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A Journal Of The Plague Year


This is the second time I have read Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year. The first time was when I was a young man (late teens? twenties?) and was only the second book by Defoe I’d ever read (true to this day; the other being his book of the English Civil War, Memoirs of a Cavalier; incidentally, the use of ‘a’ rather than ‘the’ is interesting; I am reminded of C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed, wherein the use of the indefinite pronoun and the implied rejection of a certain authorial omniscience makes the works feel more trustworthy). Read more

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Krondor: Tear Of The Gods


Finally… after two books, we see a colon used in the third volume!

More than ever, these books feel like Dungeons & Dragons tie-ins. I just finished a long campaign with my long time group, going from first to twentieth level. This feels like a campaign. But the thing is, there is a lot of filler that doesn’t really tie the true narrative together. When playing, it’s not that important because the real joy is the relationship with your companions and seeing your own character grow and evolve. But it doesn’t really work in a novel. This was possibly my least favorite of the three.

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A Shropshire Lad


I picked this up before the pandemic hit (or at least before we knew it was hitting). I am sure that I have read A.E. Housman before. I didn’t read it for a while, but it has been something I have been keeping nearby lately and reading from. I even read it to my little one during dinner (poem XVII, which opens with a stanza about football [which I changed to ‘soccer’ when I read it my little soccer fan]). Read more

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‘Tek Secret’ & ‘Tek War’ The Movie/Series


I am not going to justify myself here. I really can’t, except for a sort of pact with the devil and a deep love of William Shatner. Also, a memory of it being on the sort of revolving wire book rack you used to see in drugstores in the Dunedin Library, near the card catalog.

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A Vindication Of The Rights Of Women


To me, the heart of her argument’s current value (assuming that we can all agree that women are not inherently inferior to men and don’t need to be told that anymore; though it is still almost certainly true the we do still need to be told) is an educational one (perhaps why she take special offense at the educational writings of Rousseau). Proper education leads to people of any gender becoming fully moral creatures. The failure to properly educate women leads to them lacking, in most cases, full moral agency. At the same time, the rearing of children, who we want to be grow into moral creatures, is left to them, so shouldn’t we educate them properly so that they can raise the next generation of moral agents? Read more

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Ways Of Heaven: An Introduction To Chinese Thought


I begin to see why my wife criticizes my photography

Though not stated openly, Sterckx, for the majority of the book, sets Chinese thought as a sort of rivalry between Confucianism and Mohism. You can easily see a bias towards the former, though he is not unkind towards the latter (Legalism, however, receives only a lukewarm defense). Read more

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Tek Vengeance


I got back and forth on these Tek novels (inexplicable, save for my deep love of William Shatner, who didn’t actually write these novels). Today, I’m feeling generous towards the compulsive storytelling and decent chemistry between the middle aged, but still vigorous and athletic, Jake Cardigan, and his partner in the future world of private eyes, Sid Gomez.

What I am not down for is the revelation that Jake’s girlfriend (who he cheated on with her college friend in the last volume; did we forget that? because I didn’t forget that), is twenty-seven years old to his forty-nine. And they’ve been together for at least a year. Icky.

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Letter Of Henry St. John, Viscount Bolingbroke, To Alexander Pope


If this was not so clear in the previous letter I read, Bolingbroke has studied his s—t. He has named dropped in such a way that it’s clear he’s read them well Bacon, Descartes, and Leibniz.

My understanding is that Pope turned to Bolingbroke for philosophical counsel when writing his great Essay on Man. But no one has ever accused that poem of having more than moderate philosophical value (but great poetic value). Neither does Pope’s friend, whose philosophy seems to be, at its heart, Baconian, mixed with a dose of anti-clericalism (though knowing what I know, I expect that Anglican ministers are exempt from his rhetorically flourishing vitriol). He gets in a jab at Leibniz (which he spells Leibnitz):

Leibnitz, one of the vainest and most chimerical men that ever got a name in philosophy, and who is often so unintelligible that no man ought to believe he understood himself…
Good stuff, eh?

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Reading ‘The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe’ To My Daughter


I would call it quarantine reading but we would have done it anyways. Having finished The Hobbit, an intro to Narnia seemed the next, logical step.

Now, she did not like The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe half so much as The Hobbit, but that’s fair. Lewis, as a fantasist, is not half so good as Tolkien.

But I have come to deeply appreciate Lewis, overall, in recent years, and I was glad to introduce my daughter to him. We have put Prince Caspian on hold at the library, but what I really want to read to her is The Horse and His Boy, which, as a child, I might have read even more times than Wardrobe. It is, so far as I can tell, not highly respected, but I found it to be a lovely and beautiful self contained adventure.

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Happy Birthday, William Wordsworth


It’s William Wordsworth’s 250th birthday. My favorite poet and here is a link my favorite poem by him: The Recluse.

I am nearly alone in loving his longer poems, I fear, but maybe you’ll still like it.

It’s also my father’s birthday. He is considerably younger.