Let’s be honest. For the world as a whole, 2016 will not be remembered as a vintage year. But if the world is ending, then all the more reason to celebrate my crisscrossing of it while it was still there. Here’s my annual review!
Clambering at the Wentworth Falls
January
As 2015 passed into 2016, I was asleep in California. Apologies for the slow start here. Later on in January I tried and failed to escape from a CTA-themed escape room adventure, watched an unhealthy sibling relationship dissected in Bruise Easy and almost poisoned Kevin and Grace with out-of-date vegetable broth. Sorry! It was a good time to escape cold Chicago and head to Sydney for Claire and Mitesh’s wedding. Family reunions aside, my favourite Australian experience was my day in the Blue Mountains, before I flew to Wellington and geeked out with the wonderful Jen.
February
My all-too-brief journey around New Zealand continued with Christchurch, a train across the South Island, beach-friendly Hokitika (home to my favourite airport in the world) and finally Auckland, Tiritiri Matangi Island and – most importantly – The Shire! Back at home, Randi and I hung out with her mum at the Art Institute’s Van Gogh exhibit, saw my favourite play of the year – Byhalia, Mississippi – and visited St. Louis, including the incredible City Museum, with Jason. More ominously, with the benefit of hindsight, we also spent pancake day watching the New Hampshire primary with Catherine and AJ while flipping pancakes and laughing. Oops.
Snowmobiling
March
I saw a bunch of good shows in March: ineffectual-corporate-superhero dance troupe Trip The Light Fantastic, classic Othello, the first half of creepy Interrogation – the conclusion had to wait – and the wonderful Chvrches. In between, Kevin left for LA and we played a lot of Fibbage with Toggolyn. I also began corresponding with the elusive owner of Columbus’ Curry. But the highlight of the month was our jaunt to Iceland with my family, especially the steamy public baths and snowmobiling over the snowy plains!
April
This was the month I caved and bought an iPhone. That bombshell is probably enough to stop, but just for good measure, it was also the month I finally saw the first Indiana Jones film. Also in April: Marti’s Mai Dang Lao, building a hardy spaceship at the Adler Planetarium, and reuniting with Lauri over drinks. Sam Carter visited Chicago and discovered burgers at Kuma’s, we enjoyed musical improv group The Deltones with Karol, and Randi and I spent a weekend with Rachel in Providence where – amongst other things – we saw and loved Zootopia. (Apparently known as Zootropolis in the UK…. who knew?)
Llama problems
May
One of my favourite trips this year was to Memphis, which I booked as a surprise for Randi’s birthday. We travelled on the overnight Amtrak in a cosy roomette, stayed at the fancy duck-themed Peabody Hotel and generally had a wonderful time. But we were especially spoiled in May because we also went to Ohio with Jason: eating at Yats, ziplining at Hocking Hills and losing llamas. In Chicago, I saw my first Cubs game at Wrigley Field with Todd and Carolyn, enjoyed the immersive storytelling at Even Longer and Farther Away and threw a successful Eurovision party with a bunch of first-time Eurovision newbies.
June
As usual, June breaks this format because too much happens to be succinct. There were a plethora of overseas visitors to Chicago – including the famous Malaysian couple Robert and Julie – and we herded most of them to a White Sox game (Steven: “why are they wearing black socks?”). Alex, Nolan and Kevin all said farewell (yes, if you’re following closely, that’s Kevin’s second turn) while Carrie invited us to ‘review’ Ethiopian food with her and [drumroll] Randi graduated! This freed her up for a big family holiday to Ireland and the UK, which I met in York in time for Caroline’s amazing wedding. For my birthday we migrated from York to Willesden Green to Sanzio (try the gorgonzola gnocchi) and then over two weeks rolled on to: The Invisible Hand at the Tricycle, News Revue, Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, Maggie Jones’s, Brick Lane and climbing the O2. Plus I met up with Cat and Matt, Daryl and Ermila, Oliver and Abi, Simon, Christa, Clark, Melissa and – joyously – Abbi and newborn Jack as well as Josh and slightly-less-newborn Isaac. Oh, and I voted in person for Britain to remain in the EU. As you may have heard, this was an unsuccessful play.
Moving day
July
I know what you’re thinking: that was a nice London list, but where was the London Transport Museum? No fear, we ticked this off in July with Randi’s friend Villy, as well as an old-fashioned Kilburn High Road night out with Josh and Anna. And I finally (finally!) got to meet Cindy, who is awesome, before flying back to Chicago and then trying to find somewhere to live and somebody to live with me and Randi. Amanda agreed to join us despite being taken to dinner at a creepy bathhouse, which we’re still very grateful for. Amidst all this, I was lucky enough to go to Tokyo for work and for great food with Robert and Julie. On my return, Randi went on a killing spree on an Iowan murder mystery night and we ducked under the Maquoketa Caves. Also in July: 12 Angry Men, Lauri and Calvin’s birthdays and lots of Race for the Galaxy.
August
Settling into our new home, we christened the place with games of Would I Lie To You, lots of Olympics and Robot Wars on TV and – most importantly – putting together our king-size bed. (So much space! Never go back.) Taking advantage of the summer to swim and play pool games in Jason’s pool and Pulaski Park, we also saw two Cubs games with Todd and Carolyn at Wrigley Field as they continued their [spoiler alert] historic season. I also saw Star Trek Beyond, This Beautiful City, The 7th Annual Living Newspaper Festival, a thought-provoking Edward Tufte lecture and – as I mentioned back in March – got a resolution to Interrogation after getting my hands on the script. Carolyn’s friend Beric stopped by for lunch, Randi’s new job merited dinner at Summer House Santa Monica, and at the end of the month Simon and Steve reached Chicago on their marathon American journey.
After the river raft ride
September
After a few days together in Chicago, including a night of Improv Shakespeare, we set off with Simon and Steve on the next leg of their roadtrip to the Minnesota State Fair. After a night in Madison (highlights: our Laotian dinner and Simon’s sad air mattress inflation) and many, many renditions of I Feel Like Jeremy Corbyn we arrived at the fair, and it was AMAZING. There was so much there, but my top two were (a) the cheese curds, and (b) the river raft ride. Also in September we hosted Randi’s mum, had brunch with Karol at Windy City and saw a tense Orioles vs. Blue Jays game at a bar with Robert, Todd and Carolyn. I also saw Nolan again, met Debra and Andrew, discovered that Chloe and Aaron are big fans of Indian food and played a lot – I mean a lot – of Carcassonne. And Plants vs. Zombies 2.
October
With the election drawing closer we did a couple of phone banking sessions at Debra’s, during which I chatted with some very nice conservative women in Nevada but avoided talking to one very angry voicemailer from Cincinnati. We also saw a bunch of plays (Merge, The Rhode Island Chapter, The City of Conversation and The Last Wife), defended ourselves against Chloe’s betrayal at the House on the Hill and travelled to Omaha (where we spent a great night in a bar with Cubs fans as they advanced to the World Series) and San Francisco. The latter was primarily for a wedding at City Hall, but it was also especially great to go to Jamie and Paul’s house and meet another new cousin: Lori, their newly confident walker.
Stronger together
November
You may have noticed some story arcs simmering away in my 2016 review, and in November two of them came to a climax. Firstly, the Cubs won the World Series! We watched this in a great room at the back of a brewery with James, Lauren and friends. And then Trump won the Presidency, which we lived through after four days of campaigning in Toledo. At least with the election over we got Catherine back in our lives, and other great things this month included: The Power of the Daleks on the big screen, Four Lions with James, bangers and mash with Luis, a game of Pandemic, some great improv comedy, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Arrival. But the best part of November was Thanksgiving – I made my cauliflower cheese! – and our trip to sunny Charleston (or Charles Towne) for the long weekend afterwards.
December
If all goes to plan, this post will auto-publish as I recover from a successful 4-day trek to Machu Picchu in Peru. It will certainly be a contrast to snowy Chicago in which we spent December decorating for Chrismukkah, judging chillies at Ellen’s Master of Peppers contest and loving every minute of Planet Earth II. I also saw Rogue One this month, plus Nolan and friends for another brief reappearance in the city, before we left for our flight to Cusco on Christmas Eve. Not the most typical of Christmases, but a worthy conclusion to another year with plenty of adventures.
Time for 2016 to be over, I think. Happy new year!
I am really, really pleased with the books I read in 2016. And I tried to get better about making some quick notes as I did so… partly to remember more, and partly to make writing this review easier at the end. Let’s see how well I did!
My first book was I, Claudius, an incredibly bloody underdog story gifted by Todd. (Spoiler alert: just about everybody is murdered by the end.) Other Todd-influenced reads this year included The Corrections, an absorbing family drama and ‘state of the nation’ book, and The Art of Fielding which left me forever fearful of getting struck in the face with a baseball. It’s an interesting story because every single character is basically good and well-intentioned, yet everything falls apart anyway.
I also had high hopes for The Little Friend but found it much less cohesive than last year’s The Secret History. That said, many of its scenes and characters have remained vivid in my memory – Hely trapped in the apartment with the snakes, for example – and my research for this post suggests the murder-mystery aspect isn’t left quite as unresolved as I had thought. The main character, Harriet, has an obvious forerunner in To Kill a Mockingbird‘s Scout: a classic child’s-eye perspective which I finally read this year.
I really loved reading Asmiov’s Robot series, more so each time, which I concluded this year with Robots of Dawn and then Robots and Empire. Not only was the latter a well-timed piece of post-Trump escapism, but it also serves as Asimov’s bridge between previously distinct series, and I am eager to keep going next year. It also took some effort to limit myself to reading two of Ben Aaronovitch’s moreish Peter Grant series (Moon Over Soho and Whispers Under Ground). It’s hard not to love something infused with so much London. The Illustrated Man was another collection of Ray Bradbury’s wonderful (and mostly creepy) short stories, tied together with an unsettling framing device.
After a weaker Ishiguro last year, The Buried Giant was one of my favourite books of 2016. Following the journey of two elderly Britons, Axl and Beatrice, the book is set in post-Arthurian Britain (a time period I rarely think about) in which memory is mysteriously suppressed and an uneasy peace holds between Britons and Saxons. Its opening was so intriguing and the book held me rapt throughout. For fans of Ishiguro’s style, this is highly recommended. And on subject of Ishiguro, The Reluctant Fundamentalist is aptly compared to The Remains of the Day for its gripping first-person narrative style which drives it towards a suspenseful thriller of an ending.
Another of my favourites this year was Station Eleven, a good old-fashioned post-apocalyptic dystopia (plus travelling Shakespeare troupe) which I raced through. Cat’s Cradle was a much better Vonnegut than my last attempt, and the concept of a granfalloon actually occurs to me a lot now. Time’s Arrow, a novel in which a Nazi doctor’s life runs in reverse, will mess with your head and convince you that real life is also running backwards. And I was initially very into the postmodern If on a winter’s night a traveller although there is something undeniably frustrating about a succession of cliffhangers from different imaginary books, even if the ending comes with a nice ‘a-ha!’ moment.
I feared getting lost in the magical-realist epic The House of the Spirits but was kept engaged by the intertwining of real Chilean history, which I really appreciated learning more about. Similarly, I learnt about Biafra and the Nigerian Civil War in the 1960s through Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s engaging but slowly devastating book about the conflict. All the King’s Men wasn’t quite my style, but is apparently modelled closely on an interesting figure in Louisiana political history. (Oh, for the days when a populist American demagogue would at least build some hospitals.)
Turning to non-fiction, The Emperor of All Maladies – billed as a ‘biography of cancer’ – taught me so much about a vast subject which I had never really considered before. Perhaps the most important lesson is how unstraightforward medical ‘progress’ is. You might imagine that the history of cancer treatment is one of slow, incremental improvement… but it’s just much more complicated than that, with many intellectual dead-ends and ‘breakthroughs’ which come with horrible trade-offs. And yes, I did read some of this on a beach.
Prompted by Brexit, it felt like the right time to revisit the New Labour era in Andrew Rawnsley’s gossipy The End of the Party which documents the full destructive force of the Blair-Brown relationship. It seems like such a long time ago now. The Rise and Fall of American Growth was a much drier read, as you might expect from economic history, but it makes one side of an important argument about the uniqueness of the twentieth century. It also led to me boring people at work for weeks with random factoids, for which you can blame ‘The Weeds’ podcast for recommending it in the first place. One annoying spot in a generally magisterial work, albeit sadly common to many discussions, is the breezy assumption of ‘more marriage’ as a social good with no real nuance or consideration.
It was also good timing to read The Federalist (with the opposing Letters of Brutus, which makes some prescient predictions about the Supreme Court) straight after the election, at the very moment when Hamilton’s Electoral College defence started popping up all over Facebook. The Papers were written to urge adoption of the newly written US Constitution and defend it from accusations that too much power was being centralised, which puts me in a weird position as someone who looks at two-year terms in the House of Representatives, for example, and thinks ‘that’s absurdly short’ as opposed to ‘that’s long enough for tyranny to strangle the liberty of the people’. So I guess it made me more sympathetic to the Constitution (never my favourite document) as an achievement over nothing at all.
But a more important perspective on these events can be found in Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, a series of letters to his teenage son about the history of race in America and what it means for him. This is somewhat difficult to write about, given that only yesterday I heard Coates speaking about his frustration that the unexpected popularity of the book amongst white liberals ends up hurting his ability to write and think and explore freely. And we need that. So I will limit myself to the two most memorable things which I took from this book, which you should read. One is the moral clarity that people in the past “didn’t ask to be your martyrs”: pain and suffering by some cannot be ‘made good’ to others. The other, more personal, is his description of an incident with his five year-old son on an escalator. It is one of the most powerful things I have ever read.
Rounding off the non-fiction was Other People’s Money (a persuasive reminder that we have far more financial activity than we need) and Nagasaki: Life After Nuclear War. Susan Southard’s account of the 1945 atomic bombing, and the lives of its survivors, was at times so horrific that I had to stop reading it on a plane for fear of passing out. But it is a worthy discussions of events which are usually discussed in the abstract.
Chrismukkah
It’s that time of year again: snowy and cold outside, pretty and festive (but hard to photograph) inside. Carrying the Christmas tree home was a much less stressful exercise than last year’s gargantuan effort, but it still spruces up well. Together with the Hanukkah decorations we had a suitably seasonal living room to host many guests bearing board games, although on many occasions we tricked them into watching Planet Earth II with us instead. Because it was just so good.
Outside of the Chrismukkah base we also went to Randi’s work holiday party (and bounced on a trampoline with her CEO) as well as Robert and Julie’s mirror-image apartment housewarming, Alex’s holiday party at which gluhwein was served (very exciting) and Ellen’s ‘Master of Peppers’ chilli-making competition. Importantly, one is not required to actually cook a chilli in order to attend. I was very sad about missing this last year so it was great to finally return and meet baby Edy for good measure. (Chilli #10 was the best by some measure, in case you were wondering.) We also attended an inaugural D&D game at our neighbours’ flat across the hallway: nothing has felt more back-to-university than being able to return home for the night by just walking between apartments.
Finally, I also had great Motel Bar sessions with Alejandro and Teresa, and also saw Rogue One and Arrival. I put Rogue One in the bucket of ‘perfectly enjoyable but nothing special’ – not as good as last year’s Star Wars outing, although it does finally explain why the Death Star is so easy to destroy. But I really, really enjoyed Arrival. It’s a thoughtful science fiction film which takes seriously the problem of language between humans and aliens, and I thank Todd for wanting to see it with me after a cheeky Nando’s.
You can never go wrong with more lights
For my traditional (?) post-Thanksgiving trip with Randi this year, we went to Charleston, South Carolina.
Charleston really is beautiful
Charleston really is a beautiful city, and such a joy to walk around – not just because the sun was out. Our AirBnb was a 40 minute walk from the centre of downtown, through mostly quiet, residential streets, but all along the way we passed local shops and bars and restaurants and people. The contrast with some of the Midwestern cities I’ve visited recently is obvious. And sure, Charleston is a tourist destination: an old city steeped in American history and blessed by a core of old money and narrow, pre-car streets. It is supposed to be nice. But it really does live up to it.
Rainbow road
The best decision we made was to take a walking tour, led by Scott and highly recommended. He gave a great introduction to the city’s history – from its founding as an English colony to the place where the first shots in the Civil War were fired – and didn’t shy away from the story of the native Americans, or enslaved African Americans, which are a fundamental part of it.
We also ate at slightly-pricey-but-delicious restaurants (many thanks to Cecelia for recommending The Hominy Grill, which we visited twice) including honey-coated crawfish hushpuppies, amazing crab cakes and southern fried chicken. And on Friday night we enjoyed the Que d’Keys Duelling Piano Bar – highlights include a reluctant Miley Cyrus cover and discovering that the woman behind the bar was from Bury St Edmunds. (It was also the first and only time that my ride home has been in a pickup truck.)
The sabal palmetto trees are everywhere
But we also wanted to visit a former plantation, eventually deciding on Middleton Place. This is where my feelings are mixed, and I still don’t exactly know what to make of it. Because I cannot imagine a plantation as being about anything other than slavery. That’s the purpose of preserving it as a historic site: to ensure the past is not forgotten, and provide a place where it is talked about, especially with children. Maybe that’s a bad starting point, and it’s just a way to compartmentalise the past and keep it out of mind beyond certain designated places.
Either way, this is clearly not what the owners of Middleton Place think they are doing. As you would expect from the former gardens of very rich people, the landscape is beautiful, and seems to be why people come. We had to assemble at #22 on the map for the slavery-focused tour, and while it’s hard to articulate exactly what was wrong, it just didn’t do justice to how sober the subject should be. It was more of a historical curiosity, safely removed from the present day. No slave cabins have actually survived: #22 on the map was, in fact, constructed after the Civil War for returning slaves coming to work as sharecroppers. This would have been a good opportunity to talk about the legacy of slavery after 1865, but we didn’t. And starting a tour by saying that slavery “has existed for millennia” and “is not just a Southern institution” is not the best way of taking on the responsibility for telling this particular chapter of human history.
I don’t want to suggest that our guide was an apologist for slavery. She wasn’t. She described what happened and answered questions honestly and it could have been a lot, lot worse. But it also could have been better.
Don’t walk down this path. Trust us.
After the tour, we walked down this narrow strip of land – which we probably weren’t supposed to – and Randi almost got eaten by an alligator. So there’s that.
The remains of Fort Sumter
Holding the fort
For our final day in Charleston, we visited Fort Sumter. History lesson: South Carolina was the first state to secede from the Union at the start of the Civil War, and later fired the first shot at Fort Sumter where the US Army had hunkered down. Built to withstand the British navy coming from the sea, it wasn’t really designed for an attack in the other direction and they eventually surrendered. Only the base of the structure remains today, but it is a good place to sit and look back at Charleston over the water and be alternately grateful and afraid.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Fruit Ninja
We all have this feeling sometimes
Today was my fourth Thanksgiving but the first time I co-hosted. Thank you to our flatmate Amanda for being so great, and for her mum for coming to see us. Thank you to Jason for being my stalwart Would I Lie To You teammate and to Cat for standing behind me several years ago in Drayton Park and making it very clear the right and the wrong way to make a cheese sauce for cauliflower cheese. I’m sorry I couldn’t remember exactly which was which, but it worked out in the end!
Also had a lovely evening with Catherine and AJ earlier this week, decorating ugly Christmas sweaters/jumpers (in cookie form) and drinking lots of wine. I can’t remember exactly what made me pull this face, but it may have been the lack of American instinct for innuendo.
Happy Thanksgiving!
Beth E . Dubowe-Lawrence on China, Part 3: Chongqing & Chengdu: “Again an awesome adventure to share this with you” Apr 21, 19:13
