by Kathryn Jezer-Morton

“The stories told on social media are all, in one way or another, stories that support … a regime of neoliberal selfhood: a way of accounting for oneself that emphasizes resilience & individuality… Individuals seek to improve their access to opportunities through the demonstration of various types of fitness. In telling stories like this, we disenchant our lives. We suck all the shading & feeling out of our own experiences.”

I’ve been looking for ways to verbalize this for a long time. The myth of self-improvement. Fooling ourselves that we’re getting better all the time, when really we haven’t fundamentally changed one iota since age 4. “Believe we’re gliding down the highway when in fact we’re slip-sliding away” (Paul Simon).

“It felt ironic to be looking for a redemptive chord on which to conclude a book all about the limitations of telling one’s life story as a series of victories.” To paraphrase Leonard Cohen, “Life is not a victory march.”

Strange married couple survives 117 days at sea on a life raft. The story speaks for itself. I’m not sure the writing was great. The story stuck with the couple, Maurice & Maralyn, from their meeting, through their ordeal, and then too long after their ordeal was past, at which point things just seem to meander to a sad ending with their deaths by natural causes.

by Jerry Z. Muller

Kind of a one-point wonder of a book. The complaints mostly seem to be about how taking actions (rewarding & penalizing) based on metrics leads to gaming the system. I would have preferred the more philosophic angle – how we lose our way when only what is measurable becomes important. Take the example of charities. We’ve gotten used to judging the “effectiveness” of charities based on the percentage of their income that goes to actual programs vs. overhead and fundraising. But why – because measuring actual effectiveness (results) is often hard. But measuring inputs (dollars in, dollars spent on this vs. that) is easy. Hence that becomes the only or most important thing. But that means that if a lot of overhead is NECESSARY to achieving results, the charity still comes out looking bad, regardless of results achieved.

Always remember that what science can measure is not all that exists.

by Olga Tokarczuk

Similarities to DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD, but no plot, and missing the wonderful protagonist.

by J. R. R. Tolkien

Adorable children’s story Tolkien wrote for his second son, or Boy Two, after he lost his beloved toy dog on the beach. A real dog is enchanted into a toy dog, and then goes on adventures, up on the moon and under the sea. In the end he is transformed back into a real dog and sent home to Boy Two.

by Madeline Miller

This is the story about a goddess who lives alone on a beautiful island where she dyes, spins, weaves, and casts spells.

No, just kidding. I wish it was. It’s an outlandish story with violence on almost every single page. Just one random violent thing after another.

by J. R. R. Tolkien

Small book with three distinct parts. First part is Tolkien expounding on “faerie stories” as a concept. It’s rather professorial. The second is a lovely short story called “Leaf by Niggle”. Tolkien has stated that he doesn’t like allegory. But this is a story about an artist who can’t ever complete his painting of a tree, because he wants each individual leaf to be beautiful and unique. Makes me think of someone – except, thank all our lucky stars, Tolkien DID complete LORD OF THE RINGS. It’s a tree which is beautiful above and beyond all its individual leaves being beautiful. Finally, the end of the book is a long poem in iambic pentameter. It’s a bit cryptic but I read it as being about the existence of God in nature and art.

by Nathaniel Ian Miller

I read this because I loved his second novel, RED DOG FARM. This is extremely different. I was hooked early on, but the hook lost me after 60 pages or so. Sven is an interesting character and goes off to the north to seek adventure, and makes a sympathetic friend. Then there’s a mining accident, and I lost the thread. He goes off further north to become a trapper. Eventually the story jumps the shark when his spunky niece shows up with her baby, yes in the wilds of the north, to stay with him. By the end I was actively disliking this meandering story. It didn’t seem to matter what happened, the story would just wander wherever it wanted.

edited by Benjamin Hedin

“They’re songs. They’re not written in stone. They’re plastic.” – Dylan, Songwriters on Songwriting, April 1991

“From the bottom of my heart, however, I want to thank Bob Dylan for his poetry, his music, his soul. He’s made life, sometimes a desperate crawl through a vicious universe, clearer, cleaner, and quieter for me, even when he was at his noisiest. I hope never to meet him. This meeting would involve very little. A handshake. he’s already shaken my hand. Good God, thank you, Bobby Zimmerman.” – Barry Hannah, written for this collection

by J. R. R. Tolkien

(re-read)

I really don’t like The Hobbit. I re-read it to brush up on things. But not only because it’s a kid’s book and it trivializes important things from the masterpiece LOTR… but because it bored me! I found the ending boring. I also thought Beorn was outlandish and didn’t fit into the LOTR world.