Autumn Sundries

Books, Politics, & Journalism

Dear Friends,

What’s new? We are enjoying a spectacular Autumn. I don’t believe my lawn has ever been this green in October. The sunlight has an unusually warm, golden hue due to the changing leaves, and its angle and distance in the southerly sky and the long shadows cast is the tell-tale sign that Fall has, indeed, fallen. The air is crisp and cool.

It doesn’t last long around here, so I am trying to spend as much time outside as I can before I am forced to hibernate. (I’m not much of a “winter sports” guy—those people are outdoors all year round.)

Last week was the bi-annual used book sale and I sort of made out like a bandit.

That’s all of the books our family obtained, and you’re looking at an outlay of $47.50. Can you believe it? A couple of real gems: The second from the top on the left was a delightful find. Steelhead is a beautifully printed book about the species of fish. A steelhead is like a salmon, but not a salmon. It’s a ginormous rainbow trout that spawns in freshwater, but spends its life in the saltwater ocean. The difference between a steelhead and a salmon is that the latter die after spawning and the former can spawn multiple times. Anyway, I immediately thought of my dear friend Dave, who, growing up in the Pacific Northwest, has a passion for steelhead fishing. So I bought it for him.

William F. Buckley, Jr.’s Miles Gone By is a “literary biography,” and a complete delight. Men like Buckley just don’t get made anymore. The tales of his early life and growing up with his large, wonderful family are funny and poignant. Little known fact about Buckley. He is renowned as a master of the English language. His vocabulary was so prodigious that I remember as a kid they would publish those “tear off” day by day calendars and his was something like “365 Words You Should Know.” Guess what? English was not his native language. True story. He didn’t learn it until he was eleven years old. His native tongue was Spanish.

What else? Anne Patchett’s The Dutch House is a really good modern novel. I enjoyed it because it is about a house in Jenkintown, Pennsylvania, which was a stone’s throw from us for four years. I listened to the audio version narrated by Tom Hanks—absolutely wonderful—and was happy to find a hardcopy.

There’s a book in that pile somewhere that is a collection of sports writing from The New Yorker. What a treasure trove, including John Updike’s famous essay on Ted Williams’s last at-bat.

So many books, so little time. But we love having a very wide variety of options around here, and it just continues to grow. Someday, Lord-willing, we will build a library wing on to our house if we can ever afford it.

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What is in the news?

The government is still shut down, not that I’ve noticed. Yawn. It’ll get sorted out, as it always does.

Politics remains juvenile and nasty, as ever. My rural-dwelling sister was researching an invasive species of weed and this is what she found on the Federal government’s website:

Boy, there’s some completely necessary editorializing: the “Radical Left Democrat shutdown.” Aren’t you exhausted? The politicization of everything? Three more years of this. One may foolishly hope it is only three more years of this. Probably way more than that.

In Virginia, screenshots of a text thread by a Democrat candidate for office revealed that he fantasizes about assassinating his political opponent. That he hasn’t immediately dropped out of the race shows how decadent and careless we are as a people. Well, if he nevertheless wins it will show how decadent and careless we are, anyway.

Speaking of assassinations (particularly that of Charlie Kirk), I found these two paragraphs by the Editors in the November print edition of National Review to be quite well-written and moving:

We think, finally, of our country and its character. D.H. Lawrence, in a study of James Fenimore Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, decided that ‘the essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic and a killer. It has never yet melted.’ Founding Fathers killed in duels, and the parade of presidents from John Quincy Adams to Donald Trump shot, shot at, and stalked sustain Lawrence’s grim point—to say nothing of the lives lost to riots and lynchings.

We are a violent people. We have also a republican form of government, shaken only once, designed to channel disputes into the paths of politics. Many of us—still more than in any other post-industrial country—are also, like Charlie Kirk, believers in a God of love and mercy. Love the republic, love your fellow Americans.

Indeed.