READING
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal by Christopher Moore. (Imitation leather-bound edition!) Cheeky and acutely reverent at the same time. The Biblically literate amongst us have a great advantage for appreciating the subtleties of Moore’s humor in addition to the laugh-out-loud stuff, which is precisely paced. GC and I are reading this one together. Reading aloud (and being read to) is a wonderful activity we’ve inconsistently engaged in for years. I tend to forget how much I do enjoy it when I go for long spells without sharing a book. If you’ve never done it before, try it in lieu of a Seinfeld re-run some evening.

NONREADING
Eric G. Wilson’s Against Happiness, which I heard about on NPR. There are multiple layers to his argument, but the one that is most interesting to me concerns evaluating the cultural costs of systematically eradicating sadness if it is, indeed, a necessary part of the human experience. Will the successful minimization of sadness, angst, melancholy, gloom, and suffering upset the polarity of life (it’s probably actually a dialectic) that makes it, well, life? In Portuguese, saudade doesn’t have the strongly negative connotation its closest English translation (melancholy) carries. In Brazil, saudade is embraced & celebrated — not always enjoyed but almost never pathologized — and it imbues a particular richness into Brazilian culture (i.e., the arts) and daily life. The risk of romanticizing depression and other bona fide illnesses is very real, but Wilson’s is on to something real here – something worth discussing further.