I am here in front of one of my stuffed Billy book cases sitting Indian style, my laptop tottering on the top of a cardboard file box, typing away. Such is the life of an ambitious reader and writer in a little urban tree house of an apartment who has read (maybe) a fourth of her library and who has only posted a handful of times over the last five years on her personal blog. Over the last month or so I have been making an effort to increase my reading and consequent reflections in writing. Here are some of the results.

I can never pick up one book at a time. Reading books like a kid in candy store, I can’t help but try several at once. I have stacks of books on all surfaces, organized by relevance to what I have my mind on this week. There is a pile of art and drawing on the coffee table. On the dining table there is a stack of sewing magazines and a variety of spiritual and practical books, and on the long wall shelf a tower of Medieval literature and architecture (I am holding off on that one). Currently, there are three books that take turns accompanying me where ever I go.
There is a copy of The Paris Review Interviews Vol. I, a gift from my godfather I have been reading with relish over many months. The front is now a pasty yellow, the back is still its original taxi bright hue, and the pages are full of pencil lines and margin notes and the occasional bit of sand from our summer’s one beach trip.

The second is Beauty for Truth’s Sake: On the Re-enchantment of Education by Stratford Caldecott. Anyone worn out by academia and it’s seemingly banal and singular goal of handing out certificates to students who have checked every class-to-take off their list, please get a copy. It is a refreshing book for those who love to learn but find some unease in voicing your dissatisfaction in modern education. This book explains why there is such an unease and dissatisfaction and gives examples of the beauty that is missing and how to look for it.

Lastly, a lucky find at my beloved Half-Price, is Passionate Minds: Women Rewriting the World by Claudia Roth Pierpont. Unusually, this one I am reading without any other recommendations other than that the subject is interesting and the first pages read well. This is unusual, I am rather wary of current female writers, having disliked the prose of most of them I have perused at Barnes and Nobles. I have only just finished the first chapter reviewing the life of Olive Schreiner and her major work African Farm. I have been pleasantly surprised by the fair critiques of this biographer and her balanced review of Schreiner and her influence. She wrote this of Schreiner, which I put in my commonplace book: “She knew that she suffered the ills and dissatisfaction of a “transitory condition,” her own and her society’s and she consoled herself with Browning’s “What I aspired to be and was not, comforts me.”

Somehow I feel we are in a transitory time in history, which feels at once stalled and also renewing and growing. I think of Augustine’s time like this. (Today is his feast day) Yes, he lived shortly before the fall of the Roman Empire, the archetype of all subsequent decaying of society. Is society declining now? I would say yes. Why? I think it is partly because we are denying the basic structure of human reality, that men are male and women are female, that the human race is continued by the union of a man and women which brings forth children by procreative act and rears them in a safe, nourishing and balanced environment. With the practice of contraception and abortion, the frequency of divorce, the increase of fornication and resulting abundance of bastard children, (to name a few) mankind has withered into a self-centered self-abusive voyeuristic wreck. Being a woman, I am going to do the part of laying the blame on my sisters and myself. We are part of this Self-centered shit hole of a society. Why? Well, in my reading I hope to muse on this issue and find a solution. Why are women a problem to society? How can they be a positive movement towards the renewal of human prosperity? What can one American woman do to change her world? I am going to try to find out.