All of this winter weather has been good for my reading life. After a lackluster reading year in 2025, I'm off to a quick start in 2026. In the beginning of the January, I finished Provocations of Virtue, a book on teaching writing and rhetoric with a focus on ethical discourse by a professor at Notre Dame, John Duffy. He provides some thoughtful approaches to encouraging the careful composition of words and ideas. I appreciated his focus on an ethical approach to writing - not just that students to persuade their readers to make ethical decisions, but that writers make ethical decisions about the way they treat their audience. By envisioning their audience as readers/listeners who deserves respect and whose trust must be earned, writers and speakers write with more precision and consideration. As a teaching text but also a researched text, Duffy's book was practical and interesting, challenging and motivating. I intend to return to it regularly for guidance on moderating difficult discussions, steering students towards reliable sources, and providing suggestions for addressing different points of view.
After exercising my brain by reading Duffy's book, I gave my brain some junk food by reading the prequels to the Hunger Games trilogy, Ballad of the Songbirds and Snakes and Sunrise on the Reaping. I have mixed feelings about the Hunger Games books, as do many readers. I didn't encourage my kids to read them, but some of them did as high schoolers. I see middle schoolers reading them, but unless you have a really mature 8th grader, I wouldn't recommend them for preteens. The themes are dark and the violence is too much, even sometimes for me, but maybe I'm more squeamish than some (I really had to steel myself to remove dead mice - the last two days I've caught mice under the sink in snap traps. After seeing one scurry under the dishwasher the other night, I had to take action. Glue traps weren't working, and I'm afraid of poisoned mice smelling bad. Snap traps may not be humane, but they work. Where there are two, there are probably more - I'll be setting the trap again tonight, to the peril of my fingers! Rodents creeping indoors is a drawback to winter not mentioned in my friend's reel...) A debate could be held about whether Suzanne Collins perhaps could tell her story without descriptions of decapitation and animal attacks. People make an argument for the value of the books in highlighting injustice and depravity, but even though I tear through these books in a matter of hours, I don't really recommend them. Perhaps they fall into the category of books described by Stephen King in this essay.
What I would recommend is any book by Wendell Berry. Like many other Berry fans, I love stepping into his world for a few hours. Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story is a slim book. It's not so much about Marce, grandfather of Andy Catlett who lost his hand, (although that episode doesn't figure in this text, something that I thought might be included) as it is about the story of a day he failed to sell his crop for what it was worth and about how the story of that day became a mythic part of the communal memory and a driving force in the family history. Many critics are opining that this is Berry's last novel. However, in some ways, it is not quite a novel. It is a reflection on the power of story telling. It is an elegy for a lost way of life. It is a call to community and to advocate for the land that shapes communities. It is a recollection of an education in the land and a love story to it. It is not my favorite of Berry's books; it seems slight, although it does have some evocative descriptions - descriptions that might do more to preserve a way of life than an essay calling for just compensation for agricultural products and for people to stand by the land. I'll try to share some excerpts later. I read somewhere that someone thought this book seems to be Berry's concession he has lost his battle to preserve family farms, even though he himself has managed to continue to stand by the land and stand by words. But I'm not so sure the battle has been lost. More people than ever are reading Berry, and in communities like the one where my parents live, people are still farming, helping each other out, coming together for meals, and preserving a small town way of life. No doubt the creep of suburban and industrial development keeps coming closer, especially as data centers erupt overnight in rural communities, like the one not too far from us. (I might be a fan of sending data centers to space, as has been proposed.) But if Berry's work continues to circulate and be discovered by new readers, it may yet call more people to return to the land.
But back to reading: a couple other short synopses: The Chosen by Chaim Potok. I LOVED this book when I first read it back in high school. It seemed so foreign and yet so American; it helped formed my imagination of ethnic communities in New York City. Potok's book is full of faith but also maintains a detached tone. It's the story of two young Jewish boys living in 1940's post-War II Brooklyn who become unlikely friends because they are the sons of very different fathers. One father is a Zionist Talmud scholar, and the other is a Hasidic rabbi who is against establishing a Jewish state. The two boys become friends despite their fathers' differing views and their own friend groups who don't overlap. It is a welcome description of the necessity of friendship, and how deep friendships can overcome difficulties. Despite the connection between the two boys, they go their separate ways at the end of the novel. Readers can hope their friendship endures (and read the sequel, The Promise, which I have on my list).
The most recent book I finished was The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. This is a different book than Robert MacFarlane's The Lost Words: A Spell Book illustrated by Jackie Morris, which has been in my wish list for a long time. Williams' book was recommended by my sister-in-law. It is another one of those books that are hard to put down, but that for one reason or another won't make my favorites list. This one falls in the genre of "Stories about women in the past who react against their limitations to become unrecognized heroes in their sphere of influence." One of these I just finished at the end of last year - Rachel Kadish's The Weight of Ink about a Jewish girl in 17th c England who becomes an amanuensis for an old rabbi and then starts writing her own letters of philosophic inquiry to characters like Spinoza. I enjoy the historical settings and the development of the possible lives for intelligent women unrecognized by history, although sometimes the plots seem a little forced and there is always some romance shoehorned in. Williams's book is set during the construction of the Oxford English Dictionary. The main character, Esme, grows up in the Scriptorium where her father is one of the editors for the dictionary, which takes decades to complete. We see her grow up amongst words and become an editor herself eventually. Details about the dictionary and the history of the women's suffrage movement and the advent of WWI are fascinating, and the book seems well-researched. Esme begins collecting definitions of women's words for her own dictionary, some too coarse and some too domestic to be included in the OED. The developments of friendships and love affairs move the book along. Esme becomes pregnant, even though she is not in love with the father, but the book provides a positive depiction of adoption. Even with these difficult topics and the love affair with words in both of these books, they read like popular rather than literary fiction and don't have the heft of Potok's or Berry's books, despite being much longer.
Now on to the next thing! I've got several different books going now, but need to take a momentary break from "fast fiction" because it keeps me too late!
