Finished reading (2021): Small Wonder: Essays by Barbara Kingsolver 📚

Been picking at this one for well over a year now. I’d like to think that this book is a good indicator for how much I have changed. Fifteen years ago, I could not, even just dispositionally, have read this collection—or had any interest in it, at least. Now, I think these essays are just dandy. 🤓

I’ve never read any of her fiction, but here Kingsolver writes with the heart of Wendell Berry. (She may even say as much.) It’s the sort of thing I wish came to people’s minds when they heard the word “conservative”: to live simply, deeply, and to conserve and consciously nurture what is good. And for me, there was also a line from Chesterton that came to mind almost every time I picked up the book, from his essay “A Sense of Proportion”:

“They say it is Utopian; and they are right. They say it is idealistic; and they are right. They say it is quixotic; and they are right. It deserves every name that will indicate how completely they have driven justice out of the world; every name that will measure how remote from them and their sort is the standard of honourable living; every name that will emphasise and repeat the fact that property and liberty are sundered from them and theirs, by an abyss between heaven and hell."