The rest stops on the Pennsylvania Turnpike have a "mommy and me" stall in the women's restroom that contains an adult-height toilet and a child-height toilet. When she saw it, my daughter stopped in her tracks and said in amazement, "Mama, there is a toilet here that is FOR ME." I had thought before about how inconvenient it is for everything to be too big for kids but I hadn't really thought of it in terms of children's personal sense of whether anyone is thinking of them or whether they belong. Now we always plan our stops to include at least one on the Penna Turnpike.
I've also been reading The Power Broker this year (I'm about 2/3 of the way through), and it does a phenomenal job of demonstrating both how incredibly talented Moses was at what he did and also the steady moral decline of him as a person. The shift from an ineffectual idealist to a massively powerful and power-hungry settler of scores is remarkable, and so well told by Caro
The Power Broker is essentially my favorite book of non-fiction; it opened my mind not just about the history of New York but also about what a great book could be
That chapter on finding the money for the building project had me on the edge of my seat! "And now it was $90,000 to go. And now $80,000 to go." I took extra stroller walks to get in more audiobook time for The Power Broker! 😅
You deserve a medal for listening to that huge book! (But that’s awesome that you could combine it with stroller walks; a bit dangerous to read while you do that…)
If an audiobook book is under 40 hours, it's not worth my audible credit! 😅 Gotta make those credits stretch.
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I used a credit on, is too large a file to fit on my phone. 😂 I'll have to set up a laptop to listen to it while cooking.
I'm currently listening to Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, but before this I really enjoyed the three volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris. What a life!
When we went to the shrine of the North American Martyrs last month we hiked down to the ravine where St Isaac Jogues buried the body of St Rene Goupil. As you walk down beside a stream there are signs on either side of the trail with excerpts from Isaac Jogues' letter describing Rene Goupil's death and burial. It was beautifully meditative and made the walk really feel like a pilgrimage, made the ravine feel like a place of prayer. You get to a little meadow at the bottom of the ravine and you feel like you are truly on holy ground. It was such a simple thing but also a profound way to enter into the story and experience of the place.
I feel like I should have tons of notes of "hospitable genius!" I'm encouraging my students to have a design journal so they can take notes on things like this. Two instances come to mind. One, on the Metra Chicago commuter trains (and apparently many old-timey trains) the seats can flip back and forth to face either the front or the back of the train. Then, groups can get on and make the seats face each other. The other recent moment of design I appreciated was a lightning rod used to help a tree grow taller - I wrote about it on my own substack just today!
Although I have two degrees in English, I can't honestly say that my own favorite doorstopper book is the Riverside Shakespeare, but I'm pretty sure that's my English-minor husband's. I think mine is probably David McCullough's biography of John Adams. (Not thinking of either of those books specifically, but I also appreciate how any time a book is referred to in a review as "magisterial," it's a positive comment but also seems to be code for, "It's a flippin' long book, you guys.")
All my favorite books are doorstoppers. Anna Karenina. Les Misérables. The Count of Monte Cristo. The Collected Works of St. Rafael Arnaiz. You know, the civilizational classics—
Anna Karenina is my favorite book. I loved War and Peace too (Natasha's "leave the furniture, put in the wounded" is a motto I try to live by in how I use my house) but I tell people to read Anna Karenina first because (I think) it conveys some of the ideas of W&P even better and is a much shorter commitment.
Les Mis is on my list. Count of Monte Cristo was fun, but not a favorite of mine. I like the movie ending better. 😅 He could have learned something at the end about what revenge does to you as a person, but nope, no regrets, gonna go smoke hashish with my foreign princess babe. So very French! Partway through Three Musketeers (which was super fun!) I thought, wait, are we *for* infidelity...? I enjoyed the romp, but again, very French. "The French don't care what you do actually, as long as you pronounce it properly." -Henry Higgins, My Fair Lady
Middlemarch is a new favorite. The story of the journey from "I want to do projects to help the poor [out there]" to "I want to be of service, in person, to my neighbors who live near me, of various incomes and stations"-- to me that should be my Christian journey! Seeing needs as not "out there" but the ones right next to me, people who need friends and food and comfort. Not that far-away people don't matter, but writing a check or "designing a plan for a cottage" doesn't affect *you* in the same way as bringing food to a neighbor who has had a loss or a baby. (Also my husband was in a PhD program and that made the "growing disillusioned with research and publications" storyline so laugh-but-also-cry funny-sad for me! 😅 )
And not as long, but I just read Cranford and loved it! Talk about community and neighborhood life and ultimately, sacrifical interdependence! Oh, I could cry just thinking about the ending. Those "silly, inconsequential" stories of older women convey a depth of real lived community life-- that's how I want to live community life in my neighborhood.
Not a long book, but I named one of my children after a character in Brideshead Revisited. So I can definitely say that book has impact on me.
We almost named our second child after a character in Brothers Karamazov, but we read Ballad of the White Horse at a critical moment, so he got his name from that poem!
The Power Broker is on my list as one of those I've read about so much that I really need to actually read. Much like A Secular Age. Recently I've read Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism and Shoup's High Cost of Free Parking, but I think my favorite recent "doorstopper" non-fiction is actually Stephen Puleo's The Great Abolitionist. It's a detailed biography of Charles Sumner (the "beaten near to death on the floor of the senate by slavery apologists because he insulted one of their men" Sumner that Boston's tunnel to the airport is named after) and I had no idea how directly involved in the many facets of abolition Sumner was.
Highly recommend it, as it delves into themes of both political pragmatism and restraint as well as needing clear moral vision to get the people on your side even when systems refuse to accept moral arguments.
A Secular Age can be quite a slog (I’m guessing no editor felt comfortable calling Taylor out when he started to get long-winded!) but is so important and valuable. Taylor’s concepts and themes continue to shape almost everything I think about.
I'd heard about him in this nerdy post detailing the ways and habits of people who are absurdly energetic/productive: https://stephenmalina.com/post/2021-07-01-energetic-aliens-among-us/ Loads of fun. (disclaimer: ugh, i still haven't finished reading the whole post. 14k words--is itself a doorstopper, for online reading, at least!)
I think it's written with a rat-space audience in mind, though I think the topic of agency should have a pretty wide interest.
As a Nassau county resident, I got the best era of Moses. A lot less displacement, incredible parks, and he was still more of an idealist aiming to serve.
I'm late to this discussion, but the doorstopper question grabbed my attention. The one I love and recommend, especially to this smart audience, is Iain McGilchrist's book The Matter With Things. He's a neuropsychiatrist, talking about the methods that the two sides of our brain use to understand the world, and the risk to civilization of using the view of only one side. Since he has a wagonload of advanced degrees from the most prestigious of British institutions, this is not your usual "risk to civilizaiton" whackjob book. Instead, he begins with the question of why deconstructing poetry kills it, and goes on to a full-scale discussion of what the two sides of the brain do with humor, metaphor, irony, wit, and sadness. He proceeds then to say why we have to use both sides, and right now, as a civilization, we aren't. This may not sound interesting, but it is! And the brillliant people who call it the most important book they have ever read are not kidding.
On the bright side, he has given lots of lectures where he explains the fundamental idea, so you can try him out on YouTube before you plunge into the 2000 page doorstopper. Or you could read his book The Master and His Emissary, which covers the same point and is much shorter, at only about 700 pages, And I'm pretty sure that a lot of you will say "I knew this! I just didn't know why it was true."
My favorite mammoth door-stopper of a book would have to be The Ethics of Beauty by Timothy Patitsas. About everything from architecture to psychotherapy and trauma.
Back when I briefly worked at an after school program in NYC, we took our kids to Jones Beach for a field trip! So I can picture this. :) And I didn't realize you grew up on Long Island, but my husband I loved our time there during his post-doc.
The rest stops on the Pennsylvania Turnpike have a "mommy and me" stall in the women's restroom that contains an adult-height toilet and a child-height toilet. When she saw it, my daughter stopped in her tracks and said in amazement, "Mama, there is a toilet here that is FOR ME." I had thought before about how inconvenient it is for everything to be too big for kids but I hadn't really thought of it in terms of children's personal sense of whether anyone is thinking of them or whether they belong. Now we always plan our stops to include at least one on the Penna Turnpike.
Yes! I’m so surprised and happy when I find those
I've also been reading The Power Broker this year (I'm about 2/3 of the way through), and it does a phenomenal job of demonstrating both how incredibly talented Moses was at what he did and also the steady moral decline of him as a person. The shift from an ineffectual idealist to a massively powerful and power-hungry settler of scores is remarkable, and so well told by Caro
The Power Broker is essentially my favorite book of non-fiction; it opened my mind not just about the history of New York but also about what a great book could be
That chapter on finding the money for the building project had me on the edge of my seat! "And now it was $90,000 to go. And now $80,000 to go." I took extra stroller walks to get in more audiobook time for The Power Broker! 😅
Yes!
You deserve a medal for listening to that huge book! (But that’s awesome that you could combine it with stroller walks; a bit dangerous to read while you do that…)
If an audiobook book is under 40 hours, it's not worth my audible credit! 😅 Gotta make those credits stretch.
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which I used a credit on, is too large a file to fit on my phone. 😂 I'll have to set up a laptop to listen to it while cooking.
I'm currently listening to Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy, but before this I really enjoyed the three volume biography of Theodore Roosevelt by Edmund Morris. What a life!
And yes, I need two hands to steer the stroller!
Leah, I love your picture. So resonant! I have a little baby right now as well and I'm getting so much reading in! 💕
When we went to the shrine of the North American Martyrs last month we hiked down to the ravine where St Isaac Jogues buried the body of St Rene Goupil. As you walk down beside a stream there are signs on either side of the trail with excerpts from Isaac Jogues' letter describing Rene Goupil's death and burial. It was beautifully meditative and made the walk really feel like a pilgrimage, made the ravine feel like a place of prayer. You get to a little meadow at the bottom of the ravine and you feel like you are truly on holy ground. It was such a simple thing but also a profound way to enter into the story and experience of the place.
Oh that’s lovely
I feel like I should have tons of notes of "hospitable genius!" I'm encouraging my students to have a design journal so they can take notes on things like this. Two instances come to mind. One, on the Metra Chicago commuter trains (and apparently many old-timey trains) the seats can flip back and forth to face either the front or the back of the train. Then, groups can get on and make the seats face each other. The other recent moment of design I appreciated was a lightning rod used to help a tree grow taller - I wrote about it on my own substack just today!
We saw those on the Princeton Dinky and they’re a delight.
Although I have two degrees in English, I can't honestly say that my own favorite doorstopper book is the Riverside Shakespeare, but I'm pretty sure that's my English-minor husband's. I think mine is probably David McCullough's biography of John Adams. (Not thinking of either of those books specifically, but I also appreciate how any time a book is referred to in a review as "magisterial," it's a positive comment but also seems to be code for, "It's a flippin' long book, you guys.")
I loved McCullough's John Adams and I also cherish my Riverside Shakespeare.
All my favorite books are doorstoppers. Anna Karenina. Les Misérables. The Count of Monte Cristo. The Collected Works of St. Rafael Arnaiz. You know, the civilizational classics—
Anna Karenina is my favorite book. I loved War and Peace too (Natasha's "leave the furniture, put in the wounded" is a motto I try to live by in how I use my house) but I tell people to read Anna Karenina first because (I think) it conveys some of the ideas of W&P even better and is a much shorter commitment.
Les Mis is on my list. Count of Monte Cristo was fun, but not a favorite of mine. I like the movie ending better. 😅 He could have learned something at the end about what revenge does to you as a person, but nope, no regrets, gonna go smoke hashish with my foreign princess babe. So very French! Partway through Three Musketeers (which was super fun!) I thought, wait, are we *for* infidelity...? I enjoyed the romp, but again, very French. "The French don't care what you do actually, as long as you pronounce it properly." -Henry Higgins, My Fair Lady
Middlemarch is a new favorite. The story of the journey from "I want to do projects to help the poor [out there]" to "I want to be of service, in person, to my neighbors who live near me, of various incomes and stations"-- to me that should be my Christian journey! Seeing needs as not "out there" but the ones right next to me, people who need friends and food and comfort. Not that far-away people don't matter, but writing a check or "designing a plan for a cottage" doesn't affect *you* in the same way as bringing food to a neighbor who has had a loss or a baby. (Also my husband was in a PhD program and that made the "growing disillusioned with research and publications" storyline so laugh-but-also-cry funny-sad for me! 😅 )
And not as long, but I just read Cranford and loved it! Talk about community and neighborhood life and ultimately, sacrifical interdependence! Oh, I could cry just thinking about the ending. Those "silly, inconsequential" stories of older women convey a depth of real lived community life-- that's how I want to live community life in my neighborhood.
Not a long book, but I named one of my children after a character in Brideshead Revisited. So I can definitely say that book has impact on me.
We almost named our second child after a character in Brothers Karamazov, but we read Ballad of the White Horse at a critical moment, so he got his name from that poem!
The Power Broker is on my list as one of those I've read about so much that I really need to actually read. Much like A Secular Age. Recently I've read Zuboff's Surveillance Capitalism and Shoup's High Cost of Free Parking, but I think my favorite recent "doorstopper" non-fiction is actually Stephen Puleo's The Great Abolitionist. It's a detailed biography of Charles Sumner (the "beaten near to death on the floor of the senate by slavery apologists because he insulted one of their men" Sumner that Boston's tunnel to the airport is named after) and I had no idea how directly involved in the many facets of abolition Sumner was.
Highly recommend it, as it delves into themes of both political pragmatism and restraint as well as needing clear moral vision to get the people on your side even when systems refuse to accept moral arguments.
Ooooh, that sounds very much up my alley, and would have been perfect for my dad
A Secular Age can be quite a slog (I’m guessing no editor felt comfortable calling Taylor out when he started to get long-winded!) but is so important and valuable. Taylor’s concepts and themes continue to shape almost everything I think about.
I'd heard about him in this nerdy post detailing the ways and habits of people who are absurdly energetic/productive: https://stephenmalina.com/post/2021-07-01-energetic-aliens-among-us/ Loads of fun. (disclaimer: ugh, i still haven't finished reading the whole post. 14k words--is itself a doorstopper, for online reading, at least!)
I think it's written with a rat-space audience in mind, though I think the topic of agency should have a pretty wide interest.
As a Brooklyn native it's so funny to me to see ANYTHING Moses did framed in a positive light. He absolutely destroyed so many thriving neighborhoods.
As a fellow Brooklynite, I had the exact same thought.
As a Nassau county resident, I got the best era of Moses. A lot less displacement, incredible parks, and he was still more of an idealist aiming to serve.
I'm late to this discussion, but the doorstopper question grabbed my attention. The one I love and recommend, especially to this smart audience, is Iain McGilchrist's book The Matter With Things. He's a neuropsychiatrist, talking about the methods that the two sides of our brain use to understand the world, and the risk to civilization of using the view of only one side. Since he has a wagonload of advanced degrees from the most prestigious of British institutions, this is not your usual "risk to civilizaiton" whackjob book. Instead, he begins with the question of why deconstructing poetry kills it, and goes on to a full-scale discussion of what the two sides of the brain do with humor, metaphor, irony, wit, and sadness. He proceeds then to say why we have to use both sides, and right now, as a civilization, we aren't. This may not sound interesting, but it is! And the brillliant people who call it the most important book they have ever read are not kidding.
On the bright side, he has given lots of lectures where he explains the fundamental idea, so you can try him out on YouTube before you plunge into the 2000 page doorstopper. Or you could read his book The Master and His Emissary, which covers the same point and is much shorter, at only about 700 pages, And I'm pretty sure that a lot of you will say "I knew this! I just didn't know why it was true."
Congratulations!!
My favorite mammoth door-stopper of a book would have to be The Ethics of Beauty by Timothy Patitsas. About everything from architecture to psychotherapy and trauma.
Back when I briefly worked at an after school program in NYC, we took our kids to Jones Beach for a field trip! So I can picture this. :) And I didn't realize you grew up on Long Island, but my husband I loved our time there during his post-doc.