I’ve always liked the week between Christmas and New Year’s. This year I was even lazier than usual and spent most of my time sitting around in a panda suit and face mask, watching the new season of Black Mirror. I leave the house to go to yoga and also so that my Fitbit will congratulate me on things.
I read three more books through the end of the year:
Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid
Secondhand Time, by Svetlana Alexievich
Love and Math, by Edward Frenkel
I was reading the last two somewhat simultaneously – Secondhand Time is pretty large to be a subway book – which felt somewhat thematic, since they’re both nonfiction and take place (at least in part) in the later days of the Soviet Union. Initially I found Secondhand Time difficult because it’s so vast and seemed both static and amorphous – a chorus of voices that aren’t always identified, starting stories that are related by time, place, and theme but don’t necessarily begin at the beginning. It started to coalesce around page 150, or maybe something changed in the way I was reading it. That was also the point at which it became more depressing, such that I had to stop reading it on the plane home to Ohio for Christmas and read O Magazine instead. I think I would still recommend Voices From Chernobyl over Secondhand Time; an oral history of a singular event in one place has more clarity than one of a complex period over thousands of miles.
