Bespoke Patience

In which I finally start reading A Failure of Nerve and begin to seriously dread this election cycle.

I am so so badly backed up on my Tower of Books I Meant To Have Already Read, I’m probably going to be crushed when they collapse on me as I edge around, trying to get to the dishwasher or my toothbrush. My stack basically looks like this:

Photo by Ajda ATZ on Unsplash

Although I made it pretty quickly through The Great Dechurching, I have The Toxic War on Masculinity sitting next to me, a cool book about Maine, two anthropology books, some Georgette Heyer and Grace Livingston Hill, a nice Miss Read, and that book about Meaning that is so great but that I never manage to get to before the end of every day. However, one small bright light is that, here and there, I am snatching bits of Edwin Friedman’s A Failure of Nerve: Leadership in the Age of the Quick Fix.

For those of you who have read me for any length of time, you know I love Friedman’s Generation to Generation. If you haven’t read it, you should, even if you don’t have time, because it is the lightest and most productive way out of almost every relational pickle, if you have gumption and a decent amount of self-awareness. I love it so much I have basically been content to dip in and out of as needed, over the last two decades, and never seek out any other tome by him. But then Josh Daws tweeted that he loved A Failure of Nerve, and I had a little bit of birthday money, so I “gifted it to myself”—just to indulge in the convoluted jargon of the moment.*