Top Ten Tuesday: Backstage at the Lincoln Assassination!

Posted on April 14, 2026 by smellincoffee

This will be an unprecedented post, as I’m combining a TT and a review of the book from whence it came.

On the stage of Ford’s Theatre, Harry Hawk, facing upstage and bent over in mock civility, rotated his comic face to the audience and started his retort: “Don’t know the manners of good society, eh? Well, I guess I know enough to turn you inside out, old gal—”

Before he could finish, John Wilkes Booth with outstretched arm squeezed the trigger and their world turned upside down. BACKSTAGE AT THE LINCOLN ASSASSINATION

On April 14th, 1865, not even a week after General Robert E. Lee surrendered the Army of North Virginia to General U.S. Grant, President Abraham Lincoln was murdered while attending a play at the Ford Theater in Washington, D.C. Backstage is an unusual history of the event, because it centers itself on the Theater itself and its cast and crew. The author opens with a look at the Ford Theater, and theater in general in the 1860s: I was surprised to learn how South-biased theater companies often were, but the author attributes this to the fact that southern men of means were often the theater’s leading patrons. John Wilkes Booth, who had ardent southern sympathies, was thereby not out of place when he talked politics — even in a Washington theater. He was well known as a former colleague to many of the members of the Ford Theater company, though before the assassination he’d declared he was giving up acting to pursue oil. The book captures the moments of the assassination very well, particularly the confusion — the darkness of the theater, the strange noise, Booth suddenly appearing on the stage from one of the upper boxes, and then disappearing amid confusion and then screaming. After setting the stage by introducing us to the cast and crew in the days leading up to the assassination, Bogar then follows the aftermath. Irrational mobs being what they were, some Washingtonians wanted to burn the theater on the very night Lincoln was shot. Bogar tracks the strange priorities of Seward, harassing stage-hands who Booth barely knew while ignoring his former colleagues with whom he’d spent years talking. Because of the nature of the crime, those who were arrested and accused with some connection to the plot were very poorly used: their homes ransacked, their possessions stolen, their persons consigned to solitary cells for weeks on end. The Ford Theater, too, was poorly used by the Union soldiers who seized it: the taint attached to Ford’s name undermined his future in dominating the theater scene, though he did receive a small consolation in being paid for the property by the US government. This was interesting little history, not merely for the backstage look but the look at 19th century theater in general.

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Short rounds, Read of England style

Posted on April 12, 2026 by smellincoffee

By luck of the draw, I’ve had a series of books too short to review properly, so I’ve bid them all wait until I had enough for a short round post.

First up was my first proper experience with Dan Jones — or perhaps I should append a question mark to that, because as histories go, this one is rather short, not like his girthy Plantagenet history. Specifically, it’s a history of the year 1215. If you’re up on your English history, you may recognize that as the year that John was forced by his barons to sign the Great Charter. This document which has been hailed as the foundation of English and thereby American liberty, by establishing the principle that the King is under the Law — even if he is in the position of making the law. A Realm Divided is not entirely about the political drama that led to the council at Runnymede, though, as it also includes several chapters on social matters in case one’s eyes start closing over the constant feudal squabbling. While the book is relatively short (in the area of 200 pages), it’s a read dense with facts and surprises, and it includes the Charter itself at the end as well as a few other documents. One minor surprise here was learning that John had contemplated going on a Crusade, which I found amusing. It’s hard to think of a selfish scoundrel like John facing the rigors of travel the way Richard and Frederick did. Another surprise was learning that there was a document that preceded the Great Charter, one which contained most of its clauses and which served as the basis for debates between the barons and the king. While I’ve read Jones’ historical fiction debute and his adaptation of a medieval ghost story, this is my first proper history by him. I like his style and will be reading more: I had thought to pair this and his book on the Magna Carta proper, since he was researching them at the same time, but unless I’ve been in the hospital I prefer to cap my short rounds at 3.

Next up, the first volume in Oxford’s History of Britain, opening with Roman and Anglo-Saxon Britain. This is an extremely cursory introduction, under 200 pages, and if you are vaguely familiar with either era there’s nothing much here for you, except (in my case) the observation that archaeology hints that the Anglo-Saxons were in Britain even before the Romans left, and not simply as mercenary guards. All the usual players — Claudius, Boudica, Alfred, Edmund, etc — make their appearances. If you know nothing at all about Roman Britain, or the early Anglo-Saxon period, this is useful; otherwise, it’s simply a reminder.

About The Peopling of British North America I can say even less, because it consisted of three essays that barely get to 150 pages altogether, all of them have strange names (“The Rings of Saturn” — what?), and the gist of all of it is “You know, it’s all very complicated and we really can’t figure out any exact patterns, people just wandered over to America in all kinds of ways. Can I have my advance before it hits the printers, please?”

The latter two were donated to my University library by my former professor of medieval Europe and English history, a man who claimed to be descended from Norman warlords and definitely looked the part. I can understand why he was willing to release them. They won’t be lingering long on my end, either.

Coming up this week..

This is my final week of schoolwork for this term, and I have a 6 page paper due Friday so I may not be reading as much as I’d like. At least, not reading what I want to. I have to re-read my textbook and various articles from this term for said paper. I’ve got Dan Jones’ second historical fiction book at the ready, and his aforementioned piece on the Magna Carta. Still trying to get into Rebecca but I suspect I won’t make progress until after I submit this paper. My leisure read at the moment is Clouds of Glory, a biography of Robert E. Lee by Michael Korda: I’ve had it checked out for a bit (had planned to pair it with my Ulysses Grant biography), but it’s a beefy boy and not until this present weekend did I have time to really sink my teeth into it. I was dogsitting at a house with no internet or electronic distractions, so I got to settle in with ol’ Marse Robert the last few days. I’m 200+ pages in and just arrived at 1860. So far it’s been a delight: who knew General Lee had a penchant for watercolor and loved flirting?

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The Shaping of England

Posted on April 9, 2026 by smellincoffee

The Shaping of England is an older (1960s) Asimov history written about early England, beginning with speculation about the Beaker people and moving through the Celts, Romans, Anglo-Saxons etc to wrap up with the establishment of the Magna Carta. Like Asimov’s other histories, this is written for a general audience, with text accessible enough for a literate middle schooler but with facts and wit enough to please an adult reader. While I assume older parts of it are dated at this point (archaeology has presumably had much more to say on the Beaker, Celtic, and Anglo-Saxon periods), it’s a lovely narrative with Asimov’s usual charm and critical eye. I’m generally familiar with the subject matter and largely read this to enjoy the dear doctor’s writing again — he dominated the early years of this blog until I ran out of books by him to read — and found few discrepancies but a few surprises. His treatment of the Roman invasion of Britain, for instance, attributes Caesar and Claudius’ attentions there to Britain simply existing: seizing it meant overcoming the dangerous mystery of Oceanus, and thus driving Rome not simply past a geographic limit but past limit in general — imperium sine fine! All modern scholarship I’m familiar with stresses the connections between Celtic Britons and Celtic Gauls, and how Rome’s aims towards consolidating power in Gaul meant ending the outside interference.

I was wholly surprised by the assertion that the Scilly islands were visited by the Phoenicians. This is something I’ve never heard of, and after digging around I think it was just speculation that was common in the 1960s which is now wholly ignored. The earliest reference I can find for it (1924) comes from an article that also mentions Aryans and the Sumerian origins of English. Asimov doesn’t pursue a single-track narrative: he often follows powers and personalities who intersect with Britain and then England proper’s story. While this can appear distracting at times (why am I reading about the Norse in Vinland?), it helps maintain some flavor of the period we are in — and sometimes, to better appreciate the actual subjects by direct comparison. Robert Guiscard and William the Bastard are compared together, for instance, as forgers of stable Norman empires from far more chaotic source material. This narrative was my first time really getting into the civil war between King Stephen and Matilda, despite the fact that my name should give me an obvious interest. (Amusingly, King Stephen managed to both win and lose the civil war with Matilda: he ruled during his lifetime, but allowed her son Henry II to assume the throne and begin plantagenting all over Europe. The Angevin empire and its drama are a large part of this book’s final third, and proved interesting given that Asimov is not impressed by the lionization of Richard or the demonization of King John. Sure, Asimov writes, he wasn’t great — but Richard wasn’t exactly the bee’s knees from a character perspective. One of the men Richard arrogantly dismissed during the Third Crusade wound up getting the last laugh, being instrumental to the capture of the Lionheart in Europe and creating all manner of trouble for Europe as John was pressed to raise a literal king’s ransom.

This is dated, but fun: doubtless it’s surpassed by modern scholarship (I’m thinking of following this up with Dan Jones’ work on the Magna Carta itself), but given my longstanding affection for all things Asimov I got a kick simply from ‘hearing’ his voice again.

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Controversial Polemics

Posted on April 8, 2026 by smellincoffee
One of the first experiences I had was meeting a guy on the side of the highway about an hour south of Portland on I-5 who convinced me to go to what turned out to be an AA meeting—this is ironic—and then got me to steal a car with him. We didn’t get far before being pulled over by police.

When he was twenty-three, Michael Mohr read On the Road and decided to pursue the life of Sal Paradise himself. He hit the road for a life of drinking and adventures, but by the end of his twenties had lost enough to alcohol that he went sober and began writing. There’s something immediately captivating about that—young people reading a book, feeling it deeply, and being so fired up they want to throw themselves into the fray. Mohr is a reader who feels and writes with intensity, and like his favorite authors he is not one who can be thrown into a box — tidily labeled and dismissed. I happen to be very fond of those authors, myself — authors whose feelings and thinking cut across party lines, whose thought is honest and earnest and not prepackaged. They make me sit down to truly consider them, and that’s always a more rewarding experience than reading the latest political polemic that says ‘Hoo-ray for our side’.

This work is a mix of essays on politics, culture, and literature. While it was politics that first drew my attention to Mohr’s writing (he’s a lifelong Democrat who hates the way the party has gone since Obama retired), the latter third is all about different authors and the role of their art in unearthing truths about the human experience. These essays are extremely varied: to pick three at random, there’s a critique of the Democratic party’s platform and candidates in the 2024 election, a rumination on how Alcoholics Anonymous is not monolithic, and a tribute to the life of Charles Bukowski. I especially enjoyed the literary essays as someone who takes books and authors seriously — especially authors like Bukowski or Ed Abbey, unique personalities. Reception to the political section will vary, I think: as a former college progressive who became disaffected and then bitter and contemptuous toward the Democratic party during the same period Mohr is writing about here, I was all on-board for their getting roughed up here. That’s not because Mohr is a conservative or libertarian writer; he says he’s never read anything from conservative writers, and he has a visceral contempt for Trump. He realizes, though, that Trump’s anti-elite messaging works because the Democratic Party has become elitist and condescending, and that the legitimate needs of voters across demographics are not being met by business as usual. (The fact that Trump picked up voters in every demo in the last election except for black females is telling on that part, but I strongly doubt the Dems will take it seriously.)

In both his political and literary writing, Mohr reveals himself to be the kind of writer America used to produce amply: the impassioned individualist who hates tribal thinking, and not simply the other side’s tribal thinking. He doesn’t want himself or any other serious writer or person to be put in a box and stored away neatly. I was reminded of how when I was studying Ed Abbey that I realized Cactus Ed was too unruly for the easy label of ‘environmentalist’. The real man was far more complex and interesting — and contradictory! This collection, too, is complex and interesting. I think Mohr’s enthusiastic reading does have oversights , but I admire and appreciate his active attitude toward learning. When people accuse Trump of being a new Hitler, he reads a biography of Hitler; when people talk about cultural Marxism, he reads a biography of Marx, and in both occasions he writes down his thinking. He doesn’t just react to identity politics as shallow: he creates an essay on the Buddhist idea of no-self and how it applies. I think that kind of dedicated digging-in is fairly rare these days: we find it so easy to accept other people’s summary judgements.

All told, this was a fun collection to read through — sometimes easy, sometimes prickly, but always interesting…and more important, real.

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WWW Wednesday & When I was a Kid

Posted on April 8, 2026 by smellincoffee

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is: what were you like as a kid? But first, WWW Wednesday!

WHAT have you finished reading recently? The Shaping of England, Isaac Asimov. And, technically, Public Libraries and their Communities, one of my textbooks for this semester.

WHAT are you reading now? When the Earth Had Two Moons. Also looking through a collection of substack essays published as an e-book.

WHAT are you reading next? Trying to get into Rebecca by du Maurier.

What was I like as a kid? Well, some things haven’t changed. I used to read through stacks of books every week: the children’s director joked that I’d read every book in the library at one point. Lots of history and nature books, of course, but I also enjoyed ghost stories and regular kids’ novels. I was raised in a home without television, so reading was my main entertainment — but I also spent a lot of time outside, telling stories with my toys and using whatever I had on hand as props. To use my G.I. Joe base as an example: some of it was cinder blocks, but the chrome panels of a fire engine, with all their dials and such, were the ‘controls’ of the base, and I used an empty wrapping paper tube so my Joes could slide to the ‘motor pool’. I also enjoyed jumping on a trampoline for hours on end, as well as shooting hoops when I got older. Although I did play outside with friends — we’d explore the woods, play ‘war’, play basketball together — I was fairly comfortable being alone. I’d also read outside, of course, and one of my fondest memories is using plywood and cinder blocks to ford my way across a swamp to a wooded area beyond where I remember reading Redwall. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I could have simply walked around the swampy area and gotten into the woody area from behind. Fording was a lot more fun, anyway. (I lived near two vacant lots that were used to store piles of sand, gravel, and cinderblocks. Young me yoinked these as he pleased, and he also tore ribbons off of trees that had been marked for being removed.) As you might guess, my parents were not helicopter parents: after school we’d be outside until dark, and on Saturdays and summers I was basically feral, drinking from a water hose and coming inside only to get a sandwich around lunchtime. I’d be covered in bites and scratches! Because of my odd religious background, I was an outsider at school and got on well mostly with other outsiders: my personality changed completely once I was home, as my best friend found to his surprise in middle school. He was startled to find that quiet bookworms can morph into class clowns in the blink of an eye.

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Teaser Tuesday, 1066 Edition

Posted on April 7, 2026 by smellincoffee

That one battle had swung the pendulum. What the Saxons had won in a century of warfare against the Britons; what they had saved in a century and a half of warfare against the Danes; they now lost to the Normans in a single battle in one morning and afternoon, in which the cream of the Saxon nobility was destroyed. THE SHAPING OF ENGLAND, Isaac Asimov

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The Love Song of Miss Queenie Hennessy

Posted on April 6, 2026 by smellincoffee

The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry by Rachel Joyce was one of my favorite books of 2024, and I’ve been meaning to read its sequel for some time now. I thought Read of England as appropriate an occasion as any. Love Song is a mirror book to Unlikely Pilgrimage: just as Harold’s unplanned walk across England to visit Queenie on her deathbed was a way for him to sojourn with his past, so too do the series of postcards from him force Queenie to face her own. It’s a past that is shared in part, and separate in part — and sometimes both at the same time. It’s a story told across time, as we follow Queenie’s life inside the nursing home as she waits for death or Harold — whichever arrives first — and her ruminations on the past that Harold’s trip is inspiring. Because her story is set in a home filled with the aging and those approaching death, reflections on death, dying, and meaning are a strong part of this story. As it happens, it’s been so long since I read Unlikely Pilgrimage that I’d forgotten their story aside from Harold making the journey to see her, so I was largely experiencing this afresh. I don’t want to go into too much detail because of spoilers, but let’s say that beyond their close friendship as former coworkers, Harold and Queenie shared a connection he wasn’t fully aware of—one that led to tragedy, remorse, and Queenie’s long retreat. Until being diagnosed with an aggressive and terminal cancer, in fact, Queenie had been living in a sea-cottage. Instead of being a recluse, though, she’d found meaning in trying to create beauty amid desolation, and in her connections to the people in the village nearby. This thread of her life is beautiful in its own right — though of course, having read Unlikely Pilgrimage, I was waiting for Harold’s arrival with breath just as bated as hers and her fellow residents of the care facility. This proved to be as wise and sweet as the original, but it adds a lot to the original because we’re seeing Harold from outside himself, and his intense grief over the parts of the past — a grief that expresses itself in rage as well as sobs — surfaces here in a way that it didn’t, quite, in the original, but now Queenie’s pain and love are added to it for a sad, but lovely, story.

Quotations

So I said to the bindweed, You want to be in my garden and I don’t want you. I can’t dig you out. If I poison you, I run the risk of poisoning the plants I want to keep. We have a problem that will not go away. Something needs to change. Beside every bindweed stem, I pushed in a hazel stake. About twenty in all. The bindweed shot up these supports and rewarded me with lilac trumpets of flowers striped with white. I wouldn’t say I loved the bindweed. I certainly didn’t trust it. It would have scrambled all over my pinks the moment I stopped offering new stakes. But sometimes you have to respect the fact that even though you don’t want bindweed you have it, and you’d better get along side by side. It was the same with Napier.

We write ourselves certain parts and then keep playing them as if we have no choice. But a tardy person can become a punctual one, if she chooses. You don’t have to keep being the thing you have become. It is never too late.

Now that I’d stopped my work, I noticed that the doctor of philosophy was dressed in sensible walking gear and a red spotted bow tie. It was as if the walking clothes were saying one thing about him and the tie was shouting another. I liked that.

“Don’t try to see ahead to the nice bits. Don’t try to see ahead to the end. Stay with the present, even if it is not so good. And consider how far you’ve already come.”

“What do you do with a thousand followers?” He settled in the chair beside mine. “I had a wife and a best friend. That was all I needed.”

I accepted that sometimes you cannot clear the past completely. You must live alongside your sorrow.

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This Joyful Eastertide

Posted on April 5, 2026 by smellincoffee

Christos anesti! The choir I’m in will be attempting this piece later this morning. I knew Turner was a good musician & singer from his collabs with Allison Young, but I didn’t realize how vocally versatile he was.

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The People on Platform 5

Posted on April 2, 2026 by smellincoffee

You don’t talk to the people on the platform, or on the train. You sit in silence, lost in your headphones or your phone or even a book. But what happens when the man sitting opposite you suddenly begins choking to death? Amid his sudden gasps and heaves, the ice of convention is broken open; a woman in a bright suit bellows for a nurse, and suddenly a group of strangers become acquaintances….and then, part of one another’s lives. The People on Platform 5 is another “human connection” story, though with a different premise — and for me, a more labored execution. Whereas Authenticity Project had an ensemble cast with two stronger-than-average characters, Platform 5 is more dominated by one character so much that the other characters comment on it. She’s the hub; they’re the spokes, to quote them. An alternate title of this book calls it Iona Iverson’s Rules for Commuting, in fact. Iona is an aging dancer turned ‘agony aunt’, or ‘newspaper therapist’: she has a big personality, favors expressive clothing, and has no compunction against yelling or bossing people around. She’s especially fond of tone- and word-policing people, and insists on bringing her yappy little dog everywhere she goes — on the train, to the office, in restaurants and even the theater. Although her social aggression is part of what brings the group together, and sustains it — she’s the one who calls for a doctor to save the choker, the one who suggests that _______ talk to _______, etc — one reason I dragged my feet through this novel is that I found her borderline obnoxious and unlikable. (I have to add the latter because I’ve known several obnoxious people whom I still liked.) The most interesting character to me was Piers, who begins as an unlikable future trader: we later learn that he’s been fired from his job, is riding the commuter train to hide the fact from his wife, and is desperately day-trading to keep income coming in. He undergoes a lot of character growth and later facilitates another character’s growth. It was still a sweet story, but I think reading this back to back with Authenticity Project was a mistake: it did let me see a lot of commonalities in Poole’s writing, though, like frequent Harry Potter allusions. This is evidently set in the same universe as Authenticity, since the main character refers to one of her paintings as being a Julian Jessup: Julian was one of the two leads in AP. Without spoiling anything, Iona and Julian have another critical thing in common. All told, this is a short but sweet novel about people with different struggles — aging, bankruptcy, self-doubt, etc — finding support in one another.

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The Sober Diaries

Posted on April 1, 2026 by smellincoffee

In the afterwords of The Authenticity of Project, author Clare Pooley noted that it was her attempt to capture in fiction something she’s done in fact: change her life through honesty. She’d done it by blogging her journey to sobriety, beginning with the embarrassing account of her pouring some wine into a WORLD’S BEST MOM coffee cup just to combat a morning hangover to be there for her kids. The diary takes readers through an entire year of starter sobriety and details the psychological, physical, and social challenges she faced, as well as the changes she observed. Pooley’s journey to sobriety had the additional challenge of a cancer diagnosis several months in. I’ve never read anything like this before and found it fairly absorbing, although after a month or so it appears Pooley had more or less settled in on the right track. The biggest ongoing challenge was the expectation of social drinking, which she negated in part by drinking nonalcoholic ‘drinks’ like Beck’s Blue. There were only a couple of times that she was tempted by her old frenemy wine: one time her husband stumbled in on her contemplating a glass and intervened, another time she pulled her own self back. This is not a journey I’ve been on, personally, so I can’t comment on what her depiction of “Post-Acute Withdrawal Syndrome” is like: this entails mood swings and such as the brain continues to find a new normal after its chronic chemical sedation suddenly ceases. It was the beginning of this book that was most arresting, with Clare finally admitting that her bottle-of-wine a day habit was a problem, and she began dealing with the feelings of shame — both for having a problem and for potentially being a problem for her husband and kids — but forced herself to start moving in the right direction. I imagine whether the issue is sobriety or weight loss, getting started is always the hardest part. This appears to be very popular with readers, at least those who aren’t offended by the fact that Clare is upper middle class and not writing this memoir from a trailer park. On a partially irrelevant side note: I’ve read nearly two Pooley novels now, and was amused to see common elements in this and the novels, from words of wisdom to her frequent Harry Potter and David Attenborough references.

(Yes, this was supposed to be my next read, but I hit a stall during People on Platform 5 and looked at this instead, and then wound up reading it through. Should finish People on Platform 5 sometime today, though.)

Related:
Rachel’s Holiday, Marian Keyes. An unreliable narrator is forced to go to rehab.

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