A few books, a few words

 

"What's with all this reading, anyway?"

Earth may be blown to smithereens (one of my mother’s oddball words) any day now, but until that happens I continue to go to my bookshop, continue to communicate with friends with phone calls, texts, emails, letters, and in-person conversations, go for walks with my dog, and yes, I am still reading. Here is the list of the books I’ve read since the beginning of the year. There are not as many as usual for over two months into 2026’s twelve, but here they are:

1. Binet, Laurent. Perspective(s) (fiction, 2023)

2. Raskin, Jamie. Unthinkable: Trauma, Truth, and the Trials of American Democracy (nonfiction, 2022)

3. Letts, Elizabeth. The Perfect Horse: The Daring U.S. Mission to Rescue the Priceless Stallions Kidnapped by the Nazis (nonfiction, 2016)

4. Giffels, David. Barnstorming Ohio to Understand America (nonfiction, 2020)

5. Field, Isobel. This Life I’ve Loved (nonfiction, 1937)

6. Stevenson, Robert Louis. An Inland Voyage (nonfiction, 1878)

7. Stevenson, Robert Louis. Crossing the Plains (nonfiction)

8. Sixsmith, Martin. The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (nonfiction, 2009)

9. Morris, Heather. The Tattooist of Auschwitz (fiction, 2018)

10. Hill, Justin. The Drink and Dream Teahouse (fiction, 2002)

11. Paton, Alan. Cry, the Beloved Country (fiction, 1948)

12. Buchan, Elizabeth. Revenge of the Middle-Aged Woman (fiction, 2002)

13. Power-Greene, Ousmane K. The Confessions of Matthew Strong (fiction, 2022)

14. Galbraith, John Kenneth. The Scotch (nonfiction, 1964)

15. Paul, Elliot. Linden on the Saugus Branch (nonfiction, 1947)

16. MacDonald, Ross. Sleeping Beauty (fiction, 1973)

17. MacDonald, Ross. The Name is Archer (fiction, 1946-1983)

Make what you will of my Books Read 2026 list so far. Ask questions if you have them. I can tell you that I am currently reading Thomas Hardy’s Under the Greenwood Tree at bedtime; with dinner, a book about trees written for artists (forget title and author name; the book is at home, and I am not); began The Man Who Planted Trees, by Jim Robbins, sitting in my car by the side of an icebound inland lake; and have a George Elliot novel, The Mill on the Floss in the wings, ready to follow Thomas Hardy.

Sometimes I find it hard to justify (to myself) the hours I spend reading books while the country and the world fall apart; however, giving up the hope of making certain others care about what breaks my heart, I am now spending less time online, having realized at long last that sharing and forwarding stories to people who either deleted my messages without reading them or maybe even blocked me and never saw the messages at all was a lost cause. As long as they continue circling their golden calf and cheering him as their savior (incomprehensible!), they will be unable to take in messages that conflict with their "true belief.” (Here's another.) Time to re-read Eric Hoffer?

I won’t deny, either, that much of my reading is escape (just look at the dates of some of those novels and memoirs and travel books), but who wouldn’t want to escape from a present in which one’s own beloved country bombs a children’s elementary school in another country, kills over a hundred schoolgirls, and our “leaders” express not a single word of regret? Everything else—all the threats to voting rights, violations of the Constitution, outright lies left and right, incompetence and corruption—all of it pales for me in the light of those dead schoolgirls. Will Iran be better off now that the Ayatollah is gone? Those little girls, dead, are not better off. You think opposing abortion regardless of circumstances means you reverence life, and yet you say nothing in opposition to these murders? And because I am an American, these murders were done in my name, also! For shame, America! For shame!

Beautiful earth! Beautiful trees and mountains, lakes and rivers, hills and prairies alive with life! Potentially beautiful human animals with your lacerated hearts and stumblings and gettings-up-again and attempts to love one another! Open your eyes!

Beautiful Michigan!

“Have You No Sense of Decency?”

The question that came to my mind at 3 a.m., words so memorably uttered by attorney Joseph Welch in 1954, when the infamous McCarthy hearings, a.k.a. witch hunt, had gone on already for far too long. If you’re too young to remember it (and I was too young at the time to pay attention), what happened was that Senator McCarthy’s demagoguery had until that moment run virtually unchecked, as he whipped the country into a state of hysteria over suspected “internal enemies.” In the course of those Senate hearings, McCarthy destroyed reputations and sometimes lives. He must have felt all-powerful and thought nothing could stop him. Then one lawyer uttered the fateful words:

Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty, or your recklessness.  

 … I beg your pardon. Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. 

 … You've done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

To read the long exchange between McCarthy and Welch, from which these lines are excerpted and which I recommend you read in full, find it here. Now look at our country today in May 2020, through the lens of 1954. 

I want to ask all Americans who continue to support the man in the White House, a man who has demonstrated every day since his campaign that he has no sense of decency and who becomes only worse every day, in these difficult, difficult times when we need real leadership:

“Have you no sense of decency? Have you no conscience? Would you sacrifice your country to allow this national shame to continue?”

My parents were Republicans. My mother and I voted for John Kasich in the primary of 2016. (I should note that my father had been dead for several years and thus voted for no one.) No, I am not a registered Republican, but I wanted to vote against the man who won the nomination, in hopes he could be stopped before the race began. I could have lived with a President Kasich. What we have now is intolerable.

If the Republican Party is not to become one of the sorriest footnotes in American history, it is time for party members, especially those in the Senate, to get their act together and to renounce this man as candidate for re-election, to show the country that they have not utterly sold their souls for what can only be short-term political gain.