Category: Pop

These Precious Days, by Ann Patchett

These Precious Days, by Ann Patchett (Harper, 320 pages)

The Ann Patchett craze somehow eluded me, although I know people who wait breathlessly for her next book. She is not as famous as Stephen King nor as prolific as Jodi Picoult, having “just” eight novels and two children’s books to her name, but she enjoys those writers’ commercial success, and has developed an auxiliary fame as co-owner of a Nashville bookstore and as an advocate for independent booksellers.

As such, there’s been breathless anticipation all year for Patchett’s fourth book of nonfiction, These Precious Days, which is a pandemic book — not a book about a pandemic, but a book set in the pandemic. In fact, some of what occurs in the essays here pre-dates Covid-19 and has been published before, in The New Yorker and elsewhere. That, it turns out, matters not one whit.

The essays are finely strung, like a strand of Mikimoto pearls, and are so well-crafted as to have sprung fully formed from Zeus’s head. Patchett identifies as a novelist but says she’s always writing essays to fill in the gaps, to remind her that she’s still a writer when she’s not consumed by a work of fiction. Amusingly, she says that when working on a novel, she’s stalked by the idea of death, thinking that she could die at any time and the undertaker would bury all her beloved characters with her. The pandemic made that worse. “What was the point of starting [a novel] if I wasn’t going to be around to finish? This didn’t necessarily mean I believed I was going to die of the coronavirus, any more than I believed I was going to drown in the Atlantic or be eaten by a bear, but all those scenarios were possible. The year 2020 didn’t seem like a great time to start a family, or a business, or a novel.” And so she spent the time working on essays, which Patchett says death didn’t seem all that interested in.

The collection starts with a remembrance published in The New Yorker on Patchett’s “three fathers,” her biological dad and two stepfathers. (“Marriage has always proved irresistible to my family. We try and fail and try again, somehow maintaining our belief in an institution that has made fools of us all.”) The next essay, “The First Thanksgiving,” is a pithier reflection on Patchett’s experience as a freshman at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, when she couldn’t go home for the holiday and instead decided to cook a traditional dinner in her dorm for other stranded friends. Having never cooked a turkey or any other Thanksgiving dish before. “I made yeast rolls, for heaven’s sake! I cooked down fresh cranberries into sauce!”

Only having enough quarters to call her mother from the pay phone when she was finished (we’re talking about a woman who is now 60), she used recipes from The Joy of Cooking and writes that “even now, when someone claims they don’t know how to cook, I find myself snapping, ‘Do you know how to read?’”

Not to take away from Patchett’s talents, but part of the appeal of her essays is simply that she lives such an interesting life. Take, for example, the beginning of her essay, “Flight Plan,” in which she writes: “Three of us were in a 1947 de Havilland Beaver, floating in the middle of a crater lake in the southwest quadrant of Alaska.”

What?

It is a declarative statement, simply crafted, but dares the reader not to read on to learn more. It turns out that the essay is not about this particular excursion that Patchett took with her physician husband, Karl, but about his lifelong obsession with aviation (and by extension, every other amateur pilot), and her coming to grips with it, with reactions that range from bewilderment to fear.

We learn much from this essay about aviation culture, such as that a certain model of small plane is known as a doctor killer. (“Doctors have enough money to buy them,” Karl said, “but they aren’t good enough pilots to fly them.”) But we also go deep inside Patchett’s marriage, her terror about the possibility of Karl dying in a plane crash, her struggle to understand why dangerous pastimes were so important to him. “I understood he wasn’t interested in baking bread, that there would be no Scrabble or yoga in our future as a couple, but couldn’t there be a hobby in which death was not a likely outcome?”

But death is, of course, a likely outcome for us all, and despite Patchett’s insistence that death had no interest in essays, it enshrouds the titular essay, which is about her relationship with a woman named Sooki, who was the actor Tom Hanks’ personal assistant for nearly 20 years.

Patchett had come to know Hanks after writing a jacket blurb for his book of short stories, Uncommon Type, and came to know Sooki when Hanks later agreed to narrate the audio book of her novel The Dutch House. Through increasingly intimate emails, the women evolved from “affectionate strangers” to housemates while Sooki was in an experimental treatment for pancreatic cancer.

No spoilers here, but it is a deeply moving story about friendship, and utterly riveting. As is the collection in its entirety. A

Book Notes

As the end of 2021 mercifully approaches, here’s a look back at the books that made our A list. Some won critical acclaim nationwide; others, not much more than here, but they’re worth your attention if you haven’t read them already.

Bewilderment, by Richard Powers (W.W. Norton, 278 pages), novel: A widowed dad struggles with raising his neurologically untypical son while pondering possible other worlds beyond our universe.

The Anthropocene Reviewed, John Green(Dutton, 274 pages), nonfiction, essays: The author of The Fault in Our Stars gives 1- to 5-star reviews of everything from Canada geese to Diet Dr Pepper to the “wintry mix.”

Love Like That, by Emma Duffy-Comparone(Henry Holt and Co., 211 pages), short stories: Nine stories about love, both brittle and vibrant, all set in New England, two on the Granite State coast.

The Audacity of Sara Grayson, by Joani Elliott (Post Hill Press, 400 pages), novel: Part of the genre often dismissed as “chick lit,” this is a fun, original and New Englandish story of a daughter tasked with writing the ending to a best-selling series after the author, her mother, dies.

The Five Wounds, by Kirstin Valdez Quade (W.W. Norton, 416 pages), novel: A troubled Catholic family in New Mexico grapples with an unwed pregnancy, poverty and illness in this moving portrait of real life, the kind that doesn’t show up on Twitter.

The Blizzard Party, by Jack Livings (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 400 pages), novel: Engrossing fiction set during the very real blizzard of 1978.

Klara and the Sun, by Kazuo Ishiguro (Knopf, 303 pages), novel: This Booker Prize-winning story of a young girl and her “artificial friend” asks us to think seriously about the costs of companion robots, both to us and to them.

Chasing Eden, A Book of Seekersby Howard Mansfield (Bauhan Publishing, 216 pages), nonfiction: An intelligent and contemplative book by a New Hampshire author about an unusual cast of Americans who bid the founders’ call to pursue happiness in their own unique ways.

Book Events

Author events

• JAMES ROLLINS Author presents The Starless Crown, in conversation with Terry Brooks. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., Jan. 10, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• CHAD ORZEL Author presents A Brief History of Timekeeping. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Thurs., Jan. 27, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• ISABEL ALLENDE Author presents Violeta. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Sat., Jan. 29, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration and tickets required, to include the purchase of the book. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• JOHN NICHOLS Author presents Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiters. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., Feb. 1, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• GARY SAMPSON AND INEZ MCDERMOTT Photographer Sampson and art historian McDermott discuss New Hampshire Now: A Photographic Diary of Life in the Granite State. Sat., Feb. 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• TIMOTHY BOUDREAU Author presents on the craft of writing short stories. Sat., Jan. 15, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

Poetry

• CAROL WESTBURG AND SUE BURTON Virtual poetry reading hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Thurs., Jan. 20, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email information@nashualibrary.org or visit nashualibrary.org.

Language

• FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE CLASSES

Offered remotely by the Franco-American Centre. Six-week session with classes held Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. $225. Visit facnh.com/education or call 623-1093.

Album Reviews 21/12/30

Reptaliens, Multiverse (self-released)

The first album from this Portland, Oregon-based husband-and-wife synthpop duo was 2017’s FM-2030, named after the famous transhumanist (a barmy, pseudoscientific discipline that focuses on artificial intelligence, longevity by becoming part-robot or whatnot, etc.). So by now, if you’re normal, you’ve got warning bells going off all over the place, as you’ve seen words like “transhumanism” and “Portland,” so you know there’s plenty of kooky nonsense going on here, and you should probably avoid it, and you’d be right, at least in my book. Anyway, that first LP was dreamy but not dream-pop, more like Au Revoir Simone-meets-Postal Service-style rubbish that didn’t make it onto an episode of Portlandia. Cut to now, when Covid has prevented Mr. and Mrs. from jamming with their wine-gulping band, so it’s just the two of them, with less synth in their synthpop, just guitars and boring drums, still sporting the New Order fetish they had before. These harmless, ’60s-radio-tinged little tunes aren’t really bad, but, as on their first two albums, the muse begins to tire of them, as does the listener, and by the time album-closer “Jump” rolls around, you’re like “Wow, that’s 40-odd minutes I’ll never get back.” Don’t get me wrong, a couple of tracks would fit well on your wombat-indie mixtape, be my guest. B

Engelbert Humperdinck, Regards (OK Good Records)

I really don’t remember if we’ve gone over this former 1960s/1970s megastar before, but this five-song EP does present an excuse to remind everyone within eye-shot that this British India-born tenor was the Pepsi to Tom Jones’ Coke during the Nixon years. He was, um, I mean is, a crooner who never had the unhinged bombast (or the hips) of Jones, but he definitely was the second banana. A bonus here is that I also get to touch on a holiday tune, a super-long-overdue version of Elvis’s “Blue Christmas” in fact, not that there’s any time left for your grandmother to enjoy it unless she’s hip to the Downloadin’ Stuff scene. It’s all covers, of course; market-made spectacles like this guy probably wouldn’t know the first thing about writing a song, but it’s all good. “What a Wonderful World” is here in all its chintzy glory, and of course a tearjerker, “Smile” this time, packing a full orchestra to deliver its hilariously maudlin message. Nothing unexpected. (What else am I supposed to say? “It’s dumb”?).

PLAYLIST

• Happy New Year, folks. My favorite “2022 is coming” internet meme so far right now is the one with a picture of two tidal waves, representing 2020 and 2021, and a Godzilla standing behind them that’s supposed to represent 2022. What sheer lunacy is left to happen in 2022? I suppose we’ll find out soon enough, but we have one final week of awful albums to cover for 2021, some of which are actually being released on New Year’s Eve, which is dumb, because who buys albums when they’re drunk? But whatever, who cares, some metal band called Oathean is releasing their new album, cheerfully titled The Endless Pain and Darkness, on Dec. 30, a Thursday! Or at least that’s what the Album Of The Year webzine is saying; some other sources are saying it was released on Nov, 30, which is even stupider, since it’s a Tuesday, but at this point I need rock ’n’ roll albums to write about, because otherwise I’m going to talk about politics or something, because it’s that time of year when no band in their right mind is releasing an album, except for Oathean, whoever they are. So anyway, let’s see what this Oathean band even is, shall we? Ha ha, they use that funny font in their band logo, the type all the “extreme-metal” bands use so that their fans don’t really know which album they’re buying, they just know that the devil is involved somehow, and what else should someone care about? I’ll bet you it sounds like Deafheaven, I’ll just bet you. Huh, look at that, they’re from Korea. I thought they were from Finland or whatever, that’s weird. The whole album is up on YouTube right now. It starts out with some “symphonic metal” elements (in other words it sounds kind of snobby, like Evanescence but with no singing) and then, ah, there we are, they want to sound like Bathory/Deafheaven. That singing cracks me up so bad, like the guy sounds like a giant rat who’s demanding your cheese right this minute or he’ll — why, he’ll — he’ll screech like a giant rat at you, that’s what! Beware the wrath of the King Of The Cheese Rats, fam, that’s my only warning!

• And that brings us to the music albums that are literally being released on New Year’s Eve, the day before New Year’s Day, which is easily the worst holiday of the year. Why, you ask? Come on, you know why. All the good holidays are gone, and you know you have to go back to work or school or your court-directed community service thingie in a day or two, and from there it’s the usual wintertime activities: trying to keep from getting frostbite on your feet or going completely insane from sun deprivation while reading tweets about the Kardashians vacationing in Maui, or however you usually torture yourself. Again, there’s nothing to talk about here other than metal bands, so come on, get out the barf bags and let’s try to find something from Vanda’s new Covenant of Death album! They’re from Sweden, and they look kind of normal, like regular Judas Priest stans. Nothing on YouTube at all, but their Facebook has a snippet from some tune that’s pretty basic thrash from 1989. Yours in metal, guys!

• We’ll wrap up this rotten year with something that isn’t metal, a compilation album called Stars Rock Kill, composed of cover tunes from indie bands on the Kill Rock Stars record label, including Chateau Chateau, Amber Sweeney and Lucy Lowis, whose cover of Elliot Smith’s “Say Yes” is folk-grungy manna for ironic, badly dressed 40-somethings. Fifty-two songs here, which is pretty generous, man!

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

Powder Days, by Heather Hansman

Powder Days, by Heather Hansman (Hanover Square Press, 264 pages)

Heather Hansman learned to love skiing in New England, even though she’s more of a West Coast woman these days. An accomplished writer and editor who has worked for magazines such as Outside, Backcountry and Powder, Hansman doesn’t qualify as a ski bum, the skiing-obsessed person who will take on low-paying jobs at ski resorts in order to indulge the passion full-time. But she was for a while and brings deep insider knowledge to Powder Days, an examination of what rising temperatures are doing to the ski industry, wrapped in a love letter to the sport and to winter.

“I know that skiing is ephemeral and selfish, but I ache when I’m away from it for too long, and I don’t think it’s just the dopamine drop that drives the fixation,” Hansman writes.

Before you non-skiers depart for lack of interest, you should know that while this is a book written by a skier for other skiers, this shouldn’t be a deal-breaker for the sedentary and clumsy (myself the latter). Hansman is a graceful writer, as lithe in language as in body, and while she occasionally slips into skier-speak, with a little Googling, you will learn many interesting things, such as that dangerous clumps of snow on a ski route are called frozen chicken heads, a term I enthusiastically welcome to my vocabulary. In short, I don’t ski, and I still found this book engrossing.

Hansmen begins by recalling her early ski-bum days, which began around a campfire in Maine when another skier offered Hansman a job scanning lift tickets at a ski resort in Colorado. “I latched on to the idea that if I went west, I would be braver and truer and more exciting,” she writes.

She had become a skier like most people do — because her parents paid for lessons. “You don’t become a skier by accident — it’s an objectively stupid, expensive, gear-intensive sport — but my parents enabled it early, cramming my brother and me into hand-me-down boots and carting us to New Hampshire, so they could ski too,” she writes. “ … In college, I’d wake up in the post-party, predawn dark to drive across Maine and New Hampshire just to ski knobby backcountry lines in the White Mountains. I’ve always felt clearer in motion.”

That said, Hansman came from a family of occasional skiers, not those who strap toddlers to skis while they are learning to walk. Her obsession with the sport and lifestyle grew organically, somewhat to her bewilderment. “Skiers chase snow and freedom and wildness, at the expense of a lot of other things. I’m still trying to understand how something so ephemeral can shape your whole life.”

Hansman dips into the history of skiing in the U.S, acknowledging “the ski industry starts where my ski story starts, in the knobby mountains of New England.” She recalls skiing the Tuckerman Ravine and the Sherburne Trail of Mount Washington, created in the 1930s, back when runs were “steep and skinny, just a couple of skis wide.”

“That was skiing for a long time, no lifts, just a grind uphill and a slide back down.”

She then zips through how the sport exploded, its growth tracking with the lives of baby boomers, and how its popularity in the 1970s led to today’s elaborate resorts and McMountain trails that she fears have taken the soul out of the sport and tarnished it with elitism. (Fun fact: more than 50 billionaires have homes in Aspen.)

The bigger problem for the industry, however, is not the unaffordability of homes in ski country, but the warming climate. There’s less snow these days than there was a quarter-century ago, and it’s not always cold enough to make snow, as 88 percent of ski resorts do. We are seeing, as Hansman puts it, “the winnowing of winter.” She quotes a meteorologist friend who says that what concerns him most is that low temperatures are increasing faster than high temperatures. This means that places like New England have fewer days when the temperature falls below freezing.

“Depending on the emissions scenario you choose, snowfall is predicted to shrink by up to a third by the end of the century. That thin margin of winter is going to have a huge bearing on the future of skiing, and on whether or not people can keep counting on the seasons to eke out a way of life.”

Hansman’s worries that Aspen could be the new Amarillo by century’s end may strike some as the hysteria of the climate-grief-stricken. By the end of January, her fear of “hot, snowless winters” may actually hold some appeal. But there is real concern about what will happen if recent trends continue. Resorts can make snow, sure, but it still has to be cold enough. “I get a deep gut ache when I think about losing snow, about the contrast between my childhood memories of snow and the gray slush of right now. … New England skiing feels almost too painful now. How could it have gotten this bad so fast?”

Hansman ends with another kind of grief, the acknowledgement that skiing can be deadly. “If you get deep into skiing, eventually you have to acknowledge that the thing you love can kill the people you love.” Then, she pivots into the tendency for thrill-seekers like skiers to abuse drugs and alcohol, and sometimes to kill themselves. Deaths of despair are on the rise in the U.S. and this is an important topic, but it was a bit jarring to have this conversation take place at the end of the book. That said, it’s a small quibble with an otherwise solid book, which might even be more interesting for nonskiers than skiers, who already know about frozen chicken heads.

Book Events

Author events

• JAMES ROLLINS Author presents The Starless Crown, in conversation with Terry Brooks. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Mon., Jan. 10, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com.

• TIMOTHY BOUDREAU Author presents on the craft of writing short stories. Sat., Jan. 15, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• CHAD ORZEL Author presents A Brief History of Timekeeping. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Thurs., Jan. 27, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com.

• ISABEL ALLENDE Author presents Violeta. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Sat., Jan. 29, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration and tickets required, to include the purchase of the book. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com.

• JOHN NICHOLS Author presents Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiters. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., Feb. 1, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com.

• GARY SAMPSON AND INEZ MCDERMOTT Photographer Sampson and art historian McDermott discuss New Hampshire Now: A Photographic Diary of Life in the Granite State. Sat., Feb. 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

Poetry

• CAROL WESTBURG AND SUE BURTON Virtual poetry reading hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Thurs., Jan. 20, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email information@nashualibrary.org or visit nashualibrary.org.

Language

• FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE CLASSES

Offered remotely by the Franco-American Centre. Six-week session with classes held Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. $225. Visit facnh.com/education or call 623-1093.

Album Reviews 21/12/23

Alice Phoebe Lou, Child’s Play (self-released)

I don’t like getting all class-war on an innocent album that never did anything to me personally, but sometimes weak albums released by highly privileged postmodern artists really get on my nerves, I have to tell ya. I do try to telegraph my moves in that regard, and I’d think by now you know I don’t trust most indie bands these days, given that the Pitchfork Media crowd has become the “essential art” dictators of the potty-trained “professional management class” that’s being bashed to smithereens in leftist intellectual circles. A big-time PR firm is handling this piece of junk, the latest album from this South African-raised white woman whose parents are documentary filmmakers; Lou’s voice was purported to “sound like Judy Garland, Kate Bush, or Angel Olsen” but “mostly her own.” They got the last bit right anyway; she’s a pretty unremarkable fashion-victim waif, and her woozy awkwardness (not to mention absolutely dreadful Lawrence Welk keyboard sound) had me reaching for the Off button every 10 seconds. She strikes me as a third-rate Kate Bush with a decent-enough ear for samples, but, as always, your mileage may vary. D

ABBA, Voyage (OK Good Records)

What a treat it was to witness the Pitchfork Media writer squeezing his brain for the requisite 1,500-word essay on this album! It’s the first one in 40 years from the Swedish pop group that basically owned the 1970s, and so Pitchfork Guy’s obscure shibboleths included nonsense like “glam boogie” and “scandi-disco bounce.” It was so rich and delicious to watch him squirm, when all that’s really to report is that the two dude songwriters still have it, and the singers all sound older. That’s it. There have been a couple of hilariously bad musicals based on the band’s million-year-old tunes, of course, all of which resurged in popularity after the 1990s ABBA Gold album, so it’s not that these people have ever disappeared. Anyhow, the first two songs threaten to go Celtic Woman, especially “When You Danced With Me,” which has an Irish jig feel to it, but most of the balance forward is the usual formula of all-hook tuneage fit for children’s dentist overhead speakers. Same as it ever was, really. A

PLAYLIST

• It’s the least wonderful time of the year for people like me, music columnists who have to spin column-gold out of literally nothing, because there are basically no important new records coming out on Friday, which is Christmas Eve. And why? Well, because it’s time to forget about important things like redundant, overhyped music albums and instead — yuck — feel jolly and bright or whatever, and be sociable — with people! Gross! — and visit. It stinks, man, I just want some albums to write about, so I can fill this column with humor and fascinating news about whatever stupid pop diva or tedious Coldplay-clone-band band, because it’s my job, to fill this space with information and advice that you won’t follow anyway, but at least I try. But here we are again, with the never-ending culture war in happy détente, and me with no albums to write about, because only certified loons (and metal bands) (same thing) would put out an album on Christmas Eve. Fact is, guys, I’ve been through this for nearly 20 years now, scrambling for stuff to write about this holiday week. You see folks, here’s the thing: I must stop Christmas from coming. But how?

• No, seriously, it’s that time of year when I actually want to hear bad new albums from non-musically trained indie bands banging their ting-tinglers and disposable hit singles from whichever lollipop-brained Ariana Grande-of-the-month is honking her gong-zookas. But do I dare even bother webbing into the Album Of The Year site to look for an album to talk about here, or should I talk about my feelings? I don’t know, but here, fine, I’ll look. OMG, guys, I totally found one, it’s Tales From The Pink Forest, by some band or whatever called ID KY! I feel like Yukon Cornelius on that Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer show, like I was chipping and chipping at the barren Google wasteland and finally there it was! Silverrrr! Silver and gold! OK! Now, ahem, let’s just calm down and try to find out what an “ID KY” is; it’s probably something dumb, like some YouTuber playing Panic! At The Disco cover songs on a kazoo (I’m not expecting anything more artistic than that, honestly). OK, great, there’s literally nothing on Google or YouTube about this, so now I feel like Geraldo Rivera after he opened Al Capone’s secret vault and came out with a sales receipt from Walmart or whatever it was. Just great. OK, let’s pretend it was just really dumb polka played on a Charlie Brown toy piano. Aaaand we’re moving, people, let’s go.

• Hmm, it’s some other band-or-whatever-who-cares with a random four-letter name, this time MDMJ! I can’t wait to hear — oh, never mind, the album is called “Album” probably because it doesn’t have a title yet. I’m about to bag it, folks. Look at all you Whos down in Whoville, just laughing at the sad music critic clown making a fool out of himself, so that you can laugh and point. I can’t wait to stuff your Christmas tree up the chimney and have my dog drag it to the top of Mount Crumpit. OK, one last pass and I’m getting a drink, I deserve it.

• We’ll evacuate these dreary premises by closing with — OK, there are no other records supposedly being released on Christmas Eve. None. So let’s just get drunk and listen to the only thing that’s literally coming out on Christmas Day itself! Of course it’s a metal record, Sonic Wolves’s It’s All A Game To Me EP! Ha ha, these three people look like sleepy Hells Angels, and the EP is a two-song “tribute to Lemmy and Cliff Burton!” Figures, there’s no music for me to trash, um, I mean critique, so let’s do a last Jell-O shot and forget this column ever even happened. Happy holidays and whatever!

If you’re in a local band, now’s a great time to let me know about your EP, your single, whatever’s on your mind. Let me know how you’re holding yourself together without being able to play shows or jam with your homies. Send a recipe for keema matar. Message me on Twitter (@esaeger) or Facebook (eric.saeger.9).

On Animals, by Susan Orlean

On Animals, by Susan Orlean (Avid Reader Press, 237 pages)

Susan Orlean had me at “Shiftless Little Loafers,” her 1996 essay in The New Yorker in which she bemoaned how little babies do to earn their keep.

But then she lost me. I’ve not kept up with Orlean’s work, even as she grew in fame and output. I didn’t read The Orchid Thief in 1998or The Library Book in 2018, and didn’t even know about Red Sox and Bluefish, a 1987 paperback collection of Boston Globe columns on “Things that Make New England New England.”)

My bad.

After reading On Animals, I’ve repented of Orlean negligence and vowed to catch up, even though her new book is the type that generally irritates me: one composed almost entirely of previously published works. These essays were originally published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic and Smithsonian magazine, and they’re introduced under the unifying umbrella of a 2011 Amazon Kindle Original.

Normally there’s one suitable response to pre-published essays released in book form just before the holiday season: pffft. As in, you want us to pay money for essays we’ve already read for free? However, this is the rare collection that’s worth overlooking the bald money grab, at least for anyone who is, like Orlean describes herself, “animalish.”

Orleans begins by describing an ordinary childhood of animal longing, in which she and her siblings had to overcome their mother’s resistance in order to obtain a dog and a butterscotch-colored mouse. Early on, Orlean displayed a quirky sense of comedy that underlies her work. She writes of the mouse, “I named her Sparky and pretended that she was some sort of championship show mouse, and I made a bunch of fake ribbons and trophies for her and I told people she had won them at mouse shows.”

In college she splurged on an Irish setter puppy, causing her mother to sigh, “Well, for heaven’s sake, Susie. You and your animals.” She married a man who once promised her a donkey for her birthday and who, for Valentine’s Day one year, arranged to have an African lion — “tawney and panting, with soft, round ears and paws as big as baseball mitts” — visit her Manhattan apartment on a leash. (The lion was accompanied by his owner and three off-duty police officers.)

Orlean quotes John Berger, who said that people get attached to animals because they remind us of the agrarian lives that most of us no longer lead, but she says it’s more than that, that animals give a “warm, wonderful, unpredictable texture” to life. As such, she’s spent much of her career writing about animals and spent much of personal life caring for them. (It helps that she lives on 50 acres in California, enabling her to keep creatures such as ducks and donkeys.)

In “The It Bird” Orlean writes of her interests in chickens and tells the fascinating story of how Martha Stewart helped to launch a nationwide chicken craze by publishing glamour shots of chickens in her magazine. “Show Dog” is a brief meditation on the lives of championship dogs, focusing on a boxer from Massachusetts named Biff. (“He has a dark mask, spongy lips, a wishbone-shaped white blaze, and the earnest and slightly careworn expression of a small-town mayor.)

“The Lady and the Tigers” explores the strange life of the New Jersey woman who owned 24 or so tigers, more than Six Flags Wild Safari. “You know how it is — you start with one tiger, then you get another and another, then a few are born and a few die, and you start to lose track of details like exactly how many tigers you have.”

In “Riding High,” Orlean examines the history of the mule, the cross of a male donkey and a female horse that is always sterile because of its uneven number of chromosomes, and in “Where Donkeys Deliver,” she writes of falling in love with “the plain tenderness of their faces and their attitude of patient resignation and even their impenetrable, obdurate temperaments.”

This essay is as much a reflection on the mind-boggling differences in cultures as it is on donkeys alone. Orlean notes that donkeys in America are mostly kept as pets, whereas in other countries, such as Morocco, they remain beasts of burden. She writes of seeing a small, harnessed donkey walking gingerly alone down a steep road in Fez, with no one showing any interest. When she asked someone about this, she was told the donkey “was probably just finished with work and on his way home.”

Other animals that merit their own chapter in this book include rabbits, lions, pandas, oxen, pigeons and whales, with side trips into the business of taxidermy and animal actors in Hollywood.

In her chapter on chickens, Orlean acknowledges a largely ignored problem: Animals live short and brutish lives and then die, giving animalish people self-inflicted pain. She writes of sitting in a vet’s office sobbing after having to have a sick chicken euthanized. (“I eat chicken all the time, so I have no right to morally oppose the killing of a chicken, but I couldn’t kill my own pet.”) And she owns turkeys, “an impulse buy,” but they are pets that will not be eaten. “I am having turkey for Thanksgiving, but not my turkeys,” she writes. (Her husband calls them “landscape animals.”)

Eventually Orlean concludes that animals are “an ideal foil for examining the human condition.” Agreed, but animals are more a romp in the park than a philosophy class. That’s true of On Animals, as well. A

Book Notes

The end of the year is time for celebrating with family and friends, making resolutions for the new year, and hearing wealthy CEOs tell us what books we should have read but probably didn’t.

Bill Gates, for example, had a difficult year PR-wise but still found time to share his five favorite books of the year in a video in which he strolls through a holiday tableau, under what’s probably fake snow, wearing a buffalo-checked lumberjack shirt as if he were a simple man of the people. (You can find this on YouTube.)

Gates, who famously reads 50 books a year, says he looks forward to reading for three hours a day when he’s on vacation. His five recommended books for 2021:

Project Hail Mary (Ballantine, 496 pages) by Andy Weir, a novel by the author of The Martian, about a high-school teacher who is startled to wake up in a different star system. (Gates read the book over a weekend, he said.)

Hamnet (Knopf, 320 pages) by Maggie O’Farrell, speculative fiction about William Shakespeare’s life; Hamnet was the name of his son, who died at age 11.

A Thousand Brains, a New Theory of Intelligence (Basic, 288 pages) by Jeff Hawkins, who is best known as the co-inventor of the PalmPilot, one of the first handheld computers. In this book he delves into artificial intelligence and where it’s headed.

The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing and the Future of the Human Race (Simon & Schuster, 560 pages), by Walter Isaacson, probes the development and ethical quandaries presented by CRISPR gene editing technology.

Klara and the Sun (Knopf, 320 pages) by Kazuo Ishiguro is a thought-provoking novel about a specific form of artificial intelligence, the personal robot engineered to be a companion to humans.

For what it’s worth, we, too, loved Klara and The Sun, and gave it an A back in the spring. So we’re more interested in what Ishiguro believes to be the best books of the year than Gates. There’s no heartwarming video involved, but here they are, courtesy of the UK newspaper The Guardian, which did a roundup of several authors’ favorites.

The Premonition, A Pandemic Story (W.W. Norton, 320 pages) by Michael Lewis; Failures of State (Mudlark, 432 pages) by Jonathan Calvert and George Arbuthnott; The Dangers of Smoking in Bed: Stories (Hogarth, 208 pages) by Mariana Enriquez; and Spike, The Virus vs. the People by Jeremy Farrar and Anjana Ahuja (Profile Books, 253 pages).

Book Events

Author events

• MIDDLE GRADE AUTHOR PANELFeaturing middle grade authors Padma Venkatraman, Barbara Dee, Leah Henderson, Aida Salazar and Lindsey Stoddard. Virtual event hosted by Toadstool Bookshops in Peterborough, Nashua and Keene. Sat., Dec. 18, 4 p.m. Via Zoom. Visit toadbooks.com.

• JOHN NICHOLS Author presents Coronavirus Criminals and Pandemic Profiters. Virtual event hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Tues., Feb. 1, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• GARY SAMPSON AND INEZ MCDERMOTT Photographer Sampson and art historian McDermott discuss New Hampshire Now: A Photographic Diary of Life in the Granite State. Sat., Feb. 19, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

• TIMOTHY BOUDREAU Author presents on the craft of writing short stories. Sat., Jan. 15, 9:45 to 11:45 a.m. Peterborough Town Library, 2 Concord St., Peterborough. Visit monadnockwriters.org.

Poetry

• CAROL WESTBURG AND SUE BURTON Virtual poetry reading hosted by Gibson’s Bookstore in Concord. Thurs., Jan. 20, 7 p.m. Via Zoom. Registration required. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com or call 224-0562.

• DOWN CELLAR POETRY SALON Poetry event series presented by the Poetry Society of New Hampshire. Monthly. First Sunday. Visit poetrysocietynh.wordpress.com.

Book Clubs

• BOOKERY Online. Monthly. Third Thursday, 6 p.m. Bookstore based in Manchester. Visit bookerymht.com/online-book-club or call 836-6600.

• GIBSON’S BOOKSTORE Online, via Zoom. Monthly. First Monday, 5:30 p.m. Bookstore based in Concord. Visit gibsonsbookstore.com/gibsons-book-club-2020-2021 or call 224-0562.

• TO SHARE BREWING CO. 720 Union St., Manchester. Monthly. Second Thursday, 6 p.m. RSVP required. Visit tosharebrewing.com or call 836-6947.

• GOFFSTOWN PUBLIC LIBRARY 2 High St., Goffstown. Monthly. Third Wednesday, 1:30 p.m. Call 497-2102, email elizabethw@goffstownlibrary.com or visit goffstownlibrary.com

• BELKNAP MILL Online. Monthly. Last Wednesday, 6 p.m. Based in Laconia. Email bookclub@belknapmill.org.

• NASHUA PUBLIC LIBRARY Online. Monthly. Second Friday, 3 p.m. Call 589-4611, email information@nashualibrary.org or visit nashualibrary.org.

Language

• FRENCH LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE CLASSES

Offered remotely by the Franco-American Centre. Six-week session with classes held Thursdays from 6:30 to 8:30 p.m. $225. Visit facnh.com/education or call 623-1093.

At the Sofaplex 21/12/16

The Power of the Dog (R)

Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst.

Jane Campion writes and directs this movie based on a 1967 novel by Thomas Savage.

Brothers from a prosperous ranching family, Phil (Cumberbatch) and George (Jesse Plemons) run their ranch together, with Phil in particular getting into the dusty, gritty work of tending to the cattle. During one of their cattle drives, George starts a relationship with Rose (Dunst), the widowed owner of the inn where they stop to eat and sleep. Their relationship starts in part because George finds her crying over what a homophobic jerk Phil was to her college-age son, Peter (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who had served as waiter to the ranching party.

George and Rose get married, enraging Phil, who relates to his new relatives only via psychological torture — first of Rose, already shaky about marrying in to the wealthy family, and later of Phil.

The Power of the Dog is a beautifully shot, (largely) understatedly performed, expertly scored movie that quietly ratchets up the tension as it shows the wildfire-like destruction of performative toxic masculinity, which Phil not only embodies but encourages in the ranch hands around him. These aspects, ruminating on them, are what stand out to me as I think back on the movie.

However.

As I watched the movie, what I often felt more was how hard this movie was Oscar-ing, just straining and stretching with every fiber to “for your consideration” with all its elegantly matte Important Movie might. I mean it is beautiful and Cumberbatch does create a fascinating character to watch and I definitely had that “just before an explosion” feeling the whole time I watched it. This movie is good, maybe even great, but it also felt like it needed something to pull it out of the space where you can see the words on the page of the book it’s from and into a more organic living, breathing world. Nevertheless, A-. Available on Netflix.

Tick, Tick … Boom! (PG-13)

Andrew Garfield, Alexandra Shipp.

Before he wrote the hugely popular musical Rent, before he wrote the show that would become Tick, Tick … Boom!, the late Jonathan Larson (played here by Garfield) struggled to get attention for Superbia, a futuristic musical that Wikipedia says was meant to be a rock opera retelling of 1984. This movie, based on the one-man (plus band) show that would eventually become Tick, Tick … Boom!, tells the story of his work to put on a presentation of Superbia while dealing with changing relationships with friends and his girlfriend Susan (Shipp) and with his looming 30th birthday, which he has set as a sort of life-accomplishment deadline. (Stephen Sondheim already had a Broadway hit by 30, Larson keeps saying.)

My feelings about this musical changed in the days after I saw it. When I saw it, it felt like an affable if rough, not-quite-for-me tale with a somewhat unlikable performance at its center. But, after the Nov. 26 death of Sondheim, it started to feel more like a heartfelt tribute to Sondheim and the community of New York City theater itself. The song “Sunday,” which has more Broadway cameos than a Law & Order marathon, is a direct homage to Sondheim and he has a strong presence throughout the movie (he is played onscreen by Bradley Whitford, except during a final scene when it is Sondheim’s actual voice that we’re hearing). I felt like I was watching director Lin-Manuel Miranda express his gratitude and fondness for the lyricist/composer as much as I was watching Sondheim’s influence on Larson’s work.

I liked the nitty-gritty details of putting on the presentation of Superbia that is supposed to help it reach the Broadway stage (Jonathan takes part in a focus group to earn $75 to pay for an extra musician at his presentation) to the overall artistic struggle (at one point, his agent, played by Judith Light, explains that writing is just throwing one thing after another against the wall and hoping something sticks). But I never quite warmed to Garfield’s performance; he brings a kind of careless self-absorbed smugness to the character that just made it hard to sympathize with. And while I think some of this is part of the character — learning to see beyond himself is part of the Larson character’s journey — I don’t feel like he was meant to be as off-putting as he frequently seems.

In the moments where Garfield brings the volume down, I could see more of a real person and putting that guy in the fantastical world of song, dance and 1990s Broadway feels more winning than what we get from him through much of the film. B Available on Netflix.

Single All the Way (TV-PG)

Michael Urie, Philemon Chambers.

Also, Barry Bostwick, Jennifer Coolidge and Kathy Najimy.

This perfectly delightful Christmas cookie of a rom-com features some classic ingredients — going home for the holidays (to New Hampshire!), a pretend boyfriend, a quirky family, a blind date, the realization that your soulmate was Right There All Along. L.A.-based Peter (Urie) breaks up with his most recent boyfriend just before Christmas and asks best friend Nick (Chambers) to come home with him and pretend to Peter’s matchmaking family that he and Peter finally got together. What is extra wonderful about this movie is that Nick (who has quietly felt more for Peter than he thinks Peter feels for him) doesn’t engage in this rom-com wackiness, and throughout this sweet confection people just basically behave like normal humans (at least, by movie standards). They talk about what they’re thinking and explain their feelings and generally act out of love and respect. Crazy, I know! I know you have a lot of options out there when you need holiday silliness and joy to accompany gift wrapping or avoiding gift wrapping but Single All the Way is so enjoyable that it can be your post-chores relaxing-with-a-warm-boozy-drink treat. B+ Available on Netflix.

Ciao, Alberto (G)

Jack Dylan Grazer, Marco Barricelli.

This eight-minute short, featuring the characters from Luca, follows Alberto (voice of Grazer) as he adjusts to life with Massimo (voice of Barricelli), the fisherman, now that Julia and Luca are away at school. My kids enjoyed this short, sweet (and, like Luca, absolutely beautiful) film of Alberto earnestly trying to impress Massimo with his hard work but messing up, often with chaos-creating results. But I almost feel like this is even more a film for the parents; it offers a reminder that behind every kitchen covered in tomato sauce or flaming rowboat is a kid whose intentions (oftentimes, good intentions) outstripped their abilities. The climax is a scene that ends with one almost shockingly perfect line of dialogue. A Available on Disney+.

Olaf Presents (TV-PG)

Josh Gad.

Gad voices Olaf, the snowman of Frozen movies fame, in this series of shorts, which can be viewed individually as four-minute movies (really just two minutes, with another two minutes of credits) or as one 12-minute short. Riffing on the scene from Frozen 2 when Olaf gives a short dramatic reenactment of the plot of the first movie, these shorts feature Olaf, with occasional assists from Sven the reindeer and from the snow monster (who the internet tells me is named Marshmallow), recapping The Little Mermaid, Moana, The Lion King, Aladdin and Tangled. Each one is a goofy delight, as much for the meta commentary of the movies themselves as for snowman silliness. A Available on Disney+.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid (PG)

Voices of Brady Noon, Ethan William Childress.

The first of the popular Jeff Kinney books gets a new, animated adaptation that runs a kid-friendly 58 minutes long.

Greg (voice of Noon) and his longtime friend Rowley (voice of Childress) are terrified by the start of middle school — there are the kids who are shaving, the popularity that runs on different rules than elementary school, the politics of the lunch room and the terror of the “cheese touch” (a kind of cooties caused by a moldy piece of cheese that has sat on the basketball courts since Greg’s high school brother was at middle school). Along the way, Greg starts to fear that Rowley’s “elementary-school-ish” interests will hurt their coolness cred.

The animation is bright and round and has a nice comic-y appearance. The movie does a good job of addressing the drama of the changing friendships between elementary school and middle school and the sudden self-consciousness that sets in. While there are some cartoony hijinks, the movie is much more about these issues than just pure silliness — putting the optimum viewing audience at more the late-elementary school and up level. B Available on Disney+.

Trolls Holiday in Harmony (TV-PG)

Voices of Anna Kendrick, Justin Timberlake.

The new trolls of Trolls World Tour show up in this 30-minute holiday special whose main storylines include Branch (Timberlake) and Poppy (Kendrick) getting each other Secret Santa gifts and Tiny Diamond (voice of Keenan Thompson) trying to regain his flow after he finds himself at a loss for rhymes. Probably that this short exists and offers a half hour of kid entertainment is the most notable thing about it. It gives you songs, some troll visual fun and a few moments of quirkiness. B- Available on Hulu.

A Castle for Christmas (TV-G)

Brooke Shields, Cary Elwes.

Romance author Sophie Brown (Shields) travels to her late father’s hometown in Scotland to escape the fan fury over her recent novel, which kills off the romantic hero of her long-running series. His death is perhaps a reflection of the end of Sophie’s real-life marriage and her general sense of unmoored-ness. When she arrives in Scotland and sees Dun Dunbar Castle, the large manor house her father’s family were caretakers of, she decides she’s home. And, lucky for her, the current duke, the grumpy also divorced Myles (Elwes), is in financial trouble and reluctantly looking to sell. Or perhaps he can have his castle and his debts cleared too if he can convince Sophie to agree to some only-in-a-rom-com terms: she lives at the castle with him for a few months to learn how to take care of it, but if she leaves before this training period is over she forfeits her down payment.

Are these two people who are initially antagonistic going to warm to each other? The total lack of mystery about this question doesn’t dampen the mild enjoyment of watching exactly everything you think will happen happen exactly as you think it will. B- Available on Netflix.

Zoey’s Extraordinary Christmas (TV-14)

Jane Levy, Skylar Astin.

The TV show Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist, which had two seasons on NBC, now has this holiday movie on, of all things, the Roku Channel. I didn’t watch the show but the beginning of this movie sums things up: Zoey (Levy) can hear people’s “heart songs” — their hopes and fears and other emotional struggles expressed via song. Recently, her boyfriend Max (Astin) also gained the ability to hear heart songs and, like Zoey, tries to use this knowledge to improve things for people like Zoey’s mom, Maggie (Mary Steenburgen), still dealing with the death of Zoey’s dad Mitch (Peter Gallagher). Zoey is also still dealing with his death: this is the first Christmas that the family will be without him and she is intensely determined that everything they do be exactly the way he would have done it.

I don’t know that this movie put Zoey’s Extraordinary Playlist on the top of my must-watch list (both seasons are available on Peacock) but the movie is affable, sweet, lightly funny and, if you like a good dance number, enough of a good time. I like so many of the actors here — Levy, Astin, Steenburgen and also Alex Newell (who plays Zoey’s friend) and Andrew Leeds and Alice Lee, who play her brother and his wife — that I was willing to stick it out through some of the too-sugary elements or moments when it felt like the words “The Message of This Story” were flashing on screen. B- Available on the Roku Channel.

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