WHAT have you finished reading recently? Uncharted, a history of the 2024 campaign; and kinda sorta Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I listened to most of the audiobook read by Stephen Fry, finished it in print, and am continuing to listen to the audio. I have a review for the audiobook in the works; I’m just waiting to hear Fry’s version of Voldemort to finish it off.

WHAT are you reading now? Friends Divided, Gordon S. Wood, on the relationship between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. I was nibbling at The Summer Before the War, but at the pace of someone pecking politely at some strange vegetable dish served at a dinner party: it being a loaned ebook, the thing disappeared into thin air overnight and I don’t feel particularly compelled to check it out again. I’m loving Friends Divided so far: Wood appears to have a handle on how delightfully complex the souls of both of these men were.

Jefferson was a moral idealist, a child of light. Humans, he believed, were basically good and good-hearted, guided by an instinctive moral sense. Only when people’s good nature was perverted by outside forces, especially by the power and privilege of monarchical government, did they become bad. Adams also believed that people possessed an inner moral sense, which enabled them to distinguish between right and wrong, but he never had the confidence in it that Jefferson had. Adams may not have been a child of darkness, but he was not a child of light either. His conception of human nature was stained with a sense of sin inherited from his Puritan ancestors. But his bleak view of human nature and his irascibility were leavened by his often facetious joking, his droll stories, and his sense of the absurdity of things. By contrast, Jefferson was always much more serious about life. He never revealed much of a sense of humor, and when he did it was often so dry as to be barely felt.

WHAT are you reading next? Very much depends on Friends Divided. I have a feeling it may lead to a binge. I also have To Infinity and Beyond, a recent Neil deGrasse Tyson release, but we’ll see.

Today’s prompt from Long and Short Reviews is board and card games we like. I think I would like more board games if I had the opportunity to play them: I used to have a gaming circle, but between COVID, the tornado, and the fact that my city has been Alabama’s fastest-shrinking town for fifteen years, it’s disappeared. My family always played card and board games when I was a kid — UNO, Spades, Aggravation, etc — and I also liked stuff like BATTLESHIP. The most recent card game I got into was CHAMELEON, where most of the players receive a prompt for responses and one player (unknown to the rest) has to fake their responses based on what they think the prompt was about, judging by what the other players are saying. If I lived in a bigger area I’d probably be into games like Settlers of Cataan, but there simply isn’t an opportunity.