Most men wouldn’t be caught dead in makeup—then they are, laid cold in a coffin for final display.

A spruce wears lights and stars only in the short frantic weeks between the lot and the curb.

Just one more tree until sacralized by impulse hardened bow saw teeth and icons of family and rituals passed and passing.

Baptized to a calling echoed in the myths of trees but hardly worthy a seven-year sapling otherwise destined (in some decades) to be a light pole or flare of fire;

Maybe a 2x4 that nobly holds a wall of the family home where a distant cousin or great-grandchild one day stands in temporary juvenile honor.

Another, spared enough days and a straight place to grow, could be a fine violin and make rosin for the bow.

Each day for years you dress yourself until one day someone picks out your last suit, like your first Christmas or Easter.

But in your last suit you won’t squirm against the too-tight collar or fret about the press of the pleats and color of the tie.

Until then will you struggle and fight, or gradually—gracefully, gratefully— drop needles on the carpet until someone says, “It’s time.”

In the most recent issue of the Guitar Foundation of America’s Soundboard Magazine (which isn’t available online) there is an article that has some real twaddle in it. The kind of thing that sounds impressive and passes for analytical insight, but is essentially meaningless.

Discussing the different issues surrounding historically informed interpretation of the music of Bach the author states the following:

We cannot fully understand the ideas of Bach or his contemporaries, because we, as modern listeners and performers, operate from a fundamentally different historical vantage point—one shaped by centuries of evolving musical interpretation.

Which is—obvious? How everything in the world works? And presupposes that there is some ultimate understanding of Bach that apparently his contemporaries could understand since they were of the same vantage point. Despite the fact that Bach’s music was generally unliked (even if respected) in his own day and distinctly unfashionable.

Does 200 years of performing, editing, recording, analyzing, and interpreting the music of Bach give us a lesser or greater understanding of the music? It took an interpreter like Pablo Casals to bring the Bach cello suites to broader attention. He quite literally found the music there that everyone else had ignored. Why was he able to do this? Probably because he (as an inheritor of the romantic tradition of interpretation) took it upon himself to interpret the music using his own taste and acculturation as a guide. And he had immaculate taste. Though clearly of their time, his interpretations are still vivid and arresting. The rich product of nearly fifty years of practice, performance, and contemplation.

(An historical sidenote: his first recording session occurred at Abbey Road Studios, a few decades before it would become the recording home of the Beatles. Casals (born in 1876) disliked recording and could only be convinced to do so because his political commitment to democracy and against fascism meant he refused to concertize in his native Spain, Germany, Italy, or Russia, effectively putting his European concert schedule on hold in the 1930s. More notes here. I can’t recommend Paul Elie’s Reinventing Bach enough if this interests you).

Very little scholarship (particularly manuscript scholarship) had been done when Casals discovered the suites in a secondhand store. He developed an interpretation from the version of the score he had, and he found deep riches there. Did Anna Magdalena (Bach’s second wife and the presumed recipient of the suites) understand this music more than Casals? A fascinating and unanswerable question. Her cello playing—like every note of music ever played before recording technology, and the vast majority of them since—is lost to history. There is a very real possibility that Bach would have liked her playing more than Casals, but we would prefer Casals (or Rostropovich or Maisky or Ma or whoever you like). There is very little doubt that our modern masters play at a technical level unthinkable to Bach in his time. (In her defense, A.M. had a lot of kids to raise).

Later in the article he quotes a paper that gives a symbolic analysis of the fugue from BWV 997 (it concerns the elements in the first ten seconds of this recording). According to one person, this music apparently means the following:

1. Five diatonic notes: symbolic of human perfection
2. Saltus duriusculus / descending seventh: representing the Fall of Adam
3. Five chromatic notes [in the higher voice]: signifying pain and suffering after the Fall
4. Quotation of the chorale theme Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland, evoking the salvific act of Christ
5. Resolution through a descending fifth: symbolizing Divine Grace [also one of the most formulaic of all cadence gestures]

I haven’t read the paper this comes from so I can’t answer if there is any documentary evidence from Bach that this is the case or if it is just a hunch by the writer. (I’ve read other symbolic analyses like this before and they are usually based on hunches). I’m also not categorically opposed to these kinds of interpretations, as long as they are presented as interpretive and not as an absolute musical truth. Some performers find this kind of representation very helpful. I get a good shiver from a saltus duriusculus just as much as the next guy. But absent some kind of evidence, or the greatest clue of all—lyrics, we can’t read Bach’s mind on what he intended. Especially not down to this level of granular meaning.

The author of the article can’t take that reasonable approach though. He comments, “for the performer, awareness of these rhetorical and symbolic dimensions is essential to an expressive and historically informed interpretation.”

This is so obviously not true I’m amazed it passed editorial. I’ve played this piece in utter ignorance of this possible symbolism and I daresay it was expressive. In fact, I wrote a substantial analysis of the form of this piece (it’s a da capo fugue, quite unusual) and brought many insights from that to bear on my performance. Alas, the fact that this all happened before the above was proposed means that my performance was helplessly inexpressive.

One of the unexpected goods of having children is the way is teaches you how to value your time. The daily growth and transformation of an infant breaks us completely from the relative sameness of one adult day after the next. A “busy season” of half a year might take you away from a quarter of a toddler’s life. John Muir said of the great American forests “nothing dollarable is safe,” and this is surely most true of our time. Everyone is trying to dollar our time (even in it’s smallest moments of “engagement”) but the time of a child is profoundly undollarable and to miss it such a high cost.

The thing children need is attention and attention is the spending of time. The poet David Whyte says “the only way to change the past is the quality of attention you give to the present.” Our past is created in the present. If you don’t want to regret missing the days of your children being young you can only accomplish that right now by saying no to something and giving them your time as it passes. If you have a choice (many do not) you are paying at a punishing exchange rate to be so busy now that you miss those few precious moments of early life.

Though there are fewer things now than ever that I’m willing to be dogmatic about, I feel absolutely certain that there is no amount of putting your phone away that you will regret. All its enticements are shallow and vapid, they do not transform the past in a positive way. One of its main functions is to strip the present of any depth and vibrancy. We view our surroundings between sips of amusement, always wondering if the new thing on the screen is more exciting than our static environment. It never is, it only seems that way because we have failed to give a high quality of attention to our surroundings.

Think about it and you will see that this is right. What sweet memories do you have of time spent clutching your phone, hunching your spine and squinting at the glow?

I read somewhere that by age 12 a child has, on average, spent 75% of the time with her parents she ever will. By age 18 is is 90%. Those numbers seem about right to me. I’m not sure if we have much control over changing those ratios, but we can certainly change how much time each of them contains.

When it comes to children, there is no later. There is only now, quickly becoming the past.

“Words and numbers have unchallenged cultural hegemony. It is our job to promote the importance of sounds!”

This was the battle cry of Vern Falby, one of the teachers I encountered in grad school that had a profound influence on my musical thinking. All of his theory classes were called “Thinking By Ear” followed by whatever the topic of the class actually was. They were very untraditional classes. The text was created by him and mostly consisted of work scores annotated with various “discovery procedures” that he invented to “suss out” (a favorite phrase of his) the inner workings of the piece. After doing many practice scores we would make Shenkerian reduction scores without using the notation. We would listen and sing the middle-ground lines to understand the melodic structure under the surface notes. This was one of only two times in 10 years of collegiate study I was asked to analyze music by ear. (The other was self-imposed because I wanted to write about a piece that did not have a score available).

His approach was his own, and required significant buy-in of time. Results varied for students. For me though, it worked, and it changed how I thought about many things. It was the first time I was truly challenged to do my analysis by ear and parse a form without consulting a score (we once spent several weeks of class listening to the first moment of Mozart’s 23rd piano concerto because someone asked a question about double-exposition form and he had never done one in class before. I have still never looked at a score but I know the form like the back of my hand). He had no interest in observations from the score that we could not actually hear when listening to the piece.

I bring this up because I have encountered an attitude among my students that the score is necessary for a deep understanding of classical music. I think this reveals two things: the kinds of training they have received and the quality of listening they are doing.

There is a historic connection between the growth of literacy and diminishing of memory. It was expected that by age 8 to 10 a young boy in the early medieval era would be “psaltered,” that is, would have memorized the 150 Psalms. It was not unusual for a poet to be able to reproduce an epic of several thousand lines after a single hearing. Even if these individuals were able to read, most things could not be read either because they were not written down or access to written works was so difficult. The only option to store information was in the memory, so it stayed in tip-top shape. (Another topic for another day is the techniques of memory that we have lost.)

Musical memory is no exception. I have played with folk and jazz musicians who can absorb a song in one hearing (including 32 bar changes, which is quite a feat). Most classical musicians I know cannot do this. It takes them many times around before a melody really sticks, much less harmony and all the other information needed.

I am a heavily notation-reliant musician, but in genres where it makes sense I have moved toward working by ear as much as possible. The side effects are surprising. For one, if I learn a song by ear I don’t forget it. There are standards I figured out years ago and can still easily sit down with a guitar to play through. There are other standards I have looked up in the Real Book to play, and I couldn’t even begin to play them without looking again. A favorite phrase of one of my guitar teachers, Christopher Berg, is “recall is more powerful than review.” This is an essential learning principle. You have to make your brain do the work of remembering something or it won’t (anyone remember any phone numbers anymore?). Recall is a muscle in extreme atrophy because of the access to information we are never without.

It seems to me that we should be doing as much listening as score watching in our classes. I think we are perhaps reluctant because working on paper feels legitimizing in the academic setting. When STEM majors are doing advanced calculations and practicing surgery on robotic patients we can’t just sit in class and listen to music, can we? We can, and we should. Analytical listening is exactly the skill we should be building. We might assume our students are doing it, but I wasn’t and I doubt today’s students are either.

As a rule, I don’t set New Year’s Resolutions, but occasionally a maxim to guide the year emerges.

This year’s maxim: The right way to do something is the easiest way.

This is primarily a statement against deferment. Deferred costs, deferred maintenance, deferred effort. Our instinct is to evaluate things based on their immediate cost and defer as many things as we can. Somehow our imaginations are very good at convincing ourselves we will be in a better position to do something later on. Most likely, you will not. In fact, you are most likely going to leave it until it absolutely must be done at an inopportune time. Let us call this the Untying Your Shoes fallacy.

How many times do you walk in the door of your home, kick off your shoes, and go about doing something else? It feels great to be home, we know this. But getting home is usually not as time-sensitive as leaving home for an appointment or work. Those are times when not having to untie your shoes before putting them on would be great. Coming home is leisurely. And yet, my tendency is to kick off my shoes and leave the untying to some future time when I’m hustling three tiny people with no sense of chairos or kronos out the door. Inopportune.

I think that this calculus is true for nearly every situation. Costs deferred now are paid for with interest later. Examples:

The last step of sharpening a tool ought to be wiping it down with oil. This drives water from the stones out and protects it from rusting. It is so much easier to take five seconds to wipe down a tool than it is to clean rust off later. And yet, it is very tempting to skip that last step to get back to work.

The same goes for when to sharpen. I have a bad habit of using a tool long after its edge is gone, which results in bad work that is hard to do. A sharp tool does good work easily, but you have to take three minutes to sharpen it. It will take longer to do a planing task badly with a dull iron than it will take to sharpen the iron and do the task well.

I have played the guitar long enough to be quite a good sight-reader. I can play most pieces at a reasonable level the first or second time through. This feels like incredibly fast progress, but it’s hiding a secret. When I’m sight-reading I am not absorbing the information of the piece in enough detail to continue making progress on it. It will sound about the same on the tenth play as it did on the first. Learning is not occuring. This is great if you need two hours of easy music for a gig, but concert prep is another matter.

The fastest way for me to learn a piece at concert-level is to work in tiny chunks, absolutely mastering each one at a glacially slow tempo, combining the chunks into sections and then bringing them up to tempo. When I practice like this, learning is rapid and assured even though the process seems slow. Unless you understand how our brains learn new motor programs you wouldn’t think practicing this way would work. As my undergrad teacher said all the time, “the slower you practice, the faster you progress.” The slow start is a fast finish, but a fast start never gets you there.

So this year, clean the kitchen before you go to bed, take out the trash before the bag is bursting, sweep the shop when you finish for the day not when you start tomorrow, clear out that inbox before heading home, change the oil on time. Untie your shoes when you take them off. You will pay these costs eventually, might as well pay them now.

This is the right way, and it is the easiest way. Maybe not the easiest way it could be done at this moment, but ultimately, it is the easiest way.

Every December I take some time to go through my reading list for the year and reflect on it a bit. While I read primarily for pleasure and at whim, it is also one of the primary ways I learn and continue in personal formation. I find it an invaluable exercise to take stock of the year and also clarify some things as I think about my reading for the coming year.

Two years ago I started writing a short annotation for each book when compiling my list, which is even better for thinking about a book you may have finished several months ago. I also do a little data crunching (at the bottom), which is just for my own enjoyment. Reading is not a competitive sport, though these numbers do help me understand how much fun I’m having.

Here are the books I finished in 2025 listed in chronological order by date of completion, with annotations:

Watch for the Light: Readings for Advent and Christmas, Various

• Edited by the good folks at Plough, this was a nice compilation of readings from a variety of sources.

Motherhood: A Confession, Natalie Carnes

• In a moment of serendipity, I picked this up right after finishing a slow read of St. Augustine’s Confessions not knowing that she was glossing his work through her perspective as a scholar and mother. Insightful and deeply personal.

Handel: His Life and Works, Jonathan Keates

• This was a “disambiguation” read, by which I mean, I was frustrated with the common stories and myths that circulate about Handel and the composition of Messiah seemingly every Christmas season so I finally went to a good source to sort out truth from fiction. Turns out, Handel regularly composed large-scale works in a matter of a few weeks (just like he did with Messiah), and other than obligatory participation in English civic religion he doesn’t seem to have been particularly devout. In fact, he seems to have been quite a man of the world.
• Great read though, and introduced me to much of Handel’s music that is just wonderful but not well-known.

Practicing Music by Design, Christopher Berg

• This is the best book of its kind that I know of (and there is a lot of tripe out there in the music practicing world). Combining insights from brain scientists with tested advice from great performers of the past, Mr. Berg (who, in full disclosure, was my guitar teacher for my undergrad years) gives a set of practicing tools that increase the learning value of practice immensely. I give a lecture in my freshman musicianship class summarizing the ideas of this book and it makes a huge impact on my students. If you have anything you practice regularly (an instrument, chess, a sport, anything) and would like to improve there are insights in this book that will help you.

Ambition Monster, Jennifer Romolini

• From one of my favorite sub-genres of “trying to make it in publishing in the big city in the early aughts,” this is quite a tale. It’s one of those memoirs that one suspects has been somewhat burnished (let’s avoid accusations of fabulism) into the punchy narrative it is, but it’s terrifically fun nonetheless.

Zero at the Bone, Christian Wiman

• One of the things I get from Wiman’s prose is exposure to poems (his and others). This work got me on to Wallace Stevens which filled a lot of the poetry reading I did this year. I appreciate his voice, but I am often frustrated by his ability to doubt everything except his own modern sensibility. Despite that, some incredible writing throughout this volume.

The Marriage You Want, Sheila Wray Gregoire, Keith Gregoire

• I read this along with a young couple my wife and I have been meeting with pre-engagement. I have what I consider a very good marriage, which I account largely to our ability to ignore most of the marriage advice found in christian literature on the topic. This book is not one to ignore, but includes a lot of helpful framing and information, and is one of the few that doesn’t fall into the unhelpful gender stereotypes that make up most books of this kind.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Roald Dahl

• One of the great upgrades to my reading life this year is that my oldest (he turned 5 in June) is up for reading “chapter books” at bedtime instead of just children’s books. I’ve taken this opportunity to revisit some of my childhood favorites and it’s been a gas. We started with the master of the form: Roald Dahl. I absolutely loved his books as a child, and I enjoy them even more as an adult (as does E). Dahl said that writing children’s books was much harder than writing regular literature, because adults read a book once and are done with it. Children, however, will read a book again and again and it has to be able to hold up to their imagination over and over. It was both stranger and more fun than I remembered.

In the Name of Jesus: Thoughts on Christian Leadership, Henri Nouwen

• I read with a small group of men from church. Nouwen describes his decision to leave a successful career in academia to serve in a group home for adults. By “Christian leadership” he of course means Christ-like service, one of the few books (and lives) I’ve ever read that actually follows that thought to its logical conclusions. Challenging and convicting, we had wonderful discussions about work, faith, parenting, and more in our group.

Mr. Popper’s Penguins, Richard and Florence Atwater

• Another bedtime read with my son. He absolutely loved this one, and it was much different than I remembered it from reading it 25 years ago or so.

Hallowed Be This House, Thomas Howard

• This was recommended to me by someone after a discussion of viewing the world sacramentally. I thought I would enjoy it more than I did, but it was fine.

My Name is Red, Orhan Pomuk

• After a non-fiction heavy start to the year, I got in the mood for some novels. This was a re-read, though it has been 8 or 10 years since the first time I read it. It is an astounding work with depth and detail that is hard to believe. Told exclusively in first person narrative by every character (and some animals, paintings, and others objects), on its face it is a murder-mystery about 16th century ottoman manuscript illuminators and miniaturists. But like all great murder-mysteries, it is probing many deep questions. East and West, Islam and Christianity, iconoclasm and iconography, writing and painting, love and lust, looking and seeing.
• I was introduced to this book by a piece of guitar music written by my friend Ron Pearl. I’m pretty sure this is the only time that has happened.

The Noise of Time, Julian Barnes

• A historical novel about one of my favorite composers, Dmitri Shostakovich. I’ve read a number of biographies about Shostakovich and listened to hours of his music. In this attempt at interiority by Barnes I didn’t meet the person I imagine Shostakovich to have been, though there were some effective ideas. I also found his writing a bit…twee? The kind of thing that passes for good writing but is actually not that great.

Americanah, Chimamanda Ngochi Adiche

• Another great novel. This was much of what you hope a modern novel to be: deep characterization, overlapping timelines and settings, cultural clashes. Very enjoyable, if a bit on the long side.

Harmonium, Wallace Stevens

• I have read a Stevens poem here or there for years, but Christian Wiman’s treatment of several of his poems in Zero to the Bone encouraged me to finally pick up this collection. I learned a lot about modern poetry reading this. His poems have the rare quality of being enjoyable even when inscrutable. Stevens is to poetry what Charles Ives is to music. And both happened to work in insurance, which is just the kind of trivia I love.

All the Beauty in the World, Christopher Brinkley

• This was gifted to me by a friend when I mentioned I would be visiting the Metropolitan Museum of Art this summer. It is the memoir of a man who, wracked with grief after the death of his brother, quit an enviable corporate publishing job to work as a guard in the Met for ten years. Brinkley concluded that standing quietly among the world’s greatest art would be what he needed to heal, and he was right. Enjoyable on so many levels, absolutely recommend. Especially good for museum and art lovers.

Between Two Sounds: Arvo Pärt’s Journey To His Musical Language, Joonas Sildre

• This was the first graphic novel I ever read cover-to-cover. Likely the last. My attention is just not calibrated to enjoy this, though I understand why others would.

Charlotte’s Web, E.B. White

• When it comes to children’s literature I am a firm believer that you stick to the classics. Surprisingly, a lot of classic children’s books are mostly about death. Charlotte’s Web really takes an unflinching view of the facts of life, but through the appropriate vehicle of farm life. This theme returned later in the year.

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Caroll

• Another read with E. Even weirder than you remember it being! Some truly hysterical dialogue (I was cackling while reading the tea party scene out loud).

How to Know a Person, David Brooks

• Maybe not a book I would have picked up on my own, but it was given to me (perhaps a subtle hint?) and I enjoyed reading it. My main criticism is that I think it’s very unlikely that a book about conversation skills can effectively teach conversation skills in any practical way.

The Classical Style: Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Charles Rosen

• A magisterial work of criticism and analysis. Rosen’s depth of knowledge of this repertoire is truly astounding. To become capable of writing a book like this requires daily in-depth study for decades. I’ve already been surprised how much I’ve used his ideas in my own teaching.

Stuart Little, E.B. White

• Such a strange and effective little book. White’s ability to turn a sentence is wonderful for the reader, and the audacity of the book’s premise was not lost on E. Stuart (who is a mouse) is also a fully accepted member of the family and they make various accommodations for him. But not so much that he doesn’t occasionally get stuck in the blinds and nearly die.

Fig Pudding, Ralph Fletcher

• I didn’t read this as a child, but my wife remembered it and picked it up at a thrift store. It’s about a family of 6 kids, five brothers and a sister (exactly like my family growing up, so that got my attention). I won’t spoil it, but let’s just say some very heavy things happened for a children’s book. Death is a major part of this book, but unlike Charlotte’s Web it doesn’t remain with the animals. When E’s betta fish, Mikey, his first pet, died in November I was reminded of how important it is to encounter difficult things in art before you encounter them in real life.

Arvo Pärt: Sounding the Sacred, ed. Peter Bouteneff

• This is a collection of analytical and critical essays from the perspective of sound studies, which has been making its way to more concert music from its origins in jazz and pop music. I think it’s generally the wrong tool for the job, and most of the essays were not particularly insightful. Most of the authors have some other interest that they were attempting to cudgel Pärt’s music with but it didn’t result in good analysis. Pärt is one of my favorite composers, so it was a bit disappointing.
• One interesting tidbit was that Pärt worked for quite a while as a sound engineer and radio operator. When he started working with Manfred Eicher at ECM records to record the standard versions of his works, his understanding of recording and making a particular sound was clearly a factor in achieving such a consistent “Pärt sound.” His monk-like persona hides some signifiant technical prowess.

Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell

• My wife is a prolific reader of novels, most of which are not exactly my taste, but when she recommends a book to me I almost always read it (she does tend to know what I like). This was an excellent recommendation (and before I knew there was a Chloe Zhao film version in the works). It was a bit of a slow start, but the second half was riveting. O’Farrel’s realism and unflinching depiction are wrenching. Great, great ending as well.
• We went to see the film in the theater in December. Beautifully made, and just as wrenching as the book. There was loud and open weeping throughout the theater (which, on the rare occasions I darken a movie theater, is exactly what I want). Book and film both highly recommended.

Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston

• I didn’t read a ton of novels this year, but man, I chose some good ones. I also read quite a few first-for-me authors, including Hurston. Her novels were an extension of her anthropological work with American Blacks while slavery was a living memory and Jim Crow daily life. Her ability to create vivid and realistic characters through dialogue is really amazing. This book is like sitting on the stoop while friends and neighbors pass through telling tales.

King Lear, William Shakespeare

• I read this before seeing it on stage, and was reminded yet again of the incredible work actors and directors do. Much better on stage than page, but his sheer imagination is always startling.

A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit

• This is one of those wonderful, broody collections of essays that are so beautifully wrought you just float through enjoying the sentences and images. Would be a perfect companion to a long road trip through the American west.

The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison

• Another great novel, but absolutely harrowing. Themes of trauma (committed, experienced, inherited, cultural) self-image/hatred, and the colonization of the mind. Morrison does not flinch in her portrayal, with almost journalistic precision, of the facts this story builds over the course of the book. Morrison’s first published work, it took some time to gain attention and won the Nobel prize in 1993, 23 years after publication.

The Big Relief, David Zahl

• Another read with a small group of men from church. Led to a lot of good discussions, Zahl is a great collector of good illustrations.

Sharpen This, Christopher Schwarz

• An essential guidebook for anyone who works with sharp tools and needs to know how to make them sharp again. “Making tools dull is more fun than making them sharp.” “The solution to nearly every woodworking problem is sharp.” Schwarz is a delightful writer, and the instructions in this book are a model of clear instructional writing with comic relief.

Ralph S. Mouse, Beverly Clearly

• Another read with E. He got very invested in the mouse show the class put on.

The Nine Tailors, Dorothy L. Sayers

• Yet another first, my first Dorothy Sayers book. This one was chosen somewhat at random (I found a nice hardbound copy at a book sale) but it was very enjoyable. It is a bit of a slow opening with a lot of campanology (bells and bell ringing), but they were sufficiently integrated into the plot it made sense structurally by the end.

The Liberated Imagination, Leland Ryken

• Ryken outlines a very coherent set of principles around engaging in the arts. A lot here I had worked out in my own thinking and teaching, but some nice new additions as well. Its real weakness is his one-dimensional portrayal of modern art and its various movements. He just doesn’t have a broad enough experience with it to comment helpfully on it as a whole, which is what he purports to do.

The Sonnets of William Shakespeare, William Shakespeare

• Something of a bucket list check-off, but thoroughly enjoyable as well. Such a wild imagination. Take a few months and read one a day, you’ll be better for it. If nothing else, you can be one of those smug folks who casually mentions you’ve read all of Shakespeare’s sonnets (caveat lector).

Entries, Wendell Berry

• This collection from 1994 was a real treat. Berry is somewhat uneven as a poet. I found this out reading sections of the New Collected Poems. It’s a bit of a scavenge. I’ve also learned that I much prefer smaller, curated collections of poems anyway. Nice small books you can put in your jacket pocket on a walk, just in case.
• The collection is divided into four sections. Section 1 is Berry at his ruminative and grateful primarily, seeking a peaceful alternative life. Section 2 wanders toward his angsty register frequently. Section 3 ranges into issues of love and loss, male and femaleness, and the various connections we make throughout our lives and how they change.
• The final section, In extremis: poems for my father is the highlight of the book. Written (autobiographically, I assume) from the perspective of a middle-aged man caring for his aging father, they are elegiac, tender, frustrated, and bracingly honest about the challenges of aging and caring for an aging parent. The lessons learned from a father, the memories of ancestors slipping away from his slowing mind, the depredations of a mind and body once strong and capable (”His mind was then an act / Accomplished soon as thought, / Though now his body serves / Unwillingly at best / His mind’s unresting will.”), the frustrations of disagreements, and the memories of past hurts all swirl together, connected by the clear love for the father that doesn’t hide away his faults and challenging personality. Some of the most moving of Berry’s poetry I have read, I’m sure I will return to this in the future.

Small Teaching, James L. Lang

• I started reading this on a Sunday and used an exercise in class Tuesday. Immensely useful and practicable. Much like musical performance, a lot happens in the moments and this book is about teaching the moments. Highly recommend to anyone who wants to teach things to other people and have them learn.
• Lots of overlap with the reading I’ve done on practicing instruments. What do you know, learning is roughly the same whatever your discipline. A project I would love to tackle is writing/adapting a set of small teaching strategies for one-on-one music lessons. There is much opportunity to apply these there, but a little adaptation might be needed. Plus, there is a general dearth of good literature about teaching applied lessons rather than in a classroom setting.

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson

• Needed something quick to tide me over while I waited for a book in the mail. Found this on the shelf and it was great fun. Hadn’t read it since I was probably 13 or 14. RLS likes his long sentences, but it’s a very short book. Perhaps literature’s most influential novella? I can’t think of another with cultural recognition like this one.

A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens

• I have seen this on stage and listened to various audio versions nearly every year of my life, but to the best of my recollection I have never actually read this book myself. An error corrected! I started it with E and he was a real trooper, but he was afraid of the ghosts (he’s a sensitive soul) so I finished it on my own. I’ve never gotten into any of the long Dickens novels (though I love the good miniseries versions of them), I just may have to in the coming year.

Waiting on the Word, Malcolm Guite

• Guite is one of my guiding lights and I returned to this wonderfully curated collection of poems for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany (I read ahead a bit…). Reading analysis of poems can be like reading a dishwasher manual, but Guite’s is vivid and full of insight. Particularly where broader prior reading than my own is useful he always sheds light without getting in the way.

And now, the numbers. A single book can be counted for more than one genre, so those numbers do not add up to the total at the top. I find those categories helpful to see what kinds of things I’m reading in broad strokes. I also have data from the last two years. Turns out I had quite a good reading year (2023 numbers are artificially boosted by the birth of my twins, I spent most nights that year feeding a baby and reading).

We had a good Christmas. We aren’t traveling for any of the holidays this year, and while we do love visiting family it is a relief to not have a trip looming or be on the road.

I thought the anticipation would kill E (our 5-year-old), but he handled himself very well today. We had my brother’s family over last night so he went to sleep late and by 7:00 this morning he was jumping in his bed singing “Jingle BELLS! Jingle BELLS!” I expect we’ll have a big crash tomorrow, but today was wonderful.

If there’s anything that can make you as happy as getting legos as a kid on Christmas, it’s giving legos to your own kids.

E bashed out two 300-piece+ lego builds in a few hours almost completely on his own. Last Christmas he got his first set and could’t build it at all. Even six months ago he couldn’t have handled sets this complex.

Except the Christmas I spent in Naples, FL, this was the warmest Christmas I can ever remember. Sunny with a high of 75º . Couldn’t even wear the cozy socks I got, shed my flannel by 11.

Christmas didn’t really register for the twins last year, but they were into it this time around.

We decided to potty train them this week. Might have been a tactical error, but E (little E, I have two children with E names…) finally made her first big “peep” (rhymes with poop, they came up with this) on the potty. Our Christmas miracle.

It was a year of buying two of each present for them. Hopefully we can get away from that, but they did parallel play with their matching toys most of the afternoon. The doll strollers were a huge hit, they “took them to the park” on walks many times.

Books and tools for me. It’s good to be known well. I even spent an hour in my shop this afternoon while everyone was resting and before dinner prep really got going. I don’t think I’ve had any downtime on Christmas since we had kids.

Dinner was magnificent. Mince-meat pie has a branding problem. All the more for me.

The Incarnation astounds me more each year. Of all the ideas in the world, it is the most outrageous. Immanuel, God with us.

Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.

That’s right, it’s Christmas break and we’re reviewing sixty year old recordings.

When it comes to baroque music, I’ve usually been a fan of small ball. Bach cantatas with a chorus of 16 is usually right, and a nimble chamber orchestra is all they need. The music is acrobatic and large ensembles often can’t maneuver at the pace needed.

The same goes for Handel’s Messiah. The recording I have listened to the most is the Academy of Ancient Music directed by Christopher Hogwood. Another particular favorite is Stephen Cleobury’s, which takes all of part I like it’s single breath. Really thrilling pacing.

This year though, I decided to listen through the 1966 London Symphony recording directed by Colin Davis. I’ve had it on vinyl for years (before I had a record player I think, a thrift store find) but realized I’d never actually listened to it. I expected not to like it very much, since it is firmly from the “Big Bach” era of baroque recordings with romantic sized orchestras.

I was wrong, it is wonderful. Though skeptical, I was won over by the end of the Sinfonia. The opening section seemed lethargic to my tastes (24 violins can’t be quite as overdotted as 3), but the heft it gives to the fugatta section was striking. This was the impression throughout, bigger bigs but still small smalls. This group can get to real size without straining.

The tempos are not ponderous, even though the forces are large. The chorus is also quite nimble. It’s hard to imagine the Berlin Philharmonic chorus of the same era handling the choral fugues with the clarity achieved here, but the English choral tradition of a straighter tone and precise tuning really helps.

John Shirley-Quirk is another highlight. His musicianship is unmatched, and his sense of sung English (highlighted in his work with Britten’s operas) is magnificent. The rest of the soloists I could take or leave, Wakefield particularly is the wrong fach.

You may have attended a performance of Messiah that ended with the Hallelujah Chorus. I have. And I would like to apologize for the artistic crime committed against you. The Hallelujah Chorus is a little mid-concert diversion compared to the real ending (and highlight) of Messiah: “Worthy is the Lamb who was slain.”

This is not just the highlight of the work, in context it is the greatest thirty seconds of music in the Western canon. The most perfect unity of form and content ever achieved (despite what Kierkegaard might say about Don Giovanni, music is primarily transcendent, not erotic). When I have sung in the chorus I usually haven’t gotten a single note past the lump in my throat from this point on. Sorry, fellow tenor 2s.

Davis delivers this through the Amens perfectly. Just the right pacing and weight, and truly shimmering violins on the instrument fugue that interrupts the amens before the final chorus.

Davis has another recording of this work with LSO from 2006. Perhaps that will be next.

A photo and some memories from each month of 2025.

January

January brought the first snow we’ve seen since we moved to South Carolina. The twins first ever and the first E remembers. The snow was a highlight. I don’t remember much of January other than feeling very dark of soul. The holidays do a number on the kids and there isn’t enough sunshine. It was the first time I considered I might get seasonal affective disorder. The rigors of raising two 1-year-olds and a 4-year-old was a lot, especially without much outdoors time.

February

The caprices of February weather allowed the occasional outing and even some bike rides—the greatest mood enhancer of all. By February the Spring semester is well in hand and things start to feel normal in a good way. The girls are not yet two and can still be challenging. Even the best days leave us utterly exhausted, collapsing onto the couch right after bedtime.

A round of deep faculty cuts is announced at the end of the month. They are delivered in a way that seems, from the outside, cruelly calculated to be hurtful and encourage gossip. My position remains for now but faculty morale is at its lowest point in the three years since this turmoil began.

March

Winter is short in our southern state. Spring approaches and as we return to daylight savings time we are greatly restored by daily time outside. Usually a bike ride before or after dinner to one of the nearby parks.

The girls turn two at the end of the month. The blurring speed of the past two years is overwhelming. Slowing that time and attending to the unrelenting passage of moments that is their lives becomes a focus. I turn off my iphone and switch to a tiny little phone that barely works for anything. David Whyte said in an interview that “the only way to change the past is the quality of attention we give to the present.” I’ve spent the last two years depressed and frustrated. This is the biggest change I’ve made so far.

I attend our Ash Wednesday service alone. My dear friend George (who we call St. George behind his back, he is that kind of person) is there and we sit together, then kneel side-by-side on the hardwood floor while the Litany of Penitence is read over us. George is beginning the final stage of his life and I’m finishing my beginning, somewhere between youth and middle age. Together we confess and two years of struggling starts to come undone.

April

April is brightness and light. The last cool days are behind us but the heat of summer is far off. Evenings stretch long and we ride far almost every day. On Good Friday I see the first hummingbird of the season.

On Easter the girls wear their dresses and get mosquito bites hunting eggs. Everything is new for them and it will be again next year. We pick the first weedy flowers from the yard to add to the cross on the church steps. Family dinner in my brother’s back yard for good eating.

May

May begins at the end of the school year and ends at the beginning of summer. On its first day I perform a concerto I’ve been preparing a full year. It goes well and I’m ready for new projects. The school year ends in yet more uncertainty. The brand new president has resigned before his first year is up and for the third year in a row we do not know who the president will be when we return in August.

We end the month with a road trip to my hometown to visit my parents. The kids go to Knoebel’s for the first time. (If you aren’t from central Pennsylvania I can’t adequately explain to you the hold this place has on my heart). Watching my kids ride the rides I grew up on is the happiest I’ve ever been as a father.

June

Our roadtrip pushes into June with a stop in Virginia to visit my sister. We spend a day in Washington D.C. seeing the Natural History Museum (which blows my oldest’s mind). The kids tolerate a walk through the national gallery while we catch up with an old friend and we all eat lunch together at Carmine’s. Slowly, a new phase of parenting is starting to unfurl.

July

I help lead a study abroad trip to Latvia and Estonia. As a lifelong Arvo Pärt devotee this is something of a personal pilgrimage. We spend five days each in Riga and Tallinn, feeling like the only American tourists there with perfect weather, endless sunlight, and a comfortable food budget. S and I walk along the shore of the Baltic sea until it feels like we’re the only people in the city and the cold north wind will blow forever.

Our last day in Estonia we sat on the ground in the rain with 100,000 people while a choir of 35,000 sang folk songs and other music important to the Estonian national identity. It defied my wildest ideas of what is possible in a culture.

August

The summer ended with our first real family beach trip with two of my brothers. This involved nine children eight and under, including two sets of toddler twins. Once they all get comfortable with the idea of sand it is raucus digging, splashing, and shell collecting the rest of the day. Between the other adults and cousins there is always someone around to help.

Faculty in-service arrives and the long summer is over. My fourth year (and fourth university president) of full-time teaching begins. I have a confidence in my returning courses I never have before, plus the excitement of launching a brand new course that I believe in.

September

September is a month of habits. The school year is settled but not worn out. The kids are used to new routines but still freshly amazed by every new day of day care or co-op. The weather is still a little too hot, but compared to the scorch of July and August we spend the still-long evenings outside riding bikes to the park after dinner and staying until bedtime. The energy stored up during summer break is fueling us with just enough structure to funnel it into an energetic and beautiful life. It is one of the best months of the year, except that a nagging infection takes several weeks for E to get over.

It’s the month I get back to woodworking regularly for the first time since hurricane Helene took my previous shop. Life feels balanced for the first time in a very long time.

October

We enjoy the mildness of October, spending time outside and everyone learning to ride some form of bike. Despite our large grassy backyard, the kids greatly prefer to be in the front. They enjoy watching the traffic and the bugs are’t as bad here.

I play a few concerts that I’ve been looking forward to and submit an enormous portfolio as an application to advance in faculty rank. This project has taken all my spare time for months and it is such a relief to be done with it.

Somewhat on a whim, I reboot my blog after several years and migrate to micro.blog. I’m having fun on the internet for the first time in years.

November

The end of daylights savings hits us hard, but the weather is still mild and we make the most of it. The girls are starting to feel “almost three” and E is on his way to five-and-a-half. There’s a lot of development in those six months.

Ever Since Halloween the kids are obsessed with holidays and count down the days to Thanksgiving. I’m off the whole week and we have a perfect family time together. All my performances for the semester are over along with the bulk of the school work.

December

Cold weather hits us early this year and comes with rain. We set up our tree and decorate the house. Every day begins with the countdown to Christmas, the opening of the Advent calendar, and E crashing out with anticipation by mid-morning. We light our advent candles each Sunday and the darkness isn’t so dark.

We stagger onward rejoicing.

In The Gift of Good Land, Wendell Berry writes of the value of small solutions. An example he gives is riding a bike to lower your personal carbon footprint. There are massive global technology companies spending billions of dollars (and expending who knows how much carbon fuel) to work toward making vehicles more efficient and emit fewer pollutants. One of the towering figures of our age is Elon Musk, who (even with his re-sized public image after his brief yet intense involvement with the current administration) has been heralded as one of the great generals in the army against emissions with his luxury electric cars. (Be reminded that his other pet project does consume a little rocket fuel, about 700,000 gallons a second, and his newest pet project [Grok] is wreaking havoc on the power grid of Memphis).

And yet, as mentioned in an article from the NYT, e-bikes are now reducing the daily need for gasoline by a million barrels a day - more than all the electric vehicles in the world. Getting out of your car and riding a bike has more potency than marginal gains of vehicle efficiency ever can.

My other favorite example of this is Stoop Coffee. A couple living in San Fransisco wanted to get to know some neighbors and grow a sense of community where they live (don’t we all). The obvious course of action here might be to put invitations to a party under all the neighbors doors or form a community organization and try to get people to join. Maybe gossip on Nextdoor a bit more.

But their brilliant solution was small. They decided that every Saturday morning, they would take lawn chairs outside and sit on the sidewalk while they drank their morning coffee. That’s it. For a month nothing happened other than doing what they would have anyway, just outside. Then one neighbor joined them. After that, it was a cascade of connections and community formation unlike anything most young Americans have ever experienced. They now have a neighborhood WhatsApp group, shared spreadsheets with resources and needs, and throw larger events regularly. A small act that took a little bit of courage transformed a collection of urban housing units into a neighborhood.

My small solution this past year was leaving books where I tend to sit. At any one time I now have a couch book, a chair book, and a bedtime book. I read eleven more books this year than last year without changing any else.

What else is in need of a small solution?