PicoBlog

This is a terrible thing to say, but: the pandemic was — in some important ways — good for me.

I started eating better. Exercising more. Lost a lot of weight. (I’m still fat.) Started getting better sleep. After a decade of health problems that left me wondering if I would make it to 50, I started to feel somewhat normal again. 

And part of being normal again was becoming a serious reader again.

The health — the lack of sleep, particularly — had deeply interfered with my ambitions of being a reader of books. I simply couldn’t sustain either concentration or wakefulness long enough to crack more than a few pages at a time. Getting my alertness back was wonderful. 

I read 32 books in 2020. 30 in 2021. 31 in 2022.

This year was a tiny bit of a slowdown. (I think that’s because I watched more movies than I ever had in my life — more on that next week.) With a week or so left to go, I have read a grand total of 25 books. And as you can see, I pretty thoroughly embraced my middle-browness this year.

A quick overview:

* I probably read more Hollywood-slash-pop-culture books this year than I ever had. “Making Movies” and “Easy Riders, Raging Bulls” deepened my knowledge both of the craft of movies and of a particular defining era. Matt Zoller Seitz, who writes often at New York magazine, is one of my favorite cultural critics: His “The Deadwood Bible” was a pleasurable and at times sobering dive into my favorite television drama. 

* I read fewer novels this year than I hoped to. Of them, Larry McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove” was my favorite, despite my discomfort with the Western genre. I understand McMurtry was trying to demythologize the West with this book. He failed utterly, of course. I’m reminded of an observation from Anthony Swofford’s “Jarhead”: There’s no such thing as an anti-war movie — somebody will get off on the depictions, no matter how ugly and truthful you make it. I’m not sure that McMurtry got even that far. “Lonesome Dove” is simply an enjoyable yarn.

* Speaking of mid-century white guy lit: Herman Wouk’s “War and Remembrance” — the story of World War II as seen through the eyes of the fictional (and Zelig-like) Henry family — was actually a re-read of a book I enjoyed in high school. With a few decades on me, I can see the seams a lot more easily than I did on the first read. Still fun.

* Admission: I read W. Somerset Maugham’s “Of Human Bondage” because I saw Walter Goggins’ character reading it in jail during an episode of “Justified.” 

Go ahead. Cringe.

* And just to cement my own middle-aged white guy dadness: I read a lot of history this year. Patrick Radden Keefe’s “Say Nothing” and Adam Hoschild’s “American Midnight” were the two that enraged me most. The first is a clear-eyed overview of The Troubles in Northern Ireland and the brutality the two sides delivered unto each other in what each believed was a righteous cause — coincidentally, I was reading it when Hamas attacked Israel. “American Midnight” was a reminder that we are not so distant from very real tyranny in this country. There’s not much new to what we’re experiencing now.

* Where I really failed as a reader, though, was to branch out much beyond my white-guyness. I read to enlarge my world. But I read just five books by women, and two by minority authors. I have to be more intentional in 2024.

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