This personal essay is a few years old. I’m reposting it today on the 6th anniversary of my grandfather’s funeral.

Each year as I get older I catch glimpses of my grandfather’s hands in mine. He had a habit of holding his resting hand in a relaxed fist, palm upward, while working on something. I apparently do the same thing, and sometimes when I look down I recognize someone else’s gesture, though his hands have been in the ground for three years today.

He lived a life where hands were important. In his vocation as a family doctor his hands held both the newborn and dying beyond count. As one of the few doctors in a rural area, he likely touched a high percentage of Union County North Carolina residents during his fifty year practice. He was fond of taking out an old invoice he had sent a family in his first years as a doctor. They called during a West Virginia blizzard and he walked several miles to their home with his black bag to deliver a baby. He charged them $12.00 (two dollars more than the typical birth since he made a house call), but was pretty sure they never paid since they didn’t have any money at all.

Though a physician by trade, he was a farmer at heart. This is how I knew his hands and watched him work. Retired from practicing medicine at age 80, he kept a vigorous schedule of chores around his 200 acres well into his nineties. Much of this was gardening, feeding animals, and otherwise keeping busy. He never seemed to tire of daily chores though he had done them countless hundreds of times over the decades. Seeing the fish in the pond jump for the floating food by the hundreds never failed to put a smile on his face as he broadcast handfuls across the water from a bucket.

We enjoyed participating in these chores because of the novelty. They were a break from our small town rhythms. He seemed to enjoy them in their regularity. He knew his day’s work and did it with his own hands. The last time I did chores with him he was ninety-eight years old. We tended to grape vines he had just planted, pruning away the shoots that would absorb nutrients but not bear fruit. He expected the first harvest was several years away.

The day’s chores ended, he would spend the evening indoors with the news or a basketball game on while he read his newspapers. Eventually a bowl of fruit would appear from the kitchen and he would sit on the bed with his knees up peeling apples and pears and handing you a slice. He had a way of peeling an apple in a circular motion so that the skin would sometimes come off in a single long coil. It looked easy, but when I tried it I realized it is only easy to someone who has done it each evening for a lifetime.

The result of this lifetime of faithful chores was a place. A place with meaning because of the work done in it and the time spent together. A place loved by every member of the family.

The morning of his funeral I stood at the guest house kitchen window brushing my teeth when the great blue heron flew by. It was the first time I cried that day. Grandpa loved that bird. Every sighting would come with his whisper, “Look!” In January of 2021, a strange year later, I am reading an Eric Carle book to my son for bedtime. A painting of a blue heron makes my throat catch.

Back in January of 2020, driving from the funeral home to the cemetery, the hearse took the long way and drove by grandpa’s house. Slowly, it ascended the pecan lined driveway and made one lap around the house. A person firmly rooted to his place saying goodbye. After the burial we returned to the house and walked the land for the last time.

I left the farm with something. Grandpa’s brown suede jacket was on the coat rack. “This looks like it will fit you,” a cousin said, and it did. I am one of the few grandsons with his scrawny frame so it became mine. I don’t know how many years Grandpa wore this jacket but it is worn in without being close to worn out. The leather is thick and soft. I expect it will last the rest of my life and perhaps beyond.

Our South Carolina climate doesn’t allow many days when its weight is necessary. On the coldest days I put it on, never without thinking of him. I reach for it on a brisk Sunday morning just before the three year anniversary of his death. When I put my hands in the side warming pockets it always occurs to me that my hands are where his hands would be, and looking more like his each year.

I think of this as I drive down Laurens Road. Stopped at a red light, the largest great blue heron I have ever seen flies past though there isn’t any water nearby.

Increasingly, I am finding myself moved by efforts to humanize and dignify people in all their situations and forms. Perhaps it is the steady march of “AI” to seemingly every niche of our lives (every YouTube and podcast ad is for the newest AI enabled tools to supercharge your ability to turn profits for your boss’s boss’s boss), along with the deeply antagonistic approach to people that our national leadership take on nearly everything. Either way, there have been a few times recently when I have encountered people seeking humanity over power, over wealth, over convenience, and been moved by it.

Here are a few I highlight for your attention:

When Life Begins With Death, Plough

Veronika Kabas profiled a hospital in Vienna that provides palliative care to children born under the expectation that they will die at or shortly after birth. This is an option provided only by the heroic efforts of Sister Teresa Schlackl, a nun and the hospital’s Chief Ethics Officer. Her mission is to dignify the life of every child and parent with the option to carry a potentially non-viable pregnancy to birth and to spiritually and physically care for the child and parents. The couple featured in the story were urged by their doctor to terminate the pregnancy in the second trimester when significant brain abnormalities were detected. Determined to carry to term, they not only had a live birth but were able to take their daughter, Anna, home for nearly a year before she died. Johannes, Anna’s father, says, “The beautiful thing about our story is that for us, there are no unanswered questions. Anna’s story has a beginning, a middle, and an end.” What a gift. A grace.

Sometimes I use the phrase “doing the Lord’s work” flippantly (a bad habit to get a laugh), but these folks are doing the Lord’s work in one of the most profound ways I can imagine. Treating the unborn (and their parents) as people to be cared for and heaving against the standard of “care” and the entire national medical establishment that would rather them not see the light of day. 

Engineering at Home, Sara Hendren ( @ablerism ) and Caitrin Lynch

This is a website documenting the adaptive devices a woman named Cindy uses after medical complications that left her with significant physical disabilities in all four limbs. She was fitted with the latest of robotic prosthetics, but found that the devices that helped her the most were often much simpler, low-tech devices (often of her own design). Items like a high friction board that helps her hold a newspaper and turn the pages, or a small but strong handle to help her get in and out of her car.

The invention I found most moving though was a pen holder that allowed her to write by hand. Though proficient with voice-to-text typing, she had always been a card and letter writer and missed the personal touch of a hand-written note. A bit of leftover silicone with a hole to hold a pen at the correct angle was all she needed to write again. And remarkably, her handwriting is recognizably still hers as it was before her disability. This small piece of silicone gave her a piece of her personality back. She can send a note to a friend and they know from the writing on the envelope that it’s from her.

The manifesto is well worth reading.

The third is a personal experience; it happened a few years ago but I have thought about it many times since. Shortly after moving to South Carolina I was in a municipal office of some kind waiting to register something other. The kind of chore you have in spades when you’ve emigrated states and you just can’t wait to be done interfacing with the bureaucracy. An elderly Black woman was also waiting and greeted me with the most generous smile and kindness. We chatted a few minutes (I learned a lot about appropriate greetings and small talk from the church ladies in Baltimore). She just dripped goodness and grace. The kind of person who can only be described as spirit-filled. It was just a few moments, but it filled me with light. Right there in the Greenville county office complex.

Much later it struck me that this woman was old enough to have lived through several decades of the Jim Crow south and the years that followed it. She had, in all likelihood, experienced despicable things at the hands of people who looked a lot like me. She certainly has friends and family who did. But she didn’t treat me as them. She treated me like a person, going far above and beyond the normal conventions of public friendliness. And in so doing, helped me recognize her as a person with a history and complexity and a relationship to this state and country that is probably very different from my own. And yet here we were together, and from pure generosity of spirit, she made my day.

(I wrote this to convince some of my IRL friends who “follow” my substack account to come join us here on the free web. For those of you reading on Micro.blog this is of course the very definition of preaching to the choir.)

Before I begin, ask yourself a question: are you happier with the things you do on the internet now than you were 10 years ago? How about 20 years ago? What was your internet life like in 2006? Would you take that over the current situation if you could?

One of the best things I’ve read so far this year was a piece by Joan Westenberg called The Case for Blogging in the Ruins. The ruins, of course, are the internet. Or more specifically, the siloed reactive waste sites we have been taught to call social media. The places of the internet that for many people are the internet and for younger people are the only web they have ever known. Despite its very good qualities, substack is starting to look and act more like these other areas. (Alan Jacobs was right, as usual, substack won’t save us.)

In Joan’s piece she argues that one of the most radical actions one can undertake in the current version of the web is blogging. To write things and post them to a website you own, and see what happens. Often nothing will. Sometimes a few people will read and one or two will respond thoughtfully. Sometimes a discussion begins in the comments, and when things get really exciting someone will write a counterpost on their blog.

This describes the first version of the web I encountered and grew up using. Exchanges of information and ideas, along with recording and recounting the everyday of our lives. The blogosphere.

In the early blogging days no one could conceive of a following of millions. The savvy among us installed hit counters at the bottom of their blogs and made special posts when 1000 people had visited the blog in all of history. Blogs considered wildly popular would have hits in the tens of thousands. It was a project of human scale, mostly among friends with a few likeminded strangers joining in. (A writing tick many of us used was something like, “to the three people reading this.”)

Back in October I set out to finally fix some issues I’d been having with my Wordpress website and decided it was time to scrap it and start again. This led me to host my site on micro.blog, which also has a limited social feature that is a lot like twitter was pre-algorithm (a certain world’s-wealthiest-man gets a lot of heat for the state of twitter, but forget not that it was a garbage heap long before he supercharged the worst aspects of it). A chronological timeline, posts only from those you choose to follow. NO ADS. There are no advertisements. You don’t see anything in your feed that is advertising products, services, or paid subscriptions.

And everyone there is a blogger to some extent because the thing that holds the network together is the individual URLs of each person. We all have our own little piece of internet to create and maintain, and you can say hey to your neighbors and chat back and forth about the things you’re making. It’s like a front porch, a quadrangle, a book club. It is an open network (the term of art is Federated) so you can follow people on any other open network or even any RSS enabled blog.

The other thing is, no one is making or trying to make money at it. The substack feature that has caused all of its problems is that at its heart it is an engine for monetization. And for many people, that is great. Lots of people have scraped together enough followers to make a little side cash or even a living. Ted Gioia can buy a private island with his newsletter lucre. I am genuinely happy that more people can make an independent living writing. But wherever gold is found, prospectors follow, bringing their saloons and whorehouses with them.

There is no gold in the blogosphere. Nobody is there grifting.

One of the most amazing things about blogging again is that it has encouraged me to think in different ways. PJ Vogt’s *Search Engine* podcast did an episode about The Fediverse recently. In it PJ says, “Twitter makes you think like a bumper sticker, Instagram makes you think everyone is hot and on vacation.” The tool shapes the man.

How does a blog make you think? At least in paragraphs. And occasionally making connections between different things, or noticing things. And then having a place to think about that in writing a bit. Maybe someone else will resonate. Maybe they won’t, but you will have spent time doing something worthwhile.

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.