2019: My Year in Articles, Books, and Music
Well, this is my fourth go at reviewing the media I’ve enjoyed over the year, and this year I decided to make some slight changes. I’ve come to the realization I don’t watch enough movies in a given year for even my top three to be particularly fresh or interesting. So I’m going to highlight the single film I found most compelling.
On the other hand, I’ve come across lots of great articles, so I added a section for the top three articles I read this year. They are tremendous!
As always, my hope for this list is that you discover something new and stirring.
If you missed it, check out last year’s list.
Movies
- Zulu
Zulu premiered in 1964. It’s old, it’s slow, and it’s cheesy in the 1960’s overly-dramatic epic movie kind of way. In so many ways it clashes with our modern palette, and that is precisely what makes it so much fun to watch. Zulu is a war movie, and it’s top notch in that genre. It depicts the conflict between two great and very different kingdoms without aggrandizing either side or war itself. Oh, and you also get a young Michael Caine.
Runner-up: Toy Story 4
Articles
1. “The Devil at 37,000 Feet” by William Langewiesche
This may be the single best piece of writing I read this year. It was so exquisite that after I finished the article I read everything I could find by William Langewieche including one of his books, The Outlaw Sea (which made my “Runners-up” for books this year). The account of the crash is detailed and technical, but never anything short of thrilling. You feel like you’re slicing through the air at a thousand miles per hour while looking down at the placid, ever so slowly shifting earth far below.
2. “The Falling Man” by Tom Junod
There are some pictures so gripping they come to define and embody whole events in human life and history. “The Falling Man” photo is one of those, among several, which captured the shock and horror of the September, 11th terrorist attacks. Tom Junod’s look into the aftermath of that one photo is as gripping and defining of the human condition as the photo itself.
3. “Ghosts of War in A Wisconsin Forrest” by Bryan Box
Some things can’t be photographed, and we can still prefer to look away from them. It’s convenient. It’s comfortable to avert our eyes. But we should look. We should see them. In this autobiographical piece published on Veterans Day, ecologist and veteran Bryan Box helps us do just that.
Runner-up: “Review: The Cheesecake Factory Is the Restaurant America Wants, Deserves” by Lucas Kwan Peterson
Books
1. Gilead by Marilynne Robinson
I can’t remember now where I came across the recommendation to read Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, but few books have ever fit me as well as this one. It’s a book that knew me. Perhaps that’s to be expected since the protagonist is a pastor in a rural community (it’s set in Iowa, no less). But it’s Robinson’s insights that made the book feel like I was reading a memoir to myself. It’s so good I couldn’t even settle on one quote.
I suppose it’s natural to think about those old boxes of sermons upstairs. They are a record of my life, after all, a sort of foretaste of the Last Judgment, really, so how can I not be curious? Here I was a pastor of souls, hundreds and hundreds of them over all those years, and I hope I was speaking to them, not only to myself, as it seems to me sometimes when I look back. I still wake up at night, thinking, That’s what I should have said! or That’s what he meant! remembering conversations I had with people years ago, some of them long gone from the world, past any thought of my putting things right with them.
***
There’s a pattern in these Commandments of setting things apart so that their holiness will be perceived. Every day is holy, but the Sabbath is set apart so that the holiness of time can be experienced. Every human being is worthy of honor, but the conscious discipline of honor is learned from this setting apart of the mother and father, who usually labor and are heavy laden, and may be cranky or stingy or ignorant or overbearing. Believe me, I know this can be a hard Commandment to keep. But I believe also that the rewards of obedience are great, because at the root of real honor is always the sense of the sacredness of the person who is its object.
2. Imperium by Robert Harris
Imperium recounts the story of the rise of Roman orator and statesman Marcus Tullius Cicero from the perspective of his long-time personal secretary Tiro, himself a well-documental historical figure. As historical fiction, the book is two essential things: tremendously entertaining and historically astute. Amid this political thriller you’ll gain a heightened understanding of the practices and politics of pre-imperial Rome.
Gellius Publicola was sitting in the doorway on his carved ivory chair, surrounded by his attendants, waiting until the entrails had been inspected and the auguries declared favorable before summoning the senators inside. Hortensius approached him, palms spread wide in inquiry. Gellius shrugged and pointed irritably at Cicero. Hortensius swung around to discover his ambitious rival surrounded by a conspiratorial circle of senators. He frowned and went over to join his own aristocratic friends: the three Metellus brothers — Quintus, Lucius, and Marcus — and the two elderly ex-consuls who really ran the empire, Quintus Catulus (whose sister was married to Hortensius) and the double triumphator, Publius Servilius Vatia Isauricus. Merely writing their names after all these years raises the hairs on my neck, for these were such men, stern and unyielding and steeped in the old republican values, as no longer exist. Hortensius must have told them about the motion, because slowly all five turned to look at Cicero. Immediately thereafter a trumpet sounded to signal the start of the session, and the senators began to file in.
3. A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller, Jr
Every now and then you watch a movie or read a book that is truly unique. It defies categories and does something totally its own. A Canticle for Leibowitz is one of those books. If I call it a post-apocalyptic story, you’d have an idea about the book, but it would be the wrong idea. Miller creates a habitat that feels so uniquely old and new, it’s hard to shake.
So time mattered not at all. The Memorabilia was there, and it was given to them by duty to preserve, and preserve it they would if the darkness in the world lasted ten more centuries, or even ten thousand years, for they, though born in that darkest of ages, were still the very bookleggers and memorizers of the Beatus Leibowitz; and when they wandered abroad from their abbey, each of them, the professed of the Order—whether stable-hand or Lord Abbot—carried as part of his habit a book, usually a Breviary these days, tied up in a bindlestiff.
4. Independent People by Halldór Laxness
Independent People is a story about Iceland and about sheep. It’s about the doggedness demanded of a people who would cleave out a living for themselves as crofters in such a rugged and unyielding landscape. And most of all, it’s a story of folly. Independent People is as harsh and delightful as the Icelandic landscape. It’s the kind of book that stays with you and grows in the staying.
“And how is everything down-country?” asked the grand-mother. But instead of retailing the news, he began to speak of the incomprehensible labyrinth of fate that had sent a man of his health on so hazardous an expedition in the depths of winter, after he had dwelt for tens of years in the genial warmth of the
world’s glamorous, stove-heated cities.
“Oh yes,” said the old woman, “but I’ve heard that these so-called stoves are by no means all that they’re supposed to be. I never saw a stove in my day, and yet I never ailed a thing, at least as long as I could really be called alive, except for nettle rash one night when I was in my fifteenth year, though it wasn’t
so bad that I couldn’t get up next morning and see to my work. It was caused by some fresh fish that the boys used to catch in the lakes thereabouts. This was in the south where I was brought up.”
The man did not answer for a while, but lay pondering in silence the medical history of this incredible old creature who, without ever having set eyes on a stove, had suffered no ailment for the past sixty-five years. At length he replied that when all was said and done, the stove flames of world civilization were probably the very flames that fed the heart’s inextinguishable distress, and it is also an open question, old woman, whether the body itself is not better off in an environment colder than that engendered by the flickering flames of civilization’s stoves.
5. Danubia by Simon Winder
This is the best way to learn history. Full of humor and oddities, Danubia chronicles the strange and influential span of the Habsburg Holy Roman Empire from its beginnings in the fifteenth century to its triggering the start of World War I. There was so much here that was unfamiliar and unknown to me, so much that seems strange and yet oddly fitting for contemporary events in Europe—like narwhal tusks, for example.
Being a parodically English middle-class child I had a big book of Greek myths and became so obsessed with the Twelve Labours of Hercules that they became a sort of Stations of the Cross for me — an immutable sequence of story-telling excellence. Even most of a life-time later, excitedly looking at yet another Habsburg palace ceiling featuring a giant painting of the labours, I would find myself bristling whenever I saw a labour that was non-canonical and it was only when doing a final round of research for this book that I finally realized why there were several versions. In retrospect it is obvious: no painter could possibly paint for his patron, on some colossal ceiling under which dances, banquets and flower-strewn betrothals would be held, Hercules battling to clean up hundreds of tons of cattle excrement from King Augeas’s stables. There is really no way of doing it: a small pile simply would not be heroic — Hercules would like a farmer doing a little light composting — whereas a mountain of steaming brown so big as to be worth diverting a river to clean up, spread across half the ceiling would make for a very unpleasant visual experience.
Runners-up: Persian Fire by Tom Holland, The Outlaw Sea by William Langewiesche, Unseduced and Unshaken by Rosalie De Rosset, and Dodger by Terry Pratchett.
Songs
1. “Le Luci Di Roma” by GnuS Cello
For me it doesn’t get much better than cello and piano, and it’s not often you come to a cover melody as beautiful as this one with a clean slate.
2. “How to Be Yours” by Chris Renzema
The reality of these words resonates with my heart as loudly and passionately as I sing along to this song: “I still don’t know how to be yours.”
3. “Fall On Me” Andrea Bocelli and Matteo Bocelli
I was introduced to this amazing duet through the music video. Something about the way Andrea smiles when he first hears his son start singing (0:22) gets me. Everything about this song fits perfectly.
4. “Sleeping Fields” by Greg Maroney and Sherry Finzer
I said it doesn’t get much better than cello and piano. Well, this piano and flute duo comes close. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking this year, and this song (along with several of their others) has inspired and nurtured that inner muse.
5. “Psalm 45 (Fairest of All)” by Shane & Shane
For 18 years Shane & Shane have been so consistently good. This song is a couple years old, but it rose to the top for me this year because I kept coming back to it again and again. The refrain became a day to day psalm of praise.
6. “The Earth Shall Know” by The Porter’s Gate
I love the richness of the instrumentation and vocals. They have the buoyancy to carry the eschatological fullness expressed in the lyrics.
7. “בין קודש לחול” (Bein Kodesh L’Chol) by Amir Dadon and Shuli Rand
The title of the song comes from its first (and last) line which translates to “Between the sacred and the sand I live” in English. Even if you don’t understand Hebrew I think you might get close to that idea just from the ethos of the song.
Runners-up: “The Hype” by Twenty One Pilots; “City Samba” by Konteks; “O Great Light” by Jess Ray; and “Villanesca Alla Napolitana: Vecchie Letrose” by Jordi Savall and Adrian Willaert
Listen as a playlist on Spotify.
