What did I read? A 2020 Wrap Up

Just hours before the ball dropped last Thursday, I finished my 26th book of the year.

When I started this experiment as a New Year’s resolution last January, I was just trying to whittle down my tsundoku—the stacks of unread books that had been building on my shelves. I—like everyone else—was blissfully unaware of what 2020 had in store, and the many directions my attention would ultimately be pulled.

But I committed. At the beginning of every month, I picked two or three books that captured my interest, did the math to break down how many pages I needed to read a day to finish on time, and tried to sneak a few pages in over coffee, over lunch, or before bed. Sometimes when I fell behind, I’d reserve a few hours on a weekend to knock out fifty or sixty pages to get caught up. My wife started calling it “my book report.”

So did this commitment to reading become my structure, my tether to normalcy, my quiet in the storm of 2020? Have I emerged as an enlightened and transformed person?  

Not really.

Don’t get me wrong; I read some profound books that rocked me to my core. (The behavioral economics streak that I had over the summer was particularly eye-opening and I find myself thinking back on those books frequently in the course of my job.)

The truth is, I think I overdid it. My desire to fulfill this contract that I’d made with myself became more of a motivator than simply enjoying the process. It became a self-imposed chore rather than a gift.

“I’m sorry, sir. You’re no longer eligible for BookIt. I’m going to need you to leave this Pizza Hut immediately.”

Am I going to keep working through my tsundoku in 2021? Sure. But I’m going to cut myself some slack and instead work more on enjoying the process of discovery and the pursuit of escape.

So, what did I read?

Robin by Dave Itzkoff and The Good Neighbor: The Life and Work of Fred Rogers by Maxwell King

After reading Yuval Noah Harari’s phenomenal “Sapiens” last month, I decided to round out my year studying two of the best specimens.

I had a hard time with Robin Williams’ death. From Hook and Aladdin to FernGully and Jumanji, I’d grown up believing him to be the funniest man on earth, an uncontrollable monsoon of energy that swept everything up in its path. In college, I made some of my first friends sitting up late in the dorm imitating the golf bit from his 2002 standup (which I had memorized and likely butchered), and as we all started to share our DVD collections, I re-discovered him yet again with powerful performances in Dead Poet's Society and Good Will Hunting.

Then, 2014. I was in my dining room at my house in Richmond, having just wrapped up a late night of work. I flipped over to check the news before I shut my laptop for the evening. The headline hit me like a meteor. Could the funniest man in the world—the guy that could reduce anyone into hysterical fits in seconds—really have been carrying all that pain this whole time? His death was one of the first times I truly realized that everyone is fighting battles, no matter how they appear on the outside. It was years after his passing before I could bring myself to watch one of his movies or standups. I didn’t want the shock or the sadness to temper the humor that I treasured so much.

So I wasn’t sure what I’d be getting into with Williams’ biography, but I devoured nearly 450 pages in a week. It quickly becomes clear that the frenetic energy and lightning-quick wit was skillful misdirection—a character (or suite of characters, really) that he’d developed as an armor to protect the quiet, anxious, and sensitive soul that wanted desperately to create, if only to outrun obsolescence. Itzkoff does a phenomenal job profiling Williams as a whole person and doesn’t shy away from his self-sabotaging substance abuse, infidelity, or creeping illnesses. He uses well-selected accounts from friends, colleagues, and family to build a profile of a gifted but conflicted actor, and when the biography arrives at the inevitable conclusion, Itzkoff outlines Williams’ final days with grace and candor. I’d always valued Williams as a one of a kind entertainer, but I finished this book with a newfound appreciation of him as a tortured artist, truly sock and buskin.

Interestingly, as I moved on to The Good Neighbor, I was surprised to learn that Williams shared a lot of similarities with Fred Rogers. Both grew up lonely, seeing themselves as outcasts growing up with wealthy families in working-class suburbs. As teenagers, both men struggled to find their place in school despite being popular and well-liked and worked hard early in their careers to distance themselves from their entitled upbringing and chart their own paths. Both were natural—albeit extremely different—entertainers who quietly struggled with self-doubt and restlessness.

An interesting difference however is that people expect that Robin’s stage persona was his real personality, while Mister Rogers was playing a compassionate and gentle character, when in fact the opposite was true: Williams was revealed to be shy and quiet in person, while Rogers' "schtick" was never really a put on at all. King’s biography made it clear that everyone, from kid guests on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood to C-suite executives to the locker room attendant at his local gym received the same genuine warmth and principled frankness that Rogers was known for.

Mister Rogers too was a big part of my childhood. Although in truth I was more of a Sesame Street kid, I used to love the factory tour segments on Mister Rogers' Neighborhood. Watching crayons be manufactured is probably one of my earliest memories with my mother.                                                                                          

But The Good Neighbor opened my eyes to just how intentional and calculated this dreamy little program was. For decades, Rogers drafted his scripts with the input of bleeding-edge child development experts at the University of Pittsburgh, sometimes even halting production to run down the road for a consultation to make sure everything was framed appropriately for that episode’s theme. I hadn’t realized that Rogers selected some of the most talented jazz musicians from Pittsburgh to form his ensemble, and developed intricate musical cues to help children understand the transition from a real-world environment to the neighborhood of make-believe. Even his signature ritual of swapping his loafers for high-tops was so that he could quickly cross the stage between shots without making distracting noise. What I hadn’t realized as a child is that Fred Rogers was my first teacher; he just happened to be on TV.

As a biography, King’s profile of Rogers was significantly less successful than Itzkoff’s of Williams. It was quite repetitive, overly-structured, and tended to bounce around a non-linear timeline, with more focus on the development and evolution of Rogers’ programming than on him as a person. King is prone to swinging into tangents that are only loosely connected with Rogers, like the historic evolution of his hometown, or the competitive environment around the development of TV tubes. In that way, The Good Neighbor sometimes felt like more the meandering recollections of an older relative than a well-crafted biography.

King’s portrait of Rogers is also decidedly less well rounded, although I’m not sure if that’s due to King’s bias as a Senior Fellow at the Fred Rogers Center for Early Learning and Children’s Media, or if there are truly no other sides to the beatific Mister Rogers.

Regardless, perhaps the most Rogers-esque way that I can conclude this tsundoku experiment is by telling you that I appreciate you. Your likes and comments meant a lot to me over these last 12 months, from students that I’ve only recently (virtually) met to old friends and colleagues I haven’t heard from in a while, I’m grateful that you’ve read and reacted to my words and took the time to lend your own.  Thank you.

Here’s to all of our next chapters in 2021.