Year in Review: 2024

 Train for a decathalon. 

Finish and self-publish my novel. 

Go vegan and crusade for the environment. 

These are just a few of the things I did not do in 2024. I also did not manage to stop my unhealthy habits of doomscrolling on my phone, huffing paint fumes and huffing paint fumes while doomscrolling on my phone. I don't anticipate 2025 being a good choice of years to cease such self destructive habits, either. But then again, we must always remember what Seneca and the Stoics used to say: "The obstacle is the way. Except when that obstacle is the collapse of democracy and the abandonment of any pretense of reality in our political discourse. Then, the obstacle is a bunch of bullshit." 

Last year, I famously denounced reading lists, resolution lists, anything that objectifies what should be the constant and ever-unattainable-yet-always-pursuable path towards excellence and self-improvemtn. I denounce it this year as well. 

That said, here are some titles of 2024 I'd like to throw in all your faces: 

The Message, by Ta-Neshi Coates, is a stirring, infuriating and thoughtful book about oppression and marginalization. Coates zeroes in on South Carolina and Senegal, but it's his commentary on Palestine and how Israel has created an apartheid state in Gaza that ruffled just the right feathers late this year. It's my pick for Books to Read About Palestine in 2024. It's also the only book I read about Palestine in 2024. So go read it. 

Then there was The Sequel by Jean Hanff Korelitz, a sequel to the equally engrossing The Plot. An engrossing anti-hero, a tightly constructed plot, this book was the best book of 2024 about a criminal bestselling author working desperately and furtively to cover her tracks and recreate her life. It's also the only such book published that I know of the entire year. So go read that too. 

I would also throw Frieda McFadden's The Teacher on this list. It starts out like a typical student-fools-around-with-teacher scandal, but it takes a suitable and enthralling number of twists and turns and winds up being something entirely different. I'm still trying to get my wife to read it. If you read it, maybe she will too. 

As far as film goes, Dune 2, Wicked and Nosferatu are some of the most critically acclaimed films of the year. I think they're probably well worth seeing. I also think I did not see a single one of them. I hate going to the theater these days. Years of Covid-inspired streaming sessions in my living room, with my dogs in my lap, has ruined me for the cineplex.. Instead of yelling at teenagers and summoning ushers about overly sticky floors, I've resorted to lounding on my sofa, yelling at the neighbors and fiddling nonstop with the lights. 

Longlegs, and A Quiet Place: Day One. I think they are excellent, disturbing in all the right places and well worth watching. I also think I actually saw both of them. 

As for next year, hey, if we even have a funcitoning society this time in 2025, we should count ourselves lucky. Go hug your loved ones, consume art, be kind to others and practice actual self-care, not commercial- or hedonistic-type self-care. Drink water. Pet dogs. Take me out for drinks. Whatever it takes to pull through all of this. If empathy and consideration are wrong...we as a country are so, so wrong. So let's be right instead. 

Happy New Year. Get off my lawn. I’m having your baby and I don’t remember where I parked. Thank you. 

The Year In Reading: 2023

This year, as I do most years, I set a goal of books read, and made it a few titles over. 

But seriously, who cares? "Books read" lists are akin to notches on a palm tree during your desert island isolation. It marks the time; it's an accomplishment, but a rather arbitrary one. 

For starters, "titles read" encompasses longer works, like Nicholas Nickleby, and children's books, like The Value of Believing in Yourself. It does not distinguish between books I did a deep-dive into for the first time (Barry Lyndon; Lauren Brownstone's Enabling Enablement) and those I sailed through for perhaps the thousandth time in my life (The Hobbit; Stephen King's The Dead Zone). 

I'm reminded of magician Harry Lorraine's anecdote about the performer who bragged he knew a thousand tricks. "That's marvelous," the skilled professional responded; "I only know five." The implication being, of course, that he actually knows the tricks he performs. Sure, I may have read Zadie Smith's The Fraud, but there's a momentous amount of subtext and nuance that completely escaped me. Did I really read it? 

"Can we ever truly reread a book, since we, the reader, are not the same when we come back to it?" Joyce Carol Oates mused in one of her diaries (quoted from memory). No, I don't think we can. 

So the number read doesn't really matter; the reading does. And in 2023, I found myself strangely preoccupied with a few topics, and I found myself developing a few habits. 

Upon the morning of January 3, for example, I happened to find an online copy of W. Somerset Maugham's The Constant Wife, and devoured it in one sitting. I've been a pretty big Maugham fan ever since I discovered Of Human Bondage in my twenties, and wound up rereading it once every ten years or so, but honestly, it's not even his best work. Maugham has a wonderful ear for dialogue and domestic conflict, and pairing this play immediately afterwards with L.A. Theaterworks' dramatic performance was an experience. So I wound up repeating the experience monthly: one play, one audio production. 

In February, it was Disgraced, by Ayad Akhtar. In March, Michael Frayn's Make and Break. (I discovered him when I found out he was married to Claire Tomalin. I found that out when I read her account of Ellen Ternan, which was fantastic.)

April found me devouring Viet Gone by Qui Nguyen; May, however, was a side route with Gore Vidal's The Best Man, a play I've seen live but never actually read. 

Then in June, July and August, with the exception of Bryony Lavery's Frozen, I was mostly wallowing in the works of Noel Coward, and by September, with Design for Living under my belt, I lost the play-plus-production habit. All of these titles were free, by the way, either available in the common domain or, in the case of dramatic productions, free for download at the local library. 

It's a good way to read this stuff. I recommend it. 

The winter did not only lead me towards an immersive audiophile avenue of drama, alas. It was dark and cold; it was mostly just me and the dogs, slugging through the school days. And by sheer chance, I came across Clare Pooley's The Sober Diaries, her online account of giving up drinking and reacclimating herself to an alcohol-free life. Engaging, though not particularly prosy, I was hooked once I found that her deep dive into the subject had unearthed all kinds of revelations about her own life, life in general (why does our culture celebrate the imbibing of poison so readily, anyway?) and the nature of addiction vs. habit. That, in turn, revealed wonderful titles like Kerry Cohen's Lush and Carrie Fisher's Wishful Drinking. It also led me to Ron Livingston's Amazon seriesLoudermilk and Judd Apatow's Netflix series Love, all stories involving some kind of addiction and the people in the addict's orbit trying to navigate the waters and figure things out. "We ain't living; we're just trying to survive," as Ben Rogers sings. Utterly fascinating. 

In July, for my birthday gift to myself, when I wasn't packing or arranging to move across country, I read and took to heart No Plot? No Problem! by NaNoRiMo founder Chris Baty, and Stephanie Vanderslice's The Geek's Guide to the Writing Life. Those titles, plus the rather chaotic schedule I was keeping at the time, led me to start another novel and get farther than I ever did in my life. It's a comedic horror story about a pandemic that turns the population into zombies; the only way to avoid infection, paradoxically, is to socially congregate. The first draft is a mess, but by God it was fun to write. I inch ever closer to checking "write a crappy novel" off my bucket list. Maybe next year. 

Of course, I wallowed in Victorian literature, like I always do; this year I rediscovered W.M. Thackeray, and I'm angling towards Anthony Trollope for next year. Clare Carlisle's The Marriage Question was an intriguing deep dive into George Eliot's marriage with G.H. Lewes, and a much more critical approach than anything I'd read about her relationship before. 

But I did stretch my legs and take in some other titles besides. Leila Mottley's Nightcrawling was harrowing; Kimberly Harrington's But You Seemed So Happy is a title a husband trying to do better can only appreciate. 

I didn't read as many new titles this year as I'd have liked, but R.F. Kuan's Yellowface, Emma Cline's The Guest, Nathan Hill's Wellness and Annie Abrams' Short Changed were stalwart, challenging, thoroughly enjoyable and rewarding books. Stop reading this. Go read them instead. 

Wait, before you go...

How will you read the new year? I always say I'm going to read more outside my comfort zone; I rarely do this as much as I plan. I always say I'm going to abandon Reading for Pleasure so as to Read For Work. I'm going to find the titles that will give me the intellectual equipment necessary to fight the fights that need fighting. The horrors of Gaza. The continual heating of our planet. The war on education. Yes, it's nice that I got to reread Silas Marner but what about boning up on late term capitalism? How about knowing the ins and outs of the electoral process well enough so that, if necessary, I can step up where needed to push for sanity and rationality? 

How about reading for others, for the world, instead of just for one's self? 

I'll try. 

Read on, all. See you next year. 

They beckon me still...

My top book picks of 2019

Couldn’t resist. This year, I kept as much of an eye on new releases as I could; here are my top picks, culled from an admittedly short list. Hyperlinks, when present, take you to my reviews on Goodreads.

On global warming, we have The Uninhabitable Earth, by David Wallace-Wells, On Fire, by Naomi Klein and the Warmer collection, on Amazon Kindle (six short books—my favorite was Jesse Waters’ The Way the World Ends). ) Because global warming is looming, and we need the facts and the art to deal with it

 Then there was The Nickel Boys, by Colson Whitehead. What a great followup to his last novel. Gripping. Horrifying.

Then there was Why They Can’t Write: Killing the Five Paragraph Essay by James Baldwin—he tells writing instruction like it is. I also loved The Problem With Everything, by the wonderful Meghan Daum—she's a unique feminist voice we need more of.

It was a bit of a grind, but Bhaskar Sunkara’s The Socialist Manifesto should be required reading for both those who espouse a greater social safety net for today’s vulnerable people and aging, bitter white collar types grousing about young people and their “entitlements.” I didn’t fully agree with Matt Taibbi’s takedown of the mainstream media in Hate Inc, but he’s ideologically and intellectually consistent, and well worth listening to.

Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women was so good, I read it through twice. Yes. It’s that good.

 But because we live in the world we live in, I also have to put before you Trumponomics, by Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffler. It’s total crap, but if you want to see the direction his financial advisers took us, look no further. (Also, my review is at the top of the Goodreads page, so if you like it, you're fighting the power--hint hint).  

None of these books are on this list. But they're still good.

Runners up: Whose Boat Is This Boat? by Stephen Colbert (because yes, it’s accurate, he really said all that) and Greta Thunberg’s No One is Too Small to Make a Difference (which I haven’t read yet, but going off her speeches and media coverage, I think it belongs on any list worth considering).

 Happy 2020. Read on.

"Trumponomics" ruined the last weekend of my winter break

I should have known better, but I dove into Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer’s Trumponomics the past couple of days.

I couldn’t help it. This week alone, I saw a Washington Post columnist go head to head with Moore over his nonsense about interest rates and the effects of Trump’s trade war on American commodities; I saw Mehdi Hasan hold Laffer’s feet to the fire about the evidence for tax cuts resulting in prosperity for all. Neither of them succeeded in getting either of Trump’s lackeys to acknowledge reality, and I’m starting to think they’re not too concerned with what most of us think anyway. They’re getting what they want. I figured I’d better take a closer look at what exactly it is they want, and why they want it (or why they say they want it, anyway).

Besides, after two weeks of vacation, I was really tired of feeling good and at peace with the world and myself.

Summary: They’re full of it. Foreign Affairs does a much better job picking it apart than I ever could, but for what it’s worth, my two cents can be found below. (It's also on Goodreads, for the record.)

---------------------------------------------------

"Vote for me and you will turn into immortal sex gods with unlimited checking accounts. See this book? It tells you how."

"How many economists does it take to reinvent reality? Apparently two." 

About two thirds through this fine piece of economic cheerleading for Donald Trump’s successful efforts to deregulate and dismantle everything standing between him and his tax cuts and deregulation, punch drunk and bilious, I came across one little nugget that not only got under my skin. I took it personally. 

In a passage championing America plundering its land in order to access energy reserved, touted as hundreds of years’ worth one page and then infinite in another, Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer claim that “In Youngstown, Ohio, steel plants are being rebuilt.” 

My family is from Youngstown, and every time a politician appears there to highlight the decaying rust belt and desperation of the white working class, I can’t help but notice. My grandfather worked in those steel mills. Steel worker unions and union wages helped put me through college. So of course I was overjoyed to learn that Trump was making good on a campaign promise. 

Except, of course, he hasn’t. I don’t think fact checking means anything anymore, but for what it’s worth, PolitiFact reports there’s some evidence of steel mills reopening here and there, but not many, and the number of steel worker jobs is now the same as it was before he was elected, with an overall downward trend in jobs due to technological innovations and other global factors. 

So no. No new steel mills. That’s a lie, and this time they lied about my mother’s home town. 

Well, maybe that’s just an error. Just like their claim that he added 50,000 coal mining jobs (again, the dreaded fact checkers at PolitiFact found this to be misleading). 

Or that the U.S. expansion of shale oil has brought down carbon emissions more than anything (it’s way more complicated than that and is still killing the planet). 

Or their claims about pollution control or voter attitudes or...you know, I think I’m starting to see a pattern here. Trumponomics could not be better named. Like the authors' boss’s name, it evokes spin, salesmanship absent substance. It screams bullshit. 

But hey, maybe that’s all just detail. If we’re going to get to the core of the matter, maybe we’d want to take a closer look at the central premise of the book. Laffer and Moore, who have a long track record of talking up supply side economics, start the book with several chapters’ worth of retelling their story of the campaign, chronicling their work to get the tax reform of 2017 passed and patting themselves and Trump on the back every other page for the “historic growth” we’ve seen since. Their recipe for success: deregulation and tax cuts have historically led to strong economic growth of 3 or 4 percent. Under Kennedy, Reagan and Clinton, their thinking goes, the economy grew rapidly, added jobs and decreased the number of people on the dreaded welfare roletherefore all you have to do is cut taxes and deregulate, sit back and watch American become Great Again. Whatever that means. 

Ok, I get wanting to take credit for the economy’s recovery. Trump is hardly the first president to do that. But, again, as fact checkers point out, there’s a range of factors to consider when evaluating an economy, and these guys, who claim to be economists, don’t seem to want to acknowledge that. Besides, Trump’s claims about job creation and growth on his term range from misleading to false, and their credibility is shattered once they start echoing them themselves. 

At any rate, evidence that the country rocks under low taxes depends on how you analyze economic growth over the years, In the past week, as newly sworn in Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez talks about upping marginal rates and getting high earners to pay as much as 70 percent, economists like Paul Krugman are looking at the numbers and seeing nothing to indicate that this would cripple growth. In fact, quite the reverse. 

Look, I can’t claim to have the right answers on economic policy here. As I have made clear time and time again, I am no economist. When it comes to money matters, my philosophy is “I like it.” 

But I know bullshit when I see it. And this book is loaded with it. 

Moore and Laffer can’t conceive of anyone doing anything without examining the taxes involved. They equate Medicaid, Social Security, libraries and unemployment benefits as “welfare,” a dog whistle for Trump supporters if ever I heard one. They keep pointing to the 2016 election and claiming “the voters made it clear” they wanted all of Trump’s policies, apparently being unaware of the margin of victory and who actually won the popular vote. And when the voters don’t agree with their policies, like in 2017 when only 25 percent supported the tax bill, it’s because they’ve been brainwashed by the leftist propaganda machine. 


They repeatedly roar in triumph over what the private sector can do with computers, phones, the Internet and pharmaceutical drugs, apparently completely ignorant as to where these things came from. They reluctantly acknowledge climate change, but only by adding air quotes and talking about hysteria and paranoia; they can’t envision a world reeling from the effects of rising sea levels and higher levels of carbon in the air, and it never occurs to them that that’ll have to be paid for in the long run. All they see is the immediate price tag. 

And when they deplore the financial crisis, all they can talk about is Obama’s response to it; the Wall Street regulation that most people support isn’t even a thought that occurs to them.


To their credit, they stick to their guns over their differences with Trump regarding trade deficits and immigration. But I don’t care. These are the guys who compare him to P.T. Barnum (the man who said there was a sucker born every minute) as if that’s a plus, and they’re the guys who think that the African-American unemployment rate falling is proof that Trump couldn’t possibly be a racist. My God. 

I’m under no illusions about the effect of this book, or any criticism of it, making much of a difference. Trump supporters will read it and go “See?” Trump critics will pick it apart and get absolutely nowhere. At any rate, the authors are impervious to fact checking and criticism. Mehdi Hasan has been heroic in his efforts to pin down Laffer’s evidence for the effectiveness of trickle down economics (both years ago and recently) but when he interviews Laffer, he either gets the economist simply pointing to his own claim and spouting “There you go,” or he gets him simply discounting contrary evidence and bleating “I don’t believe that.” And Moore has made quite a career out of being wrong, starting with his prognostications about the Bush economy, failure to fact check claims about the economy or Obamacare, and going right into last week, when he claimed the U.S. economy was going through deflation and ignored what Trump’s trade war had to do with it all. 

None of this matters. They’re getting their way. They’re drilling and blasting the country for the energy; they’re screwing their and our grandchildren to pursue short term gain; they’re dismantling any and every social service they can while the rich, already doing well, get even richer. But hey, at least we’ll have cheap hamburgers and toasty winters to get us through the tough times.