Common book: John Banville's unguilty pleasures

 John Banville, NYT:

I'm getting a booster. But I feel kind of guilty about it.

Photo by Nataliya Vaitkevich from Pexels

With boosters widely approved now, I'm planning getting a booster sometime in the next few days: Today is six months since my last shot, and I've got the comorbidities. But I don't feel great about it. 

NYT: "As the United States prepares to offer Covid booster shots to tens of millions of people, representatives of the World Health Organization continue to sound the alarm over the disparity in vaccine access globally, with the world’s poorest countries struggling to get even a first dose into their citizens’ arms." 

How can I justify benefiting from the disparity? 

My local hospital has been slammed the last few months. Some -- not even close to a majority, but some -- of those patients were already vaccinated. I have friends on staff there. Yes, I'm eager to not get sick (and whispers about a possible new Delta sub-variant in the UK terrify me) but anything I can do to stay out of bed seems like a duty to my community. But it still doesn't feel optimal. 

Bad sign for Facebook?

 The most-read story at WaPo: 

Sometimes I think....

 ...about how Morgan Freeman was a working actor, but didn't really become a star until he was around 50.

That gives me hope.

Common Book: Bad books

 The Tin Drum:

A thing I didn't know: Soil

Washington Post: "Research suggests that the world’s soils are now eroding 100 times faster than new soil can form, and an estimated 33 percent of soil is so degraded that its ability to grow crops is compromised."

Also: "The combined debt of all U.S. farmers totals more than $400 billion."

Common Book: The 'demonic energy' of COVID schadenfreude

Sarah Jones, New York: This happened to me recently when I lost my temper with a woman I’d known in college. She is a nurse and wrote on Facebook that she refuses to get vaccinated. I told her that people like her are the reason my grandfather is dead. That wasn’t exactly true — my grandfather died before the vaccines were available — but her indifference toward the virus had irked me. I don’t think I changed her mind. I felt better for an instant and then I went back to feeling angry, both with her and with myself. Whatever compelled me to comment on her Facebook post could have become much uglier if I had allowed it. On the r/HermanCainAward sub-Reddit, people post screenshots of comments from anti-vaxxers who later died of COVID. To some, death has become a spectacle at which they are entitled to gawk. That’s how demonic energy must feel. Right now, it’s everywhere.