Cultural Diary, 4.10.26

Reading about John and Paul, Frederic Church and Olana, a right-wing conspiracy, and a culture clash in North London

Apr 09, 2026

READING IS my passion, my hobby, and my pastime. Retirement to me looks like sitting in one of the comfortable chairs I’ve got set up around my house, with notebooks, pens, and highlighters pre-placed for notetaking and jotting down ideas and favorite phrases and just reading books all day. (Alas, I am nowhere near to retirement, but I am slowly nudging myself in that direction. I’ll probably get there in about 10 or 15 years.) The fruits of my pre-retirement reading have included these books in the past few weeks and months.

Composing Olana by Annik LaFarge:

After reading Annik LaFarge’s Composing Olana, a visit to the home and grounds of 19^th- century painter Frederic Church will never be the same. LaFarge – who lives within sight of Olana -- deftly expands our vision to see how Church was not only a landscape painter but a landscape artist. LaFarge’s gift goes beyond Olana itself; you will view landscapes with new eyes, think of them blessed with new paradigms, and find delights in the most unlikely viewsheds and natural objects both large and small. As with her previous book, the terrific Chasing Chopin, which traced LaFarge’s obsession with the pianist/composer’s “Funeral March,” Composing Olana is also a kind of intellectual memoir of LaFarge’s immersion into all things Church. Reading Composing Olana is like spending a semester with cool professor LaFarge, who incorporates biography, art history, general history, natural history, social history, landscape design, science, geology, and more into a dance with dazzling curiosity and the gripping intensity of a good detective story. [Annik LaFarge will discuss her book and lead a walk at Olana in Hudson, N.Y., on Saturday, April 11, at 4pm.]

Murder Bimbo by Rebecca Novack:

This dazzling debut about a shadowy plot to assassinate a right-wing provocateur is formally innovative (much of the narrative is expressed in emails and text threads), smart about politics and sex work, and entertaining – funny in both a hah-hah way as well as being a DeLillo-vian cultural satire. Some describe the central character as an unreliable narrator, but in her sophisticated grasp of the ironies of contemporary news and social media practices and her unwillingness to buy into received notions of propriety, I found her to be more reliable (and more relatable) than most narrators – even if she keeps twisting facts around. The facts are just details; the truth emerges in connecting the dots of the facts into the larger narrative, which in a way is the very goal of the novel, both then and now. And Novack magically pulls this off. Welcome to a new literary voice – who happens to live in the Hudson Valley – and one from whom we eagerly await more.

Disobedience by Naomi Alderman:

I have wanted to read this book ever since its publication in 2006. It was wholly worth the two-decade wait. The London-based author, Naomi Alderman, brilliantly captures two apparently different and ideologically opposed worlds – that of the traditional Orthodox Jewish community in the North London neighborhood of Hendon and the greater secular world – and through deft plotting and characterization demonstrates that these seemingly irreconcilable groups have a lot more in common than what one might presume (and refrains from patronizing either group). Disobedience put me in mind of Sons of Daughters by Chaim Grade, which wasn’t even published when Alderman wrote her debut novel, but it reads like a modern-day version of Grade’s magnum opus about the tensions between tradition and modernity.

John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs by Ian Leslie:

As the author of a book about George Harrison, I have read my fair share of books about the Beatles. There are a lot of good or even great ones, and Ian Leslie has come out with one of the best in John and Paul: A Love Story in Songs. It’s one thing to retell the story of the Beatles through the complex relationship, friendship, and partnership between John Lennon and Paul McCartney – as the subtitle indicates, a kind of love story itself. It’s another thing entirely to trace the ups and downs of that relationship through the songs they wrote together and separately. I don’t think anyone has ever so convincingly made the case that so many of the songs of Lennon and McCartney were autobiographical, not-so-hidden messages meant for each other, but Leslie makes the mind-blowing case that indeed, it’s all there in the songs. You’ll never hear the Beatles the same way again after reading this thoroughly enjoyable book.

CURRENTLY READING:

Lucky Man by Michael J. Fox

The Elusive Body: Patients, Doctors, and the Diagnosis Crisis by Alexandra Sifferlin

Queen Esther by John Irving

In solidarity,

Seth Rogovoy

“Well, I don’t want to go on the roof.” -- George Harrison

Everything Is Broken

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