Saturday Good Reads - June 20, 2026

Tomorrow is Fathers Day. It’s a younger observance than Mothers Day, and it started in 1910 in Spokane, Washington. And it started because a daughter was determined that fathers would not be forgotten. 

Psychiatrist and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Robert Coles died June 4 at age 97. He also taught literature at Harvard and wrote more than 60 books. His Pulitzer Prize work was about race, and he went to New Orleans with a notebook and tape recording to understand how federally mandated school integration had affected the children themselves. Kenneth Woodward at Commonweal has a remembrance of Coles and his writing.

 

Way back in my junior year of high school, I did a massive research paper for my American Literature class on three Realist writers – Jack London, Edith Wharton, and Willa Cather. I had to read at least two works by each author, and for Cather I chose two of her later works – Death Comes for the Archbishop and Shadows on the Rock (we’d already read My Antonia and O Pioneers in class, and the research paper had to be on unread works). I liked them both, but I knew that critics had disliked Shadows on the Rock; it was apparently too religious. Maria Grace Birzer Papez at The Imaginative Conservative considers the book and writes that the critics at the time missed the point entirely.

 

More Good Reads

 

America 250

 

America at 250: The Greatest Compounding Machine in History – Meg Faber at Real Clear History.

 

John Hancock and the Battle for Newport – Kely Holt at Just Enough History.

 

America’s Thomas Jefferson Problem – Rick Lowry at The Coolidge Review.

 

The Plot Against Washington – Jonathan Horn at The Free Press.

 

Anatomy of a Republic – Bradley Birzer at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

The Gaspee Affair (1772): When Rhode Island Colonists Burned a British Warship – Anglotopia.

 

George Washington and the Battle for America’s Frontier – Keli Holt at Just Enough History.

 

Faith

 

Dear Dementia – Katie Laitkep.

 

Loaves, Fish, and Un-Self-Conscious Little Boys – Michael Kelley at Forward Progress.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Great Americans: The Wizard Who Created Oz – Ann Bauer at The Free Press. 

 

Candance Millard and the Revival of History as Literature – Conor Broll at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Drastic Unalikes: Flannery O’Connor and Her Mother – Ralph Wood at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Poetry

 

You’re a Popsicle – Seth Lewis.

 

“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”, Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

Keats’s Melancholy Ode – Adam Roberts at Ships on Fire, Off the Shoulder of Orion.

 

“Poppies on the Wheat,” poem by Helen Hunt Jackson and “When I Have Fears,” poem by John Keats – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

News Media

 

10 Insights from the Reuter’s Institute Digital News Report 2026 – Chris Martin at FYI.

 

Brookhaven Trailer – TS Poetry Press

 Painting: Storytime, oil on canvas (1897) by Carlton Alfred Smith (1853-1946).

Watch your tongue!

After James 4:10-5:6 

Watch your tongue;

don’t speak evil

against your brother.

If you do, you

become a judge,

not of the behavior,

but a judge of the law,

a judge against 

the law. That means

you become one

who judges, not

one who obeys the law,

one who lives the law.

You try to turn

yourself into the one,

the only one, who

can truly judge,

the one who saves.

Sometimes, all times,

Keep your tongue

in your mouth, and

keep your mouth closed.

 

Photograph: The Day of Judgment by William Blake; Art Institute of Chicago via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

From “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

When Innovation Isn’t the Answer – Darryl Dash at Dashhouse.

 

What Do You When You Fail? – Jeffrey Stivason at Gentle Reformation.

 

“In the Sweet By-and-By,” hymn by Sanford Fillmore Bennett – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

A Trailer for "Brookhaven"

I was surprised today - the nice, wonderful kind of surprise. TS Poetry Press, the publisher of my historical novel "Brookhaven," created a trailer for the novel. It is (no bias here, of course) spot on. It describes the novel perfectly and communicates the "feel" that I intended with the novel. You can see it here:

“The Boundless Deep”: Richard Holmes on the Young Tennyson

It’s not exactly a confession, but I have the textbook I used for English in my senior year of high school, England in Literature. It’s not the one I actually used, but a copy I found at a used book fair. And I’ve also held on to the texts from my two courses in English Literature in college – the Norton Anthology of English Literature, published in 1962 and revised in 1968. I’d prefer not to think about how many editions have occurred since then (those recent is 2024). 

I pulled both texts from the shelf recently to see what poems were included from Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-1892). I’ve been reading The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science and the Crisis of Belief by Richard Holmes. Holmes cites Tennyson poems I’d never heard of, and I wondered how many of them had been included in those textbooks.

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

Some Thursday Readings

 

Foxy noses – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

“The Frog,” poem by Hillaire Belloc – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Close and Slow: ‘The Thought Fox’ by Ted Hughes – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

Fifty – poem by David Whyte.

 

“To Rosamounde,” poem by Geoffrey Chaucer – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

“The Declaration of Independence” by Bradley Birzer

I was on a multi-day business trip to Washington, D.C. I had a free afternoon, so I walked from the hotel to the National Gallery on the Mall. And then, for reason or reasons unknown, I walked across the street to the National Archives. And there it was – the original Declaration of Independence. 

 

Drafted mostly if not entirely by Thomas Jefferson, the Declaration is to America what the Magna Carta is to England. The statement of beliefs. The citation of grievances against an unjust ruler (also an English king, no less). The signatures.  

As Bradley Birzer points out in The Declaration of Independence: A Radical Experiment in Liberty, the Declaration is all these things. And it is more. 

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

Some Wednesday Readings

 

Prudence vs. Fanaticism: On the American & French Revolutions – Russell Kirk at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

The art of translation: On Les Fleurs du mal, by Charles Baudelaire, translated by Richard Howard – David Paul at The New Criterion.

 

Short Story, Deep Treasures: Biblical Allusion in “Gift of the Magi” – John Savoie at Literary Matters.

Poets and Poems: Fanny Howe and "This Poor Book"

Fanny Howe (1940-2025) was the author of some 13 poetry collections, five novels, and numerous short stories and essays. Her collection Second Childhood: Poems (2014) was a finalist for the National Book Award. Her Selected Poems received the 2001 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, and she received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize in 2009.  

Shortly before her death in 2025, Howe completed another manuscript, This Poor Book: A Poem. It is and isn’t a poem. It is and isn’t a poetry collection. It is and isn’t a memoir, an autobiography, a poetic essay. It is one of the most unusual works I’ve read.

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Bringing Characters to Life – 1 – Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death,” poem by William Butler Yeats – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

“Restless Dead” by David Gatward

DCI Harry Grimm, somewhat “exiled” from the police force in Bristol to one in Yorkshire. And Yorkshire, even the idea of eating cheese with cake, is growing on Grimm. His team members are noticing the boss introduced as interim is sounding more and more like a local. 

Grimm is also very good at solving cases, tough, difficult, impossible cases. And he’s taken the step of making it permanent.

 

The call comes in. A sheep farmer, inf act the father of one of Grimm’s own team members, is reporting the theft of a prized herd. Since trouble, and cases, never arrives by itself, another case arrives – an elderly couple run off the run, and the wife has been killed.

 

David Gatward

The theft of the sheep will take the police team into barns and an auction yard, while the death of elderly woman will take them deep into a family’s passions and secrets – and possibly a ghost.

 

Restless Dead is the fifth DCI Harry Grimm mystery by British author David Gatward. It’s a bit different from the previous four, with a hint of the supernatural, which will eventually have a natural explanation. Mostly.

 

In addition to the DCI Harry Grimm series, Gatward has published children’s and teen fiction, taught creative writing sessions, worked as an editor, started a small publishing firm, and returned to writing when the COVID pandemic arrived. He grew up in the Cotswold’s and Yorkshire in England (including the town for the setting of Grimm Up North), and he’s also lived in Lincolnshire and the Lake District.

 

The DCI Harry Grimm novels are well-written stories, well thought out and developed with additional aspects added to over the series. They’re good stories, entertaining stories, with regular characters you care about and want to read more about.

 

Related: 

Grimm Up North by David Gatward.

 Best Served Cold by David Gatward. 

Corpse Road by David Gatward.

Shooting Season by David Gatward.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Revolutionary History: Gordon Wood’s Idea of America – Scott Spillman at The Point.

 

The Walls Have Ears – Mark Rothschild at Accidental Wisdom.

 

Congress Establishes the Board of War and Ordnance – Chris Mackowski at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

The Festival of Britain and the South Bank – 75 Years Later – A London Inheritance.

 

Britain: How the Southport riots broke Starmer’s government – Mike Jones at The Critic Magazine.