The past few days I’ve been listening to several piano sonatas. It turns out that Beethoven wasn’t really writing these for him (or even other artists) to play in public concerts. Instead, his business model was that he was making money by selling the sheet music for these pieces. People would buy the sheet music to learn the pieces and play them for their family and friends in their own homes.

I found this fascinating because of course then the limiting factor is that the pieces would need to be accessible to amateur musicians. While this is kind of a cool constraint (can you write something groundbreaking that is also going to sell to the regular public and that someone who’d studied piano for just a few years could play?) later in his life Beethoven decided to dispense with that. I guess he was well known enough that he wrote more of what he wanted, and the later piano pieces are more for professional musician/concert hall situations.

In general, I find it intriguing how working artists balance the need to support themselves financially with creating things that they find interesting. Through history, even artists who have been independently wealthy, or had very open-minded patrons, were often still interested in having an audience. So you can’t go completely off the deep end. Or at least not for everything. And people have to be capable of performing what you produce.

I was thinking of this over the weekend when my church choir premiered the last of seven works we commissioned from Kim André Arnesen. While we are a fairly decent church choir, it is still a constraint to write something that a church choir can sing. These pieces have also been performed, as it were, for people who are just there for Sunday services, not people who’ve bought tickets to an avant-garde performance and were prepared for whatever they were getting in to. But within those constraints he did some interesting things with melodies and particularly the chosen lyrics (he worked closely with someone who helped reinterpret familiar stories in modern poetic language). It’s been a fascinating experience.

Anyway, speaking of accessible music, on Friday night a few of us went to Disney on Ice. This particular show was all Frozen and Encanto music. The 5-year-old was slightly disappointed that there was no Moana, but it was still fun! (I like trying to match up some Lin-Manuel Miranda musical moments from Encanto and Hamilton…). Yesterday a few of us also went out to run around in the very gusty wind. For a while the forecast was calling for a huge snowstorm on Thursday but that seems to have disappeared. It will be cold this week and then maybe that will be about the end of winter. We can hope…

Photo: Olaf snow cone, in portrait mode

In any case…For many people, the year starts with a lot of vim and vigor and then around now reality starts to set in. Various surveys find that a lot of people have abandoned their goals and resolutions by now (if not earlier).

There are reasons for this. Sometimes goals just aren’t that appealing. Sometimes they’re vague. Sometimes they’re not compatible with life as it is. It may work to exercise for an hour a day on a normal workday when nothing goes wrong, but not on a snow day when several family members have the flu…which is just as much life as any other day (and is probably more likely to happen in January than other times).

I have learned not to set unrealistic goals like that for precisely this reason. But, with the first month of 2025 over, I can report that my (more realistic) goals seem to be going fairly well.

I have listened to the first 33 days of the Complete Beethoven calendar (with a bonus listen to his 8th and 9th symphonies in Boston). I am not sure if I set this as an “official” goal, but I’m also reading through Anna Karenina, one chapter at a time. I have read 33 chapters. I continue to write 2 lines a day in my sonnets. I wrote one called “For the birds” with a nod at the Eagles that I might share later this week.

My “healthy living” goal was to eat produce for breakfast every morning. I can report that I have done this 33 days in a row. A lot of times this has been apple slices, so I’ve needed to make sure we have apples in the house at all times. Some mornings I’ve just grabbed a few carrot sticks to munch while I’m making my eggs. At my hotel in Boston I had a lot of cantaloupe from the buffet. One morning I had avocados, and another morning I had a full mushroom omelette… but it tends to be apples.

I set a goal to go to three professional sports events: A Sixers game, an Eagles Game, and a Phillies game. I thought this would take me to fall to complete, but thanks to the Eagles’ post-season run, I have now been to three events (one Sixers, two Eagles, but not the Phillies yet of course). So this goal is mostly done and I’m sure I’ll be able to get to a baseball game this summer.

As another fun goal, I planned to buy some more dollhouse furniture for my miniature scenes in my office. I ordered some from a place in Australia before Christmas, but this has yet to arrive, so I’m fearing that may have gone missing in the vagaries of international shipping. But I got a tip about a place called Flip This Dollhouse in New Bedford, MA, so I might need to make a road trip there (and maybe tack on some Moby Dick tourism too with the area?)

On the professional front, my major goal is to finish Big Time (my next book). My deadline is April 1 and I can see the finish line. I’ve basically collected everything I need to collect for the book itself, so now it’s a matter of piecing things together. I found the fascinating tale of a Soviet scientist who tracked his time for 56 years so…that’s going to get a mention. I also added up my hours spent on various things in 2024. It was eye opening, even for me. I’ll write more on that later, but one major insight is that I don’t think I’m working enough, and I worry I’m not going to find stories like that Soviet scientist precisely because my days are fragmented but…we shall see. The good news is, unlike with my first book, I’m now regularly emailing 50,000 people and many of them have ideas, and have come across things of interest, so there is some leverage. Wish me luck on finishing…

Finally, I set a goal to do one extra strength training session each week beyond the one I do with my trainer. I’ve been doing this by combining it with my treadmill workouts (how I tend to run when there’s snow outside).

Anyway, I’m sure life will intervene in various ways, so we’ll see how this all goes. But at least the resolutions are good through January. I’m enjoying all these resolutions enough that it doesn’t feel too onerous to stick with them.

How are your resolutions, one month in?

Sarah and I discuss our reading habits, and then Sarah interviews Traci Thomas of The Stacks podcast. They discuss all things books, from reading habits during busy seasons (Traci has twins!), curating your reading lists, getting out of ruts, tracking reading, and much more.

In the Q&A a listener asks about the logistics of having overnight care for a couples getaway.

Please give the episode a listen! Sarah and I are also looking forward to our Patreon virtual meet-up tomorrow, at noon eastern, when we’ll be discussing travel goals and hacks. Membership in the BOBW Patreon community, which has a thriving forum (70+ comments on a thread of our top book picks of 2024!) in addition to monthly meet-ups, is $9/month. Please consider joining here. Thanks!

In 2021, I read through War and Peace one chapter at a time. Tolstoy’s chapters are very short…he just wrote 361 of them. And, sure enough, when you read one chapter a day, you finish on December 27th! That truth still feels slightly magical as I think about it. When you move at a steady pace, and just keep going, you do in fact reach the end goal.

In 2022, I’ve been reading through all the works of Shakespeare. My illustrated Shakespeare anthology is 1024 pages long, meaning that I only need to read three pages per day to keep up the pace. The font is kind of small, but it’s still quite doable in less than 15 minutes a day. Even with some of his less-great stuff, this doesn’t inspire too much resistance.

It’s been a good reading experience. I mean, obviously, it’s Shakespeare. But I’m even enjoying just the random Shakespeare references that come at coincidental times. I read Henry IV part 1, which is where the phrase “the game is afoot” comes from — and I was also, at the same time, reading This is Not A Book About Benedict Cumberbatch, where the author is obsessed with the actor who plays Sherlock Holmes in the Netflix series…and she throws in a line at some point about the game being afoot, because Sherlock Holmes always says that, and I’m like…hey!

Looking at the calendar, I see that it is…mid-October. Which means that I will, in fact, have read all the works of Shakespeare in a little over two months. So…what should I read next?

I don’t have to choose one work or one author to read over the year, but I like this steady pace of small steps, and I like the sense of completion that comes from finishing something big. I also know, after two years, that I can do it, and the idea of such a challenge feels intriguing.

I am not opposed to re-reading something, but it would have to be the right thing. (In terms of “big” books, I have read Ulysses (and The Odyssey!), Middlemarch, Anna Karenina, Moby Dick, 1Q84, and Infinite Jest…I’m not sure I truly want to spend a year re-reading any of those. I have read about 90 percent of the Bible but I don’t know that I’d want to read it straight through…and not hit the New Testament until fall.)

I could read an author’s entire works…or I could read an anthology of something (poetry?). Anyway, I welcome suggestions! I’m pretty good at sticking with something once I start it (hello, Upholder) so that makes me want to be sure I choose the right thing.

In other news: Tranquility by Tuesday launched yesterday! I’ve loved seeing people’s pictures of their copies. If you haven’t bought a copy, would you please do so? If you have, I hope you love it — and if you do, would you please post a review wherever you ordered it? I’d love to get some more reviews up at the major retailers. Thanks!

A lot of great publicity yesterday! I’ll keep adding to this list this week.

An excerpt ran at Fast Company about escaping the 24 hour trap.

I was on Hilary Sutton’s Hustle & Grace podcast — always a great conversation with her, in this case talking about practical tips for a satisfying week.

I was on the Passion Struck podcast with John Miles, talking all things passion and tranquility, and on A Mindful Moment with Teresa McKee and on Tilt Parenting, a show about raising differently wired kids hosted by Debbie Reber. I’ll send these links out in my emails later this week too!  A few others but I am trying to spread the links out!

But there are little bright spots as usual, and a moment on Friday that made me grateful. I will admit that I was nervous about the 6-year-old’s parent-teacher conference. I don’t want to write too much about specifics as my kids get older but longtime readers know that he is…spirited. This plays out in various predictable ways. There had been a disciplinary incident on Thursday night at one of his activities that had me quite upset.

Anyway…his first grade teacher, bless her, is a wonderful person who has her methods for dealing with 6-year-olds (for instance, she hands out sheets of scented stickers like they’re candy on Halloween). She told us that he was a joy to have in class, and such a sweet boy, and that he had told her he was nervous about the conference (!) but she said he shouldn’t be because he was doing a good job.

Cue me finally exhaling. I then remembered that he had told me he had put something for me in his desk.

So we all went to look and this little sticky note is what I found. He is a sweet little boy. I left him a note too!

I know the whole New Year’s concept is completely arbitrary. Today is Tuesday and tomorrow is Wednesday and there is not some big wall in time between the two. Most people will be back at work (or school, or normal life) by Thursday, doing whatever it was they were doing before the holidays.

However, I think it’s still fun to celebrate the clean slate and think about fresh starts. And I’m personally getting a jump start on my Q1 relationship goal of welcoming the new baby and helping us adjust to being a family of seven! I hope you have big goals and dreams for 2020 and I wish you the best of luck on making them come true.