by Teddy Wayne

Kind of rough – watch a man deteriorate one failure at a time, all the while listening to him blow kneejerk liberal sanctimony at every turn. Paul’s been demoted from senior lecturer to adjunct. His daughter is turning 12 and checking out of their relationship. He has to move in with his 80-something mother – and she’s started watching the fictional stand-in for Fox News. And then things get worse!

The short chapters kept me turning (swiping) pages.

I didn’t much like one of the subplots where he starts boinking a high-level employee at the faux Fox News, pretending to be a conservative misplaced in academia, in order to gain access… to what, for what? But it turns out to be key.

64 books read in 2023. Up from 58 in 2022 and 61 in 2021 and 59 in 2020. I am counting a few “Charlie Brown Cyclopedias” but why shouldn’t they count! 

Best book and best fiction was The Greengage Summer.

Best non-fiction was What’s Our Problem.

#64 for the year:

by Torie Bosch (editor)

It’s nice to read about coding. Usually in the world of books it’s like we don’t exist.

by Michael Allred

A comic book by someone with an obvious love of drawing David Bowie. Covers the years surrounding Ziggy. I particularly liked how the famous “Not only is this the last show of the tour” mini-speech was broken up over multiple pages, scattered throughout the story. I’d buy a sequel.

by Susan Neiman

This was a good defense of old-school liberalism – universalism, specifically.

by Joe Nocera & Bethany McLean

It needed to do a better job sticking to the topic. I strove and failed to be interested in how private equity took over all the nursing homes. I wanted to hear more about the science of lockdowns and masking, and was it ever possible we could have kept it all from becoming politicized?

Interesting to hear about the lack of science behind boosters. Pfizer and Moderna wanted to keep selling shots – is this why we were encouraged to boost ourselves so frequently? I have lost count of how many shots I’ve had by now. Were ANY boosters really necessary? Something about long-lived T cells being more important than short-lived antibodies.

On that topic, they didn’t explicitly mention “First Shots First” – which some were wisely calling for, while instead we boosted people who were first in line for the first shots. We should have been getting as many shots into arms, as they say, as possible, period. This is me talking now. We did need some order and prioritization, but doses going to waste, that was a crime.

Maybe the worst way we screwed up, in hindsight, was closing the schools for so long. But I worried about the teachers.