2019 Year In Review: Look At How Many Books I Read and Be Impressed Instead of Assuming It Was a Form of Escapism

It was totally a form of escapism, but there are far worse ways to spend one's time.  There's some highbrow, some lowbrow, a healthy mix of fiction and nonfiction.  My favorite nonfiction title was probably Spying on the South, and all of the Neapolitan novels by Elena Ferrante topped my fiction list.  I was going to link and annotate each book, but ain't nobody got time for that.

1. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
2. How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
3. Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain
4. Delancey by Molly Wizenberg
5. Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
6. Everything's Trash But It's Okay by Phoebe Robinson
7. Revenge of the Lawn and Other Stories by Richard Brautigan
8. Kids These Days by Malcolm Harris
9. Hippie by Paulo Coelho
10. My Year of Rest and Relaxation by Otessa Moshfegh
11. A Homemade Life by Molly Wizenberg
12. Little Fires Everywhere by Celeste Ng
13. Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay by Elena Ferrante
14. I'll be Gone in the Dark by Michelle McNamara
15. This Will Only Hurt a Little by Busy Phillips
16. Life Will Be the Death of Me by Chelsea Handler
17. Maybe You Should Talk to Someone by Lori Gottlieb
18. Shrill by Lindy West
19. I'm Fine and Other Lies by Whitney Cummings
20. A Moveable Feast ed. by Lonely Planet (not the Hemingway book, duh)
21. Feminasty by Erin Gibson
22. The Story of the Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
23. We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Sam Irby
24. You Think It, I'll Say It by Curtis Sittenfeld
25. Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
26. Spying on the South by Tony Horwitz
27. No One Belongs Here More Than You by Miranda July
28. Homeland by Sam Lipsyte
29. Howard Stern Comes Again by Howard Stern
30. You Know You Want This by Kristen Roupenian
31. Maid by Stephanie Land
32. Hot Young Widows Club by Nora McInerney
33. Dying of Whiteness by Jonathan Metzl
34. 10 Years A Nomad by Matthew Kepnes
35. Amsterdam by Ian McEwen
36. Confederates in the Attic by Tony Horwitz
37. Sick by Porochista Khakpour
38. Flow: A cultural story of menstruation by Elissa Stein and Susan Kim
39. Where We Come From by Oscar Casares
40. Brain on Fire by Susana Cahalan
41. Inland by Tea Obreht
42. Trick Mirror by Jia Tolentino
43. Guts by Raina Telgemeier/Stargazer by Jen Wang/Best Friends by Shannon Hale (counting these three middle grade graphic novels as one, because I read them each in one sitting at work, but they were great!)
44. Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance
45. Chances Are by Richard Russo
46. Doxology by Nell Zink
47. There There by Tommy Orange
48. Because Internet by Gretchen McCullough
49. Short Cuts by Raymond Carver
50. Little Weirds by Jenny Slate
51. High School by Tegan and Sara
52. Quichotte by Salman Rushdie
53. Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
54. The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick
55. Grief is a Thing With Feathers by Max Porter
56. The Trip to Echo Spring:  On writers and drinking by Olivia Laing
57. Grand Union by Zadie Smith*
58. The Dutch House by Ann Patchett*

In Progress:

Super Sad True Love Story by Gary Shteyngart
The Overstory by Richard Powers*

Started but didn't finish:

The Attention Merchants by Tim Wu

Milkman by Anna Burns

Sick in the Head by Judd Apatow

Edit:  Starred * titles updated/added on 12/29/19

He Was the Best Good Boy

Syllabus #34

The ALDI parking lot, where the carts are a quarter but the sunsets are free.  

Do you realize that there are 10 days until Christmas, and a mere 16 days remaining in this decade?  I realize it's an arbitrary demarcation of time and doesn't materially affect our lives, but it feels significant.  I feel like we started the decade with Obama at the helm, on an upswing from the recession and full of hope.  Now I just feel fatigued and numb from the constant shit slurry being forced through our collective feeding tube.  It makes me nostalgic for Y2K, which, if you're doing the math, was TWENTY YEARS AGO.  It was a simpler time with our dial-up modems or DSL if you were fancy, and sometimes I wonder if we wouldn't all be better off if the internet really had self destructed like we all feared it would as the ball dropped and Dick Clark ushered us into the potential maelstrom of the new millennium. 

That really took a dark turn, so here's some mildly interesting stuff I sifted out of the toxic debris pile that is the internet this past week.

Mazel tov, Tiffany.  One more reason for me to wish I was Jewish.  I have a little FOMO for the chosen people. 


Thank you, Sanna Marin, 34 year old Prime Minister of Finland, for wrecking the curve on adulting.  I was just starting to be proud of myself for not living in personal squalor and feeling relatively competent managing a roomful of children and there you go running an entire country, and a country towards which I feel great admiration and affinity, no less.


Where do you stand on the concept of emotional labor?  Do you think the qualifier 'emotional' elides the fact that it is actual labor?  I disagree.  I think the emotional component is an additional layer of the labor.  Around the holidays, it's not just the purchasing and wrapping of gifts, for example, but the emotional work of remembering to start the gift-buying process in a timely manner, establishing a budget for all the people on your gift list, keeping mental notes throughout the year of things they might want or need, humbling yourself to ask people what they'd like if you are stumped, keeping track of all the orders, comparison shopping and timing your purchases to get the best prices so you stay within your budget, etc. 

In daily quotidian existence, it's not just the labor of doing the grocery shopping, it's planning the meals, planning how to use up ingredients to avoid food waste, remembering your family's food preferences of the moment, noticing what is running low,  making the lists, clipping the coupons, trying to stay within a budget, and so on.  It's the never ending, unseen mental labor that accompanies the actual labor that is so often taken for granted by the person in the relationship who doesn't participate in those tasks.  Even if they are more than willing to say, scrub the toilet when asked, it would be preferable if that person would independently recognize that the toilet is becoming a petri dish for the next undiscovered pandemic and clean it without having to be asked.


 This is horrifying.  I'm so glad I grew up ugly before social media.  If I went through my teen years in the Age of Instagram Face I'd probably just have to wear a bag over my head at all times.

Seinfeld WAS way better than Friends.  I'm just glad that guy has the courage of his convictions to speak out about it.


Are you a philistine or do you make reading a habit?  Just kidding, it breaks my tender little librarian heart to say it, but I accept that not everyone loves to read (...YET...because they just haven't connected with the right book).


Do you have a morning routine?  Is your head far enough up your ass to call it a morning ritual?  Unless you're sacrificing a goat or sticking pins a in a voodoo doll of your boss, whatever you're doing in the morning is a routine.  I wake up at 5, which is probably a little bit earlier than necessary, but I have to walk Charlie, I like do yoga for a few minutes, and it's a real treat to be able to sit at a table and eat a decent breakfast like a civilized human.  There's no guarantee that my sad desk lunch won't be interrupted 67 times, so I take my moment of zen where I can get it.  Plus, if I wanted to sacrifice a goat, I would have to get up at at least 4:30.


Analog Reading:

The Odd Woman and the City by Vivian Gornick

Quichotte by Salman Rushdie

The Trip to Echo Spring:  On writers and drinking by Olivia Laing


I'm planning to do a year in review of all the books I read in 2019.  Mostly because I'm insufferable and want to virtue signal about all of my varied and impressive reading selections.  I'm up to 53 books on the year as of this writing!  I know none of the Russian or Ukrainian bots that inexplicably frequent my internet home give a good goddamn, but maybe my mom will find it interesting.  Hi, Mom.

Syllabus #33

All of this is pretty much old news by now.  I took a sabbatical.  Get over it.  I already have.  While I was gone, I ate a lot of food, I expelled a lot of phlegm, animals were sick and injured, it's been a journey.

I'd love to have Oprah eulogize me, but given the age spread, I should probably get busy dying before she does.  Also maybe get busy being important.

Do you CBD, bro?  I'm a fan of the tincture, and find it to be subtly relaxing, but I think we all realize most of the other potions are snake oil.

I am David, Andy is Hugh.  Forever and ever, amen.

Taint his fault he forgot sunscreen.

This was heavy and sad and made me think of my own students.  I don't know what happens to them when they leave school each day but I suspect a lot of them end up in precarious situations like this one.

Does anyone ever psychologically make it out of middle school?  Can we elect a grown up who has the emotional resilience not to get a Sad when someone (justifiably) whispers behind their back?  They're all gonna laugh at you, Donnie.  P.S.  Plug it up.

How was y'alls Thanksgivings?  I spent mine in a place I thought I'd never return to:  South Carolina.  At least it was pretty (and, you know, the company wasn't too shabby either):