Prose

I like to think of reading Henry James as an archaeological foray into sentences that were once the latest in exposition by prose. Read more about Reading Henry James

A Bright Torch*

Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say’st,
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.’

My bathroom book for the past few weeks has been Thun Read more about Ethel

Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.

This, as many of us know, whether we have read the novel or not, is the famous opening sentence of One Hundred Years of Solitude, by Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Read more about Discovery

A few years ago, curious as to exactly how closely we are related to our ancestors, and seeking a way to show what I thought would be a close relationship, I picked an arbitrary date of 4,000 years BCE, thinking that might be around the time of Hammurabi. I was wrong – he was much later, i.e., around 1750 BCE. Nevertheless, I ploughed ahead, and assumed a possible lifetime of 60 years. Hammurabi himself lived to about age 60. So now I was set, and I made a fantastic discovery. Read more about This Is Us

Read more about Vacation Destinations of Tomorrow

Celeborn the Wise, husband of Galadriel, is given short shrift both in Tolkien’s original text and in Peter Jackson’s movie. Even worse, Marton Csokas’ Celeborn, of the movie, intones his line/s like a stone statue and appears about as interesting as a bowl of vanilla pudding. Moviedom’s version of “wise,” I suppose. Read more about Celeborn

Galileo’s Dream, by Kim Stanley Robinson, is a story inside of a biography inside of a science fiction novel. There are times where you never really know exactly when you are or why, but the view is only slightly less amazing than the conversations. For me, the real story takes place in 17th century Italy, following Galileo Galilei from Padua to Venice to Florence to Rome. Read more about A Glimpse of Galileo

The Tyranny of Merit, subtitled Can We Find the Common Good? was something of a disappointment to me. The writer, Michael J. Sandel, a philosophy professor at Harvard, put one of his classes on ethics online; I watched the entirety of it and enjoyed it very much, so was predisposed to like this little book. Read more about A Couple More Books