Jonathan Raban, Richard Wilbur, and Christian Wiman—a thought on what was missing in Raban’s Bad Land 📚

Finished Reading: Every Riven Thing by Christian Wiman 📚

For I am come a whirlwind of wasted things
and I will ride this tantrum back to God

until my fixed self, my fluorescent self
my grief-nibbling, unbewildered, wall-to-wall self
withers in me like a salted slug

Finished Reading: Bad Land: An American Romance by Jonathan Raban 📚

“…sketching a fantastic future for the land, with an Olympian disregard for what was actually here.”

We watched John Wayne’s McLintock no less than 100x on VHS growing up. It’s not Montana, but this scene kept coming back to mind.

Finished Reading: Thin Places: A Natural History of Healing and Home by Kerri ní Dochartaigh 📚

Thin places are double rooted.

I only got through part 1. It’s beautifully written and full of heart, but the chapters are a bit repetitive. I needed to move on to something else, but I do recommend it.

📚 Finally! I have looked for Richard Wilbur in every bookstore in every city I have visited, and… I still never found him. No stores seem to think he’s worth the shelf space. (I know, that is crazy!) Ordered this one from Country Bookstore in Bozeman. 😁

Finished Reading (2023): The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor 📚

A necessary reread. A couple thoughts and takeaways here.

Finished Reading (2023): The Ethics of Authenticity by Charles Taylor 📚

This year’s first reread. A lot of talk about certain freedoms has tended only “to thicken the darkness around the moral ideal of authenticity.” Taylor would rightly like to see it, uh… unthickened. Since I don’t know that it’s any less thick than it was 30 years ago, the need remains the same. A few thoughts here.

Finished Reading Road-side Dog by Czesław Miłosz 📚

Quirky and often funny poetic prose from one of the greats. A perfect little book to have laying around the house.

Finished Reading (2023): Hope Abandoned by Nadezhda Mandelstam 📚

I loved reading Nadezhda’s memoirs. Why they are not more widely known is a mystery to me.

I wrote a review here.

Finished Reading: The Need to Be Whole: Patriotism and the History of Prejudice by Wendell Berry 📚

To the negative reviewers out there, I would concede that it is perhaps not his best writing. But I expected something hard-won and difficult to face, which is to say, the truth. And that is exactly what I found.

There is a “history that both divides us and unites us,” and it is a history that is “complicated enough, questionable enough, and interesting enough to keep us reading and writing, asking and answering, talking to one another, and thus enlarging the possibility of friendship among us.”

More friendships and hard truth, please; fewer enemies and easy divides.