Welcome to Advent! While today is only the last day of November, it does close the liturgical year’s longest season — Pentecost, or “Ordinary Time” — and begin the story of good news again. This morning, my Adult Formation class discussed the difference between Advent and Christmas, and how the latter has completely overwhelmed the former. Granted, Christmas has taken over November, too, and it would probably take over October were it not for costumes and people’s interest in the macabre. I thought it interesting that most of the people in the room disliked the weight of Commercial Christmas — the mandatory gifting, the constant parties and consumption, &c — and yet no one appeared willing to fight it. Personally, if it weren’t for family & social pressure, I’d happily be done with the gift-giving aspects of Christmas myself: while I love giving thoughtful, spontaneous gifts (ooh, they would love this! I’ll get it for them!), I despise the emotional blackmail of Christmas, Father’s Day, Mother’s Day, St Valentine’s Day, etc. Consume or endure resentment, ugh. So here’s to Advent, a season of fasting, penitence, and soberness while all around us everyone is doing the complete opposite.

While it is possible I will finish Heinlein today, it is not likely considering the deep history mood I am in at the moment. November’s reading was intended to be a careful balance between Science Fiction November and science or history, the latter goals aimed at finishing the science survey and ensuring that nonfiction did not get bested by fiction like it did last year. Instead, it started off as science fiction and then…drifted into the American Civil War, because why not? That actually brought back some fond memories: I remember spending all of one Thanksgiving break immersed in either Sid Meier’s Antietam or Sid Meier’s Gettysburg. The Civil War binge was predicated on — I think — my finding that a lecturer on southern folk music had his own Youtube channel, which I plumbed the depths of one weekend. (The linked video is his recollection of visiting New Orleans for a historical conference and deciding that sitting in a ballroom listening to people talk while there’s a historic city out there to explore is just silly.) Funny thing: when I first heard his lecture on southern music, I thought to myself that he sounded just like a Pentecostal preacher. I learned from my binge that he was in fact raised Pentecostal (but is now Catholic) and did hold a preaching license from a Pentecostal organization for a few year before deciding it was not his calling. Anyhoo, he put me in a mood for southern history and soon tramp, tramp, tramp, the ACW books were marching. I do hope we get to meet one day, because he and have similar backgrounds and stories. I even have a used smoking pipe I bought some years ago: I dare not try to smoke it because of my family history with lung cancer, but I enjoy smelling the fruits of past bowls from time to time. Also, I was volunteered to do a class on the real St. Nicholas, so time for research.

Bonus picture!

Annual Challenges Look-In

Things are grim on this front, I am afraid. I am not especially afraid for the Science Survey, because it’s two books and the only thing I lack in reading them is attention. (And who has issues paying attention to things in December? It’s not as if other things are going on.) The Grand Tour, however, got mugged in a dark alley somewhere in Lisbon or Madrid and has not been seen since. This is still an avenue I want to pursue, but 2026 will be marked by America @ 250 reading, which I will say more about later. (I.e. in a month’s time.) The Classics Club….um, we’re going to call this year a mulligan and pretend my last year starts in January. I literally didn’t read anything on my list for an entire year. Yes, I still have a month, and if we want to pretend that I am capable of reading 10+ classics in one month, we can also pretend that the next election will produce legislators who care about righting the budget and reducing foreign obligations, &c.

The Unreviewed

The Politically Incorrect Guide to The South. It’s funny that this went unreviewed, given that it inspired the back half of my month’s reading. The book is an interesting one, with some provocative Civil War history bookended by fluff, more or less. The first fluff bookend is on how very interesting the South is, and the latter part looked at southerners in US history. Evidently Dixie ran rampant in World War 2, though the author does call some people like Patton honorary southerners because their granddaddies fought for the Confederacy. It’s the middle bit that I suspect everyone comes for, and it made all kinds of claims like “Grant expelled the Jews” to “Lincoln denied emancipation attempts before 1863”. In researching some of these claims, I have found some of them basically true, but exaggerated, or true but misunderstood or misleadingly framed. Grant did expel Jews from Tennessee, but later apologized for it; and while it’s quite true that Lincoln did not free slaves in the Union (including those in DC, Delaware, Maryland, Kentucky, and Tennessee), given that he ran on an 1864 promise to push for the 13th amendment, I wonder if he actually could. This was the 1860s, after all: the Presidency had not yet been perverted by the Roosevelts, Wilson, and others to become an elective monarchy where executive orders have the effect of law. Back then the Constitution still had force, and more importantly limited government still had more adherents than not — north and south. If my current mood holds, I will be reading things like Year of Meteors and Lincoln and the Decision of War. Doesn’t that sound like delightful Christmastide reading?

Coming up in December

History and science! I am currently still working on James McPherson’s Battle Cry of Freedom, and after several days have actually gotten to the war itself. My intention is two science books + whatever else floats I am currently a third through Battle Cry of Freedom and similar for Man of Iron, though Grover Cleveland will be easier to finish than five years of war and politics. The more I read Man of Iron, the more I like “Big Steve”: he may join Adams alongside my favorite presidents. It’s also Advent, and I usually do some devotional reading: this year that’s a history of the Book of Common Prayer. (I love the BCP, and odds are you’ve heard its marriage and funeral services even if you’ve never stepped foot in an Episcopal/Anglican church.)

Nonbook Commonplace Quotes:

“One of the problems of our fallen humanity is that we’re easily distracted, and we spread ourselves out too thin. Almost all religious practice involves collecting yourself, being present. One of the great phrases of Scripture is Abraham’s response to God, ‘Here I am.’ Here I am. I think that’s become one of the most difficult things for a modern person to say — to anyone, let alone to God. Here! Right here, I am. Because we might be there physically, but mentally we’re all over the place.” – Martin Guit, interview with Dr. Alan Harrellson at the Pipe Cottage. An hour-long convo on pipes, C.S. Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Wendell Berry, and presence

“The Suburban Experiment didn’t just change our geography. It rewired our culture. It trained us to experience isolation as prosperity and consumption as citizenship. By the time the internet arrived, we were already living inside systems too large to understand and too brittle to repair.” – Charles Marohn, “The Gutenberg Moment“.

“I think the old become not just repositories of lived experience, but of the dead, too. (…) I think these absences do something to those of us who remain behind. We are like haunted houses, in a way, and our absences can even transform us so that we feel a quiet but urgent love for those who remain, a tenderness to all of humanity, as well as an earned understanding that our time is finite.” – Nick Cave, quoted in Faith, Hope, and Carnage, quoted on substack. (Said substack is evidently banned in Airstrip One.)

New Acquisitions

Oh, dear. My alma mater, the University of Montevallo, has been doing a booksale that consists of discards and donations (some from my former teachers’ libraries!): they were being sold at the lovely price of $1-2 each, so I went in with $20 and came away with this pile:

I wound up swapping A Conquering Spirit for The Battle Cry of Freedom after I realized we had Spirit in the library I work in. (Fun fact: we also have Battle Cry but I didn’t think to check for it. Eh, go Falcons.) Most of the collection is England-oriented in scope, though I’d hoped to score some books on Southern history. As nearest I came was the first volume of Lee’s Lieutenants, part of a large trilogy. There are also a few American Civil War titles in there. I’d been meaning to read The Life of Billy Yank after enjoying The Life of Johnny Reb so much a few years ago.

When I checked my bookstats on the ol’ excel sheet, I was disgruntled to find that 12% of my reads were new acquisitions; my standing goal is to keep that at 10% or under. Given the state of my nonfiction v fiction battle, obviously all of my reading for December will have to be library nonfiction! Of course, this year’s stats are all kinds of weird because of CJ Box and Joe Pickett: Mystery/Thriller is the current genre leader by 7%!

I also purchased Man of Iron on sale on Amazon; $2 for a highly-recommended biography of Grover Cleveland is not bad at all! Ditto Bell I. Wiley’s Confederate Women, which I picked up used and very cheap. Movie Watch will wait until Monday: as of the time of writing, it’s raining on a Sunday afternoon and my odds of watching a movie tonight are quite good.

Also, a final video to think on. While book bloggers lamenting the decline of fiction and the dumbification of the general reading public are common, Amy Shira Teitel has contributed her own thoughts. This is noteworthy because she’s not in the book-blogging scene: her focus is on human spaceflight history, and I’ve read several of her books. She’s currently at work on a third, which I will of course scoop up immediately.