Fifty years ago, I was reading the fiction of John Gardner. My first encounter was Nickel Mountain, followed by what I think is still his best book, October Light. He was known for a work called The Sunlight Dialogues. His last novel was Mickelsson’s Ghosts, which I liked but it had a bit of a contrived ending. Gardner was not popular with the literary theory set in the 1980s, enchanted as they were with deconstruction and related ideas. He died in 1982 in a motorcycle accident in New York; he’d been teaching at Stoney Brook. It turns out I wasn’t the only one who liked his fiction; Bill Kauffman at The Spectator has a remembrance.
Dwight Lindley is an English professor at Hillsdale College; I recently completed his (free) online course on A Christmas Carol. He has a wonderful article at Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal, connecting an author with a completely unexpected subject: Homer and the Poetry of Forgiveness.
Aaron Renn is one of the most independent thinkers, and independent Christian thinkers, you can find today. He read a book to review it for the conservative Claremont Institute, and he discovered it included an in-depth behind-the-scenes (and somewhat sympathetic) discussion of the “evangelical resistance movement” opposed to Donald Trump. This group has been at it long before Trump became a serious candidate way back in early 2015. It turns out that Anti-Trump evangelicals may be small in number, but they are very well organized and well-funded, including some non-Christian money. Read Renn’s “The Resistance Will Be Organized.”
More Good Reads
Writing and Literature
The Killer Angels Revisited – Part 1 and Part II – Evan Portman at Emerging Civil War.
Exploring the Isolation of the British Countryside – Stig Abell at Crime Reads.
‘A Desire to Constantly Learn’: A conversation with Tsh Oxenreider – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.
Who is Reading What and Why – Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft.
Poetry
Poetry for Children: Seven Great Poems to Read to Your Kids – Shaun Duncan at Society of Classical Poets.
Faith
These Fragile Remembrances – Kathryn Butler at Story Warren.
Let Us Become Like Little Children – Vanessa Le at Gentle Reformation.
Foreign Territory: A year of loss and finding the way – Mindy Belz at Globe Trot.
Life and Culture
Christopher Lasch on the Elites’ Betrayal of Democracy – Chuck Chalberg at The Imaginative Conservative.
Why I Quit My Dream Job at MIT – Mauricio Karchmer at The Free Press.
Why the left poses a greater threat to civic disorder – Lionel Shriver at The Spectator.
Orf vs. the Memory Hole: Anthony Fauci’s Pandemic Follies – Matt Taibbi at Racket News.
Who wants to be the next British Museum director? Post advertised with a salary of £216,000 – Gareth Harris at The Art Newspaper.
The deafening, disgusting silence of women’s groups on Hamas rapes continues – Mark Penn and Andrew Stein at New York Post.
The Windmills of Your Mind – sung by Noel Harrison for “The Thomas Crown Affair”
Painting: Man reading by lamp in interior, oil on canvas by Victor Lecomte (1856-1920).
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