by Joan Didion

I don’t know why I read this. It’s about the year after Joan Didion’s husband died and her adult daughter hovered near death in various ICU’s. The “magical thinking” was semi-conscious thinking like “I can’t give away his shoes; if he comes back, he’ll need shoes.” I have not yet lost my spouse and I don’t know what to say about it; I guess, thanx for the tip as to how horrible it’s going to be.

by Sally Rooney

This is not my kind of book – very talky-thinky. Dense pages with no paragraph breaks consisting entirely of people talking or thinking about their feelings.

I don’t like Sally Rooney, and this book reenforced that. I had read one book, NORMAL PEOPLE, and liked exactly one half of it. Now I have double the sample size. I don’t like her women and I don’t like her sex scenes. I preferred the young woman in the first half of NORMAL and I prefer sex scenes where people keep their socks on and not everything is wonderful.

It dragged in the middle. I thought, I get it, I get it, the “neurodivergent” guy is the most well-adjusted character in the book. I don’t buy Ivan as neurodivergent, FYI, if that’s what she had in mind, which it may not be; it may just be what readers are projecting onto him. He was a skinny guy that was really into chess. But he was as talky-thinky as anyone else when you got right down to it.

I loathed Naomi. I came to hate any scene where she was even mentioned, let alone appeared in. Why was everyone around Peter acting as if this were a perfectly appropriate relationship for him? To quote Woody Allen’s alien scene in STARDUST MEMORIES, “Hey look, I’m a super intelligent being, by your standards I have an IQ of 1600, and I cant’ even understand what [Peter] expected out of that relationship with [Naomi].”

Positives:

I thought it was really interesting about how concerned the characters were with what other people would think. Margaret says that the net you’re caught in, the net of other people, you can’t get out of it, because life IS the net. And Peter couldn’t get past what other people would about him being in a weird “throuple.” I think characters grown up in the US would not have these attitudes. If they had twinges of self-consciousness they’d shrug them off – Who cares what people think? I’m an adult, he/she/they are adults, this is our life to choose. Most of the rest of the world is very different; apparently even first-world places like Ireland.

It was actually beautiful how she conveyed the grief of the two brothers. Whenever the narration came around back to their father, in any way, whichever brother’s perspective she may have been inhabiting, you really felt the loss and the struggle he was going through; like real grief, large swathes of (narrative) time might go by without giving a thought to the loss, but a reminder would crash it down again.

by Peter Ames Carlin

Kind of dull – like the band. And I say that with R.E.M. firmly in my top 5 of favorite artists. They just never struck me as very interesting as people. The book does not disabuse me of said notion. Or maybe I’m not being fair – it’s not that they wouldn’t be very interesting people to get to know; but just not to get to know by reading about them.

Regarding the work, the book is pretty much all-out fanboy. Almost everything they make is great.

by Brette Warshaw

What I learned:

• Stout and porter were only invented in the 1700s. Guinness was the first stout.
• Broccolini was invented in the 1990s and first called “Asparation”. Because it was like “asparagus.” Um, yeah.
• The first rum distillery in North America went up in the 1600s on none other than… Staten Island.

by Benoit Clerc

In the midst of this newly conceived Dylan obsession, I read a compendium of every David Bowie song ever recorded. Well, most of it. I don’t like his later period (post-LET’S DANCE)… I just can’t get into any of the albums of the 90s and later. Too jazzy, or something. I do have his final album, BLACKSTAR, which I listen to respectfully, because it was his last. And I really felt moved to come to the end of this book and read about his final work, because of the way he went out. Bowie kept his illness secret from the public and never stopped working. He died two days after his last album came out. A lot of artists I love are dead, but the loss of Bowie really moved me.

by Ian McGilchrist

And we have a winner for best non-fiction of 2024. This is really a game-changing book for me.

The right brain is primary, and the left brain merely its emissary; yet the left brain often takes over, thinks HE is the master, and becomes a bully. All these decades I’ve thought of myself as left-brained, extremely so, maybe pathologically so. Maybe I just have to get the thing back on a leash. Maybe it just went haywire in my adolescence and I let it start getting away with murder.

The book begins with neuroscience and then deep dives – deep, DEEP dives – into the history of civilization, art, and science. I had no choice but to zone out for a lot of it; artistic discussions over my head, foreign language quotes not translated until the endnotes. This was 600 pages of heavy duty. But when I could glean what he was saying, it was a fascinating perspective.

My New Year’s resolution – in addition to “stop getting mad when people call me” – is to see if I can put my left brain back in its place. You serve at my pleasure, left brain.

by Jane Austen

Annotated – re-read

What new did I discover on this nth re-read? It deserves to be Austen’s best known and beloved. I hope Mary and Kitty married well.

by Charles M. Schulz

This may be Peak Peanuts. It’s definitely peak cuteness. Linus is still crawling when the year starts. Snoopy is starting to do “impressions”, but he’s still a dog.

This doesn’t look like it’s going to be one of my peak years for book reading, quantity-wise. WOLF HALL took up a shitload of time, and since then I seem to be abandoning long books halfway through. It’s hard to read other stuff after WOLF HALL.

by Ian McEwan

SPOILER

Two friends agree that if either one of them ever starts to go downhill, particularly mentally, the other will help him to end it all.

SPOILER NOW!

What happens then is they get into a big fight and hate each other. So each invites the other to meet up with him in Amsterdam; and each one has the other killed.

by Hilary Mantel

They sure chopped off a lot of heads back in the day.

Seriously, what can I say after devouring this entire trilogy in a couple of months? This is surely a new classic.