Reading notes: The Last Days of Roger Federer

1. Not my favorite book written during COVID--that's The Baseball 100--but my favorite COVID book (so far).
2. The central narrative decision here was to organize the book loosely. It's a lifetime of aesthetic-philosophical reflection, as it relates to various kinds of endings, organized in a meandering but satisfying way. The decision was a good one.
3. If this were a top-150 book for me (it narrowly misses, I think), I'd have to revise my books I like more than other people do list: it would come in #3. It is not easy to come in lower than both Joyce and Franzen on Goodreads.
4. Nonetheless, I think this is an underrated book format. When people spend (most of) a lifetime building up human capital, I want them to share it. When I look back on good conversations, I rarely regret that they weren't more tightly focused. So too with this sort of semi-memoir.
5. A lot of writing about Nietzsche is inaccessible to me (or at least I don't want to access it). The reflections here, however, are useful and memorable--and fun.