New Year memo

Happy new year to everyone except Donald Trump and MAGAs although it may be a happy new year for them despite anything I say. Thanks, voters! It’s hard to know what to say. The less said the better maybe, but watching will be more critical than ever. I seriously doubt grocery prices return to 2019 levels as promised, for example. Another devastating pandemic is more likely at this point. But I’m over here, keeping my little blog, cold comfort perhaps, too often feeling like embers of boomer view flaring up in a random breeze. I’m facing retirement this year so we’ll see how that goes. I’m not planning much different for the blog in 2025. I liked doing a couple of albums a month last year so much I’m going to try to keep it up, albeit with no countdown involved. That’s on Saturdays. Sundays are books and (increasingly, it seems) stories. Last Sundays I’m surveying the short fiction published in book form by J.D. Salinger, which is amazingly meager, only nine stories and four novellas (plus one novel, The Catcher in the Rye). I saw a 2013 documentary this year on Salinger, who died in 2010. The doc and people in a position to know (one would think) were then promising a handful or so of books of posthumous material, including a memoir of his unusually harrowing World War II experience, more Glass family stories, and other tantalizing stuff. WHERE ARE THEY? That’s my only question. Mondays are for recent movies, Thursdays for horror stories, and Fridays for classic movies of various repute. Critics like the darnedest things and so does the mass audience. Last, for your list-consuming pleasure, my list of Beatles albums ranked. YMMV—even your sense of what is and is not a Beatles album. Stay safe out there, folks.

Beatles albums ranked
UK editions, except as noted. The Past Masters collections, released in 1988, gather material not released on Beatles albums.

1. Rubber Soul (US, 1965)
2. Help! (1965)
3. A Hard Day’s Night (1964)
4. Abbey Road (1969)
5. Past Masters, Vol. 2 (1965-1970)
6. Magical Mystery Tour (US, 1967)
7. Revolver (1966)
8. Past Masters, Vol. 1 (1962-1965)
9. Beatles for Sale (1964)
10. Please Please Me (1963)
11. With the Beatles (1963)
12. Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967)
13. The Beatles (“White Album,” 1968)
14. Let It Be (1970)
15. Yellow Submarine (1969)