This summer’s drought and the continued warm temperatures have delayed autumn’s arrival: Most trees are reluctant to release their leaves; the weekend’s rain reinvigorated the grass. It remains just cool enough to walk with a jacket at sunrise.
Last night marked the halfway point of an NYR Seminar led by Daniel Mendelsohn on his translation on The Odyssey. Fabulous — the seminar and the translation. Last week, I finished Edith Hall’s Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life in anticipation of a course I am taking through Roundtable by 92nd Street Y. Today I’m continuing to reacquaint myself with Joan Didion’s work for a course with the Library of America.
For my next lesson, I’m preparing the seventh of Marcel Moyse’s 24 Little Melodic Studies and its variations. Having worked through Exercise 4 of Taffanel and Gaubert, I am becoming acquainted with Michel Debost’s scale game. We’ve added the first of M.A. Reichert’s 7 Daily Exercises to my practice routine, and I continue to use Moyse’s On Sonority, Art, and Technique. My current solo piece is Germaine Tailleferre’s “Pastorale for Flute and Piano.”
Four of the titles pictured above are selections for the 2026 Philosophical Book Club at Commonplace Philosophy. Speaking of philosophy, my two-person study group will discuss Book IX of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics tomorrow, which means this excellent project draws to a close soon. Next up for us is a deep dive into the novels of E.M. Forster, beginning with Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905). We’ve been reading and studying together for a couple of years now, so it is no surprise that we often discover new books that appeal to us both. Most recently, a Guardian review ensured that Rami Kamiski’s The Gift of Not Belonging ended up on our doorsteps and then at the tops of our respective “actively reading” stacks. Ditto John Burnside’s The Music of Time: Poetry in the Twentieth Century (2021). Both of these are pictured above.
For courses at the University of Chicago Graham School, I’m reading Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and (re)reading Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. Later this semester, I will read his Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend. It may prove aspirational, but I’ve pulled Claire Tomalin’s 2011 biography of Dickens from the shelves. For an upcoming seminar led by the translator, I’m reading Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Odyssey (2025), and as part of the enrichment experience for Big White Fog at the Court, I’ve pulled down Richard Wright’s Native Son (1940), selected by the Community Reads Book Club. (Admittedly, this, too, may be aspirational.) After attending the KINO! Film Salon discussion of the documentary Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer, I began reading his 2022 memoir, Every Man for Himself and God Against All, which is pretty terrific.
As for what I’ve recently finished, that includes the texts associated with courses I took through Roundtable by 92nd Street Y: North and South (Elizabeth Gaskell; 1855), Storylife: On Epic, Narrative, and Living Things (Joel Christensen; 2025); and Possession: A Romance (A.S. Byatt; 1990). I reread Lionel Shriver’s 2016 novel, The Mandibles, the book my youngest packed for vacation. It holds up — presciently so. What didn’t work for me was Megan Abbott’s latest, El Dorado Drive. Her previous novels have been reliably fun “beach reads,” but this was clumsy and predictable. Barbara Pym’s Excellent Women (1952), on the other hand, which I read with APS Together, was elegant, endlessly surprising, gorgeously written.
For one reason and then another, I didn’t get to my favorite conservation district until this past weekend. There, I greeted the sunrise both mornings, admired the many birds, and appreciated the (much needed) change from concrete and asphalt to sand and soil.
In spite of the days atop days of poor air quality and too little rain, the pockets have flourished and continue to attract pollinators. We’ve decided to add three more raised beds and two “prairie lawn” patches.
In other news…
Earlier this year, when I registered for a partial semester of lessons in order to have time to address a health concern, I was already experiencing ambivalence about my flute adventure: I love the instrument and the pursuit, but the program no longer met my interests and needs, and practice had become a self-defeating slog. My teacher’s recent retirement represented an opportunity to rethink my expectations, though, and after a four-month break, I scheduled a trial lesson with a teacher whose approach in nearly every way differs from my previous instruction. Focused on (re)building my foundation, we’re using Marcel Moyse’s 24 Little Melodic Studies and On Sonority, Art, and Technique, as well as Taffanel and Gaubert (particularly Exercise 4 to prepare for Michel Debost’s scale game). Encouraged to bring a solo piece I had never presented, I sorted through my library of music before impulsively choosing a simple but lovely arrangement of Holst’s “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” I had heard on Tomplay. The challenge for these first few lessons is simply creating a great sound with excellent support, so why not skip the usual suspects for now? What a great piece for improving phrasing and expression. (You may better know it as the patriotic hymn “I Vow to Thee, My Country.”)
Speaking of pursuits… It’s been nearly a month, but “On the nightstand” in the sidebar has been updated to reflect my current studies.
These recent acquisitions were shelved because my current stack is so tall that my youngest gently joked about it throughout her recent visit. She was not wrong. I also shelved The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro; 1989), which I (re)read with Commonplace Philosophy (this book was even more beautiful three-plus decades later), and the subtle, haunting Under the Eye of the Big Bird (Hiromi Kamakami; 2025 — review here). I’ve shelved Stephen Fry’s Troy (2021) for now because I am working though Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and secondary sources for study group and David Copperfield (Charles Dickens; 1850) for a UChicago Graham School course, plus Latin and music practice. The currently reading stack now looks a wee bit more manageable.
Nerdishly 