Listing

It's a rainy Sunday morning here in the City by the Bay, with me in my favorite Sunday ritual--gentle tide of raindrops hitting the windows, the bed stacked with Kindle (and selected to the fat Sunday New York Times), a toy-sized copy of "The Velveteen Rabbit," and the luxuriously thick paperback of Barbara Kingsolver's "The Lacuna," which I am reading in mere two or three pages at a time and then setting aside and daydreaming, sipping tea.

With my loss of IQ and memory, I find myself reading in smaller bites and listening to music. Music doesn't require a sharing of the remote, a focus on conversion of words, or a whole lot of patience, and the year is wrapping up, which means more and more "best of" lists are hitting the world, which I love. I have little money and even less time to just pick random MP3 files, books, and movies and hope that they will be enjoyable, so I tend to go with lists...this weekend I watched a movie released in my childhood that I had never seen ("Children of a Lesser God"--I probably wasn't old enough to be watching it when it came out) based on a list of William Hurt movies that a must-see from a recent "Fresh Air" podcast, added a book to the Kindle based on recommendation from a website that shouldn't know me this well but actually knows me better than most people ("Slow Love: How I Lost My Job, Put On My Pajamas, and Found Happiness," by Dominique Browning and offered on the Amazon home page), and am currently downloading the highest-grossing album to be released by anyone in quite some time, particularly from someone so young...yes...*gulp*...Taylor Swift's "Speak Now," featured in a review list from "Fresh Air" this past week.

To put things on a list the list-makers usually have to say why they put something on a list, and therein lies the hook--I don't just consume everything on a list for sheer presence on a list. If I had the means and bandwidth to consume EVERYTHING, with no lists, by God I would, but that's unreasonable, even for lottery winners. You have to do something with your life besides read all of the books that ever were. So I don't think of the lists as limiting, and I demand to know why something made a list. Sometimes, if it made it to more than one list, that's enough--"it must be good: the New York Times AND NPR like it"--but if they sell it with parts of the art to enjoy, then I'm sold. Such a thing happened with the Swift music...the reviewer played a piece of a song from the new album with the following lyric:

I was a flight risk with a fear of falling...

Damn. Yep, that's enough. One line was enough. Oh, and I have a secret vice in another area of Swift's music...brace yourself...it's inherited from Alison Krauss...I absolutely love music with banjos in it. Can't help it. I know, it's like admitting to never getting enough of the bagpipes (that's my brother's problem, by the way, so we are the biggest set of musically-bred nerds in the world, methinks), but there's something comforting in an instrument that looks like a combination of snare drum and guitar and sounds like a discontinued echo.

I thoroughly enjoyed "Children of a Lesser God," and will probably rent it again someday. The slice of "Slow Love" that I've read has been therapeutic, despite the fact that it's memoir is based on a woman who's loaded. As for Swift, I'll let you know. Can't go too wrong with banjos, though.

Onward.