Finished 2025: Pea, Bee, & Jay #1: Stuck Together by Brian 📚
I don’t know why I can’t accept anything about this book. I can accept all sorts of weird plots and characters, but it’s a bridge roo far for me to accept that a pea, a bee, and a jay could be friends. I’m slightly offended by this book! It’s ridiculous and my reaction is ridiculous.
Finished 2025: The Quiet Eye: A Way of Looking at Pictures by Sylvia Shaw Judson 📚
One never finishes this book.
Finished 2025: The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry 📚
Another re-read.
Finished 2025: Lady into Fox (Dover Literature: Science Fiction/Fantas… by David Garnett 📚
I’m grateful that this gem was called to my attention. Since reading it last week, I have been recommending it repeatedly!
Finished 2025: Treasure Island - Illustrated by N. C. Wyeth by Robert Louis Stevenson 📚
Re-read. Always a joy to re-read.
Sørina Higgins is starting a podcast! She has no idea who I am, but I have been a reader of her Charles Williams blog for over a decade now. I listen to very few podcasts; this is one that I’m excited about.
Confirmed: Kierkegaard was a smoker.
When 'academic' is another word for 'detective'
I have greatly enjoyed the following works of sifting historical evidence carefully and constructing an argument based on doing so. From most speculative to least speculative, all excellent:
Michael Ward: How did Lewis come up with the name ‘Narnia’?
Jon Nelson: “Johnny Crookedhouse” (1957)
Holly Ordway: What did J.R.R. Tolkien REALLY think of C.S. Lewis’s Narnia?
Finished 2025: Shared Life by Donald Macleod 📚
Good enough for what it is (a slim introduction to the topic for beginners), I guess.
read fewer books but read them with greater care
There are many valid reasons to read, but if you’re about self-improvement in one way or another — an increase in knowledge or insight or, hey, even wisdom — then one of the most reliable ways to become a better reader is to read fewer books but read them with greater care. If you would be wise, an essential book you know intimately — through slow reading or repeated reading — is of more use to you than a dozen lesser books that you know only casually.
Finished 2025: The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison 📚 My first Morrison (and Morrison’s first novel), past due. The writing is lovely. Characters are (mostly) fully realized. What I wasn’t expecting was the degree to which this novel is about mass media and the ways in which 20th century mass media shaped cultural expectations. In the best way, it is a particular story that speaks to broader shared context and illuminates it.
The Maverick Animator of Chaos About Shinya Ohira.
Journalist Eliot Stein takes us along on the unique adventure of kayaking the perimeter of Manhattan Island and observes some of the pockets of nature that persist within New York’s concrete jungle.
Note to myself. Read this: ANTIQUA ET NOVA
Le Cyclope (c. 1914) by Odilon Redon
The Christian must practice spiritual watchfulness and custody of the eyes. In our time, this means treating AI not as a source of authority or personal significance, but as a tool with no inherent claim on our attention or trust. Athanasius writes: “Where Christ is named, and his faith, there all idolatry is deposed and all imposture of evil spirits is exposed, and any spirit is unable to endure even the name, nay even on barely hearing it flies and disappears.” So too here. Clarity begins when we name the thing rightly. AI does not possess insight. It cannot judge. The only real threat is our willingness to cooperate with the delusion that this work of our hands is our friend, or even our superior.
Finished 2025: Under the Dome by Stephen King 📚
So many things wrong with this stupid book… but it was also a surprisingly compelling page-turner. It doesn’t matter if I rolled my eyes each time I turned a page. I kept turning the page.
The best thing I can say about this big book is that it made me want to re-read The Sirens of Titan and “Among the Hairy Earthmen”.
Solaris
Finished 2025: Solaris by Stanisław Lem 📚
It has been close to 20 years since I’ve seen the Tarkovsky or Soderbergh film adaptations. I figured that it was finally time to catch up with Lem’s original. And I’m glad I did.
Solaris is a bleak book. It is emotional horror. It is a cry of hopeless yearning for hope from a convinced atheist. It is among the best science fiction novels I’ve ever read.
That said, I’m not sure that the 1st person narrative voice of Kelvin works throughout the entire novel. In Moby-Dick, I believe Ishmael as a narrator/author who gets lost in his own narrating. Kelvin’s alternating from describing the plot on Solaris to describing his reading of the scientific history of Solaris seems less true to how this character in this situation would tell the story and just seems like a convenient way for Lem to do a whole lot of infodumping.