I love essays. I have a shelf full of these Best American essay collections dating all the way back to its inaugural volume from 1986. I’ve dipped in and out of these over the years, picking and choosing what looked interesting to me.
I’m taking a different approach with the latest volumes (I read the 2024 collection last year). I’m reading all the essays straight through, cover to cover. This means I’m reading essays I probably would have skipped after the first two or three paragraphs, thinking the topic or voice wasn’t for me.
This new diligence has been both frustrating and rewarding. Frustrating because, out of 21 essays in this volume, four did absolutely nothing for me. I should have skipped these and been better off for it. But rewarding because there were a few essays I wouldn’t have read that surprised me. I either learned something fascinating or developed an appreciation for a different style of essay writing.
Continuing my quest to read all of Stephen King’s published works with this Richard Bachman dystopian thriller, published in 1982. The Running Man is set in a 2025 America with extreme income inequality, a polluted environment, an authoritarian government, and a population obsessed and controlled by streaming media and ultra-violent reality TV.
The hero of the story is Benjamin Richards, who signs up for the most dangerous “Free-Vee” show to save his sick daughter. Richards is tough, gritty, and smart. A badass that we rarely see as a protagonist in a Stephen King novel (hence the Richard Bachman pseudonym).
Hijinks ensue as Richards attempts to evade his would-be game show killers. It’s a fast-paced read with some good plot twists. I won’t spoil the ending, other than to say it’s another example of King’s uncanny ability to predict future events.
A meticulously researched history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland. Keefe delves into the motivations behind the horrible actions taken by both sides of this decades-long conflict, which I had never really understood. Ultimately, the book is a tale of tragedy and woe for both sides of a pointless war.
There were necessarily a lot of names, places, and dates included in this account, which for me didn’t translate as well in an audiobook. Reading the physical book would have been a better experience, though I loved the Irish accent of the narrator.
Another masterpiece from Claire Keegan, this one about an unnamed child who spends a summer with her aunt and uncle on a farm on the coast of Ireland. We soon learn that the child has been utterly neglected and is in dire need of love and attention. Her aunt and uncle have their own grief, and we bear witness to a summer of tremendous healing for this newly formed family.
Her hands are like my mother’s hands but there is something else in them too, something I have never felt before and have no name for. I feel at such a loss for words but this is a new place, and new words are needed.
It’s astonishing how Keegan crafts so much story with characters of real depth in so few pages. The language is economical, yet lyrical. And moving. I did not want this to end. When I finished, I turned back and read it again to savor it more slowly and pick up on things I missed.
Set in a near-future New York City, we follow ten-year-old Vera, an exceptionally gifted yet anxious child, through a dystopian landscape of far-right extremism, absentee parenting, cultural diversity, and hilarious yet ominous technology.
Throughout the novel, Vera’s intelligence allows her to wrestle with dilemmas no ten-year-old should ever have to face alone. My heart broke for this little girl, who, like all of us, just wants to be loved.
Of course, without gravity, everyone in heaven would fall straight to hell, a word Anne Mom did not like. But that’s how the universe worked, Vera thought. You wanted to believe someone was in a pretty place like heaven, but really everybody, herself included, was living in hell.
I did not expect to be as moved as I was by the end of the novel.
I have started and stopped reading this novel at least three times. I was initially stalled by my lack of knowledge about the French Revolution. Having recently read Durant’s excellent Rousseau and Revolution, I felt ready for the challenge. I’m now glad I waited.
Easing into a Dickens novel takes patience. The vocabulary and strange setting are initially bewildering. Before long, though, the story took hold, and I found my footing through the twists and turns. There are some delightful characters in the novel, some bordering on stereotypical, some surprising. The last fifty pages had me turning pages as if this were a modern-day thriller.
Dickens wrote this as a warning that polarization, the corruption of power, the awful propensity for human barbarity, and the refusal to address legitimate grievances can lead to catastrophic consequences. He implies that a bloody revolution isn’t confined to 18th-century France, 19th-century England, or, for that matter, 21st-century America.
This is an easy book to read. The chapters are short. Most can be read in just a few minutes. Each relays a virtue, interspersing anecdotes about well-known public figures with quotations from ancient Stoic and Eastern philosophers that validate the message. The thirty-two chapters cover a wide swath of good Stoic living: keep a journal, be brave, manage your anger, be present, appreciate beauty, etc.
The risk with a book like this is that you let these short chapters of feel-good but shallow advice roll over you like water without anything sinking in. Maybe read a chapter every night and sleep on it. Or, better yet, use each chapter as a journaling prompt and write for thirty minutes about the particular virtue or practice that could fit better in your life.
There are important lessons here on leading a better life. The trick is to find a way to take each of these lessons deeper in your own life to affect lasting change.
Because of the subject matter, the death of a child, I read this highly acclaimed novel with trepidation. O’Farrell writes beautifully, and she lulled me into a world of a quasi-fairyland of evil step-mothers, abusive fathers, young impossible love, magic forests and elves, and the joy of life in harmony with nature.
While there were inklings and premonitions, the book carries on for two hundred pages before anything truly awful happens. When the tragedy finally strikes, the writing tone and structure shift from a conventional novel to short, trance-like visions of a mother’s inconsolable grief. Most people can only imagine the mere surface of grief like this. O’Farrell writes with brutal honesty as if she knows exactly what this is.
How is anyone ever to shut the eyes of their dead child? How is it possible to find two pennies and rest them there, in the eye sockets, to hold down the lids? How can anyone do this? It is not right. It cannot be.
While Shakespeare is never named, his character represents an important counterpoint in the novel. He begins as an unhappy son with ambitions far beyond his father’s business, a suitor and newlywed, a fledgling playwright separated from his wife and family, and finally as a grieving father.
I won’t spoil it, but the ending is about as perfect as you could wish for a novel dealing with the loss of a child.
Favorite Highlights
Certainties have deserted her. Nothing is as she thought it was.
She, who has always known, always sensed what will happen before it happens, who has moved serenely through a world utterly transparent, has been wrongfooted, caught off guard. How can this be?
How were they to know that Hamnet was the pin holding them together? That without him they would all fragment and fall apart, like a cup shattered on the floor?
God had need of him, the priest says to her, taking her hand after the service one day. She turns on him, almost snarling, filled with the urge to strike him. I had need of him, she wants to say, and your God should have bided His time.
(and such a secret, private pain it is, to see a boy growing like that, from lad to man, effortlessly, without care, but he would never say that, never let on to anyone else how he avoids this boy, never speaks to him, how he hates to look upon him).
“O horrible! O horrible! Most horrible!” murmurs her husband’s ghoulish voice, recalling the agony of his death. He has, Agnes sees, done what any father would wish to do, to exchange his child’s suffering for his own, to take his place, to offer himself up in his child’s stead so that the boy might live.
There can be no better role model for resilience and fortitude than Winston Churchill in the years preceding the Second World War. The British public, Parliament, and His Majesty’s Government considered Churchill a fool and a war monger due to his constant warnings about Hitler and Nazi Germany. Students at Oxford heckled him off stage. Newspapers lampooned him. Parliament leaders walked out of his incredibly eloquent (and prescient) speeches. And two prime ministers spurned him from any role in their cabinets. Down deep, they must have been profoundly afraid of Churchill and what he believed.
No strongly centralized, political organization feels altogether happy with individuals who combine independence, a free imagination, and a formidable strength of character with stubborn faith and a single-minded, unchanging view of the public and private good. — Isaiah Berlin (about Churchill)
Reading this second volume of Manchester’s biography of Churchill is both a pleasure and a frustration. A pleasure because Manchester writes like a poet trapped in a historian’s body. He intersperses vignettes of everyday life that enliven the dates, places, and names of typical history. And Churchill is certainly a riveting figure, brought to his bigger-than-life persona before our eyes by Manchester’s evocative writing style. I loved the parts of Winston’s life at Chartwell: his hilarious morning bathing ritual, the lunches and dinners, the marathon writing sessions to cover his extravagant lifestyle (“experience had taught him that budgets did not work with his family. The reason—though he would never have acknowledged it—was that he was the family spendthrift”).
The frustration stems from knowing, with perfect hindsight, how incompetently and disastrously British government leaders acted in their appeasement of the obviously evil Adolph Hitler. Again. And Again. And Again. There were so many opportunities for England and/or France to stop Hitler, if only …
The biography concludes with Churchill becoming prime minister during one of the darkest periods in European history.
I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat … You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land and air, with all our might and with all the strength God can give us…. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: It is victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror, victory however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival. — Winston Churchill, First Address as Prime Minister
Cutting off the biography at this critical date provides almost no sense of redemption or vindication for Churchill’s sacrifices, and hardly any I told you so moments. I knew from history that this would necessarily be the case, but I felt disappointed. I wish that Manchester had been able to stretch this further into the war or the end of it.
Manchester left Churchill’s revenge for the final volume of the trilogy: Defender of the Realm, covering the war years through the end of Churchill’s life. Manchester suffered a debilitating stroke about a third of the way through writing the book. He asked his friend and journalist, Paul Reid, to complete it. Manchester died before it was published. By most accounts, the book is well written, but it necessarily lacks Manchester’s style. I’m torn on whether to read it or not, but I probably will. Even without the deft hand of Manchester on the tiller, getting more time with Churchill and finally reading about his hard-earned vindication will be worth it.
I chose this children’s story as my last read of the year after listening to an episode of the Old School podcast where musician Nick Cave shares how the book changed his life.
The volume I curled up with in my easy chair tonight was a Christmas present from an aunt and uncle back in 1971. The pages now brittle with age, the inscription to “Bobby” faded, felt both foreign and eerily familiar. I was a precocious seven-year-old when I read this, but I surely wasn’t prepared for all the violence and poverty and deceit. I remembered only vague outlines of the story, but found my hair standing on end a few times as long-hidden memories resurfaced. I wonder how many unconscious phobias and life decisions have come from reading this at too-young an age.
This time around, I brought a father’s perspective to the book. How Gepetto must have suffered during the many years of searching for his lost son; how helpless he must have felt. It also reminded me of all the crazy stuff I got away with as a teenager and young adult, and like Pinocchio, I lived to tell the tale. I thought about how some never get these second chances.
In the podcast interview, Cave chokes up when he shares how reading the book helped him during a time of intense grief:
I read this book a lot around the death of my son. The idea that the missing child ends up being able to save the grieving father, who’s been sitting in the belly of the beast on his own, became extraordinarily moving to me. It’s an inversion of the way it should be. The absent child returns to basically parent the parent.
Is this really a children’s book? Maybe. It is a fantastic story, and the language is simple enough for a child to understand. But only an adult could appreciate the religious symbolism, the moral quandaries, and the woes of loss. I’d call this timeless literature masquerading as a children’s story. I’m better for reading it.
