After a vigorous opening for the year, my reading fell back rather dramatically this month before starting to recover with some short biographies and novels at the close. (The novels were Britfic, too, a nice segue into Read of England.) Part of that was spending a lot of time with The Confessions and Order of the Phoenix, full-cast audio edition; the latter was nearly 27 hours of listening in the car and in bed. (I must say, drifting to sleep with Dolores Umbridge hissing at Harry is not advisable.) I made some progress in both the Classics Club and my America @ 250 reading, though I need to broaden my range outside of presidents. I’m looking for a proper history of Philly for my “cities’ track. The Science Survey has yet to get moving, but I am reading a title at present.

WWW Wednesday

WHAT have you finished reading recently? Rutherford B. Hayes, Hans Toufousse; The Authenticity Project, Clare Pooley.

WHAT are you reading now? The People on Platform 5, Clare Pooley.

WHAT are you reading next? The Sober Diaries, Clare Pooley. Told you I was going to binge her!

America @ 250

Ulysses S. Grant, Josiah Bunting III
Rutherford B. Hayes, Hans Trefousse

Classics Club

The Confessions, St. Augustine. Trans. Anthony Esolen.
Paradise Lost, John Milton

Coming up in April…

Read of England, of course, my annual focus on English literature and English history. I have three English lit options on my Classics Club list, and last year I acquired a sack of English history (along with some Southern history) for just a few dollars:

Nonbook Commonplace Quotes

We develop an unconscious set toward reading based on how we read during most of our digital-based hours. If most of those hours involve reading on the distraction-saturated Internet, where sequential thinking is less important and less used, we begin to read that way even when we turn off the screen and pick up a book or newspaper…There is a worrisome and potentially more lasting aspect to this “bleeding over” effect…:the more we read digitally, the more our underlying brain circuitry reflects the characteristics of that medium. “The Reading Rebellion“, School of the Unconformed

Most people, historically, have not lived their lives as if thinking, “I have only one life to live.” Instead they have lived as if they are living their ancestors’ lives and their offspring’s lives and perhaps their neighbors’ lives as well. They have seen themselves as inseparable from the great tide of chromosomes of which they are created and which they pass on. The mere fact that you were only going to be here a short time and would be dead soon enough did not give you the license to try to climb out of the stream and change the natural order of things. “Me Generation”, Tom Wolfe as quoted on “The Me Generation’, Fifty Years On“. Rod Dreher.

At the root of our “metacrisis” is “the whole way in which we dispose our hearts and minds towards the world.” If you look at the world as a problem to be solved, as opposed to a mystery to be lived, you’re going to be miserable. There is no twelve-point formula for How To Live A Good Life, any more than there is a formula that, once you learn it, makes you a violinist. You have to learn by doing. “Teachings of the Monk of Skye“, Rod Dreher. Lex orandi, lex credendi….

“If moral reasoning is one casualty of reliance on LLMs, it is far from the only one. Consider writing. Writing is not simply a way to display what we know—it is the process through which we figure out what we think.” “When AI Thinks For Us“, Hyoungbin Park. Skeptic magazine.