“Everybody in Amsterdam Speaks English.” Not.

It was our 25^th anniversary trip – a week in Amsterdam and then a week in Paris. My wife had been to Amsterdam some years before on a business trip; I’d been to neither city. 

We arrived early one May morning. It turned out to be Ascension Day, a public holiday in the Netherlands. We’d reserved seats for a shuttle bus, but as we neared the city center, everything looked like an early Sunday morning. Many shops were closed; little traffic was moving on the streets. Our shuttle driver dropped us off across the canal from the hotel; he decided the street wasn’t wide enough to accommodate his (very small) bus.

 

We had a lot of luggage. I mean, a lot of luggage. Even then, we didn’t really travel; we migrated.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: The Prinsengracht Canal in Amsterdam, via Unsplash.

Some Thursday Readings

 

A Genuine Petrarchan Note on William Wordsworth’s Ecclesiastical Sonnets – poem by Tom Riley at Society of Classical Poets.

 

“The Moons” by Grevel Lindop – Malcolm Guite.

 

Burdens – poem by Maureen Doallas at Writing Without Paper.

 

A king goes out to cheer his men on the night before battle – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

Top 10 Dip into Poetry – Tweetspeak Poetry.

Books I’m Not Recommending This Christmas

It’s my annual list of the some of the best books I read this year. I call it “Books I’m Not Recommending” because I’m personally resistant to recommendations. But I can tell you what I consider to be the best books I read.  

Poetry

 

The largest single category of my 2025 books is, as it has been for several years, poetry. I read a considerable number of really fine poetry collections, and my reviews end up at Tweetspeak Poetry. If I had to pick one, it would likely be an older one – Autumn Journal by Louis MacNeice. 

 

Three books about poetry that I enjoyed are Dante’s Divine Comedy by Joseph Luzzi; An Axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben Palpant; and Ambiguity & Belonging: Essays on Place, Education, & Poetry by Benjamin Myers. 

 

Fiction

 

I OD’d on Wendell Berry year, reading three of his numbers (not to mention his Mad Farmer Poems). Without question, I enjoyed Remembering, The Memory of Old Jack, and Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story. Berry is still writing, and I’m hopeful I haven’t seen the last of the Port William novels. 

 

Foster by Claire Keegan is a short novel that packs a powerful wallop; her 2021 novel Small Things Like These is also rather amazing. And the (longish) short story Abscond by Abraham Verghese is a wonder. I also read an older short novel, A Month in the Country by J.L. Carr, that was published in 1980 but speaks to us today.

 

Art and Architecture

 

Art continued to be an interest, and three books I would not only say were among the best I read overall but I also wouldn’t hesitate to recommend. Van Gogh’s Ear by Bernadette Murphy explains how the author researched and tracked down the real story of his ear (and his art). Christopher Gorham’s Matisse at War is meticulously researched and focuses on Henri Matisse and what he and his family did during World War II. And Russ Ramsey followed his wonderful Rembrandt Is in the Wind with the equally good Van Gogh Has a Broken Heart.

 

I’m not a major (or even minor) reader of books about architecture, but one I read this year that was excellent was Forgotten Churches by Luke Sherlock. (It probably helped that I had visited some of the ones cited in the book.)

 

Civil War

 

Last December, my historical novel Brookhaven was published by T.S. Poetry Press. The research that went into it – nine pages of bibliography – was extensive. But publishing a historical novel doesn’t mean the research stops. Two books about the Civil War I read this year and I really liked were Glorious Courage: John Pelham in the Civil War by Sarah Kay Bierle and Fred Grant at Vicksburg by Albert Nofi. (I reread Brookhaven, too, and I highly recommend it.)

 

Mystery

 

Willliam Kent Krueger’s mysteries have been around for many years, and I’d read his more literary novels. I finally read Iron Lake, the first in the Cork O’Connor mysteries, and then the second, Boundary Waters. I’ve bought the third and can’t wait to read it. (There are some 20 or so in the series.)

 

I also liked London Blue, the latest in the Lord and Lady Hetheridge mysteries, and Tides of Death by Luke Davis, the first in the DI Gareth Benedict series. I also reached the current end of the Pete Brasset mysteries featuring DI James Munro (Ruse), and the current end of the Hillary Greene mysteries by Faith Martin (No. 21, entitled Murder on the Train). And I enjoyed Suffer the Dead by Rhys Dylan, the fourth of 21 in the DCI Evan Warlow mysteries.

 

And that’s the list for 2025.

Top photograph by Olena Bohovyk via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

At the Savoy Chapel – Spitalfields Life.

 

“Oh I could raise the darken’d veil,” poem by Nathaniel Hawthorne – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Dropped without Joy – Alexander Fayne on the poet R.S. Thomas.

Poets and Poems: Hedy Habra and “Under Brushstrokes”

Sometimes I find myself backing into a poet’s work – starting with the most recent work and then working my way backwards to earlier works. Such is the case with Hedy Habra, whose Or Did You Ever See the Other Side? (2023) I considered here last year. 

Then I read her first collection, Tea in Heliopolis (2013). I realized she has been writing about art – paintings, sculpture, music, architecture, and history from the beginning. Her background suggests this is not by accident; she’s been exploring the cultural heritage of her family through poetry from the beginning. 

 

Under Brushstrokes was published in 2015. As the title suggests, may, or most, of the poems are about art. Habra is going to take us on something of a tour, with our informed tour guide showing us what is and isn’t obvious.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

mist\’mist\ n. 1,3,4 – poem by M.L. Brown at Every Day Poems.

 

“A Christmas Carol,” poem by G.K. Chesterton – Kelly Keller at On the Common.

 

“Winter Wakeneth al my Care” – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

A Quarrel with the World: Milosz’s complicated Second World War – Alan Jacobs at The Hedgehog Review.

 

A Review of The Teller’s Cage: Poems and Imaginary Movies by John Philip Drury – Carla Sarett at New Verse Review.

I Bid Farewell to Chief Inspector Gamache

I’ve been a fan of Louise Penny’s Chief Inspector Gamache mystery novels for years. I was fascinated by the village of Three Pines in Quebec, so small and out of the way that it can’t be found on most maps. The Villages residents – Olivier and Gabri at the Bistro, the off-the-wall poet Ruth Zardo, artist Clara Morrow, Myrna the bookstore owner, all had their stories on how they came to live there.  

I felt t home with Gamache’s family – his wife Reine-Marie and his grown children. His daughter Annie marries Jean-Guy Beauvoir, Gamache’s second-in-command at the Quebec Surete. And his police team. 

 

From novel to novel, and there are now 20 of them, I’ve followed the characters through personal crises, upheavals, near-death experiences, entanglements in crime, and overall well-done stories. But with No. 18, A World of Curiosities, Penny wallowed personal politics to color the story. I was encouraged with No. 19, The Grey Wolf, because she seemed to be returning to her narrative storyline. 

 

Then came No. 20, the sequel to The Grey Wolf. It’s entitled The Black Wolf. 

 

I have two problems with it. 

 

First, a considerable portion of what was conveyed in The Grey Wolf gets rewritten. What we knew then is not what we find out now. Appearances were deceiving. This happened in a significant way once before in on of Penny’s stories, when a village resident gets caught up in a crime and goes to prison after trial and conviction. In the next novel, what we knew turned out to be untrue, the character is redeemed, and all is well in Three Pines, after all. It happens again with The Black Wolf. It might work as an individual story, but it weakens the overall series. You begin to ask yourself, what else is going to get rewritten? 

 

My more serious problem is that Penny is once again slipping personal politics into the story. She includes the occasional mini-lecture, and the wise characters speak to what’s really right and true. But the heart of the story is the larger part of the problem. Those evil people south of the Canadian border are always up to no good.

 

Louise Penny

What happens is that personal politics overtakes the story. I stopped reading about page 200, just over halfway through. Maybe the story gets better. Maybe the politics goes away. But I decided I didn’t want to find out.

 

The fact is that I’m tired of politics overtaking everything, and that’s especially true for books I buy expecting to read a good story. I did not pay good money to read Louis Penny displaying her wisdom – or her version of wisdom – on current events and issues.  She’s taking pot shots and passing them off as deep insights from her characters. Conservatives are bad. Christians are bad. No one believes in church any more, except perhaps as a place to meet informants (because no one would ever think of going there for any other reason).

 

If you are of a progressive or leftist persuasion, you might think this is fine. I’m not; neither am I of a far-right persuasion. And I don’t think it’s fine. If you as a mystery writer are going to do this, then you need to slap a warning label on the cover.

 

So, I bid farewell to Chief Inspector Gamache. I will miss all the pastries and breads dripping in butter at Olivier and Gabri’s bistro. I won’t be reading about crazy Ruth Zardo the poet and her equally crazy duck Rosa. No more support and words of wisdom from Reine-Maries Gamache. 

 

No more anything from characters I’ve thought of as something like friends. 

 

Related:

 

My review of Kingdom of the Blind.

 

My review of Glass Houses.

 

My review of A Great Reckoning.

 

My review of The Long Way Home.

 

My review of How the Light Gets In.

 

My review of The Beautiful Mystery.

 

My review of The Hangman.

 

My review of Penny’s A Trick of the Light.

 

My review of Penny’s A Fatal Grace.

 

My review of Penny’s Still Life.

 

My review of Penny’s The Cruelest Month.

 

My review of Penny’s A Rule Against Murder.

 

My review of The Brutal Telling.

 

My review of Penny’s Bury Your Dead.

 

My review of A Better Man.

 

My review of All the Devils Are Here.

 

My review of The Madness of Crowds.

 

My review of A World of Curiosities.

 

My review of The Grey Wolf.

Some Monday Readings

 

Your phone is a fake house – Adam Aleksic at The Etymology Nerd.

 

Our Days Are Short – Terry Whalin at the Writing Life.

 

An Autumn View Over London from Westminster Cathedral – A London Inheritance.

 

How to Ask Timeless Questions – Joseph Epstein at The Free Press.

 

Thoughts on Ethan Frome – Michael Connolly at The Imaginative Conservative.

Succession

After 2 Samuel 2:1-5:25 

A succession marked 

by turmoil, rivalries,

murder, deceit, betrayal.

The one anointed

to be king prevails,

first for Judah, then

for Israel. God’s choice

was clearly made, man’s 

choice was made with

deception, to the point

of death. The blessing

remained with the one

chosen, as it has since

he prophet’s anointing

all those years before.

The chosen one becomes

king, as provided before

the beginning of time.

 

Painting: Bringing Up the Guns, oil on canvas by Sir. John Gilbert (1817 -1897); Birmingham Museums Trust.

Some Sunday Readings

 

Moses on Mount Pisgah – poem by Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

‘Peanuts’: Suffering, Baseball, and Religion – SDG’s Dailies & Sundays. 

 

Newly Grown Grass with Last Year’s Seed – Jacob Crouch.

 

Advent Sunday – poem by John Keble at The Imaginative Conservative.

Saturday Good Reads – Nov. 29, 2025

A couple of weeks ago, I included a link here from The Wall Street Journal – an op-ed by a therapist who said that the so-called Trump Derangement Syndrome was a real thing. Now, he reports that, because of the article, he’s been receiving death threats. Which I suppose proves his point. 

Sarah Ashbach at New Verse Review has a rather wonderful review of the poetry of Benjamin Myers, comparing the collections’ themes to Vergil. Black Sunday, describing the 1930s Dust Bowl in Oklahoma, remains one of my favorite contemporary collections. 

 

David Warren is a writer who lives in the Toronto area, and he can often be found casting a contrarian eye toward what his government is up to. This week, he turned to a different subject. His father had accepted a teaching job in Pakistan, the family moved, and his father promptly got deathly sick. The school promptly cut off his paycheck, since he wasn’t teaching. The family was in dire straits – a sick father, no income, eviction looming, not to mention hunger. And then the American imperialists arrived.

 

More Good Reads

 

America 250

 

The Greatest Sentence Ever Written – Walter Isaacson at The Free Press.

 

Nathaniel Greene: Washington’s Strategist or Pioneering Operational Artist – Ben Powers at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

American Spies and Sympathizers at Fort Detroit – Geoffrey Hoerauf at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

The Bible, the Pilgrims, & Our Liberty – Jerry Newcombe at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

 

The First Presidential Thanksgiving: Washington’s Vision for a Grateful Nation – Jason Clark at This is the Day.

 

Writing and Literature

 

How Dostoyevsky dissected activistic hypocrites – James Martin Charlton at The Critic Magazine.

 

David McCullough’s History Matters – Church Chalberg at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

The Logical Triumph of English – Henry Oliver at Works in Progress.

 

Faith

 

How Science Confirms a Literal, Historical Adam and Eve – Terry Mortenson at the Council on Biblical Manhood & Womanhood. 

 

Deep River, the spiritual – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

The Kind of Service God Requires – Simon Liu at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

News Media

 

Americans’ Social Media Use 2025 – Pew Research Center.

 

Art

 

Frenemies or rivals? The Britain show explore Turner and Constable’s turbulent relationship – Henry Tudor Pole at The Art Newspaper.

 

Life and Culture

 

Everything Was Once a Place – Brandon McNeice at Front Porch Republic.

 

Poetry

 

“A Certain Young Lady,” poem by Washington Irving and “Spellbound” by Emily Bronte – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Passage to Joy: The Use of Poetry – T.M. Moore at Front Porch Republic.

 

British Stuff

 

In defense of jury trials – Jame Price at The Critic Magazine.

 

Preaching is not a crime – Andrea Williams at The Critic Magazine.

 

American Stuff

 

One Immigrant Boy’s Journey from Cuba to the CIA – Martin Gurri at The Free Press.

 

Slow Down – Chuck Girard

 Painting: Portrait of a Young Man, oil on canvas (1517-18) by Andrea del Sarto (1486-1530); National Gallery, London.

In the pale light

After Romans 13:12 

In the pale light

of early morning,

before the crowds 

stir and assemble,

before the cars 

and cabs and

buses packed

with tourists with

their necklaces

of camera straps,

the church stands

silent, unmoving,

a testimony to its

builders from

a millennium 

before. They built

to last, stone rising

on pale light, its

presence sufficient

here in the morning,

here in the pale light.

 

Photograph: Early morning at Westminster Abbey, London. I took a long walk for exercise very early one September morning in 2024. I had never seen the Abbey without throngs of tourists and traffic jammed on the streets around it. The entire area looked deserted.

Some Friday Readings

 

Depart From Me, Lord – poem by Br. Peter Coyette at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Holy Joy – Ben Graber at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

“Prayer for Creation,” poem by David Adam – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

The Shepherd of Hermas – W. Winston Elliott III at The imaginative Conservative.

Happy Thanksgiving, from Tweetspeak Poetry (and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow)

I went looking for a Thanksgiving Day poem, specifically one by Henry Wadswoth Longfellow (1807-1882). As much as I’ve read Longfellow over the past five years, I thought I remembered one. I found one that wasn’t about the day but about giving thanks in general.  And I found one about the harvest, which we’ve featured here at Tweetspeak Poetrybefore for Thanksgiving Day. 

As it turns out, Longfellow never wrote a poem for the day. He was alive at the time President Abraham Lincoln declared Thanksgiving to be a National Day of Observance in October of 1863, after the strategic Union victories in the Civil Wat at Gettysburg and Vicksburg. Like so much else that happened during the Civil War, the holiday was federalized. Previously, it had been left largely to the individual states.

 

But if there was a poet widely loved during that period and much of the 19^th century, it was Longfellow. He helped create national myths like Paul Revere’s ride and the story of Miles Standish; he introduced America to the story of the expulsion of the Acadians from Canada; and he depicted a native American as something other than a “noble savage.” He was America’s poet, and that was the reason I wrote his poetry into my historical novel Brookhaven.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

Some Thursday Readings

 

Gratitude Is Not Just One Day – Terry Whalin at The Writing Life.

 

2025: Ten Reasons I’m Thankful This Thanksgiving – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.

 

What to be thankful for – Bill Grandi at Living in the Shadow.

 

America’s First Thanksgiving Almost Didn’t Happen – Doug Spurling at Spurling Silver.

 

A President’s Thanksgiving Call to Grace and Gratitude – The Coolidge Review.

 

Why Did FDR Change the Date of Thanksgiving? – Tim Ott at History.

 

Why We Celebrate Thanksgiving – Dancing Priest (first posted in 2022).

"Winston and the Windsors" by Andrew Morton

In late October, we were back at the St. Louis County Library. We had previously attended the talk by mystery writer Elizabeth George; this time it was the British writer, Andrew Morton. 

Morton became an almost-household name in Britain in the 1990s when he wrote not just “a” book but “the” book about Princess Diana – the one she agreed to do. Diana: Her True Story nearly toppled the British monarchy – or at least Diana’s revelations seriously damaged the institution. 

 

Morton has since written books about Monica Lewinsky, Madonna, David and Victoria Beckham, Tom Cruise, Angelina Jolie, and William and Catherine when they were still the duke and duchess of Cambridge. You might say he’s an A-List celebrity biographer.

 

But his more recent attention has turned from contemporary celebrities to those who are more historical. And that’s what we were there to hear him talk about –Winston and the Windsors: How Churchill Shaped a Royal Dynasty. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at Dancing Priest.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

15 Things a Writer Should Never Do – Zachary Petit at Writer’s Digest.

 

Elitism is good – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

Finding Poetry in an Anselm Kiefer Art Exhibition

In 2014, I was in London, and I’d just recovered from my back going out that I spent a good 24 hours immobilized on the floor of our hotel room. A house doctor was called in, and he gave me a muscle relaxant via hypodermic. My back “felt like a solid brick,” he said. It took about 10 hours to work, but I could finally start moving around again.  

The floor of a hotel room is not the way to experience London. The maids were, however, very polite as they vacuumed around me. 

 

Two days later, I was moving normally again, and I went to see an exhibition at the Royal Academy. I’d heard of the German artist Anselm Kiefer; the St. Louis Art Museum has two of his works. One is a massive painting called “Fuel Rods.” The other is a sculpture, entitled “Breaking of the Vessels,” comprised of a huge shelf of burned books and thousands of pieces of glass scattered on the floor. It commemorates “Kritstallnacht,” or the “Night of Broken Glass,” when German Nazis attacked Jewish businesses, buildings, homes, and people across Germany on Nov. 9-10, 1938.

 

The London exhibition was simply entitled “Anselm Kiefer.”

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Photograph: One of the Anselm Kiefer paintings in Sculpture Hall at the St. Louis Art Museum.

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Winter penance – poem by Franco Amati at Garnage Notes.

 

The Kreutzer Sonata – poem by Donna Hilbert at Every Day Poems.

 

Into the Wasteland – Malcolm Guite at The Rabbit Room (video).

 

“The Shadow on the Stone,” poem by Thomas Hardy – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

"Shadows of Tokyo" by Matthew Legare

It’s Tokyo, 1931. An economic depression is on, and times are desperate. Farmers sell their daughters into prostitution. Crime gangs are flourishing. Resentment is growing against the zaibatsu, the top corporate and banking czars. The Japanese army has staged an incident in Manchuria in China, prompted followed by a military invasion. Assassinations, and plots, are becoming common. Democratic government seems on life support. 

Inspector Kenji Aizawa of the Tokyo police has his hands full. He’s also something of an odd duck – he believes in democracy and enforcing the law, regardless of status and position. His boss, unfortunately, is not of the same persuasion.

 

Aizawa receives an anonymous phone call from a woman, saying that Baron Onishi, an aristocrat widely believed to be the next prime minister, will be assassinated. The inspector acts on the tip and foils the killing. But circumstances allow the would-be assassin to be released, and the baron is still under threat. More anonymous phone calls follow.

 

Matthew Legare

The voice on the other end of the phone belongs to Reiko Watanabe, a geisha who’s also the mistress of a fascist writer plotting to overthrow the government. The baron is only one target; the aim is to establish a fascist regime in Japan. 

 

Shadows of Tokyo by Matthew Legare is the story of Inspector Aizawa and Reiko the geisha, and the intense work they do to try to keep Japan from falling into fascism. The story has more action scenes than a Japanese (or American) video game, including narrow escapes from death for both the hero and heroine. And the tale is saturated with the history of Japan as the run-up to World War II begins.

 

Legare has written three novels in the Aizawa / Watanabe series: Shadows of Tokyo, Smoke Over Tokyo, and Treason in Tokyo. He’s also published An American Putsch, set in New York City in the 1930s, and Shanghai Twilight, set in the same time period. His web site includes a blog, where he reviews suspense novels and historical books about Japan, China, Korea, and the World War II period.

 

One of the appeals of Shadows of Tokyo is that Inspector Aizawa makes mistakes, and sometimes those mistakes should have been obvious. He tends to go off on his own, without proper backup, but then he’s in the predicament of never knowing when his backup might shoot him in the back. But he’s human, with human failings, and he’s pitted himself against the pull toward dictatorship. And he loves his city.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

In the City of the Dead – Wiseblood Booka.

 

Wendell Berry’s Epilogue – Nadya Wiliams at Law & Liberty.

 

Before We Make a Roux – Brian Miller at Hearth & Field. 

 

The King’s Chapel of the Savoy – A London Inheritance.

A heart of stone

After 1 Samuel 25:1-44 

He hears from her lips

of his narrow escape

from destruction and

death, and the guilty

man quakes, realizing

how closely it came, how

closely his words nearly

brought his destruction. 

His heart dies within him,

paralyzed with fear. Gripped

by paralysis, unable to move,

he turns to stone, dead within

ten days, struck down not

by the man he insulted,

but by the God the man

served. Judgment belongs

to the Lord.

 

Photograph by Toni Reed via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

Grief, Memory, and the Hope We Hold in Christ – Staci Eastin.

 

Duty and Delight: C.S. Lewis on Beauty in the Psalms – Michael De Sapio at The Imaginative Conservative.