Steel Wagstaff
Trying to do good things for good reasons
Category: What I’m Reading
-
2017: My Year in Reading
This is the first year that I’ve really made an effort to keep track of my leisure reading. One of my goals for the year was to read less internet-based news and more books, and I think I was more or less successful, though some months were better for reading than others. In the end,…
-
My October and November Reading
In my last reading update, I mentioned that I had read the first book in Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey-Maturin series. Since then, apart from reading for my dissertation, that’s pretty much all I’ve read. I just finished The Yellow Admiral, which means that I’ve read 18 of the 21 books (one left unfinished at the author’s death) in the…
-
My Summer Reading
I haven’t kept up as regularly with these monthly updates as I had hoped, but I did keep reading through the summer. I stayed really plugged into my dissertation reading and research, which really cut down my leisure reading, but I still managed to get through several books that struck my fancy in some way…
-
The last years of J.B. Jackson
Passages from William Langewiesche’s Inside the Sky interspersed with quotations from John Brinckerhoff Jackson’s own writing on landscape. Normally typeset passages from Langewiesche, block quotes from Jackson. * * * To his neighbors he was known simply as John, a patron of the community, yes, but also a profane and wizened old man who…
-
My June 2017 Reading
Books The good news? I read a lot for my dissertation in June 2017. Even better news? Much of it was pleasurable (at least for me)–a lot of “Objectivist” poetry, biographical material on Williams and Zukofsky, and histories of late 1920s-early 1930s little magazines. I won’t list any of it here, since I’m saving these…
-
My May 2017 Reading
Books Pleased to report that I continued reading a lot for my dissertation (pleasurable reading, but of a different kind), and traveled to a work conference followed by a 2-week vacation starting at the end of the month. Both slowed my pleasure reading, as did the NBA playoffs, since I watched games in the evening…
-
My April 2017 Reading
Books My leisure reading of books slowed down a bit in April, as I continued getting sucked into lots more longform than I had intended and, on a happier note, did a lot more reading for my dissertation (good news!!!). Here’s some of what I read last month for pleasure. Nonfiction I spent much of…
-
My March 2017 Reading
Books If March had a theme for me, I suppose it would have been ‘Occupy’? I may be several years late to the movement, but most of what I read this month seemed to have been written by someone involved in the Occupy protests and movements of the past half-dozen years. It’s easy to love…
-
My January and February 2017 Reading
Books My leisure ‘book’ reading continued to slow over the past couple months, and I haven’t had as much time for this blog, so I’m going to roll my January and February reading recap into a single post. Here’s what I read for pleasure (i.e. not for work or for my dissertation) in January and…
-
My December 2016 Reading
Books As the year limped its way to a close, I tried to keep up my torrid reading pace. I slowed down considerably from my October/November frenzy, and spent a lot more of my free time reading and writing on dissertation related topics (hi, Objectivist poets!) but still managed to read a fair number of…
-
My November 2016 Reading
Books My reading pace slowed a bit in November (the US elections and their sad aftermath have provided me with lots of avenues for distraction and worry), but I still managed to keep up my love affair with books, though I picked a fair amount of duds this month. The poetry and fiction were great,…
-
My October 2016 Reading
Books I wrote last month that I was on a big reading kick, and that surge of devouring books has continued in full force this month. Outside of the reading I’ve been doing for my dissertation and my work, here’s a list of the books I read for pleasure/self-education in October 2016: No Good Men…
-
![Reading Recommendations from Friends [September 2016]](https://steelwagstaff.info/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/7318346230_e81850a5a6_k-1.jpg)
Reading Recommendations from Friends [September 2016]
I’ve been on a reading kick lately and I decided to crowdsource some recommendations to some friends on social media earlier this week. The question I posed was simple: “Knowing me as you do, what would you recommend I read next? One rule: no fiction, unless it’s life changing or the best thing you’ve ever…
-
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…
-
Belle Waring
I can’t remember exactly when I first read Belle Waring’s poems. It probably would have been at least a decade ago, and I do remember that it was one of her poems about nursing, maybe even “It Was My First Nursing Job”. What I remember most was feeling that I had discovered a voice that…
-
Three versions of an Objectivist Poetics
“Grandmother, have you ever looked a donkey in the eyes?” “I may have done, my dear boy, I don’t remember.” “In that case you haven’t, because otherwise you’d certainly remember. Grandmother, if donkeys could speak …” “Believe me, my dear boy, they wouldn’t and couldn’t say anything superhuman. They’d ask for good straw and clean…
-
Joyce Maynard on her mother and adult love
A few months after meeting Sydney Bacon, Joyce Maynard’s mother, Fredelle wrote this, in a letter to a friend: You ask if ‘I’m in love again.’ No, it’s not that. ‘In love’ was the experience with Max, so many years ago and for so long. ‘In love’ was feeling one would go anywhere, do anything,…
-
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…
-
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,…
-
From the Preface to Ignazio Silone’s Fontamara
The art of storytelling — the art of putting one word after another, one line after another, one sentence after another, explaining one thing at a time, without allusions or reservations, calling bread bread and wine wine — is just like the ancient art of weaving, the ancient art of putting one thread after another,…