What Just Happened

Notes on a Long Year

De: Charles Finch

Narrado por: Charles Finch

A BOSTON GLOBE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • With unwavering humanity and light-footed humor, this intimate account of the interminable year of 2020 offers commentary on the COVID-19 pandemic, protests for racial justice, the U.S. presidential election, and more, all with a miraculous dose of groundedness in head-spinning times.

"This book is so funny and so true. Charles Finch unpacks a year of plague, fear, shameless venality, and dizzying stupidity with an irrepressible wit and surgically precise cultural observations. I didn't know how badly I needed exactly this. Maybe you do too?"(Joe Hill, author of Heart-Shaped Box)

In March 2020, at the request of the Los Angeles Times, Charles Finch became a reluctant diarist: As California sheltered in place, he began to write daily notes about the odd ambient changes in his own life and in the lives around him. The result is What Just Happened.

In a warm, candid, welcoming voice, and in the tradition of Woolf and Orwell, Finch brings us into his own world: taking long evening walks near his home in LA, listening to music, and keeping virtual connections with friends across the country as they each experience the crisis. And drawing on his remarkable acuity as a cultural critic, he chronicles one endless year with delightful commentary on current events, and the things that distract him from current events: Murakami’s novels, reality television, the Beatles.

What Just Happened is a work of empathy and insight, at once of-the-moment and timeless—a gift from one of our culture's most original thinkers.

©2021 Charles Finch (P)2021 Random House Audio

Reseñas de la Crítica

ONE OF THE BOSTON GLOBE'S BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR

“Beautiful, bittersweet . . . he takes profound, frank, luxurious baths in the emotions of distaste and despair, which dominated during the pandemic. His memoir incisively suggests they reveal the depth of our love, actually, for other aspects of our world that we didn’t want to lose.”—Eve Fairbanks, The New York Times

"Articulate and engaging . . . What Just Happened: Notes on a Long Year is the journal you meant to write but were too busy dashing through self-checkout lanes or curled in the fetal position in front of Netflix to get anything down. Thankfully, Finch did. His keen-eyed account is vivid and witty. It will make you laugh despite the horrors . . . I am not enjoying the pandemic, but I did enjoy Finch's articulate take on life in the midst of it. Missing his friends and mourning the world as he knew it, Finch's account has a unifying effect in the same way that good literature affirms humanity by capturing a moment in time.”—Christine Brunkhorst, Minneapolis Star-Tribune

"Warmly conversational . . . [Finch's] sketches skillfully evoke their moment’s spiky, overstimulated atmosphere—especially the new, frightening friction of such everyday routines as grocery shopping or picking up a prescription."—Sophia Nguyen, The Washington Post

Can this be the same Charles Finch?

Can this be the same Charles Finch who writes the Charles Lennox mysteries? Hard to believe! This was a well-done essay about the year just passed. Parts were a bit repetitive and all the weed smoking -- why so many references to that? But it was a good reflection on 2020. I still can't believe it's the same guy, but my research tells me that it is. Who knew?

As only the author can…

I had a feeling this pandemic diary would be best appreciated in the voice of its author, and I was right. It was great to hear Finch’s humor, frustration, tenderness, anger. The book itself is alive with the vividness of his/our year of Covid, but this audiobook really made for a rare reading experience.

Excellent Read

While the reality is still hard to relive, this is an excellent description of what is what like during the pandemic as we all tried to navigate the health issues, the political craziness and the social injustices. This book is an important piece of history.

My sentiments exactly!

When Charles Finch started the recollection, he started on the exact day I decided to stay in for the duration. He brought forth the dread and loneliness felt by all of us but also the slowing down of everything…the look of a city when no one is around. His timeline made more sense in retrospect then while it was happening…thanks CF.

Interesting…

A year in the life of a dying nation… broken… selfish… and arrogant. No longer unified as one but fractured and disinteresting blaming the other. Charles Lennox does a good job at presenting what he didn’t set as his goal but accomplished it anyway.

Awful

The author used this book as a way to express his personal opinions by way of cherry-picked events and leftist media accounts. The only two things I agreed with were his love of Beatles and his hatred for Trump.