I like goals and still set them. But without an overarching plot, goals don’t make sense and are hard to achieve. A story gives a goal a narrative context that forces you to engage and follow through. People who are in great shape and have their finances in order probably don’t set goals to be in good shape or get their finances in order. They probably set goals of running a marathon or paying off their house. In other words, they think in narrative rather than goals. The goals get met in the journey of the story.

Doesn’t that sound like a good way to start thinking about New Year’s resolutions? I want to picturing my life as a story, complete with a plot, ambition, and overarching themes.

(First order of business: determine how overcoming nail-biting will fit into my new narrative. Yikes.)

It’s the hundredth anniversary of Leo Tolstoy’s death. The Economist’s Prospero revisited the writer and his legacy for Russia in a beautiful piece here. An excerpt:

Devastatingly, but perhaps unsurprisingly, the 100th anniversary of Tolstoy’s death is hardly marked in Russia. Tolstoy was a man who opposed state violence, who considered the Church’s union with the state as blasphemous, who denounced pseudo-patriotism, and who wrote to Alexander III asking him to pardon those who assassinated his father. These principles are firmly out of fashion in today’s Russia. By turning Tolstoy into an icon, the Soviets ultimately hollowed him out.

While traveling by train this summer, I finally read Anna Karenina. What I loved about the novel was that it had a strong plot- Anna cheats on her husband and eventually is ruined- but the whole book was just bursting with ideas. Through some remarkable subplots, Tolstoy reveals just how much he was thinking when he was writing.

It’s unfathomable that both Tolstoy and Stalin could have emerged from the same tradition.

Enough biographies of Stephen Sondheim have been published over the past three decades, you’d think there wasn’t room left on your shelf for another. Still writing and performing at 80, Sondheim has just published a colossal book, Finishing the Hat, a collection of lyrics and librettos culled from his musicals from 1954-1981. Terry Gross of NPR’s Fresh Air interviewed the lyrical kingpin about his new book in what will soon be the best 46 min 17 sec of your day.

Seriously, Stephen Sondheim can do no wrong with this book. He walks readers through the detail and thought that goes into writing the perfect song.  He even slams some of his mentor Oscar Hammerstein’s lyrics for being too flowery (he dishes out plenty of criticism of his own works to balance it out though).

The title of the book is derived from the musical Sunday in the Park with George, his most autobiographical show to date. The song “Finishing the Hat” reveals the artist’s genius and diligence–he sacrifices everything to make art. I wonder whether Sondheim’s personal life reflected his characters’.

I would buy this book if I had an extra $40 lying around, but I promise you I will be making several long visits to Politics & Prose bookstore within the next few weeks.

I’m in Scarsdale again for the weekend to see Liz and her toddler, Hank. Just got back from seeing The Social Network for the second time–still gripping, still frustrating. Say what you will about the film, it’s successfully reopened an already-controversial dialogue about the future of social networking sites like facebook.

Tim Wu at Foreign Policy penned an interesting piece about how Facebook will deal with lawsuits and the like as it becomes increasingly global. Facebook’s privacy policies have come under fire recently due to third-party applications sharing personal data.

Similarly (though a tad unrelated), Daily Beast’s Thomas E. Weber details an experiment he performed in which he attempts to crack Facebook’s algorithm for what keeps users present or invisible on others’ mini-feeds. The outcomes are weird.

I’m not worried about any security breach, nor am I particularly worried about Facebook getting shut down. I think that it’s important to open up the conversation about privacy now that we’re on the frontier of internet networking.

(By the way, if you did see the film and are interested in hearing about what’s true and what’s fiction, head on over to read this article at the Daily Beast).

One of my favorite moments of the weekend was Sunday evening, when all my friends, the Gibbs, my parents, and Grandpa Ricks sat down to play post-dinner games. It was a riot (and Grandpa nearly won Apples to Apples!). I love family and friends!

Here’s what I did:

Poked through racks of second-hand clothing in Williamsburg, Brooklyn at Buffalo Exchange.

Lunched at Brooklyn’s tiny Cafe Colette, where all the waiters were tall, foreign, and beautiful (except Ar’s friend from home, who was a busboy from California).

Skipped and mosied along the High Line from 11th to 16th.

Boogied, arm-pumped, and leapt at a Ratatat concert at Terminal 5, near Columbus Circle.

Saw a production of the opera Tales of Hoffman at the Metropolitan Opera. The opera was Ar and Estee’s first-ever!

Meandered around the Cloisters monastery, reviewing Medieval artwork and architecture.

Enjoyed an apple cinnamon french toast breakfast with good friends at Sarabeth’s before shlepping back to DC (I realize the picture features delicious pancakes, which I did not order).

I loved my short time re-visiting New York. The one disappointment was that I was not able to do much thrift store shopping, nor did I see any Broadway shows! I’m returning in two weeks, though–any suggestions?

Today, for instance, I couldn’t stop listening to the song Adventures in Solitude from The New Pornographers. Inexplicable.

Then, this afternoon I was browsing the Bangkok Post and found my daily horoscope to be:

You may prefer solitude to company now as the New Moon activates your twelfth house of secrets and solitude. Spend time relaxing and renewing your spirit, allowing your natural rhythms to complete the monthly cycle. Stress is likely to make you more susceptible to illness now, so protect yourself with plenty of rest and vitamin C. Turn in early tonight and let your soul breathe deep.

Can you believe it? The New Moon activated my twelfth house of secrets and solitude! I need to allow my natural rhythms to flow, to relax. Perhaps by listening to more Adventures in Solitude.

I try to read a lot. I read during lunch breaks, slow evenings, airplane rides, even family vacations. Books have been a perpetual source of release and joy in my life.

I’ve found as I look back on my winding path through literature, however, that I rarely remember what I read. For instance, my senior year I read Jim Crace’s Being Dead as part of an English class that dealt with themes of death and decomposition. I remember receiving the book in class–brand new, as it had only been published in 1999–and instantly being attracted to the storyline. That night, I probed the novel’s 300ish pages in record time, finishing by early morning. It was that good.

Which leads me to my dilemma: why, four years later, can I barely remember major plot twists from the book? Why did it take me five minutes to even remember the title? This question gets even more interesting when I admit that I’ve referenced the book at least five times in the last four years without actually remembering much of it, just a general abstract sense of the book’s message.

In a recent New York Times piece “The Plot Escapes Me,” James Collins asks the same question: why don’t we remember what we read? He takes my question a step further, asking: why read if we are most likely to forget the book’s contents?

In investigating these concerns, Collins consults a Tufts professor of child development. Here was the response.

“There is a difference,” she said, “between immediate recall of facts and an ability to recall a gestalt of knowledge. We can’t retrieve the specifics, but to adapt a phrase of William James’s, there is a wraith of memory. The information you get from a book is stored in networks. We have an extraordinary capacity for storage, and much more is there than you realize. It is in some way working on you even though you aren’t thinking about it.”

Did this mean that it hadn’t been a waste of time to read all those books, even if I seemingly couldn’t remember what was in them?

“It’s there,” Wolf said. “You are the sum of it all.”

I know my life experiences have certainly shaped how I perceive the world around me, but to say that I am “the sum” of everything I’ve read is a pretty profound idea. I’d like to think that everything I read somehow adds to a growing deposit of knowledge and feelings from which I can constantly draw. What books have impacted you? Most important to me are Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged.

Last week we got together with our U of U friends in DC and saw Never Let Me Go. The film is based on the novel of the same name by Kazuo Ishiguro. The three primaries–Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightly, and Andrew Garfield–are young Britons attending what appears to be a typical English boarding school. At this school, however, there is much more expected from the students than top grades and graduation. They are being raised as Donors, to give up their organs to humanity. Once released into the real world, the three friends wander without direction until they finally all serve the same fate. I don’t want to reveal too much, but the premise is grim.

Despite the generally positive reviews, the film never really achieved what it set out to achieve. Interesting side stories are ignored, there is no real plot driving the film, and we are left musing on a love triangle that was never very interesting. I will say that the final line of the film may be worth the two hours.

NPR shares an interesting review of the film. Roger Ebert, too, gave a strong review of the film. I’m still undecided on whether or not I enjoyed the movie. Has anyone else seen it?

Lately I’ve been wearing a lot of stripey shirts paired with a friend’s tan blazer. I love the combination above from The Sartorialist, but I’m not totally sold on the blazer’s shape.

I’m drawn to Zara’s lovely blazers seen here and here. What do you think?