January 1-5, 2025

First and foremost, I should share my inspiration for this project. Mark Larson has been doing this for a while, and I'm pretty shamelessly stealing his format. Mark, on the off chance that you see this, thank you.

My kids have been sick on either side of the holidays, so I had a little more time than usual to read and play some games these past few days. I'm not surprised by the appearance of woodworking across my media diet; I really want to try my hand at joinery. The desire to make something comes upon me from time to time in place of Ishmael's urge to "methodically [knock] people’s hats off" and I suppose that's why I writing this blog/newsletter and dreaming of building furniture for my living room.

I am surprised, however, by the repeat appearance of Catholicism this week. It wasn't by design, but I have been thinking about my (lack of) faith more frequently of late. In short, I'm trying. Both Conclave and Monsignor Quixote addressed the matter in terms that favored doubt, which spoke to me, but Conclave brilliantly complicated that particular message by connecting it to a character's unacknowledged desire for power while Greene's novel bathes its statement in a vodka-soaked conversation between a Marxist and a less-than-successful parish priest who has been elevated to monsignor against his wishes. Complications upon complications, wheels within wheels, doubt within faith within doubt.

Here's Greene's unwitting take on 2025 in a nutshell (and really, Conclave as well): "The believer will fight another believer over a shade of difference; the doubter fights only with himself."

Books
Blood in the Garden, Chris Herren (Finished): It's hard to overstate how much the '90s Knicks meant to me as a kid. This was full of stories that pulled back the curtain, and I can't say I always loved what I saw at this point in my life. I still love how NYC gets behind a team that plays hard, and nobody went harder than Ewing, Oakley, Mason, and Starks. (I had to skip the section about Reggie Miller. I still can't handle it.)

Lesser Ruins, Mark Haber (Finished): It's both a tough read and one of the more compelling books I've read in some time. Our narrator is stuck contemplating his life's masterwork – a book-length essay on Montaigne – in the wake of his life's death, and what starts out seemingly as an illumination of obsession, narcissism, pompousness, coffee, and mediocrity is slowly revealed to be about the crushing weight of grief and the survivors' need to deflect it. I loved the mirroring of the narrator's obsession with Montaigne with his son's obsession with house music, and I found their inability to communicate - even as the narrator realized what they were both doing - to be crushing.

Ingrained, Callum Robinson (Finished): A meditation on woodworking, the natural world, craftsmanship, and fathers & sons, this memoir has, I think, the most beautiful opening paragraph I've read in quite some time. The rest of the book didn't live up to such Shakespearean prose, but it's worth reading aloud:

"Picture the biggest tree you’ve ever seen, laid on its side and sliced lengthways into boards no thicker than expensive steaks. Every difficult year, every drought and every flood, all the minerals and pigments leached up from the particular spot in which it took root, the rippling shadows of a woodworm’s pinhole excavations, the relentless tension required to hold up those mighty limbs, and the torturous scarred stains from a barbed wire choker oh-so-gradually absorbed. It’s all there, folded into the heartwood. Centuries of character, as individual as a fingerprint, written in the figure of the grain and revealed by the teeth of the saw. Now, imagine there are hundreds of trees like this. Literally thousands of years of life and history, stacked together hugger-mugger. That they are all around you."

Monsignor Quixote, Graham Greene (Started): I grabbed this in mid-November when Yiyun Li was about to run one of her wonderful book club/read-alongs on it on A Public Space. I wasn't able to give it the attention it deserved then, but I started it this weekend to find that it's both fun and clever (a parish priest in post-Franco Spain is somehow the descendent of the fictional character Don Quixote and he goes on a roadtrip with a Marxist Sancho Panza stand-in...) and deeply shrouded in questions of faith, power, politics, and doubt. It's more applicable to today's world (or at least my mindset these days) than I expected and not exactly in a comfortable way.

The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexadre Dumas (In Process): I was excited to read this book club choice, but now I find myself wishing that we were reading the abridged version. It just keeps going with no real progression. My main interest in finally trying it was to see why the message board bros seem to love it, and I think my buddy Christian nailed it: it's simply a prolonged revenge fantasy (and it seems to perfectly fit the level of aggrievement online and in American male culture right now).

Articles
"The Way We Don't Live Now: The Social Harmonies of Anthony Trollope" (Hedgehog Review), David K. Anderson: I first encountered Trollope in grad school when we read The Prime Minister. I ended up explaining derivatives to the class, and maybe unsurprisingly really enjoyed the book. Give me the Palliser novels over the Barsetshire novels any day. Anderson's take here is a great argument for fiction more generally: the point is to go "somewhere I have never travelled, gladly beyond any experience" (to steal a line from a favorite cummings poem).

"Canonical authors are often commended to us because they seem “relevant.” Their work, it is suggested, is in tune with our proclivities and mores; it anticipates our sense of what is right. This is not true of Trollope. The case for him begins by recognizing he should be read because he is not of our time."

"What We Lose When Streaming Companies Choose What We Watch" (New Yorker), David Denby: While I kept most of my DVDs and BluRays, I ripped most of my CDs and sold them off. I deeply regret it. "That invisible hand isn’t always so benign," and yet there isn't always a lot of econimcally-feasible recourse available to most of us in the short term. Even knowing all this, I am about to use my fantasy football winnings to buy a year's subscription to the Criterion Channel...

Interview with David Haber (LitHub): "No one has taught us to live among silence, to be alone with our own thoughts. We like to complain about distraction, but of course are lonely in its absence." I read this after finishing Haber's novel (see above), and I'm a little thrown by how little he talks about grief in this interview but rather focuses on smartphones and modern distractions. I found him a little to close to his narrator for my comfort at times.

"What Magnus Carlsen's Jeans Have To Do With Chess", Louisa Thomas (New Yorker): An interesting take on the generational divide in the professional chess world. Includes this gem: "After all, jeans aren’t just pants. They’ve been a fuck-you symbol ever since Marlon Brando wore a pair in The Wild One."

Episodes (Shows and Podcasts)
Handmade: Good With Wood S02:E01-6: It's the Great British Bake Off down to every beat - but with woodworking. (In England, the non-euphemistic subtitle is Britain's Best Woodworker.) Just as charming and hosted by Mel Giedroyc, with incredible drone shots of the Glanusk Estate in the Brecon Beacons National Park in Wales. I love everything about this, and I'm now irrationally convinced I could make an end table and bookcases for my living room despite never having used a power tool in my life.

Backlisted, Episode 229: Moby-Dick: My favorite literary podcast tackles one of the most un-read novels ever. I particularly liked the multiplicity of meanings they both named and allowed for - with the unknowable nature of God and the awesome power of nature being the frontrunners to my mind.

Movies
Conclave, dir. Edward Berger: A political thriller set in the Vatican during the sequestering of the bishops as they elect the next Pope. I liked it far more than I expected to, though I did find the ending to be a sudden swerve to the didactic. It's gorgeously shot, evoking both Italian and Dutch Renaissance art to my eye, and it made me long for an Every Frame a Painting breakdown of it. Highlights were for me were the shot of the bishops moving through the rain with white umbrellas, which I'm increasingly convinced was a nod to The Handmaid's Tale, and the chef's-kiss-perfect touch of the the conservative, villainous Italian bishop vaping in the dining room during a tense moment.

Music
(I really don't know the best way to link to these. Spotify seems more and more despicable, and I worry a bit about if people still use Apple Music, so I'm going to do my . If anyone has a better way to do this, please let me know.)

In Person, Vince Guaraldi: The methadone to the heroin that is A Charlie Brown Christmas, which is on repeat in my house throughout the holiday season. This is the perfect way to transition out of the Christmas mode while not forgetting the joy the season holds. Check out "Jitterbug Waltz" to see what I mean.

Scenery, Ryo Fukui: I went a new (to me) record store nearby and I asked to be introduced to Japanese jazz. After a bit of back and forth with the owner during which I mentioned Bill Evans and piano trios, he handed me this record with a full money-back guarantee if I didn't love it. (Reader, I love it.)

Live Phish Vol. 1, 12/14/95, Binghamton, NY: I'm a Phish fan, rather than an all out phan, at this point in my life, and my buddy Andy has a project in mind that I'd like to help out on so I took some time to do a full listen to this first volume in the Live Phish series. At first, I was mostly struck by the speed they used to play at. Frenetic virtuosity. But as it sometimes happens with these things, repeat listens really opened up the work for me, and I found myself absorbed by the end of the opener "Suzy Greenberg" and genuinely transported by the second-set closer "Slave to the Traffic Light." Throw in an "Bold as Love" encore and that's some good shit.

Old Ways, Neil Young: I read about Young's unreleased album from the '70s that will see the official light of day next month and it was a day when reading to some of his music felt right. Then I streamed this album and I almost immediately regretted it. When your main currency is authenticity it doesn't take much to be found a counterfeit, I suppose, but this really didn't sound right to me.

"Peggy O", The Sam Grisman Project: A gorgeous version of a beautiful song, played by the son of the great David Grisman.

Games
College Football 25 (PS5): I was able to squeeze in a few games in the online Dynasty Leagues I'm a part of. The speed of my TCU Horned Frogs is tough to handle (unless you're one of the two guys in my league I can't seem to beat and whom I opened the latest season against. Ugh.)

"The Weald of Kent", Liberty Puzzles: This was my kids' Christmas gift to me and an absolute delight. Puzzles put me instantly into a flow state, even when they're as hard as this one was. It's my first Liberty Puzzle, but definitely not my last. Beautiful art on laser-cut solid wood pieces that smell incredible and feature "whimsical pieces" and edge pieces that aren't always clearly edges despite it featuring a traditional rectangular layout.

Uno: Winter Break from school means so. much. Uno. And when did "stacking" Draw 2's becoming a thing? Not in this house, my friend.

Ticket To Ride: My kids are now at the age when we can start playing real board games and Ticket To Ride is a great starter game. This has simple mechanics that the kids can remember and enough strategy to keep it interesting for my wife and me.

Learning
I have three learning projects I'm working on, and I was able to get some time in on two of them during a relatively slow day in the office on Monday. My job has increasingly become centered on "data-informed strategic decision-making" so I've been trying to build my knowledge of the underlying fundamentals of the tools I regularly use. This week, I learned about Python dictionaries as I work my way through Codecademy's Data Scientist: Inference Specialist career path, and I used freeCodeCamp's Responsive Web Design module to finally actually learn html and CSS. Next week, I'm hoping to put in more time building out my Google Sheets skills.