📚 Reading
- The Lottery (1941) by Shirley Jackson
- On Murder Considered As One of the Fine Arts (1827) by Thomas De Quincey
- The Tribal Rite of the Strombergs (2013) by Simon Rich
- The Left Right Game (2017) by Reddit No Sleep
- A Grimm Night On Central Park South (2025) by Bradley Andrews
📚 Books for Q1:
📰 Multiple people sent me this article on play:
We can draw lessons from game-playing as we try to navigate a reality ruled by rankings & metrics. In the real world, as in the game world, scores are motivating & clarifying; they can help groups of people coalesce around shared goals. But real-world scores, like game scores, are also reductive… [People] must also be clear about their individual purposes, which are different, nuanced, & harder to communicate. If they focus only on the score, they’ll lose track of what counts.
I am double-downing on my commitment to play in 2026.
📩 Dustin Henry just wrote a great newsletter about his “WHY” for continuing do music journalism. I suspect my friends and folks on micro.blog will enjoy. You can read it here.
Selfishly, it fortified my subpar confidence in the post I just published about a song from Peter Gabriel’s Melt album.
📚 I love having friends who read because they make end-of-year roundups that become my going-to-read pile. From Pynchon to Faulkner to Tulathimute, here is a good list from a great friend: Xander Paul’s Roundup.
📚 Three gentle & insightful essays about resolutions, goals, and rhythms from Hayley Nahman:
I think the concepts really square with my experience and help temper the common excesses of productivity culture.
📃 I have finally released my “Best Media of 2025” List! Read it now // bradley-andrews.com
📚 My quick, low-stakes review on Scott Galloway’s latest book Notes on Being A Man // bradley-andrews.com
📚 An adorable and seasonally appropriate poem from my current read, Frank O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency:
💬 Ten pages into Christmas Memory by Truman Capote and absolutely captured by this man’s prose:
Dollar bills, tightly rolled and green as May buds. Somber fifty-cent pieces, heavy enough to weight a dead man’s eyes. Lovely dimes, the loveliest coin, the one that really jingles. Nickels and quarters, worn smooth as creek pebbles. But mostly a hateful heap of bitter-odored pennies. Last summer others in the house contracted to pay us a penny for every twenty-five flies we killed. Oh, the carnage of August: the flies that flew to heaven! Yet it was not work in which we took pride.
📚 Recently procured seasonal reading
📚 Book Review: New Teeth by Simon Rich // bradley-andrews.com
📚 Book Review: PLAYFUL by Cas Holman // bradley-andrews.com
I am an unwavering advocate of Cas Holman and her life project. Was grateful to get and read this book.
📚 Book Review: Without Feathers by Woody Allen // bradley-andrews.com
📚 Let’s goooooooo
💬 Thinking a lot on Phillip Larkin’s poem Aubade lately and taking comfort from it. May write on it soon. Here is one glorious snippet:
And so it stays just on the edge of vision,
A small unfocused blur, a standing chill
That slows each impulse down to indecision.
Most things may never happen: this one will,
And realisation of it rages out In furnace-fear when we are caught without
People or drink. Courage is no good: It means not scaring others. Being brave
Lets no one off the grave. Death is no different whined at than withstood.
📚 I am officially hooked on humor writing. I cannot believe that I have never explored the genre before, but diving into it now feels as significant (and as exciting!) as stumbling into philosophy was as a teenager.
Came across this classic from Woody Allen today that is an absolute must read.
📚 It’s Halloween y’all. Here are some good short stories appropriate for the holiday that you can read right now:
Can’t believe I’ve never read Isaac Asimov’s self-proclaimed best story before tonight. My older brother put me on and it’s too good not to share. A short read: The Last Question.
📚 I wrote a brief reflection on the book that was given to me by a stranger in a coffee shop. You can read that reflection by clicking here: The Housekeeper and the Professor.
✍️ Third spaces are alive and well. A kind stranger in a coffee shop gave me this book to read last weekend. Read the full story here: bradley-andrews.com/2025/10/0…
