Weekly Roundup #005

the Thanksgiving edition

Happy Saturday, y’all! I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving. I’m (finally) back with this week’s roundup. Enjoy!

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Photo by Vlad Patana on Unsplash

Currently Reading:

I’ve been binge-borrowing books from the library to satiate my literary desires while all of my books are still packed away. Binge-borrowing also lets me get the dopamine hit of buying a bunch of books without spending the money. Sometimes I don’t even read some of the books I borrow before I return them. Judge as you will…

• On Taste, On The Sublime and Beautiful, Reflections on the French Revolution, A Letter to a Noble Lord by Edmund Burke

  • I am slowly making my way through this one. I don’t think I will read it all; just the first part, On Taste, which is short and pretty easy to read. I plan to read his reflections on the French Revolution, which many cite as the basis for conservatism.

• Bringing it to the Table: On Farming and Food by Wendell Berry

  • So far, I’ve read the first ten essays in this collection, and every single word is a treasure. Berry is by far one of my new favorite authors, and I’m so glad I was introduced to his work this year.

• An Experiment in Criticism by C.S. Lewis.

  • I’m listening to this on audio and really enjoying it so far. Lewis is one of my favorite authors, and I’ve made it a goal of mine to read all of his nonfiction.

• Starving the South: How the North Won the Civil War by Andrew F. Smith

  • I just started this one today and am only a few pages in, but I am liking what I’ve read so far. Smith is a culinary historian, and this book takes a look at the American Civil War through the lens of food, especially food scarcity. My husband and I are both big history nerds, especially when it comes to American history, so when I saw this book on the shelves at my local library, I immediately grabbed it.

On My Television

source

The other day, my husband and I watched Valkyrie, directed by Bryan Singer and starring Tom Cruise. I don’t know enough about the July Plot to kill Hitler to judge the movie from a historical accuracy standpoint, but I will say some of the directing choices were interesting and honestly left me confused at times as to what was happening. Also, and maybe this is nitpicky, but why did they all have different accents?? Tom Cruise had an American accent, some of the other officers had English accents, and maybe two or three people had German accents. The movie’s opening scene starts with Cruise’s character speaking in German, and then there’s an odd transition to English, which is used throughout the rest of the film. If your movie is not going to be in German, why include it at all? To explain to the audience that these Nazi guys spoke German, because we don’t already know that? I can suspend my disbelief enough to enjoy a movie where the Nazis have American accents, but I cannot believe that even fake Nazis spoke in multiple accents from across Europe and America. Pick a lane.

In My Earbuds

So, if you missed one of my recent notes, Thanksgiving tradition demands that one listen to Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant Massacree. If you’ve never listened to it before, please do. It represents some of the best folk anti-war music from the sixties. As I’m writing this, I have just discovered that they made a movie in 1969 based on the song, starring Arlo Guthrie, so I know what I’m doing this evening.

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That’s the weekly roundup for this week. Next week, I plan on writing about the myth of progress in the realm of technological innovation, as well as some thoughts on male/female friendships and how a lot of women (but men too) automatically treat the opposite sex as a member of their own sex, and how this naivety can cause harm to ourselves and others. I hope you all have a blessed Sabbath!