The World Divided in Two: 2021 and Another Splintered Year Spent Reading

 

"It felt like the world had divided into two different types of people, those who had felt pain and those who had yet to."

            -- Michelle Zauner, Crying in H Mart

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We are living in splintered times.

[Aside: Just saying such a sentiment makes the sentiment seem untrue, makes it seem too overtly obvious, too meaninglessly trite, too flat-out sentimental. But it's true: the times we are living in--the times that we have been living in for quite some time now--are beyond the pale in their ability to hurt us, and to lash out at us, and to cause us to feel isolated, and to cause us to feel anxiety, and sadness, and maybe even despair.]

We have all possibly felt it from time to time recently. I am not describing anything new for any of us. I know that.

In such times, though, we can seek out the company and the comfort of others. Friends. Family. Loved ones. The calm found in the presence of someone else. Succor. Solace. Call it whatever you want; it is "strength in numbers" sort of stuff. And it is real. But you could alternatively choose the opposite reaction and purposely seek, instead, to be alone.

The comfort of yourself--there is nothing quite like it; there is also nothing wrong with it. 

There can be, and is, great medicinal benefit to securing for yourself a little quiet time every now and then, a little alone time, a little time in which you allow yourself to simply be yourself. Time in which you give yourself permission to enjoy the silence. Time in which you grant yourself the freedom to admit--if only to yourself--that it is okay to spend some time alone.

In such quiet times over this past year, I enjoyed the quiet company of books (words, authors, story-presence), and so I was never quite alone. It helped the time to pass, all the days and weeks and months of another year in pandemic-mode. We all have our own ways of dealing with it; we all do what we can. I like to read. And so I read a lot over the past year. I had some time to spare in 2021--alone and yet not alone--and I enjoyed my time spent with some great books.

Below is a selection, listed alphabetically, of some of the better books I read last year--a form of healing, of sorts, in these broken, wounded, divisive times.

FAVORITE READS OF THE PAST YEAR -- 2021:

Crying in H Mart: A Memoir (2021) -- Michelle Zauner

 Zauner--a young musician hailing from the northwestern music scene of Oregon and Seattle--is best known today as the singer/songwriter/guitarist of the indie rock/pop band, Japanese Breakfast. Before that she served a brief stint in the band Little Big League. Now she can add bestselling, award-winning author to her CV with this, her first book, evolved from a 2018 essay she originally published in The New Yorker. Born half-Caucasian (her father) and half Korean (her mother), Zauner's book is part grief-memoir, part identity-discovery testimony, part love story, part lyrical ode to her growing up a part of two cultures, and part introduction to Asian/Korean cuisine. A graduate of Bryn Mawr College's school of creative writing, Zauner is the real deal as a writer. She knows what she's doing here. Poetic. Confessional. Hilarious. Moving. Insightful. Wise beyond her years. And unforgettable.

Fleishman Is in Trouble (2019) -- Taffy Brodesser-Akner

New York City power-couple Toby Flieshman (a successful, young doctor) and his beautiful wife, Rachel (a successful, young talent agent) find themselves locked in a bitter divorce. Told in the 2nd-person, Toby is the novel's central character (at first), while the book's narrator is a woman who has been close friends with Toby since college, and who--we learn later in the novel--has a troubled marriage of her own. The novel is an interesting take on the relationship between men and women, gender roles, and domestic nightmares in various forms. (The Fleishman "in trouble," according to the book's title, might be Toby, as we are led to assume. Or it might be Rachel....) As soon as you think you have the characters and the story figured out, Brodesser-Akner--a staff writer at The New York Times, in this, her debut novel--pulls the rug out from under your expectations; you find yourself suddenly uncomfortable and unsure of all you thought you knew.

Horror Stories: A Memoir (2019) -- Liz Phair

It should come as no surprise that Liz Phair can write her ass off. The indie-auteur phenom of the early1990s music scene (indelibly linked with a genre of "alternative rock" of the day, blending in-your-face confessional poetry with in-your-face guitar-hooked pop-rock, which she helped to usher in) is most well known for her flat-out masterpiece, the 1993 album Exile in Guyville. And now (like Michelle Zauner above) we have Phair's first book, proving something her fans have already always known: Phair is a wonderful storyteller. Her individual chapters are all standalone stories pulled from various incidents in her life. At times these stories read more like a collection of contemporary fiction, and you find yourself thinking, This surely couldn't have happened like this.... But then of course she reminds you, through her art, that this is exactly how life is, and this is exactly how it all went down.

Interior Chinatown (2020) -- Charles Yu

This 2020 National Book Award-winner is a gem. Only the second novel from Charles Yu, Interior Chinatown tells an (at times) epic story of the Chinese-American immigrant experience while all the while telling the intimately personal story of young Willis Wu, "Generic Asian Man" and occasional "Delivery Guy" in a fictional TV cop-show Black and White, where he dreams--always in the background, typecast as the "model minority"--to someday take the spotlight and play the coveted role of "Kung Fu Guy." Written in a deceptively playful postmodern manner--including being formatted as a motion picture screenplay--this is a funny, harrowing, and ultimately moving experiment in both fact and fiction. I love this book.

Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell (2004) -- Susanna Clarke

A brief story about this book:

In the long-ago days of my separation and eventual divorce (beginning way back in the dim year of 2004), I remember initially taking only a few things with me as I left the house. Essentials--the usual day-to-stuff one needs to get by, if only for a short while (or what would turn out to be another lifetime). Among the things I took with me at that time was a hardback copy of this book, just recently published. I tried to start reading it then, in the early days of my exiled solitude and loneliness. Susanna Clarke's dense, immense alternative-history fantasy (set in 19th-century, Napoleonic-war era England) was just a bit too much for my addled brain then. And I gave it up, only about 1/4 of the way through. Fast-forward (but not too fast) 17 years later, and I pulled the book from my shelves again, blew the dust from it, and cracked it open to the first page.... 

Long story short: I could not turn the pages fast enough this time. And it occurred to me, as I read it in earnest at this point in my life {with all that has happened to me since I first took the book with me as solace, to help me get lost in another world so long ago) that the person I was way back when wasn't ready to tackle the novel. I wasn't in the right place in my life. But I was ready now for Clarke's amazingly clever and unique tale, so much its own creation. Books will wait for us, I realized. They will choose their readers carefully. (Even though we think we choose them.) And when the time is right, they will select us. And they will carefully read us--all the while teaching us how, and when, to finally fully read them.

This book is a contemporary literary masterpiece of speculative/fantasy fiction. It deserves to be remembered, and read, and revered for ages.

Klara and the Sun (2021) -- Kazuo Ishiguro

No one--and I mean no one--writes a novel like Nobel Prize-winner, Kazuo Ishiguro. It is not easy to pinpoint exactly what it is he does that is so damned special. But it is there, in between the words almost, lodged in the characters and their plight--so fraught with longing, and desperation, and their dream of happiness, and the awareness of the almost impossible gulf between them and what it is they most desire. No one writing today comes close to Ishiguro for touching--every single time--upon just what it means to be human. Almost in parallel lines with his masterful 2005 dystopian science fiction novel, Never Let Me Go, Ishiguro's latest novel exists as a sort of "spiritual" sequel, in line with that earlier novel's themes. 

One by one, Ishiguro's books can break your heart. And this one--in its shimmering, impassioned, sad longing--is no exception.

Life Itself: A Memoir (2011) -- Roger Ebert

I wish I could have met Roger Ebert. I wish I could have gotten his autograph. I wish I could have talked to him, asked him some questions--about his life, his art, about writing (of course), about movies (of course). I wish I could have listened to his answers, his anecdotes, his stories of life as an early reporter for the Chicago Sun-Times, and then assigned the job as the Sun-Times' film critic, and then the winner of the coveted Pulitzer Prize, and then the popular co-host of the television show(s) he shared (in all its iterations) with beloved rival Chicago Tribune film critic, Gene Siskel. Ebert obviously never knew what he meant to me; growing up as a young boy, a film buff in isolated western Kansas, I first learned about something called "cinema" from this film critic in Chicago. His gift to me was priceless; I feel I owe him a "thank you," at the very least.

This book was his closing gift to all of us. And it is enough.

The Plot Against America (2004) -- Philip Roth

Leave it to Philip Roth to tell us where we would be in 2021. Chilling. Breathtaking. Heartbreaking. Eerie in its prescient, metaphorical glimpse at an all-too-real alternative reality of a fascist America--where Franklin Delano Roosevelt loses the presidential election to famed celebrity aviator/anti-semitic/Nazi-sympathizer Charles Lindbergh. And the rest is...well...history. (Sort of.)

Roth is an American master, and here he was writing at the top of his late-career powers. The Plot Against America is pretty much an undisputed contemporary masterpiece.

Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece (2018) -- Michael Benson

I am an admitted cinephile (in the correct parlance, I suppose). As such, I am also a confessed devotee of the master American filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick. I am a fan of his films; I enjoy them. I like to re-watch them, to think about them, to ponder them, to discuss them, to read about them. I have always liked his groundbreaking 1969 science fiction film 2001: A Space Odyssey, made in mythic collaboration with legendary science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke. I have always liked the movie. I have always admired it and its place in film history. But it's never been a movie that I could honestly say I embraced warmly. That is, maybe...until I read this book. Benson's deep-dive into this strange, wonderful, masterful, one-of-a-kind work of groundbreaking cinematic art made me see Kubrick's classic film, at long last (as if for the first time), as the genuine masterpiece of "human cinema" that it is.

This Isn't Happening: Radiohead's "Kid A" and the Beginning of the 21st Century (2020) -- Steven Hyden

In 1997, the British alternative rock band Radiohead released their third album to the world, OK Computer, and it would quickly become one of those rock albums--arty, thematically conceptual, moody, with guitar and "noise" hooks, and dark, brooding, mysterious lyrics--that is heralded into the rarefied air of the Great Rock Albums of All Time. Three years later appeared their fourth album, their follow-up to a masterpiece that by all rights could not be followed up. And yet...the band did it. Not with a repeat performance of all that worked before, but with the exact opposite, almost. The appearance of Kid A in 2000 (just one year before the paradigm-shifting events of 9-11-01) was perhaps even more thematically, socially, artistically "important" than its predecessor--in fact, maybe one of the most important rock albums ever.

I have always loved Radiohead. And I have always loved the album Kid A. I could not put Hyden's book down.

HONORABLE MENTIONS:

Best. Movie. Year. Ever: How 1999 Blew Up the Big Screen (2019) -- Brian Raftery

Raftery's book may seem like a required textbook for "film-nerds" and cinephiles everywhere to dig into, to hash out, to argue over, to pick apart, to agree with, to think about, to come to terms with. His argument's thesis could not be more simply stated than it is in his book's title, and while I'm not sure I (still) entirely agree with him, his argument is fun. I enjoyed revisiting some of the movies from 1999: It was a good year (not to sound too much like Sinatra, but...). It was a very good year.

But the best ever? The GOAT of movie years? I don't know about that. Still, a good argument is a good argument, whether I completely agree with it or not. And this was a good argument and an entertaining read.

Billy Summers (2021) -- Stephen King

Let me fill in some background a bit:

Ever since I was in high school and my Algebra teacher, the wonderful Ms. Kris Waldren (a veritable saint in disguise as a math teacher) loaned me her copy of the classic 1978 novel The Stand, I have been a devoted fan of Stephen King. And this was back in the early-to-mid-'80s, when King was in his cocaine-and-alcohol fueled heyday as a masterful storyteller and craftsman of popular (and in several instances very, very good) novels with a largely supernatural bent: Carrie (1974), 'Salem's Lot (1975), The Shining (1977), The Stand (1978), The Dead Zone (1979), Firestarter (1980), Cujo (1981), Different Seasons (1982), Pet Sematary (1982), Christine (1983), The Talisman [with Peter Straub] (1984), It (1986), Misery (1987).... Do I seriously need to keep going? Classics, I would argue. Great American popular novels. All of them.

And then...as is wont to happen over time, something happened. Granted, the man has nothing left to prove anymore. But for at least the past 20 years (or more) he hasn't really proven anything so much, other than that he has kind of run out of ideas and has merely coasted on his reputation and on a working man's devotion to churning out novel after novel after novel, all sadly reading more like caricatured, well-crafted fan fiction. (Which is too bad, because--as the above roll call of titles indicates--when King was in his prime he was on fire and could not be touched. No one was even close. But those days are gone.) And then a funny thing happened last year: He published a good novel. (No, not a great one. I don't think so, anyway. But a strong one. A good one.) Billy Summers hearkens back to his best art of slow, methodical, carefully layered character-building and plot construction. One thing that holds this book back, however, is its tired, cliche' story-type of the good-hearted hired-killer making careful plans to get out of the business, just one last job, a big one, and then he's gone. We've seen it just one too many times before, maybe. (As we have, of course, the young girl who gets thrown into the killer's life, giving him something pure to believe in, something and someone to help redeem him before the inevitable, telegraphed end.) We've seen all of this before. And yet what makes this book good is that King calls back some of his old, latent talent, and he does some of his old tricks, and he shows that he still knows how to do it all and do it very well. Faults and all, the book still does what it is supposed to do. And it kept me turning pages. Which is one of the most basic things you can ask of a writer, I suppose.

July, July (2002) -- Tim O'Brien

Tim O'Brien is easily one of the greatest living contemporary American authors we have. He is a genuine treasure. His unproclaimed "trilogy" (of sorts) of Vietnam War novels--the National Book Award-winning Going After Cacciato (1978), his masterpiece The Things They Carried (1990), followed by the award-winning In The Lake of the Woods (1994)--are, each of them, unmatched, unparalleled, and untouched in the canon of American Literature. This 2002 effort by O'Brien reads just like that, unfortunately--an effort that for some reason or other just never comes together and never quite works in the manner of his greatest writing. I don't know if he wanted this to be some sort of "Part 4," the last "chapter" of a great tetralogy of his Vietnam War. (If he did, it doesn't read like it. Overall, it reads like what it is: A tired retread of material he has done before and done exceptionally better.) Still...all that being said, there are a few scenes--Vietnam War scenes, particularly--that read just as powerfully as anything he has written. The problem is, those scenes are too few and scattered between longer passages of "present-day" material at a college reunion (The Big Chill sort of vibe), peopled largely by characters who are not particularly interesting or likeable. And yet those great moments linger in your memory, like the sun somehow catching the glint of gold lying in the silt at the bottom of a river. Those moments are very fine.

As it turns out, though--at least to me, anyway--even "lesser" Tim O'Brien (and, let's face it, maybe even "not good" Tim O'Brien) is still worth reading, and maybe even better reading than 90% of what is often out there to read.

Moonglow: A Novel (2016) -- Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon exploded to fame with the 1988 publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh--which, amazingly, he began writing as an undergrad in college and would eventually publish as his MFA graduate thesis. (Who does that?) He would follow this out-of-the-gate success with Wonder Boys (1995), and then the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), as well as 2007's The Yiddish Policeman's Union.

Chabon is a chameleon with his talent. I honestly believe there is nothing he can't do as a writer. And while Moonglow may not be "top-shelf" Michael Chabon--maybe high "middle-shelf," after all--it is still very good. Some postmodern fireworks here in the form of a pseudo-memoir by a writer named Michael Chabon, whose grandfather--dying after a long, full life--begins recounting his charmed life to his grandson, the writer. This is a funny, moving, deeply rich reading experience--kind of like every Chabon novel, in other words.

The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz (2020) -- Erik Larson

Like so many of the writers and their books on my list this year, I could say of Erik Larson what I have mentioned previously: He can seemingly do anything he wants. As a nonfiction historical writer, his subjects are wide and varied: Isaac's Storm (1999), Devil and the White City (2003), Thunderstruck (2006), In the Garden of Beasts (2011), Dead Wake (2015), and now this one, his latest, about England during W.W. II, about London, specifically, during the Blitz, and about the great British leader Winston Churchill, as he painstakingly struggles to hold the literal structures and the spirits of his country together while patiently trying to urge America (represented by his great friend and ally, President FDR) to come to England's aid. Winston Churchill is so great a character, I am convinced he exists in a world all his own: Had he been created by the greatest English novelist, no one would have ever believed it.

"It's supposed to be charming...": Watching Movies in 2021

 

Arthur Howitzer, Jr.: [reading aloud from a news story] "Pick-pockets, dead bodies, prisons, urinals." You don't want to add a flower shop or an art museum?

Herbsaint Sazerac: No, I don't.

Arthur Howitzer, Jr.: A pretty place of some kind?

Herbsaint Sazerac: I hate flowers.

Arthur Howitzer, Jr.: [reading aloud again from a news story] "Rats, vermin, gigolos, streetwalkers." You don't think it's almost too seedy this time?

Herbsaint Sazerac: No, I don't.

Arthur Howitzer, Jr.: For decent people?

Herbsaint Sazerac: It's supposed to be charming.

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We can say what we want about the year 2021. There would undoubtedly be a lot to say. If years had sequels, then--true to the notion that most sequels don't quite live up to the film that preceded them (rare and famous instances excluded, of course, like the often-mentioned exceptions, The Godfather Part II and The Empire Strikes Back)--2021 sucked as a sequel to the already historically dismal year 2020. I believe that's fair to say.

On most fronts--public, political, social, private--we couldn't seem to collectively or independently catch a break in 2021.

Just when things seemed to have gotten "better" as the year progressed, things soon took a nosedive again. We all know it. There isn't any sense in rehashing what we have all spent the past two years experiencing, again, collectively and independently, over and over.

In the world of film/movies/cinema, though, I have to say that I think this was an exceptionally good year. It was a challenging year for filmmakers and for their films, certainly--as artists making art, not to mention as workers in an industry. But we have discovered, through the fires of this ongoing pandemic, new ways of doing old things. In such a forge, the current struggles have seemed to strengthen some aspects of the film industry while simultaneously weakening others. We have accustomed ourselves, rather quickly--through necessity and because of a shared love of watching films--to a different, evolved way of "watching" movies. Cinemaplexes opened up again, with required social restrictions. Online streaming services flourished. Highly anticipated "big" movies--with big budgets, promising big-screen spectacle, or "smaller" new titles from big-name filmmakers--were given calendar-date releases, only to be stalled, or bumped back, or re-scheduled over, and over, and over, and over....

Again, I'm reporting on news that all of us already know.

And yet, all things considered--2021 being the terrible year that it was--we were treated to some really fine movies over the past year. One way or another, whether it was venturing out to the movie theaters again or staying home and catching up with films on streaming services like Netlix, Hulu, Prime, etc., I enjoyed a great year of movie-watching. 

Below are two different lists comprising my choices for some of the best movies I saw over the past year. The first list of ten titles are all "new" films that were released, one way or another, in 2021. The second list of ten titles includes some more "new" 2021 films, as well as a few "older" films from recent years that, through streaming at home, I was only now seeing for the first time. Regardless, these are all great films in my opinion. There is no system of valuation here, no ranking order--descending or ascending--of "greatness" to my lists. I didn't do that. Such valuation seems pointless right now, in light of the year that was.

Both of the lists below, then, are ordered alphabetically.

FAVORITE MOVIES -- 2021 FILMS:

Annette (2021) -- dir. Leos Carax

It isn't often that I find myself saying these days, as a film's end-credits begin to roll, "Well, I've never seen anything quite like that before." But such was my response to French filmmaker Leos Carax's latest project. With the exception of its dazzling self-aware opening musical number, "So May We Start," right at the film's outset, I found myself (in the movie's first 30 minutes or so) seriously questioning if I had the fortitude to make it through its looming 140-minute runtime. But by the end of it all, Carax's strange, haunting rock-opera/dark parable of the vampiric entertainment industry had completely won me over. I immediately started urging anyone who would listen to me to give this offbeat, dark, strange, moving, lovely little film the chance it deserves.

Annette is in a category all its own this year.

Dune (2021) -- dir. Denis Villenueve 

A lot can be said about a movie that makes you forget just how awful David Lynch's 1984 big-screen Dune debacle was. Anyone who's read Frank Herbert's dauntingly dense 1965 epic sci-fi novel knows how notoriously unfilmmable the book supposedly is. (To which Lynch's contribution nearly proved correct, I might add.) Fortunately for us, though, time has passed. Visual and sound effects have leaped light-years ahead in regards to what can believably be accomplished on a grand scale. And we have a filmmaker in Canada's Denis Villenueve who understands the intricacies of Herbert's original world-building and has the patience and the vision to successfully bring it to the screen.

A new sci-fi epic-in-the-making; I look forward to its "Part II."

The French Dispatch (2021) -- dir. Wes Anderson

You either love a Wes Anderson film, or you hate it. If you hate one of his movies--for whatever particular reason(s)--odds are high that you will more than likely hate all of them. Conversely, if you love one of his movies, the chances of you serving as an acolyte to the vaunted "Wes Anderson style" are exponentially (and probably annoyingly) increased.

I unreservedly and unabashedly fall in the acolyte camp. No apologies. No explanations. I just think his films are extraordinary explorations into the world of filmmaking (and art) itself, and into the nature of whimsy, and loneliness, and joy, and melancholy, and the people whom we love, and the people who don't love us back, and our need for acceptance, and our need for family--even if that family is made up, finally, of a "family" we make for ourselves. 

The Green Knight (2021) -- dir. David Lowery

For years my high school English classes--seniors who are bored, and tired of school, and simply wanting a passing grade so they can graduate--have read the 14th-century chivalric romance, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Originally written (anonymously) in Middle English dialect nearly 700 years ago, its 101 stanzas still manage to work their magic. Nine times out of ten my classes will begin the reading with the typical grumbling, moaning, griping, and complaining. And nine times out of ten my classes will come to the end of the poem surprised at how much they enjoyed it.

David Lowery is a daring artist, and his take on this old poem is everything you would hope a film adaptation would be in 2021. I couldn't take my eyes off the screen--right up until the movie's last line of dialogue (maybe one of the great film-closers of all time).

Licorice Pizza (2021) -- dir. Paul Thomas Anderson

I honestly think I had a smile pasted on my dopey face during the entire running time of this film. I couldn't help it. It is just pure delight. Funny, nostalgic (in the best sense), heartwarming (without being needlessly saccharine), and genuinely good-hearted. It is almost hard to believe that those adjectives are describing a P.T. Anderson film. Although he is easily on the shortlist of great contemporary American filmmakers, his movies are not usually described as "funny, nostalgic, heartwarming, and genuinely good-hearted" smile-busters. But this one seems to be that rare outlier.

Headed by first-timers Cooper Hoffman (son of Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Alana Haim (one-third of the band, HAIM, with her sisters, who also make brief appearances in the film), this thing has charm, charisma, and chemistry to spare. I loved every minute of it.

Pig (2021) -- dir. Michael Sarnoski

Imagine this elevator pitch for a new movie idea: A "retired" Portland chef, Rob Feld, now living off-the-grid in the outlying woods, wakes to find his truffle-hunting pig stolen from him. He goes on a journey to find his beloved pig and discovers, in the process, the dark underground of the urban restaurant scene--a world of drug addicts, and shady fight clubs, and desperate, lonely misfits who don't understand Rob's simple life-code: "We don't get a lot of things to really care about."

Imagine a first-time director at the helm. Now imagine Nicolas Cage being cast in the lead role as Rob....

No, by all calculus, this thing should not have worked. But against all odds it does. Beautifully. This is a stunningly good movie.

The Power of the Dog (2021) -- dir. Jane Campion

Set in 1925 Montana, yet filmed in New Zealand by renowned New Zealand filmmaker Jane Campion (her first feature since 2009's Bright Star) with a script she adapted from the 1967 western novel of the same name by closeted-gay author Thomas Savage about Old Testament-style brotherly resentment, grief, love, jealousy, anger, memory, fear, and sexuality.

Real Jane Campion sort of stuff, in other words.

Not your father's western, maybe. But this thing is going to have some staying power. While maybe not up to the level of Campion's masterpiece, 1993's The Piano, this is still a film that will be remembered over time, not only as one of her best (which is saying a lot) but also as simply a great movie. I think it is masterful.

Spencer (2021) -- dir. Pablo Larrain

What is a human life worth--in monetary value, I suppose (if that can even be definitively determined) but also in more metaphorical, emotional values? What is the cost of a human life? I don't know. But Larrain's movie made me ask such questions. And, granted, it also made me think of such current terms as "white privilege" and "first-world problems," etc. (Is it possible, after all, to feel sorry for a white, wealthy, privileged British princess suffering from depression, and bulimia, and existential despair? Fair questions, I guess. But the answer is simple: Yes.)

Kristen Stewart has come into her own as a fine young actress. And this is a stirring, strong, unforgettable performance as the late Princess Diana. Along with her recent films with French filmmaker, Olivier Assayas, this is some of Stewart's best work.

Summer of Soul (2021) -- dir. Ahmir "Questlove" Thompson

I had never heard of this six-week 1969 concert held in Harlem's Mount Morris Park, featuring some of the greatest black musical acts of the time. And chances are neither had you, I'm guessing.

And that, I suppose, is largely the point behind Questlove's absolutely mesmerizing work of archival documentary filmmaking. From original footage of the event, to interviews with older attendees looking back at the great concert and wondering why no one had ever documented it before, this movie soars.

"I thought I had dreamed it," one grown attendee says in the film.

This is a great musical documentary that deserves to be seen. And to be remembered.

West Side Story (2021) -- dir. Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg has nothing left to prove, really. He's done it. But he decided to prove himself again this past year, anyway, with his film remake of the great (and by "the" I mean maybe the), classic American musical.

Does it get any better than West Side Story as far as stage musicals? I don't know. I'm not an expert on the art. I just know what I like. With a classic score by the great Leonard Bernstein, and lyrics by the equally great Stephen Sondheim, as well as original dance choreography by the great Jerome Robbins (updated in 2021 by Justin Peck), Spielberg's retelling of the classic stage-to-film musical not only updates Robert Wise's tired 1961 movie-version but also ups the ante. And it does so with great urgency and with great style. We needed a movie like this during a year like 2021.

2021 MOVIE-WATCHING -- HONORABLE MENTIONS:

About Endlessness (2019) -- dir. Roy Andersson

This past year I quietly discovered Sweden's Roy Andersson. (Which is the best way, I suppose, to become familiar with an artist like Andersson and his work.) Though certainly not to everyone's taste, his minimalist, offbeat, often off-putting films--made up of short, individual scenes carefully pieced together in a thematic montage--inexorably begin to work their spell on you. I look forward to making up for lost time and working my way through his film-backlog.

Upon finishing this movie, I immediately started it over again and watched it straight through, beginning to end. (I imagine someone else could watch this movie and wonder what's wrong with me; but, honestly, this is the thoughtful, explorative, philosophical sort of film that I want to savor and to spend time with.) Great stuff.

Get Back (2021) -- dir. Peter Jackson

Never one to do anything in a small way, Middle-Earth visionary Peter Jackson is on a roll these days with back-to-back breathtaking documentaries, both pieced together with archival footage run through the best film technology of his New Zealand-based Weta Workshop. First there was Jackson's 2018 W.W. I documentary, They Shall Not Grow Old, blowing our minds with its stunning use of film-colorization done right. And now, this past year, we were treated to his nearly 8-hour behind-the-scenes glimpse at the inner-workings of the last days of The Beatles, holed up together (for the most part) in a London sound-studio, working feverishly for 21 days on the material that would make up the band's legendary final two albums, Abbey Road and Let It Be. The resulting film is unbelievably watchable.

Gunda (2020) -- dir. Viktor Kossakovsky

Filmed in glorious black-and-white by auteur Russian documentarian Viktor Kossakovsky on various farms and animal shelters in Norway, England, and Spain, and "starring" a sow and her scene-stealing piglets, and some cows, and some sheep, and a one-legged chicken, this is a film that follows the daily life of a simple mother and her children. Pieced together in deliberately slow, long takes (oh, the patience of the film crew here), the movie beautifully weaves a picture of pastoral life slowed down to a four-legged pace, a life lived on a farm by a pig and her litter of little piglets snuffling for a place at the dinner line, snorting behind her on the daily walks around the yard, tracing an existence of no small consequence lived from birth in the barn to...the film's jaw-dropping denoument of a mother's agonizing incomprehension turned to slow, painful realization of a pig's sad fate on a farm. 

I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020) -- dir. Charlie Kaufman

I've noticed several online discussion threads dedicated to deciphering the supposed confusing and confounding nature of this film, with viewers seeking answers to what it's all about and what it's all supposed to mean. I streamed this movie on Netflix and so had the luxury of re-watching it quickly and yet at my leisure. It is a movie that certainly benefits from at least a repeated watch--if not more (taste willing). And although Kaufman is notorious for his elliptical, existential, postmodern touches as a writer/filmmaker, I actually found this movie to be fairly decipherable on the first (and second) viewing. You just have to pay attention, and be a cognizant watcher, and notice the subtle intricacies of what's going on--a dreamlike reverie (or nightmare) on loneliness, and love, and isolation, and dreams, and despair. Heavy stuff, maybe, but a work of art from a genuine artist.

The Killing of Two Lovers (2020) -- dir. Robert Machoian

I caught up with this movie on Hulu this past year, and it blew me away. It shook me. The gut-wrenching honesty of its indie-style exploration into the pain, and the confusion, and the awkwardness, and the sadness, and the rage, and the heartbreak, and the helplessness of a young husband/father going through a separation/impending divorce from his wife/mother of his children is visceral. I felt it under my skin. And it made me shiver with memory. Writer/Producer/Director Robert Machoian is fantastic here, from the film's startling opening shot, to its use of non-diagetic sound--a thunderous, repetitive clicking (the cocking of a gun?)--that works to unnerve you, to unsettle you, and to keep you wondering, right up to the movie's last scene, just what is going to come of all this agony.

The Lost Daughter (2021) -- dir. Maggie Gyllenhaal

Seasoned actress and first-time writer/director Maggie Gyllenhaal seems to have intuitively absorbed, over the course of her acting career, just what it takes to make a damn good movie. She has obviously watched, and listened, and paid attention. With her script adapted from the 2006 novel of the same name by Italian writer, Elena Ferrante, Gyllenhaal enlists the aid of some top-shelf acting talent here to tell this tightly-wound examination of a middle-aged woman on the verge of coming unraveled. Olivia Colman, Jessie Buckley, Ed Harris, Dakota Johnson... It's a heady brew. 

(Not that movie-awards season technically means anything--I get that. But still...it is recognition. And I hope Colman and Buckley, at least, are remembered and recognized for the great work they do in this film.)

No Time to Die (2021) -- dir. Cary Joji Fukunaga

All right.... Calm down. Calm down. I know. I know....

I feel fairly safe in assuming I am probably one of the few people anywhere mentioning this film on any sort of 2021-End-of-Year-Best-List. But....

I make no excuses: I enjoyed this movie. It made me smile. It was entertaining. While certainly not a "perfect" film, I liked the closure it brought to the arc of Daniel Craig's five-film run as 007.

(Side note: The film-stealing action sequence reuniting Craig with his 2019 Knives Out co-star, Ana de Armas, was worth the price of admission itself. It made me hungry for the rumored Knives Out sequel... We'll see.)

Raya and the Last Dragon (2021) -- dir. Carlos Lopez Estrada and Don Hall

Another "guilty pleasure" from the past year, I suppose. (Although I have never been entirely clear why we are supposedly hardwired to intuitively feel guilt over something that brings us pleasure. Oh well...I'm not going to tackle that conundrum here.)

I saw this movie in the theater with my daughter. It was one of the first movies we saw together, venturing back with one another into the sparsely populated movie theaters--like dipping a toe into the uncertain COVID waters--and we enjoyed it thoroughly. So much so, we returned together to the theaters to enjoy it a second time....

I think it is a good "guilty pleasure." I remember the movie, largely, for those shared experiences, the two of us. It is a great memory.

The Sparks Brothers (2021) -- dir. Edgar Wright

It is entirely possible that I enjoyed this movie more than any other single film on my lists. Edgar Wright's documentary about the 50-year career from the pop-music act of brothers Ron and Russell Mael (the creative duo behind the band they call Sparks). Like most viewers--I'm assuming--I had never heard of the band Sparks. (I find that fact almost impossible to believe, considering I am a music buff, and the brothers' career has spanned a large part of what could only be called my "growing up" years. But I'd never heard of them until this film. Not even once.)

Which, much like Questlove's documentary, Summer of Soul (see above), Wright attempts to correct. And he does so. Wonderfully.

(Side note: Sparks wrote the music/story for the film, Annette.)

Thelma (2017) -- dir. Joachim Trier

Like Sweden's Roy Andersson, I stumbled upon the Danish-Norwegian filmmaker, Joachim Trier, during the past year. And I'm glad I did. His 2021 film, The Worst Person in the World, has earned a lot of high praise and acclaim, to date; and, to date, I have yet to see it.

In the meantime, though, I came across this earlier film from Trier on Hulu, and I felt--while watching it--as if the wind had been knocked out of me. What a great movie-watching experience. From its shattering opening scene (some of the most impressive first 5 minutes of any film I've ever seen, perhaps) to its provocative closing scene, I never quite knew where this film was leading me.

Thought-provoking, disturbing, visually exciting: I love this movie.

Apocryphal (The One-Armed Man): a song

     (1)

The news came down today.

A ragamuffin's heart and a charlatan's way

of saying "Goodbye." 

Of course it doesn't matter in the end.

It seems that what you spend is all you've got.

    (Chorus 1)

And what a shame, at the close of the day,

to be nothing more than the one-armed man.

Living your life, passing through time,

only to find when everything's done

and the curtain comes falling down

that for good or bad

you'll only be remembered

for the one thing you don't have.

It's so apocryphal.

    (2)

"The best is yet to come." Or so they say.

But one way or another there's never 

an end to what resolved itself through fire--

just burnt ashes and the smell of endings

hanging on a wire, left undone.

    (Chorus 2)

And what a laugh, at the close of the day,

to be nothing more than the one-armed man.

Passing your time, living your life,

always to find when everything's done

and the curtain comes tumbling down

that for better or worse

you'll only be remembered

for all you no longer have.

It's so apocryphal.

    (Bridge)

When everything's for nothing

and nothing's for the good of it all,

burning bridges on the river

that runs through the tide of time.

Clouds of smoke,

blood on water,

twisted memories of those days

and all the ways I could have

bent like a tree in the wind,

holding ground, and rustling leaves,

losing limbs like bridges slowly falling down.

All falling down.

Just falling down....

    (3)

There's a phantom feeling that comes in time,

when what's no longer yours still hangs on.

It's in the hours when the night falls darkly down,

before you're ready for the lowlight scenes.

Another drink thrown back and gone. It's all gone.

    (Chorus 3)

And it's okay, at the close of the day,

to be nothing more than the one-armed man.

Pissing away time, playing at your life,

hoping to find when everything's done

and the curtain comes crashing down

that there was no other way

but to only be remembered

for what you never really had.

And it's oh-so-apocryphal.

Yeah, it's always apocryphal.

In the end, it's so goddamned apocryphal.

Henry Bemis and Me: A Year of Reading in Solitude Amidst the Rubble

 

____________________

INTRO

"'The best-laid plans of mice and men...' and Henry Bemis, the small man in the glasses who wanted nothing but time. Henry Bemis, now just a part of a smashed landscape, just a piece of the rubble, just a fragment of what man has deeded to himself. Mr. Henry Bemis... in the Twilight Zone."

-- Rod Serling (closing narration), "Time Enough at Last," The Twilight Zone: Season 1, Episode 8 (starring Burgess Meredith), originally aired November 20, 1959 on CBS

For readers the world over, it would seem--at first glance--that the year 2020 might have been from the perfect cloth. After all, when everything [Aside: And by "everything," I do kind of mean "everything"] came to a crashing halt, leaving all of us quarantined at home, alone with our loved ones and with ourselves, we all of us suddenly found ourselves with time on our hands to more or less do whatever we wanted. For movie buffs, this meant time to catch up on some quality movie-watching. For television addicts, this meant ample time to stream and binge on everything offered up by the algorithm. For car enthusiasts, this presented itself as time spent alone in the garage, the hood to your old classic propped open, droplights illuminating the old engine where you lose yourself. For music-aficionados, this meant flipping through old record albums, dusting them off, and spinning them again. For sports nuts, this meant more time than you knew what to do with to follow all your favorite games, and your favorite teams, and your favorite athletes. For online gamers, this meant unlimited time lost in the chosen game-world. And, again, for readers it meant time at last to settle back in your favorite chair--a stack of books piled on the floor beside you--and the opportunity to literally make time disappear within the pages of a book

Suddenly, in 2020, readers found themselves with something they had perhaps always quietly wished for: a chance to read, to dive into a book (or books) without having to worry about scorn or judgment from others, and without having to hear the age-old question: "Don't you have anything better to do?"

Because, quite frankly--for maybe the first and only time in our lives--readers could answer a question like that with: "No. I have nothing else to do. Now, leave me alone."

The quandary arises, of course, when you have more time than ever to do something that you love to do, how do you discriminate? How do you choose wisely? When a reader suddenly has on their hands more time than ever before to catch up on their reading, what do you choose to read?

[Aside: I know... First-world problems.]

Below is just a sampling of some of the books and writers I chose to spend time with over the past 12 months. There were other great books and writers that I had read before and that I chose to revisit and to reread in 2020 (titles like The Old Man and the Sea, The Hobbit, Catch-22, The Country of the Pointed Firs, The Plague Dogs, The Hotel New Hampshire--all of them wonderful books that definitely would have made my year-end list of Best Reads), but I decided to leave them off this list. Below are only new books (or "new" to me, anyway) that I cracked open and read during this past year. Ten books that challenged me, entertained me, made me happy, made me angry, made me laugh, made me scared, and made me glad to be alive, even in difficult times such as these--books that made me glad to have time enough at last to spend some of my time (and some of my pandemic-induced solitude) in their company.

_______________________

10.) I Am C-3PO: The Inside Story -- by Anthony Daniels (2019)

What a notably strange career Anthony Daniels has had over the past 40 (+) years as an actor and an entertainer. A returning cast member in what is undoubtedly one of film history's most lucrative and popular movie-series of all time, Daniels has been able to maintain an almost unheard-of level of anonymity. Outside of legions of diehard/convention-level Star Wars fans, an actor of Anthony Daniels' CV can walk down the street basically unknown and unmolested by hordes of autograph-seekers and selfie-hounds. To most of us, he is a veritable mystery man--which is also, unsurprisingly, his personal axe to grind in this brief memoir/autobiography. As the physical- and voice-actor of the character C-3PO in all nine of the "canon" Star Wars films (not to mention various stints voicing the character in numerous offshoots and animated Star Wars series), Daniels loves this robot that he has brought to life over his lifetime as an actor. But he also undeniably feels cheated, somewhat, out of the "normal" career that seems to have eluded him. He has spent his life as an actor behind the golden body-suit armor of one of the most well-known and beloved characters in all of filmdom. And yet...therein lies the story of his life, I suppose.

Daniels is not a writer, nor does he pretend to be. If there is a weakness in his book it is in his somewhat amateurish writing style. (At times it reads, honestly, like an over-zealous older teenager expounding on his thoughts and feelings. But...then again he's not a professional writer. And that's okay.) Would the book have been better if he had been aided by a co-writer, to help "dress up the style" a bit? Perhaps. But then part of the clunkiness of Daniels' writing is in perfect keeping with the Star Wars films themselves (clunky dialogue and all). And it accentuates the fact that it is his story--literally the inside story--of what it's been like for him, sacrificing his ego and his career for the love of a character he has spent his life creating. As a life-long Star Wars fan reading Daniel's memoir, I discovered a thing or two about the Star Wars films that I did not know. His book is entertaining. It's fun. And it put me inside that suit, if only for a while, to look through the eyes of someone else--an actor, a robot, an icon.

 9.) A Journal of the Plague Year -- by Daniel Defoe (1722)

I don't think it's a mistake that my "Best Of" reading list for 2020 consists of several titles having something to do with disaster--either natural or man-made.

[Aside: It was, obviously, that kind of year.]

Would I have picked up Defoe's book under more "normal" circumstances? I don't know. I almost doubt it. But our contemporary life being what it was in the year past (and still is in 2021--let's just accept it right now), I thought this book--written nearly 300 years ago and set, fictionally, in the bubonic plague-ravaged  streets of London--would be an interesting comment on our modern COVID-19 life that we all seem to be living. And I was right. Defoe's 18th century fictional-nonfiction is amazing.

From the parallels--gleaned from history--to our own times in the haggard 21st century, Defoe charts a remarkably prescient glimpse of our world in 2020, staring down a microbial enemy. The echoes are startling, and when reading it I had to keep reminding myself that this is a work of fiction. Defoe, one of our first "novelists" in the English language, was (who knew it at the time?) one of our first genre-bending post-modernists, with this historic account told in a creative-nonfiction stylistic approach. As it is, it's an amazing "novel"/historical document that sings to the tune of our times.

 8.) Dune -- by Frank Herbert (1965)

Okay. Full disclosure: It seems I have always been aware of Frank Herbert's Dune and yet (for some reason) have always resisted it.

When I was younger, I was a sci-fi fan, snatching up whatever titles I could, devouring every piece of science-fiction (modern and classic) that I could get my hands on. This inevitably extended into the sub-genre of fantasy fiction, as well, and so early reading of novels like Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Childhood's End, as well as Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451, eventually melded with the likes of J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth sagas of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, as well as Richard Adams' anthropomorphic allegorical masterpieces, Watership Down and The Plague Dogs.

Along with all of this, then--always orbiting somewhere out on the periphery--was Frank Herbert's daunting Dune. I remember the stiff Permabound copy of the book on the shelves in my high school library, and I remember riffling through it occasionally, probably even checking it out from the librarian from time to time, and opening the cover, and turning to the first page, and taking a glance at the book's several Appendices toward the back of the book, as well as its Maps and its Glossary. And I am more than certain that Arthur C. Clarke's famously cryptic critical blurb on the cover (or in the inside cover)--"...I know nothing comparable to it other than The Lord of the Rings"--teased my curiosity all the more.

I have always enjoyed certain speculative fiction--I can be a sucker for fantastic fiction that deals with all the minutiae of carefully drawn-out world-building. Richard Adams had that skill. Tolkien more than had that skill. And I always knew (albeit indirectly and only through osmosis, in a way) that Frank Herbert's massive, mythological sci-fi masterpiece, Dune, doubled-down on the whole world-building thing and existed almost as a thing unto itself.

And yet strangely (for me at least) it remained unread. I just could not get into it, for some reason.

Fast-forward to 1984, my freshman year of college, and coincidentally the year of the release of David Lynch's legendary failed attempt at filming Herbert's almost unfilmable novel. 

[Aside: Let's face it, that movie is a disastrous mess, from start to finish. (Could there really be a serious dissenting discussion on that point?) Lynch is an artist of unparalleled talent and vision, in my opinion. But the book (not to mention the studio) got the best of him in this case, I believe.]

Anyway.... I do remember buying the pocket paperback movie tie-in version of the novel when I was in college--complete with the movie-poster artwork on the book's cover--orange colored sand dunes, and Kyle Mclaughlin striding heroically across the foreground, some sort of weapon-device draped over his arm and across his shoulders, looking every bit the messianic protagonist. [Aside: Cue the movie's theme music from Toto.] And I remember (because I was still intrigued and I was, already at that time, a fan of David Lynch) that I cracked open the book and tried to break into it. And I made it through the first chapter or so before quickly giving up.

I found the novel's mysteries impossible to crack, I guess. I didn't get it. It was beyond me, I suppose. And what's more, I didn't care.

But now fast-forward several decades. I'm older now (obviously). I've read considerably more (obviously). And yet another attempt to film this seemingly unfilmable book is "in the can," as they say (this time from visionary Canadian filmmaker, Denis Villeneuve--so we'll see), and merely awaiting a post-COVID green light, allowing it to open at theaters on the big screen...finally. So this year I thought would be an interesting time to once again try to tackle this cumbersome novel--hopefully making it past Chapter One this time--and finally check this book off my list of Heretofore Unread Big Books.

It's dense. It's complex. But the novel was not as daunting or impenetrable as I remember from my previous attempt 40 years ago. The book is definitely dated, I think--most definitely a product of 1965, when it was published. The drug-induced reveries of "the Spice," the ridiculously stilted dialogue, the clumsily awkward patriarchal sexism, the (supposedly) anti-Semitic take on Cold War-era views of the Middle East and U.S. relations.

It's all a mess of a mix, really. (And I'm not convinced that if the novel were to be published today it would find even half of its cult-like reverential audience--even underground. Who knows?) Herbert's classic novel is a product of its time, to be sure, but it is also undeniably the product of a massive imagination constructing and controlling a unique and singular vision.

Don't ask me what it's all about. I'm not entirely sure what all this vision finally amounts to or what it all means. But I'm glad I finally read it.

 7.) The Thing With Feathers: The Surprising Lives of Birds and What They Reveal About Being Human -- by Noah Stryker (2014)

One upside to the whole "quarantine thing" over this past year, I suppose, is that (like many people, I'm assuming) it has caused me (or "allowed me," if you'd rather) to slow down and to take a closer look at the immediate world around me. This year's pandemic and quarantine has allowed me to take inventory, to take stock of all the things I have and of all the things I'm missing.

My back yard--as it reveals itself to me now--is a remarkably interesting place. My back yard is its own little ecosystem--its own little world--of rabbits, and squirrels, and raccoons, and snakes, and possums, and chipmunks, and deer, and coyote, and birds.

I have lived around birds all my life, obviously. For 50+ years now I have listened in the back of my mind to their voices singing to one another, calling, laughing, searching, ringing through the air, and I have watched our little winged neighbors flit so casually and effortlessly in and out of the corners of my eyes, up and down, floating from tree to tree, from limb to limb, from branch to branch, from tree to ground, and back again. And I have barely noticed them.

The more I began to watch them over this past summer, the more I wanted to make time to watch them. To observe them. To note and to infer what in the world could possibly be going on with them in their airy, leafy world above my back yard.

So I got my hands on Stryker's book, wanting to maybe gain a little more educated insight into what I was watching and listening to, and I couldn't put the book down. It has changed the way I watch and listen to the ecosystem, the little world above me and all around me, the daily avian drama in my trees in the back yard.

 6.) Whale Day: And Other Poems -- by Billy Collins (2020)

From the beginning of the quarantine, the former U.S. poet laureate, Billy Collins, took to taping and recording short little daily poetry readings and discussions from the comfortable book-strewn confines of his home and study in Florida. These continuing "sessions," then, are posted to his social media sites--a daily visit and conversation that Collins has taken to calling "The Poetry Broadcast."

Subsequently, he also published his 13th collection of new poetry this past year. Like all of Collins' work, his persona's voice in this book sidles up next to you like an old friend, and you simply find yourself once again picking up the relationship since the last time you'd met. 

He's just so good at what he does best. I don't mean this simile to sound like a detriment or a criticism, because it isn't meant that way at all: Collins' poetry reads like a comfortably worn-out pair of shoes, or jeans, or sweatshirt--the kind that you're so used to you have forgotten just how good they feel, just how much you like them, until you slip them on again, and settle in to them, and find yourself saying, "Oh yeah.... This is it. This is what I like...."

It's inevitable, I think. His poetry is often--and rightfully so--described as playful, and humorous, and grounded in the everydayness of everyday life. And while those descriptions are apt, it can be too easy to simply leave his poetry there and to dismiss it and to miss what else is also there: How, for example, he so effortlessly (it seems) picks at the threads of subtle and seismic nuances in the everydayness of our everyday lives, uncovering places that we thought we had either hidden or hidden from, and all the time echoing the depths of some great and profound silence and sadness.

Collins is a contemporary master. He is a national treasure. I will read anything he writes.

 5.) Hiking With Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are -- by John Kaag (2018)

With such book titles on his Amazon page as Idealism, Pragmatism, and Feminism: The Philosophy of Ella Lyman Cabot (2011), Drone Warfare (War and Conflict in the Modern World) (co-authored with Sarah Kreps, 2014), Thinking Through the Imagination: Aesthetics in Human Cognition (2014), American Philosophy: A Love Story (2014), Hiking With Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are (2018), and Sick Souls, Healthy Minds: How William James Can Save Your Life (2020), you could be fairly quick, I'm sure, in assuming that John Kaag would be the life of any party. 

This book was fascinating, frustrating (at times), captivating, maddening, and finally fully illuminating.

Yes, as the title suggests, it is a book about walking. It is a book about walking through mountains, to be more specific. It is a book about hiking through the Swiss Alps, to be most specific, and about the pursuit of the19th-century German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, to follow--quite literally--in his footsteps, and to better understand what it means to be a human being.

Kaag, a respected professor of philosophy at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell, is haunted by Nietzsche's writings and teachings, and returns to the master's beloved area in the Swiss Alps, Sils Maria, with his wife and young daughter, to pursue his own demons, to chase them down, to hopefully finally understand Nietzsche, himself, and the meaning of his own life.

This is the kind of book that you read a little bit, put down, think about, process, read some more, put down, think about, process...and repeat. It's thoughtful, engaging, and undeniably challenging in the gauntlet that it throws down before you. Nietzsche, after all, was not an easy philosopher to either fully understand or to fully accept. The story of his life (which Kaag pursues on his own parallel track) is a story of genius, and madness, manic highs and lows, joy, sadness, and ultimately despair. Kaag--on the journey with his wife and daughter--discovers something that always eluded Nietzsche, perhaps.

And the result--at least in part--is this book. I found it moving, maddening, and beautiful.

 4.) Nemesis -- by Philip Roth (2010)

If there is another late-20th century American author of Philip Roth's stature who turned out such a surprisingly strong run of books in what came to be the "late period," I would like to know who the author is. By 1997, Roth's output (already prodigious and worthy of cementing him in place as one of America's great contemporary writers) was further solidified with the publication of American Pastoral, which would go on to win him the Pulitzer Prize the following year in '98. That book would be followed by 2000's much applauded, The Human Stain, and later, in 2004, by his alternative-history masterpiece, The Plot Against America.

All told, that is an incredible run of fine novels for any "older" writer to achieve. At a time when a writer (of such a lauded reputation) could normally relax and set the pen aside and step away from an honorable career of great books, Roth seemed intent on doing the opposite. He found a second wind at the tail end of his career and produced what many critics consider not only some of his own personal greatest work yet but also, perhaps, some of the greatest work by any contemporary American writer at the time.

In the years immediately following The Plot Against America, Roth then released a trio of short, gasping little novellas, as if finally, at long last, maybe the air was gone. But then in 2010--as if in one last, closing burst--came this novel, Nemesis, which though while just falling short of being a "great" Roth novel, perhaps, at least finds the strength to be filled with its author's typically formidable writing and some of the usual Rothian narrative trademarks.

Set in a sweltering summer of 1944 in Roth's own hometown of Newark, NJ, the novel (one of his last), signs off on his career with a story that looks back to an imagined outbreak of polio that sweeps through the city's Jewish Weequahic section, devastating countless lives--the victims, their families and loved ones, as well as the novel's doomed protagonist, Bucky Cantor, fated through the course of his life to suffer ignominy, loss, and loneliness.

While maybe the book won't be mentioned in the same breath as many of the other novels that make up Roth's pantheon, I still found Nemesis to be powerful, relevant, and moving. (I would imagine practically every writer alive would be honored to write such a "lesser" novel.)

 3.) The Topeka School: A Novel -- by Ben Lerner (2019)

I must admit, I was surprisingly unfamiliar with Ben Lerner's name before coming to this novel. As a young poet and novelist, Lerner does not have a long catalogue behind him. The Topeka School is only his third novel--his first, the acclaimed Leaving the Atocha Station (2011) was closely followed by 10:04 (2014). All of his novels (to date) are experiments of postmodern self-referential reflectivism, resulting in a clever play of fictional autobiography (or autobiographical fiction--take your pick).

This story's protagonist--Adam Gordon--is coincidentally the narrator in Leaving the Atocha Station, while 10:04's narrator is interestingly named Ben. 

[Aside: That's the limit of my knowledge of his first two novels, at this point, having only read this book, so far. But knowing even that small degree of Lerner and of the arc of his novels paints an exciting portrait of a young writer--hailing from my home state of Kansas--who is not afraid to push some boundaries and some buttons with his literary experimentalism and his deft poet's eye and ear for language.]

So, what's going on here? What are we to believe is real and what made up? Lerner is hardly the first writer to trip down this experimental metafictional Proustian lane, but this is a pretty fascinating contemporary addition to the genre. With scenes of mesmerizing wordplay and character-building, the book moves along quickly. It is compact, with passages of aching beauty and awkward humor and mounting dread and implosive sadness and explosive violence.

A depiction of late-20th century/early-21st century America--with its boiling angers, and hatreds, and manipulated rhetoric, and blunt-force trauma divisiveness--it feels as if Lerner somehow has his finger on the pulse of a nation, not to mention a voyeuristic telescope trained on all of us.

I plan on getting caught up on Ben Lerner, the writer.

 2.) Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World's Greatest Nuclear Disaster -- by Adam Higginbotham (2019)

I remember the days when I could say something as casual as, "I don't know that I've ever actually been legitimately frightened by a book before."

I can't say that anymore.

 1.) Gravity's Rainbow -- by Thomas Pynchon (1973)

I've written about this reading experience elsewhere [emptyshipoutward-bound.blogspot.com/2020/07/] and so won't belabor the point revisiting things I've already said and resaid ad nauseum about this one-of-a-kind novel.

Except by saying this: Pynchon's novel is an exhaustive and exhausting work--maybe the work--of 20th century American post-Cold War encyclopedic Menippean satire. It is funny. It is tragic. It is exciting (in places). It is boring as hell (in places). It is singular, and massive, and it is a crazy fucking masterpiece, in a world that unrelentingly needs exactly that.

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OUTRO

"Witness Mr. Bemis, a charter member in the fraternity of dreamers. A bookish little man whose passion is the printed page but who is conspired against by a bank president and a wife and a world full of tongue-cluckers and the unrelenting hands of a clock. But in just a moment, Mr. Bemis will enter a world without bank presidents or wives or clocks or anything else. He'll have a world all to himself--without anyone."

-- Rod Serling (opening narration), "Time Enough at Last," The Twilight Zone: Season 1, Episode 8 (starring Burgess Meredith), originally aired November 20, 1959 on CBS