What a month! Despite April being peak tornado season in Alabama, this year the skies were perfectly clement. Not until this past week, in fact, did we have any rumblings of tornadoes at all — seemingly all of our rain for the spring was dumped on us within a couple of days. If you are new to Reading Freely, April is always nominally devoted to English literature and English history, though some years have been misses on that front because of other passions. 2026, however, was fairly well on target with few strays. Not only did I do a fair bit of English history, finally getting into Dan Jones’ works proper, but I knocked out two bits of English lit that were also on my Classics Club list.

Read of England

Read of England began as my way of creating space to read Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, but over the years has largely been about English history and English historical fiction. This year, however, I read two classics of English lit and introduced myself to an intoxicating new-to-me author, Daphne du Maurier. I read:

• Two English classics
• Three other novels by English authors
• and five England-related histories, including two Dan Jones
• a du Maurier short story, “The Birds”, which was as weird as the Hitchcock movie that was based on it, but not quite as horrific as I wasn’t seeing birds dive-bomb schoolgirls.
• and begin ANOTHER work by du Maurier, The Scapegoat. It’s currently competing with Richard Nixon for reading time.

America @ 250

I read three books about the American presidency: one on Lincoln’s assassination, a history of Camp David, and a review of American presidents as authors. I also watched an LBJ movie and three movies about JFK. I’m waiting on Moviewatch, though, as I think I can finish the Nixon biopic I started before a dogsitting stint.

New Acquisitions

While visiting my local indie bookstore, Fair Oaks Books, the proprietor used me as an excuse to get off the phone — “Excuse me, I have to go, I have a customer” — thus obliging me to actually buy something instead of drink coffee and swap gossip. Fortunately there were two Tom Wolfe books in the Two-for-a-dollar box, so I picked up Bonfire of the Vanities and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. (The following week he let me borrow Being Nixon as a thank-you for popping by to wish him Happy Independent Bookstores Day.) also bought used copies of Lincoln by Gore Vidal (a novel, part of his Empire series), Lee in the Shadow of Washington, and Maverick by Jason Riley, the latter being a biography of Thomas Sowell.

Coming in May…

There are at least four releases in May I’m looking forward to: the American-market release of GIRLS by Freya India, on Gen Z women and the dystopian digital world; End of the Road: Inside the War on Truckers; I Would Walk Five Hundred Miles, the latter a recounting by Sean Dietrich of his Camino experience; and Brad Birzer’s The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty.

Nonbook Commonplace Quotes

More profoundly, if we are prepared to accept that “reality” is whatever we choose it to be, by virtue of what we pay attention to, then what’s the limit? Arendt said that Hitler sold to his people not just a political program, but an entire picture of reality itself. It was a synthetic reality that delivered them from the miseries of Weimar’s humiliations, fragmentation, and loneliness. If you had told people ten, twenty years ago that we would have seemingly sane adults developing romantic relationships with AI lovers, they would not have believed you. Who would do such a thing? Now we know. […] The fact that Celeste does not care that she has developed a relationship to a machine is the most important thing about this. Her son is trying to make her understand that this is not real love, that there is something dangerous about this. But she doesn’t care. She wants what she wants. Personal happiness is her absolute telos.” Mom’s AI Lover, Or: That Hideous Chatbot. Rod Dreher.

What you lose when you’re not reading is that you become cocooned within your own experience, in a way that becomes narcissistic and claustrophobic. – Dominic Sandbrook, interview. “Does reading make you a better person?“