I purchase books in such a way that I can walk up to my own bookshelf and say, “Ooo, I should read that!” 📚

Finished reading: The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andríc 📚

A fascinating tale of the long life of a bridge and the centuries of lives and change that surround it.

But the bridge still stood, the same as it had always been, with the eternal youth of a perfect conception, one of the great and good works of man, which do not know what it means to change and grow old and which, or so it seemed, do not share the fate of the transient things of this world.

(I’ll get around to putting up a few more quotes from the book, but this one is a doozy.)

Happy New Book in the Mail Day! Celebrate accordingly. 📚

Finished reading: Upstream by Mary Oliver 📚

“I would write praise poems that might serve as comforts, reminders, or even cautions if needed, to wayward minds and unawakened hearts.”

I am sure I’ve said this before, but I have never once picked up Mary Oliver for even the quickest of reads and not felt that I’d been given some profound gift — articulated in and through a holy lightness, and often with quiet and wry humor. Nothing in nature is too small or too wild or too brute to be disclosed to her or by her in this way.

As Oliver puts it, toward the end of her essay “Swoon,” all of which has been spent observing the activities of a spider, there comes a moment when

the news culminates and, slowly or bluntly, the moral appears. It is music to be played with the lightest of fingers. All the questions that the spider’s curious life made me ask, I know I can find answered in some book of knowledge, of which there are many. But the palace of knowledge is different from the palace of discovery, in which I am, truly, a Copernicus. The world is not what I thought, but different, and more! I have seen it with my own eyes!
But a spider? Even that?
Even that.

Finished reading: Iron John by Robert Bly 📚

What a very, very weird book. And weirdly rich. Some thoughts and quotes here.

Currently Reading: The Spell of the Sensuous by David Abram 📚

Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, sounds, and shapes of an animate earth—our eyes have evolved in subtle interaction with other eyes, as our ears are attuned by their very structure to the howling of wolves and the honking of geese. To shut ourselves off from these other voices, to continue by our lifestyles to condemn these other sensibilities to the oblivion of extinction, is to rob our own senses of their integrity, and to rob our minds of their coherence. We are human only in contact, and conviviality, with what is not human.

Finished reading: The Character of Virtue by Stanley Hauerwas 📚

If I have any advice, it is simply this. Many generous people have made your life possible. Don’t be afraid of imitating them.

Currently Reading: The Life You Save May Be Your Own by Paul Elie 📚

At its best, it is writing that one reads with one’s whole life, testing the work against one’s own life, and vice versa.

It is writing that invites the reader on a pilgrimage. … Certain books, certain writers, reach us at the center of ourselves, and we come to them in fear and trembling, in hope and expectation - reading so as to change, and perhaps to save, our lives.

Finished Reading (2023): Culture Care by Makoto Fujimura 📚

Simple and elegant, pointing clearly toward (and from) the profound.

We swim in rivers of culture that are “blackened and uninhabitable with utilitarian pragmatism and over-commodification.” But in that culture, we must “always be willing to present a bouquet of flowers” — even to those “who may not yet know that they desire beauty.”

Currently Reading: Aimless Love by Billy Collins 📚

I think this is my favorite piece of cover art for a book. Also one of the most fitting