April Reading Update

Best reads from the past month, what I'm reading right now, and my round-up of recent Oscar nominees

Despite the challenges of being new parents, Sara and I have tried, as much as possible, to maintain a strong reading practice. It’s important now more than ever to maintain an active mind, to practice curiosity, and to maintain some contact with the outside world. At any given time, I try to read one fiction and one non-fiction book. For non-fiction, I gravitate towards biographies, history, international affairs, and science. For fiction, I’m usually reading a recent bestseller, something critically acclaimed that is in the zeitgeist because of what it has to say about the human condition.

With that in mind, here’s my April reading update. I read three books in March - Mozart’s Starling, The Education of an Idealist, and Orbital - and am reading three others that I hope to finish this month. I’ve also watched three more 2025 Oscar nominees and am currently loving Season 2 of Modern Family.

Recent Reads

Mozart’s Starling by Lynda Lynn Haupt

As an avid birdwatcher, I devour any book about birds, and my wife got this one for me recently. This book tells two parallel, interwoven stories: one about the composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, who adopts (and is evidently inspired by) a pet starling, and another about the author’s own experiences adopting a starling into her family. The starling, for non-birding folks, is a pesky European species, introduced in North America, that is widely reviled in ornithological circles due to the fact that it outcompetes native birds for nesting sites. The author does an admirable job of forcing us to see the starling in a new light: i.e. as a highly-intelligent mimic capable of creating complex songs (see an example here). I found the narrative a little rambling and disjointed, with some non-relevant digressions, but I did appreciate Haupt’s obvious reverence for the natural world and her willingness to consider the beauty even in a despised bird such as the starling. 3/5 stars.

The Education of an Idealist by Samantha Power

The relationship between one’s ideals and one’s capacity to realize them is the recurring theme in Power’s memoir, which is an origin story for Barack Obama’s Ambassador to the United Nations. I love biographies, particularly autobiographies, as it helps me understand how another person’s mind works. Power is perhaps best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning book about genocide, and her memoir traces her passion for international affairs back to a single point in time: watching TV footage of the Tiananmen Square protests. I connected with her story at this point, as it helped me to reflect on the reasons that I myself chose to become a public servant (in my case, 9/11 was the catalyst). Power’s account of her time as a young journalist during the Bosnian war is riveting and helps us understand why she became such an advocate for outside intervention to prevent atrocities. As a member of Obama’s senior staff, her judgment was at times questionable, given her support for the US intervention in Libya and her unpersuasive attempts to get the Obama administration militarily involved in the Syrian civil war. Still, I walked away from this memoir admiring Power’s lifelong dedication to human dignity. She represents the best of American ideals on the international stage. 5/5 stars.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

I discuss Orbital in more detail in my previous post where I found the book relevant to my discussion of parenting. This “novel” (a term which can barely be applied in this case) follows the mission of six astronauts at the International Space Station. There are sixteen chapters, one for each of the station’s sixteen orbital rotations around the earth in a twenty-four hour time period. The prose is beautiful and would work much better as poetry, because there isn’t much of a plot to speak of and there is a notable absence of narrative tension. The astronauts as characters aren’t especially compelling, and I never found myself caring much about their stories. The lack of narrative progression is what you would expect from a book titled Orbital in which the protagonists simply circle the earth for months on end. The book’s strong points are its descriptions of the earth’s atmosphere and topography, which are the verbal equivalent of a BBC documentary: grandiose and sumptuous, full of wonder and also wistful reminders that the planet we have may not survive forever. The call to environmental consciousness, I suppose, justifies the book’s existence. Harvey attempts to touch other philosophical themes, such as God’s existence, but these are addressed only superficially and fail to make an impact given the book’s short length. Overall, Orbital is a sometimes enjoyable read that becomes frustrating towards the latter stages, as you get the sense that Harvey becomes self-indulgent with her flowery prose. 2/5 stars.

Reading Now

A Life of Jesus by Shusaki Endo

Endo, a twentieth century Japanese Catholic, is best known for his landmark novel Silence, an account of Jesuit priests and Japanese converts to Christianity attempting to maintain their faith in the face of persecution. I read Silence in college and its message caused me to critically examine my own Christian beliefs. I came across A Life of Jesus randomly on Amazon and decided to read it as a means to (once again) evaluate my beliefs and, more broadly, assess how relevant religion is to our current age. Endo apparently wrote this book not as a theological treatise, but rather as kind of introduction of Jesus to a Japanese audience, with an emphasis on Jesus’ humanness and ethical teachings. I’m only in the first chapter so far, but I’m riveted by his physical description of the Holy Land and the historical and cultural context he provides to explain what was happening in Galilee and Judea in the first century CE. I hope to meditate on this book and use both it and the film Conclave (see below) to discuss how I, as a new parent, wish to introduce religion to my daughter.

Long Island Compromise by Taffy Brodesser-Akner

My wife and I are reading this one to each other; typically, I’m reading while Sara is breastfeeding. Akner is an ambitious and clever storyteller, taking a darkly satirical approach to examine wealth, privilege, and family dysfunction in modern-day Long Island. The central protagonists are three adult Jewish-Americans whose father, Carl Fletcher, suffered a traumatic kidnapping in the 1980s. All three are profoundly impacted by this event and, in the present day, see their privilege unravel when the source of their multi-generational wealth disappears overnight. Sara and I are a little more than halfway through the book and are absolutely loving it, particularly for its use of humor to show the self-destructive behavior of the two Fletcher sons, Beamer and Nathan. I can’t wait to get to the end of this one and write a more thorough review. One of the main themes so far seems to be that no amount of money can paper over deeply-rooted family dysfunction. I’m curious about the author’s overall take on material privilege in this particular Long Island community and what this has to stay about the state of American society today.

Lean In by Sheryl Sandberg

This made waves upon publication in 2014. I remember a lot of my female grad school classmates talking about the book and the importance of “leaning in” to pursue professional advancement. Of course, reading this book in 2025 is very different from reading it in 2014. The cultural moment that we are living in, with the rise of the manosphere and increasing political polarization between men and women, may in fact be a reaction women’s growing desire for a great share of economic power in our country. I’m only a few chapters into this book, but it’s already giving me important insights into how women think and act at work. For example, compared to men, women are less likely to ask for a raise, compete for promotions, or aggressively search out new opportunities for career enhancement, all because women do not want to be labelled as “bossy” or “bitchy.” As man, I have been subconsciously trained to see ambition as a good thing, whereas women are subconsciously trained to be “nice” rather than ambitious. As the parent of a daughter, I want to raise my child to be a self-confident young woman with a balanced femininity, and I look forward to seeing what else I can lean from Sandberg’s book.

What I’m Watching

A Real Pain

Nominated for Best Original Screenplay, this is a small-scale picture, written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg who also stars as one of the two leads. It’s funny watching Eisenberg on screen because he speaks and acts exactly like his portrayal of Mark Zuckerberg in The Social Network (one of my all-time favorite films), with the familiar jittery, neurotic mannerisms. The film centers on two Jewish cousins, played by Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin, who are prompted by the death of their grandmother (a Holocaust survivor) to visit a Nazi death camp in Poland. A Real Pain is a reference to both multigenerational trauma and the strained interpersonal relationship between the two cousins. The film explores this question: what is the best way to honor our ancestors and the sacrifices that they made to give us better opportunities? For Eisenberg’s character, marriage, child-rearing, and professional success (i.e. conventional advancement) represent the clear answer. Culkin’s character, however, struggles with substance abuse and mental illness, and attempts to find meaning in his life through connection with others, even total strangers. Eisenberg internalizes his pain and, like most people, keeps it under wraps, whereas Culkin wears his pain on his sleeve. Overall, A Real Pain is a source of real enjoyment for its philosophical themes and superb performances, particularly from Culkin, who definitely earned his Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in this role. 4/5 stars.

Conclave

A Best Picture nominee, Conclave centers on the political machinations within the College of Cardinals as they meet to select the next pope. Tightly directed, the almost claustrophobic set design — patterned after the Vatican — really makes you feel the pressure chamber that the cardinals live in as they canvass for votes and forge alliances. The main protagonist, played by Ralph Fiennes, is a progressive-minded cardinal who undergoes his own personal crisis between doubt and faith even as he struggles to oversee the papal selection process. I appreciated the film’s exploration of doubt and the acceptance of ambiguity and uncertainty, which, in my view, is an unavoidable part of Christian (or really any) faith. While the dialogue is at times heavy-handed, particularly with its villainous, one-dimensional portrayal of the arch-conservative papal candidate, the overall message of tolerance and inclusion is a welcome addition to the broader conversation about religion and its influence on cultural norms. 4/5 stars.

The Substance

I wrote a full review here. This is a movie that sticks with you long after the credits have rolled. Some of the gore is over the top and will turn off most people, but the essence of the message — and the standout performances — make this film a must-see meditation on femininity and female beauty standards. One of my favorite films from the past year. Demi Moore should have won an Oscar for her lead performance. 4/5 stars.

Modern Family

Yes, I know, Sara and I are getting to this series late. The show wrapped up in 2020 after 11 seasons, making it one of the longest-running sitcoms in recent history. After watching the first season, I can understand the longevity. The dialogue is clever and snappy, eliciting tons of laughs, and the characters are exceptionally well-written with their own distinctive quirks and foibles. Rico Rodriguez as Manny and Ed O’Neil as Jay are standouts, with the former playing a precocious grade schooler and the latter providing the “traditional male” foil to the show’s other cast members, to hilarious effect. Modern Family does an admirable job of depicting the challenges of marriage and parenting, and each episode ends with the protagonists learning some important moral lesson. The show was probably seen as subversive in Season 1 for its portrayal of a gay couple raising a child, but watching it now, I see the show as divorced from post-2016 politics and culture wars. This makes Modern Family a kind of escapist fun that is great to watch for a low-stress evening (and as new parents, we are all about low-stress evenings).