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.
This summer’s drought and the continued warm temperatures have delayed autumn’s arrival: Most trees are reluctant to release their leaves; the weekend’s rain reinvigorated the grass. It remains just cool enough to walk with a jacket at sunrise.
Last night marked the halfway point of an NYR Seminar led by Daniel Mendelsohn on his translation on The Odyssey. Fabulous — the seminar and the translation. Last week, I finished Edith Hall’s Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life in anticipation of a course I am taking through Roundtable by 92nd Street Y. Today I’m continuing to reacquaint myself with Joan Didion’s work for a course with the Library of America.
For my next lesson, I’m preparing the seventh of Marcel Moyse’s 24 Little Melodic Studies and its variations. Having worked through Exercise 4 of Taffanel and Gaubert, I am becoming acquainted with Michel Debost’s scale game. We’ve added the first of M.A. Reichert’s 7 Daily Exercises to my practice routine, and I continue to use Moyse’s On Sonority, Art, and Technique. My current solo piece is Germaine Tailleferre’s “Pastorale for Flute and Piano.”
Four of the titles pictured above are selections for the 2026 Philosophical Book Club at Commonplace Philosophy. Speaking of philosophy, my two-person study group will discuss Book IX of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics tomorrow, which means this excellent project draws to a close soon. Next up for us is a deep dive into the novels of E.M. Forster, beginning with Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905). We’ve been reading and studying together for a couple of years now, so it is no surprise that we often discover new books that appeal to us both. Most recently, a Guardian review ensured that Rami Kamiski’s The Gift of Not Belonging ended up on our doorsteps and then at the tops of our respective “actively reading” stacks. Ditto John Burnside’s The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century (2021). Both of these are pictured above.
For courses at the University of Chicago Graham School, I’m reading Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and (re)reading Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Later this semester, I will read his Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend. It may prove aspirational, but I’ve pulled Claire Tomalin’s 2011 biography of Dickens from the shelves. For an upcoming seminar led by the translator, I’m reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Odyssey (2025), and as part of the enrichment experience for Big White Fog at the Court, I’ve pulled down Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), selected by the Community Reads Book Club. (Admittedly, this, too, may be aspirational.) After attending the KINO! Film Salon discussion of the documentary Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer, I began reading his 2022 memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, which is pretty terrific.
As for what I’ve recently finished, that includes the texts associated with courses I took through Roundtable by 92nd Street Y: North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell; 1855), Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things (Joel Christensen; 2025); and Possession: A Romance (A.S. Byatt; 1990). I reread Lionel Shriver’s 2016 novel, The Mandibles, the book my youngest packed for vacation. It holds up — presciently so. What didn’t work for me was Megan Abbott’s latest, El Dorado Drive. Her previous novels have been reliably fun “beach reads,” but this was clumsy and predictable. Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952), on the other hand, which I read with APS Together, was elegant, endlessly surprising, gorgeously written.
These recent acquisitions were shelved because my current stack is so tall that my youngest gently joked about it throughout her recent visit. She was not wrong. I also shelved The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro; 1989), which I (re)read with Commonplace Philosophy (this book was even more beautiful three-plus decades later), and the subtle, haunting Under the Eye of the Big Bird (Hiromi Kamakami; 2025 — review here). I’ve shelved Stephen Fry’s Troy (2021) for now because I am working though Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and secondary sources for study group and David Copperfield (Charles Dickens; 1850) for a UChicago Graham School course, plus Latin and music practice. The currently reading stack now looks a wee bit more manageable.
More than forty years ago, my college mentor recommended Testament (1983) in one or another of the several classes and seminars I took with him. When I was home a couple of weekends later, my mother channel-surfed in lieu of conversation, and William Devane’s face flickered across the screen. “Can we watch this for a bit?”
It wasn’t a long movie, over in a quiet horror and a sob.
I remember it as my first genuine glimpse into the lives of adults, of families. (And this is, of course, the gift of good books, films, artworks, music, etc. — that they help us understand what is real and true in ways in which what is real and true has not yet done, perhaps cannot do.)
The film, which was brilliantly cast with gifted actors (Jane Alexander, Devane, a young Luke Haas) who actually look like a typical nuclear family in a California hamlet, opens twenty-four hours before a nuclear attack. In Thornton Wilder’s Our Town, Emily cries out in Act III, “I can’t. I can’t go on. It goes too fast. We don’t have time to look at one another. I didn’t realize. So all that was going on and we never noticed.” This not-looking, not-noticing is, of course, the essence of Testament‘s extended first act: that the father challenges the son to make the hill but pedals ahead, that the youngest would prefer to be a rat in the school production of The Pied Piper of Hamelin (a wish denied that serves as heartbreaking foreshadow), that the mother fails to awaken in time to exercise, that the husband and wife make love rather than continue a painful discussion, and so on. Piano practice. Breakfast. Clutter. School. Work. Answering machines. Unfinished projects. Unspoken fears. Unmet expectations. Pain and beauty, the extraordinary and the commonplace. Life. And no one really notices. The rhythms and grace notes that underscore everyday life grow too subtle, pass unmarked, end uncelebrated.
And then the world winks out, a few lights at a time. We can wish that we remember everything, and how we survived, the mother tells her son as the movie concludes.
But is being the last woman standing on the cusp of the end of the world what a little girl conjures when she dreams about growing up?
Watching Testament decades later, with my oldest child, later with his sisters, perceptive and sensitive filmgoers all, I was challenged — again — to examine the course and content of my life. If it were all over tomorrow, would today have been enough?
Literature or art or music or conversation that makes. us. think. (like Testament, for example) hurts, doesn’t it? It forces us to re-examine ourselves and our lives in ways that may… that will disappoint us. Reconciling who we are with who we thought we might be is hard, painful work.
Thinking about Testament nearly always reminds me of Ray Bradbury’s short story “The Last Night of the World.”
“We haven’t been too bad, have we?”
“No, nor enormously good. I suppose that’s the trouble — we haven’t been very much of anything except us, while a big part of the world was being lots of quite awful things.”
Rereading the story as if it were in conversation with Testament makes me wonder if Bradbury misstepped. While we must be something more than not too bad, I’m not certain that being ourselves is such an unworthy goal — being our best selves, that is, and by doing so inspiring in those we love and those we meet the desire to be, in turn, their best selves. So that even if a big part of the world is being lots of quite awful things, we are not allowing the everyday to pass unnoticed and uncelebrated.
Speaking of works in conversation, Testament is on my mind because I am about to reread The Road as part of a deep-dive into Cormac McCarthy’s work. When I watched the film adapted from McCarthy’s dystopian novel, I concluded that Testament is far and away the more emotionally wrenching film, perhaps because quiet horror is more insidious and thought-provoking than graphic depictions of man’s inhumanity to man, and because the beginning of the end of all things is infinitely sadder and more painful than the near-end of all things.
Don’t you agree?
The above was adapted from a post that first appeared on my previous site more than twenty years ago.
When I returned from my walk, I shelved most of these and then reviewed my notes on Book II of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics for this morning’s study group. This afternoon I finished Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men (2005).
Nerdishly 