★★★★★ Archives - Page 3 of 6

The Spectator Bird by Wallace Stegner

November 3, 2024 / ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

Stegner must be my spirit author. The Big Rock Candy Mountain affected me on a deeply emotional level because of the many similiaries from my own life that that novel explores. This one touched me as well, but for diffrent reasons. The narrator is 69, retired to his dream home in California, and deeply unhappy. He looks back on his life as pointless, a spectator.

The truest vision of life I know is that bird in the Venerable Bede that flutters from the dark into a lighted hall, and after a while flutters out again into the dark.

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The Age of Louis XIV by Will Durant

September 25, 2024 / ★★★★★, History, Reading

My straight-through reading of this mammoth 11-volume history continues. Volume VIII shares a detailed view of Europe in the 17th Century. So much war and bloodshed and atrocity, and yet brilliance too.

Let us agree that in every generation of man’s history, and almost everywhere, we find superstition, hypocrisy, corruption, cruelty, crime, and war: in the balance against them we place the long roster of poets, composers, artists, scientists, philosophers, and saints. That same species upon which poor Swift revenged the frustrations of his flesh wrote the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Bach and Handel, the odes of Keats, the Republic of Plato, the Principia of Newton, and the Ethics of Spinoza; it built the Parthenon and painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; it conceived and cherished, even if it crucified, Christ. Man did all this; let him never despair.

Will Durant

The Queen’s Gambit by Walter Tevis

August 26, 2024 / ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

I loved everything about this book. Who knew it was possible to write a novel filled with intricate chess games and make them exciting?! Consider this:

She steeled herself, kept her eyes from his face, and played the best chess she knew, developing her pieces, defending everywhere, watching every opportunity for an opened file, a clear diagonal, a doubled pawn, a potential fork or pin or hurdle or skewer.

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The Age of Reason Begins by Will Durant

August 20, 2024 / ★★★★★, History, Reading

My quest to read all eleven volumes of Durant’s Story of Civilization continues. Volume VII has returned to the shelf with hundreds of scribbles and notes and many, many exclamation marks. If you think the world is crazy now, you ought to revisit these darker times of wholesale human butchery, religious wars and inquisitions. This has been an eye-opening and hair-raising experience.

Here is New York by E. B. White

August 20, 2024 / ★★★★★, Memoir, Reading

A beautiful, poignant essay of White’s return to New York after a long absence. He celebrates the eternal qualities of New York and the people it attracts, while mourning the loss of his New York, which can never be restored for New York is always changing. That’s what makes it special.

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Consolations by David Whyte

June 27, 2024 / ★★★★★, Essays, Philosophy, Reading

Ah, what a treasure. Two to three page poetic essays on 52 commonplace words or themes like Curiosity, Heartbreak, and Forgiveness. I’ve been ruminating on this definition of Beauty for the past month:

Beauty is the harvest of presence.

Whyte often shared a take that surprised me, and sometimes changed my very paradigm of a long-fixed, but one-sided belief. I can see spending a year with this book, one theme per week, and digging deep, deep, deep into the purpose of life. This one is a permanent addition to my bedside table.

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David Copperfield by Charles Dickens

June 7, 2024 / ★★★★★, Literature, Reading

Stepping into a Dickens novel requires a certain faith that the vocabulary and style and flood of characters you meet will eventually make sense. I was distrustful at first, my head spinning with each new character, some appearing for such a short visit that I complained to myself that Dickens was being indulgent. I was wrong to be critical of the master. By the end of this story, every character, no matter how minor, was reintroduced and I understood their purpose in the story. Sure, this involved a lot of happy coincidences for our protagonist, but it brought me happiness to have these loose threads woven together.

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Stories of Books and Libraries by Jane Holloway (editor)

May 18, 2024 / ★★★★★, Books and Libraries, Reading

A book of short stories, excerpts and essays about the love of reading and libraries? Of course I’m going to love it. A good father’s day gift for a dad who loves books.

To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

April 30, 2024 / ★★★★★, Literature, Reading

An absolute masterpiece. Totally gutted by the end. I can’t believe it took me this long to read it.

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Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

April 5, 2024 / ★★★★★, Literary Fiction, Reading

I loved this short, spare novella. In 109 pages, Keegan puts you squarely in the mind and body of its protagonist, Furlong. You feel the pangs of long-ago childhood angst, the chill of an Irish cold spell, the ugliness of small town bigotry, the warmth of a coal stove, the despair over the human cruelty. The Irish dialogue felt more like music or birdsong, making me wish my own language wasn’t so ordinary and flat. I felt sad to leave Furlong’s side after so short a visit, but the tale and ending was told in just the right way, with just the right words.

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