Steel Wagstaff
Trying to do good things for good reasons
Category: Reading Notes
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Atul Gawande’s Being Mortal
I recently went to Salt Lake City for a family reunion. Among the relatives I saw was my only surviving grandparent, who is now 89 years old. He’s literally my oldest friend, and the oldest living human being that I know right now. His health is slowly deteriorating (he lost his driver’s license recently–which turns…
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Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine
I just finished Bread and Wine, the second book in Ignazio Silone’s The Abruzzio Trilogy (translated by Eric Mosbacher). The book is a moving, funny, and sometimes unbelievable look into provincial life in Italy under Mussolini. Set near the start of the Second Italo-Ethiopian War, the novel largely focuses on a character named Pietro Spina, an exiled Communist…
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Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara
At the recommendation of my friend Spencer, I recently began reading the Italian novelist Ignazio Silone’s The Abruzzio Trilogy, beginning with his 1933 novel Fontamara. It is an extraordinary bit of social-realist inflected anti-fascist satire, and I found myself quickly devouring it and eager to begin the next book in the series. It’s a very short book,…
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Cesare Pavese
I just finished Geoffrey Brock’s translation of Cesare Pavese’s poetry: Disaffection: Complete Poems 1930-1950. It was outstanding. I think I had been vaguely aware of Pavese as a 20th century giant of Italian literature, but I had never read anything by or about him, apart from some long forgotten praise by Phil Levine, who was…
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Favorite Passages from Jonathan Wilson’s Inverting the Pyramid
In the past several years, I’ve become a full-fledged soccer fan. I’ve always followed (and played) sports, switching over the years from an interest in baseball to football to basketball and most recently, to soccer. It’s now the sport that I follow most closely, play most regularly for recreation, and read and think about most…
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A Guide to the Bodhisattva Way of Life
For as long as I can remember, I’ve always been attracted to wisdom literature. In my early teens, that attraction was felt most strongly toward Thoreau, Tolstoy, Marcus Aurelius and the other Stoics, Joseph Smith’s King Benjamin (from the book of Mosiah in the Book of Mormon) & Enoch (from the Book of Moses in…
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10 Years Later: Quotations for a Friend
When I was a freshman in college, my best friend was Mark Eliason. He and I went almost everywhere together, and so nearly imitated one another’s mannerisms, speech patterns, and stock phrases that we’d regularly have other people ask us if we were brothers. We usually lied and said yes. After our freshman year, each…