Merry Christmas!

Hey. I’ll be back with my typical year-end post, but for now: Merry Christmas, if you celebrate that. If you don’t, happy December 25. Thank you for reading, and for tolerating my wallowing in literacy this holiday season.

I deeply enjoyed writing these. It was…good for me, I think. It was a chance to just write. Not to worry. Not to be anxious. Not even to think very hard. These are books (or sometimes authors) that already mean a lot to me. I knew what I wanted to say. I sat down and said it. And that helped me a lot to get back into the habit of writing…something that, to be honest, has been difficult for me lately. Having a daily commitment was good as well. Without that…I can’t imagine I’d have done much of anything.

So thank you. I needed this. I hope you got something from it as well.

If you’re interested in the full list, or just want to revisit any previous entries from my advent feature, have at it:

Day 1: Catch-22
Day 2: Blindness
Day 3: Lord Jim
Day 4: The Catcher in the Rye
Day 5: The Postman Always Rings Twice
Day 6: Point Omega
Day 7: The Boy Detective Fails
Day 8: Ulysses
Day 9: Pale Fire
Day 10: Mother Night
Day 11: The Good Soldier
Day 12: Middlesex
Day 13: Flatland
Day 14: The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
Day 15: The Big Sleep
Day 16: Against the Day
Day 17: Mostly Harmless
Day 18: The Great Gatsby
Day 19: The Road
Day 20: Of Mice and Men
Day 21: The Devil in the White City
Day 22: The Sound and the Fury
Day 23: Nineteen Eighty-Four
Day 24: The Hotel New Hampshire

I appreciate all of you. Be good to yourselves, and be good to each other.

Let’s do our best this coming year. It’s bound to be a bumpy ride.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thank you all.

If you are reading this, it’s because I have lost my battle with my demons. It has been a very long battle. It was not a pleasant one. It was not a battle that was satisfying. It was a battle that I was doomed to lose at some point. I’ve said before that I need to win the fight against my demons every single day, but my demons only need to win it once. They came very close a few times in the past. Eventually, I got worn down enough that they won. I’m sorry. If it’s any consolation, I tried. I tried very, very hard for a very, very long time. I cannot thank all of you enough. For all of my misfortune to have had to deal with mental health problems and neurological issues for so long, I’ve always been exceptionally fortunate — beyond all reason or explanation — to have a better audience than I’ve ever deserved. I’ve also consistently had better friends than I ever deserved. In a lot of ways, I’ve been very lucky. But I am so tired. I am so drained. I have fought every day ...
Read more

Better Call Saul Reviews: “Nippy” (season 6, episode 10)

Image
I got a chance last week to allude to my love of format breakers, and I had no idea that one was coming up next. “Nippy” is something I’ve been wondering about since season one: a full Gene episode. I don’t know if that’s anything that I had actively wished for, but the chance that we would get one, at some point, was always in the back of my mind. One obvious possibility was that it would serve as the final episode. I’m glad that that’s no longer quite as likely, but it’s near the very end, which is probably where it belongs. More so than most Better Call Saul episodes, discussing what happens would just feel like a summary, and I’m not keen on writing that, so this will probably be a pretty short review. I’m not entirely enamored of “Nippy,” but it certainly wasn’t bad. I think that it was about as good as a Gene episode could have been. I did enjoy a good few things about it. The idea that Gene wouldn’t actually be able to leave his life as Saul behind is a good one. W...
Read more

Better Call Saul Reviews: “Point and Shoot” (season 6, episode 8)

Image
Around the time we first met Eduardo, I mentioned that this show and Breaking Bad had portrayed the drug trade — this specific iteration of the drug trade, at least — as a sort of graceful dance. Deadly, yes. Horrific, yes. Massively awful for all involved, yes…but everybody had a role. Everybody understood what was expected of them and when. Nobody deviated because, as in a dance, deviation would lead to confusion. All of the participants relied on the others to follow the choreography. Everybody had a role, and part of the danger in deviation was that everything would crash down, for everybody. Deviations occurred, but they would never be the rule and would always be at the deviant’s own peril. It was in all of the dancers’ best interests to keep dancing. Eduardo showed up on Better Call Saul and immediately started treating it instead like a bar fight. Everybody makes their own rules. Throw a punch whenever you want. Smash a chair over this bystander. Burn down the pl...
Read more