I bet you think this blog is about you.

1. Weike Wang Chemistry: How completely heartbreaking this was! The backdrop is of an enormously successful graduate student that experiences the setbacks that life tends to dole out especially to people in their 20s. She suddenly has to find a way to power through losing most of what passed for stability in her life, and tutoring undergrads becomes de facto therapy. I truly hope she writes prolifically in the future, because this was a major achievement for a debut novel. Like my number 1 non-fiction pick, this is instantly in my all-time favorites list as well.
   
   
2. Andrew Sean Greer Less: Ok, this was also the novel that I saw on many Best of 2018 lists, after it won the Pulitzer. Deserved? Yes! The protagonist is an author in San Francisco, about to turn 50 and still trying to cope with being dumped by his longtime boyfriend. To save face, he needs to invent a reason to be unavailable to attend the ex's wedding, and it manages to be tragic and hilarious at once. The theme of age gaps in relationships was addressed masterfully, I think, as were the peculiarities of how gay men date and marry.
   
   
3. Orhan Pamuk My Name Is Red*: The basic plot synopsis is this: we are in Istanbul in the 16th century when the Sultan employs multiple artists to spend their lives toiling on beautiful and intricate illustrations in books, some until they literally go blind. One of the senior illustrators is murdered near the start, and we must spend the whole novel trying to find out who it was. The suspense is compounded by the shift to a different narrator in every chapter, and I can't imagine how challenging it was to write this way. I don't remember reading anything quite this creative before or since.

• Lillian Li Number One Chinese Restaurant
  
• Viet Thanh Nguyen The Refugees
  
• Mat Johnson Pym: A Novel

1. Tara Westover Educated: A Memoir: This is at the top of many individuals' and publications' Best of 2018 Lists, and I think the consensus is accurate. Her account of growing up in rural Idaho with a father eternally suspicious of the outside world and a housewife-turned-midwife mother was painfully detailed in some parts. Ultimately, it's widely relatable to any kid that had little exposure to the Big Wide World but had to know what it offers that one's family bubble cannot. In particular, her older siblings have very jarring, and very human, experiences that made me want to fight for each of them, and Westover is honest about where she and they go on their journey to adulthood. You might cry more than a couple of times, but it's worth the ride. This one also goes in my all-time favorites list.
   
   
2. Miriam Pawel The Browns of California: The Family Dynasty that Transformed a State and Shaped a Nation: We may be hurting for competent, thoughtful leaders in the public sector in 2018 (ok, we definitely are). But digging beyond the Trumps and Mays of the world, we do have these, and Pawel wrote a painstakingly detailed account that follows three. Those are imminently retiring California governor (and one time state attorney general, mayor of Oakland, and candidate for president) Jerry Brown, his sister Kathleen, former state treasurer and one-time gubernatorial candidate, and, one generation back, their father Pat, also an attorney general and governor. The number of interviews she conducted is an insanely impressive feat, to get a fuller picture of where this family came from and what inspired them to govern as they did. Given the many offices held by the three Browns over multiple decades, this could have been an insurmountable topic, but Pawel whipped it into a smart narrative that put the details where they did the most good. Jerry Brown is the primary subject, but many other family members and friends are included. Recommended if you want to feel more optimistic about public service and how wealthy people can contribute positively.
   
   
3. Dave Holmes Party of One: A Memoir in 21 Songs: Do you remember MTV in the late 90s? I think much of my friends list was in the States and of the right age to at least have a passing familiarity. Myself, I was obsessed for just about all of ages 12 to 17, and as such I remember all of their gimmicks, high and low. Dave Holmes was a central participant in one of those: the reality show-like contest to become one of their on-air VJs. But he starts this story well before that, as a gay kid in a Catholic household (and later college) that took to popular music as a refuge and became an encyclopedia of 20th century rock. The style is original, with an era-appropriate song assigned to each of the parts of his life, of which my favorite was being a 20-something with a degree and smarts but no real idea how to navigate a heartless corporate world (song: The Man Who Sold the World). Even if you didn't grow up with MTV, it's witty and not too clever.
   
   
4. Alyssa Mastromonaco with Lauren Oyler Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? And Other Questions You Should Have Answers to When You Work in the White House*: Most of the DC politics books I read this year ended up fairly far down on this ranked list. Why? Even if historically important, the play-by-play narration of events was often tiresome, and most authors didn't seem to have a good sense of what actually counts as important to the story at hand, if not the larger context. Not so here! Mastromonaco was a campaign vet by 2008, and entered the White House as one of the senior staff in charge first of advance and later domestic policy. This was a surprisingly human take on what working with and for Obama was like, down to the mundane and humbling parts of a job that is extremely important and also all-consuming. An unsung highlight of this book by critics, in my opinion, is the chapters about her post-White House life, trying to figure out where her talents could be utilized and what to leave behind in DC.
   
   
5. Deborah Fallows and James Fallows Our Towns: A 100,000-Mile Journey into the Heart of America: If you've read online thinkpieces about rural America in the past few years, you may have come across the authors. The Fallowses are prolific writers and interview subjects, and had a career worth of work reporting on small towns even before this book. Our Towns is their apparent opus, an account of several years flying their private plane to multiple small towns and digging in to the assets and personalities of those places, which can be (but aren't always) different from the large cities that tend to dominate the American experience. I do have a minor gripe, which is an occasional tendency to be too sympathetic to bad choices, when I would expect experienced journalists to tell the situation** like it is. Still, if you want to know what small towns and cities are doing other than growing our food, this is a good place to start.

• Daniel Doctoroff Greater Than Ever: New York's Big Comeback
  
• Deborah Hicks The Road Out: A Teacher's Odyssey in Poor America
  
• Barbara Ehrenreich Natural Causes: An Epidemic of Wellness, the Certainty of Dying, and Killing Ourselves to Live Longer
  
• Richard Rothstein The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America
  
• Bill Dedman Empty Mansions: The Mysterious Life of Huguette Clark and the Spending of a Great American Fortune
  
• Lisa Servon The Unbanking of America: How the New Middle Class Survives
  
• Joseph Rodota The Watergate: Inside America's Most Famous Address
  
• Stuart Rojstaczer Gone for Good: Tales of University Life After the Golden Age***
  
• Marilyn Waring Counting for Nothing: What Men Value and What Women are Worth
  
• Jeff Goodell The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World
  
• Jonathan Alter The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies
  
• Adam Winkler We the Corporations: How American Businesses Won Their Civil Rights
  
• Bob Woodward Fear: Trump in the White House
  
• Felix G. Rohaytn Bold Endeavors: How Our Government Built America, and Why It Must Rebuild Now
  
• Tracy Metz and Maartje van den Heuvel Sweet and Salt: Water and the Dutch
  
• Emmanuel Petit Philip Johnson: The Constancy of Change
  
• Chris Hayes Twilight of the Elites: America After Meritocracy
  
• Atul Gawande The Checklist Manifesto: How to Get Things Right
  
• Timothy Beatley Blue Urbanism: Exploring Connections Between Cities and Oceans
  
• Arne Duncan How Schools Work: An Inside Account of Failure and Success from One of the Nation's Longest-Serving Secretaries of Education
  
• Michael T. Walsh Baltimore Prohibition: Wet and Dry in the Free State
  

Back at it with the window shopping.

First day back to work today was not very serious. I was set to get there around 10:45, but stopped for a burrito bowl on the way in, so let’s call it an 11 am arrival. Emails were responded to, not that I had all that many, and I made some tracker updates I’d been putting off. But I did not particularly need to be there. On the way home, I stopped into Papyrus to get heavily discounted Christmas cards, to finish my second batch tomorrow and then the rest to have for next year. Slowly I am turning into a well-oiled discount hunting machine.

There was more such discount shopping yesterday! With the weather being decent, Andrew and I agreed to pop into a few places on 14th Street. We met up and first went to Danielle’s apartment to drop off a bag she left in his car. While waiting and then walking around, he regaled me with the story of their Christmas, capped by getting a flat tire that resisted refilling and had to drive all the way back to DC stopping every few miles to check on it. Wouldn’t you know that Christmas Day is the hardest day to find any auto repair folks?

Anyhow, we started at Lululemon so he could exchange gifts for some more desirable stuff, then we went across the way to Room and Board to check out their after-Christmas sale with every other human in DC. The weather was nice, and we were admittedly enjoying a good sale so it was understandable. Lots of fun furniture, but we didn’t buy anything, just had a good conversation while moving from floor to floor browsing. In the end we just got coffee from Wydown and then I came home. But it was lovely and relaxed!