10,000 minutes
I wish I could say that the first week of the new year, the first week of the crucial year of 2024, sang a soaring anthem of blissful productivity. But New Years Day involved hiking out of the mountains, the next few days were still enfolded in northern Victoria family, and the reshaping of my work systems for a fresh calendar year took over a day. Yesterday I clocked up a fine day of work and today I’m doing what I should.
I trust that next week, instead of talking to you, dear reader, and to myself, about mere trivialities such as global warming and heart attacks, I’ll be writing in depth about the blissful experience of cranking out more of a book.
Monsters
My reading over the past few years has been bursting with climate-change-related books. How can one confront this humanity-existential crisis without becoming as well informed as possible? Articles help but there is no substitute for books.
Lately the volume of climate books has expanded and a certain reluctance, sometimes even a repugnance, has seeped into me. Some intrinsically vital or fascinating topics now seem humdrum or at least familiar.
Over the New Year period I conducted an exercise that teases out this issue. The day after New Years Day was ushered in, Jeva Lange at Heatmap Daily profiled her “17 climate books to read in 2024.” It’s a fine article and well worth your read, but let me work through her seventeen-strong “to-be-read pile.” Perhaps I’ll learn something about myself.
I never read The Beekeeper of Aleppo by Christy Lefteri but I’m assured by Pam that it’s a fine novel. This author has just released The Book of Fire, a novel about a Greek wildfire destroying a family home. Should I read this? Firstly, present-day climate-change-related novels somehow don’t excite me; perhaps they’re too prosaic. Secondly—and I’ve only now realized this—I’ve read so much about heat and fires that I need no education about wildfire risks. I skipped a couple of much-lauded 2023 books on fire; now I decide, rather summarily, to turn down any 2024 offerings on the issue.
I love Hannah Ritchie’s writing and have had her Not the End of the World: How We Can Be the First Generation to Build a Sustainable Planet on my “Shopping List” of possible reads for many months. But even though it comes out in three days’ time, I’m yet to buy it. Why? Do I not want hope? Do I relish being mired in gloom? Having put the issue like that, I now take the positive decision and pre-order. In other words, this is one book I tell myself I should read, rather than one that emotionally appeals.
Kohel Saito’s Slow Down: The Degrowth Manifesto, out in ten days, seems to be on many activists’ and academics’ lists. At my age, sorry, I can’t be bothered reading about a revolutionary economic/political idea that will surely take generations to brew.
Another fire memoir for me to skip: Manjula Martin’s The Last Fire Season: A Personal and Pyronatural History (Jan 16).
A 2023 regret was bypassing Ray Nayler’s novel The Mountain in the Sea. His January novel The Tusks of Extinction is not only novella-length (handy when time-pressed) but on the “great extinction crisis,” something I’m obsessed about. I preorder.
I’m primed for “near future thrillers” set in “a post-apocalyptic future,” but why throw in a billionaire cliche? No to Andrew Hunter Murray’s The Sanctuary.
Alexis Wright is a skilled stylist but her books don’t suit me. No to Praiseworthy.
No to another fire novel: Sarah Ruiz-Grossman’s A Fire So Wild (February).
Have already read Trish O’Kane’s British book Birding to Change the World: A Memoir (and an interesting read it is).
Emily Raboteau’s Lessons for Survival: Mothering Against “the Apocalypse” (March) covers areas I understand not at all. Maybe I should sample this but no, I decide not for the moment.
H is for Hope: Climate Change from A to Z (April) is Elizabeth Kolbert’s book-sized expansion of her brilliant New Yorker essay of the same name. I have read the essay.
Journalist Abrahm Lustgarten’s take on the inevitable huge migrations we’ll witness. He examines the United States in detail. Laziness meant I skipped a couple of key books on this topic last year. I’ll make amends by working through On the Move: The Overheating Earth and the Uprooting of America (I can’t pre-order it yet, the hardcover is published in late March, with no idea yet on when the ebook will come out).
A reflective book of photos to be published in April under an architecture label, Virginia Hanusik’s Into the Quiet and the Light: Water, Life, and Land Loss in South Louisiana intrigues. But no.
The history of Carl Linnaeus, he of the classification system, battling his rival … Jason Robert’s April book, Every Living Thing: The Great and Deadly Race to Know All Life, sounds interesting but is of peripheral importance to me.
I haven’t read an Amy Tan for years and her April memoir/sketches The Backyard Bird Chronicles doesn’t excite enough.
Briefly Very Beautiful: A Novel by Roz Dineen has been compared to Station Eleven. Enough said. I apply for a digital review copy at Edelweiss.
Zak Podmore’s Life After Dead Pool: Lake Powell's Last Days and the Rebirth of the Colorado River is too localized for me.
The upshot of these musings? I’ve now chosen four climate crisis books for the first half of this year, a fine mix of fiction and nonfiction, generalities and core topics. Call me smug.
Mortality
I hate to admit it but I obsessed excessively over the final months of 2023 about diet, health, longevity, healthfulness, and notions of staving off mortality. I suspect my personality demanded this be done. Where I got to in the end can be set out thus: I’m mostly okay but need to work and work harder. Yes, I’m genetically burdened by excessive lipoproteins (over and above what we call “bad” LDL), leading to some minor blockage of an artery and a high “calcium score.” But my metabolism, in terms of insulin behavior and inflammation risks, is sound. My heart is strong although not optimal. I exercise sufficiently (this is crucial at my age) in terms of quantity but need to boost both energetic activity and all-round weight-bearing effort. My extreme Whole Foods Plant Based diet works (witness my blood pressure at last, after years of being just below some diagnosis of hypertension, now sitting only a bit above optimal) and is sustainable (admittedly with effort).
If I stick to my geeky guns, that is, precepts of diet and exercise, and ratchet up my body’s capabilities slowly and surely, and ensure sufficient rest, 2024 should be not only a step forward but a springboard to my 70th birthday in 2025 seeing me as fit as, and probably healthier than, where I was at age 60.
Just as important, I no longer need to dwell on this issue. I can relax, enjoy, relish.
What’s a kettlebell?
Never used one before but this is a kettle bell. An alternate gym routine demands I strive harder, in this case by squatting an uncomfortable number of times holding one of these in front of my chest. Can’t say I relish this sucker…