The morning has run off without me, but I will catch up to it soon enough. In the meantime, I’ve just finished some desk work and tomorrow’s chapters of Bleak House (Charles Dickens; 1853), which I’m reading with APS Together. Other reading this week includes The Dispossessed (Ursula K. LeGuin; 1974) for a short course with NYR Seminars; The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (Michael Chabon; 2000) and the Stanley Lombardo translation of The Iliad for courses with Roundtable by The 92nd Street Y; and Moby-Dick, this time with Samantha Rose Hill.
Between this week’s lesson and next, I will attend another performance class for adult music students, the focus of which will be music for a holiday concert, but the chief part of my daily practice comprises Marcel Moyse’s 24 Little Melodic Studies and On Sonority, Art, and Technique; Taffanel and Gaubert; and M.A. Reichert’s 7 Daily Exercises. I’m also working out the second movement of Bach’s Flute Sonata in E-flat major.
Before today’s practice, though, I must do a few here-comes-winter tasks in the yards and walk. We raked and walked in snow and temps in the low twenties earlier this week; it’s sunny and 49 as I type this; the daytime highs on Friday and Saturday will be in the sixties. What is that saying about Chicago(land) weather? If you don’t like it, then just wait fifteen minutes.
What have you been reading? Studying? Thinking about? Leave a comment; I would enjoy hearing from you. Looking ahead to 2026, I am wondering if a year of “reading at whim” might not be best — fewer classes and reading groups, more pulling down some of the volumes already on my shelves. I just reached into the shelves behind and drew from them, randomly: The Hummingbird (Sandro Veronesi; 2019/2020) and The Cold Millions (Jess Walters; 2020). Unread. I looked to the left and the first title I made out was The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded American is Tearing Us Apart (Bill Bishop; 2009). Unread. The bookcase in front of me? Bitch: On the Female of the Species (Lucy Cooke; 2022). Unread. More than half of the books here are. As I’ve said, this once embarrassed me. Now it alternately enlivens and frightens me.
From early in Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable:
The writer Umberto Eco belongs to that small class of scholars who are encyclopedic, insightful, and nondull. He is the owner of a large personal library (containing thirty thousand books), and separates visitors into two categories: those who react with “Wow! Signore professore dottore Eco, what a library you have! How many of these books have you read?” and the others — a very small minority — who get the point that a private library is not an ego-boosting appendage but a research tool. Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. The library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.
Nerdishly 
We have a home library of about 12,000 books and a satisfying proportion of those are the antilibrary. I’m looking around tonight for a new book to put by my bed because I’ve run out of the series I was reading there (Travis McGee mysteries).
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Ah! This is exciting. I love reading about your classes and such. I read so much policy and law for work that I don’t have much time or energy for reading for pleasure. But I have recently trained myself to read with my eyeballs again, after losing much of that ability after a serious health crisis — not that I stopped reading altogether, but for a while now I’ve been almost exclusively an audiobook gal.
I’ve seen pictures of Umberto Eco’s home. Astonishing! But, yes, the unread masses, alternatively enlivening and frightening. Sometimes I think of my collection as additional insulation in my home.
I’ve been dipping into The 40s: The Story of a Decade, New Yorker pieces. I wish they’d printed a 30s edition, as that is the decade that enthralls me. I’ve been collecting novels by women writing in the early 20th century, and have just finished a few by Margery Sharp, The Nutmeg Tree and Cluny Brown. I have Rebecca West, Kathleen Norris (not the living poet, the other one), Daphne Du Maurier, Elizabeth Taylor, Margaret Kennedy… and so many others waiting. (I’ve read one book by each, and then began keeping my eyes peeled for more.) For nonfiction, I’ve been reading garden history & memoirs and landscape design.
I’m curious — do you keep a reading log or have a system for taking notes? Maybe you’ve already written about this, so I’ll see if I can search your posts.
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I have been a passionate reader since I was 4, and reliably read several books every week, of all sorts: fiction, poetry, history, current events, memoir etc etc! I homeschooled my lot all the way thru, and between that and being now homebound due to disability and chronic illness, I have been blessed to build up the home library over the decades, and then, one of my parents died earlier this year and I inherited their library which has effectively doubled the number of books on my home shelves to a blessed ~3,200. So I am doing lots of reading from these books, mostly nonfiction, as well as my son grabbing bagsful for me from the public library each week. Not sure where I’d be without books … I always enjoy your posts about what all you are reading and learning. Thank you.
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I always enjoy your posts! I am happy to report that I have been reading many novels this year, after many years of primarily reading non-fiction, and I have been loving it. I’ve been reading “at whim” for a long time, so for 2026, I have an aggressive reading plan I am going to try. If I am honest, it is more likely an impossible reading plan but I am undaunted.
Right now, I continue my personal studies in theology, spiritual formation, and history. I am a part of a book club for the first time and have been introduced to Claire Keegan’s work and am now in love with it and will faithfully read everything she writes from now on.
I am inspired by your music studies and have been toying with the idea of learning an instrument myself. I have also been considering language studies, l think I will most likely pursue Biblical Greek and/or Hebrew there to enhance my study of Scripture.
Finally, I am on a quest to fill in the gaps of my education re: the Great Books of the Western Canon and the ideas that help create the Western mind. I have a few books I plan to work through slowly and carefully along with some lectures.
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