Books Read in 2022 - Part 1

I read. It’s what I do. And for the last decade and a half or so I’ve been keeping track of the things I’ve read because it interests me to do so.

Last year was the year that my brain broke for a while, though. It’s been a long few years after a long few years for all sorts of reasons, and I didn’t actually get to my fifth book of the year – a mark I usually reach in January – until April. Some years you just have to sit back and let things flow over you, I guess. But eventually I got back on track and by the end I was about where I was in 2021, which itself was down a bit from where I hope to be but still better than I thought I’d do.

It was a year of sequels and rereading the previous volumes so I’d know where the story left off. I spent a good chunk of the summer reading graphic novels, something I almost never do because I tend to look at the words and ignore the art and that’s kind of missing the point of such things. There were many good books, no really great ones, and at least one that was both well written and something of a chore to get through because of the story it told.

So here is the list for 2022. Enjoy!

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The Wisdom of Crowds: Book 3 of the Age of Madness (Joe Abercrombie)

Say one thing about revolutions, say that they will eat themselves in the end. In this concluding volume of the Age of Madness trilogy (the first two of which are on last year’s list) the wheels within wheels will spin wildly out of control, plots and subplots will boil to the surface and evaporate like the steam that drives the Union’s new industrial age, and in the end all one can do is stand with the winners and make use of the tools one has. This book picks up almost immediately after the end of The Trouble With Peace, with King Orso making his way back to Adua in the wake of the battle at Stoffenbeck. Expecting a hero’s welcome – or at least a bit of respite from his cares – instead he finds the Great Change has happened, as Abercrombie’s historical model shifts from a grim mixture of the English Civil War and the horrors of early 19th-century industrialization to a feverish blend of the French Revolution’s Terror and the Russian Revolution’s purges. The world has turned upside down in Adua and the lunatics have taken over, and through it all Orso and the others from across the Union and the North – Savine, Leo, Zuri, Hildi, Vick, Judge, Shivers, Rikke, Isern, Black Calder, Clover, and on – will seek to navigate the treacherous new world of the Great Change. And in the end, those who are left will find a new world, if not one that is appreciably better, a world where industrialization and politics may or may not have crowded out the dark magics of old. Abercrombie is one of the best writers in modern SF/F and this series lived up to his very high standards.

The Dawn of Everything (David Graeber and David Wengrow)

This is a monumental book in pretty much every sense of the term. Long (over 500 pages of text), exhaustively documented (84 pages of endnotes and 73 pages of bibliography), and wide-ranging (it takes as its subject matter all of human society from the earliest moment such a thing might be said to exist through to the present), it offers a thorough and detailed rebuttal to the general thinking on such things. Basically, Graeber and Wengrow went through the last thirty or forty years of anthropological, archeological, and historical studies and asked, “How does this change the standard narrative of human history and society?” and discovered that the answer was “An awful lot.” They start with the Indigenous Critique – the sharp, often unanswerable analysis of European thought and society that was offered by indigenous cultures wherever Europeans expanded into during their various ages of empires. Where did this come from? How influential was it? And they use this to address – or, at least they start with the idea that they will address – the question of the origins of inequality. But as they quickly reveal, this is the wrong question. In fact, once you take into account the scholarship of the last half century, it’s not a question that makes any sense at all. And from there they are off, examining the roads not taken in human society, or the roads that were taken and from which we seem to have veered off. They cover Mesoamerican societies, Fertile Crescent societies, societies all over the world and from the Neolithic to the present. Eventually they offer a definition of “freedom” that is rather at odds with modern Western views on the matter and show that Western views are but one possible outcome, not an inevitability. It’s a dense, readable synthesis and one that deserves to be widely influential for future scholars of many disciplines – history, anthropology, philosophy, legal studies, and the like. Graeber has since passed away, however, and the two sequels that he and Wengrow had planned may never see the light of day. This would be an enormous loss.

Riding the Elephant: A Memoir of Altercations, Humiliations, Hallucinations, & Observations (Craig Ferguson)

Craig Ferguson is no longer a late-night television host, but he will forever be one thing: a recovering alcoholic. This is a collection of pretty much exactly what the subtitle says it is – not nearly comprehensive enough to be a biography, but thorough enough to give you a sense of the struggles he’s had with substance abuse and the work he’s put into overcoming it. Along the way he describes his show, his comedy act, various people he’s met and what he’s thought of them, bits and pieces of his childhood, and his current wife, whom he as at great pains to defend against slanders I didn’t even know were happening, which I suppose says more about me than about Ferguson. Through it all he is an entertaining and humane companion, opinionated and often skirting the edge of what can be said politely, and the book is a lot of fun that way.

Heat: An Amateur’s Adventures as a Kitchen Slave, Line Cook, Pasta-Maker, and Apprentice to a Dante-Quoting Butcher in Tuscany (Bill Buford)

This was perhaps the perfect book to be reading while on a trip to Italy. Buford was a writer – indeed, an editor for The New Yorker – and living a comfortable life as such, except for a remarkable friendship with Mario Batali and a vague sense that he wanted to do more than just write. So he approached Batali and asked to be an unpaid worker in one of his restaurant kitchens – a “kitchen slave,” as he comes to think of himself. From there he slowly learns how not to be an impediment to everything going on around him, and eventually how to contribute to it. He works his way around the various stations of the kitchen, giving descriptions of what he is learning, who he is with (some of which can be rather cringy, as his descriptions are strongly gendered), and the general atmosphere of restaurant work. This is essentially a memoir in the vein of Anthony Bourdain, in other words. Eventually Buford decides he needs to learn where Batali learned and he goes to Italy, where he learns pasta making from the masters in a small dying Italian village, and then (as noted in the title) apprentices himself to a butcher in Tuscany – an exercise in culture as much as food preparation. Buford is an engaging writer, though one of the things that comes across fairly clearly despite (one suspects) his best intentions is just how much of a horrible person Mario Batali actually is. Yet he dedicates the book to Batali, in glowing terms.

Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City (KJ Parker)

Orhan is an engineer – a colonel in the Imperial Army, in fact, despite being a milkface in the Robur Empire, a polity of blueskins who are never shy about pointing out the inferiority and general undesirability of milkfaces. But when an unseen and apparently well trained force destroys the Imperial Army, blocks the Fleet, and lays siege to the City (yes, there’s always a City in books like these) it is up to Orhan to save the day. And when the leader of the besieging forces turns up and requests an audience with him, things spiral out of control from there. Orhan is a charming rogue, utterly corrupt, resourceful, clever, and generally contemptuous of rules, procedures, and precedent – in other words, just the man for the job. He has to contend with a City divided between Blues and Greens in much the way that Justinian’s Byzantium had been and with equal violence, a catatonic Emperor, and a generally misfit group of supporters, agents, and conscripts to keep the City from being slaughtered to the last person. This is, it turns out, the first of a trilogy – something I didn’t know the first time I read it – and having now found volume three I thought it would be good to start from scratch and follow the story in real time. Orhan has a compelling voice – exasperated, sarcastic, knowing, and generally sounding like he’s letting you in on wisdom that in hindsight is more or less common sense filtered through bad experiences, and at times he’s excruciatingly funny in a deadpan sort of way – and KJ Parker’s skill with sentences comes shining through as well.

How to Rule an Empire and Get Away With It (KJ Parker)

During the American Revolution the Continental Army was completely reformed by Baron von Steuben, who was a fraud. He wasn’t a baron. He was a Prussian drill sergeant, and sometimes a fraud that works is exactly what you need. This is the basic set up for this story. It has been seven years since the events of Sixteen Ways to Defend a Walled City and Colonel Orhan has long been forgotten, mostly for political reasons as it would never do for a milkface to have saved the City so it must, therefore, have been Lysimachus – safely blueskinned, the very model of Robur heroism, and in one of those accidents of war that just happen from time to time squashed by a trebuchet stone at the very beginning of this story. The siege of the City has not been lifted since Orhan’s time, but things had settled down. Into this comes Notkur – an actor and impressionist, living at the margins of Robur society in the way actors have traditionally done in most societies, but whose skill at imitating Lysimachus means that powerful people end up tracking him down and making him an offer he can’t refuse, namely to become Lysimachus and run the City, or at least give that impression while they run the City. And since Lysimachus was having an affair with Hodda – a theater manager well known to Notkur and the most intelligent person Notkur has ever met – he ends up dragging her into this as his wife. Notkur, like Orhan, is another charming rogue with more on the ball than even he suspects, and he manages to keep the City running, defeat more than a few conspiracies, assaults, betrayals, and general episodes of mayhem, and in the end you can plausibly suggest that he saved the City, depending on how you define “saved” or “City.” Notkur has a similar voice to Orhan, and the story benefits from that immensely.

A Practical Guide to Conquering the World (KJ Parker)

With this concluding volume of his Charming Rogue Trilogy, Parker brings the story of the Robur to a conclusion if not particularly an ending. The narrator of this volume is Felix, a former Robur soldier mutilated by his peers and then sent off to the Echmen Empire to work as a translator. There he runs into She Stamps Them Flat, the queen (or soon to be) of the Hus, one of the many feuding desert tribes collectively known as the Dejauzi. Through a combination of misfortune and scheming Felix and the Hus are sent off into the world, first to gather the Dejauzi and conquer the Echmen, and then to take over the world. Along the way Felix discovers what happened to the Robur – including the disparate fates of Notkur and Hodda – and becomes a Prophet of his own religion. Parker sprinkles allusions throughout the book for those who can catch them, and in the end Felix’s plans turn out nothing like what he intended but somehow more or less fine, which for Parker is about the happiest of endings possible.

Hell’s Super (Mark Cain)

Steve Minion is damned to an eternity as the chief maintenance man in Hell. He’s not good at his job, but if he were he wouldn’t have it. He’s got an assistant (Orson Welles – yes, that one), a love interest (Florence Nightingale, who isn’t actually damned but came down to Hell to comfort the lost souls), and an eternal life of the sort of torment that comes when everything is pointless, run down, and deliberately aggravating. Hell, it turns out, is not fire and brimstone so much as sand in your shorts. But when the elevator between the Pearly Gates and Hell breaks down and his two hired hands (Thomas Edison and Nikola Tesla, who get along about as well as you think they would) can’t fix it, the whole thing turns into a spy caper that involves the devil himself, the Bat Out Of Hell (BOOH), Steven Pinkerton, and a conspiracy of rebels trying to break out of Hell. Mark Cain – which has to be a pseudonym – self-published this book and it shows, as it’s about a draft away from something a traditional publisher would support, but it’s an entertaining story for the most part.

Notes from the Burning Age (Claire North)

Ven belongs to the Temple, an order that arose in the centuries after the Burning Age – the age of combustion and technology and warfare that ended when the kakuy, the spirits of the world, restored the balance by wiping out most of human civilization and scattering its remnants. They did this not particularly out of any concern for humans one way or another but because the world simply needed to be balanced – the indifference of the gods to humans, their lack of interest in prayer or sacrifice or any other human activity, is a running theme in this book. Set among the successor states of what was once Eastern Europe, where some older technology remains (Ven has access to computers, known as inkstones, and there are batteries and electric vehicles), this is at one level a story of humanity’s urge to master the environment at any cost to itself or the world as a whole. At the human level, however, it is a brutal cat and mouse game between Ven and Georg, who plots to get rid of the kakuy and restore humanity to its pre-burning height. Georg sounds an awful lot like any modern right-wing ideologue today when he gets rolling on his ideas and plans, which is probably why the online reviews of this book are so full of climate deniers, authoritarians, and other assorted halfwits whining about their views being criticized and their delicate feelings being hurt. I can’t say this upset me. In practical terms Georg wants to restore the Burning Age by declaring war on the successor states (which makes sense in context), while Ven and the Temple want to stop him. This is written with North’s trademark complex characters, melancholy tone, interweaving plots, and general inability to bring a story to a neat end, and its often meditative style is more tonal than propulsive at times, but it is well written and engaging and if you like North’s other books – as I do – it is definitely worth the time spent reading it.

The Midwest Survival Guide (Charlie Berens)

Regional humor is an acquired taste, but I’ve lived in the midwest for more than a quarter of a century now so I thought I’d give this one a shot. Charlie Berens is the comedian behind The Manitowoc Minute and in that spirit this is a “couple-three hundred” pages of broad generalizations and humorous asides about the region, defined as Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Iowa, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma – the last five of which I don’t particularly see as midwestern so much as Plains states, but so be it. He goes through the food, the language, the general tribal customs of midwesterners (and he does go out of his way to include indigenous and other non-white groups in his definition of midwestern) and so on, and if you’ve spent any time here you’ll recognize the grain of truth behind most of it. If you like this sort of thing, this is the sort of thing you’ll like.

Christmas in Wisconsin, Again!

We have once again reached the end of our Christmas season, more or less, with Ukrainian Christmas. This entailed a trip up to Kim’s parents, a swirl of family members young and old, and a feast of epic proportions. This is what holidays are supposed to be like, after all.

It’s not a bad drive up there and there was interesting conversation along the way, much of which was spent dunking on the Stanford University IT Department, an organization that has apparently never ventured out of the miniscule ideological bubble in which it resides. You can look it up yourself if you want, but you won’t be any better off if you do.

We arrived and immediately settled in as people gathered. Dustin is visiting us from Texas so he came along, and Kegan brought Jessica with him as well so it was a good sized group. There is never a bad time for an UNO game in our family.

At one point my niece Viera asked me to teach her how to use my DSLR camera, which is a relic in this age of cell phones. We went over the basics of it and I sent her off to take pictures since that’s really the only way to learn. She got some nice shots. People smile differently for kids.

For long stretches the television was tuned to music videos – mostly from the 80s (memories!) with a surprising number of Michael Jackson videos. We charted his progression from the precocious kid he was with the Jackson Five to the superstar he became in the 80s to whatever it was he evolved into after that. Sometimes a project just presents itself and you just go along to see how it turns out. I can’t say I was ever a huge fan of his, but it was interesting to see.

Dinner was Ukrainian food in abundance, though there was rather a rotating cast of characters at the table – there are far more people than seats at the table and many of those people are young children, so people slot in and eat as spaces become available. It makes the conversations more varied and nobody goes hungry, so it all counts as a win.

The younger family members get their gifts after dinner.

The rest of us do the Dice Game. All of the adults gather around the table with two gifts, one kind of nice and one kind of goofy. We arrange them in six piles and you roll a die – if you get a 4, you pick something from pile 4 and open it, to much oohing and ahing if it is one of the nice gifts and an equal amount of laughter if it is one of the goofy ones. The die goes around the table and eventually everyone has two gifts in front of them, and then the chaos begins. Two pairs of dice are distributed, a timer is set, and for the next several minutes the dice roll and get passed along, and anyone who rolls doubles can forcibly swap presents with anyone else. It’s a lot of fun. You should try it.

It was a long ride back home, but a happy one. Merry Christmas to all who celebrate it.

News and Updates for the New Year

1. So I’ve been away for a few days. Did I miss anything?

REALLY?

Sigh.

It’s going to be a long two years in Congress with the nation held hostage by the lunatic fringe of the Republican Party – a party whose mainstream is already by any rational post-WWII American standard firmly situated on the radical right-wing extreme and which has demonstrated conclusively that they don’t have the spine to protect democracy and law from attacks by their own fringe even if they were inclined to do so, which seems doubtful after the evidence of the last decade or so. If they wanted to prove themselves incapable of governing and unfit to hold power they couldn’t have picked a more effective way to do it.

2. Also, I’m not sure how the new Speaker of the House can claim a mandate from the American people when he doesn’t even have a mandate from his own Congressional delegation.

3. There is a backlog of posts to be made here and I’ll get to them all by and by. There are Vacation Posts, because nothing says “personal blog” than having to slog through someone else’s travels – it’s the 21st-century version of the old carousel of slides! But this is where I tell the stories I want to remember, and perhaps they’ll be entertaining enough for others too. There are also the Books I Read Last Year posts, and later today we’re heading to my in-laws for Final Christmas: The Reckoning, which will be much fun. So watch this space!

4. And the Christmas cards are almost ready to go out! Perhaps even Monday! Hey – it’s never too late for a card as far as we’re concerned.

5. Do not under any circumstances fly with the company which I will, for legal purposes, refer to as Ghost Air, unless you really, really feel a need to have the free time to get to know the airports along the way in excruciating detail. More on that when we get to the Vacation Posts.

6. Ancestry has been scoring at a higher rate than usual with the hints that they send me, so I’ve been downloading a satisfyingly large cache of documents to review at my leisure. The problem is that I already have a satisfyingly large – indeed, worryingly large – cache of similar documents downloaded from earlier binges through their holdings, and at some point I really do need to get to the “review at my leisure” part of this process. This is hard to do one is included in other plans, though admittedly this is a nice problem to have.

7. I also need to devote some time to my US2 history class, which I have been threatening to revise from the ground up since 2019. Likely not this time around, alas, but at least I can see about squeezing a few topics along the way so I can then extend the class closer to the present. Last year I got up to about 2010. If I can get to 2021 I’ll be happy as it provides a rather dramatic end point (“A republic, if you can keep it.” – Ben Franklin). This will require condensing some topics that were once rather popular but which now aren’t all that interesting to students born in the 21st century, but that’s how it goes.

8. I need a new computer, as the one I have now I bought used in 2017. Unfortunately I would like to replace it with an up to date version of the one I have – Apple’s most popular desktop model, after all – and Apple, in its infinite edginess, has decided to discontinue it because “it’s cooler this way.” I have no interest in a laptop, tablet, or whatever miniaturized thing is hip and trendy these days because I am old, and I have had enough of Windows to last me several lifetimes and most of whatever afterlife I may someday experience. Linux is not even on the table as an option because, well, just consider who this is for. So it is a quandary. Meanwhile bits and pieces of my computer seem to stop working randomly and at some point the whole thing will just freeze and die and I just hope I can get this resolved before it all collapses. This is the modern version of the Great Race.

9. Kim may have resolved my iPhone photo issue, however. It may well have just been a setting after all.

10. The house smells like pizzelles. Life is good.

Happy Birthday!

Today is Oliver’s birthday, and as has become something of a tradition we will celebrate it with egg rolls. Probably cake too. Lauren is home from college so we’ll all be together, and Dustin is coming up to visit later in the day which will add to the festivities. It will be a good time.

It has been a strange few years for the world at large, and for me in particular. Everyone is moving up a generation now, and I find myself in the position my parents were in after I graduated college, watching my eldest child figure out what to do with the rest of his life. I’m not sure I ever figured it out, though it has turned out well. Oliver will be fine.

He has accomplished much, and more importantly he is a good person. I enjoy hanging out with him and I hope he does with me. He's my hockey buddy, among other things.

Happy birthday, Oliver.

I’m proud of you.

An Axe to Wind Up and Throw

So we spent the afternoon throwing axes.

Not at each other.

We’ve been in a generally slow-motion pattern since Christmas. Lauren went up to her apartment to serve out her Covid isolation, which ended today, since she had more freedom to move about there. Kim, Oliver, and I have been at home working on the Christmas letter, watching various things on television (Glass Onion: thumbs up!) and trying to solve the 1000-piece puzzle of the Sistine Chapel that I got Kim for her birthday, which may or may not have been a kind thing to have done.

But with Lauren coming home today and the afternoon open for Plans, well, hanging around the place just wasn’t an option.

Fortunately, Kim knew of a place that would let you release your Inner Lumberjack for a small fee. It’s a barn-like sports-pub that has three big-screen televisions over a bar that’s roughly twenty paces long. The ceiling is a good thirty feet overhead, and at one end there are two of those digital golf driving range things where you can take real golf clubs and whack at a ping pong ball and the mainsail-sized screen in front of you reacts as if you’re at St. Andrews. You get used to the whacks eventually. There are a couple of dart boards off to one side, and in the back there are several mostly enclosed spaces where the general public is encouraged to try throwing forestry equipment at a wooden target.

They make you watch a ten-minute video before you can actually start the mayhem. It’s long on technique tips and rather short on safety information, which I thought was a bit odd, though given that my performance ended up looking a lot like like this perhaps that was more on the ball than I gave it credit for.

Also, you have to sign a Release From Liability that absolves the bar from any responsibility for any injury you might sustain at any point in this process, up to and including the bartender sneaking up behind you and stabbing you with a harpoon.

So we signed.

We also chose names for ourselves to go on the electronic scoreboard. You can choose any of the axe-related names that they offer (“Polearm”) or make up one of your own (I went with “Axl Rosacia”), or you can go with more prosaic options (“Beast 1” or “Beast 2”). You get your choice of target images, which are projected onto the wooden target, and even if you pick just the Standard Version it alternates between three or four options so it stays interesting.

We spent an hour happily clanking axes off the wall.

Kim has done this before. She has a crew of Science Babes who go out periodically and do Fun Things, and sometime earlier this year they ended up in this place. You could tell which of us had the experience.

I’ve got good aim. I probably hit the bullseye more often than not, in fact – it’s a big bullseye, you’re not all that far from it, and an axe has a lot of surface area to hit it with. But I could never really get the rotation down and it doesn’t count unless the axe sticks in the target. Out of about fifty throws I probably got it to stick maybe half a dozen times. Oliver’s throws were similar. Lauren, it turns out, is rather a natural at this and I will keep this in mind for the future.

But Kim won most of the time, as you would expect.

Go us!

The Christmas Report

If all had gone to plan today we’d probably be somewhere in Kentucky right now. It’s a long story. I’ll get to it by and by.

But we had a lovely Christmas here, just the four of us.

Christmas Eve we had our Odd Number of Kinds of Fish dinner – popcorn shrimp, spaghetti with clam sauce, and a Caesar salad since that has anchovies in the dressing. Apparently this is called La Vigilia, though when I was growing up we just called it Christmas Eve dinner. You’re supposed to have seven kinds of fish, but some people have fewer and some have as many as nineteen, which is rather excessive. As long as it’s an odd number the Italian saints are satisfied, I suppose. My dad – the only person in my immediate family when I was a kid who enjoyed eating fish, ironically enough – used to say that one is also an odd number. But we go with three these days because we can find three we like.

For those of you who doubted me when I said that I cannot actually get my iPhone to take decent photographs, well, now you know.

We also had fresh homemade biscuits, and for dessert we had the French Silk pie that I made earlier that day. There were gifts exchanged – a custom from my side of the family, where Christmas Eve is the big holiday – and then we mostly hung out. Lauren’s friend Nolan came over after that and we had a very nice time together.

Christmas Day I continued my tradition of getting up long before anyone else. I’m not sure why this happens routinely, given my general preference for night over day, but this is the one day of the year that I don’t mind so much. It’s quiet, and I can sit by the tree and think about things. Eventually people filter on down.

We decided to have a Christmas brunch, though since it was early afternoon by then perhaps “linner”? “Dunch”? Who knows. But we had bacon that needed to be cooked and a fresh box of eggs, and what more do you need? It was good food shared with loved ones and that’s all that mattered. Conversation largely focused on biology for some reason – bacteria, parasites, and the symptoms and progression of rabies, for the most part – but we had a grand time and even learned a few things. You have your holiday topics, we have ours.

Eventually there was dinner again – ham, potatoes, green bean casserole – and if it sounds like we are a group that thinks from one meal to the next, well, you’re not wrong. Kim decided to make a bourbon glaze for the ham so I looked through the cabinet where such beverages are stored and came back with two bottles that we inherited from my parents, a nearly empty one with a tax sticker from 1978 and another more full one with a tax sticker from 1976. What can I say? We weren’t tee-totalers, but we weren’t really big drinkers either. They made a nice glaze.

Yesterday we started the day preparing for our Second Christmas, which by rights was supposed to be our First Christmas (there will be another next month which will either be the new Second or the Third depending on how you count – we do this holiday up right) except that the worst winter storm in decades pretty much shut down the entire eastern half of the United States on the two days we could have driven to Tennessee so we stayed put and had our own Christmas here (vide supra).

We’ve had three years in a row of Christmas at home now, in this pandemic decade, and we’re starting to create our own traditions for them, which is a nice thing. We’ve discovered we’re a pretty relaxed group that way, and that’s lovely.

But we had plans to be in Tennessee today, so yesterday Oliver and I went off to do some final errands and ransom his now fully operable laptop from the repair shop. This was when Kim texted to let us know that Lauren’s cold was in fact Covid.

The rest of us have all tested negative since then, but rather than take a chance on exposing the extended family we are staying home. It was a sad decision, but the right one. Lauren feels fine – it’s a mild case, fortunately, as one would expect in someone fully vaccinated – and she has gone back to her apartment, where she has more space to rattle around and can cook her own meals without worrying about us.

So we’re here, with a few days of found time to hang out again. Perhaps we’ll keep working on the Christmas card, in the fond hopes that it will be out in January. There’s also a puzzle we’ve been meaning to start. There are books to read and I’ve got a pot of gravy and meatballs simmering on the stove. We’ll see what happens. It would have been good to see everyone, but we’ll figure out a time to do that later.

Merry merry, joy joy.

The Night Before Bopmas

Earlier this year I found some time to scan a couple of boxes of letters that my parents had sent to each other when my dad was in the Navy, back in 1959 or so. They were recent high school graduates at the time, and much of what was in them you could probably predict – the ins and outs of daily life for two people who loved and missed each other, with occasional things tucked into the envelopes that they thought the other would find interesting.

My dad served as a radioman on a small-engine repair ship and spent most of his time in the service in Norfolk, though he did go to Havana twice before Castro took over and once got far enough north to see the northern lights. Otherwise, he said, it was pretty uneventful and he rarely ever considered his time in the service as worth bringing up in conversation. My mom was a college student during that whole time, immersed in books and classes, peering through the blue haze of cigarette smoke that filled classrooms in those pre-Surgeon-General’s-Report days. It was a lovely conversation to read, nearly three quarters of a century later.

One of the more interesting finds in those letters were a couple of Christmas poems – parodies of the classic T’was the Night Before Christmas, adapted to the Beat Generation vibes of the late 1950s and filtered through the sensibilities of the US Navy. I have no idea what role my dad or his shipmates may or may not have played in their creation, but as a radioman he had access to the equipment he needed to find and reproduce them.

The first, entitled “The Night Before Bopmas,” is clearly a teletype and was created by one or more intelligent young men who were clearly not being stretched by their responsibilities.

The other, untitled, but addressed to All Hep Cats, may have been the work of a single creator named E. Smith, but is otherwise similar.

They’re a lot of fun to read.

Christmas Eve has always been the bigger holiday on my side of the family but it’s pretty low key this year as it was last year, though we’re all healthy this time. We’re hanging out here at home, on a bitterly cold day in southern Wisconsin. The winds have moderated somewhat from yesterday and the temperature has climbed into positive numbers (Fahrenheit) for the first time since Thursday, but it’s a good day to stay inside.

The chickens are fed, the cats and rabbits are asleep, and the gifts are wrapped. I’ve got lovely music playing as I write this – a singer I’ve only recently discovered named Laufey, which tells you how far behind the times I am as she has apparently been popular on TikTok for a couple of years now. The Christmas cards will go out in January as per our usual practice so we’re not worrying about those at the moment. We’ll have an abbreviated Feast of the Seven Fishes (three this year, if you include the anchovies in the Caesar salad dressing – as long as it’s an odd number it counts) for dinner, and I made a French Silk pie from scratch this afternoon because why not? Perhaps afterward we’ll play cards together.

It’s been a long year. It’s been a long couple of years. But for right now I am warm and dry, surrounded by my family, and generally doing well.

Boppy Xmas to all.