In my lifetime, in my part of the world, the notion and meaning of ‘home’ has steadily crumbled under this external pressure until it is little more than a word. In a Machine anticulture, the home is a dormitory, probably owned by a landlord or a bank, in which two or more people of varying ages and degrees of biological relationship sleep when they’re not out being employed by a corporation, or educated by the state in preparation for being employed by a corporation. The home’s needs are met through pushing buttons, swiping screens or buying-in everything from food to furniture; for who has time for anything else, or has been taught the skills to do otherwise? Phones long ago replaced hearth fires. Handily, a phone, unlike a fire, can be kept under the pillow in case something urgent happens elsewhere while we sleep. We wouldn’t want to miss anything.

Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine.

Today’s Top Ten topic is….cozy reads. Well, alrighty then!

(1) The Awakening of Miss Prim. A young woman accepts a position in a strange little village that time and modernity have appeared to have forgotten. It’s a philosophical novel, but not in the Brothers Karamazov read-it-three-times and suddenly your life is irrevocably changed sense. It’s more of “…I never thought about that before.”

You say you’re looking for beauty, but this isn’t the way to achieve it, my dear friend. You won’t find it while you look to yourself, as if everything revolved around you. Don’t you see? It’s exactly the other way around, precisely the other way around. You mustn’t be careful, you must get hurt. What I am trying to explain, child, is that unless you allow the beauty you seek to hurt you, to break you and knock you down, you’ll never find it.”

(2) What You are Looking for Is in the Library. This one borders on the edge of magical realism because a librarian’s uncanny ability to find a book, and an object, that will change a person’s life. The plot is simple: in each story, a person in distress finds themselves in a community center’s library, in search of a book. When they tell the librarian what they want, however, they receive something different: what they need. I’m hoping more of this author’s work goes into English translation.

(3) The Invisible Heart:An Economic Romance. Boy meets girl, they fall in love. Problem is….he’s a classically liberal economist and she’s a modern liberal English teacher. Arguing over politics seems an improbable way to build a romance, though it’s worked for me in many of my friendships. Anyhoo, this is a sweet story full of discussion. Its author, Russ Roberts. hosts a weekly show called EconTalk which these days is more about human flourishing. Unfortunately, its audio quality suffered after he moved to Israel and had to do phone interviews only, but the dear man offers transcripts for free. Reading a conversation is nothing near the same as sitting and listening to two intelligent, urbane people hashing out an issue, but it’s not nothing. Speaking of…

(4) The Black Widowers series. Six men meet at a dinner club every month, taking turns to host and bring a guest. The guest, invariably, brings a mystery. The six professionals then try to logic their way through the puzzle, applying their reason along with their knowledge of history, literature, geography, etc. The mystery is always solvable by the reader, with the possible exceptions of “The Acquisitive Chuckle” and “The Obvious Factor”. When I eat at home, these are go-to companions.

(5) Possibly my strangest entry, The Kunstlercast: Conversations with James Howard Kunstler on the Comic Tragedy of Suburban Sprawl. I find this “cozy”, I suppose, because there’s a huge amount of nostalgia for me. Listening to Kunstler lecture at my university back in ’08 or ’09 was a life-changing experience for me, making me understand why I found old American cities fascinating and modern development so ugly and depression. These are transcripts of conversations between Jim and his friend Duncan Crary, who at the time I knew from another podcast, on some issue related to urbanism and its relationship with human flourishing.

(6) Anything by Rachel Joyce. I stumbled into her last year and fell head over heels with her stories, all of which are about human connection.

(7) Most anything by PG Wodehouse. I say most anything because he wrote an awful lot, and I’ve only explored his Jeeves and Wooster stories for the most part.

(8) Old Star Trek novels I’ve re-read so many times that the covers are worn off and I know most of the dialogue and sometimes confuse scenes in books for scenes in the actual shows.

(9) Before the Coffee Gets Cold. This is Japanese magical realism about a coffee shop with a twist: one chair in this shop can transport you to a moment in time in the coffee shop. That doesn’t seem like much, especially since the past can’t be changed, but sometimes the past can change us. I’m amazed by the fact that the author is able to get so many stories from the same basic premise.

(10) Anything by Wendell Berry, whether that be his Port William novels or his essays. I’ve even read his poetry and memorized one, “The Peace of Wild Things”.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

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