To keep a writing rhythm, I’m starting a new monthly feature bearing the title of this post. With simplicity as the goal—so I can finish something—I’ll write about one book I am reading or have recently finished, one song I have had on repeat, and a few words on whatever subject is top of mind.
A book.
I recently started reading Adam Higginbotham’s NYT bestselling Midnight in Chernobyl: The Untold Story of the World’s Greatest Nuclear Disaster. Passing over my consternation over the word greatest rather than worst in the title, this masterwork was a nonfiction finalist for an Andrew Carnegie Medal and named to the 10 Best Books of 2019 by the NYT Book Review. I’ve had it on my to-read list since watching HBO’s Chernobyl mini-series for the third or fourth time. It’s my current weekend read.
Midnight is a devastatingly thorough history of the April 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Pripyat, Ukraine (then part of the Soviet Union) in the context of the overall failure of the Soviets to development a safe nuclear program. Unlike the mini-series, the book presents the players as mostly competent and, though deceptive to the outside world, they actively, quickly, and smartly addressing the disaster. While they did not always have what they needed, they usually knew what they needed, and were often able to come up with solutions.
It is also interesting to see how the history differs from the TV production. Midnight in Chernobyl is very well written, eliciting sympathy for most of the ones involved and insight into the cost-cutting and rule-bending that created the conditions for the disaster.
A song.
My kids have introduced me to at least as much music since their teen years than I ever did before then, and though we are not active musicians, we all enjoy music a lot.
My youngest accidentally introduced me to After the Fall, by Kodaline (it was added to my iTunes account when we were sharing and it is still there). It’s a Coldplay-esque tune, with a lot of piano, driving beat, and catchy vibe.
It is tune about life and losing love with a nod to time being on your side in relationships, at least “that’s what people tell you.” I listen to it on repeat all the time.
And some words.
Writing is often trying to get on paper or screen words that will hardly come to mind. It is reading the fruit of your labor and deeming it rotten. Over and over. It is type, delete, or write, erase. Over and over. It is looking for ways to make two words replace three or four, deciding a sentence that seemed to flow really just rambles, and why a paragraph that makes decent sense is in the wrong place.
I imagine there are writers for whom the words flow like water from an open hydrant, but I am not that writer. Usually. Though I have had the experience of laboring over a piece for days or weeks making little progress, then something not-half-bad and totally unrelated streams out one morning in thirty minutes.
Writing. It is the best of times and it is the worst of times. All the time.
fides quaerens intellectum
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