Top Ten Quotes about Books

Posted on February 24, 2026 by smellincoffee

Today’s TTT is quotations about…books. But first, a tease!

Back in Washington, Lincoln came down with what doctors diagnosed as “varioloid,” a mild form of smallpox. So now he and Tad both were sick—though Tad at least was improving. Where were the office seekers? Lincoln quipped. Now he had something he could give everybody. – WITH MALICE TOWARD NONE

1. “A house without books is a house without windows. A man that has a few books, the best works of the great and the good, is in the best of company. He can sit in his chair and call before him the great spirits of the past. He can talk with Shakespeare; he can listen to the music of Milton; he can see the philosophy of Bacon; he can hear the wit of Sheridan.” — Robert G. Ingersoll, attributed

2. “What an astonishing thing a book is. It’s a flat object made from a tree with flexible parts on which are imprinted lots of funny dark squiggles. But one glance at it and you’re inside the mind of another person, maybe somebody dead for thousands of years. Across the millennia, an author is speaking clearly and silently inside your head, directly to you. Writing is perhaps the greatest of human inventions, binding together people who never knew each other, citizens of distant epochs. Books break the shackles of time. A book is proof that humans are capable of working magic.” — Carl Sagan, Cosmos

3. “Literary experience heals the wound, without undermining the privilege, of individuality. There are mass emotions which heal the wound; but they destroy the privilege. In them our separate selves are pooled and we sink back into sub-individuality. But in reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with a myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action, and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.” — C.S. Lewis

4. “What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism. Orwell feared that the truth would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture, preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble puppy. As Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the civil libertarians and rationalists, who are ever on the alert to oppose tyranny, “failed to take into account man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In 1984, people are controlled by inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell feared that what we fear will ruin us. Huxley feared that our desire will ruin us.” — Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death

5. “If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.” — Marcus Tullius Cicero, attributed

6. “I explained — with the excessive exposition of a man spending a lonely week at the airport — that I was looking for the sort of books in which a genial voice expresses emotions that the reader has long felt but never before really understood; those that convey the secret, everyday things that society at large prefers to leave unsaid; those that make one feel somehow less alone and strange. Manishankar wondered if I might like a magazine instead.” — Alain de Botton, A Week at the Airport

7. “Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realise the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realise it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated. The man who is contented to be only himself, and therefore less a self, is in prison. My own eyes are not enough for me, I will see through those of others. Reality, even seen through the eyes of many, is not enough. I will see what others have invented.” — C.S. Lewis

8. “The books are to remind us what asses and fools we are. They’re Caesar’s praetorian guard, whispering as the parade roars down the avenue, ‘Remember, Caesar, thou art mortal.’ Most of us can’t rush around, talk to everyone, know all the cities of the world, we haven’t time, money or that many friends. The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine per cent of them is in a book. Don’t ask for guarantees. And don’t look to be saved in any one thing, person, machine, or library. Do your own bit of saving, and if you drown, at least die knowing you were headed for shore.” — Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

9. “Naturally, since I myself am a writer, I do not wish the ordinary reader to read no modern books. But if he must read only the new or only the old, I would advise him to read the old. And I would give him this advice precisely because he is an amateur and therefore much less protected than the expert against the dangers of an exclusive contemporary diet. [….] A new [theology] book is still on its trial and the amateur is not in a position to judge it. It has to be tested against the great body of Christian thought down the ages, and all its hidden implications (often unsuspected by the author himself) have to be brought to light.” — C.S. Lewis

10. “We may be sure that the characteristic blindness of the twentieth century—the blindness about which posterity will ask, ‘But how could they have thought that?’—lies where we have never suspected it, and concerns something about which there is untroubled agreement between Hitler and President Roosevelt or between Mr. H. G. Wells and Karl Barth. None of us can fully escape this blindness, but we shall certainly increase it, and weaken our guard against it, if we read only modern books. Where they are true they will give us truths which we half knew already. Where they are false they will aggravate the error with which we are already dangerously ill. The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books. Not, of course, that there is any magic about the past. People were no cleverer then than they are now; they made as many mistakes as we. But not the same mistakes. They will not flatter us in the errors we are already committing; and their own errors, being now open and palpable, will not endanger us. Two heads are better than one, not because either is infallible, but because they are unlikely to go wrong in the same direction.” — C.S. Lewis

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Andrew Johnson

Posted on February 23, 2026 by smellincoffee

Andrew Johnson is one of those presidents who can’t get away with merely being forgotten; he is no Pierce or Fillmore, whom the general public knows nothing about. If Johnson is mentioned, his reputation is closer to that of his adversary Buchanan — a man who history has judged as having been found wanting. This owes entirely to his attitude in Reconstruction, which was contra to the ‘radical Republicans’ who dominated Congress following the War of the Rebellion: so different were Johnson and the Republican Congress’s views that they attempted to impeach him simply to get him out of the way. No executive had been impeached since the creation of the Union, and none would again until Bill Clinton lied to Congress and got caught in the 1990s. Johnson has since become a whipping boy of history, the man to assign blame because Reconstruction did not work exactly the way Congress intended. Johnson has been labeled a vile racist as though he were different from most people in the Union, including the Republicans — many of whom did not want slavery in the Territories because they did not want blacks in the territories, and who insisted that freemen or ‘contraband’ remain in the South rather than migrating en masse into lily-white Puritania. Annette Gordon-Reed delivers a surprisingly fair appraisal of a man who is now largely condemned despite having real reasons to dislike him.

After reading this, the most startling fact about Johnson is how unprepared he was to be president. Johnson grew up in near poverty, and began life as a tailor. Like Benjamin Franklin, he ran away from the de facto indentured servitude of apprenticeship and put out his own shingle. He realized a talent and love for debating while hanging around a bar, and from there established a debate club and then a career in politics, serving as first a legislator and then later a mayor and governor. (Tennessee’s constitution at the time made the office of governor nearly impotent, however: he was effectively the manager of prisons and the post office!) He came of age at the right time — the Age of Jackson was nigh, and advocates for the poor working man found plenty of wind to fill their sails. Johnson’s priority was the white working class, and he viewed the plantation elite as their enemy and slaves as the enemy’s device — and that, along with the racial views that were normal in the 19th century, gave him an especially salient animosity toward blacks. Gordon-Reed comments that this is the tragedy of Johnson’s life, because he could have pre-empted the Wobblies and fought for solidarity between the white working class and black slaves, both of whom were dominated by the plantation gentry.

Perversely, Johnson would end up defending and re-empowering the plantation gentry when the Congress made it clear they wanted to completely dismantle the old South and give the vote to field hands, and possibly divide up the old plantations as well. Johnson may not have liked the plantation gentry, but the idea of the federal government trying to shape the South like clay was evidently enough to activate some sense of Southern partisanship. There was also, too, the question of authority: just as Buchanan and Lincoln had to work out their own approach to what the Constitution permitted in terms of responding to secession, Johnson and Congress had to figure out how Reconstruction might proceed, and under whose direction it should proceed. Johnson, following Lincoln’s lead, thought it belong solely to the executive office’s purview — but Congress had their own ideas, especially given that Johnson’s approach to Reconstruction was a ‘let’s pretend the last four years didn’t happen’ one. Johnson may have been good at rousing voters and getting elected, but he was not an able politician: not only did he increase his enemies while in office, but he didn’t bother cultivating alliances with moderates, preferring instead a bullheaded approach that led him headlong into historical infamy.

I was very much surprised by this: given the author’s previous work on antebellum slavery, I assumed it would be something of a hit piece like Finkelman’s unprofessional treatment of Filmore in this same series. While Gordon-Reed is definitely not a fan of Johnson, her treatment is far more fair-minded than expected, save for the use of ‘neo-Confederate’ to describe his attempt to coddle the plantation elite after the war in hopes of adding them to his electoral base: not only is that polemical slop, but it’s absurdly disingenuous given that he was a staunch Unionist who rebuked secession, refused to give up his seat after Tennessee seceded, and answered Lincoln’s call to serve. That said,. Gordon-Reed is generally quite kind to Johnson, and I learned quite a bit about the man. I don’t know that I’d want to read a large biography of him, but this was a slim little volume of surprises that remedied gaps in my knowledge.

Next up, the butcher of Cold Harbor!

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Harry Potter and the Strangely Tortured McGuffin Quest

Posted on February 22, 2026 by smellincoffee

I’ve been looking forward to the full-cast audio edition of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire for a while now, because (1) the full cast audio books are BRILLIANT (2) I’m addicted to them and have accepted that all my audible credits belong to the series, (3) this is a hinge book in that it replaces the younger voice actors with older voice actors (4) it’s a hinge book in that it guides us into the far more serious and morally interesting back half of the Harry Potter series. The first three books, despite having a nice spread of death and danger, are mild adventures compared to the outright murder that closes Goblet of Fire, and the dark turn the books take after this. Goblet of Fire, in the parlance of the O.W.L’s, largely gains Outstandings with a few Exceeds Expectations. The only squib is the fact that Harry and Ron’s new voice actors sound a bit alike sometimes, but I imagine more exposure will tune my ear to tell them apart more readily.

Revisiting Goblet of Fire this time was especially enjoyable because it’s been ages since I enjoyed this particular story: I cannot count how many times I’ve read the first three books, which I know back to front. While I’ve read every book in the back half at least twice (more for Half-Blood Prince), it’s been ages (like a decade) since I did a proper re-read. Given how much the movies cut out, there was a lot in this I’d simply forgotten, so unlike the first three books I was listening with honest “Golly, what will happen next?” expectations. Yes, I know what happens with the Tri-Wizard Tournament, but I’d forgotten all about Ludo Bagman: his entire story is absent from the movies, from his trial before the Wizengamot to his shady treatment of the Brothers Weaseley. One standout scene that I don’t remember is the one where Invisibility-Cloak’d Harry gets stuck in a staircase’s trick stair and drops not only his incredibly loud and awful clue-egg (which screeches), but the Marauder’s Map. Filch, Snape, and Moody all convene (in their night clothes) to argue with one another while Harry’s trapped and thinking every time I think this can’t get worse, it SOMEHOW GETS WORSE: the tension is awful even though it’s a bit hilarious if you’re not involved in it. “A pajama party, eh?” growls Moody.

Even if I had an encyclopedic familarity with Goblet of Fire, I still think I would have loved this book. While it took some time to get used to the new voice actors — especially Harry, who jumped from a thirteen year old to someone who sounds like he could apply for car insurance — I generally enjoyed them. As mentioned, there was some overlap between Ron and Harry’s new voice actors, and that’s taking into account that the reader gets to to experience Harry largely by himself for several hours when Ron is being moody and dramatic and not speaking to Harry because he thinks Harry put his name in the Goblet of Fire and didn’t bother to tell him. There are a lot of new actors in this book, and they all knock it out of the park; Mad-Eye Moody is wonderful, as are Ludo, Barty Crouch, and Voldy himself. (Spoilers if you’ve not read this, the big V makes a comeback at the end.) The sound design in general is OUTSTANDING, and this is a book where good design really matters. It opens with the Quiddich World Cup, for instance, and they manage to integrate crowd noise, announcers, and dialogue wonderfully: I never felt overwhelmed and that would have been very easy to do. Background atmospherics are good: I especially loved hearing Arthur Weasley giggling like a schoolboy smacking tent stakes. One HUGE highlight is the Song of the Mermaids: I liked it so much that when I got home I loaded up Audacity so I could excerpt it and send to a friend who was on the fence about trying the full-cast audio series. She loved it, and frankly it’s much better than the song that was put in the movies. I’d give you proof, but YouTube wouldn’t allow it. If you’d like the clip, though, just swish and flick.

I loved every minute I was listening to this: I even loved it when Audible-in-my-car decided “Oi, I’m not syncing with Audible proper and now you get to listen to stuff you heard yesterday”. As a production of Goblet of Fire, this is definitely an O in the O.W.L’s. However, this is probably the book with the murkiest planning: as readers know, we find out that one of the principle characters, Mad-Eye Moody, is not “himself”: he is, in fact, a Death Eater pretending to be MEM. The problem is that MEM is not written that way: I fully believe Rowling was writing MEM as himself until 2/3rds of the book was done and then it occurred to her that ooh, it would be jolly interesting if someone were pretending to be MEM. Moody is such a distinctive character in the opening part of the book, with a great passion for destroying the Dark Arts, that I simply cannot buy that he’s being impersonated at that point: I realize that’s Rowling’s official canon, but it does not work for me. The premise of the book is also a little absurd: serious effort is undertaken so that Harry Potter will not only enter and compete in a tournament (effort that attracts a lot of attention, because how the hell has a fourth champion been entered into the “Tri”-Wizard Tournament), but that he wins. He needs to win so he can touch the cup and voila, be transported to a graveyard where Voldy’s weird corpself is waiting. Honestly, there’s easier ways to do that: how Voldemort managed to become a terror with this kind of planning is beyond me, especially when the noseless git couldn’t even taken over a high school. Just imperio a Gryffindor to give Harry a book on Quidditch, and bob’s your uncle.

At any rate, I’m awfully sorry I’m finished with this already. Order of the Phoenix doesn’t release until March 10 and the wait makes me feel like Harry at the Dursley’s. Sidenote: I’m starting to love Hugh Laurie as Dumbledore.

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With Malice Toward None

Posted on February 20, 2026 by smellincoffee

As part of my US Presidents course of reading, and in combination with my obsessive 1840s – 1860s dive,  I’ve read two biographies of Abraham Lincoln this year –   one hailing him a saint, the other a brute. Both of these books were written with an Intention in mind,  and I decided to try a third volume – one written more as a straightforward biography. With Malice Toward None came highly recommended to me as an enduring one-volume biography of one of the United States’ most pivotal presidents – a man who either ‘saved the Union’, or forged a new one.  I can certainly understand why it carries its reputation,  as it’s quite readable and offers a good ‘mix’ of Lincoln’s life, with neither politics nor war overwhelming treatment of the man underneath the stove-pipe hat. We find that man complex and largely sympathetic –  driven and easy to be around, even when we find the decisions he makes or permits unfortunate. 

With Malice Towards None immediately stands out as the most comprehensive Lincoln biography I’ve read to date, since Meacham and DiLorenzo were largely focused on Lincoln’s civil war work.  One of the more surprising things I’ve found while studying his life is how politically unsuccessful Lincoln was in public:  he only served a single turn in Congress,  then returned to private practice. It was in the background, though, that he made his bones and grew as a political actor – working tirelessly to build the Republican party and support its candidates.  Even in his failures, like the senate race with Douglas, he eloquently expressed and promoted the Republican principles, and Oates gives the debates and Lincoln’s philosophy there expressed their due.   

Stephen Oates accomplishes something which I would think difficult – making Lincoln admirable in his stances even when the modern mind would find them abhorrent, salvageable only because the alternatives were worse. Contra the fears of the South, Lincoln and the Republicans had no intention of attacking slavery where it existed – but they were adamant it not expand. Lincoln was not the racial egalitarian his contemporary opponents made him out to be:   he viewed blacks and whites as too different to live together, and continued championing ‘colonization’ – the deportation of blacks to Africa or some other colony – as a means of settling the race question after slavery well into the war. He took the view, though, that even if blacks were inferior to whites that it was unjust and un-Christian for whites to take from blacks what little they had, like the fruits of their own labor. 

The narrative gets  more potentially complex, but Oates’ execution more admirable, once the war begins.  We see Lincoln as a politician,  commander in chief, and man – all at once.  The narrative gives an interesting take on the war, in that we see Lincoln working in despair for over two years, thinking that defeat will meet them in the field. The Union army cannot seem to win   any great strategic victories,  and the view from his desk is that this owes to a lack of real talent in the field. While his generals might be excellent field commanders, they quarrelled with one another, and according to Oates’ Lincoln,  none of them had a grand strategic vision. Oates has Lincoln grumbling that the proper focus of fire should be Lee’s army, not Richmond –  something Grant knew.   I’m hesitant to fully subscribe to Oates’ depiction of Lincoln as a war-time commander, in part because I do not see why a country lawyer from Illinois would possess some grand vision that his West Point officers lacked, and because Lincoln in military histories comes off as a meddler, camping in the War department offices and constantly trying to run the war himself. The humanness of Lincoln keeps making itself known, though; when he’s laid low by an illness, he jokes and asks after the office-seekers who hounded him early on; at last he has something to give everybody.  Even as the election approaches and Lincoln views his prospects dim – with draft riots and the peace movement rising in the north –  he reads something so funny he has to trot through the house in his bedclothes to share it with people still working. 

Although Oates always gussies up Lincoln – treating him with kid gloves where civil liberties are concerned, describing his antagonists through their negative physical appearances,  and so on –  he does at least mention the excesses instead of ignoring them altogether.   Even Clement Vallandigham gets a brief mention, even if it’s just Lincoln saying “How can I authorize shooting a soldier for deserting and ignore the man who advised him to do it?”  Whether Vallandigham’s rhetoric rose to the level Lincoln implied is debatable: I haven’t gotten that sense from prior books where he made an appearance. Oates drops the ball where war on civilians is concerned,  referring to the Union army’s treatment of South Carolina towns, farms, and homes as their “sweeping in like avenging angels”: that is an interesting way to describe Sherman’s deliberately malicious campaign to reduce women and children into starving refugees, and Lincoln not only did not condemn this but made jokes about another general’s similar policy.

Taken all together, this was an impressive biography,  addressing the many issues that Lincoln’s life encompassed rather adroitly. While Oates is plainly enamored of his subject – most people are, Lincoln frequently being raised to the level of Washington –  he paints him as a man who was nearly as good as his time and his responsibilities allowed him to me, and often more courageous on matters of import than was prudent.   Oates has quite the bibliography and I can see myself returning to him, especially his Voices series that draws in first-hand accounts before and during the war to understand what people at the time thought about it.

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Taking Religion Seriously

Posted on February 19, 2026 by smellincoffee

I should preface this review with a bit of biography; some who have been reading me for a while are already familiar with it, and others have gotten bits of it, because I’ve grown more comfortable sharing over the years. I grew up in an extremely religious Pentecostal sect; left it somewhere between age 20 & 21; was a zealous secular humanist for 3-4 years, became obsessed with meaning and living a ‘good life’, and by age 27 was a practicing Christian within the Episcopal tradition. I have remained there since, though in practice and belief I am now much closer to a traditional Catholic than your average Episcopalian, pope aside. Given this, I am sure a reader might understand why I might find a man writing about his conversion from practical agnosticism to Christianity somewhat interesting.

Taking Religion Seriously is a chronicle of Murray’s journey from effective agnosticism to a tacit embrace of Christianity — tacit because he believes in it, but not in a ‘set the world on fire’ kind of way. His is an intellectual, reading journey: he shares the books he’s read that have shaped this thinking, and cautions readers that he is no authority. He simply asks that readers consider his history of thought, look at the books he’s read, and draw their own conclusions. (He believes he has found ‘evidence that demands a verdict’, you might say.) His early story is like many: he was raised in belief and came from it in college, thinking that intelligent people simply didn’t take religious claims seriously. From here, the story is a little more complex: Murray writes that it’s very easy for us to impose a tidy narrative after the fact, when changes in beliefs as lived are in fact much more messy. Having changed worldviews at least twice in my several decades on this Earth, I can readily agree with that — because I have tried first to explain my departure from Pentecostalism to secularism to family and friends, and then to explain my departure from secularism to belief to myself.

Murray opens with scientific concerns, particularly the peculiar fitness that our universe has for life, and the improbability of physical laws not only allowing for a stable universe, but one stable enough to engender life. He is also skeptical of strict materialism, arguing that studies into psychic abilities, near-death experiences, and ‘terminal lucidity'( a new term for me, I will admit) indicate that there is more to a human being — to any one given person — than simply brain activity. He then begins transitioning into other arguments, like Lewis’ argument from moral law, and interesting textual studies of the Gospels that argue for their being attempts to capture historical fact, not simply tell an enchanting story. He shares arguments he’s read that the synoptic Gospels were written earlier than 20th century scholarship has admitted, and introduces a new-to-me concept called “undesigned coincidences” in which minor details from one account support details from another account — like Jesus giving disciples nicknames in one Gospel that seem random until details from another Gospel are taken into account. In concluding, he recaps what he’s written and tries to anticipate some criticism like ‘God of the gaps’ being applied to his first chapter.

I found this a very interesting book, but I have to admit that reading it as a believer was an odd experience. It felt like Murray had put the cart before the horse, that Jesus didn’t matter so much as textual studies and the limits of scientific enterprise. This may owe to the way I came round to accepting Christianity, which was highly personal and admittedly subjective, but just as real to me as the wet and crashing waves of the ocean that have mesmerized me in the past. My reading of this makes me believe that Murray takes seriously the existence of souls, and of a transcendent moral order that nearly all human cultures have perceived and created religions around. I can even believe he believes in the Gospel accounts, miracles included — but at the same time, his approach to Jesus feels like approaching a museum exhibit or something. There’s reverence, but no connection and no presence.

This was an interesting work, one honestly written, I think. It’s not a conversion story per se, but a straightforward account of a man whose reading journey led him to live up to the title — to take religion seriously. He does not say if he has incorporated things like religious praxis in his life, though his wife is a devout Quaker and watching her spiritual growth over the decades they’ve been together was one motivation for him in investigating religion’s claims more seriously. He was seeing something in her he could not dismiss, even if his own faith remains — as he says ‘arid’. It’s his honesty that gives this book a unique appeal, I think. I imagine its ideal audience is Christians who are uneasy about factual claims of the faith, or perhaps people who are spiritual seekers and are curious. As much as I appreciated Murray’s views on the historicity of the Gospels, some of which were new approaches to me, I couldn’t escape the sense that all this was just air without having had a serious religious encounter. Perhaps it’s appropriate that Murray uses the absurd and flaccid “BCE/CE” convention for his dates: he has not had a road-to-Damascus moment that divides his life into two parts — before Christ and in the year of our Lord.

Quotations

I blame it on Beethoven, who was the exemplar of the rebellious, ill-tempered genius who breaks old rules and is contemptuous of his audience’s preferences. He acted as if he were God’s gift to humanity. As it happens, he was. The problem is that subsequent generations of artists who weren’t gifts from God emulated him.

Undesigned coincidences correspond to what happens in real life when different eyewitnesses describe an event. If the witnesses are concentrating on reporting what they recall rather than constructing a story, they will often give a detail that seems inexplicable on its own but makes sense when put alongside the testimony of another witness who reported another, complementary detail. Thus, for example, Mark (3:17) mentions parenthetically that Jesus nicknamed the brothers James and John “Sons of Thunder”—an odd choice for a nickname. But not so odd when you read Luke (9:52–56), which records an incident in which a village of Samaritans refuses to receive Jesus. James and John ask Jesus, “Lord, do you want us to command fire to come down from heaven and consume them?” Mark records that Jesus gave them a nickname (I like to think of Jesus laughing when he did it), and Luke coincidentally gives the reason for it.

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A Lenten WWW Wednesday

Posted on February 18, 2026 by smellincoffee

WHAT have you finished reading recently? The Dark Sacred Night, Michael Connolly. A Bosch/Ballard novel in which his grumpy retired cop and his increasingly-annoyed-at-the-system novice cop join forces to drink black coffee, listen to jazz, and grouse about the system together. It may not get a review, because my reading of it was interrupted; I read half, then read an entire series by CJ Box, then finished it.

WHAT are you reading now? Currently enjoying The Goblet of Fire, full-cast audio edition, and committing to my Confessions re-read for Classics Club, Lent, and a buddy read.

WHAT are you reading next? I need to start Paradise Lost for CC since it was the spin.

Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. I already have two formidable Lenten challenges set before me — rereading The Confessions and tackling Milton, though spiritual boons of reading Paradise Lost are suspect at best. I’ve been fairly faithful in doing the Bible in a Year podcast, and in Lent I want to introduce and maintain the practice of doing it first thing in the morning, before I do anything else. I also want to finally commit to The Religion of the Apostles, a history of first-century Christianity: I’m very curious about the subject, and have been pecking at a copy of the Book of Jubilees just to better appreciate the first-century Jewish-turned-Christian mind, but have not yet really settled down with it.

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Teaser Tuesday, Feb 17

Posted on February 17, 2026 by smellincoffee

From Polk: The Man Who Transformed the Presidency and America, by Walter J. Bornman:

It has long been popular to paint James K. Polk as a dark horse, but the record does not square with that tradition. If he was indeed one, he chose to ride boldly across a bright land and in doing so opened up the American West to half a century of unbridled expansion.

And from The Confessions, which I began to re-read yesterday. Seems an appropriate way to approach Lent…

The house of my soul is too cramped for you to enter: make it more spacious. It is falling to ruin; repair it. Much inside it offends your sight; I know it and I confess it. […]

But I, I slipped away in the days of my youth, and wandered from you, my God, far afield from your steadfastness. And I made of my own self a kingdom of want.

“A kingdom of want!” That will certainly preach.

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Paradise Valley

Posted on February 16, 2026 by smellincoffee
Take me down to Paradise Valley
Where the C4’s primed
and the girls are plotting revenge

And so ends my chaotic run at the Cody Hoyt/Cassie Dewell series — right in the middle, when the serial killer known as The Lizard King is finally rendered extinct like his tyrannranous namesake. Here, Cassie is still a lead investigator with the sheriff’s department, but after luring the King into a trap, she’s devastated when he springs the trap with C4 — wiping out part of the sheriff’s department in an apparent suicide, and ending her career. A month after this, Cassie is approached by a woman she knows and told that a boy she rescued a few years ago, Kyle Westergaard, has evidently disappeared on the river. He and his friend decided to float down to Mississippi. The sheriff’s department hasn’t even stirred to look into what could have happened, and armed with cash Cassie is put on the case. She’s effectively an unlicensed private investigator, but one with connections. Imagine her surprise when her investigation of the boys makes her realize that the Lizard King may be alive and well — though, he’s seemingly abandoned his former patterns of behavior, like driving a big rig and kidnapping/abusing/killing prostitutes.

My chaotic reading order was prompted by the fact that I was reading this series at the same time as someone else at my library, and the books I wanted to read were sometimes not there; however, I couldn’t have ended this read with a better set of books. Back of Beyond introduced the character of Bull Mitchell, a retired outfitter who Cody Hoyt recruited to guide him into Yellowstone to find a potential serial killer who had for some reason decided to join a week-long expedition into the park. Mitchell reutrns here, albeit deafer and less polite, and because both Cassie and Bull knew Cody, his ghost rides with them to some extent. Cassie is even riding Cody’s former mount, Gipper. The drama here is two-fold, then three: we’re watching Cassie try to figure out where the LK is going and then find a solution to bringing him down for once and for all, but within the bounds of the law; we have viewpoint chapters where LK is abusing two captive women and engaging in some weird father-mentor relationship with Kyle, and then close to the end Cassie realizes that the same goonie boys who had ignored her claim that the LK was alive and well are shadowing her so they can pounce and gain glory for themselves. This is a problem not because Cassie wants the glory, but because goonie boys are goonie boys: they shoot women, children, and dogs first and offer explanations later.

Quotations

“Twelve is too young,” Kyle said.
“When you were the same age you shot two men,” Ben said.


“When his wife died he stopped coming in,” she said. “I haven’t seen him in probably a year and a half.”
“Oh. Do you have any idea where I could find him?”
The outdoor girl said, “This is a library. We can find anything.”

Cassie said, “Did you take your hearing aids out so you could talk nonstop and not answer my questions?”
“Let me tell you about the other ways the Park Service plays God in Yellowstone…” Bull began.

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Back of Beyond

Posted on February 16, 2026 by smellincoffee

Who’s up for a horror movie, western style? The story begins when an older man is found dead in his half-burned cabin, with a hole in his head and an empty bottle of liquor beside him. When Cody Hoyt arrives on scene, he immediately smells a fish. The deceased was his AA sponsor — and oddly, the man’s AA coins, proving decades’ worth of sobriety, have been taken. While the sheriff was eager to nail this an accidental death — the old man fell off the wagon, accidentally set fire to his cabin by overstuffing the furnace, end of story — the discovery of a hole in the deceased’s head leads to more investigation by Cody. Or it will, after Cody’s goes on a serious bender in grief and then climbs back out of the hole. A computer in the crime scene gives Cody a hint: either the old man or whoever killed him was researching a multiday horseback trek into Yellowstone. Cody, despite being suspended for certain actions undertaken during the bender that included shooting the coroner decides to investigate — and eneroute, he gains added motivation when he learns his son is on this particular trip. The result is a slow-burning psychological thriller as multiple people are interested in this particular trek into the park — and for very different reasons than to breath the clean air of the west and bond with a horse.

Take a distressed man with substance abuse problems, put his son in mortal danger, and then let some unknown party try to kill the man when he’s enroute to try to rescue his son and find out who killed his mentor. Add financial stress from having to pay a guide for his local knowledge and horses, mix with chronic danger from grizzly bears and wolves, and then throw in dollops of running into escaoed horses and murdered bodies as the man moves further into the park, suffering all the while from alcohol and cigarette withdrawal. Things are scarcely better when we move away from Cody’s perspective, as we focus on some teenagers who are scared as hell — scared of the park that their parents are making them visit, scared some of the strange people traveling in the group party, and scared of the pack leader who keeps making strange deviations from their published and agreed-upon itinerary. Then it gets worse, because people disappear every night — and the teenage girls’ father is distracted by his new girlfriend and must surely win the reward for Awful Father of the Year. When they tell him they think someone was spying on them when they tried to use the restroom, he laughs it off and tells them it was just a squirrel or something. Excuse me, but squirrels don’t laugh and leave size 11 boot prints in the dirt, Dad .

This was a very effective thriller, far more interesting than I expected at first: a routine murder investigation turns into a chaotic chase through a dangerous wilderness, filled with lethal critters and people with hidden motives and a willingness to commit desperate violence. Box somehow makes Cody sympathetic despite how deeply flawed a character he is, and I was surprised that the teenage sisters from the Highway quartet appeared here, too: I’d assumed they were one-offs, but they’re part of the action. Little Gracie even gets to stab someone! She wins “What did you do this summer” come fall, for sure.

Quotations:

When Cody looked out over the vista of green carpeted saddle slopes with tree-choked river valleys, massive red-veined geological upthrusts that bordered the eastern horizon until they gave up and became mountains, and the vast sprawling tableau of Yellowstone Lake miles ahead and below them, he said, “What big country.”
Mitchell grunted and reached back into a saddlebag for his binoculars. “Don’t fall in love with it,” Mitchell said. “It’s guaranteed to break your heart.”

Mitchell clucked his tongue and his horse stepped out. He said, “I’m not sure I’m getting paid enough money to come out here into the wilderness with a desperate man withdrawing from alcohol AND cigarettes.”
“Please shut up,” Cody said.

“I haven’t had a drink in days and I smoked my last cigarette two hours ago. All I want is an excuse to kill you five times over and piss on your remains. Do you understand me?”

“Oh, it’s you. The man who shot our coroner.”
It seemed like ages ago, Cody thought. “Yes, well, there’s a good story that goes along with that but I’ll need to tell you at a better time.”

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Treasure State

Posted on February 14, 2026 by smellincoffee

Who watches the watchers? Or in this case, who investigates private investigators? Cassie Dewell is intrigued by an odd phone call she gets: a wealthy Florida patron had hired a P.I. to investigate a man who swindled her out of money, but said P.I. mysteriously disappeared shortly after reporting that he was on the way to Anaconda, Montana, and that he expected results soon. (Montana also evidently has towns called Wisdom, Harmony, and Manhattan. Still no patch on New Mexico’s Truth or Consequences, though.) She gets this request while she’s working on another odd job: the creator of a nationwide treasure hunt, who left clues to a fortune in gold hidden somewhere in the wilderness, wants Cassie to see if she can suss out who he is. He doesn’t want people figuring out where the gold might be because they know the author; he wants them to find it the honest way, by deciphering the clues and riddles within the poem he used to kick off the treasure hunt. With this odd combination of cases, Cassie enlists some help in the form of a rough-and-ready young woman named April Pickett. Treasure State is far and away my favorite of the Dewell books so far, combing as it does a real-life treasure hunt and Montana’s fascinating history.

The main thrust of Treasure State is the missing P.I. and his search subject, “Marc Daly”. both Cassie and her missing predecessor realized that Daly was not a one-off, but rather a serial offender. He approached single, wealthy women while assuming various personalities, charmed them completely, then vanished after they wired him money for whatever project his personality had in mind — a movie deal, a new “killer app”. As the plot develops, we realized that the missing PI had gotten quite close indeed to the truth — but there is, as ever, a twist. The treasure hunt aspect is more of a B-plot, but brings in a minor character from Badlands, who here doesn’t get viewpoint chapters but is still heroic in his way. Speaking of bringing in characters: I was quite pleased to see April Pickett, though I much prefer her older sisters Sheridan and Lucy. Still, April’s abhorrent appraisal of men continues in good fashion. (She is responsible for introducing Dallas Cates, a character so hateable I still remember his name a year later: he is the Obadiah Hakeswill of the Pickettverse.) Dewell has definitely grown from her first appearance in The Highway: no longer a Dudley Doright, she’s accustomed to fibbing a bit (or “applying social engineering”, if you’d like) to get information she needs, and she’s much better at thinking outside the box in general. I think her prolonged struggle to find and nail the execrable Lizard King has definitely summoned up the blood and stiffened a few sinews within her. The action execution of the novel was wonderful in itself — I zipped through this in barely a day — but Box added a lot of appeal through his version of the real-life Fenn Treasure Hunt, and his foray into Anaconda’s history within America’s mining & labor movement. I also love how seriously place incorporates into Box’s writing; a lot of the restaurants he mentions really exists, and the competition between Butte (where the bosses lived) and Anaconda (where the workers lived and were poisoned by their work) is visceral.

Treasure State was a great read for me; I’m looking forward to ‘continuing’ in this series by reading the prequel (Back of Beyond) and the book where she finally finds and makes extinct her personal ‘terrible lizard king’.

Quotes

“My history with state troopers isn’t very good,” she said.
“Just don’t shoot him.”

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