How I have been spending my time: Walking. Music practice. Latin tutorial homework. Supplementary reading for the courses on Moby-Dick and Don Quixote.
Pursuits
Category Archives: books
Sunday afternoon
A long walk. Music. Latin. Reading.
(Re)reading Moby-Dick
For UChicago Graham School and Night School Bar courses.
The year in books
The year opened with the usual goal: read 100 books from my shelves (i.e., books in my collection before the end of 2021), including at least 24 non-fiction titles and at least one book from each of the following categories: Shakespeare (about or retold), poetry, NYRB, Kurt Vonnegut (by or about), Joyce Carol Oates, philosophy, art, and children’s / YA. As it turns out, I read 139 books in 2022, of which 76 were from the shelves. Of those read from the shelves, nineteen were non-fiction titles; and while I met the poetry, NYRB, philosophy, and art challenges, I missed Shakespeare, Vonnegut, Oates, and children’s / YA.
Still. It was a pretty spectacular year of reading, one that included (finally) the bible. Here are some of the other projects, courses, and groups that shaped my reading year.
With the Cardiff BookTalk, I read:
■ A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess; 1962. Fiction.)
■ The Waste Land (Norton Critical Edition) (T.S. Eliot. 1922. Poetry.)
The 100 Days of Dante relaunched this year, but I participated in the first cycle, which began in 2021 and continued into 2022. In addition to Purgatorio and Paradiso, I read two related books (marked with asterisks):
■ Purgatorio (Dante Alighieri; 1320. (Trans. Robin Kirkpatrick; 2008.) Poetry.)
■ Paradiso (Dante Alighieri; 1320. (Trans. Robin Kirkpatrick; 2008.) Poetry.)
* Dante’s Divine Comedy (Seymour Chwast; 2010. Graphic fiction.)
* Dante (R.W.B. Lewis; 2001. Non-Fiction.) RFS
For two Guardian Live events:
■ Twelve Caesars: Images of Power from the Ancient World to the Modern (Mary Beard; 2021. Non-fiction.)
■ The Essex Serpent (Sarah Perry; 2016. Fiction.)
With A Public Space / APS Together:
■ Childhood (Tove Ditlevsen; 1967/2021. Fiction.)
■ Youth (Tove Ditlevsen; 1967/2021. Fiction.)
■ Dependence (Tove Ditlevsen; 1971/2021. Fiction.)
■ Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (Herman Melville; 1851. Fiction.)
■ Cane (Jean Toomer. 1923. Fiction.)
■ W-3: A Memoir (Bette Howland; 1974. Non-fiction.)
■ Villette (Charlotte Brontë; 1853. Fiction.)
For three Night School Bar courses:
■ Debt: The First 5,000 Years (David Graeber; 2011. Non-fiction.)
■ Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body, and Primitive Accumulation (Silvia Federici; 2004. Non-fiction.)
■ Capital Realism (Mark Fisher; 2009. Non-fiction.)
For a Newberry Library course:
■ The Emigrants (W.G. Sebald; 1992/1996. Fiction.)
■ The Rings of Saturn (W.G. Sebald; 1995/1998. Fiction.)
■ Austerlitz (W.G. Sebald; 2001. Fiction.)
■ Speak, Silence: In Search of W.G. Sebald (Carole Angier; 2022. Non-fiction.)
With Catherine Project reading groups (supplementary texts are marked with asterisks):
■ Anna Karenina (Leo Tolstoy; 1878. (Trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.) Fiction.)
■ Apology (Plato; 399 BC. (Trans. G.M.A. Grube; 2002.) Non-fiction.)
■ Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (Herman Melville; 1851. Fiction.)
■ The Sun Also Rises (Ernest Hemingway. 1926. Fiction.)
■ The Old Man and the Sea (Ernest Hemingway; 1952. Fiction.)
■ A Farewell to Arms (Ernest Hemingway. 1929. Fiction.)
■ On the Origin of Species (Charles Darwin. 1859. Non-fiction.)
* Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (Sabina Radeva; 2019. Graphic non-fiction.)
* The Tree of Life (Peter Sís; 2003. Graphic non-fiction.)
* Darwin: Portrait of a Genius (Paul Johnson; 2012. Non-fiction.)
* Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species: A Graphic Adaptation (Michael Keller. 2009. Graphic non-fiction.)
■ A Good Man Is Hard to Find (Flannery O’Connor; 1953. Fiction.)
■ Everything That Rises Must Converge (Flannery O’Connor; 1965. Fiction.)
Several readers in the Hemingway group decided to continue reading together:
■ A Moveable Feast (Ernest Hemingway; 1964. Non-fiction.)
■ For Whom the Bell Tolls (Ernest Hemingway. 1940. Fiction.)
■ East of Eden (John Steinbeck. 1952. Fiction.)
■ Fathers and Sons (Ivan Turgenev (Trans. Constance Garnett); 1862. Fiction.)
And three of us in that group decided to meet, too:
■ The Pearl (John Steinbeck. 1947. Fiction.)
■ Lolita (Vladimir Nabokov; 1955. Fiction.)
With the UCSC Deep Read:
■ Transcendent Kingdom (Yaa Gyasi; 2020. Fiction.)
With The Readers Karamazov:
■ The Name of the Rose (Umberto Eco; 1980. Fiction.)
* The Key to The Name of the Rose (Adele J. Haft, et al.; 1987/1999. Non-Fiction.)
■ A Canticle for Leibowitz (Walter M. Miller; 1959. Fiction.)
■ The Sign of Four (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle; 1890. Fiction.)
■ A Confederacy of Dunces (John Kennedy Toole. 1981. Fiction.)
For a course with the Premise Institute:
■ The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka; 1915. (Trans. Ian Johnston.) Fiction.)
■ The Metamorphosis (Franz Kafka; 1915. (Trans. Susan Bernofsky.) Fiction.)
■ The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Jean-Dominique Bauby; 1997. Non-fiction.)
■ The Bell Jar (Sylvia Plath. 1963. Fiction.)
■ Nausea (Jean Paul Sarte. 1938. Fiction.)
■ Lost Connections: Why You’re Depressed and How to Find Hope (Johann Hari; 2018. Non-fiction.)
In advance of a Theater of War event:
■ The Suppliants (Aeschylus; 460 BC. Drama.)
In November, I deleted my Twitter account, but I certainly miss the reading groups with whom I read:
■ Europe Central (William T. Vollmann. 2005. Fiction.)
■ A Mapmaker’s Dream (James Cowan. 1996. Fiction.)
■ A Lost Lady (Willa Cather. 1923. Fiction.)
■ Infinite Jest (David Foster Wallace. 1996. Fiction.)
■ Zeno’s Conscience (Italo Svevo; 1923. Fiction.)
With the T Book Club:
■ Desperate Characters (Paula Fox; 1970. Fiction.)
■ Specimen Days (Michael Cunningham; 2005. Fiction.)
With the SciFri Book Club:
■ Upgrade (Blake Crouch. 2022. Fiction.)
Looking ahead, this winter, I’m taking classes with the University of Chicago Graham School, the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, and Night School Bar. The Premise Course in which I’m enrolled will meet once in January and conclude in February. I’m hoping to participate in a Catherine Project tutorial beginning later this month, and the band of merry readers who remained following Hemingway (and Steinbeck and Turgenev) is tackling Crime and Punishment over the next few months. If I manage to keep up with these exciting pursuits, I’d like to participate in the February SciFri Book Club. More another time.
Recent acquisitions
Coupons, points, gift cards = new books.
Acquired
At the Seminary Co-Op Bookstore.
New books
A few recent acquisitions.
Recently shelved
A few more books to celebrate jólabókaflóð early.
In which jólabókaflóð arrives early
Celebrating the “Christmas book flood.”
“Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood?”
This week, I will reread Ralph Waldo Emerson’s “Self-Reliance,” which includes the oft-(mis)quoted epigram, “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” In my work (editor, tutor, teacher, among other gigs), I often advised writers to strive for consistency (in voice, tense, naming conventions, punctuation, “messaging,” etc.), referring them, when appropriate, to related passages in the assigned grammar book and / or style manual. “Isn’t consistency the hobgoblin of small minds?” some responded, clearly frustrated that more effort was required of them. In the interests of civility (and looming deadlines), I usually let the (mis)quote pass unchallenged. (Although, yes, especially when I worked in the university writing center, I itched to reply, “Define consistency. Define hobgoblin.“)
One afternoon about twenty-six years ago, though, I did not. A new claims attorney — one who had repeatedly communicated his contempt for the requirement that all submissions to company publications go through my office (“You’re kidding, right?”) — interrupted my review of his submission to the firm’s annual report, theatrically sighing, “You know, [insert my first name here], consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds.” It is difficult to determine which stung more, the smug mansplaining or his secretary’s smirk.
“You know, [insert his first name here],” I replied. And, yes, I had time enough to choose, “You’re right,” or, “Yeah,” or an uneasy but conciliatory you’re-the-man giggle. Instead, I continued, “The quote is, ‘A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.’ And here’s what I’m thinking: I’m thinking that Mr. [insert surname of firm president] would share my view that closely adhering to the company style guide he helped me pen would represent an, oh, I don’t know, wise consistency.”
The beat during which his face so thoroughly betrayed his thoughts (he may as well have called me the epithet) caused his secretary to waver in her allegiance — but only momentarily. “Whatever. Leave the changes for [insert secretary’s name] to input. Thanks.”
“Yeah. Whatever. Thanks,” she said without looking up, when I placed the marked-up submission in her box.
Yeah. Whatever.
This is a frustrating and, yes, embarrassing recollection, for many reasons, not the least of which is this: It was so petty. It was so terribly, terribly petty. Small. And Emerson wasn’t talking about company “messaging,” grammar or punctuation conventions, style guides or publishing formats. He was talking about something… something life-sized.
Or larger.
From the essay:
The other terror that scares us from self-trust is our consistency; a reverence for our past act or word, because the eyes of others have no other data for computing our orbit than our past acts, and we are loath to disappoint them. […] A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
Read. Think. Learn.
Note: This entry was adapted from a 2004 post to my previous site.
Nerdishly 