Some Kind of Life
Notes on Stefan Zweig’s “The Post Office Girl”, assimilation, and shifting fortunes.
Category: Books
Zora Neale Hurston: An American Story
A collaborative post by Chris and Burt Likko, telling the story of Zora Neale Hurston, an American writer who deserves to be better-known and better-read.
Driving Blind: Austerity, Street Art, and Books
Let’s get right down to business. Paul Krugman comes out swinging in the New York Review of Books with a piece of extended economic criticism that will surely draw much ire, but push an...
The Principled Pragmatic Reader
Last week I got an email from reader Karen, who asked if I would be willing to share some book titles that might help her better know and understand my political philosophy of principled...
The judge as moral philosopher
Reviewing Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia and Bryan A. Garner’s Reading Law: The Interpretation of Legal Texts in the Claremont Review of Books, David Forte exposes Justice Scalia’s famous legal positivism as moral philosophy by another name. “They call false,” Forte writes of Scalia and Garner, “the ‘notion that the quest in statutory interpretation is to do justice,’” and they, like Alexander Hamilton, prefer judges to be “‘bound down by strict rules and precedents.” But judging, Forte pushes back, is […]
Books On Which to Build a Civilization: The Thursday Night Bar Fight Results
As many of you know, this week’s Thursday Night Bar Fight was a Survivor-like game where readers had to hash out which three books should be taken to a deserted island to build the...
Add Me as a Co-signer
In the Washington Post, Alexandra Petri pleads with Barnes & Noble not to marginalize itself, with more effectiveness and less of the accidental elitism of a former Classics major than I could muster. (h/t Rod Dreher)
Beowulf-Grendel book club reminder
Just a quick note to remind everyone we’ll be starting our Beowulf-Grendel book club tomorrow. We’ll be discussing lines 1-1007. (Pages 3-67 in the Heaney translation – only about 30 pages or reading for...
In Praise of the Big Box Bookstore
Sitting in a Barnes and Noble cafe at the start of January, I read: What is astonishing is the quantity of books worth reading at college age and later which cannot be bought except...
Announcing the Beowulf & Grendel Book Club
Starting the week after next, the League will be hosting the Beowulf & Grendel Book Club*. Everyone and anyone is invited (nay, encouraged!) to participate. For those not familiar with either work, Beowulf is...
Reading in the Digital Age
At the end of every term for at least the last half-dozen years, I’ve had to take a week (or two—the task probably isn’t done by the end of a single week) and re-teach...
The Illustrated Man
My dad foisted Dandelion Wine on me when I was young and still homeschooled. It was to be, appropriately enough, the first book in my list of self-imposed summer reading. His copy was old, and...
May’s Embarrassment of Riches – A Books & Reading Open Thread
For the past few months I have been bitching to friends and family that I can’t find anything good to read. So I am really looking forward to the next four weeks. May 2012...
How Not to Discuss Whether We Need Stories
“Do we need stories?” asks Tim Parks. An interesting question. And an important one. But not a matter easily resolved within the confines of a few tweets, a couple Facebook updates, or an entire blog post...
Bible Verse and Commentary
Matthew 25:31-46 – “When the Son of Man comes in his glory, and all the angels with him, he will sit on his glorious throne. All the nations will be gathered before him, and...
