Tag: reading

November 2025

Stick season has arrived in the DC area. I’m adjusting to riding in 40-degree weather rather well but the winds are a bit of a challenge as always.

Watching

The World Series – On a par with the very best baseball games I’ve ever seen including the fabled 6th game of the 1975 Series that resurrected baseball’s popularity. The 2025 Series was so good that my wife (not a big baseball fan) watched most of it with me.

A House of Dynamite – Kathryn Bigelow’s latest masterpiece about the 19 minutes after a nuclear warhead is launched toward the US. It is told from three perspectives: the military, the White House, and the President. Whoa.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps – The latest Marvel movie. Orders of magnitude better that A House of Dynamite. Not! When the best thing about the movie is the set decoration (early 60s NYC meets The Jetsons), you know you’re in for a long two hours.

Say Nothing – A nine-part miniseries based on the book of the same name (see below). Excellent but disturbing and depressing. I had nightmares after watching this.

The American Revolution – A six-part, twelve-hour miniseries on how the US came to be. Another gem from Ken Burns with collaborators Sarah Botstein, and David Schmidt. Your school history lessons will seem utterly incomplete after watching this.

Ryan van Duzer’s Natchez Trace Tour – Ryan rode the Trace in October. It was fun to re-visit the ride I did this spring.

Riding

I rode the Cider Ride with Chris, Michael, and Kevin. The No-estrogen Ride. First time I’ve ridden one of these with just the boys in forever. I knew I was in trouble when they dropped me on the first hill at the half mile mark. Still I slogged my way through 60 miles. This was the longest ride of the month.

I rode 787 miles in 24 days during November. I took the CrossCheck out for a 20-mile ride but otherwise the whole month was on The Mule. Big Nellie spent the month in the shop for much needed maintenance. I dropped The Mule off for work yesterday. This will give me a jump on bike maintenance for next year. Also, my local bike shop’s service area is dead so I get The Mule back by mid-week.

For the year, I’ve clocked 9,479 miles. Just 521, or 16.3 miles per day to get to 10,000. Fingers crossed.

Reading

Say Nothing by Patrick Radden Keefe. An account of the dystopia that was Belfast during the Troubles in the 1970s and later. Absolutely riveting. To quote dialog from A House of Dynamite: This is insanity. This is reality.

Mediocre Follow-Up (The No-Name Tour) – My journal (created from posts on this blog) of my 2019 tour from Northern Indiana to San Francisco. I was surprised over and over again at how my memories seemed to get all jumbled with time. And how much I walked to get over mountain after mountain after mountain.

Connecticut Road Trip – We took a four-day mini-vacation to Connecticut where we witnessed our daughter get sworn in to the Connecticut Bar, saw some awesome trolls in Rhode Island, and had dinner with friends we hadn’t seen in over a decade.

December 2023

Riding

This was a month to back off a bit. I managed to ride 749 miles or about 24 miles per day, less than half of my daily mileage on my summer tour. The cold weather makes riding my normal 30 miles feel like an ordeal. My outdoor rides ranged from 30 to 32 miles. I rode 110 miles on Big Nellie indoors. Most of the outdoor miles were on The Tank, my Surly CrossCheck. I did ride The Mule a couple of days but Little Nellie took the month off.

I reached 11,000 miles for the year on December 9.

Riding The Tank has been a struggle this year. It seems slow and heavy and hard on my legs. Once I reached 28,000 miles on its odometer on December 22, I put it away for a few days. In addition to my dissatisfaction with the ride quality of this bike, I had been experiencing a marked increase in back pain accompanied by worrisome neck, shoulder, and arm aches. A two-mile stroll (with cane) through Georgetown last week left me with even more pain. And, despite doing all kinds of physical therapy exercises for months, my back was stooped like never before. I seemed destined to return to the dreaded medical merry-go-round.

On a whim, I compared the saddle height on The Tank to that on The Mule, my touring bike that fits like a glove. The Tank’s saddle was more than a half inch higher. I must have raised the saddle earlier in the year. Why? I have no idea.

Anyway, I lowered the seat by a half inch or so and went for a spin. Bingo. Suddenly the bike fit me nearly perfectly. My mechanics were much better; my speed jumped by ten percent or so with less effort. The handlebars were still a little higher than on The Mule so I paid a visit to my local bike store where I bought some thin, 2.5-millimeter, spacers. I used them to drop my bars 5 millimeters. Dang. Locked and loaded. I finished the year with three 30-mile rides. My back feels much better and my neck, shoulder, and arm pain are nearly gone. Thank god I didn’t go to the doctor. It would have been a total waste of time.

Watching

Minari – A Korean family buys a farm in Arkansas. Nominated for all sorts of awards. Korean cast was outstanding including a little boy played by Alan Kim. They overshadowed a stellar performance by Will Patton as a religious nut who is the family’s farmhand.

Top Gun – Maverick. Another movie we skipped a few years ago. I’m not a big Tom Cruise fan but he’s far better in this than in the earlier movie. The plot is predictable but the editing and sound and visuals make for a fine action movie.

Interstellar. A Christopher Nolan film I missed when it was released nine years ago. Matthew McConaughey at his best. The rest of the cast, other than McKenzie Foy as his daughter and Michael Caine as an aging scientist, left me a bit flat. The story is filled with sci fi bafflegab and impossibilities but it was still very entertaining.

Yogi Berra – It Ain’t Over. A documentary about Yankee catcher Yogi Berra. One of the most highly decorated athletes of the century. He was short and funny looking. And he was famously a malaprop machine. History treated him like a clown, but he was anything but. He earned more professional championship rings than any athlete in the 20th century, including Bill Russell. (Russ has nine NBA championships, two NCAA championships, and a gold medal. Don’t at me.) And virtually everyone who appears on screen says he was a phenomenally decent human being.

Everything, Everywhere, All at Once. This movie took tons of awards including the Academy Award for Best Performance with a Butt Plug. Also, people with hot dog fingers, a sword fight with dildos, an all powerful everything bagel, and sentient rocks. How many hallucinogens did the filmmakers take when writing and directing this thing?

Air. The story of how Nike, a running shoe company, signed Michael Jordan. It’s funny. Interesting. Great cast. Matt Damon is the new Tom Hanks. Viola Davis rocks. Jason Bateman is terrific. Ben Affleck is quite good as the head of Nike. And he directed.

Nyad. A very entertaining movie about a self absorbed jerk who swims from Cuba to Key West at the tender age of 64. As good as Annette Benning was as Diana Nyad, Jodie Foster was even better as her coach and friend. I am not a big fan of either actress but I’d be shocked if they don’t both get nominated for Academy Awards.

Big Adam Bikes – This is an Instagram daily journal of a young man who rode the TransAm this year. It’s funny and brings back a lot of memories. Adam Bigelow doesn’t leave out the tedium, the bad weather, and the dogs. And the headwinds – forget about that nonsense about getting tailies going west to east. You get a pretty good idea of what it’s like to ride from the Oregon coast to Yorktown.

The Crown – We watched the final six episodes over the course of three nights. How odd that of all the characters in the story, Camilla Parker-Bowles came across best. In the end, the Queen is humanized although I have to say of the four women who played Elizabeth over 68 episodes, I found Imelda Staunton the least appealing. (There’s a new actress who plays the not yet queen as a young woman. She looks remarkably like a young Claire Foy.)

Death on the Nile – I’m not a big Agatha Christie fan and this movie did nothing to change my mind. An impressive cast but not one memorable performance. Dull. If you’re going to watch a Kenneth Branagh film there are many others worth your time.

The Big Dig – This nine-hour podcast covers the biggest urban traffic project in US history. The Big Dig involved burying the Central Artery, an elevated highway built in the late 1940s. The highway design predated the interstate highway system. It was characterized by narrow lanes and more miles of on and off ramps than roadway miles. To get on the thing you had to drive like a maniac which may explain why Boston drivers are such Massholes. The Central Artery was a daily nightmare for drivers and it ruined the city, separating the North End and South Boston from the rest of the city. The Big Dig also included building a new tunnel to Logan Airport, a much needed addition. In the first episode I learned how an inner loop highway that cut through Cambridge, Jamaica Plain, and Roxbury was on the drawing boards. A grassroots effort stopped the project, but not before acres of Roxbury were levelled. (I drove a cab in Boston in the mid-seventies and always wondered why there were so many empty lots in Roxbury. Now I know why.) The same sort of thing happened in DC where I-66 would have cut the city in half if not for local opposition. The Big Dig took over 20 years to design and build and cost billions more than planned. Although the podcast doesn’t mention it, the Big Dig was not unlike another big dig, the Panama Canal, in terms of its complexity, cost, political intrigue, and length of time to completion.

Reading

The Path between the Seas. David McCullough’s award-winning account of the building of the Panama Canal. As with many of his tomes, the amount of information in this one boggles the mind. Not only was the canal an engineering feat that rivalled Project Apollo, the effort also included the early use of electricity for industrial purposes and pathbreaking epidemiological work. It cost over $300 million and tens of thousands of lives, mostly those of unskilled black workers from the West Indies.

A Truck Full of Money by Tracy Kidder. This is the story of Paul English, a working class kid in Boston who eventually made $120 million (hence the title) from the online travel company he founded called Kayak.com. The book oddly dovetails with two other Kidder books: Mountains beyond Mountains and Rough Sleepers and seems like a fitting companion to Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine.

Mornings on Horseback. After reading about Theodore Roosevelt’s involvement with the Panama Canal in the book above, I decided to read this biographical book, again by David McCullough, about TR’s upbringing. (The book ends well before he becomes president.) A chapter of the book deals with his three years of on and off adventures in North Dakota and eastern Montana. I rode through this area on my 2018 bike trip and was curious about his times there.

On the Street by Bill Cunningham. Cunningham was a fashion photographer of sorts for the New York Times and other publications. He chronicled the art of fashion, mostly as it appeared on the streets of New York and Paris over four decades from the 1970s to the 2000s. I often have wondered who wears those weird outfits you see in fashion magazines. The answer is New Yorkers and Parisians. Cunningham traveled the city on his beat up three-speed bicycle. His photos of people walking to work in Manhattan after a big snow storm brought back oh so many miserable winter days in Boston. The book made me all the more appreciative of amateur photographers Joe Flood and Mary Gersema, two friends of mine who have an fine eye for life in DC.

The Mystery Guest by Nita Prose. This whodunit is the follow up to Prose’s The Maid. Molly the maid solves another murder in the hotel where she works. Molly’s a bid of an odd duck but she’s a good egg and has an eye and an ear for detail. After two months of nonfiction, this novel was a fun read to end the year on.

Readin’ the ‘Rona

Well, I’m not exactly burning up the roads of America this year. Other than watching Washington Nationals baseball games, I am spending a lot of time reading. I read National Geographic and Adventure Cycling magazines. Otherwise I’ve been working my way through a pile of books.

  • This Is Going to Hurt by Adam Kay – the diary of a doctor in the National Health Service in the UK. This is very funny, and sometimes tragic.
  • Labyrinth of Ice by Buddy Levy – the incredible tale of a multi-year arctic rescue mission in the days before modern communications. If you liked books about The Endurance expedition to Antarctica, this one’s for you.
  • The Body, A Guide for Occupants by Bill Bryson – This book lacks Bryson’s usual wit (his A Walk in the Woods is the funniest book I’ve ever read), but it will tell you a million bizarre factoids about your bag of bones.
  • Lie to Me by J. T Ellison – an entertaining novel in the style of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl.
  • Sharp Objects by Flynn – ditto.
  • Notes from a Small Island by Bill Bryson – a Bryson travelogue showing off his wit as a fish out of water in Great Britain. As you’re about to discover I tend to work my way through books by author
  • Dark Places by Flynn – Another dark Gone Girl-ish novel
  • And I Do Not Forgive You by Amber Sparks. The author is the wife of a former co-worker. Well written off-beat short stories that was not well read (as Nick Hornby likes to say).
  • The Road to Little Dribbling by Bill Bryson. Another witty travelogue.
  • Made in America by Bryson. A book about the history of the English language. I had high expectations for this one but it wasn’t my cup of joe.
  • Giving Good Weight, La Place de la Concorde Suisse, Irons in the Firel Looking for a Ship, The Ransom of Russian Art, The Control of Nature all by John McPhee. I loved these on first read many years ago but reading them in sequence got a bit tedious. Still he’s a skilled researcher and writer and they hold up well to the passage of time.
  • Buzz Saw by Jesse Dougherty. The tale of the improbable march to a World Series title by the 2019 Washington Nationals. I always regard the long baseball season as like an epic novel. This one proves my point.
  • Table of Contents by McPhee. By this point I was pretty burnt out on McPhee. (I have only Coming into the Country left to read in my McPhee collection.
  • One Day: The Extraordinary Story of One Day in America by Gene Weingarten. Dang is this book a revelation. Using a day chosen entirely at random, Weingarten reports on events that happend on that date in the recent years. I like Weingarten’s weekly humor column in the Washington Post but he’s cheating us by not writing more books like this.
  • The Rest of Us Just Live Here by Patrick Ness. A young adult novel in the style of Twilight. Weird times five.
  • Circe by Madeline Miller. She’s a nymph, she’s a which, she’s a badass. I didn’t think I like this but it’s pretty great. The writing style is unusual but it works.
  • A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles. How about a Russian novel in the style of Graham Greene. Not that I know anything about Greene’s writing.
  • The Hours by Michael Cunningham. Unless you’re a big fan of Virginia Wolff and Mrs. Dalloway, don’t bother. By page three I was sick of metaphors and atmospherics.
  • Normal People by Sally Rooney. A rich nerd has an affair with a smart jock in high school in Sligo, Ireland. The story follows them through college in Dublin. Rooney is amazing at describing the nuances of relationships.

Still to come: this eclectic pile. Note that my wife and daughter picked up on my tastes. I read Ron Chernow’s biography of Ulysses S. Grant last year and was amazed. And since I saw Hamilton on stage last year it was a no-brainer to gift me the book where it happened. I loved Matt Damon in the movie about a botany nerd stranded on Mars. The Outsiders is a classic that I’ve never read. And two books by authors I first read earlier this year.

I am saving Hamilton for after the baseball season. I’m not throwin’ away my shot.

It’s been a long time since I’ve read so many books that float my boat.

Two Seasons

I am a baseball fan. Before the start of the season, I thought the Washington Nationals had a great chance to win it all. Then the games started. Players became injured. I went to game after game and watched them lose over and over. My bike tour took me away from the wreckage.

But as Joe Garagiola said, baseball is a funny game. The season unfolded like all baseball seasons. Ebbs and flows, just like a long bike tour. Pre-season hopes gave way to harsh realities. A series of injuries gutted the lineup for a month. A relief pitcher coming off surgery on his throwing arm threw 100-mile-per-hour pitches everywhere but over the plate. Other relievers did little better. The injured players returned. Gerardo Parra was acquired and taught the team to just have fun. The team started to win. Max became utterly unhittable. Baby shark boomed from the speakers at the ball park. Strasburg and Rendon quietly, steadily evolved into elite players. Howie Kendrick, a part time player who had spent nearly a year off the diamond with an injury, hit like a monster. Eaton wore out pitchers and played with his hair on fire. Robles vacummed the outfield. Soto played like a veteran, even becoming a decent outfielder himself. The catchers, acquired over the winter to replace the disappointing backstops of 2018, became anchors. Max got hurt. The team kept winning. Astrubal Cabrera returned and hit like a beast.  The team kept winning. Aaron Barrett returned from a hideous arm injury to pitch again and inspire. Zimmerman came back from a long struggle with foot problems. And he hit. More winning.

By the time they squeaked into the playoffs they had become the elite team I had hoped for in March. Then, impossibly, they won five elimination games, the last being Game 7 of the World Series.

Image may contain: one or more people, people sitting, drink and indoor
Red wine. Black sweats. Can’t lose

In a way, winning the World Series doesn’t matter. The long arc of the season matters. Watching games on warm summer nights, sharing a beer or three with my daughter matters. Doing Baby Shark matters. Seeing friends at the game matters. Riding home from the ball park in the dark after a mid-summer night game matters.

Yes, we will celebrate for a few days. There will be a parade.  Enjoy it. Already temperatures have dropped. Winds have begun to howl. Big Nellie soon will take her place in the basement where I’ll spin and read all those books I’ve neglected for the last six months. It will be reading season once more.

Meanwhile, a new team will take shape. Hopefully, my body will follow suit. Then sometime next spring, a flag will be raised and a new baseball season will begin. Maybe I’ll ride somewhere far, hopefully on two healthy legs this time. As Nationals manager Dave Martinez mother told him when he was growing up, “Often bumpy roads lead to beautiful places.”

.

Reading Season: Books and Blogs

Winter is a time for rest. I learned this as a distance runner in New England many years ago. Over time your body will thank you for not going out on a 20 degree day and trying to grind junk miles through gusting winds.

And baseball season is 85 days away.

So I read.

Mrs. Rootchopper gave me two books for Christmas: Michael Lewis’s The Undoing Project and Jeff Passan’s The Arm. I’ve read all but one of Lewis’s books. (Lewis is one of my go-to authors. Others are Nick Hornby, David McCullough, David Lodge, Tracy Kidder, John McPhee, Tom Wolfe, and Jon Krakauer.) This one is about the bromance between two academic psychologists who flipped economics on its ear by noticing that people do not behave rationally, and they are irrational in predictable ways. I finished this book on Friday while riding Big Nellie in the basement. (I read faster when my legs are moving. I swear.)

Passan’s book is an investigation into the epidemic of torn ulnar collateral ligaments among baseball pitchers. These pitcher have what is known as Tommy John surgery. Long- time baseball fans will remember that the orthopedic kiss of death for pitchers used to be a torn rotator cuff in the shoulder. Not anymore. So Passan’s book looks at the inane history of baseball and sports medicine. (For a while, it was thought that sore arms were caused by infections from the mouth. So injured pitchers had some teeth pulled. I am not making this up.)

I am also reading blogs. I have a long list on the right that is in no particular order. My favorite blogs these days include:

BlissfulBritt: I have become addicted to this one about a twenty something perpetual college student and erstwhile barista in Seattle. Britt’s bliss is often illusive but the quality of her writing and photography is ever present. And I’d kill to go on a hike with her.

My Year with Kerouac: Michelle is another twenty something blogger who coordinates events for our local bike advocacy organization. She loves the beats and tats and cats. And writes wonderfully. Somewhat like Britt, she’s in search of something more profound in her life than the daily grind. (Ooh, a pun.) She’s a banquet.

Wakeupshakeup: Katie is between successes as they say. She quit her job after feeling worn down and disrespected. What next? For now it’s odd jobs and writing gigs and interviewing “responsible adults” for insights into how to get on board the train to happy success or successful happiness.

Revrunner: I have no idea who this blogger is but (I think it’s a woman) she takes great photos mostly of the DC area (the DMV) and occasionally other places. She has a great eye for making the mundane look intriguing.

Smilecalm: Whenever I feel the need to get my woo woo on, I read Smilecalm. Half the time I don’t have a clue what it’s about. Other times it strikes a chord in me. The photos are wonderful.

And since I live in DC and ride a bike, there are three go-to bloggers I read regularly.

Chasing Mailboxes: Mary’s writing and photography captures her inner being, the one every distance runner and cyclists has a running mental conversation with. Her inner child often makes an appearance between the lines or in a picture (especially when she jumps for joy). She sometimes writes about long distance running and it evokes strong memories in me of my running days some 30 years and one knee pop ago. Mary, as the superhero Coffeeneur, runs two annual friendly competitions: the Coffeeneuring Challenge and the Errandonnee. Originally intended as a DC thing, they quickly went global. Try them. But you must follow the rules!

Tales from the Sharrows: Brian is a notorious rule-phobe who started this blog as a blow-by-blow account of his bike commutes across DC. How he remembered the details of his rides is beyond me. In recent years, he’s written more broadly but always with quirky wit. He also writes a bicycle advice column for the local free weekly newspaper. It’s called Gear Prudence. Feel free to submit a question.

The Washcycle: From time-to-time this blog has gone dormant, but it has started kicking its heels up again. Washcycle posts are in depth reports of interest to the DC cycling advocacy community. Lord, that sounds dull. It’s not. I don’t know where he gets his material from but there are maps and annotated photos and links galore to help you get your inner bike advocacy wonk on.

Finally, I read  Adventure Cyclist and National Geographic from cover to cover. I highly recommend National Geographic’s latest issue on Gender. It’s especially interesting if you are or have been or plan to be a parent.

Okay, time for me to head into the basement for some active reading on Big Nellie.

Feel free to recommend blogs or books to me in the comments section. I am always looking for new ground for my eyes to cover.