Finished reading

Nonesuch by Francis Spufford. A ripping plot, fascinating setting (London during the Blitz), spunky (to say the least) protagonist, and real themes about important things. I enjoyed it enormously.

June 6, 2026 - The Eighty-Second Anniversary of D-Day

I was in the backyard this evening just before 7 o’clock when a squall line blew through. In less than five minutes, the temperature dropped probably 10 degrees, the air — which had been heavy and muggy, a real swampy, soupy gravy — suddenly lightened and dried. The wind kicked up and the trees all whooshed and swayed in their tops. Seven or eight birds — just crows, I think — soared, wings spread to the max on the waves of air. The sky darkened. Not to the green light of tornado weather, but deep gray-blue. And something inside me absolutely vibrated with excitement and a kind of joy.

In five minutes the wind died. And… nothing happened. No rain. No thunder. No lightening. No wind.

But for those few minutes when it felt like a little charge, a little danger, a little excitement, like a little (or a lot of) weather was on the march, it was a happy, thrilling joy. Joy is perhaps too strong a word, but I cannot come up with anything more accurate. I prayed a thank-you prayer, and then came inside.

I am certain that were it not for Annie Dillard and Wendell Berry — their books and their poetry — I wouldn’t have noticed; I would have come inside too soon and missed that brief interlude of aliveness. Thank you, God, for their teaching.

“Childness”

" … there are these rules that we think of with literature, but in picture books they’re all broken. The main character can be eaten in the middle.”

“What Adults Lose When They Put Down Children’s Books” by Anna Holmes, The Atlantic, May 9, 2026

Perfect Days

Moment by moment by moment, lived gracefully and honorably, makes a life.

Bring Me My Whangee

Jeeves,’ I said.

‘Sir?’ said Jeeves. He had been clearing away the breakfast things, but at the sound of the young master’s voice cheesed it courteously.

“You were absolutely right about the weather. It is a juicy morning.”

‘Decidedly, sir.’

‘Spring and all that.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘In the spring, Jeeves, a livelier iris gleams upon the burnished dove.’

‘So I have been informed, sir.’

‘Right ho! Then bring me my whangee, my yellowest shoes, and the old green Homburg. I’m going into the Park to do pastoral dances.

RIP, Tracy Kidder

His books, especially House and Mountains Beyond Mountains (and to a lesser degree, The Soul of a New Machine) enthralled me.

Maitre

There are good arguments that Chapters 4 and 5 of P. G. Wodehouse’s Leave It to Psmith are the pinacle of English literature. For an extra treat, try the audiobook read by Jonathan Cecil.

Pynchon: What should I know?

Starting with The Crying of Lot 49; any thoughts before I get very far into it?

Rinkitink

King Rinkitink of Gilgad, by John R. Neill, from Rinkitink in Oz, by Frank L. Baum, 1916

From The Sacred Journey, Frederick Buechner:

For reasons that I can only guess at now, no one I came to know during that first year in Oz left a deeper mark on me than a plump, ebullient king named Rinkitink. He was a foolish man in many ways who laughed too much and talked too much and at moments of stress was apt to burst into unkingly tears; but beneath all that, he gave the impression of remarkable strength and resilience and courage even…

Rinkitink was a very vulnerable man, silly and unstable in numberless ways, but in his fatness he seemed also somehow solid and substantial, eccentric and yet reliable with his slippered feet planted heavily on the ground and his heart in the right place. Like a tree that has been blown for years from so many directions by so many winds that none of them can ever quite blow it down, he seemed strong in his very vulnerability. In his capacity to laugh and weep at the drop of a hat and in general to make a fool of himself, he seemed wise with the wisdom of a child who sees better than his elders that the world is indeed something to laugh and weep about and who, more realistically than the rest of us, accepts his own foolishness as part of the givenness of things. Frightening and terrible adventures befall him in the course of Baum’s book, but somehow he always manages to come riding out of them on the back of his faithful goat Bilbil. The world can wound him and scare the daylights out of him, but never, you feel, can it destroy him. It is only the world of the fairy tale to be sure, but nonetheless he has overcome that world, and I have remembered him with admiration and love ever since.

In different guises (though always fat) and under different names, Rinkitink has haunted me always…

… these books were all childhood or early boyhood reading – but certain patterns were set, certain rooms were made ready, so that when, years later, I came upon Saint Paul for the first time and heard him say, “God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise, God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are,” I had the feeling that I knew something of what he was talking about. Something of the divine comedy that we are all of us involved in. Something of grace.

Birnam (yawn) Wood  by Elizabeth Catton

Good guys and bad guys in New Zealand. Catton’s deft writing of her good guys’ interior lives reveals how noble aims often come bundled with not-so-noble motives. But her bad guy is simply bad. Nothing mixed about him. Too bad – for both the character and the novel.📚