Fancy at least the concept of more serious reading, while you know damn well you’re not about to give up the comfortably compelling tropes of genre writing? Try Julian Barnes’ The Sense of an Ending. A profound examination of all the ways our memories contribute to our self-deception is deftly sugar-coated with a driving plot and cliff-hanger-ish mystery. It’s an exploration and utterly ruthless understanding of aging and rationalization that I haven’t found elsewhere. But be prepared to leave the comfort-zone romanticism with which you justify your own life…and to which you may never return.
Click here for the Kindle version that you won’t have to sanitize.
All of which seems appropriate as the snow rages outside, and I wonder…even when vaccinated…if endemic COVID will ever let us return to what we at least thought was normal. But, hopefully, yours is a reasonably functional, snug place to “shelter in place” and contemplate at leisure the past, present, and future mysteries of it all.
