Reading at a park attached to a public library while listening to kids play baseball. Ain’t spring fine? Montevallo, Alabama
What a month! Despite April being peak tornado season in Alabama, this year the skies were perfectly clement. Not until this past week, in fact, did we have any rumblings of tornadoes at all — seemingly all of our rain for the spring was dumped on us within a couple of days. If you are new to Reading Freely, April is always nominally devoted to English literature and English history, though some years have been misses on that front because of other passions. 2026, however, was fairly well on target with few strays. Not only did I do a fair bit of English history, finally getting into Dan Jones’ works proper, but I knocked out two bits of English lit that were also on my Classics Club list.
Read of England
Read of England began as my way of creating space to read Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, but over the years has largely been about English history and English historical fiction. This year, however, I read two classics of English lit and introduced myself to an intoxicating new-to-me author, Daphne du Maurier. I read:
Two English classics
Three other novels by English authors
and five England-related histories, including two Dan Jones
a du Maurier short story, “The Birds”, which was as weird as the Hitchcock movie that was based on it, but not quite as horrific as I wasn’t seeing birds dive-bomb schoolgirls.
and begin ANOTHER work by du Maurier, The Scapegoat. It’s currently competing with Richard Nixon for reading time.
America @ 250
I read three books about the American presidency: one on Lincoln’s assassination, a history of Camp David, and a review of American presidents as authors. I also watched an LBJ movie and three movies about JFK. I’m waiting on Moviewatch, though, as I think I can finish the Nixon biopic I started before a dogsitting stint.
New Acquisitions
While visiting my local indie bookstore, Fair Oaks Books, the proprietor used me as an excuse to get off the phone — “Excuse me, I have to go, I have a customer” — thus obliging me to actually buy something instead of drink coffee and swap gossip. Fortunately there were two Tom Wolfe books in the Two-for-a-dollar box, so I picked up Bonfire of the Vanities and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. (The following week he let me borrow Being Nixon as a thank-you for popping by to wish him Happy Independent Bookstores Day.) also bought used copies of Lincoln by Gore Vidal (a novel, part of his Empire series), Lee in the Shadow of Washington, and Maverick by Jason Riley, the latter being a biography of Thomas Sowell.
Coming in May…
There are at least four releases in May I’m looking forward to: the American-market release of GIRLS by Freya India, on Gen Z women and the dystopian digital world; End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers; I Would Walk Five Hundred Miles, the latter a recounting by Sean Dietrich of his Camino experience; and Brad Birzer’s The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty.
Nonbook Commonplace Quotes
More profoundly, if we are prepared to accept that “reality” is whatever we choose it to be, by virtue of what we pay attention to, then what’s the limit? Arendt said that Hitler sold to his people not just a political program, but an entire picture of reality itself. It was a synthetic reality that delivered them from the miseries of Weimar’s humiliations, fragmentation, and loneliness. If you had told people ten, twenty years ago that we would have seemingly sane adults developing romantic relationships with AI lovers, they would not have believed you. Who would do such a thing? Now we know. […] The fact that Celeste does not care that she has developed a relationship to a machine is the most important thing about this. Her son is trying to make her understand that this is not real love, that there is something dangerous about this. But she doesn’t care. She wants what she wants. Personal happiness is her absolute telos.” Mom’s AI Lover, Or: That Hideous Chatbot. Rod Dreher.
What you lose when you’re not reading is that you become cocooned within your own experience, in a way that becomes narcissistic and claustrophobic. – Dominic Sandbrook, interview. “Does reading make you a better person?“
Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is “A Celebrity We’d Like to Meet”. Interestingly, one of my favorite authors (Rod Dreher) recently announced he’s returning to the United States, and has chosen Birmingham as his new residence for the time being. I’ve caught him twice at events in the Magic City, and I’m up there several times a month, so I’m hoping to see him more often. I’ve subscribed to his substack for years, and he wants to hang out with area readers, so that’s something to look forward to. And now, WWW Wednesday!
WHAT have you finished reading recently? Rebecca and “The Birds” by Daphne du Maurier.
WHAT are you reading now? Being Nixon by Evan Thomas and The Scapegoat, by du Maurier.
WHAT are you reading next? Being Nixon is going to keep me busy for a while, I think, as it’s six hundred pages and dense.
Today’s treble T is a freebie, and my initial impulse was to highlight some booktubers I enjoy. However, embedding videos is always hit and miss with youtube, so I’m going to highlight recent books in my browsing history.
But first, the Tuesday Tease!
Again and again the rockets sped into the air like arrows, and the sky became crimson and gold. Manderley stood out like an enchanted house, every window aflame, the gray walls colored by the falling stars. A house bewitched, carved out of the dark woods. REBECCA, Daphne du Maurier
Someone joltedmy elbow as I drank and said, “Je vous demande pardon,” and as I moved to give him space, he turned and stared at me and I at him, and I realized, with a strange sense of shock and fear and nausea all combined, that his face and voice were known to me too well. I was looking at myself. THE SCAPEGOAT, Daphne du Maurier
And now, window-shopping…two of these I’ve actually bought or borrowed, and several others are very tempting.
(1) Masters of the Planet, Ian Tatterstall. A work on human origins.
(2) Those Damned Rebels, a primary source look at how the British experienced the Revolutionary War.
(3) A Fierce Glory, a history of the battle of Antietam and its consequences.
(4) Being Nixon: A Man Divided, Evan Thomas.
(5) Case Closed: Lee Harvey Oswald and the Assassination of JFK, Gerald Posner. A large history written to rebuke conspiracy theories, but astonishingly not the largest. There’s a 1600 page book (Reclaiming History) written to address Oliver Stone’s JFK movie specifically.
(6) JFK and Vietnam, John Newman
(7) The Unexpected President, Scott Greenberger. On the life of Chester Arthur.
(8) How States Think, John Mearscheimer
(9) The Hell of Good Intentions: America’s Foreign Policy Elite and the Decline of US Primacy, Stephen Walt.
(10) Lincoln, Gore Vidal. The lone novel on this list! I’m thinking of trying his Narratives of Empire series of novels. It begins with Burr, but I’ve ordered the Lincoln book to start with.
“Do you think she can see us, talking to one another now?” she said slowly. “Do you think the dead come back and watch the living?
Imagine your life being so overwhelmed by other people’s memories of a woman that her name is emblazoned over your story — and still worse, you don’t have a name in your story, only the title that both you and she share. The future Mrs. de Winter is a young woman in service to a loud American one, serving as assistant while the American vacations in Monte Carlo. The young woman happens to meet a handsome stranger who takes an interest in her, and before her client can even recover from a cold, the lass and her mysterious gent are married. Upon arrival at her new home, Manderly, the new Mrs. de Winter finds herself not only horribly out of place — she has no idea how to be the lady of a great house — but feeling like an intruder. The staff all loved the former Mrs. de Winter, whose quarters are now closed, and the present Mrs DW finds herself trapped in the gravity of the hole the former’s death left. She has no idea, however, how deep and dark that hole can be. Rebecca is another immersive novel with a ‘stand up in shock’ type twist and a heck of an ending.
Although Rebecca has a slow start — our unnamed narrator hanging around enduring her boss talking down to her, then developing a friendship of sorts with Mr. de Winter, the man with the tragic past — once the action moves to Manderly it pulled me completely. Our narrator is a woman from humble circumstances; she wears flannel skirts, not crinolines, and even if the circumstances weren’t what they are, she’d be out of place. She’s a bit like Mr. Branson in Downton Abbey, the mechanic who had to suddenly adapt to living “upstairs”: many of the servants don’t take her seriously, especially the former maid to the late Rebecca de Winter, Mrs. Denvers. In addition to living in this grand home, made all the more intimidating by how the memory of Rebecca is an active presence within it, our narrator also has to try to fit into Cornwall society. They, too, remember Rebecca, and it’s not long before the narrator is an emotional wreck convinced she’s made the worst mistake of her life. And then, dear reader, it gets….all kinds of interesting, and turns into a mystery-thriller instead remaining a relationship drama. Many characters take on a new life in the second half, and those that were already mildly interesting become much more so — and the atmosphere at Manderly grows thick.
I wish someone had told me earlier that du Maurier was this fascinating! I’ve already started listening to “The Birds”, her short story that Hitchcock adapted into the famous movie, and am planning on giving The Scapegoat a look.
Quotations
We all of us have our particular devil who rides us and torments us, and we must give battle in the end.
“I suppose your ancestors often entertained royalty at Manderley, Mr. de Winter?” This was more than I had hitherto endured, even from her, but the swift lash of his reply was unexpected. “Not since Ethelred,” he said, “the one who was called Unready. In fact, it was while staying with my family that the name was given him. He was invariably late for dinner.”
It was an ancient mossy smell, the smell of a silent church where services are seldom held, where rusty lichen grows upon the stones and ivy tendrils creep to the very windows. A room for peace, a room for meditation.
Dear God, I did not want to think about Rebecca. I wanted to be happy, to make Maxim happy, and I wanted us to be together. There was no other wish in my heart but that. I could not help it if she came to me in thoughts, in dreams. I could not help it if I felt like a guest in Manderley, my home, walking where she had trodden, resting where she had lain. I was like a guest, biding my time, waiting for the return of the hostess. Little sentences, little reproofs reminding me every hour, every day.
“History will be kind to me, for I intend to write it,” said Winston Churchill, and write it he did – histories of the World Wars and the Anglo-American people. Across the pond, American executives were also doing their writing. Author-in-Chief is an oblique take on American presidents, examining them through the lens of literature and authorship. While most of the presidents’ books are directly tied to politics – being titles that were meant to introduce their authors to the voting public, or to offer a parting shot at defending their legacy – there are a few exceptions. The title is not comprehensive: Trump’s business books are almost entirely ignored, as are Carter’s many post-office works. (The Art of the Deal is mentioned twice, once to point out that the same editor who approved it also signed off on Obama’s Dreams from my Father.) The accounts of these men are grounded in an ongoing review of how the literary world was changing in America at the time – publishing becoming easier, books more common – until the contemporary era in which books take more and more of a backseat to electronic and digital mesmerization. The book is generally fair-minded and does not shy away from claims that Kennedy’s books were largely ghostwritten, despite the tendency of authors to shy away from critiques of martyrs like himself and MLK.
Frankly, I find the writing not connected to political aspirations far more interesting than the campaign books, because those are fairly predictable. I don’t read campaign books, myself, the only exception having been Ron Paul’s Revolution, and that was years after the election he wrote it for. Books associated with campaigns were used early in the 19th century, but were not the ghostwritten junk food we get today. Lincoln, for instance, published the transcripts of his multiple debates with Stephen Douglas, which went a long way to communicating not only his principles and values, but the thinking behind them. They were real arguments, not just the so-there! polemics we get every four years from hopefuls. Nonpolitical books include Theodore Roosevelt’s The Naval War of 1812, which was exhaustively researched, if sometimes pedantically written: the book was immediately purposed as a reference text on both sides of the pond. Roosevelt went on to write other titles, but he was never as diligent about them as his first work. Jefferson and Adams both produced works unrelated to their presidential ambitions: Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia began as a response to European allegations that everything in the New World was stunted compared to the Old World counterparts, and turns into a rambling text covering everything from natural philosophy to law in Virginia. Adams’ study of Republics through history was written to inform attempts to create a working Republic from the united States, though Adams’ approach was less synthesis than I thought: Fehrman writes that large portions of the book are Adams’ copying materials from other histories and adding commentary. Woodrow Wilson also penned several works on political theory and practice with an eye towards making American governance more parliamentary; later on, of course, he simply made it more authoritarian.
While several presidents wrote memoirs to defend themselves out of the gate, others like George H.W. Bush have patently refused. Bush appears to have regarded this kind of self-defense as beneath the office, contending instead that if he had gone good work, it would be appreciated later down the road by more objective historians. He referenced specifically the redemption of Harry Truman by David McCullough, an author who also went a long way to reviving interest in the life and legacy of John Adams. Interestingly, Michael Korda appears here as a young ghostwriter; these days he is a historian and biographer in his own right. The question of ghost-writing comes up a lot in the second half of this book, as every president from Kennedy onward has made use of one. This is not always to their benefit: Fehrman argues that Reagan’s first attempt at biography, Where’s the Rest of Me, was far superior to An American Life in that it conveyed his personality, his own style. The production of An American Life was also hindered by Reagan’s spotty memory. Obama receives a large section towards the end of the book, in part because he was a man formed by literature, especially fiction, and saw it as a valuable way to get inside the heads of people he would see as otherwise alien. Like Kennedy, his early writings gave him name recognition and pushed him toward politics even before he’d started thinking about it. (Kennedy was so fixated on winning a Pulitzer prize that he forwarded a list of the nominees committee to his father, assuming the Kennedy don would ply wallets or twist arms as needed to get it done.)
This was a fun book. I liked seeing the presidents in this literary context, and not simply because I’m a huge reader myself. I’m the sort of person who always beelines for the library in someone’s home, enjoying the insights one gets into people from the books they bring into their homes and minds. To me, seeing these men as earnest authors – as men who wanted to write, who sometimes viewed writing as more personally compelling than even their ambitions – was fascinating. Sometimes it was a means to an end: the men might simply want the cachet that being An Author conveyed. This was apparently true of Kennedy and Teddy, though T.R. was also obsessed with doing the best work possible and delivering a definitive history of his subject. If Obama saw reading as a valuable way to get into the minds of others, he saw writing as a way to better clarify his own thinking: I very much resonated with this, as writing is the way I better ‘inwardly digest’ books.
Quotations
Short, bald, a quill pen stuck in his hat, Weems traveled the countryside in a book-laden wagon he dubbed the Flying Library. Whenever he pulled into a town, he hollered out: “Seduction! Revolution! Murder!” It was a strange thing for a former Episcopalian minister to say.
Jefferson needed books to think, legislate, and persuade. To him, the tools of a writer and the tools of a politician were the same.
Jefferson’s early retirement frustrated his friends. “The present,” James Monroe wrote in an acerbic letter, “is generally conceived to be an important era.”
No one ever described Adams as a writer better than Adams did himself. In another letter to Jefferson, he summed up his style by alluding to a lush mountain in The Iliad: “Whenever I sit down to write to you,” the author confided, “I am precisely in the situation of the woodcutter on Mount Ida: I cannot see wood for trees. So many subjects crowd upon me that I know not with which to begin.” So Adams, as both a writer and a reader, would wander, chopping for a while on this tree, then trimming a branch on that one, then deciding to plant a sapling in the clearing up ahead.
“To be wholly overlooked,” [Adams] once wrote, “and to know it, are intolerable.”
During lectures, [Theodore] Roosevelt would interrupt and interrogate his professors. One resorted to pleading, “Now look here, Roosevelt, let me talk. I’m running this course.”
“I am going to begin to be a historian again,” Wilson said, “and I am going to have the privilege of writing about these gentlemen without any restraints of propriety.”
Ex-presidents had plenty of ways to make a buck—endorsement deals, consulting fees, marketing stunts—but Truman rejected all of them. He hated the thought of doing something that would exploit or demean the executive branch, and that standard applied to underfunded ex-presidents as well. “I’d rather starve,” he said.
Reagan’s literary side even popped up in his movies. In 1952, he starred in She’s Working Her Way through College, a musical about a burlesque dancer trying to get an education (and to overcome some ugly stereotypes). Reagan played a professor who gives a speech denouncing bias in all its forms, and when he didn’t like the speech in the script, he rewrote it himself. Studio head Jack Warner couldn’t believe it. “What’s this I hear,” he demanded of the director, “about you letting a damned actor write his own speeches?” Then Warner watched Reagan’s version: “You win.”
The narrative of his life, told in his books and best speeches, often felt like the key to his appeal. “We’re not running against a real person,” one of Hillary Clinton’s staffers complained in 2008. “We are running against a story.”
During the 2012 campaign, Herman Cain was accused of running for president to boost his book sales. “If you know Herman Cain, you know nothing is further from the truth,” he replied. “And if you don’t believe me, I invite you to get a copy of my new book, This Is Herman Cain!”
President Herbert Hoover found himself homesick during his term in office in D.C, and decided to buy some land with his own money to develop as a mountain retreat. While security concerns did add some infrastructure, like telephone lines, the creation of Camp Rapidan was solely a personal project — though one Hoover intended to gift to presidents who followed him. Roosevelt, who did follow him, found Rapidan too rough for his own needs, but liked the idea. So was born a new camp in a more attractive location, some two hours from D.C. and largely isolated. Thus Shangri-La was born, and ever since then it has been — despite a name change — a retreat for presidents and an attractive locale to host world leaders. Inside Camp David is written by a former commander of the camp, who served during the tail end of the Clinton years and the beginning of the George W. years, and folds in stories about presidents at the camp inside Giorgione’s own personal memoirs. While formal history has been made at Camp David, this is chiefly of interest to those curious about the camp itself, and the parts of the presidents that were revealed in this more casual, rustic setting. Who would ever guess that Bill Clinton liked being a choirboy on Sunday mornings?
This was not a topic I had a huge interest in, but one day while taking lunch at work I realized I didn’t have a book to read: fortunately, I work in a library, so I grabbed something off the shelf that lent itself well to cozy lunch reading. I do have a fascination for the presidency that other libertarians probably find suspicious, so I was fairly quickly pulled in. I was surprised to learn that the camp is operated by the US Navy, and this owes in part to the odd way that the idea of a retreat was formed. Franklin D. Roosevelt liked the idea of a camp, but he much preferred relaxing on the presidential yacht, the USS Potomac. The outbreak of World War 2 forced him to claim a Works Progress Administration park, newly built, and christen it “Shangri-La”, transferring crew from the Potomac to serve as its staff. To this day, the camp has a naval officer in charge of operations, and the entire staff — from servers to groundskeepers — are bonafide members of the Navy, many of them Seabees who are doing work like planting flowers that they’re absurdly overqualified for. Although the camp has witnessed history itself — being used by Roosevelt to conduct the war, even hosting Churchill, and later being the setting of the Camp David Accords — more interesting for me was how the men themselves and their families used the place.
Like their employment of vice presidents, presidents have varied widely on how they use Camp David. Ronald Reagan loved the place, visiting most weekends he was in office: it probably helped that it gave the equestrian a place to ride regularly. Reagan’s use of Camp David is also notable in that he preferred coming alone, without the large family and friends entourages that marked other presidents who visited less, like the Clintons. For virtually every president who visits, it’s a place of relaxation — a place where their days are unscripted and they can ride, shoot, or bike at their pleasure. (One notable exception is LBJ, who viewed it as just another workspace.) The isolation allows for presidents to get away with things they couldn’t otherwise do, like drive themselves, or teach their kids to drive. Giorgione remarks that the lessening of pressure allows for presidents and first families to let their hair down — making jokes with the staff or even forgetting the eyes on them. (Gerald Ford introduced himself to camp staff as “Gerry”.) While White House memoirs I’ve read consistently mention that Hillary Clinton was a …pill, let’s say, she is evidently more pleasant company at Camp David or the commander didn’t see fit to comment. As close as he comes is noting that LBJ was demanding about his showers, and that George W. frequently wore staff out with his love of biking, running, etc. Dick Cheney also appears in a mis-step: he arrived at Camp David during 9/11 and said that the president had said for him to be put up in Aspen Cabin, the presidential suite. When Bush returned to Washington, he was not pleased that Cheney had taken over his bedroom.
This was a fun look into a place I knew literally nothing about before. I enjoy books that allow me to see the presidents more as people than politicians, especially given that there are some politicians I have strong opinions about and don’t particularly like disliking as much as I do.The book is good about showing that human side for most everyone covered here, and the camp itself is such an odd operation there’s intrinsic interest in learning about it. There were bits of trivia I found fascinating, like the number of foreign dignitaries who have an interest in seeing nearby Gettysburg Battlefield when they visit, and the absurd degrees that the White House goes to appease foreign visitors. Reagan allowed the Russians to replace the phone system at Camp David with their own during peace talks, and the women in the camp staff, as well as their children, were asked not to go outside wearing shorts, swimsuits, or anything too revealing as a way of showing their respect to Clinton’s Palestinian guests. Said guests returned the favor by going commando under their open robes and driving golf carts all over the flower gardens, paved paths made for the purpose apparently being marks of western decadence. Honestly, what’s the point of being the global superpower if you’re going to let terrorists destroy the tulips?
Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is, “A few happy memories from my life”. But first. WWW Wednesday!
WWW Wednesday
WHAT have you finished reading recently? Magna Carta, Dan Jones.
WHAT are you reading now? Rebecca, Daphne du Maurier. A third through and picking up steam. I think the earliest part was the slowest. I also started reading Inside Camp David yesterday when I realized I’d forgotten Rebecca at home. It strikes me as a fairly fast read.
WHAT are you reading next? I may take a look at Mansfield Park. It’s on my CCII list and would be an appropriate way to start closing April out. I’ll also be getting into Author in Chief, I think, a study of presidents who write. (Yes, inspired by Inside Camp David. No, I’m not planning on a sudden presidential obsession like the one of summer-fall 2023. No, “not planning” doesn’t mean a thing at RF, just like “planning” only rarely means something.)
Long and Short: Happy Memories
My happiest memories tend to congregate around 2007-2010, when I went off to a full university. I was leaving behind a past that had become difficult and degrading, and going to college was a genuine escape. Imagine Harry Potter going to Hogwarts for the first time and you’ll have some idea: in fact, I wrote in my journal that my residence hall, Napier, “was no Gryffindor, but it will do”. I was young, idealistic, and optimistic about the future: I lived on a beautiful campus with constant intellectual and artistic stimulation at the ready, and a group of friends whom I argued and stargazed and hiked with often. Perhaps it was simply because college is a special time of life, or perhaps it was because the campus and the town were designed for humans rather than cars: I could walk anywhere, and did, making a weekly habit of toddling down to the local public library for books. I was around people I knew and liked every day; we never planned to meet up, we just did, and I ate with friends nearly every day. Even when I was alone, there was quiet contentment to be found in curling up in a secluded corner of the university library to read or work on a paper. When I left Montevallo, I made it my purpose to recapture as much of this magic as I could, cultivating community and connection. COVID and the tornado that gutted my city have both made that a challenge, but I still find it — sitting on porches with families and friends with stories and laughs, settling under a tree with a great long book, etc. And then ther have been more extraordinary moments, like watching the sun set over St. Augustine, watching it rise over Santa Fe & the Grand Canyon, or sitting in the surf in Pensacola, hypnotized by the power of the waves.
Let us step into the night and pursue that flighty temptress, adventure.
Half-Blood Prince and Prisoner of Azkaban routinely compete for my favorite HP novel, and for similar reasons — humor and backstory. It is far, far more than that, however: Prisoner of Azkaban had both in spades, but HBP is a different beast altogether. It is the book that ushers Harry through the end of his youth and lays on him the mantle of adulthood and responsibility — not because he turns 17, but because events in motion are ushering in the Endgame. HBP marks itself as different from the beginning, opening not at Privet Drive but in the offices of the prime minister. The PM is aghast to be visited by the “other” minister — the Minister for Magic — and informed that Voldemort is indeed among the living, and that the strange streak of deadly weather and disappearances and deaths owes to the magical world’s new war bleeding into his own. We then visit Death-Eaters before finally returning to Harry, who is snatched away by Dumbledore on a mission. Harry and Dumbledore on a mission is a recurring theme of this book, because Voldemort’s rise means Dumbledore must redouble his efforts — and recruit Harry as an ally — in his very secret plan to strike at the heart of Voldemort’s dark power. This is a novel rich in story, in laughs and heartbreak. For me, it has pushed the full-cast audio books into new terrain — I am growing to see them more and more as the optimum way to experience the story of Harry Potter.
If The Goblet of Fire eased us into the exit of normality onto the freeway of Intense Magical Drama, one whose stress we experienced more intensely by virtue of being crammed into a little car with Dolores Umbridge, in Half Blood Prince we are fully in the thick of things. School is happening in the background, yes, and in fact Harry has an interesting school year. His nemesis Snape has finally gotten the promotion he’s long desired, to teach Defense against the Dark Arts, and Harry has a new potions teacher (Horace Slughorn) who was quite fond of Harry’s mother. Better yet, Harry uses an old textbook with annotations from the previous owner, a boy who was something of a potions savant, and grows in confidence now that he’s no longer being brow-beaten by Snivelus. Quidditch continues apace, as well. But Half Blood Prince has a far more serious undercurrent that continues growing stronger with every chapter until towards the end when all the minor chatter about exams and House Cups is swept away by Dumbledore and Harry’s quest to understand the rise of Voldemort — and his rebirth. What led to the young Tom Riddle becoming the dark wizard he was, and why did Voldemort seem to die in the attempt to kill Harry, only to be reborn? The answers lie in the particular dark arts that Voldemort was pursuing: this is hardly a spoiler, given that his name means ‘flight from death’ and his followers call themselves Death-Eaters. I won’t go into spoilers, of course, but in the last fifth of this book Dumbledore introduces Harry to a theory he has regarding Voldemort’s approach to defeating death, an approach they must frustrate by research, hard work, suffering, and boldness. The battle against Voldemort will not be bloodless, not even at this early stage.
Shifting now to the audio: the new voice actors are good, especially the man (Bill Nighy) voicing Slughorn. He had a rough mark to beat, as I adore Jim Broadbent’s Slughorn (despite being more morally dodgy than his book version) , and he also has a demanding performance. A running part of the book is Dumbledore sharing memories from various people with Harry regarding Voldemort’s rise, and Slughorn unwittingly played a large part of who Voldemort came — something he’s very ashamed of. Harry is tasked with getting Slughorn to share the memory with him, and Slughorn is extremely defensive and emotionally touchy in general about this. He loved Harry’s mom and feels partially responsible for her death, so there’s a lot of emotion work here: there’s also a drunken singing scene with Hagrid, which is hilarious. I don’t know if the lyrics are in the actual book, but at one point Harry is thinking and Slughorn and Hagrid are besottedly pouring themselves into some wizard folk song, and despite knowing what darkness the reader is in for, I couldn’t help but be tickled. There’s an incredible amount of emotion work throughout this book, actually, and the atmospherics are top notch as possible. Toward the end there is an extended bit of dialogue in a tower where there’s a fight going on below, and as the scene progresses we can hear the fight getting closer, closer, closer, and while the emotion in the room is rising we can also feel the stress and pressure that the combat is putting on the people in the tower. They’re all circling around action, but not yet taking the leap.
This was quite the performance: the more of these I listen to the more addictive and compelling I find them, so I wind up sitting in the car after I get home from work just trying to make it to the end of the chapter, or falling asleep with the story playing and then waking up in the middle of the night to turn it off so I can get some sleep. I really cannot recommend the full cast audio editions enough, and I almost dread the arrival of Deathly Hallows because it means this exquisite ride is almost over. Yes, I will be listening to the stories again, but there’s nothing, nothing like that first time. It makes me think of the month I got into Red Dead Redemption 2, and I wound up playing the last two chapters through nearly in one weekend, not because I was in a hurry to finish but because the story was so good I kept wanting to wade in deeper despite knowing the faster I went the sooner I’d find myself rather rudely deposited back in the real world. This is simply masterful and deeply human entertainment.
Quotations
“I don’t mean to be rude – ” he began, in a tone that threatened rudeness in every syllable. “ – yet, sadly, accidental rudeness occurs alarmingly often,” Dumbledore finished the sentence gravely. “Best to say nothing at all, my dear man.”
“What have you been doing to that book, you depraved boy?’ ‘It isn’t the library’s, it’s mine!’ said Harry hastily, snatching his copy of Advanced Potion-Making off the table as she lunged at it with a clawlike hand. ‘Despoiled!’ she hissed. ‘Desecrated! Befouled!’ ‘It’s just a book that’s been written in!’ said Harry, tugging it out of her grip.
“Do you remember when I said we were practicing nonverbal spells, Potter?” “Yes.” “‘Yes. sir.'” “There’s no need to call me ‘sir’, professor.”
“I am not worried, Harry. I am with you.”
“Think your little jokes’ll help you on your deathbed?” “Jokes? No,no, these are manners.”
“Tonks deserves someone young, and whole.” “But she wants YOU, Remus.”
Today’s TTT is ‘April showers’, which a challenging one. One obvious approach that comes to mind is books in which rain is a major element, either in shaping the plot or in creating an atmosphere. The problem is that I can’t really think of any off-hand, and I don’t want to do weather nonfiction because I’m fairly certain I’ve done that for a list before…so I’m going to have to bow out of this one!
(1) Go Directly to Jail: The Criminalization of Everything, Gene Healy. Several essays on how the rapid expansion of federal crimes not only creates injustice by ruining lives for petty, bureaucratic matters, but distorts services in ways that diminish the lives of everyone.
(2) Saving Congress from Itself, James L. Buckley. Argues that Congress is overwhelmed by petty work — listening to committee reports on grants-in-aid — and spends very little time on issues of national interest, and none in defending its Constitutional prerogatives from the executive branch.
(3) The Iron Web, Larken Rose. This is a fascinating thriller that is also a political dialogue; a teenager and a wounded Federal agent find themselves living in the compound of a so-called terrorist group/extremist cult, which is engaged in a Waco-style standout with armed goonie boys. As the standoff proceeds, the teenager and the agent both have arguments with the ‘terrorists’ about politics: the thriller part has a heck of a twist ending. This heavily favors voluntarist politics.
(4) Seeing like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition have Failed, James Scott. This is one of the more conceptually interesting books I’ve ever read: one of its recurring themes is that the state seeks to increase the ‘legibility’ of things in order that it might better control them. This is, of course, EXTREMELY relevant in the data age: every bit of information that corporations and the government hoover up about us makes it possible for them to render us more legible/known/transparent. Scott also points out that the process of making things more legible often destroys or diminishes them.
Jonathan Haidt delves into the nature of morality, following the pursuit of it from philosophy to evolutionary psychology. Haidt produces three core ideas: one, David Hume was correct in positing that people are more intuitive than rational; two, moral concerns don’t have a singular source, but fall along six separate axes, each derived from our natural history, despite being couched in flourished religious and philosophical language; and finally, that morality is double-edged sword, binding us with one another as well as against others
Teaser Tuesday
Richard would become one of the most celebrated kings in British history; he remains the only monarch to be commemorated with a statue outside the Houses of Parliament. This is ironic, for of all the kings who reigned after the Norman Conquest, Richard probably spent the least time – and took the least personal interest – in his English kingdom. MAGNA CARTA, Dan Jones
I’m being rather a brute to you, aren’t I? This isn’t your idea of a proposal. We ought to be in a conservatory, you in a white frock with a rose in your hand, and a violin playing a waltz in the distance. And I should make violent love to you behind a palm tree. You would then feel then you were getting your money’s worth.” REBECCA, Daphne du Maurier
(Some phrases…..change meaning after a century or so…)
I knew it was 1216! One after Magna Carta! As I could ever make such a mistake. Never!
In a sunny meadow in southern England stands a quiet monument commemorating a document signed there centuries ago: the Magna Carta. The monument is erected not by some English historical society, however, but by the American Bar Association. The Magna Carta, or Great Charter, has had a fascinating life, famed more in legacy than in its own day. Dan Jones’ Magna Carta is not simply a history of how the Great Charter came to be: his Realm Dividedcovered that fairly well. Instead, it is both a history of how the Charter came to be created and how it grew to be a legend in the annals of the Anglo-American world — regarded as the foundation of law beyond the king’s arbitrary authority. It’s a short book, with over half its physical body being composed of appendices. Interestingly, the story begins with John’s father Henry II, who created an increasingly efficient machine in the English state for conducting business and extracting money from the populace; this machine would be put to especially good use by Richard II, who I was surprised to learn spent vanishingly little time in England proper. John, too, would take advantage of it both for his own causes and when Richard was taken hostage and needed to pay off his European captors. A recurring theme here is the absolute faithlessness of monarchs to their people, family to family — John was trying to help the French undermine his brother, only to later be bitten by serpent he’d nursed when Phillip II seized all of the Angevin dynasty’s French holdings — and the barons and their king. One can understand the barons wanting to strike against the king, but soliciting the French who have already taken the barons’ “home” of Normandy? Frankly, if it weren’t for the very brief mention of Thomas Becket in this, there’d be no one to root for at all. The last twenty pages of the text concerns the ‘afterlife’ of Magna Carta: evidently in the 13th century it was continually modified and re-issued, and then fell into disuse, but then during the Enlightenment era when liberalism first became a political force, both Englishmen at home and in the American colonies seized on it as an ancestral inspiration for their own desire to reign in power via the law, and its reputation has been ballooning ever since.
This was in short a brief, but interesting little history.
Quotations
It is true that at times John was no less ruthless than his brother Richard, nor any less manipulative than his father, Henry. But if his relatives shared some of his worst traits, he shared almost none of their best. […] Ralph of Coggeshall lived through John’s reign and despaired of the king, pointing out his cruelty, his small-minded viciousness, his threatening manner and his childish habits of ridiculing his subjects and laughing at their misfortunes.
Reading Freely 
