2020: A Few of My Favorite Things
This makes year #5. You know the routine. As always I hope this list guides you to something new and inspiring.
If you missed 2019’s list, check it out.
Movies
1. Little Women
When I heard they were remaking Little Women I was sure it was going to be terrible, without a doubt absolutely insufferable. I was wrong. It’s creative, poignant, and funny—every scene with Aunt March (Meryl Streep) made me laugh. Most of all, it’s a well-told story. If you enjoy a good story or appreciate the art of storytelling, I’m confident you’ll enjoy Little Women.
Runner-up: 1917
Articles
1. “A Photographer’s Parents Wave Farewell” by Eren Orbey
If you only have time for one item of this list, make it this moving piece on life’s farewells.
2. “America’s Never-Ending Battle Against Flesh-Eating Worms” by Sarah Zhang
Simply great reporting, in which we learn about tiny killers and the people who hold the line against them.
3. “The True Story of the Heartthrob Prince of Qatar and His Time at USC” by Harriet Ryan & Matt Hamilton
Not your typical “handsome young prince” story. But it definitely provides some moral insight into our culture, if we care to look.
Runners-up: “Politics Cannot Save Us” by Michael Hanby and “‘Imagine’ Is a Bad, Bad Song” by Matthew Walther
Books
1. How to Think Like Shakespeare by Scott Newstok
Inspiring, instructive, and very much needed, this isn’t a self-help book; it’s an education itself. Required reading.
The words of a nineteenth-century schoolmaster could be just as applicable to Shakespeare’s era as they were to Cicero’s:
You go to a great school not for knowledge so much as for arts and habits; for the habit of attention, for the art of expression, for the art of assuming at a moment’s notice a new intellectual posture, for the art of entering quickly into another person’s thoughts, for the habit of submitting to censure and refutation, for the art of indicating assent or dissent in graduated terms, for the habit of regarding minute points of accuracy, for the habit of working out what is possible in a given time, for taste, for discrimination, for mental courage and mental soberness. Above all, you go to a great school for self-knowledge.
2. Charis in the World of Wonders by Marly Youmans
I think this book will become a classic. It should, at any rate. It’s an epic set in early colonial North America, full of danger, devils, mythical beasts, wilderness, splendid 17th century vocabulary, and of grace. Charis comes of age in an untamed time in a world of wonders. Everything about it fits. More people need to know about this book.
What I find most surprising about either attending or suffering through childbirth is how when women are walking along the edge of the Jordan, holding hands within sight of the mower, Death, with his cloak and sickle, they can yet laugh, pray, tell stories, and encourage one another. A painful sweetness is compacted in those hours. The fingers may loosen and be impossible to hold, the precipitous bank catch hold of a woman’s feet; she may trip and plunge irresistibly into the drink, no matter how her friends and neighbors call to urge her to put forth hands and swim to shore. She may drown in those heavy waters, taking her babe with her. But the women go on in cheer, doling out comfort as if we were all safe and could skip along the border, and as if no river with its buried currents and fatal slap of waves on stone flowed nigh.
3. The Emperor of Scent by Chandler Burr
Chandler Burr opens a window on the mysterious and oblique worlds of perfumery and scientific consensus through the polarizing work of biophysicist Luca Turin. One part perfume guide, one part biography, mixed in with a little biology and academic egotism, with overtones of humor throughout, and you have an astonishing exploration into the world of scent.
Start with the deepest mystery of smell. No one knows how we do it. Despite everything, despite the billions the secretive giant corporations of smell have riding on it and the powerful computers they throw at it, despite the most powerful sorcery of their legions of chemists and the years of toiling in the labs and all the famous neurowizardry aimed at mastering it, the exact way we smell things — anything, crushed raspberry and mint, the subway at West Fourteenth and Eighth, a newborn infant—remains a mystery. Luca Turin began with that mystery. Or perhaps he began further back, with the perfumes. “The reason I got into this,” Turin will say, “is that I started collecting perfume. I’ve loved perfume from when I was a kid in Paris and Italy.”
4. Peace Like a River by Leif Enger
Peace Like a River is nothing less than endearing. It’s a story of family, sacrifice, and true heroism. Leif Enger’s characters and scenes seem somehow so familiar to life it feels like sitting an evening with kin revisiting events-gone-by.
Along American turnpikes he had failed to peddle vacuum cleaners, saucepans, patent medicines, candy, cufflinks, hairpieces. (I didn’t know all this at the time, but would learn it soon, gracefully worded, in his obituary.) Though he probably came through Roofing but once or twice yearly, it was more than enough to establish him as a kind of mean joke among us clannish kids. One Christmas Eve (the dishes done, the gospel of Luke read aloud, presents imminent), Davy looked out the window and said, “Oh, no, Tin Lurvy’s driving up!” The bluff dropped my organs into my shoes. Worse, it turned prophetic: Lurvy really was driving up, except he was only as far as Michigan at the time. Come New Year’s Eve (10 P.M., popcorn rattling in the pan, Swede and I looking ahead to the one time all year we’d see midnight), Lurvy drove up for real. Atop the stove were four glossy carameled apples, one for each of us to eat at the stroke of twelve. Lurvy ate Dad’s. The arrival of Tin always turned your day in unexpected directions. Here we’d been trying to give Swede a birthday to make her troubles flee; now we wanted to flee as well. It had to be done quickly if at all; otherwise protocol took hold, like the death rigor, requiring a person to respect company and sit and listen, in the case of Lurvy, to pointless recitations about people you didn’t know.
5. The King of Confidence by Miles Harvey
Often, the most interesting stories are the ones which are also true stories. The King of Confidence is definitely one of those cases. James Strang’s outlandish life story—masterfully told by Miles Harvey—offers a fascinating vignette of American society in first half of the 19th century, one with surprising relevance and parallels today.
And then the angel disappeared, never to be seen again. History does not record this celestial messenger’s name, nor does it establish whether he was an actual divine or a figment of the imagination or an outright lie—only that the bald-headed man’s name was James Jesse Strang, that he was thirty-one years old, that much like Smith he would rise from obscurity to fame, and that he too would meet a violent end. And in an age when the showman P.T. Barnum was perhaps the most famous person in the country—an age when, as one contemporary put it, “larceny grew not only respectable, but genteel” and “swindling was raised to the dignity of the fine arts,” an age that gave birth to the term confidence man—Strang would come to embody a constantly repeating character in American history, a kind of figure whose grip on our collective imagination is as tight today as ever. But before all that, he would reign as King of Earth and Heaven.
Runners-up: Long Shot by Azad Cudi, The Baghdad Eucharist by Sinan Antoon, Lila by Marilynne Robinson, and Fly by Wire by William Langewiesche.
Songs
1. “Entrance” by Liz Vice
“There you were hanging transforming the pain into entrance into your heart.” I don’t think I’ve ever heard a more succinct and expansive description of what Christ did than this opening line.
2. “Lento” by Howard Skempton
A masterpiece—a song like watching cresting waves in solitude and timelessness.
3. “Take Heart” by Mission House
Words I’ve needed to hear and tell myself often this year: “Our joy is born in labor pains. Love suffers long but not in vain. Take heart. Take heart.”
4. “Joy To Be” by Citizens
There were several songs from this outstanding album that could have made the list. It was a tough call, but the steady exuberant joy here buoyed me (and the song) up.
5. “Return, Oh Lord!” by Simon Khorolskiy
One of the fun discoveries of the year has been Simon Khorolskiy (credit to Keysha for introducing me). Epic scores, soaring vocals, Russian—what more could you want? [Turn on the closed captions for English subtitles].
6. “Harp Land” by Phamie Gow
I’ve enjoyed Phamie Gow’s piano compositions, but this harp and kora duet with Bajaly Suso is something absolutely extraordinary and engaging.
7. “Ability” by Bren axe
“Ability” has a personal dimension because I know the young artist and his story of resilience, pluck, and personal growth in the face of terminal disease. So yeah, this song hits me in the feels. And keeps me coming back.
Runners-up: “Altogether Good” by Citizens, “Behold” by Mission House, “Seasons” by NEEDTOBREATHE, “Christ Jesus” by John Mark McMillan, “O Jerusalem” by The Porter’s Gate, and “17” by Chris Renzema
Listen as a playlist on Spotify.
