Over the holiday, I finished The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon; 2000) for one Roundtable by The 92nd Street Y course and have nearly finished The Oppermanns (Lion Feuchtwanger; 1933) for another.
My reread of Moby-Dick (Herman Melville; 1851) with Samantha Rose Hill continues. As I mentioned, my daughter and I are registered to read in the Moby-Dick Readathon at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. This year, the event begins on January 3, exactly 185 years after Melville sailed from New Bedford on the Acushnet. We will return to Boston from the Readathon in time for my daughter to head to work and for me to attend (virtually) the first meeting of the latest iteration of UChicago Graham School’s course on the book.
A friend and I will continue making our way through E.M. Forster’s novels with Howards End (1910), January’s selection. We will also meet to discuss some short stories in December, beginning with the first in Simon Van Booy’s 2009 collection, Love Begins in Winter.
Music lessons resume this coming week; the holiday concert is the following week. With winter holidays and related prep and travel, it’s difficult to say what sort of progress I will make on the two remaining projects in the sidebar.
The morning has run off without me, but I will catch up to it soon enough. In the meantime, I’ve just finished some desk work and tomorrow’s chapters of Bleak House (Charles Dickens; 1853), which I’m reading with APS Together. Other reading this week includes The Dispossessed (Ursula K. LeGuin; 1974) for a short course with NYR Seminars; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon; 2000) and the Stanley Lombardo translation of The Iliad for courses with Roundtable by The 92nd Street Y; and Moby-Dick, this time with Samantha Rose Hill.
Between this week’s lesson and next, I will attend another performance class for adult music students, the focus of which will be music for a holiday concert, but the chief part of my daily practice comprises Marcel Moyse’s 24 Little Melodic Studies and On Sonority, Art, and Technique; Taffanel and Gaubert; and M.A. Reichert’s 7 Daily Exercises. I’m also working out the second movement of Bach’s Flute Sonata in E-flat major.
Before today’s practice, though, I must do a few here-comes-winter tasks in the yards and walk. We raked and walked in snow and temps in the low twenties earlier this week; it’s sunny and 49 as I type this; the daytime highs on Friday and Saturday will be in the sixties. What is that saying about Chicago(land) weather? If you don’t like it, then just wait fifteen minutes.
What have you been reading? Studying? Thinking about? Leave a comment; I would enjoy hearing from you. Looking ahead to 2026, I am wondering if a year of “reading at whim” might not be best — fewer classes and reading groups, more pulling down some of the volumes already on my shelves. I just reached into the shelves behind and drew from them, randomly: The Hummingbird (Sandro Veronesi; 2019/2020) and The Cold Millions (Jess Walters; 2020). Unread. I looked to the left and the first title I made out was The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart (Bill Bishop; 2009). Unread. The bookcase in front of me? Bitch: On the Female of the Species (Lucy Cooke; 2022). Unread. More than half of the books here are. As I’ve said, this once embarrassed me. Now it alternately enlivens and frightens me.
From early in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable:
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
In between walking and leaf-raking, I have been reading and studying. Yesterday the Roundtable by 92nd Street Y course on the Iliad began, and the Library of America (LoA) course on Joan Didion ended. (With one exception, I have greatly appreciated the Roundtable courses and recommend them.) The NYR Seminar led by Daniel Mendelsohn concluded last week, and it was so terrific, I signed up for another (shorter) seminar with them. My two-person study group has moved on to our third Forster novel, A Room with a View (1908), and I’m participating in two other slow-read groups: Bleak House with APS Together (underway) and Moby-Dick with Samantha Rose Hill (beginning November 9). (Speaking of the White Whale, my daughter and I are once again slated to read at the marathon.)
I continue to work in Marcel Moyse’s 24 Little Melodic Studies and On Sonority, Art, and Technique; Taffanel and Gaubert; and M.A. Reichert’s 7 Daily Exercises. My lessons are now complemented by a performance class, at the first meeting of which, I presented Germaine Tailleferre’s “Pastorale for Flute and Piano” and at the second, the James Galway arrangement of “Ashokan Farewell.” My new solo is Bach’s Flute Sonata in E-flat major.
A star-filled sky featuring Orion and a moon-sliver greeted me on my son’s birthday, and as I walked in the morning dark, I remembered… When he was ten, he asked to attend an introductory course at the Adler Planetarium — telescopes, asterisms, astronomy basics. Because it was not a “kid” or family program, I called to inquire about their policies, and they granted permission with the understanding that I would accompany him.
What a collage of memories from that shared experience: learning the constellations, discovering binocular astronomy, doing jumping jacks outside the small observatory to get warm while awaiting our turn at the ‘scope. How young he was. I was.
Time bends and folds.
And the blur of the sword hanging from Orion’s belt bends into an image of my ten-year-old son talking to the planetarium scientist then folds into one of his sister — now older than his forever-21 by seven years — on a research assignment at an international astronomical observatory.
Time bends and folds.
Like one of the origami cranes he loved to make, some of which are preserved in a mason jar on a shelf near my music stand.
Nerdishly 