THE SENSE OF AN ENDING by Julian Barnes

I don't know about you, but the end of the year I get reflective. I think about the previous year's successes and failures, pros and cons, hits and misses, and use these to plan the next year(s). My professional life, my writing, speaking, and my librarian gig, is governed by an academic calendar, but my personal life and learning are still attached to a traditional January-December schedule. This month being December, the month's blog book is about life, learning, and existential considerations, and I thought it would be a good choice to round out the year.

The Sense of an Ending is a novel with a unique form. The narrator, Tony Webster, introduces the reader to his school friends in some detail in Part One. There are Colin and Alex, his long-term friends, and then the noticeably brilliant Adrian Finn who manages to add himself to the trio. A quartet only briefly, each guy goes off to a different college and mostly lose touch, except that an old girlfriend of Tony's provides a link of sorts. Tony zooms through his middle age and we arrive at his retirement. This is where Part Two starts.

Tony the narrator reflects on his relationships in this section and how memory can be faulty. Evidence surfaces which takes Tony and the reader completely by surprise. This evidence makes a start at understanding why people have acted as they have, but as soon as the reader believes they've figured things out, more surprising details surface to shed new light on why people are how they are, and in one case why a person is at all. Oh, the novel is thick with surprises alright, and so many have to do with the slipperiness of memory.

I heard about this book at a memorial service. It was one of the last books the deceased English professor had read with his elderly eulogist. They loved the book, and that was enough of a recommendation for me. I relished imagining them in the elderly gentleman's apartment discussing the thoughtful novel with their intellectual ideas and wry observations. I live for those kinds of conversations over literature, music, art, and film, and wished I had known that my late colleague was such a devout reader! I purchased my copy of The Sense of an Ending and read it soon after, reflecting on how appropriate, or perhaps ironic, the title is. It's the kind of book I'll pick up again, I'm sure, and in it find new surprises and treasure.

The Art of Stillness by Pico Iyer

Pico Iyer has emerged as one of my favorite writers and speakers, and he's an inspiration for me in both areas. He writes about travel, but in a cerebral way that gets readers to think about what they are thinking about while they are traveling. The book I'm recommending this month is a little one by Iyer from the TED Original series: The Art of Stillness: Adventures in Going Nowhere.

It might seem counter-intuitive for a travel writer to write about going nowhere,

but not for Iyer. He's not walled up in a tiny hut like Hildegard of Bingen. He actually goes places and sees people but more for meditation than sightseeing. He's exploring his mind rather than unfamiliar scenery and terrain.

I found myself recently craving literal 'stillness' because of a painful bruise on my side that I acquired during a slapstick-worthy fall. I read Iyer's short book about Stillness while I was being still. How clever am I? I thought of other kinds of stillness: I decided not to travel this year. I've been traveling a lot lately and I want a year to be home and still. I want to think about where I've been and mindfully write about the experiences and what I learned and what I was thinking about. Of course that's not literal stillness, but I kind of stillness of the mind. I took a couple of walks over Thanksgiving weekend, before I took the epic tumble, and I found myself thinking about where I was walking, what I was seeing, and my memories of those places with no distractions or worries from my everyday life. I had a Thanksgiving dinner to prepare, assignments to grade, and a hundred other things to do, but I was nicely focused on my walks. I was in the moment.

And then I read the little Pico Iyer book and thought about all these ways to be still and how important they are as I was sitting as still as possible. And I was still as I contemplated the gentle photos by Icelandic photographer Eydis S. Luna Einarsdóttir which separate each of the book's sections. You may be thinking that I've spoiled the fun of reading a short book like this meant to be read in one sitting (according to TED). I haven't, really. TED wouldn't have any thing to do with puny ideas that could be spoiled in a simple blogpost, and there's no way my words could come close to stirring up your mind as Pico Iyer's words will. So read this worthwhile book, and watch this worthwhile companion talk: