Steel Wagstaff
Trying to do good things for good reasons
Tag: books
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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,…
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![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…
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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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On Patience and Non-attachment
I have long believed, in theory, that patience and non-attachment were complimentary and essential virtues and that I would do well to cultivate both of them. In practice, both are difficult, elusive, and have not always felt desirable or worthy of recommendation to others, particularly to those who suffer injustice. I have been thinking about…
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More on Beck. Plus: Homeless Guys. And the Library.
One thing I didn’t mention in my last post about Beck was that when I was young, one of the reasons that I especially liked Beck was that he seemed to be friends with a lot of homeless guys, or at least guys that looked the way that most of the homeless guys that I…