Favorite books of 2021 (and 2020)

My blog is new, so I've never picked out favorite books for a year, but here we go. My ten faves for 2021, fiction and nonfiction, out of the 66 books I read: 1. New Testament -- the recent translation by David Bentley Hart 2. Notre Dame de Paris Translated by Alban Krailsheimer 3. Lonesome … Continue reading Favorite books of 2021 (and 2020) →

Huck and Jim, cosmologists

Of the many conversations between Huck and Jim on their floating raft, one of my favorites is their discussion of how the stars came to be. Sometimes we’d have that whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark—which was a … Continue reading Huck and Jim, cosmologists →

Finishing Huckleberry Finn

September 27, 2021 I’ve finished “Huckleberry Finn,” and I want to go straight to the controversial ending, in which Tom Sawyer reappears. It’s painful to read of all that Jim is subjected to, all because Don Quixote – excuse me, Tom Sawyer – feels the need to stage a dramatic rescue of the kind that … Continue reading Finishing Huckleberry Finn →

Hero, meet your villain; or, never mind

It's a common trope in fiction: a final confrontation between the central hero of a story and its central villain. It's an important trope in Westerns, both on the page and screen -- Clint Eastwood's "Unforgiven" is just one famous example. And we see it in works of fiction that are too many to count: … Continue reading Hero, meet your villain; or, never mind →

Streets of Laredo

About 10 years ago I saw the television adaptation of Larry McMurtry's novel, "Streets of Laredo," his sequel to "Lonesome Dove." I had recently become a father, and that may have colored my judgment a bit, but I found "Laredo" to be, among many things, most memorably a story about parenthood. Motherhood, in this case. … Continue reading Streets of Laredo →

McMurtry and Cervantes

Larry McMurtry published “Streets of Laredo”, his sequel to “Lonesome Dove”, in summer 1993. The Atlanta Journal-Constitution then ran a piece by Michael Skube, who compared “Lonesome Dove” to “Don Quixote”: Living briefly off the luster of its predecessor, a sequel establishes its own grounds as art or it diminishes the work from which … Continue reading McMurtry and Cervantes →

Don Quixote and Lonesome Dove

I've recently finished Larry's McMurtry's western, "Lonesome Dove," a magnificent novel that I cannot get off my mind. I've been doing a little research about the book, and apparently McMurtry was partly inspired by "Don Quixote." In his 2008 memoir, he wrote: [E]arly on, I read some version of Don Quixote and pondered the grave … Continue reading Don Quixote and Lonesome Dove →

Pale Blue Dots

I posted Sancho Panza's speech about the earth in the comments section of a YouTube video featuring Carl Sagan's meditations from "Pale Blue Dot." One Youtuber replied that there were similar thoughts in Cicero’s “Scipio’s Dream” and Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations.” Cicero’s “Scipio’s Dream”, part 3: And as I looked on every side I saw other … Continue reading Pale Blue Dots →

Niebuhr on caballeros

January 31, 2021 I'm rereading Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Moral Man and Immoral Society”, which I read back when I was at Union Seminary. This is from chapter 5, and it reminds me of the problems I had with the word "caballero": The moral excellencies which privileged classes claim and by which they justify their special advantages … Continue reading Niebuhr on caballeros →

Madame Bovary

January 14, 2021 I’ve just finished “Madame Bovary.” Some of it was slow going, specifically the passages of excessive detail about physical objects and surroundings. But after finishing the novel, I read in Soledad Fox’s “Flaubert and Don Quijote” that Flaubert used all this detail to satirize the “realist” genre: that’s why he describes the … Continue reading Madame Bovary →