In January, I set a timer for 10 minutes and drew what I wanted to do more of and less of in 2024. It was easy to fill out the More column. I’ve always got more I want to do and learn and experience: draw, paint, listen to music, walk, hike, start a travel journal. The Less column was trickier. But one thing I drew in that column was my hand holding my phone and scrolling Instagram.
Recently, while scrolling Instagram, I saw one of those silly little list memes: 20 tiny habits to change your life (or something like that). The list included things like make your bed, step outside at daybreak, and at the end of one day, write a 3-3-3 for the next day: one big goal you’ll spend 3 hours on, 3 small tasks, and 3 maintenance items.
The list had a bunch of fun and inspiring things on it, along with everyday things like drink water before a meal. One habit-to-build that jumped out to me was this: before I pick up my phone to scroll something, read a passage from philosophy or a religious text. I liked the sound of this a lot. At first I thought, I’m sure poetry or any other type of reading could be substituted here, but I’ve never read philosophy, and I am interested in the teachings of different religions, so I’d learn something new if I followed the idea as written.
I don’t really know where to start with either of those things, philosophy or religious texts (that I’d be interested in — Buddhism comes to mind), but I wanted to try this switch, from scrolling to reading a passage, so I looked to our shelves and found a couple of books I can revisit for now: The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran, and the Tao Te Ching. I’ve also got a couple of poetry books — Mary Oliver’s A Thousand Mornings, and Basho’s On Love and Barley.
I’ve started working on this new habit this week with The Prophet, which I haven’t looked at in probably 20 years. When I remember, as I reach for my phone, I pick up The Prophet instead. Everything about the experience is lovely. I feel a peace and beauty when I read it that’s soothing. I remember this same peaceful feeling from the other books on my shelf as well.
Our bookshelves are pretty bare, though, since I read mostly fiction and mostly on an e-reader. Once I’m through with these four books, I’ll need to find others.
I just finished the final book I’ll finish in 2023: Someone Who Will Love You In All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg. It’s a collection of quirky short stories that are funny and philosophical and weird, and that are all about love in one form or another, including the love a dog Rufus has for his ManMonster, told from the point of view of Rufus. Our son gave me this book as a Christmas gift, and told me it is one of his favorite books of all time. Of course this made me want to read it, every word. I laughed, I cried. It was the perfect book to end the year with.
This book took my reading year out with a bang. I’m grateful for that, because it wasn’t a great reading year for me compared to other years. I started but didn’t finish several books in 2023 because they just didn’t do it for me. I’m not going to suffer through crap I don’t want to read, not any more. I’m almost 50, I don’t have time for that.
I remember blogging at least twice this year about being in a reading slump, and my book count this year was 49 on a goal of 60. I set a goal of 60 because 60 was fewer than what I read in 2022 because why even set a reading goal, that’s dumb when I read for pleasure, and I don’t want to pressure my reading life, but Goodreads has a reading challenge thingy, and I do challenges, and I figured why not, 60 is easy. I read 60 in 2019, 65 in 2020, 70 in 2021, and I don’t know how many in 2022 because I forgot to publish a “Reading in 2022” post and Goodreads doesn’t easily give up that stat now that we’re in the end of 2023 (but I counted manually because now I want to know, and the count in 2022 was 64). So 60 is the minimum number of books I’ve read in a year since I started paying attention to that.
Well, now that minimum has dropped to 49. I don’t know how to deal with this for setting a goal for 2024. I’ll figure that out tomorrow. But for this year, for 2023, I read 49 all the way through to the end. Only a couple of them were terrible, but I finished them anyway because either I paid for them or they were short. The rest were pretty good, and a few were excellent. Things really turned around in October when I got my hands on Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake, and then Gabrielle Zevin’s Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and then Lauren Groff’s The Vaster Wilds. I wasn’t in a slump anymore when those came out.
Looking at my list, I have no recollection of some of the books; I am nostalgic for where I was and what I was doing when I read others. I am nostalgic for the early part of the year when I was preparing for my February trip to Istanbul. Seeing If We Were Villains takes me back to our summer beach vacation to the Outer Banks, where I turned the pages so fast I almost tore them. I remember really enjoying The Golem and the Jinni, and buying a copy of When God Was a Woman for one of my best friends, and sending it immediately after I finished the book.
Here’s what I read in 2023, in chronological order:
The Bastard of Istanbul by Elif Shafak ♥️
Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie
Sailing to Sarantium by Guy Gavriel Kay ♥️
Lord of Emperors by Guy Gavriel Kay ♥️
Madonna in a Fur Coat by Sabahattin Ali
Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt
Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins
I’ll Give You the Sun by Jandy Nelson ♥️
When God Was a Woman by Merlin Stone
The Magicians by Lev Grossman
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt ♥️
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Seven Days in June by Tia Williams
Drinking Coffee Elsewhere by Z.Z. Packer
The Golem and the Jinni by Helene Wecker ♥️
Weyward by Emilia Hart
The London Séance Society by Sarah Penner
The Measure by Nikki Erlick
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Symphony of Secrets by Brendan Slocumb ♥️
Still Life by Louise Penny
The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron
All the Names by José Saramago
If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio ♥️
Fates and Furies by Lauren Groff ♥️
The Bear and the Nightingale by Katherine Arden ♥️
Honor by Thrity Umrigar
The Forgiven by Lawrence Osborne
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley ♥️
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride
The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison
A Court of Thorns and Roses by Sarah J. Maas
Tom Lake by Ann Patchett ♥️
Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow by Gabrielle Zevin ♥️
The Housekeepers by Alex Hay
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff ♥️
The Very Secret Society of Irregular Witches by Sangu Mandanna ♥️
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak ♥️
The Memory Keeper of Kyiv by Erin Litteken ♥️
The Alice Network by Kate Quinn ♥️
What I Talk About When I Talk About Running by Haruki Murakami
North Woods by Daniel Mason
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder David Grann ♥️
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams ♥️
Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory by Raphael Bob-Waksberg ♥️
My reading life is looking up! Last night I went to a public book club. A local book shop, Blacksburg Books, hosted it at nearby Moon Hollow Brewing, which I’ve been wanting to go to anyway, and this gave me a perfect excuse. When I walked into the cozy, wood-floored brewery, I saw several 4-top and 6-top tables with “Reserved for book club” signs on them, and lots of people seated at them with colorful beers in pretty glassware — pale citrines, foamy apricots, rich chocolate browns — each with a copy of The Bluest Eye on the table next to them.
I bought myself a New Moon Milk Stout in a cute little 12oz goblet glass, and I sat in the last chair at a table of three other women. We all introduced ourselves and mentioned whether this was our first time joining (two of us were first-timers, two had been coming since the beginning), and then we dove straight into the book, and how it’s a challenging book to describe as liking or not liking because the content is not something to be described in terms of like or didn’t like. It doesn’t tell a pretty tale, but it tells a necessary one. A fifth woman soon pulled up a chair, and a few minutes later, a sixth. There were probably 30-40 people in total at this little brewery to talk about this book.
As always happened to me in college literature classes, talking about the book with other people deepened my appreciation of it. I loved lit classes and I love book clubs for this very reason. I love hearing what books made other people think about and reflect on, what messages they pulled from the text, what passages struck them, which characters mystified or magnetized them. I love asking what people thought of some section I didn’t understand, or wtf was up with that preacher, where’d he come from. I love digging in and realizing what the author was doing as we talk about all these different angles and I see things I hadn’t seen before.
I admit, I was nervous about showing up at this random thing without knowing a soul there. As soon as I saw the date of the book club, I put it on my calendar. I also kind of didn’t know, up until the time I needed to leave my house to get to the brewery, whether I would actually go. But I really really like books, and I want to meet more people in my town, and books are a thing I feel super comfortable talking about and sharing with others.
So I went. And I’m glad I did. Now I want another one and I have to wait until next year. But I think going and having such a great time opened up a book magic portal for me, because as soon as I got home, I got a library notification that Ann Patchett’s Tom Lake was ready for me to borrow. I plowed through the rest of my placeholder romantasy before I went to sleep, and today I get to start on Tom Lake.
This has been kind of a bummer year for me, book-wise. I’ve only read about five books that I’ve really liked, and otherwise I re-read a bunch of stuff because I just couldn’t find anything that got me excited to read. Seven of the 34 books I’ve read so far this year are books I’ve read before, and that makes me feel like I’m living in the past.
My hold list at the library has several books on it that I’m eager to read, if not truly excited to read, and I’ve been waiting for weeks for many of them. While I waited, I decided to read Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye for a local book club, and of course as soon as I started reading it, four of my library holds became available. I delayed them so I could finish the book club book, which was fine but not great, and by the time I finished it, the hold that became available was one I’d been waiting on for something like 14 weeks. I couldn’t remember anything about the book or why I’d requested it, but I started it because it was there. It’s very long, and is a romantasy, which I didn’t realize when I started it, and sometimes I like that! but not right now. Now I’m in it, and I don’t really want to abandon it because I feel like I’ve already abandoned a bunch of other books this year, and besides, I don’t have another book lined up. It just feels like a placeholder.
I started listening to book reviews and the Book Riot podcast again as a replacement for actual books I feel are missing in my life. I’ve learned that Lauren Groff and Ann Patchett both have new novels out, and for the first time this year, I’m excited about what I get to read next.
I finished another good book this week, watched some more Shakespeare, binged a podcast series about using AI to create a podcast episode, was inspired by open source, and listened to some new music I love.
Reads
I’m enjoying the anthology of American short stories I bought a few months ago. I like to pretend that one day I might write a short story, and as I read the anthology, I collect the first sentences to study and reflect on. Every stab I’ve taken at fiction sounds self-conscious in the opening sentence, and it’s a joy to read authors who craft a compelling first line. This week I read Katherine Anne Porter’s “Theft” from 1930, along with “Double Birthday” by Willa Cather and “Wild Plums” by Grace Stone Coates, both from 1929, and both about the confines of class distinction and the limitations they place on joy for all classes. I thought Coates’ first sentence was pretty great, and it certainly made me want to keep reading:
I knew about wild plums twice before I tasted any.
– Grace Stone Coates, “Wild Plums”
For longer fiction, I finished Brendan Slocumb’s novel Symphony of Secrets this week, and I loved it. Our trip to NYC jazz clubs catalyzed me to finally do a thing I keep saying I want to do but have never actually done: learn about music. As with everything I’m interested in learning about, I immersed myself in a novel. The setting is today and the 1920s music scene in New York. The characters are musicians and music publicists and music historians. They speak the language of music. They are moved by music. Their hearts and souls are in music. And the story was a page-turner. I recommend it.
In non-fiction, I’m still making my way through Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence. The crux of what I’ve gotten through so far is that, in economic terms, as the cost of prediction decreases due to machines being super fast and good at prediction compared to humans, the value of complements like judgment and decision-making — which require humans — will increase. In other words, our humanness doesn’t make us less valuable: our uniquely human capabilities become more valuable as machines make prediction easier and faster for us. Humans can harness AI to complement our own skill sets, and because AI lacks critical components of decision-making (judgment, action, outcome), an essential role of humans is that of machines’ supervisors.
Listens
This week, I fell in love with the title track from Jenny Lewis’s new album, Joy’All. I’m trying not to listen to it over and over again, even though I want to. I don’t want to wear it out too soon.
I’m fascinated by the implications of AI, what it’s capable of, and how people are reacting to it, so I listened to several podcasts this week, including a three part Planet Money series where the hosts had AI write an entire podcast episode, including creating an AI generated voice of one of the hosts. The result was both impressive in what it was able to do, and funny in how corny and wrong AI got some of the elements. The first two episodes are about how the hosts worked with AI to create the AI-written episode, and the third episode is the AI-written episode itself, along with the podcast team’s reaction to it. My coworker recommended the series, and I highly recommend it to anyone interested in AI’s implications for knowledge work and creative jobs (spoiler: we’re safe. See above for human judgment and decision-making).
Similarly, Fresh Air’s Could Artificial Intelligence Destroy Humanity? is a great listen to assuage fears and also explain today’s AI technology for folks who are hearing the buzz but aren’t familiar with exactly what ChatGPT is, how it works, what it’s shortcomings are, and whether it will kill us all (spoiler: unlikely, though given enough time, anything is presumably possible, assuming the infinite monkey theorem that given infinite time, a monkey typing random keys would eventually write the works of Shakespeare).
Watches
Speaking of Shakespeare, I watched Hamlet this week. I didn’t enjoy it as much as Macbeth; I found my attention wandering in several parts. I don’t know how much of that was that the production I watched stayed 100% true to every word Shakespeare wrote for Hamlet, and it was hard for me to follow at times, or how much was simply that I didn’t care for the story as much. As with Macbeth, though, my eyebrows shot up several times when words were spoken, I recognized them, and I had no idea they had come from Shakespeare. For example, the whole “What a Piece of Work Is Man” speech, which I know large sections of from Hair. All these years I’ve been singing that song, and I had no idea it was from Shakespeare. It seems fitting to include alongside all the AI stuff this week.
What a piece of work is man How noble in reason How infinite in faculties In form and moving How express and admirable In action how like an angel In apprehension how like a god The beauty of the world The paragon of animals
– Galt MacDermot via William Shakespeare
Finally, WordPress, the open source software that powers this blog and more than 40% of the web, turned 20 on May 27. In celebration of the anniversary, to talk about WordPress’s history, and to talk about the principles of open source and their implications for our future, WordPress’s co-founders, Matt Mullenweg and Mike Little, joined with Dries Buytaert, founder of Drupal open source project, for the first time ever. They talked about why and how open source — software that’s available to everyone for free to use, study, redistribute, and improve — is one of the most powerful ideas of our generation, is based on rights instead of restrictions, and enables software to evolve and improve because it has a world of contributors instead of a restricted group within a walled organization. I was once again inspired by and proud to work for a company whose mission is to make the web a better place through open source.
I’m tired of feeling bad about consuming other people’s creations instead of making my own. I was originally going to write about fiction I read this week, then I realized I’m also reading some non-fiction, which made me think of the podcasts I listened to, which led to the ear and eye art, so I figured what the heck, I’ll just hit it all.
Reads
I finished the novel Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver this morning, and it was well worth reading. I had no idea it was set right here in Southwest Virginia when I picked it up. I love all of Kingsolver’s books that I’ve read, and especially the ones that take place here in Appalachia. In this one, she dives deep with the main character into the world of foster care, the opioid epidemic, and what it’s like to live in one of these small Appalachian towns. Apparently it’s a loose retelling of Dickens’s David Copperfield, but I’ve never read that, so it’s definitely not necessary to have read it in order to appreciate Kingsolver’s book.
Last weekend I read Hemingway’s “The Killers” in an anthology of American short stories I bought a few weeks ago. Despite his flaws, and there are many, I can’t help but be awed by Hemingway’s ability to tell a story through what he doesn’t say. He leaves the perfect amount of empty space for the reader’s mind to fill.
In non-fiction, I’m working on a book about AI that my statistician friend recommended: Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb. I’m only a few chapters in, but already it’s fascinating to me to think of the role of prediction in intelligence and learning. We as humans are continually taking in data, processing it, and making predictions based on what we’ve taken in. Prediction is what a reader’s brain is doing when it fills in the blanks in a Hemingway story. Prediction is what makes generative AI possible.
Listens
When I walk or run, I like to listen to podcasts, and this week I listened to a couple of great ones. My favorite was a special for Pride month: The Seagulls from Radiolab. It’s about homosexuality and gender fluidity in nature, and it’s funny, infuriating, sad, beautiful, life-affirming, and thought-provoking. I laughed. I cried. I adored it.
I enjoyed Hidden Brain’s Seeking Serenity: part 1 about a neuroscientist who sought to understand the mind from the outside using scientific tools, from the inside by working with master meditators, and the pushback he got from both communities when they were confronted with the other. I’ve also recently started listening to Articles of Interest, a podcast about what we wear, and this week’s episode was about Prison Uniforms, and the role clothing plays in how we feel and are seen in the world. I would have never thought to go deep into what prisoners wear and what kind of impact those garments have on them, though it makes perfect sense after hearing their stories.
Watches
Shakespeare is everywhere. The Weird Sisters, Hamnet, Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. I can’t remember what I read recently, but it referenced the wyrd sisters in Macbeth, and I recently read Hamnet without remembering the story of Hamlet, and I’ve read The Weird Sisters probably half a dozen times. I’ve been thinking lately about how I want to revisit Shakespeare so I can connect some of this stuff and see what the big deal is. The last time I experienced any of his original work that all these things are referencing was probably high school, 30 years ago. Our son came home from college with a book of Shakespeare plays he bought at a used bookstore, so last weekend I told him, I’m watching Macbeth, the one by Roman Polanski, if you want to watch with me. He was non-committal, said he might not watch the whole thing. But next thing you know, he’s on the edge of his seat to the very bitter end, just like me. I’m a fan. I get now why Shakespeare is a big deal. I want this to be my summer of Shakespeare; I think I’ll watch Hamlet next.
We finished Ted Lasso this week, and my god, what a great show. I won’t say anything about it for those who haven’t watched yet. It’s just the best. Funny. Hopeful. Lots of swearing. Loveable, hilarious characters. Probably my favorite TV show of all time.
We also finished Better Call Saul, which was infinitely better than Breaking Bad. Saul is so, so good. Where Breaking Bad made me despise everyone in it (except Jesse and Hank and Marie), and I didn’t finish it because everyone was so annoying, I loved everyone in Better Call Saul, even the very, very bad people. The characters in Saul are more complex and deep and human, and even the bad people have kernels of beauty. Plus it’s funny, which I very much appreciate.
Butterfly Mind 