Well, welcome to the end of another year. December began quietly here at Reading Freely, as I was preoccupied with a final project that I didn’t finish until December 10, though my month of research, writing, and designing culminated in something that the teacher hailed as “top notch” and asked if she could use as a model for her future classes. That was quite a way to end the semester! Although I had some daft hope of using December to give nonfiction a chance to reclaim its never-before-challenged supremacy, the mental load from school and the business of going to Christmas plays and such meant that I mostly read novels….again, but cozy and Christmassy novels fit for the season. I also had the goal of posting reviews for several excellent books I’ve read this year but had never posted reviews for.

RetroReviews:
Living in Wonder, Rod Dreher

Classics Club:
Animal Farm, George Orwell. “Holupaminute,” you said, “Animal Farm wasn’t on your list!”. I’m altering the list. Pray I do not alter it any further. (My library’s copy of Plutarch’s Lives went missing, so I am replacing the two volumes with Animal Farm and The Confessions.)

The Unreviewed:

Imagine…..a human economy. Picture a city in which all the stores and farms were owned and operated by households and individuals who lived in that city, not by corporations — a city fed by the farms that surrounded it, produced by the same people who called that city home. Imagine a place where waste is recycled, because there’s no “away” for it to go to, where agency, accountability, and fellowship undergird everything. Welcome to the distributist/localist vision. “Distributism” is an ugly word for a beautiful idea, one first bandied about by GK Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc, and embodying the ideals put forth in papal encyclicals from the 19th and early 20th century. It’s something I stumbled into via E.F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful, the book that led to my investigating the Catholic social doctrine, and being besotted by Catholic culture in general. Localism is not a monograph, but a collection of essays centered in the localist theme, all expressing themselves through the author’s respective expertise. For instance, I was delighted to encounter none other than Chuck Marohn here: I’ve followed his urbanist writing at StrongTowns ever since he began in 2008, but here the place-building as local and intimate as possible, as he urges Catholic parishes to devote themselves to building up the neighborhoods surrounding their churches, to be truly integral. Another writer who is an experienced homesteader offers a beginner’s guide, beginning with how to study the land and ending with advice on diverse kinds of livestock. Curiously, there’s no overall introductory essay which provides the theological underpinnings of the Catholic social doctrine — the encyclicals like Rerum Novarum and Quadragesimo Anno, which scrutinized industrialism, capitalism, and socialism — though occasionally authors touch on subjects covered within the encyclicals like subsidiarity and participation. I knew five of the authors contributing: Marohn, Joseph Pearce, Michael Warren Davis and Anthony Esolen. Pearce’s inclusion was no surprise, as he’s written a book called Small is Still Beautiful which is a tribute to Schumacher’s classic.The collection is enjoyingly diverse: one piece is a dialogue between two persons with Latin names (a la Galileo’s Dialogue) about poetry and place.

The Science Survey:
Rain: Four Walks in English Weather, Melissa Harrison. Distantly like Aldo Leopold’s Sand County Alamanac, focusing on the changing landscape of a place: but Leopold canvassing an entire year, whereas Harrison is focused on the rain’s effects within that year.

Coming up in January:

I like to have a very mixed January, and I’ve got two books that will be featured as soon as the year starts. (Yes, I cheated by reading them both halfway through in 2024.)