Saturday Good Reads - Feb. 21, 2026

I learned the song when I was a young child: “Yankee Doodle went to London / just to buy a pony, he stuck a feather in his cap / and called it macaroni.” It’s an old song, likely dating to the start of the American Revolution or colonial period. Historians know how it’s been used over the centuries, but it’s still a mystery as to where it came from. 

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose poetry figures in my novel Brookhaven, wrote the poem that is the most famous about the American Revolution, “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere.” It was one of the stories included in Tales of a Wayside Inn, published in 1863, as another conflict ranged in America. We have Longfellow to thank for how we understand Paul Revere’s ride, and it happened slightly differently from how he romanticized it. Well, perhaps more than slightly. But it did happen. Kostya Kennedy at Time Magazine explains why the famous ride did indeed matter.

 

One of the most common headlines I’ve seen in the last 25 years is “Book publishing faces a crisis.” Book Publishing seems to stay in crisis these days, with the latest being what’s perceived as a dramatic drop-off in sales of non-fiction books. Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review looks at the data and asks, is the non-fiction book crisis for real?

 

More Good Reads

 

America 250

 

Richard Cranch, Boston Colonial Watchmaker – Andrew Dervan at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

George Washington: The Indispensable Man – Charlton Allen at Real Clear History.

 

Why George Washington Should Still Inspire Every American – New York Post.

 

No, George Washington Didn’t Have Wooden Teeth. Yes, he led the Siege of Boston – Michael Casey at Associated Press.

 

The Sieges of Fort Morris, Georgia – Douglas Dorney, Jr. at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

The republican “we”: On David McCullough and Walter Isaacson – Michael Taube at The Critic Magazine.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Revisiting Milton: A Review of Alan Jacobs’ Biography of Paradise Lost – Amanda Patchin at Front Porch Republic.

 

Four Unexpected Traits of Great Writers and Artists – Nicholas McDonald at The Bard Owl.

 

How Wuthering Heights Pushed Victorian Boundaries – Betsy Golden Kellem at History.

 

Faith

 

Taking the High Places Down – John Beeson at The Bee Hive.

 

Throwing Yourself Off the Temple: When Productivity Replaces Trust – Staci Eastin.

 

News Media

 

Nancy Guthrie and the gamification of crime – Katherine Dee at The Spectator.

 

Poetry

 

“Church Monuments,” poem by George Herbert – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

“Unexpressed,” poem by Paul Laurence Dunbar – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

British Stuff

 

Who governs Britain? – David Shipley at The Critic Magazine.

 

American Stuff

 

The Largest Surrender of the Civil War: Bennett Place, North Carolina – Kris White at Boom Goes the History (podcast).

 

Is-Land – Jeff Johnson

Painting: Corfu, A Rainy Day, oil on canvas by John Singer Sargent (1856-1925).

On the wings of the wind

After 2 Samuel 22 

I ride the wings

of the wind, lifted

from danger and

peril and my own

stupidity and sin,

lifted and cleansed,

brought into presence,

carried through and

over the fire, over 

the storm, arriving

at a place of safety,

of peace, peace within

my own soul.

 

Photograph by Irina Iriser via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Friday Readings

 

The Mad Farmer on Claude, AI, and the Church – Hayden Nesbit at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

“Idle,” poem by Anne Corkett – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

Psalm 119 in Eight Words – Andrew Wilson at Think Theology.

 

“Lord, Who Throughout These 40 Days,” hymn by Claudia Hernaman – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

What else does God name? – Seth Lewis.

Poets and Poems: Mary Meriam and "Then Flew My Caw Away"

I wasn’t quite prepared for Then Flew My Caw Away: Poems, the recently published collection by Mary Meriam. Many of the poems are about broken families or broken or lost relationships. They’re filled with a sharpness, a toughness, words wielded like a heavy blade. But every so often, something else breaks through, and it’s so tangible you can almost taste it.  

That something is pain. In “Heron,” the collection’s first poem, she writes, “I need to live another way,/ somewhere, maybe Oakland, / leave my old broken oak tree / feels like my only friend.” Several of the poems suggest a mother figure who, intentionally or not, dominated the child. The words often ache. They don’t ask for pity; they simply seek to understand and explain.

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

Some Thursday Readings

 

Reasons for not writing…and other poems – Kelly Belmonte at Kelly’s Scribbles.

 

Small things – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

“In the Wilderness,” poem by Robert Graves – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

Some Wednesday Readings

Love Along the Raid: A Morgan’s Raiders Love Story – Caroline Davis at Emerging Civil War. 

Old Tom’s Ash Wednesday – Bradley Birzer.

 

T.S. Eliot’s Long Lent – Dwight Longenecker at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Britain: Westminster is running out of time – Lee Cain at The Critic Magazine.

 

The Vikings of Orkney – Warren Frye at The New Criterion.

 

Concerning Kipling – poem by George Bradley at Literary Matters.

 

Photograph: Ring of Brodgar Stone Circle and Henge, Orkney Islands, Scotland – Maxwell Andrews at Unsplash. Used with permission.

Poets and Poems: Erin Murphy and “Mother as Conjunction”

When we were children, my brothers and I would sometimes be handed a snack that I thought had been invented by my mother. “Bread, butter, and sugar” was possibly our favorite treat. My mother was tickled that we saw it as a special dessert. It was only years later, when I visited her in a rehab center while she recovered from a broken hip bone, that she told me where it had come from. 

She grew up in the Great Depression. Money was so tight that my aunt quit high school because she couldn’t pay the 25 cents for gym clothes. My mother, the fourth of six children, knew hunger. She said there were times when there was nothing to eat, so they’d go to bed hungry. The next day, my grandmother would prepare sandwiches for school, using the only ingredients she had – butter and sugar sandwiches. It was a poor child’s lunch in the 1930s, and her own children thought of it as a terrific treat.

 

Reading poet Erin Murphy’s new work, Mother as Conjunction, imagine my surprise to discover someone else who had the same experience as my mother, except it happened decades later. 

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Nature – poem by Sonja Benskin Mesher.

 

Memento Mori: On Philip Larkin’s “Aubade” and its Discontents – Alexander Fayne.

 

The Sea in You – poem by David Whyte.

 

“My Heart Leaps Up,” poem by William Wordsworth – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Whatever Is – poem by Sarah Chestnut at Rabbit Room Poetry.

"Bones Buried Deep" by Emma Jameson

It’s June of 1940. Dunkirk has happened. France had surrendered. The day of the formal surrender – June 22, 1940 – is approaching. And in Britain, there’s a collective holding of breath. What happens now? 

For Dr. Benjamin Bones, working in the village of Birdswing in Cornwall, what happens is another murder. A body is found in a stream nearby. It’s finally identified as that of a young man from Plymouth, and he’s been kicked and beaten to death. The case takes on a different overtone when the body is identified – a young Jewish man, the sole support of his young brothers and sisters.

 

The discovery brings out the best and the worst in the local residents. Dr. Bones, and his great love Lady Juliet Linton, are surprised by the depth of anti-Semitic feeling from the people they like and thought they knew. It seems particularly virulent among the more upper-class crowd who gather at the Duke of Cornwall Hotel in Plymouth, already infiltrated by Lady Juliet’s errant husband working undercover for the British government. But what happened to the young man?

 

Emma Jameson

Bones is joined by the official investigator, a detective from Plymouth who himself is Jewish and knows firsthand what discrimination is like in the police department. Lady Juliet is not to be left out, and she finds innovative ways to investigate on her own.

 

Bones Buried Deep  is the fourth of four Dr. Benjamin Bones mysteries by British mystery author Emma Jameson, who’s also written the Lord and Lady Hetheridge mystery series (all set in London and have something to do with the word “blue”). 

 

This installment in the Dr. Bones series, like its predecessors, is leavened by humor (Jameson has created a great comic detective with Lady Juliet). And humor is definitely needed in what would be a dark tale indeed without it, a tale of vicious discrimination, death, black marketing, and the overhand of war.

 

Related:

Blue Murder by Emma Jameson.

 Something Blue by Emma Jameson.

 Black & Blue by Emma Jameson.

 Blue Blooded by Emma Jameson.

 Blue Christmas by Emma Jameson.

 Untrue Blue by Emma Jameson. 

 London Blue by Emma Jameson.

 Bones in the Blackout by Emma Jameson.

 Bones at the Manor House by Emma Jameson.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Technological Poverty – Matthew Walther at The Lamp.

 

A Quiet Refusal to Compromise – Elizabeth Corey at Law & Liberty.

 

The Novel That Kept a British Prime Minister Up All Night – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review.

 

Art is the Signature of Man – Joseph Pearce at The Imaginative Conservative.

 

Why Essex is Britain’s most right-wing county – Daniel Dieppe at the Critic Magazine.

Singing to remember

After 2 Samuel 22 

I wrote a song, once,

a song of thanksgiving

and redemption, a song

I remember now. It is

a song of life,

a song of my life.

the song I wrote

to remember always

celebrates who

the author is,

the author of salvation,

the author of redemption

and rescue, the author

who takes me and

protects me in the cleft

of the rock, the author

who brings me to

the oasis in the desert,

the author who writes

my story. I sing

that song to remember.

 

Photograph by Vitalii Khodzinskyi via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

The Spiritual Discipline of Unlearning – David Prince at Prince on Preaching.

 

Holy Humor – Joshua Budimlic at Iotas in Eternity.

Saturday Good Reads - Feb. 14, 2026

Ah, those Valentine Day candy hearts, with those little messages that read like they anticipated text messages decades later. “Luv U.” “U R Mine.” I was surprised to learn that they originated during the Civil War. See “Hub Wafers: A Yankee Delight” at Emerging Civil War.  

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is all over the media – stock market drops, worries about impact on jobs, already beginning to redefine industries. More than a year ago, a former colleague at work asked me if I’d embraced ChatGPT. I surprised her when I shook my head no. “Not for me,” I said. “I think I’d prefer to give up writing altogether.” AI popped all over my inbox this week. Writing coach Ann Kroeker asks whose voice is on your page. Writer Paul Kingsnorth sees it as the latest manifestation of what he calls “the machine,” and tells writers to oppose it. And Samuel D. James takes a look at that latest AI article that went viral.

 

More Good Reads

 

America 250

 

The Mecklenburg Declaration of Independence: The Present Status of the Controversy – Scott Syfert at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

Just Call It Washington’s Birthday – Jonathan Horn at The Free Press.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Twenty-one reactions to Wuthering Heights (from 1847 to 2007) – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader.

 

Shakespeare in the Bardo – Tana Wojczuk at The Baffler.

 

Life and Culture

 

The Popular Progressive Podcast Calling Evangelicals ‘Cancer’ – Bonnie Kristian at The Free Press.

 

Ten Books No One in Education Wants You to Read – Michael Rose at Classical Compass.

 

How Jamaica’s Bobsled Team Became an Unlikely Global Sensation – Kareem Nittle at History.

 

Poetry

 

A Sonnet on the Transfiguration – Malcolm Guite.

 

“On Stella’s Birth-day,” poem by Jonathan Swift – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Poet Laura: Month of Fevers – Donna Hilbert at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

Faith

 

All Those Undone Days – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

American Stuff

 

The Oath I Took – Sarah Harley at Front Porch Republic.

 

Winters Remembered – Brian Miller at Notes from an East Tennessee Farmer.

All Because of Mercy - Casting Crowns

Painting: A Woman Reading, oil on canvas (1920) by Pablo Picasso (1881-1973). 

Poets and Poems: Dave Malone and "Bypass"

I’m reading a poetry collection, and an image forms in my mind, a memory I hadn’t recalled in years. I’m 11, and my mother arranged for me to spend a week with my widowed aunt who lived in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans.  She was the family historian, and I was the family reader, so I suppose my mother thought we’d be a match. We were. 

She was a force to be reckoned with. In her lifetime, she crossed swords with reluctant neighbors, homeowner associations, historical commissions, the New Orleans City Council, and just about anyone whom she saw standing in the way of historical preservation and urban beautification. She also buried every deceased pet in her deep back yard, well behind her pre-Civil War house.

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

Some Friday Readings

 

Found in Translation: Love’s Fire and Ice – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

“Hendecasyllabics,” poem by Algernon Charles Swinburne – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Formalist, Farmer, and Faithful – Marie Burdett at New Verse Review.

Remembering a song

After 2 Samuel 22 

I remember a song

I sang before, long before,

a song to celebrate,

a song to remember

my rescue ar a time

of peril, a time

of disaster, a time

when my life seemed

over. Yet it wasn’t.

I sang a song

of deliverance, a song

of rescue, a song

of salvation, a song

of redemption fom

disaster. I sang

the song then;

I sing the song

now.

 

Photograph by Hailey Reed via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Thursday Readings

 

Holy Sonnet VII by John Donne – D.S. Martin at Kingdom Poets.

 

“Psalm XIII,” poem by Sir Philip Sidney – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“When Jesus Left His Father’s Throne,” hymn by James Montgomery – Anthony Esolen at Word & Song.

 

Right Here – poem by Seth Lewis.

In Praise of Art Museums as Sources of Inspiration

I’d heard that, as you age, you often become more interested in art. What I didn’t expect was to discover how that growing interest in art would affect my fiction writing.

I wasn’t a stranger to art, but I can’t say it was a major preoccupation, either. I had two semesters of art history in college; I took two, because the same textbook was used for both, and it was more expensive than the tuition. I’m also not an artist.

I know when my connection of art to writing fiction started. It was some 50 years ago. We were young twenty-somethings living in Houston, and we saw two exhibitions at the Museum of Fine Arts. One was the works of Paul Cezanne, and it was stunning. But the one that captured me was “Master Paintings from the Hermitage and the State Russian Museum, Leningrad.” Houston was one of five cities hosting it. 

To continue reading, please see my post today at the ACFW blog.

Painting: Lumpeguin, Cigwe, Animiki, by Anselm Kiefer, from collection of the artist on display at the St. Louis Art Museum.

Some Wednesday Readings

 

The genre that came in from the cold: Why we love spy fiction – Andy Owen at The Critic Magazine.

 

Fierce, wild, intractability: Emily Bronte’s untameable spirit – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader. 

Surf’s Up in Slop City – Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft.

Poets and Poems: Linda Nemec Foster and the Extraordinary Ordinary

A few weeks ago, I looked by Bone Country, the recent poetry collection by Linda Nemec Foster. It was like a travel guide to Europe, but not what you expected from a travel book. She explore through both real and imagined stories, and you came away with a strong sense of what the people and places are really about. 

Since then, I’ve looked at two of Foster’s previous collections, Talking Diamonds, first published in 2009 and reissued in 2023, and Bue Divide, published in 2021 and republished in 2023. In both cases, the first publisher had closed its doors and the collections were reissued by Cornerstone Press of the University of Wisconsin – Stevens Point. It’s not difficult to see why. Both Talking Diamonds and Blue Divide are excellent, with sharp imagery, moving stories, and an original voice. 

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

Some Tuesday Readings

 

Fire in the Earth – poem by David Whyte.

 

Poetry Prompt: Meet Your Muse Erato – L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

An Answer Without a Question – poem by Robert Cording at Rabbit Room Poetry.

 

Verses on the Prospects of Planting Arts and Learning in America, poem by George Berkeley – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

"Shooting Season" by David Gatward

If you had told him three months before, DCI Harry Grimm would have laughed. He’s on loan (or “secondment”) to the police in Yorkshire, and he first couldn’t wait to return to his base in Bristol. But now, the landscape and the people are growing on him; he’s even tried the local preference for cake with cheese and discovered it’s not too bad. 

Grimm and his team are called into to handle a missing person report. A bestselling London author, in York to promote his newest book, has driven off into the dark. They soon discover the people attached to the author – his agent, his editor, his personal assistant, his accountant, and two “friends” – may have al had axes to grind. But where is the author?

 

David Gatward

He soon turns up, or his body does. It appears to be suicide by shotgun, except both triggers were pulled in succession. Suicide it wasn’t, and the list of suspects grows to include a woman who made a scene at a local bookstore author event, accusing the man of stealing someone else’s words. And if a murder investigation isn’t enough, Grimm’s criminal father shows up with two thugs, attempting to bring his son “into line.”

 

Shooting Season is the fourth novel in the DCI Harry Grimm series by British author David Gatward. Rather than a slow development toward the conclusion, this one finds Grimm and his team stymied at every turn, chasing leads that go nowhere – and that lasts for most of the book. What that means is that the story is less about the mystery and more about Grimm’s own development – and setting the stage for his possible permanent assignment to York.

 

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.

 

Related: 

Grimm Up North by David Gatward.

 Best Served Cold by David Gatward. 

Corpse Road by David Gatward.

 

Some Monday Readings

 

Köln Revisited: Or why our art needs this non-ideal world – Andrew Roycroft at New Grub Street.

 

The American Revolution and the Fate of the World by Richard Bell – review by Phill Greenwalt at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

From the Stacks: A Place on Earth – Jeffrey Bilbro at Orange Blossom Ordinary.

 

River Reversed: The New Madrid Earthquake of 1812 – Jason Clark at This Is the Day.

 

Art competitions a forgotten part of Olympic history – Anne Handley-Fierce at St. Louis Art Museum.

The wicked thrive

After Psalm 73 

We see the wealth,

the success, the position,

the status, the renown,

the power that accrues

to the wicked, the wealthy,

the unbeliever, the powerful.

We see the oppression,

the injustice, the innocent

betrayed, the godly

persecuted. Our hearts 

turn hard, turn black;

we ask how he allows

the disparity so grotesque.

Does he not know?

Does he know and ignore?

In his sanctuary I find

the answers, I see

their ends, I understand

the anxiety of losing all

in a moment with nothing

to fall back on. I see

my own end, my own

wickedness, my own

failings and sin. 

I look all over,

I search all over,

I see what the world

values and prizes,

glittering like gold.

My dreams end,

my heart awakens

to the reality of what

matters in this world. 

And I know I am

blessed, my heart knows

I am blessed. I find rest,

I find safety, only in

nail-scarred hands.

 

Photograph by Vitaly Shevchenko via Unsplash. Used with permission.

Some Sunday Readings

 

Wild, Unorganized, and Totally Worth It – Jacob Crouch.

 

The Songs I Once Found Dreary – Karen Dedert at Think Twice.

Saturday Good Reads – Feb. 7, 2026

The image that come to mind when I think of the American Revolution are the Boston Tea Party, Lexington and Concord, crossing the Delaware, Bunker Hill, the winter at Valley Forge, Paul Revere’s ride, the Declaration of Independence signed at Philadelphia, and Yorktown. Do you see what’s odd about that list? Except for Yorktown, the story in my head centers in the northeastern colonies. Alan Pell Crawford, writing for The Coolidge Review, talks about  another war – the Revolutionary War that history forgot, one that just as important as what happened in the North.  

I like the writing of William Faulkner. My wife does not. “Didn’t the guy ever hear of punctuation marks?” she says. Well, yes, there is that. Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review asks a very pertinent question for writers: how long should a sentence be? To be fair to my wife’s criticism, Miller points out that Faulkner has one sentence in Absalom, Absalom that is almost 1,300 words long. But Faulkner is a piker compared to last year’s Nobel Prize winner, Hungarian Laszlo Krasznahorkai, who has a novella of 17,800 words – all in one sentence. The mind boggles.

 

J.P. Moreland, professor of philosophy at the Talbott School of Theology (Biola University), has a relatively short article adapted from a longer paper. It’s about how three worldviews – Christianity, postmodernism, and scientific naturalism – view government. It will be no surprise that two of the three almost by definition favor big government. If you’re interested in the longer paper, you can download it here.

 

More Good Reads

 

America 250

 

Ten of the Most Exciting Ways to Commemorate America’s 250^th This Year – Laura Kiniry at Smithsonian Magazine.

 

The New Dominion: The Land Lotteries – Gabriel Neville at the Journal of the American Revolution.

 

When Revolutionary War Heroes Became Enemies of the State – Jason Clark at This Is the Day.

 

The First War for Hearts and Minds – Jonathan Horn at The Free Press.

 

The Monmouth County Jail and the Jailbreak of February 1781 – Michael Adelberg at Journal of the American Revolution.

 

Victory or Death: Trenton, December 1776 – Charlton Allen at American Thinker.

 

Writing and Literature

 

Charles Dickens and the Upside-Down Kingdom – Kari Cope at Story Warren.

 

Why Literature Needs a Punk Rock Mindset – Lincoln Michel at Counter Craft.

 

Faith

 

Lincoln on Reviving Truth in Public Discourse – John Pletcher at the Institute for Faith, Work, & Economics.

 

Tiptoeing to the Edge of Cliffs – Tim Challies. 

 

The Need for Father-Scholars – Ian Harber at Mere Orthodoxy.

 

Softly, Softly, Break a Bone – Kristin at The Palest Ink.

 

Life and Culture

 

Don’t Call It a Comeback – Elizabeth Stice at Front Porch Republic.

 

Poetry

 

“Ode” by Arthur O’Shaughnessy – Sally Thomas at Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

“Madam Would Speak with Me,” poem by George Meredith – Joseph Bottum at Poems Ancient and Modern.

What is Lyric Poetry? - L.L. Barkat at Tweetspeak Poetry.

 

American Stuff

 

After Trump comes reform – Simon Jenkins at The Spectator.

 

Psalm 116 (I Love You Lord) – Mission House with Andrew & Skye Peterson

Painting: St. Francis of Assisi in Prayer, oil on copper by Cigoli (Ludivico Cardi) (1559-1613), Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest.