Powerwash

I had to attend a Zoom meeting a few nights ago, God help me, and my camera didn’t work. I tried one thing and then another, and it wasn’t user error. The camera just didn’t work. 

My Chromebook is new. I just bought it in January and this is February so I think that still qualifies as “brand-new,” in fact. It occurred to me, as I tried one possible fix and then another, that I shouldn’t have to troubleshoot hardware issues so soon after I unpacked the box that the device was shipped in. But I deal with repair and maintenance issues the same way that I deal with health matters: I Google hotfix ideas; and if they don’t work, then I either ignore the problem until it goes away, or I learn to live with it. 

Yeah, I know. I never said that I was a genius. 

Apparently, you can wipe a Chromebook, restoring it to its factory settings, in about five minutes; and then you can set it up and configure it to your personal specifications in another five minutes. The wiping part is called a “powerwash,” and the online Chromebook community assures me that the whole thing is a snap. And I have no reason to believe that it’s not, because I set this thing up starting from factory settings just a few weeks ago, and that took all of five minutes. I do pretty much all of my writing on Google Docs, and I store all of my stuff on Google Drive, so I wouldn’t lose any data. It's a pretty low-risk operation, in my estimation. 

I was this close to pushing the proverbial button and power washing this thing right back to ground zero, and then it occurred to me that I had never actually powered the Chromebook completely down, and that maybe I should try that first. I have it set to sleep when I close it, but I never really turn it off. So I turned it off. And then I turned it back on. And voila--the camera worked, and the fire hose was not necessary. I was still tempted to power wash the Chromebook anyway, just to see what would happen; but then I thought, why tempt fate? Why mess with it? Why fix that which is not broken? 

*****

So I had another meeting earlier today, and the camera didn’t work. It wasn’t on Zoom, it was on another damn thing. I don’t know. I can’t, with the virtual meetings. Anyway, if the meeting had been a Zoom meeting, then I might just have assumed that the problem was on the Zoom end and not the Chromebook end, but this was a different meeting platform. It’s not meeting-related either, because I just tried the camera again with no meeting in sight, and you know what? It doesn’t work. 

I have yet another Zoom meeting tonight. Did I mention how many volunteer jobs I have right now? I have three, in addition to my actual paid job. And they all require meetings, and all of the meetings are on virtual platforms, so I need the stupid camera. 

I’m going to try Plan A again. I’m going to shut down the Chromebook until it’s time for my meeting. If the camera doesn’t fix itself, then I’m going to scrub this device like a car after a snowstorm, so that it’s squeaky clean and shiny. I’ll let you know what happens. Or maybe you’ll never hear from me again. Oh, technology. 

Grid

Last Monday was a work holiday, so I slept a little later than usual; all the way until 7:30 AM, in fact. Everyone else was off, too, but they all like to sleep late, so I had the house to myself. I made coffee, and I settled on the couch to stream a British detective show, and I thought about how much I appreciate a paid holiday, one of the greatest gifts of the labor movement of the 20th century. 

And then the power went out. 

It always feels so abrupt when the power goes out. Everything shuts down or off, all at once, before you even have time to react. And you notice how much noise you’ve become accustomed to, because a house without power is a very quiet house. 

My first thought was “Thank God I already made my coffee,” and then my second thought was that I’d text my friends to see if it was just me, or if the rest of the neighborhood was out. My friend Erin texted first, and that’s how we knew that it was the whole street. I checked the power company’s website. They already knew about the outage, a thousand customers were affected, and they expected to restore power by 9 AM. And they did. I was reading a book and texting with my friends, and the power came back on as suddenly as it had gone out. Everything sounded normal again. The whole thing was done and over in less than an hour. 

Last Monday was a nice day, and the outage wasn’t weather-related. It was apparently human-caused; an error that accidentally cut the switch or the transformer or the circuit or whatever the thing is that carries the power to the affected homes and businesses. The power company’s update on the outage admitted as much. Imagine that--they made a mistake, they admitted they made a mistake, they got to work immediately to fix the mistake, and then they actually did fix it, in practically no time. When the lights came back on, the coffee in the coffee pot was still warm. 

*****

I don’t want to get into the politics of what’s happening in Texas. Well OK, maybe for a minute. It was the Green New Deal! Really, Governor Abbott? And Ted Cruz--really? REALLY? OK, that’s all. 

Politics aside, I have been thinking about this a lot during these last few days, and not just because it’s been all over the news. It’s because I think a lot about everything we depend on, and how easily it can all fall apart. I flip a switch and voila--light! I turn the handle on a faucet and clear water streams forth, stopping only when I tell it to stop. My car runs out of gas and I go to the gas station and fill it back up; and we eat food, and then I drive my car to the grocery store and restock the kitchen. Most people take all of this for granted. I don’t take it for granted. That is not because I’m a better and more thoughtful person but because I’m a compulsive worrier. I worry about everything. I worry that things will fall apart, that the center won’t hold. 

OK, now that’s REALLY the last time you’ll ever see me paraphrase Yeats. 

It’s all very fragile, the whole thing--the power grid, water systems, the Internet, the transportation infrastructure that allows things and people to move freely from place to place so that we can drive our cars to nearby stores and buy everything we need. It can all go away, and very quickly. Just one disaster, one cyberattack, and the whole thing is kaput.  

Kaput, I tell you. Even now, I worry. Most people in Texas have power again; but apparently, many people who didn’t lose their power in the first place are receiving five-figure electric bills because the free market or whatever. It’s snowing again here, snow mixed with sleet that is making everything icy cold and that could easily weigh down the power lines and shut down the electric power; and that could easily make the roads impassable, thus making it impossible for delivery trucks to restock the stores that we all depend on for food and household supplies. 

*****

I like to think of myself as a resourceful, flexible, fearless person who can adapt to any circumstance, roll with the punches, and turn lemons into lemonade. But that’s totally ridiculous, of course, because I am exactly the opposite of that and if we find ourselves in a Texas-like crisis here in Maryland, I’ll start panicking and lose my shit within the hour. 

OK, maybe within a day. We have seen how I handled an unexpected power outage of less than an hour’s duration with total aplomb, and I bet that I can sustain that devil-may-care attitude for as long as six hours. After that, I make no promises. 

Uncanny Valley

 From Wikipedia, source of all knowledge: 

“In aesthetics, the uncanny valley is a hypothesized relationship between the degree of an object's resemblance to a human being and the emotional response to such an object.”

File that little definition under “I,” for “I learn something new every day.” I just finished reading Uncanny Valley, Anna Wiener’s memoir of her time working for tech start-ups in Silicon Valley. I stumbled across the definition of an uncanny valley, a thing that I hadn’t previously known existed, when I Googled the book title, because I couldn’t remember the author’s first name. 

*****

The young are different from you and me. Well, they’re different from me, anyway; and the meaning of “uncanny valley” (a very apt title, now that I know what the term means) is not the only thing I learned while reading this very good book. Uncanny Valley is a memoir, about a life that is very particularly the life of a young person in the early 21st century, and so it is chock-full of references to things and people and cultural trends that I didn’t know about. Things like third-wave coffee shops (hint: not Starbucks!) and black box theaters and dakimakura pillows. I was relieved to note that even the author had had to look that last one up when she first heard about it. (And it was weird, but at least it wasn’t please God return-me-to-the-bliss-of-ignorance, sight-seen-that-now-cannot-be-unseen weird, because I’ve been on the wrong end of that kind of Google search more than once, and I still have the scars). 

*****

“What is your North Star metric?” Well, mine is to live out an entire business day without hearing a single reference to a metric, direct or indirect (meaning no dashboards, no visualizations, no X or Y axes…) but that’s neither here nor there. When Weiner was a customer support specialist for the analytics start-up, this is the question that she asked her customers, because it was the question that she thought they wanted to hear; the question that made her sound like she understood their business and the technology that would illuminate its strengths and weaknesses. “I acted like I was cosplaying a 1980s business manager,” she writes, mocking her own desire to please and impress. At least I didn’t have to look up cosplay. This time. 

*****

In Silicon Valley, as in many other tech-focused environments, the non-technical person, the person who does everything but the coding, is a second-class citizen. These are the people who take care of the customers and the employees, pay the bills, write the ad copy and manage the social media, clean the floors, stock the kitchens with expensive snacks and generally keep the whole operation running so that the programmers can plug into their headsets, pull up the hoods of their hoodies, and write the code. As a non-technical person who has worked in tech environments for a long time, I have always wondered: Who decides these things? Who decided that a person who can code but who has no emotional intelligence should make three times as much money as a person who can’t code but who can read the room and then write about it? I tell you who decides: Men, that’s who. Men designed the system in which traditionally male roles are valued--and paid--more highly than traditionally female roles. 

This is not really the entire point of Uncanny Valley, though it does examine the subject of inequality and sexism in Big Tech. And although it’s a memoir, it’s not solely personal, either. It’s a micro and macro hybrid; the micro of Anna Weiner’s personal experience as a non-technical female person in a technical world and the macro of why somehow, for some odd reason, the system has decided that these non-technical people are not important, that their skills are not valuable. And of course, these non-technical people, the second-class citizens who earn less money and don’t get stock options, and are often employed as “contractors'' through third-party agencies that don’t provide benefits, are overwhelmingly women and people of color. 

But there’s more to it than that, too. There are two levels of macro in Uncanny Valley, and sexism and classism and the tyranny of “the meritocracy” is the lower of the two, the higher being the peril of this brave new world in which a handful of computer scientists and programmers in a handful of technical once-startup companies pretty much run the world. And they’re just getting started.

*****

Weiner writes about the pervasiveness of ad tech and the creepy Google search results that get up in your business and follow you around, pushing stories about whatever you happen to be reading or streaming or listening to into your feed; and magically serving ads for products that you’ve searched for in the past, each one becoming ever more specific and ever more targeted until you’re sure that a huge evil silicon chip is reading your mind. And it is. Who doesn’t have a story about Google knowing far too much about what we’re reading, or searching, or saying, or even thinking? Here’s one: Two years ago, when parties still existed, we went to our kids’ swim team’s annual parents party, which was 80s-themed. The younger parents barely remembered the 80s, but they were very enthusiastic about the theme. One mom was wearing a Swatch, complete with a Swatch Guard, a thing that I hadn’t seen or heard about since 1987 or so. I complimented her on her outfit and her attention to detail.

Yes, you know what happened next. For a week, my news and social media feeds were filled with Swatch ads and stories. I never once entered the word “Swatch” into a search field. I didn’t even have my phone in my hand when I was talking to the Swatch lady. But somehow, some way, Google heard me, and thought that I wanted to buy a Swatch, and helpfully offered me the opportunity to do that. 

Wait a minute. I’m writing this in Google Docs. So let’s see what happens. Let’s see if Google Docs tells Google’s search algorithms “Hey! She’s at it again! She really wants to buy a Swatch! Send her a coupon! Insert a Swatch story into her Instagram feed! 

I’ll report back on this. 

*****

As Weiner notes, not only does Big Tech read our minds, it decides what we should say, and when, and to whom, and how. This is a big deal right now, of course, with conservatives all over the country crying crocodile tears about “cancel culture” and “silencing of conservative voices.” Boo hoo. Every time I hear a Trump supporter cry about cancel culture, I think of Colin Kaepernick, rolling his eyes and thinking “yeah, cancel culture--it’s the worst.” 

In all seriousness, though, I agree with them to a certain extent, as much as I hate to admit it or to side with Trump worshippers in anything. Even though our current dilemma, in which large tech corporations have nearly unlimited power, is largely the fault of conservatives who spent the last 70 years or so resisting every attempt to control corporations and limit their influence, I still don’t want a tiny handful of overpaid, over-privileged, self-important software engineers determining the boundaries of free speech in the United States, and then using their social media networks and their collaboration platforms to enforce those boundaries. But that’s where we are right now. Now that immense corporate power is finally biting them in the ass, maybe conservative lawmakers,will come to the realization that it’s always a bad thing to allow a tiny group of people to amass nearly unlimited wealth and power. 

On the subject of Big Tech deciding who gets to speak and what they get to say, Weiner discusses her experience moderating content and chats for the open-source startup (it’s GitHub), writing “No one was equipped to adjudicate speech for the millions of people spending their lives online.” No kidding. That’s a big decision to make. It’s a big deal to censor another person. And as much as I think that Donald Trump deserved to be kicked off Twitter and Facebook and all of the rest of them, there’s a counterproductive downside, too. Weiner agrees. Commenting on tech executives’ tendency to spill their guts on the Internet and whether they might be better advised to just put down the phone and stay quiet for a bit, she touches on the question that many people have asked about Donald Trump. Is it maybe better to allow these guys to keep tweeting and posting and sharing all of their brilliant thoughts? At least then we know what they’re up to. 

*****

Uncanny Valley is a very good book that works as both a work-focused personal memoir and social criticism. Anna Weiner has something to say, and she’s a really good writer. I’m not sure why she insisted on maintaining the vague, no-names-please tone, when even a middle-aged layperson like myself had no trouble identifying the less-well-known companies and people with just a quick Google search. In one case, I didn’t even need to Google first--I guessed, and I Googled to confirm that my guess was correct. It’s even sillier when she writes about the very well-known firms, like the “search engine giant” (Google), or the social network that everyone hated (Facebook--and I do hate Facebook!), or the highly litigious Seattle-based software conglomerate (Microsoft). A stylistic choice, I suppose. 

Last year, I read Studs Terkel’s Working, a book of short essays about the lives of working people in mid-20th century America. Those people could not have imagined the world of work today. But one thing that hasn’t changed is that people want something more from their work than just a paycheck. “I would long for the sense of ownership and belonging, the easy identity, the all-consuming feeling of affiliation. And then I would remind myself: There but for the grace of God go I.” Weiner understands that it is a natural human tendency to look for connection, but she also knows that it’s wrong and even dangerous to rely solely on work for meaning in life. She understands that it’s far too easy to get in too deep, to become too devoted to an undeserving idea or institution or person. 

So where do you draw the line? If you are dedicated to your work, do you then run the risk of becoming a true believer in something that isn’t true? On the other hand, if you tell yourself that work is only work, that you’ll do only what’s necessary and required to earn your paycheck, do you then run the risk of becoming an automaton, and of missing the chance to serve and connect with others through work? How do you strike a balance between finding meaning in your work, and working only to make a living? 

Weiner answered that question for herself by leaving the tech industry rather than continue to enable and participate in a system that she knew to be morally suspect on many levels. Of course, thanks to an employee stock option windfall (small by comparison to other employees of the same start-up, she assures us) and immense talent as a writer, she had the option to leave the industry and start over. People who don’t have those fallbacks, and who have families to support, can’t walk away so easily. 

*****

If there’s one final takeaway from Uncanny Valley, it’s that Big Tech is both completely indispensable and completely unsustainable. With it, the center cannot hold; without it, things will fall apart. And that is the one and only time you’ll ever see me paraphrase Yeats. 

*****

Right now, I’m reading Let Me Tell You What I Mean, the new book of until-now unpublished Joan Didion essays. In “Why I Write,” Joan Didion writes (of course) about why she writes, and she claims that it’s partly because she doesn’t know how to think; not in abstracts, anyway. 

Part of me scoffs at this as utter ridiculousness because I’ve read enough Joan Didion to know that she knows how to think in concretes and abstracts and everything in between. But part of me knows exactly what she means, because I’m not an abstract thinker, either. I am also not typically a big picture thinker. I don’t always see the whole, only the sum of the parts. But even a vague and fuzzy thinker can see that the tech industry’s influence has grown exponentially in just the last few years; and that most of us are going to be affected by this in pretty significant ways. And most of those ways are not good. More of us will be driven into the so-called “gig economy,” scratching out a hand-to-mouth living so that the tech companies that employ us as contractors and sub-contractors and sub-sub-contractors, won’t have to provide benefits or job security or any of the other things that we have always associated with the employer-to-employee relationship. More of us will be driven to political or religious extremism, radicalized by targeted news and social media content. More of us will have a hard time distinguishing between fact and fiction. 

That’s the concrete part. The abstract is what we’re supposed to do about this. And I have no idea. 

*****

Uncanny Valley asks very big questions about important things: Work and its role in our lives, truth and falsehood, wealth and poverty, men and women, fairness and free speech, and more. That’s a lot for one relatively short book, isn’t it? 

Verdict

It’s Tuesday afternoon, almost evening. I was trying to finish writing something about a book that I just finished. It’s a pretty long post, and it just needs a conclusion, but I just ran flat out of words. I’ll try again tomorrow. 

Although it’s Tuesday, it’s the first day of the work week because yesterday was the Presidents’ Day holiday, which for some reason is under fire on Twitter. Apparently, there is a movement afoot to get rid of the Presidents’ Day holiday and replace it with an Election Day holiday. I am all for Election Day as a national holiday, but February cries out for a three-day weekend. Call it whatever you want, Twitter activists, just don’t take it away. 

Anyway, I needed the extra day this weekend, after an entire Saturday glued to the impeachment trial. Every TV in the house was on and tuned to MSNBC, and I watched on and off all day, from multiple different rooms in the house. When the defense wrapped up its ridiculous closing argument and my own Congressman, Rep. Jamie Raskin, gave the closing remarks and the thing went to a vote, we all sat still in front of the TV to await the verdict; even my younger son, who is completely uninterested in politics. 

I was cynical about the vote, and sure that I knew what the outcome would be. Still, I have to admit that when Senator Burr and then Senator Cassidy voted “guilty,” I allowed myself a brief moment of optimism. I thought that it might--just might--be possible that 17 Senators would vote to convict. But I knew what was going to happen. When it did, I was disappointed but not surprised. 

And then Schumer spoke, and I barely listened. And then McConnell spoke, and holy shit. It’s been three days now, so the initial shock has worn off. But it really was a shock. I was genuinely gaping-mouth shocked as I watched and listened live to Mitch McConnell finally, after four years, telling the truth about Donald Trump. 

Back to Twitter (from which I think I need a break). The political commentators, professional and amateur, whom I follow on Twitter are divided on the seven Republican guilty votes. One camp says that it’s too little, too late (true) and that most of the seven are either retiring or safe from primary challenges, for now. The other camp concedes the too little, too late point but argues that we should give them credit for doing the right thing, no matter what calculations might have informed their decisions. I’m in that camp. I don’t want to make the perfect the enemy of the good, and if we can get seven Republicans to do a good thing when it counts, then I will take it. And now, of course, all seven are under attack from their state party organizations and the pro-Trump media. There’s that terrible “cancel culture,” at it again. 

*****

Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. I usually give something up for Lent; and that thing is usually sweets. And I’ll probably do that. But I think I need to walk away from politics again, at least for a few weeks. Maybe I’ll alternate days; a day with no media consumption, and then a day with no sugar. And forty days with no Trump. 

They DO have eyes...

I’ve always wanted to write something that would give me an excuse to use the term “murder of crows.” But did I want that excuse to be an actual murder of crows colonizing my front lawn? No. No, I did not. But we don't always get to choose the circumstances under which we get to write about crows. We don't invite them. They just show up. 

And two days or so ago, they did show up, in considerable numbers. I heard them before I saw them. They were screeching or squawking or whatever crows do, and I could tell that there were more than a few crows making that racket. So I decided to investigate, and holy crow. A murder of crows, whose specific number can be best described by the word “shitload,” were swirling around my front lawn, helping themselves to birdseed that was never intended for them and just generally making a nuisance of themselves. The sky was literally almost black on an otherwise sunny day. It was creepy, I tell you what. Creepy, and more than a little menacing. 

The crows swooped and dipped, landing on low branches and on the grass, pecking around for seeds or worms or whatever it was that attracted them in the first place; and then one of them strutted up the driveway, bold as brass, looking for all the world as if he were going to march up and ring the front doorbell. Maybe the bird feeder was empty, and he wanted to complain. Maybe he wanted directions. Maybe he wanted to ask if the house was for sale. 

What are the schools like? (Image: Wikipedia)

And it would have been, if those crows hadn’t cleared the hell out of here. But they did. They flew out almost as abruptly as they arrived. I don’t know if that’s because they got what they came for, or because they didn’t, but that’s their business. I wish them the best in their crowish pursuits, as long as they pursue those pursuits in some other location.  

Super Bowl Snow Day

Another snowy Sunday morning. A very light gray sky and very large white feathery flakes of snow, the kind that comes down heavily and piles up quickly and shovels easily, light and fluffy. The trees look pretty. It’s going to snow for a few more hours, I think. Then it’ll warm up enough tomorrow and Tuesday to melt some of it, before the real winter weather hits again, just in time for the holiday weekend. 

The Super Bowl is later today. I don’t care at all about any wintertime professional sporting event that doesn’t involve pucks and skates and ice. I do like the parties, though. We almost always go to a Super Bowl party, but well, you know. It’s the ‘rona. It’s always the ‘rona. We’ll watch the game and eat snacks and rank the commercials, and we’ll wait for next year. Just like everything else in 2020 and now early 2021, nearly 365 days in. There’s always next year.

Books and Pictures: 2020 Bibliography

I made a rash commitment to finish my book list over the three-day MLK weekend. And then all of a sudden the MLK weekend was here and gone, and as the next three-day weekend approached, I still was not finished. I always forget how much work this is. I write about some books right after I read them, and then I have to search my blog and my Google Docs folder to find what I wrote. That’s easy enough. What’s not easy is to remember what I thought about the books that I read but didn’t write about during the year. Thank God this isn’t my actual paid job. 

I wrote that paragraph well over a week ago. Now two people in my house have COVID, and the other two of us can’t go anywhere--I mean even more than we couldn’t go anywhere before. Being nearly totally housebound drove me to get this done so I can waste your time with my inane observations about things other than books. I spent a few days updating the blog with posts about specific books and authors, which I am linking to here, so that this list won’t be quite so God-awful long and meandering. I do try to be helpful.

Anyway, in very approximate chronological order according to my now very messy handwritten list, here are the books I read in 2020. 

*****

The Little Friend (Donna Tartt). This was my 2020 - 2021 overlap book. I wrote about it here. 

*****

Working (Studs Terkel). Working, which made Studs Terkel famous when it was published in 1974, is a series of stories narrated in the first person by a huge collection of people spanning a pretty big variety of professions, social classes, and education levels. Its full title is Working: People Talk About What They Do All Day and How They Feel About What They Do. That title is exactly right. Terkel adds short introductions of each subject, and occasionally adds his own comments and observations; but most of the book is people talking about their work and how they feel about it. Their voices come through very clearly. 

Here’s a question: What makes a job a good job? Pay, hours, working conditions, title, commute, benefits--all of those things are important. But Working makes clear that the work itself is the most important thing. If the work isn’t interesting or if the person doing the job doesn’t see its value to the world, then it almost doesn’t matter how much it pays, or how prestigious it is, or how pleasant the working conditions are. We have an innate need for meaning in our work. As one of Terkel’s subjects says, "That's the difference between being alive and being dead." 

*****

How to Ruin Everything (George Watsky). Certain smarmy younger people, including one to whom I actually gave birth, have expressed surprise that I read this book. I see no reason why this should be surprising. I hope Mr. Watsky writes more books. And I hope some millennial or Gen Z-er stumbles across this blog post and finds it hilarious that I refer to him as Mr. Watsky. 

The Best of Marlys (Lynda Barry). This is an anthology of Ernie Pook’s Comeek, one of the best comic strips ever. Last year, I bought Making Comics, and it made me remember how much I loved Lynda Barry, so I bought this best-of directly from the publisher, Drawn and Quarterly. I didn’t read it all the way through in 2020, so maybe it shouldn’t be on my list, but I’m counting it anyway because I’m pretty sure that I read most of these strips when they were originally published. When I was in my early 20s, my friend and I used to cut these out of the Philadelphia City Paper and mail them to each other, even though we lived in the same town and saw each other at least once a week. I found a few of them among my old letters when I was cleaning out cabinets. It was a different time, but Ernie Pook’s Comeek holds up. 

Does this picture make you hungry
 for a fried-baloney sandwich?

*****

The Princess Diarist (Carrie Fisher). I loved Carrie as an actress, but I love her even more as a writer. This is the book in which she famously revealed the long-suspected affair with Harrison Ford, who appears to have been a bit of a jerk. She shares long entries from her 1976 journal (she was 19 at the time), and they are astonishingly good. I write every day, but when I read writing that’s so effortlessly beautiful and incisive, I wonder why I bother. But then I go back and read some of my own work, and I know why. It’s because I’m good at this. So was Carrie Fisher. God rest her soul. 

*****

Sally Rooney:

• Conversations with Friends
• Normal People

For some reason, it is now fashionable on the Internet to talk about how overrated Sally Rooney is, and how ordinary and dull her two novels are. Disregard all of this talk when you come across it because Sally Rooney is a wonderful writer, and Normal People and Conversations with Friends are both beautiful books. I wrote about Conversations with Friends early last year, but I never got around to writing about Normal People. It’s not very long; or maybe it is but it didn’t seem long because of two things: I read it just after I finished Ron Chernow’s Hamilton, also wonderful, but VERY long. And because it’s so good that I didn’t want it to end, but it did end despite my best efforts to ration the last few pages so that I wouldn’t finish it too quickly. 

Normal People gets so many things right, but if I had to pick just one thing, it would be the beauty and pain and loneliness of a young person’s first time away from home; especially a certain kind of introspective young person, and really especially the kind of young person who doesn’t always understand the social signals in a new environment. I was nowhere near as bright or as sensitive as Normal People's Marianne or Connell; and I grew up in a place and time quite different from Ireland in 2011, but I was very much like Connell in one way. I was the child of an unsophisticated working-class family who encountered worldly, cultured, well-educated people for the first time when I went to college. Like Connell, I didn’t know how to fit in with them; and then later, I didn’t know if I even wanted to. Like both Marianne and Connell, I experienced real loneliness and depression for the first time as a young adult. And like both of them, I learned that “life offers up these moments of joy despite everything.” It still does. 

*****

Loving My Actual Life: An Experiment in Relishing What’s Right in Front of Me (Alexandra Kuykendall). I know that I read this because it’s on my list. If I’d especially loved or especially hated it, I’d have written something about it. Anyway, the message is right there in the title, and it’s a good one. 

Happens Every Day (Isabel Gillies). Early pandemic reading. I wrote about this one right here. I might read it again. It’s very good. 

The Reading Life (C.S. Lewis)

The Hope of the Gospel (George MacDonald). George MacDonald had been on my to-read list for a long time, so I’m glad I finally got around to reading him. Now I don’t have to feel guilty every time I read C.S. Lewis, who urged everyone to read George MacDonald. He was right.  

Things We Didn’t Talk About When I Was a Girl (Jeannie Vanasco)

Goodbye to Berlin (Christopher Isherwood)

*****

Hilary Mantel: 

• Wolf Hall
• Bring Up the Bodies
• The Mirror and the Light
• Giving Up the Ghost
• Eight Months on Ghazzah Street
• Mantel Pieces

Hilary Mantel was my author of the year for 2020. 

*****

Not That Kind of Girl (Lena Dunham). I wrote this down, so I suppose I read it. IDK why. I guess I wanted to catch up with what young women were thinking about five years ago. 

*****

Helene Hanff:

• 84, Charing Cross Road
• The Duchess of Bloomsbury
• Underfoot in Show Business 

Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins as Helene Hanff and Frank Doel in the
1987 movie version of 84, Charing Cross Road. It almost doesn't matter if you
see the movie first and then read the book or vice versa. 

*****

Your Blue Flame (Jennifer Fulwiler). I like Jennifer Fulwiler, and it’s hard not to admire a woman who decides that she needs to go on tour as a stand-up comedian, and then just does it, successfully, on her own, with no backing or support from the entertainment establishment. I don’t remember much about this book other than the general premise, which is that you should find the thing that you’re meant to do--your blue flame--and then just do it and don’t let anyone stand in your way. To which I say, absolutely. Sure. Why not. You go, girl. Get it. Get after it. Crush it. Kill it. Slay.  

*****

Meg Wolitzer:

• This is My Life
• The Wife
• The Interestings 

*****

The Rent Collector (Camron Wright). A friend recommended this to me, and I read it, and then I felt bad about myself because I did not find the story as moving and inspiring as I was supposed to. What the hell is wrong with me? 

*****

The Life of Elizabeth I (Alison Weir) and Mary Tudor, England’s First Queen (Anna Whitelock). It was a year full of Tudors.  

Always a bad relationship choice. He only killed two of his six wives, but that's 33 percent.
Are are those odds that you want to mess with? 

*****

Hamilton (Ron Chernow). I can’t be the only person who saw the musical first and then read the book. Among many things for which I will remember 2020, some good, and most bad, Hamilton is among the very good. 

The Man Without a Face (Masha Gessen). I didn’t need any more proof that Vladimir Putin is a bad, bad man, but thanks to this book, I know that he’s even worse than I thought he was.  

Look Alive Out There (Sloane Crosley). What did I think about this book? I read it many months ago and I only remember two essays. One is about the author’s housesitting stay in an isolated mountain home in California; so isolated that when the homeowner is delayed by a few days, Crosley has to befriend the neighbors in the hope that they’ll invite her to dinner, because there’s no more food in the house and the nearest store is 20 miles away. And of course, she doesn’t have a car. Fortunately, the neighbors are friendly and they invite her to dinner. In fact, they’re too friendly, and it gets weird. The other one was about Crosley’s unsuccessful attempt to climb Cotopaxi. Well, she did climb it, but didn’t make the summit. She gets credit for trying. I wouldn’t have made it to base camp, whatever that is. But I don’t know that she gets credit for this book. I came away from it with no real idea of who Sloane Crosley is. And that’s her prerogative, of course, but I feel that a book of personal essays should reveal a little bit more about the person who wrote them. That’s just me. 

*****

P.D. James

• Time to Be in Earnest 
• The Children of Men 

P.D. James was one of my four favorite author discoveries of 2020. I wrote about Time to Be in Earnest here (and I’m still cracking up about my dolla dolla bills joke). Then I read The Children of Men. Time to Be in Earnest was my first P.D. James, but it's probably not the best exemplar of her work because it's a memoir, and she was actually a novelist. I think I need to read some of her detective novels, which is what she is best known for. The Children of Men, though technically called a novel, is really a morality tale disguised as a novel. And it’s a very good morality tale, with a relevant and urgent message; and it’s full of beautiful writing. But it’s not really a novel. That’s what I think, anyway. What do I know? 

OK, here’s what I know--it’s very rare for me to prefer a movie to the book that inspired it, and this is one of those rare cases. "Children of Men," the 2006 movie version, is great, and very different from the novel, though I read that P.D. James liked the movie version very much. Anyway, a book about the impending end of the world was either entirely appropriate 2020 reading, or very inappropriate, depending on your mood. I will be seeking out additional P.D. James, but probably not until 2022 or so. 

*****

Things I Want to Punch in the Face (Jennifer Worick). This book was among the many, many things I wanted to punch in the face in 2020. But whose fault is that? I'm the one who chose to pick up a book titled Things I Want to Punch in the Face; and then having picked it up, chose to actually read it. Maybe I should punch myself in the face. 

Crazy Salad and Scribble Scrabble (Nora Ephron)

How to Be an Antiracist (Ibram X. Kendi)

*****

Allie Brosh:

• Hyperbole and a Half 
• Solutions and Other Problems

*****

I just re-read the introductory paragraphs for this very long hot mess of a post (but seriously--can you imagine how much longer it'd have been had I not broken it into smaller posts?) and I see that I mentioned that this list was in "approximate" chronological order. Approximate indeed. I read the first Allie Brosh book in May or so, and then the second one in November (I think that's when it came out). I read How to Be an Antiracist in June or July. I read the face-punching book sometime during the early days of the 'rona, when I thought that we'd be out of lockdown in a matter of weeks and I didn't have a care in the world. Really, this list is in no real order whatsoever, much like the inside of my brain. I'm reading and writing again in 2021 and the one thing that I can promise is that next year's list will probably be just as crazy as this one. As always, don't say you weren't warned. 

Goodbye, January 2021. Don't let the door hit you in the ass.

Thursday, January 28. A week ago, we thought we were “on lockdown.” We thought we were “quarantining.” We were staying at home most of the time. We were going only where we really needed to go, when we needed to go; and we always wore our masks. Two people in our household (my husband and older son) work outside the house, but my younger son and I attend school and work (respectively) 100 percent from home. The outside-the-house people went to work and came right home and showered and changed; and the inside-the-house people didn’t make many unnecessary excursions. We thought we were pretty restricted. 

And then my husband and older son both got sick, and both of them tested positive for COVID, and so we learned what “lockdown” and “quarantine” really mean. I haven’t left my house for four days, not even to get groceries or take my daily walk.

*****

Friday, January 29. We’re on day 5 now. They are both starting to feel a bit better, though they’re both very tired. We’re all very tired. It’s Friday afternoon, and just about to get dark. We have about 15 minutes of rosy golden fading daylight on the coldest day of the season so far, and we’re all in various states of undress. I showered this morning, as I always do, and I put on a wool sweater with the flannel pajama pants that I wore to sleep last night. It’s cold enough today that I had to put a pair of leggings on under the pajama pants. So I’m right now wearing a wool sweater and long-sleeved t-shirt, pajama pants with leggings, and two pairs of socks with slippers; and I’m warm enough. I’m even comfortable. But I feel sloppy. I worked today, and I did just about as much work as I usually do, but I don’t feel the sense of satisfaction and accomplishment that normally accompanies the end of the workday. I feel like a person who sat around the house in her pajamas until all of a sudden, daylight faded and night fell and I was still in the clothes that I slept in the night before.

*****

Saturday, January 30. And now it’s Saturday morning. Guess what I’m wearing. Yeah. 

I will get dressed today; all the way dressed, and not half clothes and half pajamas. I know that this is the work-from-home look of 2020 and now 2021, but there are mental health downsides to sitting around in your pajamas all day. 

It’s freezing cold again; like legitimately 32-degree freezing cold, not the average winter chill that I tend to describe as freezing cold. We’re expecting snow. The other members of the household are even looking forward to it. And I guess I am too. It’ll be a change of scenery. It’ll look pretty and sparkly. Anyway, it’s cold enough today that many of the usual neighborhood walkers and runners will stay indoors and since I myself don’t have the ‘rona, I might venture out, masked and distant, for some fresh air and exercise. Maybe I’ll finally, finally, FINALLY finish that book list. I have time. I have plenty of time. I have all the time in the world. 

*****

Sunday, January 31. It did snow, and I did go out, crossing the street every time I saw someone coming. The snow continues to fall, and it’s pretty, but not sparkly. The sky is pale, almost-white gray, and there’s no sunlight to reflect off the snow and give it that magical sparkle that only lasts until the shoveling and the plowing and the snow-playing and sledding commence. I’m looking out my family room window and I see nothing but brown and white. Snow covers every branch and limb, forming a complex spidery pattern of white on brown against white again. There’s very little wind. 

I could, I suppose, have finished that book list yesterday. But I didn’t. I did work on it, so that’s something; something that I accomplished other than disinfecting surfaces and washing bedding and responding to text messages from concerned friends and family. COVID is a stern taskmaster, I tell you what. Maybe I’ll shovel today, or maybe I’ll venture out for a walk in the snow. Or maybe I’ll finally finish that list. I don’t know why I keep putting it off. 

*****

Monday, February 1. You were a long month, January. That was no way to start a year. It’s a new month now, 2021. Do better, OK? You're on notice. 

It’s Monday now and we’re still in the tunnel, but now there’s a light at the end of it. My husband had a follow-up COVID test this morning, which was negative. My son is still experiencing symptoms, but he’s getting better, so he’ll be able to have his follow-up test in a day or so, which means that our quarantine will come to an end in a few days. And you know what I did yesterday? I cleaned, and I cooked, and I disinfected stuff, but I also finally finished the book list. I also finished another book, and I’m going to have quite a bit to say about it. I wrote some things down, so I wouldn’t forget. I learn the hard way, but I do learn.