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Sunday, July 26, 2026
Saturday, July 25, 2026
First Paragraph
The noise was ended now. The smoke drifted like thin, gray wisps of fog above the tortured earth and the shattered fences and the peach trees that had been whittled into toothpicks by the cannon fire. For a moment silence, if not peace, fell upon those few square miles of ground where just a while before men had screamed and torn at one another in the frenzy of old hate and had contended in an ancient striving and then had fallen apart, exhausted.
- From Way Station by Clifford D. Simak
Get Well Soon Packages of Books
If you had a friend of eclectic tastes who was going to be recuperating at home for a lengthy period and who was a reader, which books would you placing in a Get Well Soon package?
My selections would include:
1. The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Age 13 3/4 by Sue Townsend
2. The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux
3. Don't Let's Go to the Dogs Tonight by Alexandra Fuller
4. Erasure by Percy Everett
4. Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry
5. Any of Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot mysteries
6. Middle Passage by Charles Johnson
7. Directions to Servants by Jonathan Swift
8. Shogun by James Clavell
9. Station Eleven by Emily St. John
9. City Primeval by Elmore Leonard
10. Master and Commander by Patrick O'Brian
11. Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James
12. The Secret History by Donna Tartt
13. The White Tiger by Aravind Adiga
Friday, July 24, 2026
You Never Know
A lawyer who read an early draft of Pilate's Magician predicted that the book would have a particular appeal to lawyers.
So far, he appears to be correct although I certainly sought a wider audience.
Christians? Jews? Roman history buffs?
Preparing for the Future
Teachers should prepare the student for the student's future, not the teacher's past. Most teachers rarely discuss the important topic of the future of their field, and when this is pointed out they usually reply: "No one can know the future." It seems to me the difficulty of knowing the future does not absolve the teacher from seriously trying to help the student to be ready for it when it comes. It is obvious the experience of an individual is not necessarily that of a class of individuals; therefore, any one person's projection into the future is apt to be somewhat personal and will not be universally accepted. This does not justify reverting to impersonal surveys and losing the impact of the personal story.
- From The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn by Richard W. Hamming
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