Meeting with a Monthly Book Club on "Brookhaven"

Last week, I sat with seven or eight members of a local St. Louis book club. I was there at their invitation to discuss my historical novel Brookhaven, which they’d chosen for their monthly reading. I was there to talk about the book and answer their questions. 

The hostess was more than knowledgeable about the Civil War, having an ancestor who served on the Union side. She even had his picture and other memorabilia. Her husband had an ancestor who published Origins of the Late War in 1866.

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

Photograph: The Brookhaven, Miss., train station about 1915.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Le Pen mightier than the sword? – David Warren at Essays in Idleness.

 

Another Look at Ulysses Grant – review by Gould Hagler at Emerging Civil War.

 

Contemplation in Action: Booth Tarkington and the Art of Business – Steve Soldi Jr. at Front Porch Republic.

"An Axe for the Frozen Sea" by Ben Palpant

Occasionally, you come across a book that feels like old home week, like you’ve returned to your college alma mater and almost nothing has changed. Poet and writer Ben Palpant has written a book just like that. 

The book is An Axe for the Frozen Sea: Conversations with poets about what matters most. Over the course of many months, Palpant interviewed 17 poets. He talked to them about what they write, why they write, how they view poetry (their own and others’), and generally focusing on the question most poets likely ask themselves throughout their writing careers: Why poetry?

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

A Seeming Stillness – poem by David Whyte.

 

“The Restoration” and “Quo Vadis?” – poems by Brian Yapko at Society of Classical Poets.

 

Estuary – poem by Luci Shaw at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

Pansies – poem by Kate Seymour MacLean at Every Day Poems.

 

“The Waste Land,” poem by T.S. Eliot – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

"Caution: Death at Work" by Rhys Dylan

A young London securities trader is getting married, and his best friend since childhood (and best man) takes him on a weekend bicycling trip through the forest they both knew so well as kids. But while camping out, they’re attacked while sleeping. The securities trader is killed and the best friend seriously injured in a brutal knife attack.  

The clues are few. The friend couldn’t see what was happening in the dark or identify who the killer might be or even look like. The only clue of substance is the friend’s hearing a motorcycle or motorized dirt bike. 

 

Detective Chief Inspector Evan Warlow and his team begin an investigation of a crime that looks random, and yet it doesn’t. Slowly they check everything possible – video footage of nearby roads, backgrounds of the victims that might suggest something, exhaustive interviewing of family, friends, and acquaintances. Some indications point to an incident in the past, but it looks at best inconclusive.

 

Rhys Dylan

Warlow has been coaxed from retirement, but his health issue is still there, and he’ll learn more in about two months. In the meantime, the case gets his full attention, and he soon learns that, like in too many murder investigations, people don’t always tell everything they know.

 

Caution: Death at Work is the second in the DCI Evan Warlow series by Rhys Dylan, and it’s every bit as good as its predecessor, The Engine House. In Even Warlow, Dylan has created an experienced police detective who’s struggling with a (still unknown) health issue and who often has to allow clues and conversations simmer in his mind before the light bulb pops on. 

 

Dylan has published 15 novels in the DCI Evan Warlow series. A native Welshman educated in London, Dylan wrote numerous books for children and adults under various pen names across several genres. He began writing the DCI Warlow series in 2021; The Engine House was published in 2022. Dylan lives in Wales.

 

Related:

 

“The Engine House” by Rhys Dylan.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

How One Town Turned a Child’s ‘Cru for Help’ into a Hate Crime – Frannie Block at The Free Press.

 

Noble Street: The Ruins of London’s Industry – A London Inheritance.

 

The Burning Season – Paul Kingsnorth at The Abbey of Misrule.

 

Finding the Lost Generation on a Stroll Through Paris – Jackson Lanzer at Literary Traveler.

Missing

After Luke 2:41-50 and Mark 11:12-17 

Returning from Passover,

they know their son is

among the group traveling

together, until they look

and can’t find him.

Panicked, they rush back,

back to Jerusalem, 

a day’s journey, and search

the city for three days. They

find him in the temple,

teaching the teachers 

by asking questions,

questions as insightful as

they are profound. They 

should have known, he

says, were to find him –

in his father’s house.

 

In twenty years, the boy

now a man is in his

Father’s house, turning

over tables, cleansing,

redeeming, still about

his Father’s business.

 

Photograph by Bertrand Borie via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

“On the Savior,” poem by Claudian (AD 370- 494) – E.J. Hutchinson at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

And all the people said…[inaudible mumble] – Simon Arscott at Gentle Reformation.

 

The Hidden Saints of Seventh-Century England – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative. 

Saturday Good Reads - March 29, 2025

This past Tuesday was the 100^th birthday of writer Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). I still remember when I discovered her writing. I was 24, working for Shell Oil in Houston, and a work colleague (who herself was a bit Flannery-esque) strongly me urged me to read her. Which I did. And I promptly devoured everything he’d written, including her letters, collected and published in 1979 as The Habit of Being. One of my favorite lines of hers was, “When I’m asked why Southern writers always seem to write about freaks, I say it’s because we’re still able to recognize one.”  

Her 100^th birthday meant she was just about everywhere you looked.

 

Poet and writer Sally Thomas has a reflection on O’Connor and her works, as does Chilton Williamson Jr. at Modern Age. Catherine Taylor at The Guardian wonders if we should still read her works. Shaun Usher at Letters of Note considers her letters (she was a marvelous letter writer), while Henry Eliot at Read the Classics recommends reading her short stories. Ralph Wood at Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal argues that her life and work embodied the three Lenten requirements of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Poet and writer Angela Alaimo O’Donnell has written three books about O’Connor, and she has three poems about the writer at Rabbit Room Poetry. If you want to read O’Connor, I’d recommend the edition of her collected works published by the Library of America. 

 

And if you’d like to hear O’Connor speak in her own voice, Open Culture has a recording of her reading “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” (The early part is difficult to follow, but it gets better, and you can click on “Show transcript.”)

 

More Good Reads 

 

Writing and Literature

 

The Vanishing White Male Writer – Jacob Savage at Compact Magazine.

 

Twenty-one facts and opinions about A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader. 

 

Building: How You Can, While You Can – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review on Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather.

 

The American Revolution: The 250^th Anniversary

 

Discover Parick Henry’s Legacy – Cassandra Good at Smithsonian Magazine.

 

“Never heard anything more infamously insolent”: Loyalist and British response to Parick Henry’s famous speech – Rob Orrison at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

Virginia 250^th Events – Bert Dunkerly at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

American Stuff

 

The Man Behind Reagan’s ‘Evil Empire’: Tony Dolan, RIP – Paul Kengor at The American Spectator.

 

Review: The Confederate Resurgence of 1864 by William Marvel – Civil War Books and Authors.

 

Israel

 

Israel’s Second War of Independence – Michael Oren at Clarity.

 

Poetry

 

“The Last Ship,” poem by J.R.R. Tolkien – Andrew Henry at The Saxon Cross.

 

“On Joy Harjo,” excerpt from Ambiguity and Belonging by Benjamin Myers – New Verse Review. 

 

At the Funeral Parlor – James Matthew Wilson at National Review.

 

“Spots of Time,” from the Prelude by William Wordsworth – Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Faith

 

You Were Made for This – Brianna Lambert at From Glory to Ordinary.

 

Friends Come and Friends Go – Tanner Kay Swanson at Desiring God.

 

Life and Culture

 

In Praise of “Old” – Reid Makowsky at Front Porch Republic.

 

O Freedom – Anchor Hymns

 Painting: The Evening News, oil on canvas by Louis Charles Moeller (1855-1930).

How we are to live

After Galatians 5:22-25 

Living in the Spirit

produces fruit, tangible

things we see, that are

expensive, that we know,

within us and within

the body. We see these

things:

love, joy, peace, patience,

kindness, goodness,

faithfulness, gentleness,

self-control. We have

left behind our old lives,

its passions and desires.

We are new creatures,

living in the Spirit,

keeping in step. We are

not citizens of this world;

we are strangers to it.

Our citizenship is someplace

else. We do not earn our way

to heaven; we are the vessels

through which the light

of heaven shines.

 

Photograph by Name Gravity via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

“To Keep a True Lent,” poem by Robert Herrick – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Immortal, Invisible, God Only Wise – poem by Walter Chambers Smith at Kingdom Poets (D.S. Martin). 

 

“Annunciation,” poem by J.C. Scharl – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

If I Had Not Been Writing the Poem – poem by Rene Emerson at Rabbit Room Poetry.

Among the Seven Golden Lamps – poem by Cody Ilardo at Power & Glory.

Poets and Poems: Forrest Gander and "Mojave Ghost"

In 2021, five years after the death of his wife, poet C.D. Wright, poet Forrest Gander began to walk sections of the San Andreas Fault from north to south. Accompanied by a recent immigrant, Ashwini Bhat, he eventually found himself in Barstow, California, where he’d been born. It was more than a hometown; he describes how his mother’s enthusiasm for the washes and canyons of Rainbow Basin led in an almost direct line to his own interest in geology (and a degree and a career before poetry).  

That early experience and his own background in geology led to an intense interest in landscape, an interest reflected across many if not most of his writings. And it’s fully reflected in Mojave Ghost: A Novel Poem (2024). The ghost of the title, he says, refers to his mother; he can’t help seeing the landscape of the Mojave Desert through his mother’s eyes. 

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

Some Thursday Readings

 

John Niehardt’s Epic ‘Cycle of the West’ – video by Andrew Bensn Brown at Society of Classical Poets.

 

The Draft Horse – poem by Robert Frost at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

“The Touch of the Masters Hand,” poem by Myra Brooks Welch – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“Epic,” poem by Patrick Kavanaugh – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.