What I’ve Just Finished Reading

My second-to-last Newbery book, Jeanette Eaton’s Leader by Destiny: George Washington, Man and Patriot, which is also my second Newbery George Washington biography, which should tell you everything you need to know about the importance of American history in the Newberys. (Maybe that should be a Newbery post in itself.) I don’t actually remember the other one that well, but I’m fairly sure that it didn’t feature George Washington’s tragic doomed lifelove for the already-married Sally Fairfax nearly as prominently, or possibly indeed at all, as I was quite surprised to hear about it in this book.

(Eaton’s Daughter of the Seine also dwelt on Madame Roland’s tragic doomed love for a man not her husband, so this may just have been an Eaton thing. Admittedly, there was no tragic doomed love in her Gandhi biography, except perhaps Gandhi’s unrequited yearning for a united India?)

I also finished Rudyard Kipling’s Puck of Pook’s Hill. I really enjoyed the ancient Roman Britain stories in the middle of the book: truly they are so Sutcliff! Or rather, Sutcliff is so Kipling!

But then the last story is Kipling’s attempt to create an inclusive vision of England by making the Jewish people an integral part of the story of the Magna Carta, by having a Jewish moneylender force the king to terms by refusing to lend him any more money, and “by refusing to lend him any more money” I mean our hero actually tosses an entire gold treasure into the sea.

I believe that Kipling is trying to be anti-anti-Semitic here, but he also has the moneylender character describe sitting under a table as a child listening to Jewish moneylenders decide which king shall rise and which shall fall, so, like, maybe he needed to workshop this one a bit.

What I’m Reading Now

Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac. I listened to an audiobook version of this a few years ago and really didn’t like it, but had a suspicion that it might be due to the narrator’s gravelly monotone, so I bought a copy and am reading it with my two eyes and now I’m loving it! An important reminder that an audiobook reader can make or break a book.

I just finished the Almanac portion of the book, which are just monthly musings on plants and animals in the environs of the sandy farm Leopold owned in Wisconsin. It makes me want to write a Hummingbird Cottage almanac. Maybe I’ll do monthly posts next year starting in January.

What I Plan to Read Next

I’ve been intending to read Ben MacIntyre’s Operation Mincemeat ever since I read Max in the House of Spies, but despite the fact that I’ve loved the other two MacIntyre books I read, I keep putting it off and off and off. Why is it sometimes so hard to read a book that you really do want to read?

Judith Shulevitz’s The Sabbath World: Glimpses of a Different Order of Time is a book braided from three strands. The first and smallest strand is about Shulevitz’s evolving relationship with the Sabbath over the course of her life, which would probably get tedious at greater length but as it is adds an interesting personal through-line to the book.

The second and largest strand is a history of the Sabbath, which is full of fascinating historical facts. For instance: did you know that Sabbatarian can mean either “Christian who believes in a very strict Sunday Sabbath,” or “Christian who practices the Saturday Sabbath and maybe also takes on other Jewish practices and eventually becomes Jewish in all but name because for centuries it was illegal in many European countries for Christians to convert to Judaism”? I love it. I hate it. Why can a word mean two things that are not exactly opposites but nonetheless completely different?

The third strand features Shulevitz’s musings on the potential for the idea of the Sabbath to help cure modern society’s diseased relationship with time, which is the weakest part of the book. The problem is that Shulevitz is attracted to the Sabbath, but also exhausted at the very idea of keeping it properly, which is a dynamic that could create an interesting dialectic but mostly dissolves into wishy-washiness.

Now, to be fair, I also find the Sabbath intriguing but quail at the idea of doing it properly. NO Starbucks? Well, you see, the Starbucks workers ALSO need a day of rest. Granted, but: NO STARBUCKS?? So I can’t blame Shulevitz for also being of two minds. But it seems like something of a cop-out to say, “The Sabbath is enticing! But scary! And probably impossible in the modern global context anyway, so we don’t need to take the idea really seriously. But maybe just meditating on the idea of it will help heal our relationship with time?”

Again being fair, Shulevitz had the great handicap of writing this book a decade before the pandemic, so had not witnessed modern global society making massive structural changes virtually overnight. But since I have, I have to roll my eyes at anyone who half-heartedly suggests a social change only to dismiss it in the same breath as impossible. Well of course it’s impossible if that’s all the enthusiasm you can muster! A few people who kinda care a little do not world-historical changes make.