This was an interesting reading year for me. I read less than I have in the past couple of years, probably in part due to the easing of pandemic limitations and the return of busyness that came with it. But I also seemed to hit the distracted malaise this year that many described having earlier … Continue reading 2022 Reading List
Non-fiction
How Shall We Live?
I've always had a deep faith in books. As with many readers, libraries felt like church to me, bookstores like monasteries. Opening a new book feels like a ritual, as does closing it when finished. I'm sure this worship led me to seek a scholar's life, and not only a scholar but a scholar of … Continue reading How Shall We Live?
2020 Reading List – The Final
In one of the two holiday movies I watch without fail, It's a Wonderful Life, lead character George Bailey is a man who has always resented his meagre, small town life until he gets a chance to see what said town would have been like if he'd never been born. George discovers that he actually … Continue reading 2020 Reading List – The Final
Notions, Summer 2019 edition
This weekend I went on a climbing trip and, assuming I wouldn't have much time for reading, I only brought one book, of which I was two-thirds of the way done. (I know!) I finished it on the way there, leaving the drive home bereft and bookless. I used that time to catch up on … Continue reading Notions, Summer 2019 edition
The Library Book
This weekend I finished Susan Orlean's The Library Book and ... wow. I will have more to say about this book but for now I want to give a slow-clap standing ovation to the writing. This was my first Orlean and she is remarkable. Take this early description of the Los Angeles CentralLibrary: ...the neighborhood … Continue reading The Library Book
On Toggling Between Books, or the Strange Fixed Marriage of Julia Child and Carlo Rovelli
Listening to: A Spotify playlist where I'm dumping one-off songs I want to keep listening to. Drinking: A Firestone Walker IPA. Traditionally—since childhood—I've been a one-book-at-a-time kind of reader. The first cracks in that tendency probably came in graduate school, a time when it's relatively impossible to be reading only one thing at a time. … Continue reading On Toggling Between Books, or the Strange Fixed Marriage of Julia Child and Carlo Rovelli
Dogs, Coffee, & Books 