Today’s treble-T is “Books By My Favorite Authors”, which is unfair but I shall do my best. But foist, Teaser Tuesday!

Today Jupiter radiates twice as much heat as it receives from the Sun. Early on it would have glowed much hotter, baking away the water from its innermost moon, Io. From Io’s perspective, Jupiter looms like a giant saucer in the sky, so it would have acted like a heat lamp. WHEN AMERICA HAD TWO MOONS

And now:

Top Ten Books from My Favorite Authors

(1) Jayber Crow, Wendell Berry. Although I love Brother Berry’s nonfiction, my first experience with him was Jayber.

(2) Tales of the Black Widowers, Isaac Asimov. Is — are? — Tales ‘foundational’ literature? No. The dear doctor is known for other titles, but I love his Black Widowers stories. I used to re-read them at meals regularly.

(3) Lords of the North, Bernard Cornwell. I have read a lot of Bernard Cornwell, a term which here means “at least 54 titles”. Lords of the North, though, number three in the Saxon Stories series, always springs readily to mind because it had a unique plot, and it’s the lowest Uhtred or any of Cornwell’s characters has ever been in a story. Back in 2010 when I first read this, I immediately followed my book-reading with the audiobook.

(4) Surprised by Joy, C.S. Lewis. This one was a hard one, because I love so much Jack has written — but Surprised has the signal virtue of being the Lewis work I’ve re-read the most times. I re-read it less for what it chronicles, but for his presence.

[My father] relied wholly on his tongue as an instrument of domestic discipline. And here that fatal bent toward dramatization and rhetoric produced a pathetic yet comic result. When he opened his mouth to reprove us he no doubt intended a short well-chosen appeal to our common sense and conscience. But alas, he had been a public speaker long before he became a father. Words came to him and intoxicated him as they came. What actually happened was that a small boy who had walked on damp grass in his slippers or left the bathroom in a pickle found himself attacked with something like Cicero on Cataline, or Burke on Warren Hastings; simile piled on simile, rhetorical question on rhetorical question, the flash of an orator’s eye and the thundercloud of an orator’s brow, the gestures, the cadences, the pauses. […] While he spoke, he forgot not only the offense, but the capacities of his audience. All the resources of his immense vocabulary were poured forth. I can still remember such words as ‘abominable”, “sophisticated”, and “surreptitious”. You will not get the full flavor unless you know an angry Irishman’s energy in explosive consonants and the rich growl of his r’s.”

(5) Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, Anthony Esolen.

If you take a peek at my Classics Club list, you’ll see four works translated from the Latin by Esolen. He has been a favorite for liberal arts / humanities reading for many years now, though I cannot remember when I stumbled on him. He’s one of two authors (the other being Bill Kauffman) who could write an article without a byline and I’d recognize his ‘voice’, so to speak.

(6) How Dante Can Save Your Life, Rod Dreher. I was tempted to mention Crunchy Cons here since it’s the work that introduced me to Dreher, but his Dante book came around for me at just the right time — and I had the good fortune to thank him personally for it back in 2022. He is currently working on a book about American Weimar.

(7) Tolkien’s Sanctifying Myth, Brad Birzer. Man alive, I love reading and listening to Brad Birzer. I found him via Liberty Classroom, where he has lectures on American history, as well as the intersection of politics and science fiction. He has such a wonderful voice for speaking that, like Esolen, I look for his lectures on youtube.

(8) The Demon Haunted World, Carl Sagan. Speaking of voices, I can’t miss Carl. I owe this book — on the importance of skepticism in the information age — a re-read.

(9) Look Homeward, America!, Bill Kauffman. I gotta go with my first book by Bill (he told me to call him Bill, we exchange Christmas cards). Just going to quote my review:

 Look Homeward, America collects the stories of eccentric individuals who, in a century marked by the advance of corporate and state power, rebelled against the machine. Planting their flag above small towns and in the countryside, they held on what they regarded as valuable and defied or attempted to resist the march of a more inhumane world. Bill Kauffman is a sympathetic soul, a die-hard “placeist”. He calls himself the anarchist love-child of Henry David Thoreau and Dorothy Day, and Look Homeward is his tribute to peaceable troublemakers like his ‘parents’. They are farmers and social workers, politicians and miners, men and women whose faith is the family and the local community. They champion self-reliance, local interest, and peace; they scorn war, industrial agriculture, big business, and government bureaucracy.

Fun fact: the artwork that is the frontispiece of Look Homeward is called “Spring in Town” by Grant Wood. A print now hangs in my bedroom, along with several Jack Vettriano pieces and posters of Frank Sinatra and Audrey Hepburn.

(10) The Consolations of Philosophy, Alain de Botton. When I first found Stoicism, I searched on Youtube for resources. This was in 2008 or so, long before Stoicism had a strange revival, so I was surprised to find anything. I found a TV show based on this book, and an episode “Seneca on Anger”, that lulled me into watching the series, buying the book, then reading all I could of de Botton.

Blog news: I’m working on a review for Lincoln as well as Maverick, but I gave my brain the weekend off and just watched movies. Currently reading Kennedy & Nixon (there is no escaping 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue this year) and When the Earth Had Two Moons.