“You are never alone with a poet in your pocket.”
John Adams, who spent hours on horseback during the American fight for independence, found pleasant diversion in poetry he read along the way. Maybe it’s a sign of age but I’ve come to find myself of a mind with Adams on this one. Currently, I’m reading through Diary of an Old Soul by George MacDonald. The Diary consists of 365 seven line poems, one for each day. They are devotional in character, and chronicle MacDonald’s honest struggle to love God as he would, and amazement that he is nevertheless loved.
I never made it through the Divine Comedy. In Dear Dante, Angela Alaimo O’Donnell offers poetic responses to Dante that inspire me to try again. And if you remember, I recently read a collection of poems by 95 year-old Luci Shaw. I wonder if writing poetry is a key to a long life. At very least, poems do remind us of our shared human experience, that we are not alone, as Adams observed.
Five Articles Worth Reading
I love a good mystery. There are classic writers I love. The question is finding new ones. “4 Great Fictional Detectives” gave me some good ideas of new writers to explore.
There is a loneliness epidemic, and sometimes poems are not enough! In “Hungry for Connection: Addressing Loneliness Through the Library” I learned how librarians across the country are helping people find the opportunity for connection.
Barnes & Noble, which has experienced a major turnaround under CEO James Daunt has just rescued a venerable Denver institution, The Tattered Cover, whose parent company is in bankruptcy proceedings. “Tattered Cover will chart its own course, says Barnes & Noble CEO on bookstore’s sale” details Daunt’s recent visit to the store, his commitment to maintain the Tattered Cover name and ethos while providing the resources “to figure out how it becomes Tattered Cover again.”
Richard Hughes Gibson argues in “The New Verbal Economy” that reports of the death of the writer with the advent of generative AI are greatly exaggerated. The technology needs the creativity of human writers to continue to develop. Still, I wonder whether we will find a way in this new economy to reward human writers. And as AI improves, will people still prefer the works of humans?
I love keeping up with science writing. One way I do that is to subscribe to the daily newsletter of Nature. On many Fridays, Andrew Robinson reviews five of the best science picks recently published. Here is this week’s: “Blooming plants and sunken cities, Books in brief.”
Quote of the Week
Nathaniel Hawthorne, whose birthday we marked on July 4th, made this pithy observation:
“A pure hand needs no glove to cover it.”
How we could use more people like this!
Miscellaneous Musings
I’ve been reading The Social Life of Books: Reading Together in the Eighteenth-Century Home by Abigail Williams. She offers a fascinating study of reading practices in the 1700s. One tip: elocution was considered a valued skill! I wonder what a future cultural historian might write about reading practices in our century.
Here’s a reviewer’s dilemma. I love losing myself in a long book, but it also takes longer to finish such books. The best I’ve been able to figure out is to have several books going, including a mix of shorter ones.
I’ve just started Jessica Hooten Wilson’s annotated edition of an unfinished novel by Flannery O’Connor, Why Do The Heathen Rage? Apparently, O’Connor never saw how the story could come together, including how to organize the pieces of it. It seems that Jessica Hooten Wilson has taken on quite a challenge, one other scholars have passed up. I look forward to seeing how she does. But from the little I’ve read, it’s pure Flannery O’Connor!
Well, that’s The Weekly Wrap for this week!
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