Tomorrow the kids go back to school and life returns to something approaching normalcy (kudos again to Warren Harding for coining that word). What, pray tell, have I accomplished during this winter vacation?

A good deal of reading, mostly. I finally dug into Tim O'Brien's 2002 novel, July, July. It takes up the Darton Hall College (based loosely on O'Brien's and my alma mater, Macalester College) Class of 1969 on the occasion of its 30th reunion, probing the multiple ways that youthful dreams translate into adult reality. The whole thing is brilliant, but the first chapter in particular is a tour de force: it's been a long while since a novel hooked me like that in the opening pages. For a male writer, O'Brien also seems unusually skillful in depicting female characters. Then again, how the hell would I know?

I also enjoyed Neil Harris's coffeetable book, The Chicagoan: A Lost Magazine of the Jazz Age (2008). It reproduces hundreds of pages from a magazine published here in the Windy City during the 1920s and 1930s and intended as a rival to The New Yorker. The writing (and proofreading) aren't as sharp as in its East Coast rival, but the modernist graphics and photography often dazzle the eye.

I'm currently reading Kojima Nobuo's 1965 novel, Hōyō kazoku 『抱擁家族』, also now available in English translation as Embracing Family. It's a tragi-comic allegory about domestic life in early 1960s Tokyo, all set in a Japan that remains very much in the shadow of U.S. hegemony. The hapless father tries to spend his way out of the crisis of declining patriarchal authority, as his wife has an affair with a young American and then is afflicted with breast cancer. It's very much an odd duck of a novel, and halfway through I haven't a clue where Kojima intends to take the reader.

I've also started in on Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century ( 2008), a finely tuned history of modern music that is damn near Hegelian in its ambition. Ross connects the dots from Richard Strauss, Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg to the Sex Pistols, Brian Eno and Missy Elliot (and their peers in contemporary classical music composition), arguing that all can be heard as participants in a single epic adventure.