(As I recently announced, this is the first in a new blog series I am trying out called “Shelf-Life.” Each episode centers on a book on my shelf. See the original post for more details. And enjoy!) Several years ago, needing to free up shelf space, I went through a very rare (for me) purge…
Each year, our church has a book fair to raise money. It gives people an opportunity to empty their bookshelves, which makes me sad for them but happy for me since I usually manage some good finds. We headed to the book fair this morning. Usually, we go to the “preview,” but we had a…
With the Tolkien diversion I mentioned yesterday, I decided that I needed a plan to execute it. I outlined my rather simplistic goals to ChatGPT (o1) and then asked for it to consider my goals and produce a reading list in the order that provides maximum entertainment, while also considering my desire to deep dive…
The butterfly flaps its wings and I find myself down an unexpected path. I mentioned the other day that I was going to read David Herbert Donald’s biography of Lincoln. On the way to Lincoln, however, I bumped into The Collected Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien: Revised and Expanded Edition. I read the foreword, and then…
Writing is a soothing balm for me. It soothes me. Like the Star of Elendil, it provides me with a light in dark places. I’ve been wanting to write more, and my favorite writing is the writing I do here. I especially like writing about books. Last year, I tried an (unsuccessful1) experiment to write…
Over the years, I’ve managed to read several biographies of Abraham Lincoln. I read Carl Sandburg’s Abraham Lincoln: The Prairie Years and the War Years. I read Jon Meacham’s And There Was Light: Abraham Lincoln and the American Struggle. I read Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Team of Rivals: The Political Genius of Abraham Lincoln. One Lincoln…
Aside from finding out that your favorite magazine is ceasing publishing–something I experienced when the wonderful SCIENCE FICTION AGE ended its 8-year run nearly a quarter century ago–one of the more depressing trends for a magazine reader is to find your magazine putting out fewer issues in the space of a year than it once…
I read one thing at a time. That is to say that I read many things through a given day, contemporaneously but not simultaneously. Typically, I am listening to an audiobook (Reagan: His Life and Legend by Max Boot as I write this); and have a paper book on the nightstand (Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Champion…
While on vacation in Florida for the holidays, I finished reading Brandon Sanderson’s Wind and Truth, book 5 in the Stormlight Archive series and the end of the first “arc” of the series. It was a fun read and a worthy conclusion to the “arc.” It was also a long read—over 1,300 pages—so it took…