Here I am, back again, recommending another book. I think it comes down to the social creatures we are at heart. Those best portions of our memories—of travel, a good meal, an unexpected kindness—are never isolated; they are more fulfilling when shared.
I’ve been reading Roger Rosenblatt’s Rules for Aging. Its sequel, More Rules forAging, comes out June 2.
Originally published a quarter-century ago, this book is a slim, deceptively simple survival manual for the twilight of life. Rather than offering earnest scientific breakthroughs or dense psychological theories on growing older, Rosenblatt delivers fifty-eight bite-sized, counterintuitive gems of wisdom rooted in a liberating truth: most of the little things we agonize over simply do not matter.
Armed with a rueful, tongue-in-cheek irony, he instructs us to stop defending our character, to run when someone says “we must do this again,” and to realize that nobody is thinking about us anyway.
Rosenblatt’s crystalline writing is breathtaking, the sagacity drawn from a vast repertoire of experience, a way of saying things that startles. Rhythmic in cadence, exhibiting sustained, aphoristic eloquence, it’s a book you’ll want to read, pen in hand.
A learned man—Harvard Ph.D., essay writer extraordinaire, journalist, playwright, and author of more than twenty books—he’s your Renaissance man. In his spare time, he is an accomplished jazz pianist who plays by ear.
Reading Rosenblatt feels as though he’s sitting at a table across from you in a quiet café, conversing like a friend you’ve known all your life and care deeply about. He makes you think, distilling options, engaging your interior life.
With grace, he helps you accept your griefs and regrets, revise your hopes, and embrace aging and ending.
A famed memoirist, he shuns nostalgia, exemplifying the sanctity of life’s daily rituals, whether making toast for a grandchild or paddling a kayak on a foggy morning.
There’s a sadness in finishing anything Rosenblatt writes—his sheer ability to extract wisdom from close observation reveals truths we too often miss. He lingers like the aftermath of a fine wine.
He once wrote of the writer’s calling, words that capture his entire spirit:
“What are we here for? We are here to write our way into the hearts of total strangers… If a piece of writing does not touch, alter, or shake the human heart, it is nothing. It is a beautifully constructed house with no one living inside” (UnlessIt Moves the Heart).
Few twentieth-century writers combine sensual brilliance, personal scandal, and literary influence as completely as the French novelist Colette (1873-1954). Revered in France as one of the great stylists of modern prose, she remains comparatively underread in America. Her life was marked by artistic triumph, erotic independence, moral ambiguity, and deep contradiction, qualities inseparable from the extraordinary vitality of her work.
I hadn’t encountered Colette until I came across reprints of several of her best-known works in the New York Review of Books, including Chéri and The Pure andthe Impure. Curious, I decided to begin at the beginning with Claudine at School, the first of her semi-autobiographical Claudine novels, featuring the rebellious schoolgirl whose wit, sensuality, and independence challenged conventional notions of womanhood as passive, domestic, and sexually muted.
The Claudine novels emerged from one of the most exploitative literary marriages of the era. Colette’s husband, the flamboyant Parisian critic and entrepreneur Willy, recognized her talent and pressured her into writing the series, which was initially published entirely under his own name. The books became enormously successful, while Colette remained publicly overshadowed. Her eventual break from Willy marked not only a personal emancipation but the beginning of her emergence as an independent literary figure.
After reading Claudine at School, I turned to Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette by Judith Thurman, a massive and meticulous biography produced from nearly a decade of research in French archives and sources.
Thurman had previously written Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, which won the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 1983 and later helped inspire the Academy Award-winning film Out of Africa. She was co-producer.
Her Colette biography became a finalist for both the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, while France honored her with the title of Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters in 2016. She has also been one of the longtime staff writers of The New Yorker.
Yet I suspect many Americans remain only vaguely aware of Colette, even if they have seen Gigi, Vincente Minnelli’s celebrated adaptation of her 1944 novella.
In France, however, Colette long ago entered the cultural canon, the first female president of the prestigious Académie Goncourt, and remains a central figure in the French literary curriculum. Her Claudine novels, Chéri, and Gigi continue to be widely read.
Among her admirers were some of the century’s most distinguished literary figures: Marcel Proust, André Gide, Jean Cocteau, and even Jean-Paul Sartre. William Faulkner reportedly kept her photograph on his writing desk, a tribute from one master stylist to another.
Upon her death in 1954, she became the first French woman granted a state funeral, though the Catholic Church denied her religious burial because of her divorces and unconventional private life.
Colette’s writings eventually filled more than eighty volumes: novels, memoirs, journalism, literary criticism, essays on theatre, fashion, cuisine, and animals. During the First World War, she even worked as a war correspondent, visiting battlefields and interviewing soldiers.
Yet one finds little overt political or philosophical argument in her work. What distinguishes Colette is her total immersion in the senses. She does not merely describe experience; she inhabits it, merging the physical world with psychological perception.
One feels physically present in her prose: the ripening of a peach, the texture of a cat’s fur, the shifting power between lovers, the ache of aging, the fierce necessity of independence.
Her evocations of her native Burgundy possess extraordinary sensory delicacy:
“Je redescendais… Le jardin frissonnait encore, les roses étaient froides. J’attendais que le premier rayon de soleil touchât le mur, et alors l’odeur du buis montait comme une prière. Tout était bleu, argenté et nacré. C’était un monde où la rosée n’était pas encore de l’eau, mais une sorte de lait céleste qui adoucissait le monde avant que le jaune cruel du jour ne commence à le brûler.”
Translation:
“I would go down into the garden… The garden was still shivering, the roses were cold. I would wait for the first ray of sun to touch the wall, and then the scent of the boxwood would rise like a prayer. Everything was blue, silver, and nacreous. It was a world where the dew was not yet water, but a kind of celestial milk that softened the world before the harsh yellow of the day began to burn it away.”
She was equally perceptive about aging and female self-awareness:
“Elle regarda son reflet — le cou qui commençait à perdre sa tension, le fin réseau de rides autour des yeux qu’aucune poudre ne pouvait vraiment bannir. Elle ne pleura pas ; elle étudia sa ruine comme un général pourrait étudier la carte d’un territoire perdu. Il y avait une magnificence dans cette défaite. Elle se rendait compte qu’être une femme, c’était être une série de peaux, muées l’une après l’autre, jusqu’à ce qu’enfin, on ne reste qu’avec les os de son propre caractère, qui sont, après tout, les seules choses qui durent vraiment.”
Translation:
“She looked at her reflection—the neck that was beginning to lose its tension, the fine web of lines around the eyes that no amount of powder could truly banish. She did not weep; she studied her ruin as a general might study a map of a lost territory. There was a magnificence in this defeat. She realized that to be a woman was to be a series of skins, shed one after the other, until finally one is left with only the bones of one’s own character, which are, after all, the only things that truly endure.”
She also possessed an uncanny sensitivity toward animals, especially cats:
“Elle restait là, ombre gris-argent, ses yeux comme deux raisins translucides. Elle ne se contentait pas de regarder ; elle humait la chambre. Ses oreilles bougeaient comme de petits radars indépendants, captant le bruit d’une aile de phalène ou le tassement lointain de la maison. Dans son immobilité, il y avait une concentration terrible et belle — l’orgueil d’une créature qui s’appartient tout entière et ne doit aucune explication au monde.”
Translation:
“She lay there, a silver-grey shadow, her eyes like two translucent grapes. She did not merely watch; she inhaled the room. Her ears moved like small, independent radars, catching the sound of a moth’s wing or the distant settling of the house. In her stillness there was a terrible, beautiful concentration—the pride of a creature that belongs entirely to itself and owes no explanation to the world.”
Colette’s private life, however, remains controversial. Her relationships were often transgressive; she had a strained relationship with her daughter, engaged in an affair with her teenage stepson, and continued publishing in journals associated with Vichy France during the Nazi occupation.
Thurman describes Colette’s maternal style as one of “ruthless detachment.” Much of the child-rearing was delegated to a nanny. Mother and daughter frequently quarreled. At one point, returning from boarding school, her daughter reportedly remarked that she wished they were Jewish because Jewish parents seemed more emotionally involved with their children.
Thurman suggests that Colette regarded motherhood as an intrusion upon the artistic life—a conflict that has shadowed many women writers navigating the competing demands of creativity, erotic freedom, and domestic expectation.
Her conduct during the Nazi occupation remains morally ambiguous. Although she used her connections to secure the release of her Jewish husband from internment, she nevertheless continued publishing under the Vichy regime, actions critics still debate. Thurman offers a pragmatic possibility: survival.
In many respects, Colette embodied contradiction, shaped by a conservative provincial upbringing while seeking freedoms historically reserved for men.
Though later embraced by many feminists as a symbol of female independence, Colette often denounced feminism, once remarking that women “deserved the whip and the harem.” In a 1927 interview with Walter Benjamin, she suggested that women wielding power could become “worse than men.” Bisexual and involved in numerous relationships with women, she nevertheless disapproved of her own daughter’s lesbianism, perhaps knowing the difficulties of gay life, Thurman suggests.
And yet, despite these contradictions, Colette helped redefine what modern womanhood could be. She fashioned a public life of artistic independence, sexual autonomy, and professional achievement at a time when few such paths existed openly for women.
French culture has often shown a greater willingness than Anglo-American culture to celebrate women who combine sensual freedom with intellectual authority, as seen in figures such as George Sand and Simone de Beauvoir. Colette belongs within that lineage, though she remains more elusive, less ideological, and ultimately more instinctive than either.
Thurman’s biography succeeds precisely because it resists simplification. She neither canonizes nor condemns Colette, but instead reveals a woman of immense artistic gifts, profound appetites, emotional blind spots, courage, vanity, discipline, selfishness, and brilliance.
Above all, Colette endures because of the precision and sensual richness of her prose. Few writers have rendered nature, animals, desire, aging, and the textures of ordinary experience with such tactile immediacy and lyrical control. Whatever her personal failings, her writing continues to justify the devotion of her readers and her enduring place in French literature.
I’ve finished my clustered reading of Wendell Berry with his Port William novel, Hannah Coulter, and feel I know him now as an adamant lover of the old ways: the community of belonging; simpler living and inherited traditions; the sanctity of the family farm; nature’s cyclic wheel, ushering change and mortality’s inevitable visit; the enduring power of love to redeem life’s frequent anguish.
Reading Wendell Berry has made me more mindful of what truly matters and, like him, I mourn the passing of a better way of life—less angry, more humane, sustaining in the daily beneficence of the familiar and the abiding.
We live in an age of unprecedented access to information, and yet books themselves are becoming harder to obtain. Prices rise, libraries strain, and even digital access comes with invisible expiration dates. The result is a quiet paradox: the more abundant knowledge becomes, the less equitably it is distributed.
I have long been a fervent devotee of Virginia Woolf, unquestionably among the greatest writers of the twentieth century. For nearly thirty years, Mrs Dalloway and To the Lighthouse were central texts in my modern novel course. Most recently, I read her diary (1918–1941), an extraordinary record of a writer’s inner life and artistic evolution.
I had assumed that we possessed a full collection of Woolf’s extant letters—some 3,100 of them, published in six volumes spanning 1888–1941. Yet recent scholarship has uncovered more than 1,400 additional letters, now published by Edinburgh University Press. The problem, however, is cost: the retail price approaches $255 (£188), and the collection is unavailable in e-book form. What should be a scholarly enrichment becomes, for many readers, an inaccessible luxury.
Even in the digital age, book prices—especially for hardbacks, the staples of libraries, bookstores, and schools—continue to rise. I am fortunate to have a well-stocked independent bookstore nearby, yet like many such stores, it survives as much on gift merchandise and an in-house café as on book sales. Across the country, independent bookstores have declined, leaving some communities without any physical access to books.
School budgets are under comparable strain. In the United States, library funding has remained essentially flat in recent years, even as costs rise. More than half (58%) of school librarians reported restrictions on spending in 2023–24, up from 48% in 2020–21; some report being unable to purchase books (Cockcroft, 2024).
In the United Kingdom, 15% of secondary schools report having no library budget whatsoever, while 69% of those with budgets indicate that funding has remained static or declined, eroding real purchasing power (Reading Cloud, 2023). In England more broadly, school funding fell by 8.5% in real terms between 2009 and 2020, with predictable consequences for library acquisitions (Sibieta, 2021).
An underreported consequence is the strain on public libraries. Approximately 94–96% of public library funding derives from government sources—primarily local governments through property taxes, with supplementary state and federal support, including grants from the Institute of Museum and Library Services. Only 4–6% comes from fines, fees, or philanthropy (Sweeney, 2025). This reliance on local funding creates a structural inequity: communities with weaker tax bases, often those most in need of library services, are least able to support them.
Yet public libraries remain indispensable. Roughly 17,000 public libraries in the United States receive more than 1.3 billion visits annually, exceeding the combined attendance of major professional sports leagues (Sweeney, 2025). They are not luxuries, but essential civic institutions: centers of learning, access, and communal life.
Recent federal policy has compounded these pressures. In March 2025, the administration of Donald Trump mandated reductions to the budget of the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the nation’s only federal agency dedicated to library funding, as part of a broader effort to reduce government spending. A coalition of 21 state attorneys general successfully challenged these cuts in federal court, restoring funds that had amounted to just $266.7 million in 2024—approximately 0.003% of the federal budget, or roughly 75 cents per capita (NPR, 2025).
Meanwhile, the publishing industry has consolidated into five dominant firms—Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Simon & Schuster, Hachette Book Group, and Macmillan Publishers—three of them foreign-owned. Together, they exert enormous influence over what is published. Such consolidation reduces competition and contributes to rising prices.
Libraries face an additional burden in the form of digital licensing. Unlike consumers, who may purchase an e-book outright, libraries must often pay steep licensing fees; for example, $55 for a popular title that a consumer can buy for $15, and must repurchase access after a limited term, typically two years (Goode, 2024). If a library declines to renew, the title simply disappears from its collection. When high-demand titles—such as The Women by Kristin Hannah—are involved, libraries have little choice but to pay.
Efforts by states to legislate fairer licensing terms have thus far failed in the courts.
At the same time, Amazon dominates the market, controlling roughly 68% of e-book sales—rising to 83% when Kindle Unlimited is included—and an increasingly large share of print sales as well (eReaders Forum, 2024; WordsRated, 2024). Its Kindle Direct Publishing platform has democratized access to publishing, allowing authors to earn up to 70% royalties on certain e-books, but it does so within a system that further concentrates market power.
The result is a feedback loop: as platform dominance reshapes the market, major publishers compensate by raising prices, especially for institutional buyers such as libraries and schools, and by concentrating resources on high-profile authors and guaranteed bestsellers.
In 2017, Barack Obama and Michelle Obama secured a reported $65 million joint publishing deal with Penguin Random House for their memoirs, Becoming and APromised Land (Weaver, 2017). Such advances reflect market realities but may also crowd out emerging voices.
We have, in other words, not resolved the paradox but deepened it. As prices rise, access narrows, and even our digital abundance proves conditional, knowledge becomes less a shared inheritance than a gated resource. What is at stake is not simply the cost of books, but the principle that they, and the intellectual life they sustain, belong to everyone.
–RJ
REFERENCES
Cockcroft, M. (2024, April 4). School library budgets remain strained. School Library Journal.
Goode, L. (2024). E-book licensing and libraries. GoTech.
Reading Cloud. (2023). UK school library funding report.
Sibieta, L. (2021). School funding trends in England. Institute for Fiscal Studies / Wiley.
Sweeney, P. (2025, September 4). Public library funding in the U.S. Candid.org.
Weaver, H. (2017, March 1). _The Obamas’ publishing deal. Vanity Fair.
“I have always imagined that Paradise will be a kind of library.” — Jorge Luis Borges
This year I decided to overhaul my reading habits by adopting what I call focused reading—pursuing a subject deeply rather than wandering endlessly from book to book. Instead of grazing randomly across titles, I try to follow a particular vein: reading several works that illuminate a topic, an author, an era, or a historical moment until the subject begins to feel textured and alive.
For years, though my reading had been eclectic, and not without pleasure, I began to sense that the most memorable intellectual experiences of my life had come, not from isolated books, but from immersion, one work leading naturally to another, ideas conversing across pages and centuries.
Reading then becomes less a pastime than a form of exploration, the mind moving gradually through a landscape rather than darting past it from the window of a passing train.
This year I began, as usual, with my annual eclectic list of fiction and non-fiction culled from authoritative sources. But going forward, I hope to limit that list to perhaps twenty titles—books that seem especially deserving of attention.
Alongside these, I’ve begun concentrating on several areas. This year they include the farming iconoclast Wendell Berry; the conservative economist Thomas Sowell; the late historian Walter Johnson; and the classical world—an area where I lack deeper exposure.
Next year, should I still walk the planet, I can imagine expanding the method further: perhaps ten topic areas, each composed of primary and secondary works. Five books per topic would yield roughly fifty works of focused reading, in addition to the twenty eclectic titles.
To give an example, one of this year’s areas of focus is the classical milieu. Staying within my five-book limit, I chose the following:
• The Republic — Plato • Nicomachean Ethics — Aristotle • The Bacchae — Euripides • Metamorphoses — Ovid • Letters from a Stoic — Seneca the Younger
So far, my experiment is yielding dividends. I’ve committed to reading a minimum of fifty pages a day—assuming an average book length of about three hundred pages—and by mid-March I’ve completed twelve books. Last year, by contrast, I finished only twenty.
I should confess that Atomic Habits by James Clear helped inspire the discipline. Clear’s practical application of behavioral psychology, ideas traceable to B. F. Skinner, encouraged me to approach reading not merely as an aspiration but as a daily practice. Nowadays I cringe when my routine threatens the minimum and will sometimes delay sleep simply to complete my pages.
Such discipline may seem quaint in an age that offers a thousand distractions. Once it was linear television that eroded the nation’s reading habits; today, the Internet amplifies the trend. Last year, nearly half of Americans, 48.5 percent, did not read a single book. In Britain, the figure stood at 40 percent, according to a YouGov poll reported in the Times Literary Supplement.
Bottom line, Americans spend roughly four to five hours each day watching television or streaming media; in Britain, the average approaches four and a half hours. Platforms such as Netflix, Hulu, YouTube, and Facebook dominate much of that viewing.
Add the hours spent on smartphones, computers, and tablets and the total easily approaches seven hours a day, nearly the equivalent of a full workday, devoted to screens. Much of that time is spent watching movies, sports, or the endless scroll of digital entertainment.
Younger generations, though still fond of sports and films, increasingly inhabit the fast-moving currents of TikTok, YouTube, and video games.
Reading, by contrast, has steadily fallen out of fashion.
Nor has reading alone suffered. The social fabric has frayed as well. I remember when houses faced the street with broad porches where neighbors gathered in the evening, waiting the advent of night’s coolness, conversation drifting unhindered from one subject to another, board games on small tables, laughter an abundant sprinkling of neighborly fellowship.
This simple act of sitting together seemed reason enough to linger.
Today, many houses turn their porches to the rear, facing private yards rather than the street, as if community itself had quietly retreated.
Perhaps this is why books continue to matter.
Reading restores a community the modern world has forsaken.. Open a book and time folds in upon itself: Plato resumes his patient inquiry into justice; Seneca counsels composure in adversity; Ovid reminds us that the human story is one long sequence of transformations. The centuries speak again in voices at once distant and intimate.
Books, in this sense, comprise the old porch of civilization.
There we sit again with the living and the dead alike, the conversation unbroken. The room grows quiet, the hour late, yet the mind moves freely—wandering Athens with Aristotle, pausing in the tragic shadows of Euripides, or returning, perhaps a little wiser, to our own small corner of the world.
So I keep my modest covenant of fifty pages a day. Not simply to finish more books, though that is pleasant enough. I read because within those pages waits a larger company and a wider horizon.
In a distracted age, the turning of a page may be one of the last quiet forms of freedom left to us.
I’ve just finished Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch alongside Wendell Berry’s TheUnsettling of America.
I’ve never read two books simultaneously before, but the pairing worked. The Goldfinch proved a genuine page-turner for me—a Dickensian, plot-driven suspense novel layered with thematic, even philosophical, meditations on life’s meaning.
Berry, by contrast, is at his consummate best in The Unsettling of America, distilling a passionate defense of the rural, the sanctity of non-industrial agriculture free of chemicals and heavy machinery. It is, finally, a lament for the erosion of community in our contemporary drift toward urbanization and accumulation. Berry is Thoreau à la mode. Simplicity, he reminds us, yields contentment.
I’m now reading Berry’s Jayber Crow, perhaps the finest introduction to his Port William novels, sixteen in number.
Since my experiment of reading two books at once has proven fruitful, I’m also reading A Beginner’s Guide to Japan by renowned travel writer Pico Iyer.
Iyer never disappoints in his genius for illuminating the subtle ambiences of disparate cultures. I confess I’m easy prey for this particular read as a longtime devotee of Japanese culture, now under threat. May ikigai, the art of pursuing one’s bliss, never meet its end.
My decision to weave a topical thread through my otherwise eclectic reading marks a meaningful turning in my reading approach. Last year I read twenty books. With ten already read this year, I anticipate—barring life’s interruptions—fifty or even sixty by year’s end.
But numbers surely are incidental. To read this way is to live more than one life, testing long held convictions, enlarging sympathies, and keeping my mind unsettled in the best sense of the word.
On winter mornings, before the day has decided what it will become, the fields hold a stillness that feels provisional—frost clinging to the grass, fence lines darkened with damp, the land waiting without impatience. It is a good hour for reading slowly, for choosing words that do not hurry ahead of their meanings.
I have begun the year reading Wendell Berry. Now in his ninety-second year, he continues—more slowly, more deliberately—to farm and to write, unchanged in his fidelity to limits: the authority of place over abstraction, the moral claims of the local over the corporate, tradition understood not as nostalgia but as knowledge earned through use and endurance.
I read him most mornings. His work steadies the day. It does not offer solutions so much as orientation—toward what is given, what is sufficient, and what must be borne. Berry has always made room for joy, but never without sorrow, nor for hope without the acknowledgment of failure, including one’s own.
Some of his most influential prose appeared early, when his voice was still finding its public footing. The Long-Legged House and The Unsettling of America argued, quietly and insistently, that culture and agriculture are inseparable, and that when land is treated as commodity rather than community, both soil and people are diminished.
I return often to his poetry, especially A Timbered Choir: The Sabbath Poems. Written on Sundays and largely free of polemic, these poems are acts of attention. They move patiently through the stages of a human life—birth, labor, love, diminishment—offering a sacramental vision of ordinary days lived close to the ground. Among them is Berry’s most widely known poem, “The Peace of Wild Things,” whose calm acceptance of life’s ephemerality offers not escape from anxiety, but release from the burden of false mastery:
“I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief.”
The peace the poem offers is not consolation so much as proportion. Its discipline lies in relinquishing the anxious reach into the future and reentering creaturely time—where life is finite, local, and sufficient.
That same discipline governs Berry’s essay “Why I Am Not Going to Buy a Computer,” first published in 1987 and often misread as a rejection of technology itself. It is instead a meditation on the moral weight of tools. Berry does not deny their usefulness; he questions their claims. Certain technologies, he suggests, quietly privilege speed over deliberation and convenience over care, reshaping habits of attention until efficiency becomes an unquestioned good.
The good life, in Berry’s accounting, is not optimized. It is inhabited. To live well requires learning the difference between what is necessary and what merely promises ease.
Barbara Kingsolver, another Kentuckian, names this work plainly when she writes:
“I consider it no small part of my daily work to sort out the differences between want and need. I’m helped along the way by my friend Wendell, without his ever knowing it. He advises me to ask, in the first place, whether I wish to purchase a solution to a problem I don’t have.”
Berry’s essay is not finally about computers at all. It is about scale and consequence. It asks not simply what a tool can do, but what it may undo—what forms of patience, responsibility, and mutual care it quietly displaces. It asks how our choices shape our relationships to family, to community, and to the land that sustains both.
Berry still writes with pencil on a yellow legal pad. He still farms, though within the limits age imposes. He still publishes—new poems, even a recent novel. The persistence itself feels instructive.
In a culture bent on expansion and acceleration, Berry’s life suggests another measure of success: fidelity to place, restraint in use, and the long patience required to learn what is enough.
I’ve been absent from Brimmings for nearly a week, recovering from a serious bout with the flu—the fever lingering for ten days. A chronic cough remains my daily companion.
That hasn’t stopped me from reading—slowly, attentively—six books already this year.
As I’ve previously shared, alongside my annual eclectic reading list, I’ve committed to a topical approach to reading as a way of resisting intellectual grazing and cultivating sustained attention (Topical Reading). I’ve begun with Kentucky sage Wendell Berry, now in his ninety-second year.
I didn’t want to one day come upon his obituary and feel the guilt pangs of having neglected an agrarian pacifist, a champion of the local, often described, without much exaggeration, as America’s “moral conscience.”
Berry has farmed a 125-acre hilly tract adjacent to the Ohio River at Port Royal in Henry County, Kentucky, for more than forty years. Farming, for him, is not metaphor but moral practice. As he writes, “The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all our most pleasing responsibility.”
Academically, Berry is no lightweight: a BA and MA in English from the University of Kentucky, a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford, and a Guggenheim that took him to Italy, he taught briefly at New York University before returning—against the counsel of colleagues who believed he was jettisoning a promising academic career—to rural Kentucky and the family farm.
They were wrong.
Berry has since written more than fifty books spanning essays, novels, and poetry. His great theme is stewardship—not management or control, but reverent care. “The idea that people have a right to an economy that destroys nature is a contradiction,” he writes, insisting that economic life must answer to ecological reality.
For the farmer Berry, stewardship begins with the soil: an antipathy to chemicals, a reverencing of the biosphere, and a life lived according to natural rhythms. He is deeply opposed to industrial agriculture, which he regards as a cultural as well as ecological calamity: “Industrial agriculture is not just bad for farmers; it is bad for land, for rural communities, and ultimately for culture.”
Among American environmental writings, the two most salient works I’ve encountered are Thoreau’s Walden (1854) and Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962). Thoreau’s aphoristic brilliance lends itself to endless quotation: “Our life is frittered away by detail… Simplify, simplify,” while Carson’s prose approaches poetry. Her opening paragraphs of SilentSpring remain, to my mind, the finest in environmental literature, exposing the arrogance behind what she called “the control of nature, a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy.”
I’m only in the early stages of getting acquainted with Berry, but he keeps distinguished company with Thoreau and Carson in his passion for preserving nature’s bounty and the pulchritude of a simplified life lived in fidelity to place and community.
In this sense, Berry reaches back to Thomas Jefferson, whom he quotes more than any other figure: “In my own politics and economics I am Jeffersonian.” Jefferson believed liberty was best secured in small, decentralized communities of independent producers, warning that distant power—whether governmental or economic—inevitably corrodes responsibility and freedom.
Though Berry was an activist who vehemently opposed the Vietnam War and has voted Democratic, his politics resist easy classification. He has lamented that America’s two major parties have grown increasingly to resemble one another.
There may appear, at first glance, to be overlap with libertarianism—his opposition to big government, military expansion, and imperial intervention—but the resemblance is superficial. Libertarianism exalts the autonomous individual; Berry emphasizes communal obligation. “We do not have to sacrifice our economic well-being in order to act responsibly toward our land and our neighbors,” he writes. “Rather, we must do so in order to preserve our economic well-being.”
Berry has his critics. His suspicion of technology strikes some as untenable in a hungry, overpopulated world. Can an aggregate of small family farms feed a wired and burgeoning global population, particularly in parts of Africa?
I find myself grappling with his apparent parochialism. Only a tiny fraction of Americans now farm. What of the rest of us who earn our livelihoods elsewhere? And in an interconnected age, can the local truly stand apart from the global?
Berry would respond that the issue is not technology itself, but dependence. “There is a difference between being technologically advanced and being technologically dependent,” he reminds us—a distinction too often elided in contemporary debates.
Ironically, Berry would fit comfortably in an Amish community. He still plows with horses. He owns no computer, television, or mobile phone, and has no internet access. He writes first in pencil, then types. He uses electricity sparingly, supplemented by solar panels, and his writing studio is without electricity. He walks the talk, living a life rooted—quite literally—in the land. Thoreau would have approved.
An iconoclast, Berry remains well worth reading. Growth, he reminds us, is not synonymous with the earth’s welfare. Economies, like soils, can be exhausted. Big government and industrial systems, he argues, erode local responsibility, foster dependency, and inflame military and international tensions. Rural poverty in places like Appalachia persists, in his view, because urban prosperity has been purchased by the plundering of these regions.
In 2013, President Barack Obama awarded Berry the National Humanities Medal.
In 2015, he became the first living writer inducted into the Kentucky Writers Hall of Fame.
That same year, the Library of America published a boxed set of his work—an honor accorded to only two living American writers at the time.
Berry may be impractical. He may be impossible to scale. But he leaves us with an uncomfortable and necessary reminder: care, once abandoned, is not easily restored—and neither are the land, the culture, nor the communities that depend upon it.
The other day I posted on my Brimmings blog a new method I’ve devised to inspire myself to read more—specifically, to aim for 80 books a year, assuming an average length of 300 pages. That works out to 24,000 pages annually, divided by 365 days.
I didn’t linger long over the arithmetic. What mattered was putting the idea immediately into practice. I set a daily goal of 50 pages, read first thing in the morning. For me, any attempt at habit formation has to be anchored in time. Once the day’s interruptions begin, resolve alone is no match for contingency.
Experience has taught me that it takes roughly four to six weeks of daily repetition for a habit to take hold. Once anchored, the reluctance to break a streak becomes a force in its own right. Acquiring a new habit, I’ve found, is less about willpower than about showing up.
The results have been gratifying. In the past two weeks I’ve finished two books, one of them nearly 600 pages. Fifty pages a day takes me about an hour. I could read faster, but speed isn’t my aim. I underline, annotate, argue with the text. I’m not a passive reader; I want to engage—agree, disagree, extend.
At this pace, I’ll read roughly 18,250 pages a year. Divided by 300 pages per book, that comes to just under 62 books annually. Not 80—but what a start. If I can raise my yearly total from my long-standing average of 20–25 books, I’ll consider the experiment a success.
Quantity, of course, is not an end in itself. The real aim is access to the best fiction and nonfiction available, the works that challenge and enlarge the mind. Increasingly, I’ve been drawn to cluster reading, concentrating on subjects where I feel thin or want deeper understanding.
What excites me most is the daily result: fifty pages read before the day properly begins. The reward is immediate, and reward, as we know, is integral to habit formation. Each book brings with it a flood of ideas—fuel for writing, and an invitation into community with others who share similar intellectual and aesthetic appetites.
Stephen King reads sixty or more books a year. I’m lucky if I reach twenty—and the disparity bothers me more than I care to admit. Not because I value quantity over quality, but because there are simply too many books I want to live with, too many voices I want time to answer back to.
Time flows from us like a running faucet. Time is our common currency granted daily. How do we spend it? It comes down to our priorities.
King has been candid about how he does it. He treats reading as a necessity, not a luxury, reading every day for two or three hours, sometimes more. As he puts it in OnWriting: “If you don’t have time to read, you don’t have the time (or the tools) to write.”
That rings true for me. When I write, it’s almost always in response to what I’ve read—to extend an argument, disagree with it, enthuse about it, or share it with others.
King refuses to slog through books that fail to engage him. He abandons them without guilt. Interest propels reading; boredom kills it. And he always has a book with him—reading while waiting, traveling, between tasks, or before bed. Those fragments accumulate.
The numbers themselves are demystifying. Suppose your goal is eighty books a year with an average length of 300 pages. That’s 24,000 pages annually. Divide by 365, and you arrive at roughly 66 pages a day. At a moderate pace of about 40 pages per hour, that comes to around an hour and forty minutes of daily reading.
That’s doable.
My final tip is one that has helped me most: read in clusters. Choose a topic that genuinely interests you and commit to five or six books in that area.
Reading a single book from a wildly eclectic list can feel shallow; focused reading builds momentum, deepens understanding, and increases motivation.
This year, for example, I’ve chosen to immerse myself in Kentucky sage Wendell Berry—two biographies and three of Berry’s own books. Depth, it turns out, can be the best catalyst for volume.
Brimmings: up from the well 