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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 o f 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.

The end of the Canfield Fair on Labor Day always marked the beginning of school when we were growing up. Usually the first day of school was the Tuesday after Labor Day. Before that happened I would have to go through the dreaded ritual of getting measured for new school clothes and buying new shoes. Mom would get out the tape measure and then we would look through the Sears-Roebuck catalog and order clothes. Truth was, I wasn’t one of the “cool” kids, and catalog-ordered clothes probably didn’t help, but I was kind of a “geeky” boy even back then so I was probably oblivious most of the time! Anything fashionable would be wasted on me. Durable and inexpensive was better.

Site of Washington School. From:

We always learned about our new teachers on our report cards at the end of the year. So when we gathered outside of school, Washington School in my case, the big subject of conversations were what each of the teachers were like. After first grade, I found out that my second grade teacher was Mrs. Smith, the same teacher I had had for first grade. I thought I flunked! Instead, she moved up a grade along with me. That wasn’t so bad–I always liked Mrs. Smith, except for the time that I discovered that the answers to quizzes in our reading workbook were in the back of the workbook. She tore the pages out!

Schools these days publish school supply lists ahead of time. As I recalled we learned what school supplies we needed after school began, which meant going out and shopping for No. 2 pencils, protractors, and whatever else we would need for class. My wife used to love this and organizing all her school supplies in her pencil box. Some kids would have Peanuts (boys) or Barbie (girls) pencil boxes. For me, the pencil box was usually an old cigar box.

Cigar Pencil Box, from http://mentalfloss.com/article/53144/10-things-disappearing-elementary-schools

When we got older, we began to get textbooks, so one of the first things we did each year was make book covers. There were fancy ones you could buy in the stores with superheroes, rock bands, or even the name of your school, but in our house, book covers were brown paper grocery bags (courtesy of the A & P at which we shopped) on which we wrote in magic marker the subject and my name in smaller print. Seems we usually had to re-cover the books a few times during the year.

First days of school were usually fun. Somewhere in there was a school assembly talking about safety issues and other things. We usually had a fire drill–nice because it was still warm outside. We also had Civil Defense drills. This was the 60’s when we were in a Cold War with Russia and there was fear of nuclear attack. We would shelter in our school basement. Not sure how much good that would have done!

Teachers usually eased us into homework, printed out on mimeographed worksheets. There was the inevitable theme on “what I did on summer vacation”, always kind of challenging because we didn’t vacation much–just went swimming, played baseball, read a few books from the library, went to Idora Park and on family picnics. The trick was to figure out how to make that interesting.

At the end of the day, I always remember mom asking, “how was school?” I’d tell her about the teacher and who was in my class and what supplies I would need. And off we would go into another school year.

What were your memories of the first days of school?