Oh, what a year! A review of 2020, through the prism of reading, listening, working and gambling

It’s my annual year in review. I think I’ve done one of these every year. Or most years. I don’t remember.

In keeping with the spirit of the holiday season last couple of months, which have been oh-so-frenetic, this too will be a rushed, whirlwind recap of what was truly a raucous annus horribilis. And if that makes no sense, that’s because this year hardly made sense.

The biggest positive to emerge from 2020? One of my most productive years of reading ever. But that also came at the cost of other things. When people ask ‘how do you find the time to read?’ I answer: ‘because I don’t do most of the stuff I should be doing instead of frittering away my time reading!’

Herewith 2020 in review. The books are a selection of my favourites and highlights. Mercifully, not all of them.

January and February: months like any other, for the most part

Grand Hotel, Vicki Baum; Flights, Olga Tokarczuk; Love, Poverty and War, Christopher Hitchens; Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, Michael Pollan; Honjin Murders, Seishi Yokomizo; The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

March…the fun begins. The start of working from home. Juggling parenting and co-working with my wife at the dining room table and various other free spaces. 

Rules of Civility, Amor Towles; The Book of Dead Philosophers, Simon Critcheley, The USA Trilogy Part 1: the 42nd Parallel, John Dos Passos

Interlude 1: Back to blogging

Regular, loyal readers and followers will remember this as the time when I started blogging fairly prolifically, by my standards anyway. I was churning them out at a [relatively] rapid rate. If you’re at a loose end with time to kill over the holiday season…

My blog count for all of 2019: 4

My blog count for February-July 2020: 12

(but just wait until you get to August)

April…May…the days are blending together. Slowly getting the hang of teaching online. Dealing with my daughter and her constant cries for attention. She’s interrupting my lessons from time to time. But she still clings more to my wife, which makes her job extra tough. Starting lessons in one room, the bedroom/office, moving to the kitchen so my daughter can take her nap…or go to bed…

The start of pandemic-fuelled reading: The Great Influenza, John Barry; Station Eleven, Emily St John Mandel (you think we’ve got it bad? In Station Eleven, the ‘Georgian Flu’ wipes out 99% of humanity – so look on the bright side?)

Underground Railroad, Colson Whitehead; These Truths: A History of the United States, Jill Lepore; 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, Yuval Noah Harari; Travels, Paul Bowles (which I dipped into slowly throughout the year, only finishing in November)

Interlude 2: Music, nostalgia and re-connecting with old friends

It might be an age and generation thing, but I started suffering from overpowering nostalgia in the early pandemic days. Music (and wine, I suppose) fueled my maudlin moods and I, like probably so many others, starting re-connecting with old classmates and checking in with people and just catching up. By May(ish), the whole ‘let’s have a massive group Zoom chat!’ phase was starting to wear thin, and pretty soon we were all just thinking ‘wait, why did it take a pandemic for us all to start chatting again?’ and ‘why the hell, if we’re all spending 40-50 hours sat at a damn computer are we spending more time sat at a damn computer chatting on Zoom? To hell with this!’.

June…same old, same old…at this point, we’ve thrown in the towel as parents and said ‘to hell with this whole screen time thing, if our daughter wants to sit and watch cartoons all day and rot her brain, as long as it keeps her quiet…’

Eric Hobsbawm: A Life in History, Richard Evans; Meditations, Marcus Aurelius; The Joke, Milan Kundera; Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to his Son, George Horace Latimer; Between the World and Me, Ta-Nehisi Coates

Interlude 3: Boredom

A common theme of the year, at least one doing the rounds in my Twitter circle, perhaps more so as we got into the autumn months, was boredom. As in, I’ve watched everything there is to watch and I’m bored senseless, and I don’t know what else to do with my time, I’m going stir-crazy at home, help, I need something new to do, I want to get out, I want to travel, I want…

I’ve never understood this. I can’t imagine being bored. There are too many things to watch, books to read, things to learn…

I’m fortunate. I was able to keep working. I had a stable job (I still do…I think). So I’m not complaining. But I kept thinking that for people in a similar position, to be ‘stuck’ at home but without a family to worry about…my goodness, the things you could do and learn.

July…back to work! In person! Face-to-face teaching! Well, almost…masked and socially distant, but still, it was nice to be back in the classroom

Excellent Women, Barbara Pym; Another Day of Life, Ryszard Kapuscinski; The Sea, John Banville; The 48 Laws of Power, Robert Greene; The USA Trilogy Part 2: 1919, John Dos Passos

Interlude 4: The hidden pleasures of listening well after the fact

This is a major first world problem, but from March-June, my podcast listening suffered. I can’t listen at home (I don’t enjoy it). It’s purely a commuting thing. So I had a major backlog of podcasts to get through.

I usually listen to a mix of sports, pop culture, current events and business stuff, with my favourites being The Ringer and BBC Radio 5 Live’s Fighting Talk. The Ringer has a great podcast called ‘The Rewatchables’, which is perfect for when you’re feeling overly nostalgic. The premise: two or three hosts take old classic (primarily 80s) films like Top Gun, The Karate Kid, Beverly Hills Cop and even more recent ones like John Wick and Taken, and take them apart, nitpick and analyse them to death. It’s very often hilarious.

Without boring you senseless with too much detail…when I returned to work in July and started catching up on these old podcasts (not the Rewatchables, the other stuff), where people talked about the start of the pandemic in March and then on into April and May…what a fascinating and illuminating experience, to listen after the fact. Nothing felt dated. It was enlightening to hear early ruminations and see how well they aged. Highly recommended, if you get the chance.

August…on holiday and off work…a trip to the Carpathians where my wife tried to kill me…a month of super prolific blogging with 10 posts of varying quality…(you know where to find them if you missed out on the fun the first time…)

Dancing Bears: True Stories of People Nostalgic for Life Under Tyranny, Witold Szablowski; The Pleasure of Finding Things Out: The Best of Richard Feynman; Facing Unpleasant Facts: Narrative Essays, George Orwell; The Wild Places, Robert Macfarlane; The Minds of Billy Milligan, Daniel Keyes

September and October…the full return to the classroom and the start of a new teaching year…life getting busier, things starting to feel more full-on and intense, work-wise.

Bear in Mind These Dead, Susan McKay; Hotel New Hampshire, John Irving; The Loss of El Dorado, VS Naipaul; The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration, Isabel Wilkerson; The USA Trilogy Part 3: the Big Money, John Dos Passos

Interlude 5: Introducing my daughter to gambling

This is another theme that my regular readers will no doubt fondly recall. How many posts have I written on this over the years? 4? 5? You can go back in the archive (search for words like ‘gambling, American football’ maybe). 

A reminder: many years ago, I used to bet on American football. Not much. But I did well when I did. This was in the very early days of the internet, when you didn’t need analytics and extensive research to know which teams to pick. I knew my stuff. These were the days of newspapers and calling bookies on the phone.

But gambling on sports is a bit like investing in the stock market. There’s so much luck involved, and so much of it is random. A bit of skill, yes. But the pros regularly get outperformed by amateurs and algorithms these days. Back in March, everyone started recklessly gambling on the stock market. Everyone became a trader. Many did well.

I didn’t gamble for many years. After I met my wife, I introduced her to American football (she still doesn’t really like it). I told her my gambling tales and how random it all was. And so we started picking games for fun (no money). She had no idea what she was doing, but she was beating me more often than not. I analysed the matchups, she picked teams based on uniform colours and team names (animal names in particular: Bengals, Rams, Dolphins, Broncos, Panthers, Lions…).

Then we got the cat involved, putting two treats down, one for each team.

Pretty soon, I was getting my ass kicked by my wife and my cat. I mean, maybe my wife started to pick up on who the good and bad teams were (‘Wait, the Bengals…they suck, don’t they? Okay, I choose Eagles.’). But my cat? What the hell did she know?

Over the years, from 2014-2019, I don’t think I won more than one season. If even that. Maybe I did, I honestly forget. But my wife and cat definitely won more than me.

This year, we got our daughter involved. Welcome to the world of gambling, sweetheart.

The standings, after Week 10 (of 17):

DP: 23-31 (not good)

Wife: 31-23 (pretty good)

Kid: 34-20 (very good – any professional gambler would take this record in a heartbeat)

Thus proving once again that luck is everything in life…or that I suck and don’t know a damn thing about football.

November and December…back to working from home, online teaching yet again. Busy as hell. Way too much sitting. Way too much computing. Not enough sleep. 

September-November blog count: 1

But as of today (Week 14), I’ve started to make my gambling comeback. And my daughter’s luck is slowly running out. By the end of the season, I will no doubt be triumphant.

DP: 38-42

Wife: 42-38

Kid: 41-39

Nickel Boys, Colson Whitehead; The Club: Johnson, Boswell, and the Friends Who Shaped an Age, Leo Damrosch; The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon

In progress: The Fifth Risk, Michael Lewis; An Economist Walks into a Brothel: And Other Unexpected Places to Understand Risk, Allison Schrager; To the River, Olivia Laing; Heaven Lies About Us, Eugene McCabe

My highlights of the year

Grand Hotel

Station Eleven

These Truths

Meditations

The 48 Laws of Power

The Wild Places

Hotel New Hampshire

The Warmth of Other Suns

The Club

On tap for next year, in terms of reading and writing themes: lots of ideas in the pipeline. Stay tuned.

Here’s to a happy and healthy 2021. 

Mind yourselves, and keep safe.