My first movie for 2026 was Train Dreams, a beautiful but tragic story of a man who found happiness, then saw it ripped away from him, and then was forced to grapple for meaning like Job. After dealing with an allergic reaction to something that induced lots of eyeball leaking, I declared on facebook: this is the best movie I will see all year! Then I sought out the story it was based on, and …uh.
Just..uh.
“When you was a boy, did you ever get on a stump and love a cow? They all did it over where I’m from. It’s not unnatural down around that way.”
I’m sorry, but what the hell? Train Dreams as a written story is quite different from Train Dreams the movie, and while I do not wish to go on comparing the two stories, it is difficult considering I watched them in the same evening and my brain insists on making Venn diagrams. Doing my best to treat Train Dreams as a novella in its own right, though, it is an odd story — a look at the Old West within the Pacific Northwest, a realization that the Past can continue within the Present (or the Future) for far longer than many might suspect. The Future comes slowly to rural places, especially to those occupied by men like Grainer who still live deeply in the past. One cannot fault Grainer: he was a logger with a wife and a small child, and he worked for them during the logging season and pined for them when he was away, taking solace in the fact that he was providing for them. But then something happened and there was no longer a them to provide for, and he was forced to persist — to work, to wonder. And strange things happened to him. There is a scene where he thinks his daughter is a wolf with a broken leg. I do not know that I would have finished it without having watched the movie in the same evening, to be honest. Well, here’s the trailer for Train Dreams. You may anticipate my comments on it in a month’s time.
“Beautiful, ain’t it?” “What is?” “All of it. Every…bit of it.”
Some Quotations because it did have its merits
Grainier waited. A full minute passed, but Peterson stayed silent. “That just tears it then,” Grainier said, quite agitated. “I’m pulling this team up, and you can walk from here, if you want to beat around and around the bush. I’m taking you to town with a hole in you, and I ask a simple question about how your dog shot you, and you have to play like a bunkhouse lout who don’t know the answer.” “All right!” Peterson laughed, then groaned with the pain it caused him. “My dog shot me in self-defense.”
“His heart was his fate,” Mrs. Pinkham said. “You could looked right at him anytime you wanted and seen this.”
Grainier asked him, “Do you really know how that motor works inside of there?” “I know everything.” Heinz sputtered and fumed somewhat like an automobile himself, and said, “I’m God!” Grainier thought about how to answer. Here seemed a conversation that could go no farther.
In a civilized place, the widows don’t have much to say about who they marry. There’s too many running around without husbands. But here on the frontier, we’re at a premium. We can take who we want, though it’s not such a bargain. The trouble is you men are all worn down pretty early in life. Are you going to marry again?”
“If you’re prowling for a husband,” he said, “I can’t think of a bigger mistake to make than to get around me.” “I’m in agreement with you,” she said. She didn’t seem particularly happy or sad to agree. “I wanted to see if your own impression of you matched up with mine is all, Robert.” “Well, then.” “God needs the hermit in the woods as much as He needs the man in the pulpit. Did you ever think about that?”
This year the United States of America will celebrate its 250th anniversary. I was too young by a decade or so to celebrate the Bicentennial, and unless future medicine is very magic I doubt I will witness the Tricentennial. So, I shall be making hay of this year and the “Semiquincentennial”. I am making wild plans to celebrate in reading along three ‘tracks’. While I would normally be reluctant of making grand plans, given my track history (ho ho), this involves primarily history so I think it’s a fair bet I will make progress among at least one of them. I may also try to emphasize American literature I’ve not explored, like Vidal’s Narrative of Empire series, but we’ll see.
Track One: American History. While this is a fairly broad category, I want to approach it from a bit of an oblique, looking at areas of American history I know little about — like the South in the Revolutionary War, or the the Cherokee in the Civil War. I have started doing this already with the sectional divisions of the pre-Civil War era
Track Two: Americans of interest. “All history is biography,” said Emerson. Will be reading about American lives. Biographies, in other words, and intending to represent a cross-track of Americans I admire or am curious about, with a range of vocations. Some of this will muddle with Track One, but I imagine I’ll also be looking at musicians & such who wouldn’t fall into this category. Many years ago I played with the idea of doing an “American History in 50 Lives” series that would begin with say, Columbus, and then incorporate figures like Jefferson, Clay, Tubman, Carnegie, etc to deliver a rich crossection of American history – buuuuuuuuuuut that’s more ambitious than I can take at the moment. Like my “A Century in a Year” idea, which would have begun January 1 in 1900 and concluded in December at 1999, it would entail not only identifying but SOURCING an insane amount of books. (I’m good at thinking up great reading projects, but not so much at executing them.)
Track Three: American Cities. I am playing with the idea — and again, this muddles with Track One — of exploring American history through cities that embody particular eras. So, Boston for the Revolution, Philadelphia for the early Republic, New York for the age of immigration and commerce, Chicago for industrialism, San Francisco for expansion west, etc. I am still mulling over themes and applicable cities. I like reading city histories, so I am cautiously optimistic about this one.
PRELIMINARY reading idea:
Boston: colonial America
Philadelphia: revolutionary America
Charleston & New Orleans: the South-dominated early republic
Industrialism and civil war: New York, Richmond, and Atlanta
The drive west: Chicago, San Francisco, Los Angeles
Well, December was a heckuva month, that’s all I can say. I read twenty books this month alone, though quite a few entries were ‘short’ — I’ve been making my way through The American Presidents series, all volumes of which are compact, and of course there was Narnia and a few science books I choose specifically because they were short and matched categories I needed to fill for the Science Survey. My Christmas was fairly uneventful: my family couldn’t make any plans, as we are still waiting for the arrival of my great-nephew, so I spent the day sitting on a porch with friends. I spent the majority of the month working on my current obsession, understanding sectional politics in the 1840s – 1850s leading to the Civil War. I made major strides on a presidential reading list, and am currently devouring a volume on John Tyler. Tyler is an unusual character: two decades after his presidency ended, he was part of the convention that voted for Virginia to secede from the Union, and he was elected to the Confederate congress, only to die before he could take his place. My Advent reading was lackluster, but not as lackluster as prior years; I did, at least, read a few titles — a history of the Book of Common Prayer, and the last two books in the Narnia series, both of which are Advent appropriate.
Nonbook Commonplace Quotes
It’s not a feelgood book, but I don’t read and watch movies to feel good; I do it to learn more about the mysteries of the world. Rod Dreher, “Budapest, Mon Amour“
Some people ask me why I get such pleasure from reading books that others would find distressing (e.g., a history of the Great War and cultural decline, Weimar, the Apocalypse). The answer is because nothing makes me happier than gaining deeper understanding of God and the world. – ibid
Moviewatch
What Did Jack Do? David Lynch interrogates a capuchin monkey for 20 minutes in what feels like an exchange of nonsequitors. Short film.
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar and More. A collection of little-known Roald Dahl stories brought to life by Wes Anderson and actors with serious chops like Ralph Fiennes, Benedict Cumberbatch, and Ben Kingsley.
The Big Short. A dramatization of the 2008 economic crisis that led to the Great Recession from the point of view of investors who saw it coming and were determined to capitalize on it. Not as good as Margin Call, but it had a good acting bench. Margin Call was such a tight story, focusing on a few men and women over a single weekend, all managing to make staring at their computer scenes riveting. Jeremy Irons and Kevin Spacey certainly went a long way. Also, I watched Big Short on YouTube for free and it was heavily censored, resulting in high-powered business executive screaming about “dog doo”. (Even better are hip hop lyrics that rhyme doo doo with boo boo.) Brad Pitt is an unexpected broker-turned-doomer with an organic garden and a lot of opinions. The movie occasionally uses cameos like Margot Robie, Anthony Bourdain, and….Selena Gomez? ….. to explain some of the concepts involved. This always breaks the fourth wall, but it works, especially when the explainer is in the scene and the camera just focuses on them. Also, Marisa Tomei plays a bit part!
Bring it On, 2000. Continuing in my quest to watch the movies that everyone else in middle and high school was watching but that I missed, Bring it On is about a cheerleading competition. Kirsten Dunst just inherited her squad from Big Red, who is now going off to college, and at the beginning of the movie she gets a shock: all of her squad’s cheers have been copied by some school in the ghetto by Big Red. Said other school has a new captain, too, and she’s determined to make it to nationals and destroy the squad of rich girls who have been stealing her chants. I enjoyed it for retro tech (like a Gameboy Pocket with a Gameboy Camera attached), the period music, etc.
Gettysburg, 1993. I love this movie; I have watched it I don’t know how many times, and that is a feat given that it’s four hours long. I bought it in high school, along with the book it was based on (though I did not know that at the time). Its characterizations have been in my head for two decades; it was my introduction to actors like Martin Sheen, Sam Elliot, Jeff Daniels, and more. Shaara’s The Killer Angels’ has a style that influences my own fiction, when I write it. There is so much about this movie that is….exquisite. The landscape, as it was filmed in Gettysburg National Park; the battle scenes, using reenactors who knew what they were doing; the divine music, but perhaps most of all for me….the characterization. The characters themselves are so strong – Chamberlain’s sense of duty and justice, coupled with humility; General Amistead’s devotion to his friend General Hancock across the lines, his sobbing horror to learn on Day Three that Hancock had been wounded – Longstreet’s deeply conflicted demeanor, Pickett’s exuberance and warmth and pain. When I was a teenager, I was deep in a Civil War phase and experienced this alongside Sid Meier’s Gettysburg and loved the battle scenes; as I have matured, or at least aged, I find the character drama ever more compelling.
“I’m sorry, sir, the general’s down. He’s been hit.” “No! Not…..both of us! Not….all of us! Please, God!!!”
Richard Jordan, who played General Armistead, died before this film finished post production.
The Lincoln Lawyer, 2011. Matthew McConaughey, Marisa Tomei!, William Macy, and – – BRYAN CRANSTON? Oh, and Bob Gunton, who played Captain Maxwell in ST TNG’s “The Cardassians”. Matthew McConaughey plays a ‘street lawyer’ of sorts – representing all sorts of genuine criminals who are scattered so widely across greater LA that he spends his days in Lincoln towncar. A potentially lucrative case has an uncanny resemblance of one of his earlier cases, and M.M. begins wondering if he isn’t actually defending a monster.
True Grit, 2010. Technically a rewatch, though it’s been 15 years. Based off the Charles Portis novel, which it is far more faithful to than the John Wayne movie, buuut I watched the John Wayne/Robert Duvall film first, so I’m still partial to it. Young Mattie Ross has come to Texas to settle her father’s affairs and avenge his murder; she hires a marshal with a reputation for meanness and drinking to pursue the treacherous Tom Chaney ‘til his death.
“Who is the best Marshall?” “I’d have to weigh that. William Waters is the best tracker — half Comanche. Something else to see him cut a track! The meanest is Rooster Cogburn. He’s pitiless, double-tough. Fear don’t enter into his thinking. Does like to pull a cork. The BEST is probably L. T. Quinn. He brings his prisoners in alive, believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake.” “…..where can I can find this Rooster?”
Gods and Generals (2003). This is a prequel to Gettysburg, just as the novel that it’s based on is a prequel-in-spirit to its own inspiration, The Killer Angels. Gods and Generals is an altogether different experience, though: instead of following a battle, it covers nearly three years and its first hour is set wholly before the war begins. The pace is slower, and Stonewall Jackson dominates the film in a way that no one could in Gettysburg. Lang steals any scene he is in, even in the slower ones that give the viewer a rest between First Manassas, Fredericksburg, etc. I watched the extended version, which adds a John Wilkes Booth chain of scenes that culminate in both him and his costar Harrison deciding to help the Confederate cause in their own ways. Sharp-eyed viewers will recognize this Harrison as the same man who was the scout in Gettysburg, though I do not know if he is based on a real person. I also am very wary of how closely this film’s Stonewall Jackson is based on the real man, because he often talks like one of the Nashville Southern Agrarians of a half-century later — especially when commenting that the war may bring the triumph of the banks — rather than the actual general. I have not read a great deal into Stonewall, but I’m fairly certain that element would have crossed my radar by this point considering that I have read the Southern Agrarians.
I’ll Be Home for Christmas, 1998. This was a family favorite growing up, mostly because we were really into Home Improvement. Jonathan Taylor Thomas of HI fame plays Jake, an inconsiderate rich kid who gets some comeuppance when some bullies kidnap him, glue a Santa hat, beard, and suit to him, and leave him in the middle of the desert without any way of knowing where he is or how to get home. More than that, his girlfriend Jessica Biel thinks he’s stood her up and reluctantly decides to accept a ride back across the country with Adam LaVorgna, the same bully who deserted JTT. JTT has to charm and swindle his way back home – from Cali to New York – so his girlfriend doesn’t dump him forever. Also, his dad promised him a Porsche if he came home for Christmas: JTT has been avoiding the homefront since dad (Lumberg from Office Space) remarried following the death of JTT’s mom. Along the way JTT learns the meaning of Christmas. I knew all of the principal actors as a kid – JTT from Hompe Improvement, Biel and LaVorna from Seventh Heaven – so I loved this. Rewatching with the ladyfriend was fun.
Little Women, 1994. While I have seen a version of Little Women before, I’m fairly certain it wasn’t this one, because it’s all kinds of charming and I would’ve never forgotten it. It’s absolutely delightful, what with the opening Christmas scenes, the girls acting out what Jo was writing, and Young Batman being a bit scampish. The book and novel follow the March girls as they mature and navigate society’s expectations of them, as well as their own passions. Lovely music, and quite cozy. Lots of star power – Susan Sarandon, Winona Ryder, Christian Bale, and a very young Claire Danes. A feature with the LF.
The Heavenly Kid, 1985. A Fonz-like character accidentally dies in a car stunt and finds himself in a smoky restaurant called “Midtown”. He’s not wicked enough to go Downtown – just a stupid teeanger, really – but he also wasn’t a good enough guy to go Uptown. He’s consigned to ride the subways for nearly two decades until he’s sprung loose in the 1980s and told to befriend a teenager – a total spazola – and help him out. Fonz starts trying to give the kid lessens in charisma and confidence, but then realizes: the kid’s mom is his old girl! The girl he got killed trying to impress, even though she told him “You don’t come back from Dead Man’s Currrrrvveeee!”. What he doesn’t know? The spazola is his kid. This was a film I watched several times as a kid, and when I began working and had money, it was one of the first films I bought on DVD. Rewatch with the ladyfriend.
Housesitter, 1992. A rare Steve Martin film that I have NOT seen. Cowatch with the LF. Martin plays an architect who runs into a girl who decides to ….uh, move into a house he built and then pretend to be his wife, and then hilarity ensues, especially as Martin tries to use the fake-marriage to aid and abet his desire to woo his ex-girlfriend by demonstrating how good a husband he is. (Ignore the whole cheating thing.)
A League of their Own, 1992. During World War 2, an all-woman baseball league is formed to keep the sport alive while Teddy Ballgame, Joe DiMaggio, & others are running bases around the Germans. Despite the number of times I’ve watched Tom Hanks’ “There’s no crying in baseball!” scene, this is a first time for me. Lots of 1940s swing music, which was a definite plus, and the acting ‘bullpen’ as it were was great fun. I especially liked seeing Lori Petty — who I knew from In the Army Now — appear here as Kit, the younger sister of the main character Dottie. Their sibling rivalry is a major part of the movie; another arc is Tom Hanks’ slowly-kindling relationship with the team. He’s a washed-up ballplayer who ruined his prospects through liquor, and resents being made to babysit a bunch of “girls”: eventually he starts appreciating their passion and talent for the game. Wonderful way to close the year out! This would’ve made the movie top ten list (in place of The Lincoln Lawyer) had I not posted said list so early.
Books in bold are superior favorites. I’ve been trying to whip one of my drafts of Provoked into shape fit for posting but am still not happy yet. It will happen, though. I’m close.
Here we are at the end of another year. After the distressing takeover of fiction in 2024, I was determined to not let that happen again. Then entered CJ Box, whose 26-strong Joe Pickett series lassoed my intentions off their horse and carried them into the wilderness where I was happily lost for several months. Nearly all of April and May’s reading were CJ Box, and I almost got sucked into another game warden series but was saved by the fact that my library doesn’t have as many Doirons as it does Boxes. In all, it was a strong and I think varied year, with chaotic alt-history, Grease, and crime mingling with my usual staples.
I began the year with great aspirations. I was going to tour Europe through history books, learning about the days when Sweden and Poland were major players. I was going to finish my second Classics Club—and I was going to re-read a bunch of books that were formative for me to see how another decade of life had changed my perspective. I read exactly one book in the Grand Tour, forgot the Classics Club list even existed, but did re-read a few titles. Not the main one I’d intended, Death and Life of Great American Cities, but I’ll take the pitches I can get over the plate.
Blogwise, I’m generally pleased with my activity as a scribbler: I reviewed virtually everything I read, I don’t think I missed a single Teaser Tuesday/WWW Wednesday, and I began experimenting with a feature called Saturday Shorts that last about as long as many other features I’ve played with over the years. I’m still divided on it: I liked the idea of featuring short stories on occasion, but it’s also been my habit the last few years to withdraw from the blogging world on weekends to focus on that ‘real life’ thing people still talk about. Maybe as a monthly feature.
I began the year with expectations I’d have my usual 60/40 or 70/30 split favoring nonfiction. CJ Box almost made that not happen, but Nonfiction reasserted its dominance by the end, if barely.
My standing goal is to keep the number of purchased books under 10%, so I failed miserably there. However, Kindle Unlimited is definitely paying for itself.
Ebooks overtook physical this year, but they’re fairly back and forth in recent history. Audiobooks are consistent with last year’s 11%.
History is…er, double its amount from last year. Granted, it has a slight boost because I combined it with Biography, given my amount of biographies-read-for-historical interest.
History
History had a strong year, with well over FIFTY titles by itself and closer to seventy if biographies are included. That’s not unusual: history is typically queen of the stacks, nonfiction or otherwise. An early standout for me was Susan Besser’s Selma: An Architectural Field Guide, which gave an architectural analysis and history of hundreds of buildings in my city’s historic business and residential districts. Given that I’m a local history librarian, this was both a godsend and something I was able to contribute to. The year’s early history offerings were mostly baseball oriented, a favorite being Memories from the Microphone, a history of baseball broadcasting. I listened to this as an audiobook and highly enjoyed the narrator’s impersonations of Dizzy Dean, a pitcher-turned-sportscaster. I also thoroughly enjoyed Ty Cobb, Charles Lehrson’s thorough biography of the great ballplayer. After that, it was fairly varied: the Mob in Cuba, Rome, medieval Europe, etc, and so on until I went on a Civil War binge the last two months of the year. The highlight of that, and a highlight of the year in general, was Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson, with The Life of Billy Yank by Bell Irwin Wiley not far behind it. I read several of Wiley’s social histories of the war after Billy. Biographies were a bit thing this year, even before my history binge in November and December: I had fourteen biographies for the year, including two other top-ten favorites, Benjamin Franklinand Gandolfini. The latter wound up guiding my movie-watching for the rest of the year as I began devouring Gandolini’s film presences.
Mysteries and Thrillers
Man alive, was I obsessed with CJ Box’s Joe Pickett series. I have never just married a series the way I did the Pickett stories, nor dedicated a post to raving about it. Joe is such a likeable character, I loved the storytelling that used the Wyoming landscape to full effect, and the books manage to hit all the emotions throughout the series. I also read some Paul Doiron, another game warden novelist, but held myself back to allow nonfiction to catch up. Expect more of him next year, though. Box got me to reading some game warden nonfiction, too. He’s one of those authors like Asimov or Cornwell who just completely changed my reading life the year I found them.
Historical Fiction
HF is usually one of my strongest categories, and after a strong start I thought it would be sitting pretty at year’s end. Then CJ Box happened, I think, and I was trying for the rest of the year to avoid fiction running away again. The year’s opening book, Sword Brethren, is the beginning of a most promising series – that of an English nobleman who is betrayed and forced to seek fame and fortune in Eastern Europe. That’s an area I know vanishingly little about prior to the 20th century, I’ll be looking for more by that author. 2025 also marked my returning to Steven Saylor after a long break, in part because I was in a serious Roman mood for a bit that led to me buying an enormous Augustus Caesar biography. I also returned to an old favorite, Max Hennessey, and read a couple of his aviation novels. Marce Catlett could fall in the area of historical fiction considering that it begins in 1907 and ends (I think) somewhere in the middle of the 20th century. It was another of my top ten favorites, another Port William story.
Science
Science started off with a bang, with three entries in January alone, followed in February by two more. And then, mysteriously in the late spring, it dropped off the radar and only a deliberate push in late December allowed me to finish the year with my head up and not hanging. Some of my ‘science’ titles were also not purely science – Storm of the Century and Bringing Back the Beaver – but they had enough science content to pass muster. Although Primate Made put up a good fight, I think The Light Eatersprevails as my favorite science book of the year. I am getting closer and closer to finishing Neil deGrasse Tyson’s works: I think the only one I’m lacking now is his entry on science and the military-industrial complex.
Science Fiction
SF was also weak, unless we count the Roswell High YA series that I re-read, in which case it had a strong year by the numbers. I listened to a few short stories by Arthur C. Clarke, but the only SF titles I’ll remember from this year are Husk and SHELLI: MurderMind, the latter being a sequel to the SF mystery-thriller I enjoyed so much last year. I also read Scalzi’s latest, though it was more of a lark than anything else. I’d expected a big boost in SF in November, but between a Narnia re-read and the Civil War, that did not happen. Relatedly, I only read two Star Trek books. I’m not sure how to account for the falloff: certainly the fact that fewer Trek books are being published helps, alongside the literal death of the extended litverse I loved so much from 2004 until the return of Trek to the screen. Now we’re seeing the return of The Aliens of the Week, which honestly makes me feel contemptuous. We had characters with history, alien races with histories and developed cultures, and now — now it’s back to Planet of Hats.
Politics and Civic Interest
This was an interesting category this year. I began it with Strong Towns: The Book, which I’d anticipated reading for a few years – having follower of the author for sixteen years now. I read a couple of titles on the Biden administration, neither of them compelling, and enjoyed digging into The Nixon Conspiracy. That almost kicked off a Nixon binge, as I have two Nixon titles waiting to be finished and keep eying Being Nixon on the shelves of my local indie bookstore. Midyear I began thinking about America @ 250 Reading, and consequently read a few more presidential biographies, my favorite being Man of Iron. And then there’s Paul Kingsnorth, whose works partially touch on politics, but more on him later. The big kahuna in this category, though, is Scott Horton’s Provoked, a history of DC-Russia relations since the ‘end’ of the Cold War. I listen to Horton’s podcast, so I thought I’d be familiar with most of the content….but brother, I didn’t know the half of what mischief DC has perpetuated in Europe. Here I thought it saved its chaotic energy for destroying the middle east! I have several drafts of a review and am still faintly hoping to I also took a deep dive into political history at the end of the year, studying the personalities involved in the sectional strife of the early 19th century that ultimately led to Civil War. That will continue into the New Year, I think, as I’m deep into a Tyler biography and am anxious to start on Chorus of the Union.
Yes, he gets his own category, because he’s too singular a writer to be filed anywhere else. Imagine Wendell Berry refracted through Eastern Orthodoxy and the lived experience of a former political activist. After meeting Kingsnorth at a conference last year and hearing him speak about Against the Machine—which he described, without irony, as his life’s work—I went back and read his earlier nonfiction, even knowing he regarded those books as preparatory steps. Kingsnorth resonates deeply with me because he articulates questions I’ve been worrying at for most of my adult life. Like Berry, he writes powerfully about our alienation from creation and the personal, social, and political costs of that severance. Where writers like Neil Postman and Nicholas Carr focus on technology’s effects on attention and cognition, Kingsnorth pushes further, weaving those concerns together with Matthew Crawford’s insistence on our nature as embodied, working creatures and with Berry’s ecological and moral vision. His critique of “the machine” is not merely technological or political, but civilizational—and spiritual. He’s definitely my favorite discovered author of the last few years. His Against the Machineis on my top ten list for the year, butSavage Godswas a precursor that I liked enormously. One No, Many Yeses and Real England were also interesting, but not not a patch on Savage Gods or his ecological memoir from last year.
2025 was a big year for reading, and while I didn’t make progress in my goals, I had a lot of fun and am currently digging ever deeper into a “history hobbit hole”. That will continue into the New Year, especially since it’s part of my America @ 250 project, but the 19th century will lose its monopoly on my reading once the New Year hits. I always like for January to be a nice mix of subjects: on the off chance that anyone views my “What I’ve Read This Year” tab, I like to give them an idea of the chaotic variety here. As far as 2026 goes, I do not have any huge reading plans: America @ 250 will begin in earnest, and I’ll share more details about that in the days to come. It will be joined by my “fifth” year working on my second classics club list, as well as the usual science survey.
WHAT are you currently reading? President without a Party, Christopher Leahy. An ….incredibly…..detailed….policy history of the Tyler presidency. Also, Jon Meacham’s biography of Andrew Jackson. I am trying to resist reading more of President without a Party so it can be 2026’s first read, but I really want to move on from the level of exhausting political detail.
WHAT are you reading next? Most likely Chorus of the Union: How Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas Set Aside their Rivalry to Save the Nation, Edward McClelland, but with the New Year coming, who knows? I like January to be a grab-bag of books.
Marce Catlett The Force of a Story takes a life we’ve visited with previously and then visits with it for a while, learning how the story of Andy Catlett was really a continuation of a story in which his grandfather Marce and his father Wheeler had been swept up in prior. This is a theme in Berry’s writings, really: “there’s always more to tell than can be told.” Readers who have delved into the Port William series know that no matter how stirring one particular story within it, the story always grows in richness when other Port William stories are read alongside it, for we begin learning the history of these people and their town. Marce Catlett goes for that effect in a single volume, as we follow the plight of independent farmers from the turn of the 20th century to the time of Andy Catlett, a man whose life has previously been used to shine a light on the community’s ‘dismemberment’. We already know that Andy goes to college and begins to learn of ‘modern agriculture’, only to walk away in disgust after realizing its methods are divorced from the land and particular the love of it – bearing more resemblance to industrialism than stewardship and husbandry. Marce Catlett goes a bit deeper, though, taking us back to a day in 1907 where a man’s entire year of labor, care, and pain disappeared at the auction-house – prices driven so low by one buyer eating up all the others that the crop appears to have not been worth planting at all. This connects to the later theme of Port William books – the brutalization of farming and of towns like Port William by those whose only motivation is the efficient ‘use’ of land, not its care. This was like many Port William stories, beautiful, tragic, and humane. Unusually, though, towards the end it slides into what sounds like one of Berry’s many essays, but one lightly illustrated by Andy, Wheeler, and Marce’s lives.
So in their memories the way went: a passage through the dark, undertaken familiarly by men of their kind in their time. So Marce remembered it to Wheeler, who told it to Andy, who in a world radically changed needed a long time and great care to imagine what he heard, but as he has imagined it he has passed it on to his children, for the story has been, as it stil is, a force and light in their place.
“[Hers] was an old mind, as he would come to understand. It was contemporary insofar as it had acquired the knowledge of younger people, but it was also continuous with minds that had come and gone long before hers.
For [Marce], morality began with a mortal fear of the waste of daylight, particularly of the morning light. He believed with the passion of old custom and his own long observance that at four o’clock in the morning, a man should be awake, on his feet, and at athe barn, caring for what needed care, feeding what needed to be fed.
In those days nobody knew he was a boy who belonged to a story. In those days he did not know it himself.
Port William’s fatal mistake was its failure to value itself at the rate of its affection for itself. Gradually it had learned to value itself as outsiders — as the nation — valued it: as a ‘nowhere place’, a place at the end of the wrong direction. So far as Andy has learned, the Old Order Amish, alone in all the country, have had the wisdom – the divine wisdom, it may be — to give to their own communities a value always primary and preserved by themselves.
As people have grown helpless and lonely, they have come to be governed by those most wealthy, who rule by the purchase of nominal representatives, who, having no longer the use of their own minds, do not know and cannot imagine the actual country by the ruin of which they and their constituents actually live.
Today’s TTT is our ten most recent acquisitions, but I’m going to be wicked and do my top ten favorite films watched for this year, instead. But first, the Teaseday Tues!
[Tyler] was an Old Republican who pledged fealty to the states’ rights bible of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions, but beyond that it was difficult to pin him down. He became a Jacksonian Democrat but consistently opposed President Jackson. He became a Whig but usually opposed the party’s nationalistic agenda. When he did so in the White House, party members banished him, making him a president without a party. Charges of partisan disloyalty never troubled Tyler. In fact, he seemed to enjoy his reputation as a political renegade.” PRESIDENT WITHOUT A PARTY
I have watched well over a hundred movies this year, going on tangents like “John Grisham movies” and “movies with James Gandolfini” in them. Can I manage to pick ten favorites? Rewatches like Gettysburg are disqualified. I will paste in my original notes and supplement them as appropriate.
(1) Wonka, 2023. A Charlie and the Chocolate Factory prequel that surprised me both in terms of general quality and sheer delightedness. I loved the musical numbers.
(2) The Straight Story, 1999. Excellent film about an old retired farmer who, upon learning his brother had a stroke, decides their ten-year silence after a bitter argument needs to be ended. Since he is old and prideful, he decides to visit said brother on….a lawnmower. Phenom acting.
(3) 10 Cloverfield Lane . Horror-suspense film. A young woman is hit in a car wreck and wakes up chained in a basement, and soon meets her captor, John Goodman, who alleges that the United States has been attacked and that the outside air is now toxic. Although she’s dubious and tries to escape, she becomes convinced after seeing evidence of an attack outside – but that doesn’t mean Goodman’s character still isn’t unhinged and and dangerous. Very effective.
(4) Men in Black III. I watched the original movie when it came out, of course, and tolerated the second one, but it wasn’t until that I saw Josh Brolin’s Tommy Lee Jones impersonation – which he does throughout this film – that I thought, holy WOW do I need to see this. Will Smith is “J” and is thrown back in time to 1969 to help his partner K (Tommy Lee Jones/Josh Bronlin) knock off an alien who wants to destroy Earth. This involves manhandling Andy Warhol and putting a thingy on the Apollo 11 Saturn-10. Such a good film, between the acting and the raygun gothic tech.
(5) Carnage, 2011. I have only watched Inglorious Basterds one time since its release, but I have rewatched every single Christoph Waltz scene more times than I can remember. I asked ChatGPT for movies where Waltz was a similarly dominant presence, and it recommended this – a comedy wherein he features alongside JODIE FOSTER!!, Kate Winslet, and that guy from Step-Brothers who isn’t Will Ferrell. Four parents meet in a room to discuss what to do after their respective children get in a fight that ends with broken teeth. They get into a lot of side discussions and there’s interesting shifting character dynamics: different characters side with one another in different scenes depending on where the conversation is going. (This gets…more interesting after a bottle of 18 year old single-malt Scotch is uncorked.) This is a difficult movie to summarize, but if you’re into character drama like myself it’s quite a treat, especially with heavyweights like Waltz and Foster aboard. A plausible drinking game could be composed of the times that Waltz and Winslet take on or take off their coats and attempt to leave.
(6) Zero Day (2003). AColumbine-inspired found footage documentary, in which we witness two friends with violent fantasies collude and plan a school shooting. What makes Zero Day so utterly disturbing is the nature of the production itself, the “found footage” approach: the film is presented as a series of clips taken from consumer video recorders, some purposely filmed by the future shooters as a record for the future, some simply documenting their lives as-lived. We get a sense of the boys as people, with utterly normal social circles and lives, though they do have resentments toward certain parties at school. One such person is “Brad Huff”, a jerk jock whose house they pelt with rotten eggs after arriving at his home to find his SUV nowhere in sight. The found footage is eerily weird, with expect amounts of outtakes, muffed lines, and “teenagers mugging for the camera” that you’d expect. It avoids the poor widdle buwwied story completely: we see two teenagers with unhealthy interior lives and an uncanny awareness of how they’d be perceived afterwards ratcheting each other into a course of destruction, where they will escape a world and a school they hate by turning it into a bloody mess. Zero Day is far more unsettlingthan Elephant for its approach, though I will admit to being partial toward found footage.(See my affection for The Blair Witch Project, which continues to disappoint my film buddies.)
(7) Terminator 2: Judgement Day, 1991. I watched Terminator some years ago, enough that I’ve forgotten most everything but the basic premise and the haunting percussive soundtrack. Bottom line: in the future, sentient machines are waging war on humanity and they want to destroy the leader of the resistance by knocking off his mother. Terminator 2 reintroduces Arnie as The Terminator, a killing machine, but now his former target (the future human rebellion leader John Connor) has reprogrammed some iteration of him to protect John Connor in the past. This is necessary because the machines waging war on humanity have sent back another terminator, this one a shapeshifter, I didn’t realize how much of this movie has saturated pop culture: I recognized line after line. While going in I had some doubts – movies that are just chase scenes and supermen bashing the hell out of each other and destroying property bore me, hence why I watch very few superhero movies – this proved far more compelling than predicted. There was one scene where I thought “WOW! What a great finale!” and then realized – wait a minute, there’s twenty minutes left in this film. Nice twist. The special effects are crazy for 1991, and it’s replete with badass reloads.
(8) St. Vincent, 2014. Bill Murray is a broke misanthropic ….widower? with a drinking problem. Then the house next door to him gets a single mom and her kid, Oliver. Insert Man Called Ove plot, only instead of being a very functional grump, Bill is more of a dysfunctional lush whose bond with Oliver no one understands. I love almost any movie Bill is in, and of course readers know I am an absolute sucker for the “curmudgeon is recalled to life” trope. This one is more gritty than Ove or say, Frank and Red: Murray’s character is deep in hock to loan sharks and has gambling, prostitution, drinking and cigarette addictions. However….as the movie progresses, we realize there’s more to Bill’s story than meets the eye: it’s a tough, tear-terking tale that turns out wonderfully sweet. A very me movie, I will say.
(9) The Last Castle, 2001. Superb drama with James Gandfolini, Robert Redford, and a young Mark Ruffalo. A general (Redford) with a legendary reputation – who was famously tortured in Hanoi but refused early release to remain with his men – is the newest prisoner of a military prison. Gandolfini, the commandant, is immediately torn with admiration for the man, plus his professional need to treat him like any other prison – including abject humiliation. Redford, though, is something of a Stoic, and I am certain Admiral James Stockdale was the inspiration for him. Redford, by personal example and admonition, urges the men to be true to the best in themselves, to comport themselves with dignity. There’s a moving scene where the men gather in formation and sing the USMC fight song in honor of a prisoner who stood on principle and was shot down in cold-blooded murder. Disgusted by Gandfolini’s treatment of the men, Redford moves to take over the prison in an effort have Gandfolini removed from his post as per the Military Code of Justice. (Losing control of your prison = update your resume, sport.) I don’t think I’ve seen Redford in anything else, but I believe I will now. I do have….questions, like HOW DID PRISONERS BUILD A TREBUCHET? One of ending scenes – of Old Glory rising above fire and ruins – gave me shudders. This came out five weeks after September 11, when similar shots could have been taken at Ground Zero.
(10) The Lincoln Lawyer, 2011. Matthew McConaughey, Marisa Tomei!, William Macy, and – – BRYAN CRANSTON? Oh, and Bob Gunton, who played Captain Maxwell in ST TNG’s “The Cardassians”. Matthew McConaughey plays a ‘street lawyer’ of sorts – representing all sorts of genuine criminals who are scattered so widely across greater LA that he spends his days in Lincoln towncar. A potentially lucrative case has an uncanny resemblance of one of his earlier cases, and M.M. begins wondering if he isn’t actually defending a monster.
Although I ostensibly took a break from the blog on Christmas eve to focus on real life and all that, part of my brain is resolutely blog-oriented and insisted I keep reading so that I did not fail the Science Survey. This is, I should note, my self-imposed challenge, meaning nothing will happen if I fail it — only my own disappointment. I have, for the record, muffed one year, and nothing bad came of it: in fact, I was so annoyed with myself I finished the next year’s survey rather early. I read three science books in the last week, satisfying the Survey, and finished off the history book I’ve been nibbling on for a couple of weeks besides. Are they my last reads for this year? Mm…probably, unless I pick up The Widow (a Christmas gift) and knock it out, but there will be another review coming as I finished Wendell Berry’s latest (a gift from the ladyfriend) on Saturday night. I am also working on a biography of President John Tyler, but it’s a hefty boy so I don’t know that I will finish it before the year’s end. At any rate, I’m presently sitting at a nice round number and am content.
Mary Roach’s Replacable You is a dive into how humans have or are trying to cope with the lost of body parts or body functions; we begin with medieval types replacing noses that got lopped off during saber-drawn hijinks and move quickly into the 21st century. Roach, for those who have not read her, combines science, squickiness, and some level of humor. This is is heavy on the squick, so reader discretion is advised: even her Gut didn’t have so many applications of our intestines. Possibly the most interesting chapter was Roach’s personal experience with using an iron lung — that, or her holding a still-beating heart in her hands.
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s Just Visiting This Planet returns to his “Merlin” character, an ageless and knowledgeable sort from another planet who answers questions from Earthlings via a newspaper column. As the title implies, the focus of Merlin’s answers here is much closer to Earth: the overwhelming majority of questions are about matters of local astronomy. We learn about how the Earth may be viewed from the moon, for instance, and Merlin explains why we don’t feel the rotating earth.
Mark Miodownik’s It’s a Gas! was the most disappointing of this group. It promises to explore several different gases and their role in our lives, but it’s not like some of the several books I’ve read on the elements. Almost none of the gases here are discrete elements, in fact; with the exception of oxygen, Miodownik deals largely with compounds like nitrous oxide and the air itself. Although there’s plenty of science here, there’s a lot of digression as well, from history to politics. Fun fact: Samuel Colt raised funds for the production of his famous revolver by dressing up as a doctor and giving nitrous oxide demonstrations.
Lastly, and a departure from science, I’ve been reading Arguing Until Doomsday these last few weeks. This is a joint look at the lives of Jefferson Davis and Stephen E. Douglas, and through their political histories, an examination of how the Democratic party fractured through the 1850s and led the way for a purely sectional candidate — Abraham Lincoln — to win the election with only 39% of the popular vote. The book largely focuses on Douglas, which makes sense given how much more of a challenge he had. Jefferson Davis was essentially the heir of John Calhoun in representing southern (or at least, plantation) interests: his goal was to make the Democracy a reliable protector of those interests. While previous generations had been content if the government were not directly adversarial to them, the disruption caused by the Kansas-Nebraska act meant that offense could be the one and only defense. If the government did not actively protect slavery and “property”, the South would be corralled in and its ‘pecuilar institution’ actively attacked by a North increasingly assisted by western states. Douglas had a harder row to hoe, trying to be a candidate who could unite the Democracy against rival parties like the nativist Know-Nothings and the rising Republicans. He sought an answer in popular sovereignty, or majoritarianism, in which the people of a territory made the decision of whether or not their state would be slave or free. This led to not only things like Bleeding Kansas, but changed the way discussions on the transcontinental railroad developed. Jefferson Davis presented a far better argument for a southern route than his colleagues could for a northern route, but there were fears that a southern line would disrupt the advantage northerners had in populating the west coast, or at least make it easier for the ‘slave power’ to extend itself across the rails. Ultimately, the South — seeing abolitionist violence on the rise — would make the decision to break from the Democracy and ultimately, from the Union. This is an extremely detailed account of Davis and Douglas’ grapple for the future of the Democratic party; a little inside baseball at times, but considering my current obsession, it suited my tastes exactly. I am planning on reading Chorus of the Union, Douglas’ postelection attempts to keep the South from leaving the Union, sometime soon.
Recently I took a chance on the full-cast audio version of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone that’s just come out. I say “took a chance” because the preview on Audible does not communicate the nature of the book especially well, focusing entirely on the narrator, whom I liked well enough but did not want to commit to, considering I listened to Stephen Fry narrate this same book earlier in the year. I’m glad I threw my credit at Audible, though, because the full-cast audio is terrific. Its sound design makes it more of an audio drama, and the voice-acting bench is fairly good. As “full cast audio” implies, every character has a different actor, so there’s no dealing with a narrator having to do falsettos to reach out of his range. Interestingly, although this edition carries the American title in Audible, it was recorded with the original text, so the students do “revisions” instead of studying. I’ve read a British version of Philosopher’s Stone and somehow missed that until I heard it being said multiple times here.
An important thing to note about this full-cast audio edition—and a selling point, I’d say—is that the sound design is atmospheric. We don’t simply have actors reading lines one at a time: when one is speaking, we can hear others reacting in the background. There’s originality here as well, in that we hear background reactions that are not written down word-for-word in Rowling’s original text. Spatiality is also incorporated. When the scene is focused on Harry, as it were, and someone speaks from across the room, we hear them as such—at least, if we have stereo speakers. When I was driving through a foggy wood and listening to this, I had the startling experience of having a character yell at “Harry” from my passenger door. Not the sort of Forbidden Forest immersion I’d expected! There are also audio effects: characters speaking from behind a door are muffled, and there’s a kind of rippling intro when characters are reading from a letter or remembering something someone said earlier. The sound design also includes effects like footsteps and crowd noise, along with some music, delicately applied in only a few scenes where it feels especially appropriate. I was very much impressed. The voice-acting bench is strong. So far, the only character whose voice I don’t like is Snape’s—and I swear it’s not just because he doesn’t sound like Alan Rickman. The problem is he sounds like a nasty insurance agent who doesn’t like his job, but who has been doing it too long to do anything else and is many years yet away from retirement. He’s bored and slightly bitter but not….Snapey. Other characters make me suspect that their movie actors slightly inspired their casting — especially Hagrid and Oliver Wood — but on the whole the bench is distinct, yet recognizable.
I can see continuing in this series, but more as a every-once-in-a–while treat. I loved the experience, but it seems silly to spend credits on a book series I’ve already read, and — in the case of the early books — listened to several different versions of. This post’s title comes from my amused observation (while driving) that Harry appears to spend most of the book actively trying to get into trouble, especially after dark.
Reading Freely 