June 2025
Some notes about books I’ve finished reading this month
Dear Writer: Pep talks & practical advice for the creative life
by Maggie Smith
The title and the sub-title of this book together capture very nicely what Smith is about here. The sub-title describes the content, and the title describes the approach. There’s a general letter with the title as a salutation at the beginning of the book, and another letter, similarly addressed, at the beginning of each chapter. A few of the chapter titles offer a sense of the themes: Attention, Wonder, Play, Vulnerability, Connection, and Hope.
Click here to read more.
Smith illustrates her writing advice with many examples from her own work and also from other authors. While the advice she offers is valuable for any sort of writing, many of her examples are poems. It’s worth mentioning here that while reading the book I found myself thinking that I should try writing poetry. It’s also worth mentioning that when I suggested that possibility to my wife, she laughed rather heartily. There have been so many times when she excitedly read me a poem that she found very powerful and then dealt with the frustration of my getting nothing out of it. I’ve often said that I’m tone deaf when it comes to poetry, so it’s not at all surprising that she found if more than a little funny when I suggested I might write poems.
Still, there’s good advice in this book, even for me. Both reading and writing, she suggests, should change the one who reads and writes. “I don’t engage with language because I want to be soothed. I don’t turn to literature to have my choices or ideas confirmed. I go to be changed” (p. 57). What’s more, both the reader and the writer are shaped by the world in which they live, so a writer should not assume that the reader finds in the text precisely what the writer thinks is there. She encourages me to admit that my vulnerabilities are central to the writing process, and that I should acknowledge them.
At the end of the book, she draws a connection between creativity and hope. “…there is no creativity without hope. Creativity is inherently hopeful, and the reverse is also true: Hope is inherently creative. Hope is imaginative; it allows you to envision what might be up ahead, even when you see nothing” (p. 225). I hope that I can remember that and take it to heart the next time I find myself staring at a blank computer screen, trying to remember what I thought I was going to be writing about.
On the Calculation of Volume II
by Solvej Balle
This is volume two of the novel. In this volume we re-join Tara Selter, who in volume I found herself re-living November 18 over and over again, waking up each morning to a repeat of the day before. She moves around on each of these days, encountering different people, and even engaging family and friends in extended discussions and activities. But the next day, it’s a new November 18th for Tara. Though she remembers conversations and activities of the previous November 18, it’s a new day — the only November 18th — for the people she’s encountered. They have no memory of those conversations and activities.
Spoiler alert – don’t click on “read more” if you’ve not read and want to read the first volume of this multi-volume novel. I find it impossible to say anything about Volume II without revealing a crucial detail of Volume I.
Click here if you want to read more (but be aware of the spoiler!).
Tara’s repetition of November 18th continues in the second volume. Balle deepens the experience of Tara’s day to day. Tara struggles to retain her sense of self; I found myself thinking of how much of one’s self-awareness is built on and in response to the perceptions of those around us, even when we reject others’ perspective of us. She attempts to recreate the feedback of the seasons, traveling north to have a sense of winter, and then south to experience spring and summer. It’s so hard for me to write about fiction here — somehow it seems more important to avoid spoilers when I’m writing about a novel than when I’m writing about philosophy or history. So I’ll not get into Tara’s response to and reflections on these attempts to ground a sense of self in a world that doesn’t fully acknowledge her existence. But I’ll say that, just as when I read volume one, I found myself invested in her world. I hope that the translator and publisher don’t leave us waiting too long for the remainder of the seven volume (!) novel.
Hannah Arendt: For Love of the World
- by Elisabeth Young-Bruehl (notes pending)
The Book of Records
- by Madeleine Thien (notes pending)
Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom
by Ariel Burger
Ariel Burger. Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2018.
Elie Wiesel is known by many as one of the early first-hand witnesses to the Holocaust. In this book Burger celebrates and details how Wiesel brought his experience of the world into his teaching, both in the classroom and in many and varied interactions outside the classroom. I value this book both for its portrayal of Wiesel as a humane friend and mentor and also for its reflections on how one might teach, especially when one is teaching students with strikingly different backgrounds. Imagine a university classroom, for example, where a German student whose grandfather was an SS officer in Nazi Germany asks the question, “Can any good result from evil, and can evil result from good?”
I wish that I had read this book while I was still teaching.
Click here to read more.
I read Wiesel’s Night long ago, and details are for the most part lost in my memory. I’m regretting that loss as I write this because in this book Burger focuses so much on Wiesel’s emphasis on the importance of memory. “It is a cliché that ignoring history can lead to its repetition. But we also know that the purely technical transmission of information has never been enough to prevent the next tragedy. If memory is to make a moral difference, we need to locate ourselves within it” (p. 23). My general recollection of the book is of a young life in a very dark time. The only detailed memory is of my own despair as I read Wiesel’s account of the night that his father died.
It’s touching and revealing to read how Wiesel brought his vast experience — as a devout Jewish teenager studying sacred texts, as a victim of this Holocaust, and as an activist and writer — into his teaching practice. I’ve already mentioned his insistence on the importance of memory. He also focused on the importance of asking questions. “If you have faith, question it. If you have doubt, quesetion it. Whether you have certainty or uncertainty, question it. And the questions will lead you higher. This is, after all, what we are here to do … together” (p. 105).
Given current trends, his counsel on the importance of questioning, of acknowledging uncertainties, is insightful: “Those who intend evil do not want others to ask these questions, and the bystanders who watch evil happening avoid such investigation. This is the front line of the battle against fanaticism. The fanatic believes he has all the answers, and he has no questions. I have only questions, so I am their enemy. Questions can save us from the certainties that lead to fanaticism. To be human is to ask questions, to ask why, to inquire, to interrogate each situation in a search for the truth, the truth of how we must act. We must face such questions rather than turn away from them; we must unmask and confront evil rather than reduce it to something comfortable. It is not comfortable to name and confront evil, but we cannot be too attached to comfort if we want to make the world better” (p. 123).
All in all, this is a good book for teachers. But it’s also a good book for those who want to live authentic lives in a world rich in inauthenticity.
Eichmann in Jerusalem
- by Hannah Arendt (notes pending)
Aflame: Learning from Silence
by Pico Iyer
Pico Iyer made his name as a travel journalist, beginning with Time Magazine. In 1988 he published his first book, Video Night in Kathmandu And Other Reports From the Not-So-Far East. In 1991, his house burned to the ground. Left homeless, he was sleeping on the floor of a friend’s house, and another friend suggested he would be better off staying at a Benedictine Hermitage in Big Sur. He had his doubts — he’d suffered through “twelve years of enforced chapel at school, every morning and every evening, [which] left me with an aversion to all crosses and hymnals” (pp. 5f). But he found something of a home there, and has returned again and again (and visited other retreat centers as well) over the last several decades.
Click to read more.
While he initially found comfort in the silence — after all, he had just lost his home and everything he owned, including the only manuscript of the book he was writing — he has come to see the silence as a way of getting back into the world rather than a comforting end in itself. He cites Thoreau as a companion in this journey: “‘I have no private good,’ the seeming hermit wrote, ‘unless it be my particular attempt to serve the public.’ … ‘I think that I love society as much as most. … I am naturally no hermit’” (pp. 45f).
Iyer continues with his own thought: “Retreat, I’m coming to find, is not so much about escape as redirection and recollection. You learn to love the world only by looking at it closely, in the round. I’m too inclined, I sometimes think, to accentuate the positive, so as I come out from the Hermitage, I try more and more to take myself off to the wounded or desperate parts of the globe. It pains him, I hear the Dalai Lama say, to see an animal killed on TV. But it’s going to get killed anyway, and maybe by watching he can learn something” (p. 58).
He writes that his experience at the Hermitage has helped him to see value in the tradition he felt he had left behind. But he also admits that he can’t commit fully to the silent life, and acknowledges the irony of his taking advantage of the offerings of those who live at places like the Hermitage. How, he wonders, will those of us outsiders who find comfort in such centers manage, when fewer and fewer people are willing to make a full-time commitment to silence?
As the book’s title suggests, the rebirth in silence has an analogue in fires like the one that destroyed his home. “Fire is nature’s agent of rebirth. It replenishes wild places much as I replenish myself by sitting in silence. Out go built-up leaves, in comes open space for animals. Meadows and pine trees and nanzanita cannot survive in its absence” (p. 204). Once again, I’m reminded of the intersection of Iyer’s thought with a line in one of MaggieSmith’s poems.
I sought this book out after stumbling on an online conversation with Iyer that I can no longer find. I was touched by the kindness and insight that Iyer brought to that conversation. I resisted reading his book at first because it seemed not to fit with my current reading plan. But I find that it fits very well, reminding me that time in silence could be especially important while living in a turbulent and unsettling world like the one outside my home today.