposed that Cervantes's talent as a writer and the beauty of Don Quixote as a character made up for a poorly structured novel that mainly seemed designed to cruelly misuse the poor knight errant. I only read Don Quixote in its entirety a couple years ago and really liked it, flying into a minor rage when some wanker on a podcast that Janet likes was telling his listeners that they didn't need to bother reading the novel. I'm not going to agree with the wanker in question or Nabokov, because I definitely think you should read Don Quixote. Still, it was interesting to get Nabokov's very different interpretation, and it inspired me to give Cervantes another read sooner than later. 

Christmas 2025 - the Prequel

 OK, so Christmas is clearly not here yet, and I don't know exactly what form it will take (we might be down visiting Janet's mom or we might be spending it with Gary and Ali and some combination of her family or we might be spending it blissfully alone). So, I thought I would go ahead and post the beginnings of the celebration.

I think we went a little crazy on the Christmas tree this year. At Morse Farm, our traditional location to buy our tree, we had a sense that it was a tall tree, but we didn't seem to understand how fat it was as well. Thank God we live in a cabin, or that guy would have been hunched over by the roof.

I was out running errands when Janet began to decorate the tree, and when she realized that we don't really have enough lights or ornaments (but considering this is our last Christmas here for, at the very least, years, we couldn't justify purchasing more stuff for decorating).

Being a problem solver (and also, obviously, usually a problem creator), I jumped in to help fill out the tree decorations. Thank you Mothman! That said, I'm disturbed that the Banff Trading Post didn't selling Merman stuffies.

Merry Cryptidmas!! What problems doesn't Mothman solve?

It's strange to think that next year we'll be celebrating the Christmas season in Sicily. I started doing some research on Christmas traditions in Sicily and I think it's going to be pretty amazing.

2025 Readings 112

 Here's another book that's very indicative of this Year of Reading (or, as I sometimes refer to it as: The Years of Reading Stuff I Never Read): Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. This was one of the selections from our Unofficial Book Club, which has, from the beginning, taken a science fiction slant (which is fine, because I never read science fiction). I had never read any of Butler's works, so this was a new experience. The fact that I read the entire novel in about two days let's you know that I definitely liked it, and strongly recommend it. The work has a very dystopian feel to it, but it's more about a very easy to perceive natural end of the world. The novel was published in 1993, which means it was written during the Bush 1 presidency and clearly in the shadow of the Reagan years. As horrible as things are at this moment during the Trump nightmare, we should never forget that the foundations of this horrific right wing wet dream were set years ago when the Evangelicals made it clear that theirs was the only path to God and the wealthy and corporate America made it clear that we're all on our own. One member of the UBC said that she found it very difficult to read because of the violence and the unrelenting grimness, but I suggested that it was hard to read because we were living it right now. My copy of the Parable of the Sower came with her Parable of the Talents (which is the second book of what she planned to be a five book series, but, sadly, she died before completing any more - so I guess we'll never know her long-term goal for the series). I'll definitely be tearing into Parable of the Talents early next year, although it will be after the Year of Reading comes to an end, which is why I'm recording my plans now. 

Sizzlebrain

 During my long life I've usually been the one who established and popularized nicknames, both for my family members and also friends. With that in mind, I suppose it's not surprising that I ended up playing a similar role here in the cabin with the cats. Cici, the little of the two sisters, is not often referred to The Vertical Cat or Nut Job or Two Pounds of Terror (all, clearly, originating with me). Her sister Mollie (or Miss Mollie, as Janet insists on calling her) is alternately referred to as The Horizonal Cat or the Lap Whore or Anvil Head or Sizzlebrain (which is based on her propensity to curl up next to the stove or the chimney, even leaning in with her brain pushed up against a pretty hot surface). Here she is upstairs happily napping against the chimney.

There comes a point when I should just go ahead and create a Label for Cats (we just received five calendars that I had manufactured mainly from pictures of Mollie and Cici.

2025 Readings 111

 "Under every dictatorship," he said, "one man, one perfectly ordinary little man who goes on thinking with his own brain is a threat to public order. Tons of printed paper spread the slogans of the regime; thousands of loudspeakers, hundreds of thousands of posters and freely distributed leaflets, whole armies of speakers in all the squares and at all the crossroads, thousands of priests in the pulpit repeat these slogans ad nauseam, to the point of collective stupefaction. But it's sufficient for one little man, just one ordinary, little man to say no, and the whole of that formidable granite order is imperiled."

Ignazio Silone, Bread and Wine

Memory is a strange thing. I have this clear memory of my friend Bill and I sit in the Brannigan Room at our fraternity at Franklin College. We were both reading the same book, Ignazio Silone's Bread and Wine. It my memory I was about a half-hour ahead of Bill, as we pushed to finish the novel. It must have been a requirement in some interdisciplinary class, maybe the only one we ever took together. A side note: it's funny how Champlain always sold our interdisciplinary core as a revolutionary creation when I was taking classes in an interdisciplinary core in the late 1970s (although that's a question for another day). In my memory I finished the book, was disgusted by the ending, and threw the book across the room. A half-hour later, again, in my memory, Bill reached the same conclusion and fired the book across the room as well. Recently, I mentioned this to him during a Zoom chat, and he had absolutely no memory of it at all. So, he could have just forgotten it - or it could have been another friend - or, more likely, it never happened. I mean, this is the same time and place that gave rise to my famous/infamous Halloween Killer story, which has haunted/amused generations of students, but which I always have to admit to them might never have happened either. The last paragraph recounts the almost certain demise of Cristina, the lover, at least potentially, of Pietro Spina/Paolo Spada. She climbs up into the mountains to find Pietro/Paolo, who is fleeing the Fascists. Here is the last paragraph: 

Eventually a voice in the distance answered her, but it was not a human voice. It was like the howling of a dog, but it was sharper and more prolonged. Cristina probably recognized it. It was the howl of a wolf. The howl of prey. The summons to other wolves scattered about the mountain. The invitation to the feast. Through the driving snow and the darkness of approaching night Cristina saw a wild beast coming towards her, quickly appearing and disappearing in the dips and rises in the snow. She saw others appear in the distance. She knelt, closed her eyes, and made the sign of the cross.

Obviously, this is extraordinary, a fitting ending and a brilliant metaphor for the anti-Fascist core of the book - and, even more obviously, I was a moron as a freshman in college. Of course, I was already a passionate reader, and very well-read, as the first year moron, and yet I clearly missed the point pretty dramatically. In that sense, I guess it's not particularly surprising that my generally illiterate (not simply culturally, but actually in regards to reading as a basic skill) don't pick up the symbolism in Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. Of course, none of this may have ever happened.

What matters is that it's a great novel, and I highly recommend it. Interestingly, I'm planning on using parts of it in my Images of Fascism class this spring. I've just ordered Silone's Fontamara, the first novel of the Abruzzo Trilogy, of which Bread and Wine is the second work. 

27

 And that the semester is over - and my spring schedule is finalized (inshallah) - I went ahead and posted my number of official days on campus left until retirement. I didn't include any calculations for Finals Week in the spring, mainly because I don't know how my rearranged schedule will translate into finals. Besides, all I do during Finals Week is show a film, give an in-class group analysis of said film, and kibitz with the students. I'm sure there are all sorts of days where I will be required to come up, but good luck on that happening during my last semester. With that in mind, factoring in 14 regular semester weeks in the spring, times two class days a week (even after the change in my schedule, I'm still stacked on Mondays and Thursdays), subtracting a day off for MLK day, I'm down to 27 days left. I've already run off pictures of players with the numbers 26, 25, and 24, because I'm nothing if not prepared.

Mike Pringle played for the Montreal Alouettes (most notably), Edmonton Eskimos - and during that shameful time when the CFL had franchises in the US - the Sacramento Gold Miners (Surge) and Baltimore Stallions. He's a three time Grey Cup Champion, a two time Most Outstanding Player, rushing for over 16,000 yard in his CFL career, and had his number 27 retired by the Alouettes. While I have my unique souvenir Alouettes jersey (which always gets praise by fans at the games), I don't have an actual player jersey: Pringle's 27 would be a great choice.

Out and About

 Last Sunday was the last F1 race of the season, and super fan Janet was appropriately saddened. So, I managed to talk her into heading down to the Langdon Street Pub to watch the Vikings game, and partake of many appetizers. While I seriously lament the passing of Smitty's, the bar in Burlington who used to text me on late Sunday mornings to encourage me to come in, letting me know that my seat was waiting for me and that the Vikings were already on that TV (I would waltz in and a switchback and 13 hot wings would magically appear before I had my coat off), Langdon is a pretty fair replacement. An excellent time was had.

And, inexplicably, the Vikings played great, probably because I've sworn them off (as shown by my amazing Hamilton Tiger-Cats sweatshirt).

Kevin's Happy Day

 Every year my excellent friend Kevin takes the day off to celebrate his favorite band, They Might Be Giants. I know I, at one time or another, shared the story of my clumsy They Might Be Giants beginnings with Kevin. Year ago, probably at the Saint John's Club, a group of us were sitting around talking about music. In the process of making a point about the subjective nature of music appreciation (and all art, for that matter), I pointed out that my ex-wife loved They Might Be Giants, but that I had never warmed to them. I did not know that they were Kevin's favorite band, and he was rightly appalled by my philistinism. Almost immediately a They Might Be Giants concert ticket with my name on it showed up - and then another. In an odd way, I think it was actually the true beginning of our friendship. Anyway, every year a radio station in Minnesota holds a They Might Be Giants marathon, with all sorts of cool, appropriately quirky surprises, and Kevin takes the day off to happily listen. He even cancelled out on the weekly Breakfast of Excellence for the occasion. This, as a Tradition of Excellence, clearly trumps the Breakfast of Excellence, and I vouchsafe his decision.

This is literally the happiest I ever see him. What a great tradition.

2025 Readings 110

                             He was sad at heart, 

unsettled yet ready, sensing his death.

His fate hovered near, unknowable but certain; 

it would soon claim his coffered soul, 

part life from limb. Before long 

the prince's spirit would spin free from his body.

You know, I suppose I shouldn't actually include works that I read specifically for my Epics book, but I'll make an exception here. I had not read Beowulf in an age, but picked it up again because I was searching for a half-remembered passage that I wanted to include in a chapter. However, after sitting down, I ended up reading the entire epic again. In this case it was Seamus Heaney's verse translation, which wasn't obviously wasn't even in existence when I read Beowulf in college. As to be expected, the things that resonated with me now almost assuredly didn't interest me all those decades ago, and vice-versa. I'm sure the passage above speaks to the end of the year, the end of another semester, the upcoming end of my career, and my rapidly approaching sixty-sixth birthday. 

2025 Readings 109

 A couple nights ago I finished Edith Wharton's Ghosts, a collection, not surprisingly, of her ghost stories. I've always loved her novels, but had never really delved into her short fiction, and didn't, to my shame, even know that she was known for her ghost stories. They tended to fall into a very familiar pattern: outside is drawn into a very larger country house which has a spectral past, although I suspect that's more a limitation on the genre than it is Wharton as a writer. I didn't love the collection, but I would still recommend it.

The Human Condition

 Last week's Thanksgiving break was dominated by Janet unfortunately coming down with COVID. Happi8ly, it was a mild case, and our trip to Massachusetts to see her mom turned into takeout grilled chicken from Market 32. After laying up for a few days she's now right as rain, although still tires pretty easily (classic COVID). Now I'm the one who feels dreadful, although I've tested negative twice. While Janet slept long hours recovering I launched into the requisite movie marathon, re-watching the entire nine and a half hours of Masaki Kobayashi's The Human Condition trilogy: No Greater Love (1959), Road to Eternity (1959), and A Soldier's Prayer (1961). It's such a pity that the original set of novels of Junpei Gomikawa have never been translated into English. The right wing in Japan hated the novels and the films, and maybe that helps explain why it is under-watched (and obviously under-read) even today.

The greatest film trilogy in history is The Human Condition, and, no pun intended, I will die on that hill. I'm going to show part of it next semester in my Images of Fascism class, although, sadly, not the entire trilogy (which would make the foundation for a great class).

2025 Readings 108

 I've been watching a lot of Japanese cinema lately, and not simply all the films in my Japanese film noir class. Anyway, I was thinking of watching my favorite Akira Kurosawa film, Ikiru, again. It's a film that I always want to show in class, but, being a Kurosawa film, it's much too long. It's influenced by Leo Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich, which made me realize that I hadn't reread that classic in way too long a time. If you haven't read it (and shame on you if you haven't), it's essentially a novella (especially by Tolstoy standards), and on Audible it was only two and a half hours. It's message, that of a dying man, if only for about fifteen minutes about two hours before he dies, realizing how foolish his life decisions had been. completely still resonates today: "Ivan Ilyich's life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible." Highly recommended.

2025 Readings 107

 I've finished three different books in the last couple days, which is more impressive than it sounds. As we've discussed, I, like most readers, have several books going at the same time, and this time three just happened to finish up at the same time. I finished the second book in the Dune series, Dune Messiah. The ending redeemed the book a bit, although I don't know if it would inspire me to read any more in the series. I was telling my son that I thought Dune Messiah had too little of what made the first book, Dune, so good: extensive and fascinating world building - and too much of what often dragged down the first book: pretty clumsy dialogue, full of endless self-reflection and doubt. Obviously, it's not as if I'm opposed to the self-reflection, it's just that it was either clumsily delivered or painfully obvious, and tended to drag on. I'll do some research on the next installment and decide if I want to go on or not.

33

 We're down to 33, counting this upcoming Finals Week. Actually, as I've pointed out, I'm not certain exactly how many days, mainly because my spring semester is still a little unclear. The number will not jump to lower single digits, however, because the college, after giving it some thought, decided to not buy me out of my last semester.  Or maybe they didn't decide not to do so because that would have implied that they actually thought about it. Either way, it looks like my spring schedule is coming closer to coming into focus. The countdown next semester will be more exactly.

Here's Andrew Harris during his early days with the BC Lions. He later played for his hometown Winnipeg Blue Bombers before finishing his career with the Toronto Argonaut. Currently he's the running back coach for the Saskatchewan Roughriders. Obviously, he's CFL through and through. During his career he rushed for over 10,000 yards. He has won five Grey Cups (four as a player, and one this year as a coach).