My Journey Through Books: From Childhood to Lifelong Learning

I’ve been a reading addict since childhood, when as a young boy I’d walk a mile—sometimes more—just to lose myself in a library’s cool hush, seated at a table, surrounded by shelf-lined books inviting adventure.

My love for animals found early confirmation in the Dr. Doolittle books I devoured. I read every one. Years later, that same fascination with the speech of creatures led me to Jane Goodall’s revelatory studies of chimpanzees—proof that empathy can grow into insight.

Another passion took root in the dusty bleachers of Shibe Park—later Connie Mack Stadium—in Philadelphia. I loved baseball with an intensity only children know, lingering outside the gates, hungry for autographs as players boarded their buses. I read passionately about my idols—Ruth, Gehrig, immortals who remain with me.

Travel books, too, called out to me. Mutiny on the Bounty and its aftermath on Pitcairn’s Island transported me to the South Seas, where I imaginatively romped through Tahiti, New Zealand, and Australia. In later years, that early enchantment led me to consider emigrating to New Zealand. I was, in fact, approved.

Languages fascinated me. One day, at ten, I brought home books in Russian from Philadelphia’s Free Library, expecting the Cyrillic script to magically transform itself into English. That early infatuation would one day carry me across the world to Russia and the homesteads of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Chekhov.

I call myself an autodidact, though I’ve graduated from several reputable universities. I started behind most students, having fled a troubled home at seventeen, enlisting in the Air Force, which sent me to Korea. Our base library was a single room, yet its shelves were somehow populated with a few classics. One off-duty evening, I pulled down a book called Look Homeward, Angel. It changed my life.

After Korea, I read everything Thomas Wolfe wrote, visited his home in Asheville, eventually enrolling as a Ph.D. student at his alma mater—the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Pulpit Hill” in Wolfe’s novel. On my first campus day, waiting to register for classes, I bumped into a retired professor, who asked what brought me to Chapel Hill. “Thomas Wolfe,” I said without hesitation.

A serendipity moment, that professor had known Wolfe. Becoming lifelong friends, they traveled together to prewar Germany, where Wolfe witnessed the Nazi persecution of Jews, which he would later feature in You Can’t Go Home Again. He shared anecdotes about Wolfe, who stood six feet, six inches. His hands too wide to use a typewriter, Wolfe wrote standing up, a refrigerator top serving for a desk.

Despite the scores of books I’ve read, there remain gaps I want to fill. The books I’ve read have been my faithful companions along life’s road, shaping who I am.

Were I granted another life, I think I’d come back as a librarian. No other choice comes close.

The Thinking Machine That Makes Us Stop Thinking

AI excels at counterfeiting the human mind. If we’re not vigilant, it will think for us—leaving our own intelligence dormant, our creative impulse atrophied.

Already, much of our news is machine produced at news outlets like AP, Reuters, and Bloomberg, recapping the latest happenings in news, sports, and entertainment.

It can project us into videos, put words in our mouths, falsify who we are.

Writing in the Free Press, Tylan Cowen warns that within the next few years, AI will author most “of the words written in the United States.” He contends AI is much smarter than us, encyclopedic in scope, capable of writing our books and news for us.

New advances in technology assure its omnivorous takeover of much of everyday life. Indeed, we’re on the threshold of Ray Bradbury’s apocalyptic new world.

Bradbury foresaw a future of stupefying distraction—a civilization that traded reflection for amusement. With AI, his warning no longer reads as metaphor but as prophecy.

AI’s intelligence is borrowed; it knows only what its creators feed it. In the wrong hands, it becomes a megaphone for manipulation—its outputs polished, persuasive, and perilously biased.

AI cannot think for itself. What it spews out can prove toxic, prodigious in conspiracy, disseminating division that may spill into violence.

Algorithms are predictive. They know our wants and pile-on their overtures. Increasingly, they orchestrate our choices. Corporate driven, they offer a pecuniary bonanza servicing their interests.

AI outsources cognition. Invading scholarship, it’s become the campus Cliff Notes, shortcutting inquiry, analysis, and reasoning. It can summarize a complex Faulkner novel in milliseconds, replete with analysis. Why read at all? Why bother with the professor?

AI’s convenience comes at the price of serendipity: the unplanned discovery that alters our thinking, robbing us of the slow astonishment that once expanded the boundaries of our knowing.

AI proliferates plagiarism, the theft of another’s thought, masquerading as one’s own. It’s become the teacher’s nemesis: how do I know the student’s writing is their own?

AI homogenizes the writing act, making us all sound alike—the short, staccato sentences; simplified vocabulary; the annulling of the cumulative, crafted sentence, subtle in its syntactical variation, rhythms, and nuance. It’s the ultimate in dumbing down.

The heart of the matter, however, is AI’s largesse as a substitute for thought, straying into amnesia—a prosthetic for our inner murmurings.

—RJ

Solitude’s Recompense

More than eight billion souls rise each morning to breathe another day—many of them lonely. While others seem to rollick in life’s plentitude, they feel left out.

Loneliness has many strands. Ultimately, it’s feeling you’re disconnected. Or like the world’s hung up on you.

Loss is loneliness’ common denominator. It comes in many currencies: loved ones who’ve died or drifted away, a romance gone sour, schoolmates reduced to memory, a job that vanished overnight, aging, the slow erosion of health

According to a Gallup/Meta survey, 25% of people in 140 countries experience loneliness “very or fairly often.” In the USA, 1 in 3.

Loneliness can be grievous. Even fatal. There seems to be a herd instinct governing human behavior. We like togetherness. Like cows in a pasture, we like facing in the same direction.

And yet the paradox: you can feel most alone in a crowd, the noise of others drowning out your pulse. For introverts like me, solitude grants restoration, not exile. My happiest moments have often come in silence: in a garden, along a woodland path, or beside a pounding shore.

A few days ago, I wrote of three places I’ve been that have sustained me, each of them granting solitude—a chance to reflect, to locate myself, to fish in life’s stream, that rare chance to glimpse Eternity.

Recently, I’ve found someone, Scott Stillman, who shares my love for solitude, writing eight splendid books on this theme. He has a way of putting things:

you are not broken for needing stillness

you are not flawed for shrinking from noise

your mind is simply attuned to something different

something more aligned with the quiet current

that flows beneath all of existence

Diane Keaton: Rare and Superb

We’ve just added “Something’s Gotta Give” to our streaming collection—Diane Keaton’s own favorite among the seventy films in which she starred.

I’ve never been much drawn to romantic comedies, but this one—also featuring Jack Nicholson and Keanu Reeves—has held a special place for me.

A compassionate woman, Keaton was more than a Hollywood icon. She gave freely of her time and means to causes close to her heart, including animal welfare. I hadn’t known she refused to eat meat: “I don’t eat meat. I’m a vegetarian, and I’ve been a vegetarian for twenty-five years—and I’ve stopped even eating fish.” Learning this, I admire her all the more.

Art, as Keats reminded us, transcends mortality. We’ve lost you, Diane, but through your movies—and the goodness that shaped you—your legacy endures.
RIP.

Finding New Ways to Choose Books I Want to Read

Every New Year’s Day for the past six years I’ve posted on Brimmings my annotated recommendations for the finest fiction and nonfiction reads. I spend hours culling my lists from authoritative sources. I give emphasis to canonical works, both domestic and international—books intellectually stimulating, challenging, and broadening, the kind that will still be read generations hence. Often one of my criteria has been to fill gaps in my own reading, those books I should have read long ago, but somehow missed.

But lately I’ve been musing on a new way of choosing books—more personal than public, more in keeping with my desire to read systematically, to fill in the areas I don’t know well but should.

While my published lists have value, they fall short of providing full acquaintance with an author through a single recommendation. A fragmented forest, bisected by a highway or development, comes to mind—isolated stands of trees cut off from the territorial expanse essential for their flourishing.

It used to be that when I encountered a great writer for the first time, I would read five books: two about the author (often biographies), and three by the author. It worked well—Tolstoy, for example.

But now I want to do better still.

Perhaps I could read not only by author but by theme—a focus on, say, the environment, doing a minimal five books, maybe beginning with the late E. O. Wilson, who never disappoints, or the sagacious Carl Sagan. Reading only The Great Gatsby hardly gives one the fullest sweep of Fitzgerald’s range and mastery. It’s like movie buffs: if you admire Tom Hanks, you don’t stop at one film.

To really round out my education, I should read chronologically, starting with the classics. I’ve read and taught Euripides’ Medea, but it’s only one play—nineteen of his tragedies survive.

So yes, I can focus on an author or a theme—or read chronologically across disciplines.

Here’s another approach: why not read geographically, and I mean largely internationally? I know so little of Chinese literature, philosophy, and culture—the same for India and Japan.

Or I could venture a European country that most readers overlook—Finland, for example, a nation whose people are addicted to both writing and reading, dark interminable Arctic nights surely contributing. I already have Finland on my list.

I’ll still publish my annual New Year’s list, but when push comes to shove, know that privately I’ll be trekking the road not taken.

–rj

Out of Nowhere: Gaza in Poetry

I’m about to eat breakfast, but I feel guilty for the good life I wake to daily when so much of the world, removed from our shores, knows only war, destruction, death, and incalculable grief: Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ukraine and Gaza. Still others.

I am moved by Palestinian-American poet and physician Fady Joudah’s recent poem about Gaza. The death toll, vastly civilian, now approaches 70,000.

Joudah has lost 100 members of his Gaza family. He has served as a volunteer with Doctors Without Borders.

Since his poem is under copyright, I can only share an excerpt:

“And out of nowhere…”

And out of nowhere a girl receives an ovation
from her rescuers, all men on their knees and bellies
clearing the man-made rubble with their bare hands, disfigured by dust into ghosts.
All disasters are natural including this one, because humans are natural.
The rescuers tell her she’s incredible, powerful,
and for a split second, before the weight of her family’s disappearance sinks her, she smiles,
like a child who lived for seven years above ground receiving praise.

PostScript:
Joudah is a winner of The Yale Series of Younger Poets Competition and long listed for the National Book Award for Poetry (2024).

—rj

What I Read and How I Choose

I am committed to reading the best that has been thought and said. Escapism and the utilitarian have never been my guides to what I read. In our age of competing stimuli, we’ve imperiled our ability to reflect, to think hard about life’s meaning and live it well.

Stillness is prerequisite for reflection that enlargens our thinking, renders us more humane, the finding time for the right read that nurtures the goodness that lies within us.

I am dismayed about contemporary classrooms, vastly different from those of my New England childhood that lent emphasis to the reads that expand awareness and humane endeavor.

Classicist Michael S. Rose sums up for me what today’s classrooms have lost with their inability to distinguish the wheat from the tares:

“The great catastrophe of our time is not that children fail to learn, but that they have never been taught what is worth knowing. The tragedy that unfolds daily in classrooms across the land is the presence of amnesia, a colossal forgetting of our inheritance. The inheritance of human genius and beauty—from Athens and Jerusalem, through Rome and the Renaissance, to Shakespeare’s London and Lincoln’s prairie—is what now stands in peril. It has not been violently seized; that would require too much effort and too much awareness of what was being lost. Rather, it has been carelessly misplaced, forgotten among the dazzling distractions of modernity” (Substack, Oct. 9, 2025).

—rj

A Book’s Greatest Compliment

I think the greatest compliment one can pay a book is to want to read it again. I doubt I can ever shed Eliot’s Middlemarch or Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina—or, more contemporary, Pullman’s The Dark Materials.

You know me as loving anything by Virginia Woolf: a summer day of floating clouds in sea of blue, daisies blooming at my feet; a tranquil sojourn in the shade of a leafy maple, my back propped against its furrowed bark, To the Lighthouse in my hands.

A momentary escape from a troubled world of tribal factions…

How can I not enter into character Lily Briscoe’s insightful awareness of art’s ability to unify experience and grant it meaning?

“She could see it so clearly, so commandingly, when she looked: it was when she took her brush in hand that the whole thing changed.”

And then the question that hovers over all our lives:

“What is the meaning of life? That was all—a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark.”

The artist’s struggle to render visible her inner contemplations—it’s all there. Those rare moments when the gates of mystery yield, and we glimpse the whole.

As Lily exclaims in triumph and exhaustion:

“Yes, she thought, laying down her brush in extreme fatigue, I have had my vision.”

Great artistry helps us find our own vision, makes us more aware, and doing so, lends nurturance for living our lives better.

And so it is for me with To the Lighthouse: like a well-brewed tea, to be sipped slowly, savored, drunk down to the very lees.

—rj

Three Places I Remember Most: Reveries in Stillness


There are three places I’ve been that I’ve loved the most, but not in the way most travelers recount their memories.

Each remains a palpable memory, not because they yielded an Eiffel Tower, Cancun beach, or haute cuisine New York restaurant; but on the contrary, a stunning silence, sweeping me out of myself and a landscape weighted with human duplicity.

In those moments I floated, unmoored from gravity, a wanderer among the stars —part of everything that has been or ever will be, glimpsing eternity beneath all mortal breath, my entrance into epiphany.

It happened first for me years ago at Arlington National Cemetery, the white rows glimmering in the rays of early morning sun.

The second at Kitty Hawk, where the Wright brothers’ fragile dream first lifted from the earth. I stood alone, wombed in stillness, as if the air itself remembered that first exultant rise.

Most memorable of all, traveling eastward from Edinburgh, and suddenly they unfurled, the Highlands, spectacular in their rolling verdure. I stepped from the car into a silence so immense it seemed alive.

In its haunting stillness, I understood Emily Brontë’s fierce passion for the Yorkshire moors, resounding in her poetry and prose:

“you are not broken for needing stillness
you are not flawed for shrinking from noise
your mind is simply attuned to something different
something more aligned with the quiet current
that flows beneath all of existence.”

Like Emily, I exalt in that stillness, shaking hands with Eternity.

A Polarizing Artist: Rudyard Kipling’s Legacy

I remember it well. I was a young graduate student, privileged to study under one of the world’s foremost professors of Victorian literature, a renowned authority on Thomas Hardy.

The course was rigorous. We read the greats of the age—Macaulay, Tennyson, Browning, Dickens, Mill, Newman, Arnold, Morris, Ruskin, the Rossettis, Swinburne, Hopkins, Pater, and of course Hardy. Yet strikingly absent was Rudyard Kipling. Our professor dismissed him as the mere voice of imperialist Britain—an attitude then dominant in the Academy, and one I suspect still lingers on American university campuses.

I had never read Kipling. I had not yet learned to question. I accepted what I was told.

It was only later, during a summer course at Exeter College, Oxford, that I encountered another view: one that esteemed Kipling’s literary brilliance without committing the American folly of conflating his politics with the merits of his artistry.

Kipling’s literary range was astonishing. His verse, endowed with rhythmic command, borders on the hypnotic. He opened poetry to colloquial speech and became a supreme craftsman of the ballad form.

Yes, he gave voice to Empire in works like The White Man’s Burden, Kim, and The Jungle Books. But he also revered Indian culture—its spirituality, wisdom, and sensory richness. Often, with subtle irony, he questioned the very order he seemed to affirm.

Perhaps his greatest achievement lies in the short story. With precision and nuance, he crafted narratives of extraordinary compression, modern in their suggestiveness, wide-ranging in their scope. The Man Who Would Be King remains a masterpiece—its sweep and power undiminished. Kipling’s influence on Conrad, Maugham, Hemingway, Borges, and others is beyond doubt.

He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1907—the first English-language writer to receive it—honored for his “power of observation, originality of imagination, virility of ideas, and remarkable talent for narration.”

Kipling’s stories, like all enduring art, probe psychological depths. They are complex, skeptical of conventional wisdom, and riveting in their precision.

In today’s multicultural Britain, he is taught in context: his genius as a storyteller acknowledged, his colonial perspective rejected. Lewis, Tolkien, and Pullman have recognized him as a precursor to modern fantasy.

In India, where he was born and spent his early years, his reception is understandably ambivalent: many readers disdaining his imperial condescension, yet acknowledging his literary craftsmanship. Salman Rushdie has called Kim “one of the greatest novels written about India,.” Other Indian writers continue where Kipling left off, offering vivid vignettes of India, but through an Indian prism.

Controversy about his place in the Western literary canon remains. Vladimir Nabokov, in his Cornell lectures, dismissed Kipling for his moralizing, He deemed his indulgence in exotic adventure stories as juvenile. Great literature, he argued, obeys the aesthetic imperative of narrative neutrality, or distance, as in Flaubert and Joyce.

On the other hand, the late eminent Yale critic Harold Bloom came to Kipling’s defense. In his The Western Canon. Bloom lists Kipling among hundreds of writers deserving inclusion in the canon. Bloom saw Kipling as a myth maker and gifted story teller, especially in his short stories. On the other hand, he found his poetry “scarcely bear reading.”

While I find merit in both Nabokov’s and Bloom’s arguments, I lean towards Bloom’s appraisal as more balanced. I have long resisted either/or equations, particularly as to the political or aesthetic. Over a lifetime, I have frequently found reasoned judgment occupies a middle place. I have given my own arguments earlier in this essay for his belonging in the canon.

Whatever a reader’s verdict, Kipling was a singular voice, very much his own man. In short, authentic. As he said in an interview shortly before his death,

“The individual has always had to struggle to keep from being overwhelmed by the tribe. To be your own man is a hard business. If you try it, you’ll be lonely often, and sometimes frightened. But no price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself” (Qtd. in the Kipling Journal, June 1967).

rj