Marta Albertini, the great-granddaughter of Leo Tolstoy, has taken a Ukrainian mother and daughter into her home in Switzerland. Anastasia Sheludko and Marta Albertini Apparently Albertini and many others of Tolstoy's descendants have signed a letter to Putin saying that the family opposed the war and that Tolstoy himself, a renowned pacifist, would have been … Continue reading Tolstoy descendant takes in Ukrainian refugees
Back in 2009 Dominic Lieven wrote a book, "Russia Against Napoleon", that challenged Leo Tolstoy's view of history as expressed in "War and Peace." I read it recently and it's excellent, heavy on military analysis but brimming with other kinds of insights as well. The subtitle, "The True Story of the Campaigns of War and … Continue reading Russia Against Napoleon
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)
Some bloggers and BookTubers have been presenting Christmas material from novels, for example, this selection from "Little House In the Big Woods." That one is part of a full series of Christmas-related readings, and I don't have enough reading under me to list that many readings. But I'll give one. It's a scene, or rather … Continue reading Christmas, 1811
During the first quarantine summer (2020), my family and I were binging heavily on the "Little House On the Prairie" television show and starting to read Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Little House" novels. My wife, who read all those novels as a child, suggested we look into a series of young adult novels told from the … Continue reading The Birchbark House
I picked up “Pilgrim’s Progress” only because I was reading “Little Women,” which I found made constant reference to Bunyan’s earlier novel. So I put down Alcott and started “Pilgrim,” and it was a mixed experience – riveting in many places, but often hard-going. As often happens when I pick up a new author, the … Continue reading Pilgrim’s Progress
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
“Anna Karenina” is not a book you can read quickly. It just doesn’t move at a hungry pace. You can read a couple of chapters and feel like you’ve moved into a single character’s soul; and you’ve got more than enough to digest for one night, without thinking of moving out into some other character. … Continue reading Anna Karenina – Parts 3 and 4 (of 8)
February 1, 2021 Reading “Koheleth” and Tolstoy's “Confession” back-to-back lifts both works for me. Both works struggle with the fact that death is coming for everyone. Both observe constantly how the good and the wicked have random rewards in this life; both hang on to the idea of knowledge/wisdom while questioning both its extent and … Continue reading Koheleth and Tolstoy
January 31, 2021 I keep running back into "War and Peace", in my re-read of Reinhold Niebuhr's "Moral Man and Immoral Society". This is from chapter 1: The growing intelligence of mankind and the increased responsibility of monarchs to their people have placed a check upon the caprice, but not upon the self-interest, of the … Continue reading Niebuhr and Tolstoy
