2015 in Review

2015 was a Year of Tremendous Ups and Downs for me, more so than any in the past ten or fifteen years (2011 comes close). As I do at the end of every year, I try to pass along the best and worst of what I’ve read, saw, heard, and experienced.

Best book read (nonfiction):

The Autobiography of a Yogi by Paramahansa Yogananda (and no, I didn’t become a Hindu, but the book was an incredible and moving read)

Runner-up: (tie)

Watching Baseball Smarter by Zack Hample

The War of Art by Steven Pressfield

Best book read (fiction): (tie)

Read nothing truly outstanding this past year. A lot of good stuff, but everything seemed to come with an exposed, swollen Achilles heel. With this in mind, a tie between two masters – Lord of Light by Roger Zelazny and Double Star by Robert Heinlein.

Worst book:

That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis. Hated it. Couldn’t finish it.

Reading notes:

I read 58 books cover-to-cover this year, 21 fiction and 37 nonfiction. Need to read more good fiction in 2016 to balance the scales. This number also includes two self-published books I bought off Amazon (and does not include reading my own!) I also read Fulton Sheen’s Life of Christ (658 pages) three times in the past twelve months. I read it twice before in the early 2000s. Since it is so sublime and meaningful to me, it is exempt from voting this year.

Trends:

Bounced from one unrelated topic to another, to varying degrees of depth, over the course of 2015:

Crusades > Catholicism > Baseball > Working Out > Self-Publishing > Unemployment > Nietzsche > Hinduism > Tom Clancy revisit > Physics revisit > War in the Pacific > Discworld > Gormenghast > Return to Working Out > Return to Catholicism > Arthurian legend > Finnegans Wake

As you can see, I had a very, very diversified year.

Best Trend:

Self-Publishing, without a doubt!

Best Movie Watched: four-way tie

The Interview (comedy)

Happy Go Lucky (indie drama)

Birdman (mainstream drama)

Cabin in the Woods (horror)

Can’t recall seeing any real good SF, but enjoyed Vin Diesel’s Riddick a lot.

Worse Movie Watched:

Mission Impossible V (or whatever the number of the latest incarnation)

Guitar achievements:

(1) Finally learned how to play “Here Comes the Sun” by George Harrison and Jimmy Page’s guitar solo the Honeydripper’s “Sea of Love”

(2) Wrote another album (8 or 9 songs). Have to start writing down these tabs …

Worst (Yet Paradoxically Best) Experience:

Being laid off in May

Undisputed Best Experience:

Hitting the Publish button on my first book, Oncewhere Walked the Whale

Best bonding experiences with the girls:

With Patch (age 6/7) – spending the day together at Van Saun Park

With Little One (age 10/11) – learning Self-Publishing with her at my side

With Both – going to Turtleback Zoo in August

Best family experiences:

(1)   Four baseball games (and taking my two little ones into NYC via bus/taxi):

        May 2, Citi Field: Nationals 1, Mets 0. Sat in highest row behind right field foul pole.

        Jun 22, Yankee Stadium: Phillies 11, Yanks 8. Sat in the first row of the left field bleachers.

        August 17, Yankee Stadium: Yanks 8, Twins 7. Sat 14 rows behind home plate.

        September 21, Citi Field: Mets 4, Braves 0. Sat halfway up behind left field foul pole.

(2)   Weeklong vacation visiting the in-laws in Hilton Head

Song of the Year:

As with last year, dunno. Not been into music much lately. Didn’t buy a single music CD all year. Classical music, once a love, bores me. Opera, once an infatuation, grates on me. Classic rock is … yawn. I need to discover something new. (This happened to me before, in 1998.) Perhaps I need to make it a ritual, when I take the girls to the library every Saturday, to borrow something weird musically and give it a listen during the week.

So, alas, this category must remain vacant for 2015.

Personal Milestones:

98 weightlifting workouts (since May)

147 miles walked (since May)

275 hours worked on the whole self-publishing thing (since May)

Painted Little One’s bedroom purple and light blue in August

Power-washed and restained my backyard deck in September

Family Milestones:

Little One’s grammar school graduation / starting middle school

Patch’s 4 goals scored this past soccer season

Wife’s new job – upward and onward, keeping Battleship Hopper afloat!

* * * * * * * * * * * *

Hwyl fawr, 2015, mai y flwyddyn nesaf fod yn un gwell!

Book Reviews: The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills

The Crystal Cave © 1970 by Mary Stewart

The Hollow Hills © 1973 by Mary Stewart

One of my more perverse literary habits is to periodically revisit memorable books from my past. My distant, idealized, youthful past. Books that thrilled me and chilled me as a child, books that colored my black-and-white world, books that breathed pneuma into the sails of my life, sweeping me beyondward to distant lands and distant peoples.

I say “perverse” because, more often than not, such revisits often rebound with regret. The book does not live up to my memories of it – a strict function of the fact that I am now solidly adult, and see the world through the pragmatic and dour eyes of a mature man. The awe and glee of a child’s glance rarely sits with me during today’s literary wanderings, and it is the hope of recapturing such awe and glee that prompts me ever to the next book.

However, not all is personal, private tragedy when I return to a Book from my Childhood. I’ve read The Lord of the Rings twice now since tweenhood, and each time it has grown stronger and brighter and more meaningful to me. Same can be said for Watership Down and some Asimov novels recently re-read. In fact, off the top of my head, I’ll throw out the guestimate that one in three books I revisit from my youth exceeds my starry-eyed memories. It’s those other two-thirds that populate my literary masochistic streak.

I don’t remember when first I read Mary Stewart’s The Crystal Cave and The Hollow Hills, but I do believe it was those murky months after my parents divorced and my mother, brother and I moved into our first apartment. Tolkien gave me much comfort in the initial stages of their separation, and that was the summer before Freshman year at high school. So perhaps the Stewart books followed a year later, because they were assigned summer reading. Or maybe I read them directly after The Lord of the Rings. Either way, I had to read them.

But they were right up my alley back then: Merlin. Merlin, and Arthur.

Now, I haven’t the time or the inclination to test my theory, but to my mind it seems these books were the first to re-image classic, traditional tales of myth and legend. The story is told from Merlin’s point of view, beginning at the innocent age of six and ending with the wizard coming full into his powers, at age thirty-five or so, with the ascendency of his ward, Arthur. Nowadays, reimaged myth and legend are a multi-billion dollar industry (see: Riordan, Rick). Take a dash of classic literature, throw in heaping amounts of teen angst and faux Po-Mo attitude, shake and stir with action set pieces ripe for the Big Screen, and serve copiously at your local Barnes and Noble. Though not taken to that extreme, and written with class and reserve, Stewart’s novels are the progenitor of the Riordan phenomenon.

Anyway, the books themselves:

I used the adjective “murky” a few paragraphs ago, and that best describes my thirty-five-year-old memories of them. Not crisp, clear memories, but nebulous emotional attachments. Images laced with fear and foreboding. The vague recollection of Merlin’s forbidding grandfather-king slipping on spilled oil and cracking his head open, and Merlin’s slave put to death for it. The boy’s uncle slyly inducing the lad to eat a poisoned fruit. The ever-so-brief interlude in the forest with the hermit / teacher Galapas, expanding the boy’s vision in countless ways. Merlin finally overcoming brutality, savagery, and near death to wind up at the fireside next to his true father (how that warm image stayed with me!). The larger, geopolitical jigsaw pieces fragmented about in my recollection, such as the dragon at Vortigern’s castle, Merlin’s deception to bring lovestruck Uther to Ygraine’s bed (and thus beget Arthur), Morgause incestuously laying with Arthur after his first battle success.

Thus, for distant me, the two novels morphed into one timeless, blurry dream of incomprehensible apprehension.

Three-and-a-half decades later, a vivid laserlight has excised those dark and dank memories.

I enjoyed the two books. Crystal Cave slightly better than Hollow Hills.

No doubt it’s the seven hundred books read in the interim. I know that good triumphs over evil, mostly, mostly after taking a damn hard beating. I know that now; I didn’t know that then. I know story arc, and characterization, and plot, and setting. I have tried my own hand at them. Stewart is a great expositor, and great dialoguist, a wizard in her own right with the turn of a phrase. I thoroughly enjoyed travelling with Merlin as he grew in age, stature, and power, and found his own way, and discovered (“put himself in the path of the gods”) his charge to unite all of Britain through a bastard like himself, a hunted helpless child name of Arthur.

Oh, and maps. Maps help immensely in fantasy books. Don’t think the version I read in the early 80s had any. The paperbacks I just finished printed detailed maps of post-Roman England on the first pages.

Grade: A for The Crystal Cave. A-minus for The Hollow Hills, for two minor points of contention. First, I found large swaths of Hills unmemorable and unremarkable – Merlin spends years tending a shrine, trekking through snowy woods, encountering the Old Ones, etc. And I thought the whole “origin story” and “reveal” of Excalibur – called “Caliburn” here – something of a let-down, in that it was at variance to what I’ve absorbed from the more traditional tales.

Still, perfect for any youngling approaching high school age and bitten by the fantasy bug.

Bag of Toys

“What is this?” Patch, age seven, asks, holding up the tiny black key fob.

“That,” my eleven-year-old Little One says, “is a flash drive.”

“A flash drive?”

“Yes.”

“What’s a flash drive?”

My ears perk up and strain to listen in on the backseat conversation as I navigate the slushy roads.

“Say you have files on one computer,” Little One explains, “and you want to put them on another. You just stick the flash drive in, here, wait for a window to open up on your computer, and then you drag the files you want to move onto this, here. Then you take the flash drive out and insert it in this slot in the second computer, wait for that box to open, then you drag the files you want to move onto, say, the desktop area, or you can search for another folder if you want to put it there.”

Patch is quiet. I can’t see her in the rear-view mirror, but expect that face is scrunching up a bit as she’s trying to make sense of what big sister just said.

Time for an intervention.

“Patch,” I say, “think of it this way. Imagine you’re in your room and you put all your toys in a bag. Then you take that bag over to Grammy’s house. That bag is like the flash drive. It moves stuff from one place to another.”

More quiet.

Then, Patch says: “So … wait. There’s toys in this flash drive?!?”