Personal

It’s the perfect time of year, somewhere far away from here.

It actually was the perfect time, especially of that year. July. I’d just graduated from high school. My friends had started that awkward dance of preparing for a new life while pretending nothing would change between us. We didn’t know what the future held, which is true all the time, but in that exceptional moment we were aware of it.

I spent the holidays home with both our kids, which was both deeply rewarding and exhausting. This weekend we’re taking a grownups-only trip to New York, and I have a little time to think and finally pull together all my favorite books of the last year.

The Director, by Daniel Kehlmann

This might have been my favorite book of the whole year. It’s a novel loosely based on the life of D.W. Griffith, a film director in the early days of filmmaking. Kehlmann’s story begins in Hollywood, where Griffith was languishing in the 1920’s before abruptly deciding to return home to Austria moments before Hitler annexed it. Kehlmann’s storytelling is taut without being melodramatic–a remarkable accomplishment given the world-historical events that take place around Griffith as he finds himself ensnared in Hitler’s regime and still trying to make movies. There is a deeply moving scene involving a gathering of random acquaintances when Griffith arrives in Europe before going on to Austria. War is in the air, but nobody knows it for certain yet. The chill I felt when reading this section was very real.

Gosh what a year it’s been. None of it has gone the way I expected.

Way back in January, my family and I got out of town for MLK weekend. While staying at a cabin on a pond, I watched fat flakes drifting through the trees and felt at peace.

That was January 19.

These aren’t all 2024 releases, just books I happened to read this year that I liked. I know I am missing a few here but it’s the end of the year and I am weary.

As of today, our second daughter has been alive on this planet for five weeks. I’ve been on parental leave that whole time, and it has really flown by. Having a kid at the end of the year is really disorienting, since time already feels more compressed than usual with all the holidays packed into the final quarter of the American calendar.

But it’s also a bit boring, since most of our time has been spent at home, overseeing the baby’s three main activities (sleeping, eating, pooping). Today, against my better judgment (meaning that of my wife), I ventured with our baby out into the Great Unknown to shop for a new e-bike at REI.

I made my first website when I was in middle school. My family had just gotten AOL, and I was thrilled. The internet was huge that year. Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks were hanging out and chatting on AOL Instant Messenger, along with all my friends. AIM was the killer app, but I was more taken with another feature: each AOL user was allotted 2 megabytes of hosted webspace. The “Personal Publisher” software they provided to build your site was total garbage—I remember that by default, any <img> inside of an anchor tag had a thick border that looked clunky. But you could also edit your page’s source code directly. Suddenly I had the same power to build pages that any professional “web designer” did. The bar was not high then, and I was full of eighth-grade hubris.