"There's more to life than books, you know / But not much more"

For me, the period since the start of the pandemic has, by turns, seemed to slowly drag on and fly by at hyper-speed. Though it feels--and I'm certain I'm not alone in this!--like I haven't done much, I've read a ton, and more widely and pleasurably than I've read in years. Just for memory's sake, here are the books I've read cover-to-cover between March and August.

*Martin Goodman, Josephus’s The Jewish War: A Biography
*Gary Wills, Augustine's Confessions: A Biography
*Timothy Beal, The Book of Revelation: A Biography
*Jun'ichirō Tanizaki, Naomi
*Allison Yarrow, 90s Bitch: Media, Culture, and the Failed Promise of Gender Equality
*Ellen Datlow, editor, The Best of the Best Horror of the Year: 10 Years of Essential Short Horror Fiction
*Cassiodorus, Institutions of Divine and Secular Learning
*James J. O’Donnell, Cassiodorus
*Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy
*M.L.W. Laistner, The Intellectual History of the Early Middle Ages
*Petrarch, The Secret
*Denis Feeney, Beyond Greek: The Beginnings of Latin Literature
*Neil MacGregor, Germany: Memories of a Nation
*Angelo Paredi, Saint Ambrose: His Life and Times
*Johannes Fried, Charlemagne
*Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey
*Helen Phillips, editor, Robin Hood: Medieval and Post-Medieval
*John Burrow, A History of Histories: Epics, Chronicles, Romances and Inquiries from Herodotus and Thucydides to the Twentieth Century
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Silver Linings


While 2020 has been generally, very obviously The Worst, it has actually been quite a great year for new music, particularly for "returns" (not to say "comebacks")––to form, to top-shelf excellence, to the fold, as it were: Fetch the Bolt Cutters, of course; Morrissey's strongest album in 14 years; Kathleen Edwards' first in eight years, just as resplendent as where she left off; and now the amazing Microphones in 2020, albeit a "return" in name only, a semantic point that Phil Elverum ruminates over as if it's a matter of the utmost existential urgency and which he uses as a point of departure for a sui generis 45-minute lyrical/photographic single-song autobiograpy. Never solipsistic or narcissistic, it is the perfect summation and merging back together of a musical oeuvre that had felt radically bifurcated––not by the mere nominal distinction between Microphones records and Mount Eerie records but by universalistic nature-focused abstraction and sonic experimentation on the one hand and the most painfully hyperspecific and literal death albums ever recorded on the other. "I was already who I am," sings Elverum at one point on Microphones in 2020, reflecting back on his much younger self's way of being in, and looking around at, the world. Where in most cases a line like this would just sound like a syntactically odd cliché, it registers here like a midlife epiphany of seismic proportions.
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NBA players are legitimate heroes, truly doing what they can: using their influence and celebrity to fight the forces of systemic racism and incipient fascism and to encourage activism, democratic change, and full enfranchisement. I really love basketball, but Black Lives Matter infinitely more.
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