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.
‘Are the child’s clothes still hanging in the wardrobe?’
‘You don’t ever have to say anything,’ he says. ‘Always remember that as a thing you need never do. Many’s the man lost much just because he missed a perfect opportunity to say nothing.’
‘See, there’s three lights now where there was only two before.’ I look out across the sea. There, the two lights are blinking as before, but with another, steady light, shining in between. ‘Can you see it?’ he says. ‘I can,’ I say. ‘It’s there.’ And that is when he puts his arms around me and gathers me into them as though I were his own.
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.
As an aside, I was able to attend “pub day” for this book at the 92NY in New York City, where Shteyngart and Amor Towles discussed the book and took questions from an intimate audience. I love New York!
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.
Favorite Highlights
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair …
A wonderful fact to reflect upon, that every human creature is constituted to be that profound secret and mystery to every other. A solemn consideration, when I enter a great city by night, that every one of those darkly clustered houses encloses its own secret; that every room in every one of them encloses its own secret; that every beating heart in the hundreds of thousands of breasts there, is, in some of its imaginings, a secret to the heart nearest it!
Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind.
“It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”
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.
I listened to the audiobook, which was probably a mistake. I could not stand the narration, particularly Louisa’s strident voice, which made me cringe for much of the book. How these teenage characters spoke, acted, and thought rang false far too often. The author’s continued use of literary device cheats grew tiresome by the end. I loved the book’s ideas and themes, but not its execution. As was repeated often, this was a really long story. Too long for me.
I have a strange weakness for novels that involve chess. I adored The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis (the book was so much better than the Netflix series). It’s the utter brutality of the game, but without the bloodshed, where wits matter, not brawn, or wealth, or greater numbers.
Surely it is championship chess, and not boxing, that is our most dangerous game—at least so far as psychological risk is concerned.
Joyce Carol Oates
This short, tight novella is about chess, yes, but it’s also an examination of the lengths the human mind will stretch and strain without variety or socialization.
Nothing on earth exerts such pressure on the human soul as a void.
A good chess story, but an even better story of the psychological dangers of extreme isolation and single-minded focus.
What a fun, creepy book! I loved the slow build of suspense and the unexpected twists. And the ending … Whew.
It’s hard to believe this was written almost sixty years ago. So much of it still feels fresh. Levin created a blueprint for generations of suspense and horror writers to follow.
I came to this book with high expectations. The New York Times considers it one of the best books (so far) of the 21st Century.
The story is simple enough: a professor with a background in amateur falconry retreats from public life after the death of her father to train a goshawk. I enjoyed the descriptions of the hawk, the English countryside, and the fringe customs of falconry.
The book bogged down for me in two ways: the author’s overwrought descriptions of her descent into near madness over the loss of her 67-year-old father, and the inclusion of a quasi-biography of the writer T.H. White. I think this book would have been better without the deep dives into her fascination with White. And the emotional punch would have been more effective had she let her actions speak for her feelings of grief. We all approach grief in different ways, so I know this is an unfair judgment on my part. This one just missed the mark for me.
There are levels of hell on earth that only a parent who has lost a child have traveled. YiYun Li, a successful novelist and mother of two, lost her oldest son to suicide seven years ago. Her youngest son, James, whom this memoir is loosely about, took his life last year in the same fashion as his brother. In this memoir, Li pays tribute to James and shares what it’s like for a mother to lose her children to suicide.
Li is a gifted writer. The language here is sparse and omits any emotional flourish. She is clear-eyed and honest about her experience. As someone who has lost a child, I could only read this in small doses. I can’t imagine how difficult this was for her to write.
Sometimes people ask me where I am in the grieving process, and I wonder whether they understand anything at all about losing someone.
One of the incredible things about books is when an author writes something so beautiful and so recognizably true, but you could never have grasped the thought on your own. Most readers won’t understand, but a few, the ones who never chose to be part of this unfortunate club, will nod their heads, and cry, and set this book down in meditative thought many times during their reading.
Having heard about bullet journaling for years, I decided to finally read Ryder Carroll’s well-regarded book. I didn’t expect to adopt the practice. I have a well-established journaling habit, both in a physical notebook in the mornings and in a digital journal app at night. However, I did pick up some interesting tips on ways I could make my notebook scribbles more accessible after the fact.
What surprised me was how well Carroll writes about the benefits of journaling for work and personal fulfillment, particularly how daily reflection can help you make time for those important but not necessarily urgent things in life.
This was a worthwhile read, no matter your stance on bullet journaling.
I love a great short story, but I don’t read enough of them. I decided to read one every night alongside my other reading. And what better source than this mammoth treasure of short fiction from the New Yorker Magazine’s first hundred years?
There are some well-known stories here that I had read before, and many from authors I knew well, but not their shorter works. Thurber’s “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” still amazes me for how much story can fit into just a handful of pages. And Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” continues to shock and fascinate me no matter how many times I’ve read it.
Out of the remaining 76 stories, there were a few that missed the mark, but most were very good, and some were fantastic. My favorites:
I bought this little gem from the Midtown McNally Jackson bookstore on our last week of a five-month stay in New York. Collected here are witty commentaries, short stories, poems, and essays, all originally published in The New Yorker, and each an ode to what I’m sure White would agree is the greatest city on earth.
The two moments when New York seems most desirable, when the splendor falls all round about and the city looks like a girl with leaves in her hair, are just as you are leaving and must say goodbye, and just as you return and can say hello.
I had to stop myself from gulping this down in one sitting. I read it slowly over a few evenings, savoring, reminiscing, and laughing aloud in places. I loved “The Rock Dove,” a piece on the roosting habits of New York City pigeons, and “Goodbye to Forty-Eighth Street,” an essay on the challenges of leaving a city he loved. But honestly, every piece in this collection is great.
Alain de Botton and his School of Life organization are on a mission to help otherwise bright people become more emotionally intelligent. We have lost touch with the instructive benefits of organized religion and the traditional family unit. Without this foundation, our quest for knowledge through technical and technological means has left our souls barren and empty.
De Botton suggests we need to study culture and art as a replacement for the calm and perspective religion once gave us. Without this, we will continue to seek our happiness in brash consumerism or destructive behaviors.
Buying expensive things can feel like solutions to needs we don’t understand. Happiness may be difficult to attain, but the obstacles are rarely financial.
And so, the book represents “a crash course” in emotional maturity, and by necessity, it must gloss over big swathes of psychology, philosophy, art, and literature. I didn’t pick up much new from the book, though it was a nice refresher in some areas. The British writing style, with its dry humor and roundabout sentence structure, was initially a delight, but it grew tiresome by the end.
For a recent college graduate, this might be just enough of a primer to tease a lifelong appetite for the arts and offer advice for being a better human being.
Highlights
Almost universally, without anyone intending this to happen, somewhere in our childhood our trajectory toward emotional maturity can be counted upon to have been impeded. Even if we were sensitively cared for and lovingly handled, even if parental figures approached their tasks with the highest care and commitment, we can be counted upon not to have passed through our young years without sustaining some form of deep psychological injury-what we can term a set of “primal wounds.”
The causes of our primal wounds are rarely outwardly dramatic, but their effects are rarely insignificant. Such is the fragile base of childhood that nothing outwardly appalling needs to have happened to us for us to wind up inwardly profoundly scrambled.
What properly indicates addiction is not what someone is doing, but their way of doing it, and in particular their desire to avoid any encounter with certain sides of themselves. We are addicts whenever we develop a manic reliance on something — anything — to keep our darker and more unsettling feelings at bay.
Most of what we are remains a secret to the world, because we are aware of how much of it flouts the laws of decency and sobriety we would like to live by. We know that we would not last long in society if a stream of our uncensored inner data ever leaked out of our minds.
Philosophical meditation seeks to lend us a structure within which to sieve the confused content that muddies our stream of consciousness. Key to the practice is regularly to turn over three large questions:
What am I anxious about right now? What am I upset about right now? What am I ambitious and excited about right now?
Kindness is built out of a constantly renewed and gently resigned awareness that weakness-free people do not exist.
The tragedy of every sorry argument is that it is constructed around a horrific mismatch between the message we so badly want to send (“I need you to love me, know me, agree with me”) and the manner in which we are able to deliver it (with impatient accusations, sulks, put-downs, sarcasm, exaggerated gesticulations, and forceful “fuck you”s).
People don’t change when they are gruffly told what’s wrong with them; they change when they feel sufficiently supported to undertake the change they-almost always—already know is due.
We must beware too of the “incumbent problem”: the vast but often overlooked and unfair advantage that all new people, and also cities and jobs, have over existing―or, as we put it, incumbent-ones. The beautiful person glimpsed briefly in the street, the city visited for a few days, the job we read about in a couple of tantalizing paragraphs in a magazine all tend to seem immediately and definitively superior to our current partner, our long-established home, and our committed workplace and can inspire us to sudden and (in retrospect sometimes) regrettable divorces, relocations, and resignations.
The way to greater confidence isn’t to reassure ourselves of our own dignity; it’s to live at peace with the inevitable nature of our ridiculousness. We are idiots now, we have been idiots in the past, and we will be idiots again in the future-and that is OK. There aren’t any other available options for human beings.
We tend to become ironic around things that we feel disappointed by but don’t think we’ll ever be able to change. It’s a maneuver of disappointment stoically handled.
There can wisely be no “solutions,” no self-help, of a kind that removes problems altogether. What we can aim for, at best, is consolation—a word tellingly lacking in glamour. To believe in consolation means giving up on cures; it means accepting that life is a hospice rather than a hospital, but one we’d like to render as comfortable, as interesting, and as kind as possible.
I read this one before, some twenty years ago, but I didn’t remember much of it other than the setting: a log cabin set on a lake in western Maine. I had a hankering to revisit this place long locked away in my memory.
This is a classic haunted house with enough mystery and spooky parts to keep the pages turning. We meet many of the residents of this lakeside Maine setting, and King captures both the joy and discontent of multi-generational life in an isolated community. Having spent over twenty years on a rural island in Washington state, I laughed and cringed at the similarities.
But, like most good Stephen King novels, it’s the exploration of the deeper human condition that lingers. In this case, the grief of losing a soulmate and how a loss like that changes you.
Grief is like a drunken house guest, always coming back for one more goodbye hug.
The narrator is a well-known writer who suffers from a debilitating bout of writer’s block. Through him, we learn a lot about the highs and lows of the publishing industry. The title is borrowed from a Thomas Hardy quote after he stopped writing novels: “the most brilliantly drawn character in a novel is but a bag of bones.” It’s a humble admission from our generation’s greatest storyteller that, as effortless as the final product seems to readers, writing is a tough business.
Highlights
I think reality is thin, you know, thin as lake ice after a thaw, and we fill our lives with noise and light and motion to hide that thinness from ourselves.
This is how we go on: one day at a time, one meal at a time, one pain at a time, one breath at a time. Dentists go on one root-canal at a time; boat-builders go on one hull at a time. If you write books, you go on one page at a time. We turn from all we know and all we fear. We study catalogues, watch football games, choose Sprint over AT&T. We count the birds in the sky and will not turn from the window when we hear the footsteps behind us as something comes up the hall; we say yes, I agree that clouds often look like other things – fish and unicorns and men on horseback – but they are really only clouds. Even when the lightening flashes inside them we say they are only clouds and turn our attention to the next meal, the next pain, the next breath, the next page. This is how we go on.
This is a difficult book to describe without spoiling the entire story. There are two plot lines at work: the narrator, a severely disabled and reclusive scholar writing a history of his literary grandmother, and the life of that grandmother, her husband, and children, eking out a difficult life in 19th-century American West.
Quiet desperation is another name for the human condition.
Stegner is a favorite writer of mine, and I trusted him through the first 500 pages that all this story would transcend the descriptions of an untamed West and the travails of unlucky pioneers.
My patience was rewarded by a spectacular ending, though any other writer might have lost me long before I turned that final page.
I’ve now read four of Stegner’s novels, saving this one, his Pulitzer Prize winner, for the last. I thought Crossing to Safety was his best, and Big Rock Candy Mountain absolutely gutted me. Still, I think this one will stick with me for a long time.
Highlights
I am neither dead nor inert. My head still works. Many things are unclear to me, including myself, and I want to sit and think. Who ever had a better opportunity?
Exposure followed by sanctuary was somehow part of Grandmother’s emotional need, and it turned out to be the pattern of her life.
Is it not queer, and both desolating and comforting, how, with all associations broken, one forms new ones, as a broken bone thickens in healing.
“What do you mean, ‘Angle of Repose’?” “I don’t know what it meant for her. I’ve been trying to make out. She said it was too good a phrase for mere dirt. But I know what it means for me.” “What?” “Horizontal. Permanently.”
Some cowardly, hopeful geometer in my brain tells me it is the angle at which two lines prop each other up, the leaning-together from the vertical which produces the false arch. For lack of a keystone, the false arch may be as much as one can expect in this life. Only the very lucky discover the keystone.
Wisdom, I said oh so glibly the other day when I was pontificating on Shelly’s confusions, is knowing what you have to accept. In this not-quite-quiet darkness, while the diesel breaks its heart more and more faintly on the mountain grade, I lie wondering if I am man enough to be a bigger man than my grandfather.
