Posted 10:55 a.m. Friday, April 25, 2025
Man of Leisure, Volume Two: Part Four
“. . . the world is always ending over and over again in one place but not another and that the end of the world is always a local event . . .”—Paul Lynch, Prophet Song
There it was. The pale blue dot. And here I was. The amputated astronaut. Like a rocket, almost dying had launched me into space, and I had crash landed here on the moon. I arrived, across the universe, shaken but alive. And as I observed the Earth, in all its deep blue oceans and its bright white clouds, I realized that it’d keep spinning whether I was there or not. It’d been my life upended, not the world’s. So, what was I to do other than to search for signs of life.
And I found it. There was the day nurse who liked to talk about Southern cooking and the night nurse who gave me horror film recommendations. There was the occupational therapist who, upon seeing I didn’t have clothes of my own, went to Wal-Mart and purchased two pair of shorts and two t-shirts for me. There was the woman who scribbled my daily schedule of therapies on the large whiteboard in my room and who’d periodically encourage me to participate in bingo with the other patients.
“Playing bingo while hospitalized is my personal hell but thank you for asking,” I politely declined.
There was the woman who put in my IV so smoothly I didn’t feel anything. When I asked her about how she had become so adept, she offered a simple explanation.
“I used to put IVs in cows on the farm,” she said.
“I’ll try not to take that personally,” I countered.
There was my physical therapist, the one with jet black hair and a slight streak of grey that had been recently cut into a Disney prince hairstyle. This stylistic choice had garnered quite the strong positive reaction from the elderly women on the floor. He took me on walks outside Gundersen to get me adjusted to the knee scooter.
“So, you work at a library,” he said on one of our walks. “That means you must like to read a lot.”
“Yeah, I read a bit,” I said, concentrating on not tipping over on the sidewalk. “I read 101 books last summer actually.”
He lifted his sunglasses in slight astonishment. “Willingly?”
“Yes willingly,” I said, equally astonished.
Life went on like this for two weeks in my little moon colony before I was sent back to my home planet. My joy of being out of the hospital dissipated as I settled into the stillness of my apartment. The quiet I had so desperately longed for in the hospital was now here, and it was eerie and all-encompassing as I stuck mainly to my futon.
The days blurred one into the next except on Fridays. Fridays was when my coworkers from Murphy Library visited, with piles of food and news about the goings-on at the campus. We laughed, they marveled at my collection of McDonald’s toys I worked on displaying on a bookshelf. They even took boxes of donated books to put out in the atrium of the library. In those moments, in between bites of pizzas and laughing, I felt human again. Like I had never left this planet. Like everything was normal.
Then they would leave. And I would be in the void again. Sometimes I would get overwhelmed with emotions, looking out the patio window. With all the lights of the city, I couldn’t even see a star to make a wish upon. No matter, in the darkest nights, in the dimmest of moments, I’d take a deep breath and tell myself the following:
I thought I was going to die. I didn’t.
I thought I was never going to leave the hospital. I did.
I thought I’d never go back to work. I will.
31. The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
Synopsis: A Minneapolis bookstore employee tries to juggle her relationships with her job, her partner’s temperamental daughter and the ghost of an annoying customer who has chosen to haunt her bookstore, all with the Covid pandemic looming on the horizon.
Review: The titular sentence in Erdrich’s moving novel The Sentence can refer to many things: protagonist Tookie got her job at a bookstore after being in jail in a backstory that could’ve been its own novel; the bookstore she works at is currently being haunted by an annoying customer seems to be sentenced to spend eternity to be there; it could all be all how we were in lockdown when the Covid pandemic hit in 2020. Erdrich expertly puts together all these different sentences to write a book that is impactful in its humor as well its more somber moments. Highly recommended.
32. Self-Portrait in Black and White: Unlearning Race by Thomas Chatterton Williams
Synopsis: A non-fiction examination on what racial identity means in the current sociopolitical landscape
Review: No group is a monolith so as a POC I was fascinated by Williams’ approach to race as a biracial person with biracial children and the artificiality of the thing we call race. You may not agree with all (or any) of his points, but I think reading this book would open up some great conversations.
33. Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
Synopsis: An Irish family fights to stay together against the encroaching evil of an authoritarian government.
Review: Sometimes the most horrifying thing is the possible. Lynch’s Prophet Song taps into a lot of fears (authoritarian government, wars, education, etc.) and brings those big concepts down to a very personal, real way as it follows one family trying not be destroyed by the world. Unlike some dystopian novels that revel in the exploits of an extraordinary, often teenage, character who will save society from itself, there is no Chosen One in Prophet Song. It is just a group of people doing their best to survive, and that is one of its biggest strengths. A must read.
34. You are What You Watch: How Movies and TV Affect Everything by Walt Hickey
Synopsis: A non-fiction, infographic-heavy look at the who, what, when, why and how of the ways we consume media.
Review: An eye-popping book that delves deep into the world of entertainment in surprising ways, You are What You Watch is more than just a clever book of trivia to impress people at your next dinner party. It’s a granular look at why we consume what we do and the decisions that are made to bring it to us and how seemingly innocuous entertainment has real world changes. A highly addictive read.
35. Calico Joe by John Grisham
Synopsis: The son of an abusive baseball legend tries to bring together his father and the rival baseball player whose career he helped end together for one final meeting before his father dies.
Review: “A baseball novel written by John Grisham?” I said to a coworker. “I’m going to hate this book.” Insert a SpongeBob THREE HOURS LATER title card as I came back to that same coworker and excitedly said, with tears in my eyes even, “Um, actually I loved this book.” Grisham smartly uses baseball as the impetus for a story about the complicated relationships between fathers and sons, between reality and legacies, between life and death. It is an incredibly moving novel that was probably one of my biggest surprises of the summer.
36. Blue Lake by Jeffrey D. Boldt
Synopsis: A Wisconsin judge and an environmental reporter fall in love against the background of corporate greed and intrigue with tragic consequences.
Review: This entertaining potboiler that mixes courtroom drama, corporate greed, and romance into a quick moving tale is worth reading if only to see La Crosse’s very own Charmont Hotel be the setting for some of the intrigue.
37. Reminders of Him by Colleen Hoover
Synopsis: Kenna Rowan is fresh out of jail and fresh out of options when it comes to getting custody of her kid from her dead boyfriend’s family, but she may find renewed hope in a complicated relationship with her deceased boyfriend’s best friend if her troubled past doesn’t sink it all.
Review: Colleen Hoover’s Reminders of Him is a thought-provoking novel, mostly things like: Why am I reading this? Why do I keep putting myself through this? And, after nearly every chapter, are we supposed to be rooting for the main character? The first time we meet the plucky lead character Kenna Rowan, she’s destroying a roadside tribute to her dead boyfriend whose death (spoiler alert) she was the chief cause of. We love a complicated female protagonist, do not get me wrong. Yet, there is complicated and then there is what Hoover does, which is make her female character a vessel mostly for trauma and a man’s love. I say all of this to say that I was never once bored and that is a type of talent to keep your audience engaged. Hoover, for good/bad/indifferent, has mastered that.
38. Cinema Speculation by Quentin Tarantino
Synopsis: Award-winning and highly influential film director Tarantino talks about the films that had a great impact on him, detailing their productions with interviews of cast and crew.
Review: Cinema Speculation is a book about films written by Quentin Tarantino, and it is as informative/annoying as you’d suspect a book about movies by Quentin Tarantino would be. Brimming with insights, behind the scenes interviews with filmmakers, the writing of the book completely captures Tarantino’s personality that is a beacon of enthusiasm about the making of films. What also helps the book is that is a mix of high art, low brow exploitation and middlebrow offerings that Tarantino gives the same amount of deference to.
39. You are Your Own Fairy Tale by Amanda Lovelace
Synopsis: A collection of three poetry books penned by Lovelace, Lovelace uses the tropes of the fairy tale genre to give poetic advice about self-esteem, dating, and other modern issues.
Review: How you respond to a book is so subjective, hinging on so many other factors like the time in your life you’re reading it, when the book came out vs. when you’re reading it, and countless other mitigating factors. Not dissimilar to Yung Pablo’s three poetry books I read, Lovelace’s book, a collection of a trio of previously published poetry books, feels like something I would’ve vastly enjoyed more in my twenties than I do at 41. That’s no knock against Lovelace because the poems are fun and do give great advice and make excellent use of illustrations. The self-help aspect of the book just didn’t speak to me personally, but I could easily see how this book and this style of poetry has taken off and been helpful to others.
40. The Unsinkable Greta James by Jennifer E. Smith
Synopsis: An indie musician and her gruff father try to heal their fractured relationship while on a cruise.
Review: A formulaic novel that is nevertheless a nice frothy read that touches on grief and loss and mending relationships between an adult child and parent. It just proves that every story doesn’t have to reinvent the wheel; sometimes it just must make sure there is enough air in the tires to get to where it wants to go.
Want more "Man of Leisure"?
Volume One, Column One: Once Upon a Time...
Volume One, Column Two: Life, Death and the Pages In-Between
Volume One, Column Three: The Summer I Turned Pretty Sober
Volume One, Column Four: (101) Books of Summer
Volume One, Column Five: Ever After
Volume Two, Part One: The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Reader
Volume Two, Part Two: The Good Book
Volume Two, Part Three: Scary Essays to Tell in the Dark