My audiobooks project is ready to roll. I’ve just completed two stages of preparation and am launching a full year of exhilarating listening.
The first stage was conceptual: investigating whether audiobooks could offer a sustainable workaround to reading printed books. Intensified lighting and magnifying devices gave temporary relief from my visual impairment. But print was fatiguing and often illegible. Making connection with Sacramento’s Braille and Talking Book Library confirmed that audiobooks could be my main solution. BTBL had a friendly, professional staff and a field-proven system for complimentary lending of recordings. Their regularly replenished collection of 150,000 audio titles made clear they could satisfy my borrowing requests.

A trial run suggested I could listen to an average of one audio recording per average week, about 50 per year with periodic pauses. While I hoped to sustain my enthusiasm into the indefinite future, I’d start with a single-year timeframe.

So that brought me to the second preparation challenge: what categories of audiobooks did I most want to read and where could I find recommended titles? With a targeted bookshelf of only 50 total books, I decided to limit my search to prose works, excluding poetry and drama. Top-quality writing was a prerequisite. I definitely wanted to revisit literary classics, but I also wanted to sample prize-winning recent works. Fiction was my favorite genre, celebrating writing as an art form. But I also aimed to include non-fiction, for some in-depth analyses of politics, economics, science and current affairs.

This account of my searches for recommendations and selections will necessarily contain a number of lists. My late-in-life hunt began with a return to early adulthood.

I’d like to devote a pair of blog posts to an encouraging workaround project.  This month I’ll first provide context by reprising the medication mismatch that has permanently impaired my vision. Then I’ll report on connecting with a remarkable public-service agency — Northern California’s Braille andTalking Book Library — that is offering me an alternative portal to restorative reading. Next month I’ll roll out my plan for selecting a year’s worth of listening attractions: literary classics, recent prize-winners and simple entertainment. 


My hope is that this personal case-study can illustrate how even an irreversible disability can generate a transformative remedy.

Tony Lavely, our Yale ’64 Class Secretary, recently relocated to Minneapolis. In a February Zoom call with Bay Area classmates, he shared some ground-level impressions of the ICE killings of two anti-deportation protestors. Tony commented how startled he had been to discover a 90-year-old novel closely anticipating our country’s current authoritarian slide. What he sardonically labeled “the best-selling ‘non-fiction’ in Minnesota.” I borrowed a large-print edition of Lewis’s dystopian saga from my local library. The parallels are rattling.

In a recent email conversation about aging with a life-long friend, I discovered the two of us were talking at cross-purposes. My friend is in his early 70s, preoccupied with successfully winding up his international law practice. I’m in my early 80s, preoccupied with successfully winding up my recuperative therapy following a fall and serious leg injury. We’d been communicating (or miscommunicating) from opposite ends of the aging continuum. This awkward gap got me thinking that aging may be better understood not as a unified flow but a succession of distinct phases. And since I’m entering what I think of as my final phase, I wanted to take a closer look.

What are this period’s distinguishing characteristics? Its core challenges and opportunities? How’s it different from prior phases? In the spirit of Agile Aging, how can I navigate its passage with informed judgment?

It occurred to me that I am surrounded by a final-phase case study in the form of Nancy’s and my retirement community. Virtually all of its residents are 80 or older. What makes this community tick? What are its key problems and solutions?

I’d like to report my study findings in two blog posts. This month I’ll profile the community. Next month I’ll home in on my personal aging experiences, relationships and impressions within this community. How can I make the most of my own final phase? 

Two of my greatest pleasures in working with our retirement community’s Play Readers are revisiting literary classics and adapting them for our performance. At our January business meeting, Edgar Lee Masters’ Spoon River Anthology was mentioned. I knew the name but had never read it. A quick borrowing from our local public library and I was immediately enchanted: by the historic work’s artistic creativity and its potential adaptability. Here are case notes from this Agile Aging exploration. 

For the new year’s first post, I’d like to review and recommend two stimulating recent publications:
• Hampton Sides, THE WIDE, WIDE SEA: Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook;
• Michael Taylor, IMPOSSIBLE MONSTERS: Dinosaurs, Darwin and the Battle between Science and Religion.

Both works closely re-examine crucial milestones in British imperial history: Captain Cook’s strategic mission to locate the elusive Northwest Passage; and the intensifying culture war triggered by an explosion of fossil discoveries. These developments occurred only a generation apart. Cook’s voyage concluded in 1779. The transformative fossils began emerging in 1811.

Both studies report on scientific breakthroughs and their practical applications: navigation, cartography and first-contact anthropology in Sides’s case; geology, paleontology, botany and zoology in Taylor’s.

Both are articulate, accessible, educational and entertaining. They garnered “Best of 2024” kudos from The Economist and The New York Times.

Have a look. I think you may enjoy them. 

When I think about Agile Aging, one core objective has always been a two-sided coin:

When planning blog posts for 2024, I always intended to devote November’s to election reflections. For months, it felt as if the Main Event was taking an eternity to arrive. Then suddenly it had come and gone. 

AHere’s a two-month post that examines a pair of linked subjects instead of my usual one.