Greg Kindall

I read The Minister's Wooing, by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1859). Duty and heart's desire are set at odds at a time when New England Calvinism is fracturing, specifically in post-Revolutionary War Newport, Rhode Island. Surprising how much theology one can pack into a novel.

I read The Stolen Heart, by Andrey Kurkov (2025 translation by Boris Dralyuk). Further adventures of the young Ukrainian police investigator in this second installment of The Kyiv Mysteries series. @AKurkov @BorisDralyuk

I read The Consolation of Philosophy, by Anicius Manlius Severinus Boethius (Victor Watts translation, 1969, rev. 1999). Written while in prison for a trumped up charge of treason, for which he was executed (and brutally tortured, though accounts vary as to details) in 524 AD.

I read Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach (Princeton, 2014). Three parts, one mostly devoted to Giambattista Vico, a second on Dante, and a third on a variety of topics (Montaigne, Pascal, Racine, Rousseau, usw). Translated by Jane O. Newman.

I read Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, by Raymond Carver (1976), his first collection of stories.

I read A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, by Pierre Chuvin (Harvard, 1990; translation credited to B.A. Archer, an alias, I'm told, for Joel Relihan). A chronicle in that the story is hung on the series of Imperial edicts, but well-padded with color and anecdotes.

happy birthday to Charlotte Perkins Gilman! since reading this I've learned that her ancestor Ebenezer Sperry was the younger brother of my ancestor Esther Sperry Hotchkiss, so happy birthday, cousin!

3 July 1844, at the Kun Iam Temple in Macau: the Treaty of Wanghia, the first diplomatic agreement between the China and the U.S., was signed at this stone table by Caleb Cushing, the American ambassador, and Ke-ying, the Viceroy of Liangguang. #OTD

I read Earth House Hold, by Gary Snyder, a 1969 New Directions selection of his journal entries and essays.

I read The Resurrection, by John Gardner (1966).

I read The Deserters [fr: Déserter], by Mathias Énard (2023; 2025 translation by Charlotte Mandell for New Directions [US] & Fitzcarraldo [UK]). A pair of stories spiral around each other, two novellas in a double helix, you might say. I don't expect I fully grasped what they…