Category: Book Notes
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2015 in Books
Every year I read a lot of books and spend far too much time playing around with spreadsheets tracking them all. I then promise myself that I’ll use that tracking data to write a lengthy summary of my reading, only to break that promise as soon as humanely possible. This year, I shockingly didn’t break…
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Three Fragments of Tacitus
I remembered Tacitus as a grumpy stick-in-the-mud, and, while that’s not necessarily an incorrect characterization, I actually enjoyed re-reading him more than I expected. Three passages which stood out to me, all from the Agricola: There is no great difference in language [between the Gauls and the Britons], and there is the same hardihood in…
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Letters to a Diminished Church, Dorothy Sayers
I enjoy Dorothy Sayers and think she’s underrated as a thinker, though I haven’t read all that much. Her suggestions in her article on the Trivium have always struck me as eminently reasonable. Anyway, this is a collection of her essays. Within she offers a number of wonderful insights and images, this is my favorite: But,…
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Framing and the Loyalists
Trying to post more, and thus gathering some scraps that have found their way into my notebook over the past few months. The plight of the Loyalists during and after the Revolutionary War is interesting to me, especially how they’re portrayed in our history books. For instance, look at the framing here in Joseph Ellis’s…
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I place before my inward eyes myself with all that I am–my body, soul, and all my powers–and I gather round me all the creatures which God ever created in heaven, on earth, and in all the elements, each one severally with its name, whether birds of the air, beasts of the forest, fishes of…
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Easy to Forget – Laudator Temporis Acti
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“Human beings are not different from the fire, scanner, or mother bear; they’re just more complex systems.” But if science discovered that burning were actually as complex as the brain action, or even if there were some Rube Goldberg contraption that was as complex as neuronal firing, would we then have a reason to become confused…
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1 Kings 19
At the mountain of God, Horeb, Elijah came to a cave where he took shelter. Then the LORD said to him, “Go outside and stand on the mountain before the LORD; the LORD will be passing by.” A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the LORD— but the LORD…
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Accounts of Medieval Constantinople
Reading Accounts of Medieval Constantinople, which contains a lot of really fascinating stuff. Constantinople has a fundamentally different feel than the Latin West. This passage sums it up nicely, I think: And Constantine the Great set up this lofty column and the statue of Apollo as Helios in his name, affixing nails from those of…
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Zing!
(Gawain and some of Arthur’s other knights are at the court of the leader of the Romans, Lucius Hibernius) As Lucius was replying that he had not come there in order to withdraw, but rather that he might govern the country, his nephew Gaius Quintillanus who was present was heard to mutter that the Britons…
Dan Yingst 