A perfect novel

John Williams's masterpiece Stoner (1965) "is something rarer than a great novel—it is a perfect novel, so well told and beautifully written, so deeply moving, that it takes your breath away," wrote Morris Dickstein in The New York Times. But Williams, born 102 years ago on this day, wasn't limited to the campus setting of his best-known work, exploring the dark side of the Old West in Butcher's Crossing (1960) and the Roman Empire in Augustus (1972).

hiddengems

https://www.threads.net/@libraryofamerica/post/C_QcJK3uwlC/?xmt=AQGzMoUeBW0sNzRlmlEZt29Mng02kCpbdAjyaiXjhW_kAQ

Shohei’s 🐕

Shohei Ohtani's dog, Decoy, threw the first pitch tonight 🐶

https://www.threads.net/@dodgers360/post/C_PJkttvQA7/?xmt=AQGzamUmAknZMLV6OmmZbdYJoRefFPnPer0dEfPbnH6PzA

Selves on shelves

This exactly captures my feeling about the value of a personal library (and a bit of my apprehension toward the time that's surely coming when I'll have to disperse it). When students tell me they don't read, I quote Mark Twain at them: the person who does not read possesses no advantage over one who cannot. 

Self-inflicted illiteracy makes such a needless waste of a mind.

==

My Bookshelf, Myself

To walk past the bookcases in our family's house is to make a different study of the history of time.

...When I reread a book from my own shelves, I meet my own younger self. Sometimes my younger self underlined a passage that I would have reached for my pencil to underline now. Other times she read right past a line that stuns me with its beauty today. I am what I have read far more surely than I am what I have eaten.

By looking at our bookshelves, I can tell you who my husband was, too — the hardly-more-than-a-boy who read "A Brief History of Time" on our honeymoon, the young teacher who learned he was about to be a father by reading the inscription I wrote inside a copy of "The Oxford Book of Children's Verse in America," the doting son who memorized Irish toasts to please his aging father, who still had cousins back in the old country. To walk past our bookcases is to make a different study of the history of time.

So when the schoolbooks came home from Haywood's classroom, all we could do was build more bookcases and shoehorn them into his home office. They are likely to be the last bookshelves we will ever build. There is no room in this house for more, and the next house will be smaller. Too small for all these books. Almost certainly too small for sentimentality in any form.

In the meantime, our books ensure that I am still surrounded by all the selves I have ever been, and all the selves my mate has been, and the selves our children were when we held them in our laps and read aloud from the poetry collection I gave my husband when our oldest son was on the way. In that book are some of the same poems my father read aloud to me as a child.

Just as she did then, just as she did again when our sons were young and again whenever anyone opens that book now, Emily Dickinson is right there explaining how a book is a chariot "That bears the human soul."

However capacious her own inimitable soul, Emily Dickinson could not have conceived of a book that exists in paperback, much less as an mp3 or digital download. Even recognizing them as books, I will always have trouble warming to such forms myself. I prefer the messy shelves, the dogeared pages, the notes inscribed in a familiar hand. Someday, long from now, a child may open a book of poems and find the note I wrote to her grandfather on the flyleaf: "For Haywood, to read aloud (beginning in about nine months)." Maybe she will save it, too.

Margaret Renkl, nyt

Reasonable expectations (for a centenarian)

Maria Branyas Morera, World's Oldest Person, Dies at 117

Ms. Morera, who cultivated a following on social media as "Super Catalan Grandma," died peacefully in her sleep, her family said.

...Like many supercentenarians, Ms. Morera became the subject of scientific fascination. Her habits and lifestyle — and genetic makeup — have been studied in the hopes of understanding her longevity.

"What do you expect from life?" a doctor once asked her while retrieving blood samples for study, according to El País.

Ms. Morera, unmoved, answered simply: "Death."

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/world/europe/worlds-oldest-person-maria-branyas-dead.html?smid=em-share

Hope vs. cynicism

https://www.threads.net/@andrew_revkin/post/C-wOcKts9Rc/?xmt=AQGzgCOg45EQMNuSgAMKGMCh4gwnHaAbbGDlTMCPoYDeUg

Maya’s moral holiday

An hour or two every day is even better.

"Every person needs to take one day away. Jobs, family, employers, and friends can exist one day without any one of us, and if our egos permit us to confess, they could exist eternally in our absence.

Each person deserves a day away in which no problems are confronted, no solutions searched for. Each of us needs to withdraw from the cares which will not withdraw from us."

~Maya Angelou, Wouldn't Take Nothing for My Journey Now

https://www.threads.net/@philo.thoughts/post/C-u4kMoC1hw/?xmt=AQGz6i3MaHp-kcoHEX1pxmREqtqtwqZ2E8IEewidKlys4w

Walden

On this day in 1854, Henry David Thoreau published Walden; or, Life in the Woods (books by this author). His friend Ralph Waldo Emerson said he saw a "tremble of great expectation" in Thoreau just before publication day. Thoreau's previous book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers (1849), sold fewer than 300 copies. On the day he got his 706 unsold copies back from the publisher, he wrote in his diary: "I have now a library of nearly nine hundred volumes, over seven hundred of which I wrote myself ..." Walden didn't do much better. It took five years to sell off the first edition of 2,000 copies, and Thoreau did not live to see a second edition. He managed to arrange a nationwide lecture tour, but only one city made an offer, and so Thoreau kept his lectures to the Concord area. Since then, millions of copies of Walden have been sold. WA

https://open.substack.com/pub/thewritersalmanac/p/the-writers-almanac-from-friday-august-0fb?r=35ogp&utm_medium=ios

The good life

A life well lived ☕️📚(plus 🐾🐕‍🦺⚾️)

https://www.threads.net/@french75studios/post/C-YHSK-RfV0/?xmt=AQGzwBZDQDJm8ThOIxryrQc-TBaPx_WmV95D0jJ7iqGT4g