The Weekly Wrap: August 23-29
Personal Libraries
Build a personal library. Unless you are at the stage of deaccumulating, I would urge you to consider this. Many homes have a bookshelf or two. I’m suggesting a real library. It could be a designated room or distributed through your living spaces, as it is in our home.
This doesn’t mean keeping every book you read. Rather, think of those books each member of your household treasures. Our household has theology and history, literature and science, cookbooks and art books. One room has Ohioana and Youngstown books. When our son was living with us, the library included his books, including stories we treasured reading aloud together.
As a child, my parents books helped feed my love of reading–everything from fiction to encyclopedias. Often guests in our home would take a book to read before bed. Sometimes those books would go with them! Hospitality is not just about feeding the body, but also feeding the soul.
Books are a kind of memory palace. They remind us of where we were in life when we first read them. Some, such as favorite stories and poetry and books of devotion are friends we revisit.
I also ponder the pulping of books and the decline of reading and worse dystopian nightmares. I hope we may, in our lives and beyond, preserve what is best of what people have thought and written. So, my advice to those starting out in life: build a personal library. It will be a friend for life.
Five Articles Worth Reading
One of the reviewers I consistently read is Jennifer Szalai, with the New York Times. This week she reviews classics translator Emily Wilson’s new essay collection, Crossing the Wine-Dark Sea in a review titled “For Emily Wilson, Translating the Ancients Requires a Dash of Cardi B.” That tells you something right there!
My newsfeed has been full of tributes to Dolly Parton, who passed this week. I thought “The Most Beautiful Woman” captured the many facets of Parton’s life and her cultural impact.
Those who devote themselves to the study of literature learn to engage in close reading. In “In Praise of Unclose Reading” Stephen Akey agues that there are also joys and a place for what he terms “unclose reading.”
It was many years ago, while working on a study of the theology of work that I came across josef Pieper’s Leisure, the Basis of Culture. I felt like Pieper wrote from another time or a different place, speaking into the dysfunctions of our culture. I was reminded of this by Griffin Gooch who makes the case for “Why You Should Read Josef Pieper.”
Finally, with students, teachers, and professors returning to the classroom, JSTOR ran another of its article compilations on “Back to School.” It includes articles on everything from primary sources to the mainstreaming of homeschooling, on libraries and reading lists and so much more!
Quote of the Week
Poet and essayist Rita Dove was born August 27, 1952. She offers this insight into the generous life that I really like:
“If we really want to be full and generous in spirit, we have no choice but to trust at some level.”
Miscellaneous Musings
At a time when there are a record number of challenges and banning efforts against book, I am all the more impressed with the quiet work of Dolly Parton’s Imagination Library. During her life, this put over 330 million books into the hands of children, a great boost to reading literacy efforts. And during the time when so many are fighting about vaccines, she quietly donated $1 million of her own funds to provide seed money that led to the development of Moderna’s vaccine. If I had to choose, I want to be like Dolly.
I watched the American Masters documentary, Mary Oliver: Saved By the Beauty of the World, on Tuesday. I’ve loved her poetry and was fascinated to learn that I had lived for a time in her childhood home of Maple Heights, Ohio. I was saddened to learn of the dark history of that childhood and her instinct, from the week she spent in the woods at 17, to seek out beauty and light, which shines through in her poetry, read by luminaries like Oprah Winfrey, Stephen Colbert, and her neighbor, John Waters. If you missed it, you can still stream it from this link or on many streaming platforms.
My son sent me this reel from Facebook on how the Internet Archive scans books without destroying them by removing the bindings. I don’t approve of what AI companies are doing in buying old books to train AI, but at least they could adopt this method and then donate the books.
Next Week’s Reviews
Monday: Alan Noble, To Live Well
Tuesday: The Month in Reviews: August 2026
Wednesday: Muriel Elmer, Night of the Fireflies
Thursday: Stuart Kaminsky, Murder on the Yellow Brick Road
Friday: Elizabeth Strout, Tell Me Everything
So, that’s The Weekly Wrap for August 23-29.
Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.