Finished Reading: American Journal by Tracy K. Smith 📚

I loved carrying this little anthology around in my pocket at work and having a good poem available at any moment. I couldn’t possibly say more than what Smith says in her intro. Here’s an excerpt.

Currently Reading: Why We Drive by Matthew Crawford 📚

I’m a couple chapters in, and so far it’s everything I hoped it would be, and more. I’m pausing after just about every paragraph to let the goosebumps settle. Crawford’s is a sorely needed mind.

Futurism is a genre of mythmaking that seeks to generate a feeling of inevitability around some desired outcome, a picture that is offered as though it were a prediction.

Finished Reading: Repair by C. K. Williams 📚

that something in the rest of us, some doubt about ourselves, some sad conjecture, seems to be allayed,

nothing that we'd ever thought of as a real lack, nothing not to be admired or be repentant for,

but something to which we've never adequately given credence,

which might have consoling implications about how we misbelieve ourselves, and so the world,

that world beyond us which so often disappoints, but which sometimes shows us, lovely, what we are.

Finished Reading: The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy 📚

I need more fun novels like this in my life.

Finished Reading (2023): The Redress of Poetry by Seamus Heaney 📚

Ten perfectly and wonderfully thoughtful reflections on “the surprise of poetry as well as its reliability… its given, unforeseeable thereness.”

"To redress poetry... is to know and celebrate it not only as a matter of proffered argument and edifying content, but as a matter of angelic potential, a motion of the soul. And this is why I have tried to profess the pleasure and surprise of poetry, its rightness and thereness, the way it is at one moment unforseeable and at the next indispensable, the way it arrives at something unhindered and self-directing, sweeping ahead into its full potential."

Finished Reading: Atomic Habits by James Clear 📚

Finished Reading (2023): On Getting Out of Bed by Alan Noble 📚

Finished Reading (2023): Life Worth Living by Miroslav Volf 📚

Finished Reading (2023): Quiet Power & Quiet The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain 📚

Finished Reading: The Home of God by Miroslav Volf 📚

The New Jerusalem does not compensate for anything; it is the final form of the true life to be lived in history, whether in affliction or in joy. This story as a whole makes the life of the follower of Christ intelligible.

I love reading anything from Volf. His perspective is always fresh and clarifying. I’m really looking forward to his next book, which comes out next week—especially because anything with an endorsement from Marilynne Robinson is worth reading. (Thanks to my friend Luke for pointing that out!)