📚 Finished Reading: Foster by Claire Keegan.

I’m just astounded at what she can do in such a short space. Not quite as heavy as Small Things Like These, but a beautifully told story you can read in a sitting or two.

📚Finished reading: Craftland: in search of lost arts and disappearing trades. James Fox.

Just a delightful and fascinating read.

📚 Finished Reading: The Locust Years, Paul J. Pastor.

Good collection. As with most poetry collections, he has a wavelength that is sometimes hard to find. But, there were a number of very good poems and a pretty high average quality.

📚Finished Reading: Against the Machine, Paul Kingsnorth.

A book both enjoyable and disappointing at the same time.

📚 Finished reading: Entries (1994), Wendell Berry.

I’ve read a lot of Berry’s poetry, but I think this is the best collection I’ve found. I expect I’ll write more about it soon.

📚Finished reading: Small Teaching (2nd edition), James M. Lang.

Absolute dynamite. I started this Sunday and used one of the exercises Tuesday, and another Thursday. Many times I stopped to open up a lesson plan or assignment to add ideas that came right from here.

📚Finished Reading: The Sonnets of William Shakespeare (first published in 1609).

I’ve been reading one or two of these a day the last few months as part of my larger project to read more poetry in general.

📚Finished Reading: The Nine Tailors (1934), Dorothy Sayers.

This was my first book by Sayers. Delightful, and now I know more about bells than I ever thought I would. FWIW, I guessed the murder weapon.

📚Finished Reading: The Liberated Imagination, Leland Ryken (1998).

Lots of good insights and helpful ways of describing the workings of art on our imaginations and lives. His tastes are quite traditional, I wish he had a more sympathetic eye/ear/pen for modern art and it’s social functioning.

📚 Finished Reading: The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison. Absolutely harrowing. Need to read something lighter for the next book (or several), but is there a greater debut novel than this?