#BooksOf2025

1. Less by Andrew Sean Greer

5.5/10

GOOD: Funny, engaging, well-written
BAD: Blow-by-blow from a single perspective, self-indulgent

Finished my first novel of 2025 last night (though I read the majority of it in 2024). Less by Andrew Sean Greer. It was fine. Engaging and fun and a few very funny lines, eg:

His first response to Peter was to ask: "How did they even know I was gay?" He asked this from his front porch, wearing a kimono.

The fact that it's not dissimilar from stuff I've written and gotten nowhere with, and that it won the Pulitzer probably played no small part in engendering some bitterness... But it also does the thing that I used to love and can't stand anymore, which is to paint as realistic a world in which literary novelists have any sort of recognition or relevance.

The protagonist, Arthur Less, is an aging novelist, and a minor one by all accounts, who finds fans among the working class he encounters in different countries. It's writer porn. By writers and for writers.

There's also an under-developed thread that turns out, in the end, to be the big pay-off, which felt a bit pat and uninteresting.

I'm also a bit squeamish with male physical intimacy, and there's that throughout the book, though it's perfectly tasteful, but it probably didn't help its chances of winning me over.

When I first moved into my little studio on E. 9th Street in November of 2021, I kept things pretty spartan for quite awhile. Slowly started populating the space with Facebook Marketplace deals, and things like this that I encountered on the sidewalk on evening walks through the neighborhood.

This little table fit my space perfectly and became my desk. Then, when I bought my younger son a fancy PC for his birthday, I sawed out the crossbeam and moved it back to fit the tower.

I even moved the thing to my new apartment and put it in my son's bedroom closet. But after Christmas, he got other furniture for the closet and there was really no place for it, so today, it went back to the street from whence it came.

I hope it gets another chapter.

For something like 15 years now, I've kept a daily diary, using Leather Gallery's Desk Weekly Leather Planner (Open Format) - 8" x 5.5". Last night, I stuck 2024's on a pile in a cabinet and set pen to 2025's for the first time, starting the January first entry: The scene opens.

I went on to detail where the night found me, broadly, which painted a pretty positive picture in terms of all the metrics generally regarded as meaningful. I could write endlessly about God's endless indulgence and providence towards me; I've been hurling myself off increasingly tall cliffs and landing in the beds of increasingly luxuriant marshmallow-and-goose-down trucks for a long time. I'm very lucky and increasingly focused on being happy with my luck rather than fearful.

If I took any particular lesson from 2024 (other than constant reminders that I am of more value than many sparrows and will never get stones in lieu of bread), it is that many of the foundational attributes I ascribed to myself -- anxiety, sadness, laziness -- were either misattributed or not-particularly-relevant derivatives of my real core quality: cowardice.

Which is a promising diagnosis, as I think it has more ready remedies than the others. Namely, patience and gratitude (or patience, experience, and hope).

I'm always grateful for fatherhood as it provides such great illustrations of God's perspective. It annoys me when my sons worry about things that are far beyond them and really only my concern. The affordability of something, managing certain details, etc... And it saddens me to see how it can dampen what should be a purely positive experience I've afforded them.

It's been a mad rush since Christmas Eve, so this is quite belated, and many clever-er men than me have made the observation better than I can, but it really struck me at the candlelight service, in this grand ornate sanctuary on Broadway, wealthy and homeless alike singing praises to a savior born two millennia ago to peasants.

Morning hike at Bear Mountain. Unexpected sighting of the Manhattan Skyline. Bit crowded.

In church this past Sunday, the Psalm reading came from Psalm 90. One line of it struck me: Make us glad according to the days wherein thou hast afflicted us. The bit that struck me was in the idea that God afflicts us.

I read and enjoyed a book recently, recommended to me by my church rector: The Will of God by Leslie D. Weatherhead. The basis of it is to critique those that might, in the midst of suffering, say that it is God's will; that it is never God's will for us to suffer, but that in our liberty, we are not restrained from acts of which the natural consequence is suffering.

While I think this view has a lot to commend itself and affords us a concept of a loving God better aligned with our earthly definition of love, it replaces a God who would intentionally injure us with One who merely lets us be injured. I think both have downsides.

Either way, the verse in question leaves no doubt in a straightforward reading that God does not just let us be afflicted, He afflicts us.

It might be splitting hairs, but I personally favor a God who, seeing me running into traffic would snatch and beat me rather than watch on, determined to let me learn my lesson naturally, even if the injuries were equal in either scenario.

I don't know why I felt compelled to write about this, but I did, and in doing, went to review the Psalm in full and was struck further by how the line that had first caught my attention actually ranks pretty low in the litany of active cruelties described.

Thou turnest man to destruction; and sayest, Return, ye children of men... (read: An older sibling: "stop hitting yourself!")

I was struck too by Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hadst formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting, thou art God. but for no reason other than that it brough to mind Job; God demanding of him Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?

So it seemed especially interesting that Psalm 90 is, by tradition, the only Psalm attributed to Moses, making it the earliest, which again parallels Job, as that book is similarly cited as being the earliest written book of scripture.

What does it mean that the earliest question posed by man was why we suffer? And what does it mean that both Job and Moses, who had direct interactions with the Almighty, understood the answer to be that He willed it so?

Beats me.

But it has gotten me thinking about how dismissively I approach the Psalms, which I don't think is unusual among thoughtful Christians. They plead for God to torture enemies, they lament our unjust sufferings; all of which seems wrong through the prism of Christ's teaching. But I think it suggests that I ought to find a way to adjust my thinking rather than to somehow find clever contextualizations that bring it into alignment with how I think it ought to be.

I'm planning on trying to actively read through them with a mind for how I can genuinely pray them. I have a copy of C.S. Lewis' Reflections on the Psalms which I've never read past the introduction, but which might be a useful guide.

Fun at Spirit Halloween.

On June 26th, 1777, an officer of the Continental Line, Captain Ephraim Anderson, was killed in the Battle of Short Hills. Three days later, Colonel Israel Sheve wrote in his journal "Col. Rhea Returned with the Body of Capt. Anderson is now Gone to Westfield to Bury him with the honours of war which he Deserves as he fought Brave, and fell in a Glorious Cause." Two hundred and forty-one years later, as a living relative, I got elected to his seat in the Society of the Cincinnati, which a healthy percentage of the people I know are aware of, since I tend to talk about it a lot...

Every October, the Society meets in Washington for a series of meetings and dinners.

One of the memorable highlights of this past weekend was the election of a new representative of Captain Jonathan Phillips by General David Petraeus. As the registrar, I had the honor of introducing him at the formal dinner, and got to visit a bit, (his ancestor, coincidentally, was the executor of the will of mine, the both of them having served in the same regiment), but had more time to speak with his wife since we were seated next to each other at a dinner.

Whenever I get the chance to talk to a notable public figure, I always enjoy asking about the experience. When I asked her to pinpoint when he became known, she mentioned Tom Brokaw referring to a successful "young general" in Mosul in 2003. I said sort of blithely that I find it appealing to have people always wanting to tell you how great you are. She mentioned the security issues, how he had been the only person in Bin Laden's recovered hard drive as a target.

I'd like to apologize to Sam Rockwell. You are an actor I have a lot of respect for, and in passing you on 12th Street this evening, you deserved better than to have "Pete & Pete!" shouted in your face, regardless of my fondness for your turn as Endless Mike on that show.

In other news, today I learned that Endless Mike was portrayed by an actor named Rick Gomez, and Sam Rockwell did not, in fact, ever appear on the show.