Syllabus #86

 I'm beginning to edit this post on Monday, December 28.  If all goes as planned, it will publish on Sunday, January 3rd.  But if we've learned anything from the past year of life on this fetid blue marble, very little ever goes as planned, not really.

Fortunately for the exactly one of you reading this (hi, Mom!), we pulled it together and made it through the week.  I hope your year is off to a better start than the person who flipped their Jeep in front of our house the other night.  

copycat crime

Andy gave me the new David Sedaris book for Christmas.  I wonder if Sedaris would be so critical of this particular bit of his early work if it wasn't so popular still.  

My homeland is calling, and I must go.  

Well that's a familiar refrain.  

Do we have reasons to be optimistic?  He kind of glossed over the political realities that make the future murky at best.

Analog Reading:

Soon I need to publish my list of books read in 2020.  There were 64, which is a handful more than last year.  These were the last two I finished before the 31st:

The Joyce Girl by Annabel Abbs.  This book was kind of a metaphor for the year 2020.  It started off with a vibe of Jazz Age exuberance and ended with incest, rejection, and madness.  

The Fixed Stars by Molly Wizenberg.  Loved.  Wizenberg writes so beautifully and thoughtfully that even when she's writing about personal struggles, you don't feel pity or schadenfreude but rather, relatability.

Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner is the first book I finished this year.  It got off to a slow start for me, but I heard such good things and was intrigued by the narrative conceit after listening to an interview with the author a few months ago.  I kept at it and got to a place where I couldn't put it down.  Highly recommend.

Just started Kim Ji-young, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-ju.  It's too early for a verdict, but it's strange and I'm into it so far.