Viva il Papa

My mom is watching news coverage of the papal conclave. So far, there have been four rounds of black smoke since the thing got underway yesterday. Rumor has it that we might get a Korean Pope. Or an African Pope. Or an American Pope (not Cardinal Dolan, I hope). We’ll see. 

*****

I was scoffing as I wrote that last part. I fully expected a non-European Pope (and it’s long past time) but I never ever expected an American. My whole hometown is claiming Pope Leo XIV (formerly Robert Cardinal Prevost) as their own, because he went to Villanova. My mom texted me the now-famous Villanova yearbook photo of young Robert Prevost, looking like the WJM mailroom boy who would have had a crush on Mary Richards. Her high school classmate’s much younger sister was his classmate at Villanova. Or so she says. Pretty soon, every Catholic in Philadelphia between the ages of 50 and 75 will find some Villanova association with the new Pontiff. Catholic New York and New Jersey and Boston and Providence and New Haven are all right now looking for their own Prevost connections. Meanwhile, every Catholic in Chicago is going to be insufferable for the entire term of this papacy. 

And good for them. As much as I’d have enjoyed seeing a Pope from the East Coast (again, not Dolan), Chicago seems like the most American place for an American Pope. New York and Boston and Philadelphia started as colonial settlements, remnants of the old world. Chicago grew out of American expansionism and exceptionalism. No other place could have produced Barack Obama and Oprah Winfrey and Hillary Clinton and the Second City and John Belushi and Bob Newhart, not to mention Jimmy McGill and Carmy Berzatto. No other place has the same American Century energy. Anything can happen in Chicago. 

*****

I have to admit that it’s very exciting to have an American Pope. And I am not the only person with Pope-mania. My mom has been sharing Prevost trivia for the past three days. We went to dinner last night and she reminded me a few times that she needed to be on the couch in front of the TV by 9 PM to watch an ABC News special about the new American Pope. My son sent me a video of then Bishop Prevost at the 2005 World Series (the Holy Father is a White Sox fan). Even my non-Catholic husband and friends are on this bandwagon. 

The whole country is on this bandwagon. The White Sox video has gone viral, and the White Sox organization is rubbing it in the Cubs’ faces. The yearbook photo is all over the internet, and the Pope’s brothers are all over the news. Donald Trump is out in these streets claiming that the College of Cardinals would never have chosen an American if he hadn’t been in the White House - never mind that they went out of their way to choose an American who is different from Trump in every way. Pope Leo XIV is the anti-Trump. 

*****

I’ve been at odds with the Church lately, mostly because I think that American Catholicism bears quite a bit of responsibility for Trumpism. But this Pope seems unafraid to confront MAGA. As a Cardinal, he even smacked JD Vance down on Twitter. And if the Swiss Guard is wise, they’ll keep JD out of the Vatican because that guy leaves a trail of destruction in his wake everywhere he goes. I’d travel with Tom Hanks sooner than be in the same room with JD. Meanwhile, right-wing Catholics (that should not be a thing but it is) online are apparently losing their minds about yet another “liberal” Pope. And if they keep calling this guy a woke socialist Friend of Francis, they might actually get me back into a pew on Sunday.  He's even a Wordle player. Viva il Papa. 

Circumlocution

Do you know about avoidance writing? Last week I started writing some dumb thing that will probably never see the light of day.  I had intended to finish the meeting minutes for our neighborhood association meeting, and then started writing something else because I’d rather do almost anything than write, revise, and proofread meeting minutes. 

That was last Sunday, a picture-perfect day. Now it’s Sunday again, and raining. We have had summery sunny weather for over a week, and now it’s going to rain for a few days but the warm temperatures look likely to continue for another week or so. Maybe we have seen the last of the cold. Between the sustained warmth and the rain, it’s wildly green outside, overgrown and almost tropical. This is what I like about Maryland. It’s crisp New England one day and lush Louisiana bayou the next. Maryland is like a box of chocolates.  You never know what you’re gonna get. Never a dull moment in the Free State, I tell you what. 

I did eventually finish those meeting minutes, slowly and reluctantly and with the worst possible attitude toward the whole endeavor. But I’m going to judge myself by results not attitude. The minutes are done, and they’re as good as they’re going to be. Never mind my sighing and muttering to myself like a surly teenager. 

*****

It’s going to be a busy week, work-wise and at home because my mom is here visiting. My son is also coming home this week and although I can’t wait to have him back at home, I’m a little shook at the idea of all his stuff arriving here and joining all of my mom’s stuff (she owns the largest suitcase I have ever seen, and she packs it full to bursting when she comes here, and then she wears the same three outfits on repeat all week and oh my gosh, who am I to talk). This house is small, and neatness is key in a small house, especially a house that contains a person as tightly wound as I am. But it’s good to have a few days of chaos, honestly. It forces me to go with the flow, which is something that I am not very good at. I like for things to be the way I think they’re supposed to be and for things to happen the way I think they’re supposed to happen. It’s good to have the occasional reminder that I can’t control everything. 

*****

I finished those dumb meeting minutes just in time for today, the first Tuesday of the month, which means it’s time for another monthly meeting. Now (in addition to a whole new set of meeting minutes, of course) I have to think about what else I want to put out on this blog, because I do appear to have a small but loyal reading public, and I can’t keep writing about the weather and household routines and my personal neuroses. Although who knows? Maybe that's why people show up here. 

Yesterday, I started writing about the book I’m reading now, which is Dickens’ Little Dorrit. I can already foresee what’s going to happen between young Amy Dorrit and Mr. Arthur Clennam, and I can guess the secret that Mrs. Clennam is keeping from her son, but I don’t yet know HOW all of this is going to shake out, and that’s what is so great about reading Dickens novels. This is going to be my year of Dickens. Little Dorrit is shaping up to be almost as good as David Copperfield; and reading Dickens will also give me something good to write about when I’m avoiding this month’s meeting minutes. 

Literature and lists

“Good luck to that MFer.” 

What does that mean? For which MFer is this well-wish intended? I had (and still have) the very same questions when I found this note written at the top of an old grocery list. The whole thing was in my handwriting so I know that it’s not Samuel L. Jackson’s grocery list. I just can’t remember writing it. 

*****

Meanwhile, two very unfortunate MFers share a cell in a Marseilles prison. It’s a hot August day, sometime in the middle of the 19th century. This is the opening scene of Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit, which I just started for the first time. I know almost nothing about Little Dorrit, except that the main character, Amy Dorrit, is a young English woman raised in the Marshalsea Debtors Prison where her father is an inmate. Debtors' prisons feature very prominently in David Copperfield, one of my favorite books ever, and so I’m optimistic about this one. But these two prisoners in France are as yet a mystery to me. I don’t know why they’re in prison - for debt or some other offense - and I don’t know who they are and what connection they might have with the Dorrit family. But the first few pages are riveting, and I can’t wait to see what happens. 

*****

Back to the old grocery list with the cryptic headline. It was in an old handbag that I hadn’t used in some time. That bag just popped into my head one day, so I dug it out of my closet, and I liked it so much that I decided to use it again for a while. That’s the upside of having too many bags. I can always shop for a new one in my very own closet. 

It had been at least two years - maybe more - since the last time I carried this bag, making the grocery list at least that old. And try as I may, I really cannot recall having written it, and I also cannot recall which of possibly many MFers to whom I might have wished good luck - either sincerely or sarcastically. Whoever it was, I hope everything worked out for them. 

Homeland Security

I worked from home today after almost leaving my computer at work yesterday. In fact, I DID actually leave my computer at work yesterday. I breezed out the door at 6 PM, and was halfway to Gate 5 (which I would soon learn had been locked since 5, forcing me to turn around and walk to Gate 2, but that’s a story for another day) when it occurred to me that my bag seemed very light. It was light because I didn’t have it. At all. I had my purse, but I had left my work bag with my notebooks and papers and of course, my computer, on my desk. Thankfully, I was wearing my badge and was able to get back in the building to retrieve it. Thankfully, I realized that the bag was missing before I got home or worse yet before I woke up this morning ready to work only to find that I didn’t have a computer. 

It is not lost on me that I wrote a whole post last week mocking the “theft” of DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s Saul Goodman go bag. Maybe I’m a little bit hypocritical for making fun of this woman when I am obviously just as careless with my belongings. Except my bag was on my desk in my locked office in a secure space on a Navy installation. And I just forgot it - I didn’t leave it on the floor in a restaurant. So Ms. Noem and I are not the same, and I stand by my initial take on the purse heist. And who - who, I ask you - could have predicted that an arrest would be made and that the person arrested would be an undocumented immigrant? 

This seems plausible, doesn’t it? An undocumented person puts on a face mask, walks into a very busy Capitol Hill restaurant filled with exactly the kind of people that an undocumented person would run a mile in tight shoes to avoid, attracts absolutely zero attention from a gaggle of Secret Service agents, sits RIGHT NEXT to the person the Secret Service agents are supposedly protecting, steals her $4,000 Gucci bag right out from under the chair THAT SHE’S SITTING IN, and then saunters out the door without a hair out of place? Sure. OK. It all makes sense. It all adds up. No holes in that story whatsoever.

And in the very unlikely event that this picaresque little tale is true, should Secretary Noem not resign immediately? Girl, you can’t secure your own belongings. How are you going to secure the gosh darn Homeland? 

All sales are final

Forewarned is forearmed: This is a ridiculous post and you probably don't want to spend the next ten minutes of your life reading it. If you decide (unwisely) to do so anyway, then please be aware that there are no returns and no exchanges. All sales are final. 

*****

Today is Easter. It’s a beautiful spring day - perfect, really. Sunny, warm, softly breezy - an every-window-in-the-house-open kind of day. I’m sitting next to one of those open windows now. The slight rustling of the trees, some birdsong, a very distant lawn mower, an Orioles game on TV in another room in our house - it sounds very spring-into-summery out there. 

I’m hosting dinner. We’ll have a lot of food, but I didn’t make much effort at presentation this time. I don’t have a lot of Easter-themed dishes or decor. We’ll be eating our ham and asparagus and macaroni and cheese and fruit salad from paper plates. I forgot to buy wine, so I hope that my sister-in-law brings a bottle. The whole thing is much more haphazard than my holiday dinners usually are. It can’t be helped. I’m hanging on by the proverbial thread so I consider it an accomplishment to be cooking and hosting dinner at all. 

*****

Why am I hanging on by a thread? Well, I’m glad you asked but you won’t be, lol. Actually, I couldn’t really tell you other than all of this (gesturing around wildly at everything) combined with the annual spring PTSD attack, which is worse than usual. I’m very tired. 

*****

OK, here’s one thing that’s getting to me. The old lady whose grocery shopping I’ve been doing for five years has been querulous and fussy lately, much more so than usual. Her house is in appalling shape - dirty and dilapidated outside and I can only imagine what it’s like inside. I’m very sorry for her but I’m also not a doctor and cannot cure a hoarder, which is what she is. I can see the stacks of newspapers through the windows, and the enclosed porch is a pit of despair. I used to leave her groceries by the front door, as she requested, and she would bring everything in. But she has been asking me lately to bring the items all the way in through the enclosed porch by the front door. She gives arcane and detailed and specific instructions for how she wants everything arranged - some things double-bagged, perishables separate, certain items closer to the door, be sure not to block the door even though she wants everything near the door and there’s very little room in that nightmare of a porch to put anything at all, etc., etc. 

The way this works is that I drop off the groceries, and she leaves a check. She will not use the internet and so I always have to call to get her list and then call to let her know when I’m dropping everything off. Last week, she placed the check inside a large Ziploc bag, and wrote me a very long note in felt-tip marker ON THE ZIPLOC BAG. And so of course, what I saw was a salutation, a few words and then three lengthy paragraphs of illegible smear, and then a few words about a blessed Easter, and her signature. 

It turns out that the letter was additional detailed instructions for how she wanted her groceries separated and organized and placed in front of and as near the door as possible but not blocking the door even though the “enclosed porch” is nothing more than a junkyard filled with piles of old household items and empty bottles and cans and so much other stuff that you can’t even see the “porch” part. It’s not even really safe to walk through this mess. But sure, tell me all about how we need to neatly organize the grocery delivery, after packaging the canned goods and cookies and yogurt like they’re Hermes bags. 

I couldn’t read the letter, as we have established, so I couldn’t follow any additional instructions that it might have contained. I did the best I could, and got out of there. My phone rang on Saturday morning. She was sorry, so sorry, so very very sorry to bother me and she’s absolutely not complaining but she can’t find the 70% isopropyl alcohol and she needs it and she wondered if I saw the note asking me to place it with the paper towels right near the door. I said that I was sorry about that, without saying a word about the illegible note, and promised that I’d stop by later and find the bottle of alcohol and place it near the door on top of the box where she could reach it. “The box,” she said, although there are literally dozens of boxes in that crazy porch, several of which are right near the door. I didn’t bother to ask her to clarify because she would have, at considerable length, so I just assumed (hoped) that when I arrived, it would be readily apparent which box she meant. 

But it wasn’t. There were several boxes near the door, any of which might have been the one that she described, but I couldn’t be sure, and she will not come to the door.  I found the alcohol and a few other items that I thought she might need, arranged everything as best I could, and I got out of there as quickly as I could. 

The phone rang again, at about 9:45 on Saturday evening. I was tempted to let it ring but she’s old and crazy and alone and maybe it was an emergency, so I picked up. “Can you help me to understand something?” she said. This is never a good faith question. The person who says “help me understand” already understands perfectly - they just want to complain or argue. They just want to start shit. And right now, I am in no way in the mood for anyone to start shit with me. Not that I ever would be, but right now? Just please do not. 

“Can you help me to understand something? I have been advocating for people with disabilities for my whole life (this was news to me - she has told me 20 different things about her prior occupations) and I always seem to be able to clearly express what they need, but I can’t make myself understood when I need something.” I started to ask her what she meant specifically, but she kept talking. The alcohol was placed just out of her reach. There was a jar of instant coffee placed with the alcohol, and she didn’t want it there. Something wasn't double-bagged. The container of pre-cut fresh fruit that she had asked for had leaked and made a mess. Everything was bad and wrong and terrible, and it was all my fault. I couldn’t even respond - partly because I was upset, and partly because she wasn’t even pausing for breath. And then the call just dropped and the line went dead. 

At that point, I was tempted to just go to bed and forget about the whole thing. But I called her back several times, with no answer. I might have worried that she’d fallen or had some other medical emergency, but earlier the same week (just three days earlier, actually) I had called her multiple times and just as I was about to call the police to do a welfare check on her, she had called me back, cool as a cucumber, saying that she’d been listening to a radio program and hadn’t been able to pick up. I wasn’t going through that again. So I called her on Sunday, just to see if she was OK, and it was as if the entire conversation hadn’t taken place. She was fine. Everything was fine. Later, I sent her a plate of food, for which she was very grateful. 

So again, she was fine - which is great - but I was not. I felt gaslit and ill-used and manipulated, and not for the first time. I call this woman every Wednesday night to get her grocery list, and when she doesn’t pick up, about ⅓ of the time, she later tells me that she saw my call coming in, but had been on another call, or listening to the radio, or something else more compellingly important than talking to the person who is literally keeping her alive. 

What was the point of all that? Am I going to stop helping her? No. But I have to complain to someone. Sorry it’s you. 

*****

It’s Friday now. The lady and I had a reasonably pleasant conversation on Wednesday. I mentioned the Ziploc bag, and suggested that she write her notes on paper from now on because I obviously missed her instructions and she was obviously upset about that. “No no no, I wasn’t upset,” she insisted. “I wasn’t criticizing! I wasn’t complaining!” Reader: She was upset. She did criticize. She did complain. But whatever. I did her dumb shopping and I bagged her dumb groceries the way she wants them, and I dropped them off in the den of disarray that she whimsically refers to as her front porch, and I picked up the check (which she had stuffed inside a disposable glove for reasons best known to herself) and I went on my merry way. 

*****

And Easter was perfect. I did get that bottle of wine (two, in fact!) and dinner was very very good, and everyone had a wonderful time. And I will be absolutely fine - despite crazy old ladies and anxiety attacks and mama drama and all of this (gesturing wildly at everything) - I will be absolutely fine. 

Purse heist

I literally cannot stop thinking about Kristi Noem’s purse. I know that there are far more important news stories than this one, but a story involving a handbag is always going to be my top headline, especially when it’s a story about a Cabinet Secretary’s handbag, and really especially when so many aspects of that story do not add up. The whole thing is suspect. The whole thing is off. 

First of all, let’s talk about where the Secretary placed her very expensive Gucci bag. No woman I know puts her handbag on the floor - anywhere, not even in her own house - let alone on the floor of a restaurant. That alone is enough to make me very suspicious, very suspicious indeed. Secondly, who carries three grand, her passport, and her medication out to dinner with her family? That’s a go bag, not a handbag. And the Secret Service! The woman has a Secret Service detail. I know that the Secret Service doesn’t hover over protectees when they’re out in public with their families, but should they not have noticed a dude sneaking up behind her and absconding with her bag? I think they should have, and I think they would have. There’s something very very off about this whole story. 

The thing that bothers me is that I’m not sure what’s going on. My theory is that they’re trying to build a case that DC is dangerous and crime-ridden, to justify a federal takeover of the city. Several people have suggested that it was a planned theft of her phone, orchestrated to prevent investigators from seeing her texts or Signal chats. I’m not sure why she’d care about that since the Justice Department is obviously not going to prosecute a Trump official for carelessness about information security. That train left the station with Signalgate. Another possibility is that she is just stupid and silly - but this isn’t a zero sum game. Any of a number of theories about this incident could be true, and she could also be just stupid and silly. 

Someone’s going to find that bag in a trash can somewhere. Secretary Noem’s makeup bag and her Vuitton wallet and whatever other random trinkets she was carrying will still be in the bag, but the passport, the cash, the IDs, the keys, and the phone will all be gone. And we’ll probably never find out what really happened, and who really took that bag, and why. 

Meanwhile, I wonder who paid for dinner. 

David Copperfield (spoilers left, right, and center)

I’ve read Dickens’ David Copperfield at least ten times, which means that now I’m reading it for at least the 11th time. I used to read it once a year, and reading Demon Copperhead, Barbara Kingsolver’s fan fiction interpretation of DC, made me want to read it again. And it’s just as good as it always is. PS - this post contains many many spoilers. But even if you read all the way through, and you haven’t read the book yet, you should because it’s great. 

I’ve read other Dickens novels too - Bleak House, and Hard Times, and Great Expectations. They're all great (especially Bleak House), but none have the hold on me that David Copperfield has. I’m going to read Little Dorrit, which I’ve never read, after I finish with David Copperfield. Dickens seems very relevant now. 

*****

Because of family turmoil of one kind and another, my life was abruptly and completely turned upside down several times during my childhood. Maybe I’ll write all about it someday, but not today. I wasn’t shipped off to a boarding school run by an abusive psychopath, and I wasn’t forced to make my own living in a strange city at age 10 or so, as David Copperfield was, so I’m not drawing any exact parallels between my life and his. But just like David, I knew what it was like to have the rug pulled out from beneath my feet, and to have no idea what would happen next nor any say in the matter, and to always feel unmoored and uncertain and insecure. It leaves a mark. 

It’s probably not that much of a spoiler to tell you that things turn out happily for David Copperfield, after many trials and tribulations. You also might already know that Dickens’ novels were originally published as serials in pulp magazines that apparently paid by the word. Dickens’ writing is beautiful and his work is a lot of fun to read, but economy doesn’t enter into the equation. If you prefer a spare and spartan prose style without a lot of unnecessary detail and embellishment - well first of all, what are you doing here; and secondly, Dickens might not be for you. Brace yourself also for the Victorian social mores. Dickens is rightly outraged at the grinding poverty of the working class in mid 19th century London, but he doesn’t question the hierarchy that places most people in positions of service in one way or another not to society itself but to its masters. He just wanted the people on the lower rungs to have a decent place to live and enough food to eat and enough money that they didn’t need to send their children out to work in factories. 

And of course, we have to talk about the women of David Copperfield. Dickens probably never questioned the patriarchy even once - but I still believe that he thought more highly of women than a lot of 21st century men whom I could name but won’t. 

David Copperfield’s society is one in which a fallen woman is literally better off dead. Although Dickens certainly doesn’t let the man or men involved in a woman’s downfall off the hook in terms of moral culpability, he also expects and accepts that a man who corrupts a young woman will eventually get on with his life. The young woman, however, is an outcast forever. Dickens, through his narrator David, obviously feels sorrow and compassion for such women, but doesn’t really seem to question why it’s necessary that they be separated from decent society. 

But Dickens didn’t make the rules of this society, he just wrote stories about it. And his female characters, good and bad, are as interesting and beautiful and human as the male characters. David’s aunt Betsey Trotwood is an independent woman of means and one of the strongest female characters in the literature of that time. Miss Betsey doesn’t care about pleasing men; in fact, she goes out of her way to avoid pleasing men or really interacting with them in any way, with the exception of her beloved nephew, her friend and charge Mr. Dick, and a few other trusted gentlemen. Miss Betsey lives by her own rules, and she demands and receives respect from others, men and women alike. Her nephew David, whom she renames Trotwood (after herself, of course) admires and loves Miss Betsey without reserve, not only because he is rightly grateful to her for giving him a home and an education and a rich and interesting life, but for her own sake. 

Agnes Wickfield, David’s childhood friend and eventual wife, is easily dismissed as a Victorian archetype - angelic, sweet, selfless, ladylike, accomplished in feminine pursuits, demure and deferential to her father and other men. David admires Agnes for her beauty and her other traditionally feminine virtues, but he and everyone around her also admire her for her strength, her courage, her intelligence, and her character. Agnes and David become acquainted at age 11 or so, and he recognizes Agnes’s brilliance quite early, noticing that her learning is quite equal to his own, even though she lacks formal schooling. Agnes sees and notices everything, and she is the moral heart and soul of the story.

The novel’s other female characters are also delightfully complex and nuanced and human.  Peggotty, David’s childhood nurse and lifelong friend, is love and steadfastness and selflessness personified, with a near-flawless eye for human goodness and evil (it is she who spots Mr. Murdstone for what he is the moment she sees him - on the other hand, she is taken in by Steerforth just like everyone else). David’s mother Clara and his first wife Dora are young and beautiful and a little silly and vain. But they recognize their own flaws - Dora is particularly self-aware and perceptive, especially at the end of her short life. Mrs. Steerforth is a cautionary tale about misguided love - she worships her son, making it impossible for her to truly love him, to his detriment and hers. And although we know that Mrs. Steerforth has spoiled her child, Dickens makes quite clear that the responsibility for his bad behavior and his eventual downfall is entirely his. The same applies to the vile Uriah Heep and the unfortunate Mrs. Heep.

It is also interesting that of the two women most hurt by Steerforth - Emily Peggotty and Rosa Dartle - Emily recovers and gets a second chance at a new life, and Rosa spends the rest of her life mired in grief and bitterness and anger - even though it is Emily who is “fallen” in the sexual sense, and Rosa who remained chaste. Rosa and Mrs. Steerforth would be outraged at Dickens or any writer who didn’t properly punish a girl like Emily - preferably by killing her off in some dreadful way but at the very least by making her live out the rest of her days as a pauper and outcast. All of this is to say that although Dickens wrote from the perspective of 19th century attitudes toward women, he obviously also loved and respected them.

*****

I’m right in the middle of the book now. David has finished his education and is about to begin his proctor’s training at Doctor’s Commons. He’s going to fall in love with the wrong woman and then the right woman. Uriah Heep will try to ruin Agnes’s life and he will almost succeed, but for the unlikely intervention of the unlikeliest of heroes, Mr. Micawber. The Murdstones will reappear, like black mold. Miss Betsey’s secret will be revealed. Mr. Dick will keep trying to get Charles I and his troubles out of his head. Steerforth will die at sea despite the heroic effort to save him by a man whose life he ruined. Most of the people who deserve a comeuppance will get it. A bunch of people who suffered unjustly will pick up and move to Australia, where they will prosper. And David and Agnes will finally live happily ever after. 

Ineffective coping strategies

A few days ago I saw a social media post that read something like “I’m torn between saving for the apocalypse and saying ‘What the hell, the end is coming soon and I need a little treat.’” And that pretty much summed up the past three months for me. That feeling - that constant desire to buy something silly or have a second glass of wine or a third piece of chocolate, with the concurrent knowledge that I should save my money and that I should not stress eat my way through the day - was just so familiar. Yes, it’s March 2020, all over again. 

*****

Today was an unseasonably cold April day, following soon after a summery weather in late March. Maryland weather: You’re adorable. Whimsical. Delightfully quirky. And I’ll see you in Hell. 

But it’s not all bad. Everything is in bloom right now, so the view outside my window is pretty. The skies were bright and clear today and the bird and squirrel activity was exceedingly entertaining. But the spring 2020 vibes persist. 

*****

I look back at that time, five years ago (and yes, I am still shopping for my crazy old lady, who is now talking about sensitivity to electricity, which means that I am actually Jimmy McGill delivering groceries and supplies to Chuck) and I remember the constant anxiety, the constant worry about how this was all going to end - how bad would the pandemic get, would we all get sick, would our parents and families get sick, would the economy collapse, would all social and political structures collapse, would we be living in the Thunderdome? 

Every day of spring and summer 2020 was an exercise in maintaining some semblance of normality, keeping everyone sane, keeping everyone’s spirits up. And we were among the lucky ones. My husband and I kept our jobs, our kids were in high school and college so we weren’t trying to work and homeschool, and we all stayed relatively healthy. We did all get COVID eventually, but we all recovered. And Trump lost the election, which made it seem like everything would eventually be OK. And then we got the vaccines, and things started to open up, and things were OK, kind of, for a while. But the anxiety persisted. In just a few very short years, Trump came roaring back from electoral defeat, lawsuits, felony convictions, and won the next election. “Won” being a relative term. I have some thoughts about this. I have some questions. 

*****

Last October, I was very hopeful - I thought that Kamala could win and toward the end of the month, I thought she would win. But I never once thought that Trump couldn’t possibly return to the White House, that people would have learned - I always knew that he could make a comeback and I also knew that the second time would be much worse than the first. And I was right, and there is absolutely no satisfaction in being right. 

*****

But we were talking about 2020, weren’t we? It feels like it’s all coming back. I’m restless and distracted, all the time. I’m always in the middle of five to ten different tasks or activities, and I’m always buying some dumb thing that I don’t need. On my TV, a lot of British people are getting murdered in Northumberland, and a wily and irascible female detective in her 60s is solving those murders left and right.** I’m not sleeping well. I’m stressed out. Just like in 2020, I’m not only worried about what is happening right now - I’m also worried about what could happen. And when I worry about what could happen, I go big. The worst case scenario is my default setting. Always has been. 

*****

Take martial law, for example. I’m very unsettled by the persistent rumors that the President will declare martial law on April 20. I’m legitimately worried that this will happen, and I’m dreading the prospect of living under martial law, and my children living under martial law. 

On the other hand, it’ll be fun to mock Republican Members of Congress who will post about “marshall law” on social media. There’s always a bright side. Don’t let me down, MTG. Don’t let me down, James Comer. 

*****

The whimsical Maryland weather continues. Do you think that Trump’s tariff policy is unpredictable? Do you think that the financial markets are a whirlwind of uncertainty? Come visit Maryland in the spring. Stay a week, and experience eight different climates and 15 different seasons. 

*****

Here’s one thing that’s different about this year. The spring of 2020 and the transitional return-to-normal spring of 2021 seemed very very long. Schools here remained closed until after the summer of 2021, and I was working full-time from home, and the contrast between my normal spring of constant sports and activities and the languid pace of the COVID year made the time pass very slowly. But we’re running through this year at breakneck speed. I can’t even keep up. 

*****

Assuming that Trump remains in office for the full four years, this is a marathon, not a sprint. And I have to assume that he’s not going anywhere just yet, so I am going to have to learn how to live with the chaos without reacting to everything, and without panicking every five minutes, and without using shopping and chocolate and doomscrolling as coping strategies. I’ll let you know when I figure out how to do that. It’s probably not going to be today. 

*****

**”Vera,” of course, in case you’re not familiar. By the way, I’m quite sure that Vera is not supposed to be a fashion and style icon, but her whole look is flawless, as far as I’m concerned. Goals. I might need a trench coat. 

Demon Copperhead

I finally finished my 2024 book list, and then of course found two more books that I read but forgot to add to my list. Whatever, bro. The past is past, and I’m not revisiting that list. 

I did, however, come up with a new way to organize my 2025 list, and to keep track of what I’m writing about as I write about it. I'm very pleased with this new system; very proud of myself. 

*****

Right now, I’m reading two books: Demon Copperhead (Barbara Kingsolver) and Lovely One (Ketanji Brown Jackson). Why two? Well, it’s because the latter is a hardcover actual book, and so I read it when and where I have good light. The former is on my Kindle so I read it in bed. It’s a good system, though I don’t think I could come up with two more different voices than Justice Jackson and Damon Fields aka Demon Copperhead, the first-person narrator of the eponymous novel. Sometimes it’s a little confusing to switch between the two.

Demon is as good as everyone says it is. I’ve read Dickens’ David Copperfield, which inspired Demon Copperhead, at least 8 times, and although I might normally take a dim view of fan fiction (“might” means “definitely would”), I found that fan fiction in the hands of someone like Zadie Smith (her 2005 novel On Beauty is based on E.M. Forster’s Howards End) or Barbara Kingsolver can be an art form all on its own, and I am thoroughly absorbed. I’m only about 10 percent into the book, but I already wish the very worst on the vile Stoner, Demon’s evil redneck Mr. Murdstone stepfather. 

*****

I wrote that a week or so ago, and then some other things came up, and now I’m back. I’m about 60 percent of the way through Demon, and I’m officially a fan of fan fiction. Stoner is out of the picture for now, and although he hasn’t yet gotten the comeuppance that he so richly deserves, I have faith that the comeuppance is imminent, and I eagerly await this evil man’s downfall. Of course, it will probably come at the expense of some other poor beautiful abused woman (girl, really), just as Mr. Murdstone married another very young woman after driving David’s poor mother to an early grave. 

As you have probably guessed, part of the fun of reading Demon Copperhead is the roman a clef exercise of figuring out who’s who. This is not hard for me, because I’ve read David Copperfield so gosh darn many times. There are a few characters that don’t have counterparts in the original, but most of Demon’s main characters are directly inspired by David Copperfield’s, and it’s pretty easy to identify everyone. The plot is also quite similar but modernized - Demon, like David, is orphaned young and ends up in rather terrible foster care situations until both boys are rescued by older relatives. But Demon takes place in rural Lee County (a real place) in western Virginia during the early part of the 21st century, and the characters’ lives are dominated not only by rigid social and economic structures, but by the then-new opioid epidemic. For the most part, the same people die but in very different circumstances. 

The first-person voices of the main characters are also very different. David “Trotwood” Copperfield is a proper Victorian. Damon “Demon Copperhead” Fields is a rough-edged and girl-crazy high school football player who is bluntly frank about sex and drugs and rural working class life. Dickens’ contemporary readers would have been shocked, but I don’t think that Dickens himself would have been.

*****

I’m almost at the end now. I’m still waiting for Stoner to get his just desserts, but it looks like the vile U-Haul Pyles (Uriah Heep) is about to get what’s coming to him, and that’s just as good. No additional spoilers, except to say that I think I know what’s going to happen to Angus and Dori and Fast Forward and the Armstrongs and Emmy and Hammer Kelly - for better or for worse - because I know what happened to the original characters who inspired them. And there’s still several chapters to go, so I’m not giving up on proper retribution for Stoner, either. I’m either going to speed through the final chapters right this minute, or I’m going to stretch this out for the rest of the week. And then I’m going to read David Copperfield again. It’s been a while. 

Fighting the Power

I’m going to a protest today. Maybe I shouldn’t be writing that down, right? Maybe I shouldn’t be advertising my opposition to this regime. But a protest is a public thing, so here I am. If they want to come get me, they can.

What should I write on my cardboard sign, I’m wondering? Deport Elon? Trump is a Chump? Impeach 47? Any of those will work. I’m not going to waste time trying to be clever. I’m going with Impeach 47 on one side, and Deport Elon on the other. The simpler, the better.

The weather is uncertain today. It will be warmer than usual, which is great from my perspective; and it might rain. Or it might not. I have to figure out what to wear now, which should not be a problem. A person with as many clothes as I have should not have any trouble assembling an outfit for pretty much any occasion, from work to social gatherings to fighting fascism.

*****

Well that was a blast. I arrived at the protest about 10 minutes late. I’d expected to join a scrappy little group of 25 or maybe 50 at most. But there were at least 300 people on our side of Georgia Avenue and the crowd overflowed to the other side of the street. The protestors were mostly older and mostly white, but we had some young people, too, including some children. I had a delightful conversation with a 9-year-old girl who proudly showed me the colorful signs she’d made for herself and her mother.

A few of the older people out on the street yesterday were really old. Walker and wheelchair and cane old. Their various infirmities didn’t stop them from joining the crowds and holding up their signs, and they seemed absolutely delighted to be out. A lady in a wheelchair held up a beautifully hand-lettered sign that read “Hail to the Chief,” with the H and the C crossed out and replaced with a J and a T. Another older woman, tiny and wiry and energetic - the kind of lady who will be mall-walking circles around the rest of us when she’s 100 - had hand-painted signs for herself and her husband. Her sign was an angry polar bear with the caption “Welcome to Greenland - Come and Get Us.” I don’t remember what her husband’s sign looked like, but both were works of art, and the woman’s husband told everyone who would listen that his wife is an artist and that she made their signs. They were both adorable. As was a lady with a walker, flanked by her daughters, who said “Will we be on Rachel Maddow? We have to watch on Monday!”

*****

The weather was really ideal - just slightly cool with a tiny bit of mist. The sun peeked out every so often but it was mostly overcast. A few of the organizers walked a patrol, making sure that people had water if they needed it, and reminding everyone to stay on the sidewalk on very busy Georgia Avenue. Traffic was heavy, as it always is on Georgia Avenue, and at least 80 percent of drivers honked and waved in support. A few people seemed oblivious, while others stared studiously ahead without looking to the right, which was really funny when the light changed and those people were stuck at the red light trying to pretend that nothing was happening, nothing at all. One person flipped us off as he sped by, and the crowd laughed and cheered. Altogether a perfect afternoon, and I plan to do it again at the soonest opportunity. Meanwhile, I’ll await my direct deposit from Mr. Soros. The economy is in freefall right now, and every penny counts. And of course, I'll watch Rachel tomorrow. Maybe we'll all be on TV.

Childhood nostalgia

I went back to see my mom on Friday and Saturday last week. As I drove through the Main Line on Saturday morning on my way from my sister's house to the rehab facility, which is just down the street from Haverford College, I thought about similar beautiful Saturday mornings throughout my children’s school years. During those years, at 9:30 on a Saturday morning, I’d have been at a swim meet or a track meet or a baseball game or on my way to one of those things. I loved that time, but I don’t miss it as much as I did the first year after my youngest graduated. And of course we still have college swimming, which is the greatest.

But I still miss it a little bit. I drove past the Haverford YMCA, wondering if they have a swim team, and if there was a meet going on. I pulled up to the Wawa to pick up my mom’s coffee and I listened in on the coffee station conversations - parents had just dropped kids off at lacrosse and baseball practices, or were on their way to games and picking up coffee and snacks for the morning. Some of them were harried younger parents, still figuring out how to manage spring sports along with everything else. The senior parents, the ones whose kids are in their last year or two of high school, seemed happy and a little smug. I remember that feeling during my younger son’s senior year and his last summer of summer swimming - I was happy and a little smug and also a little sad that it was all ending. I thought about saying something, just joining the conversation for a few minutes, but I decided not to. I paid for our coffees and was on my way.

*****
My mom was up and about when I arrived; or as close to as up and about as she can be right now. She had already had breakfast and was dressed for the day, and she seemed ready to do something. Her spirits were high, which was nice to see. I told her that I’d seen a “Deport Elon Musk” sign, with an Uncle Sam illustration, on the front lawn of a very nice Main Line house. “Good for them,” she said. “Maybe I’ll get one too. As far as I’m concerned, all the other immigrants can stay, but they need to send that Elon back to South Africa.” Damn right, Mom.

The nurse said that my mom was well enough to go out, so we went out - lunch at a nice little neighborhood spot called Angelo’s Cafe, and book shopping at Barnes and Noble. My mom had crepes for lunch because why shouldn’t she, and she bought a gardening magazine and two illustrated Philadelphia history books. She sat and read her books while I shopped a bit to spend a gift card that had been burning a hole in my pocket. The walk back to the car wore her out a bit, and we headed back to the Quadrangle. She was tired enough that she needed the wheelchair for the trip back to her room, but she had a good time. We sat looking at our new books together, and my mom showed me photos of the places that she remembered from her Philadelphia childhood and mine. 

No no no

"They're tryna make me go to rehab 

I say no no no"

Amy Winehouse (may she rest in peace)

*****

The Quadrangle is a somewhat fancy senior living community with a rehab facility and a memory care unit in the middle of Haverford, PA, a somewhat fancy neighborhood in the middle of the fancy Philadelphia Main Line suburbs. Haverford College is right up the street. It's a Tuesday afternoon, and I'm here with my mom in the room in the rehab facility, where she was admitted yesterday. She's less than happy about this whole situation but there's not much we can do about that. She needs professional care, at least for a few weeks. 

My mom has a ton of health issues but the big problems now are a very painful hip injury and lymphedema that keeps worsening because she doesn't move enough because of the pain. She had symptoms of an infection on Sunday so my brother took her to the hospital, and they kept her overnight. We brought her here yesterday. Rather, an ambulance brought her here, and my sister and I followed in my car. And now she's here, and hopefully on the road to recovering her strength and mobility. 

She was at my house a few weeks ago, and I could see that she wasn't well. Mobility has been a problem for her for a long time but she had a much harder time than usual getting up and around, getting in and out of the car, walking between the car and wherever we went, which wasn't very far. I took her for a haircut, as I always do, and she almost had to skip the wash, because she couldn't get comfortably settled in the chair. But she finally got her hair washed and cut and then we met my husband for dinner. Had he not been there, I would not have been able to get her back in the car to go home. So it was a situation 

*****

There are a lot of things I don't miss about Philadelphia but there are some things that I do miss, especially food. The DMV has its own special food culture, of course, and it's pretty great, but different. And of all the things I miss, I miss Wawa, the greatest convenience store on Earth. 

Yes it is. No I don't want to hear about Bucee’s or Sheetz or some weird Midwestern gas station that offers strangely good pizza. I said what I said. 

Wawa hazelnut coffee tastes like my young adulthood in Philadelphia. I'm drinking some right now in my mom's room at the rehab. She seems a bit more reconciled to her situation, but she hates the coffee here and wanted a Wawa coffee. I'd have been happy to oblige in any case, but it was also a great opportunity to get my own Wawa coffee. 

You pour your own coffee at Wawa, and then you add milk and sugar or whatever you want, and then you pay at the register. The coffee station is always busy but it's large enough that there's plenty of room for everyone. And I do mean everyone. The Wawa coffee station at 845 in the morning is a town square. At least five other people were making their coffee as I made cups for my mom and me. REM’s “Man on the Moon" was playing on the radio, and I sang along. I do happen to believe that they put a man on the moon. 

*****

I drove back home on Wednesday, late afternoon, so that I could get home before dark. My night driving is not good. And my daytime driving isn’t much to brag about either but I have to say that I had no trouble on this trip - no unwarranted panic, no major wrong turns, no car trouble, no fear, really. I drove to Philadelphia on Monday, and then drove all over the Main Line and Chester County on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then drove back home, and didn’t have a single bad moment other than some sun glare on Tuesday night. I felt free and at ease, much as I used to when driving. I quite enjoyed myself. 

Traffic in the Philadelphia suburbs can be heavy at times, but the volume and the driver aggression don’t compare to the Thunderdome that is driving in the DMV. Pennsylvania’s roads, on the other hand, are just silly. If you have ever driven in the Main Line suburbs of Montgomery and Chester and Delaware County, you will know what I mean. The term “rolling countryside” was invented to describe this topography, and the narrow two-lane roads bob up and down and back and forth, twisting and winding over blind hills and through little one lane bridges over creeks and railroad crossings. And it all came back to me - how to navigate those winding roads, and how to crest those little hills and bridges without being able to see what’s coming from the other side and most of all how to drive up and down Green Lane in Philadelphia. IYKYK. It wasn’t just OK. It was fun. 

Of course, the perfect weather was a big help. Green Lane would not have been fun in the rain, I tell you what. Wednesday was technically the last day of winter, and it was glorious - warm enough to wear a skirt without stockings, warm enough to leave my jacket in the car, warm enough that I remembered what it’s like not to be cold for five minutes. When I left my house on Monday afternoon, our forsythia had just started to bloom the tiniest bit. Now they’re in almost full bloom. Our cherry trees are budding now. In a few days, they’ll be bursting with pink blooms, and we’ll have a few days of forsythia/cherry blossom overlap. 

*****

OK, that is enough of the weather and traffic. Back to my mama. On Tuesday, we saw the chief occupational therapist, who did an evaluation and explained how the OT and PT would work. She asked my mom what she hoped to accomplish, and my mom snapped right back “To get out of here.” The OT did not take the bait. “Yes,” she said, “of course. We know you don’t want to live here forever. But what do you want to DO when you get home? How do you want to FEEL?” 

That gave her pause, just for the briefest moment. From her brief hospital stay last weekend through her arrival and intake at the rehab facility through the first day of adjusting to the routine and schedule, she was completely resistant to everything. She didn’t need to be in the hospital (she did), she didn’t need rehab or PT or OT or any of it (she does) and she was perfectly fine on her own at home (no she absolutely is not). But when the OT director looked at my mother, completely serious and earnest, and asked that simple question - I could see her attitude changing, just a tiny bit. Seeing an opportunity, I chimed in, reminding her about our trip to Ireland, and our beach vacations, and the shopping and lunch excursions that she loves so much. “If you do the therapy,” I said, “and I mean REALLY work at it, then you can do all of those things again.” 

She didn’t say anything. But when the OT came to collect her on Wednesday, she went without complaint, and when I asked her how it was, she said “not too bad.” The activities director invited her to come hear a DJ who spins oldies on Wednesday afternoons, and she went. And the PT came to get her as soon as she returned from the DJ’s performance, and she didn’t even try to talk her way out of it. 

My mom actually did agree to do physical therapy last year. It was not successful. This was partly because she resisted it at every turn, and didn’t do any of the follow-up exercises. And it was partly because she cancelled more appointments than she actually kept. I’d call her to ask her how her PT went. And she’d say “Oh, I missed the appointment, and now I’m playing phone tag with the guy.” 

Translation: “I cancelled the appointment. The guy is calling me to reschedule and I’m dead-ass ghosting him.” I had to explain to my mother, more than once, that “phone tag” describes a situation in which BOTH parties are attempting to reach one another. Hence the word “tag.” If only one person is calling, and the other person is avoiding the call, then there’s no game. No tag can occur. 

*****

Anyway, it’s been almost a week now, and although she is not likely to admit it, I think she’s enjoying herself just a tiny bit. And she will get daily therapy whether she likes it or not because they come to her, and there’s no place to hide. She’ll be in the care facility for two to three more weeks and will then have home therapy and a visiting nurse. She’ll spend weeks at my house and weeks at my sister’s house to give her a change of scenery and to give my youngest sister, who lives with her at home, a break from taking care of her. 

I’ll be there again next week. Stay tuned for updates, including full reports on traffic and weather conditions on the Main Line. 

Bibliography 2024

I’m about five months into a semi boycott of Amazon. Bezos kowtowing to Trump is only one reason for my disdain for Amazon. I don’t like the way they treat workers.I don’t like that Bezos brags about wanting Amazon employees to be “terrified” because terror is supposed to spark creativity and innovation or some stupid shit. I don’t like that Amazon is one of the biggest recipients of corporate welfare among US businesses (right up there with Walmart and McDonald’s). I don’t like Amazon’s impact on the environment, and its phony climate pledge greenwashing attempts. And I don’t like centibillionaires. I don’t think it should be possible for one person to grab and hoard that much wealth. 

I still shop on Amazon - and then I go to other merchants to actually buy what I need. There’s something very satisfying in using Amazon to do the research and then giving the money to another business, and I don’t even mind paying more. In fact, I LIKE paying more, just to make a point. I’m that petty. 

*****

But I do still have a Kindle, and so I haven’t yet broken with Amazon altogether. I’d go back to a Barnes and Noble Nook, but Kindle books are not compatible with Nook hardware because of course they’re not. I have too many Kindle books to abandon the technology altogether. So Jeff Bezos will still get a little bit of my money. When I figure out a way to remedy this situation, I will. Meanwhile, this was a very long and meandering way to introduce my 2024 book list. I read almost all of these books on my Kindle. 

Enough. Cassidy Hutchinson. This book exists, and yet Donald Trump is President, once again. No good deed goes unpunished. SMDH.  

Free: Coming of Age at the End of History. Lea Ypi. I wrote about this one here but fair warning - this post is kind of a mishmash of random stuff (much like this entire blog) and you have to dig for the part about the book. Caveat emptor, readers. 

Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen. Mary McGrory. The best parts of this book, about McGrory’s New York literary life in the middle of the 20th century, are Helene Hanff-good. The rest of it is pretty good too, especially if you really care about correct use of “you and I” vs. “you and me” and if you have strong feelings about the serial comma. I do care, of course, but not enough to read whole chapters of exegesis explaining why it’s “Between you and me” and not “between you and I;” and not enough to listen to anyone’s impassioned arguments in favor of the serial comma. I am already on board, is the thing. It’s preaching to the proverbial choir. No need to sell me on the serial comma, Mary - I am already fully invested. 

Middlemarch. George Eliot. I have an actual degree in English - summa cum laude! - and yet I had never read Middlemarch. But when both Zadie Smith and Martin Amis tell me that I need to read something, I read it. Zadie Smith, especially, is never wrong. I loved Middlemarch so much that I wrote about it at least twice, here and here. I might read it again very soon. Check this list again next year. 

The Broom of the System. David Foster Wallace. I wrote about this one right here in yet another rambling word salad covering books, movies, college swimming, anxiety, and social media health influencers. This book was very important to me when I was young, and although small parts of it do not hold up, most of it has really stood the proverbial test of time, and I loved reading it again. Maybe I’ll read Infinite Jest again. 

Prophet Song. Paul Lynch. If you’re already terrified that the United States is on a collision course with totalitarianism then this book will absolutely not reassure you. It is a great novel - but also grim and terrifying and much more realistic than most dystopian novels. Forewarned is forearmed, right? 

Burn Book. Kara Swisher. I’m especially proud of the very last line of this little review, which I wrote nearly a year ago. It holds up, and so does Burn Book. BTW, if you don’t follow Kara on social media, you absolutely should. 

All She Lost. Dalal Mawad. 

Answered Prayers. Truman Capote. I just searched my Google Docs, thinking that I had written something about this somewhere, but I didn’t. I did find something that I wrote when I was still in school; and 11 years later, I stand by my undergraduate assertion that In Cold Blood is the greatest true crime story ever written. I read Answered Prayers after watching “The Swans,” the Hulu miniseries based on the book and the post-publication fallout. I felt sorry for poor lonely Truman, but I don’t blame Babe Paley and the rest of the Swans for cutting him off. You can’t sell your friends out in exchange for money and fame and expect to keep those friends. 

The Big Myth. Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes. Last year, I attended a lecture by the great Dr. Donald Berwick, who recommended this book. A short synopsis: The “myth” is the spurious idea that the free market is the only thing that can accomplish anything of value and that we should let it run free like it’s a wild fawn in the woods. For a long time, politicians (mostly Republican but plenty of Democrats, too) were completely taken in by this myth, and our economic and tax and regulatory policy were all based on free market fundamentalism. And now that wealth is ever more concentrated at the top, and the middle class is shrinking while people on the lower end of the socioeconomic scale seem to keep getting poorer and most people can’t afford to buy a house unless they have generous and well-to-do parents and the country’s infrastructure is literally falling apart, it’s become clear, at least to some of us, that unregulated capitalism is just the slippery slope to failed-state status.Authors Erik Conway and Naomi Oreskes point out that at one time, not that long ago, most people supported the liberal order established after the Depression and WWII, and that it took a very sophisticated, well-planned propaganda campaign to convince people that government oversight and regulation were bad and that the “invisible hand of the market” (invisible because it does not exist) was capable of fulfilling every human need and solving every problem. This propaganda campaign, which took the form of everything from TV programs to textbooks for every educational level from elementary to college, was so successful that by the early 1980s or so, most people believed Ronald Reagan’s famous “Government IS the problem” line. And that is why I blame Ronald Reagan as much as I blame Mitch McConnell for the sad state of affairs that is America in February 2025. It’s not just a big myth. It’s a big fat lie. 

The Zone of Interest. Martin Amis. A rare case in which I saw the movie first and then read the book on which it was based. This is a fictionalized story about Rudolf Hoss, the commandant of Auschwitz, and his wife and children, and their idyllic life in a lovely home with a tennis court and a pool and beautiful gardens and household staff and a death camp in the backyard. Both the movie and the book are just astonishingly good. 

Coming Home. Brittney Griner. I keep reading these Putin-is-evil books, even though I’m on board with this thesis and have been for some time now, and don’t need any further convincing. I didn’t realize until I read this that Britney Griner was the Angel Reese or Caitlin Clark of her time. I’ve never paid much attention to college basketball, men’s or women’s, and so I didn’t know that Griner was the number one pick of her draft year and the greatest player in Baylor WBB history. I’m not the only American who didn’t know much about Brittney Griner until her imprisonment in Russia - she acknowledges that most Americans had no idea who she was. But women’s professional basketball is extremely popular in Russia, and she was LeBron-famous there. The book is very good, and I’m very happy that Ms. Griner is safely back in the US. But of course, I’m sure that Trump would have gotten her out, too, now that Russia is our BFF. 

We Were the Lucky Ones. Georgia Hunter. As an adult, Georgia Hunter discovered that she was the grandchild of Holocaust survivors. She wrote this novel based on her own family’s near-unbelievable story of courage, endurance, and plain luck. Not that many Polish Jewish families survived the war nearly intact, but Hunter’s family did, despite being scattered all over the world, both during the war and after. It’s a good, though not great book. And the Hulu miniseries based on the book is quite good. 

If You Can’t Take the Heat: Tales of Food, Feminism, and Fury. Geraldine DeRuiter. This is a book of essays about food and cooking. I don’t normally read books about food or cooking but then I came across some social media discussion about the NYT’s rather negative review of this book, and that review and the resulting online pushback made me want to read it. NYT book and music and media critics need frequent reminders that most of us don’t care what they think. Anyway, I liked this book, which is not really about food and cooking. Or rather, it’s ostensibly about food and cooking, and it is, on the surface; but it’s really about misogyny in the restaurant business (and everywhere else), with side forays into family trauma and secrets, and a little bit of travel. Anyway, it’s very good. DeRuiter, known on social media as The Everywhereist, really knows how to write her way around the perimeter of a thing, and to keep going, spiraling inward until she gets to the root. I’d definitely read more of DeRuiter’s work. I might even read this one again. 

No Judgment. Lauren Oyler. In 20 years, Lauren Oyler will be as good an essayist as Zadie Smith. She should quote me on this, because it’s the highest praise she will ever receive in her literary career. 

Here’s Your Hat, What’s Your Hurry and The Hero of this Book. Elizabeth McCracken. “American wiseacre” is now on my list of phrases that I wish I had coined. 

Autocracy Inc and The Twilight of Democracy. Anne Applebaum. Yes, as a matter of fact, this IS my idea of vacation reading. 

*****

Murder on the Orient-Express. Agatha Christie. Speaking of vacation reading,  I needed something to read when my Kindle went missing for a few days during our vacation, and

this was on the bookshelf at the beach house we rented. That bookshelf was filled with Tom Clancy and Mitch Albom and Danielle Steel and who knows what else, and so Agatha Christie was the only reasonable choice. And it was absolutely delightful. I’d never actually read any Agatha Christie before, but I was aware that Murder on the Orient-Express is one of the best-selling novels of all time (maybe THE best-selling novel of all time) and I enjoyed knowing that I was one of millions of people who have spent an August afternoon at the beach with Hercule Poirot figuring out who murdered the vile Mr. Ratchett. SPOILER ALERT: It was everyone. If you need a break from all of this (gesturing wildly at everything) you could do a lot worse than to spend a day with Agatha Christie or Margery Sharp or Muriel Spark or Barbara Pym or Nancy Mitford or P.D. James or really any British female novelist of the early to mid 20th century. 

Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow.  Gabrielle Zevin. As I wrote earlier,  I was very surprised to find a novel about video game designers so absorbing, because this is a topic in which I have absolutely no interest. Zevin uses the video game industry and its fast-paced (and toxic) culture to tell a story about two brilliant young people and their decades-long on-and-off friendship, and their place in the time in which they lived, that being the waning days of the 20th century and the early years of the 21st. When I read fiction, I always want a happy ending. I wouldn’t describe the ending of Tomorrow as happy in any way, but it was fitting. 

Girl, Maladjusted and The Social Climber’s Handbook. Molly Jong-Fast. Memoir and murder - two very different books by the same author. 

Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets. Svetlana Alexievich. When I read this, I asked myself what the American version of this book might be like; what stories we would tell journalists and historians about the American Century and the end of the United States. At the time, I was just being dramatic. Now this is a perfectly legitimate question. 

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Alison Bechdel. Not long ago, I read a self-help book that wasn’t very good. I wrote about it, and about the fact that I never read self-help except for this one time. Maybe if I’d chosen a good self-help book, I’d be open to more from the genre, but self-help is dead to me now. Graphic novels are another thing that I never read, except that I did read this one, and it’s very good (not really a novel though, more of a memoir) and I might occasionally read more graphic novels, except not often because the print is usually too small and they don’t work particularly well on e-readers. I bought and read the actual paperback book because I liked the way it looked. 

*****

It’s March 2025 now, and I’m almost finished writing this list of books that I read in 2024! Any day now! I should just power through and finish this thing right now but the tedium is getting to me. All these links. All these titles to italicize. All of this writing about stuff that I already wrote about. I’m literally dead from boredom. 

*****

OK, back to work. 

*****

Patriot. Alexei Navalny. We were at my son’s first college conference championship meet early last year when Alexei Navalny’s death was first reported. We had all watched “Navalny" together, and I bought the book soon after his death but didn’t get around to reading it until later in the year. Putin was so afraid of a peaceful political opponent that he hounded him literally to death. Navalny was so unafraid of Putin that he doubled down on his opposition to the regime every time he got out of prison. He was so unafraid that he walked away from freedom and safety in Germany, returning to certain imprisonment and eventual death in Russia. Similar extraordinary courage will soon be required in the United States. I hope that I’m up to it. I hope we all are. 

On Tyranny and On Freedom. Timothy Snyder. I read On Freedom right after I finished On Tyranny, which was the book of the moment right after the 2024 election, when On Tyranny’s first rule, “Do not obey in advance,” was all over social media. I think that Snyder wrote On Freedom before On Tyranny, but you can read them in the opposite order, as I did. You can read one or the other, though I definitely recommend reading both. 

*****

I’m finally at the end! Democracy Awakening (Heather Cox Richardson) is the last book I finished in 2024 - I started another book right after this, but I didn’t finish it until 2025 and so consistent with my customary practice, I will include it on my 2025 reading list. 

Caveat emptor: The post linked to the words Democracy Awakening discusses the book only very briefly. It discusses pretty much everything else at considerable length. 

I started reading Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American newsletter probably early last year. And when I say “read,” I mean that I skimmed it, and sometimes just looked at the first paragraph. Now I read that newsletter from top to bottom every single day. When the topic of all of this (gesturing wildly at everything) comes up in conversation, almost invariably someone will ask me (or I will ask them) “Do you read Heather Cox Richardson?” As much as I love Rachel Maddow and Timothy Snyder and Sherilynn Ifill and so many other pro-democracy writers and thinkers in the traditional media and online, I think that Heather Cox Richardson is the best of the best. As they say on social media, protect HCR at all costs. 

*****

And that is it! A year of reading; roughly 80% dictators and political upheaval and 20% everything else. No wonder I’m stressed out. It’s only about 25 books, a low for me, but I think I read a few more books that I forgot to track. And it’s not a contest, anyway. 2025 is going to skew a little bit more toward fiction, I think. I studied for 2025 last year. I knew there would be a test.