Posted on by rjonakait

Books 2024

Two years ago, I wrote about my reading habits, which include listing all the books I have read in a year. (See “My Book List” of January 2 and 4, 2023.) I continue to keep such a list; it’s a good thing I keep it because I remember few of the books I finish. What I wrote previously still applies: “I do wonder why I read. I read few books closely. I remember well only a few of the books I finish. I do get some fodder for this blog from my reading. It produces the ‘First Sentences’ I occasionally post. Sometimes the reading gives me an idea for a post or a quotation to use. But I don’t read as if I am researching for the blog or anything else. I read because I read.” Henry Grabar’s Paved Paradise: How Parking Explains the World typifies much about my reading. I remember that the book has a lot of fascinating information and insights, but I can’t now tell you what they are. As I read over this year’s list, however, I realize that a few still stick in my mind. These include:

Bob Dylan’s The Philosophy of Modern Song. Dylan’s musings about popular songs are often surprising and set me in search of many he wrote about. Thank you, YouTube.

Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World: The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Me. Bringley left his job with the New Yorker after the untimely death of his brother and became a guard for ten years at the Met. He writes movingly about grief and art.

Rupert Holmes’s Murder Your Employer: McMasters Guide to Homicide. A clever book. I would say it was Harry Potter-ish, but since I have not read any of the Harry Potter books, I’m guessing.

Vanessa Walters’s The Nigerwife, a striking mystery with a setting that opened a new world to me.

Rashid Khalidi, The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917-2017. This is essential reading for making any sense out of the Mideast. It was the selection of two different book groups I attended.

Chris Van Tulleken’s Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food that Isn’t Food. This convinced me that I should not eat ultra-processed foods. And someday perhaps I won’t.

Abraham Riesman, RingMaster: Vince McMahon and the Unmaking of America. Is Trump’s best friend really Vince McMahon?

A.J. Jacobs, The Year of Living Constitutionally: One Man’s Humble Quest to Follow the Constitution’s Original Meaning. Amusing and insightful about our founding document and how we now often mistakenly regard it.

Walter R. Brooks, Freddy and the Perilous Adventure (illustrated by Kurt Wiese). I still enjoy the sly wit of Freddy the Pig books.

Christopher Morley, Parnassus on Wheels. An old-fashioned delight from the beginning of the twentieth century.

Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Message. Coates always makes me think and makes me check my assumptions.

Percival Everett’s James. At times this retelling of Huckleberry Finn took my breath away.

Posted on by rjonakait

Snippets

The nurse watched me walk the fifteen steps from my bed to the bathroom. My first few were shaky, but they got better. I was superb getting back to the bed. I said, “So I don’t need you to go to the bathroom.” She responded, “But I would prefer that you call me.” I said, “Do you know how many women have said that to me?”

I have many identities. One of them is as a catless parent.

My Amish amigo Amos at the greenmarket works as part of a construction crew with other people from his church. I asked if there was music while they hammered and sawed. He said, as I knew, they had no radio. The only music came when one of them sang. In reply to my question, he said the songs were always religious, but Amos said that he knew a lot of country songs. He hears them when is driven to the market or the construction site by an “English” driver. The drivers can play the radio and apparently country music predominates. I said that an Amish can’t sing country songs since they are all about how I got drunk last night and my woman left me. Amos smiled. His sister Sadie laughed.

He says that his crowd numbers were huge, larger not only than hers, but larger than those of MLK, Jr. An obsession over size, size, size. Soon I expect him to whip it out of his pants and proclaim, “It is larger than hers.”

“When he lies, he speaks according to his own nature, for he is a liar and the father of lies.” John 8:44.

Was it the Paris Olympic or the Paris Olympics?

Why is it called water polo. It does not have to be played right-handed like polo. It does not use anything like mallets. Unlike polo, it has a goalie. Unlike polo, it has something like a penalty box. Would water soccer or water hockey have been a better name?

My life would not have been unfulfilled if I had never had pimiento cheese. [The spouse disagrees.]

According to Chris van Tulleken in Ultra-Processed People: The Science Behind Food that Isn’t Food, near the end of World War II, “the average U-boat crewman lived for only sixty days from boarding the ship.”

Pennsylvania has a close Senate race. The incumbent has run ads stating that the challenger invested in a Chinese company that makes fentanyl, implying that this has affected the state’s fentanyl problem. As the factcheckers often say, the ad lacks context. The challenger did invest in the company, but that pharmaceutical corporation makes fentanyl legally. Perhaps part of its output gets diverted to the illegal market, but if so, the incumbent’s ad does not present any information to support such a claim. The challenger has responded by saying that he never invested in Chinese pharma making illegal fentanyl. True, but he then goes on to imply that the real cause of the fentanyl problem is the southern border. This, too, lacks context. He presents no information that major amounts of fentanyl get into this country via illegal border crossings instead of legal ones. It also ignores that death from synthetic opioids soared while Trump was president. There were 19,500 such deaths in 2016, the year before he became president. That increased to 28,659 in 2017, 31,525 in 2018, 36,603 in 2019, and 56,894 in 2020.