Lord of the Rings – 5/5 I am revisiting Lord of the Rings this Thanksgiving season, mostly while I do yardwork and household chores avoiding work and staving off boredom and frenetic energy. I am also listening to the audiobooks this time, and the last time I read the books was in 2004. I also previously read them twice: in high school and then in college when the movies came out. Here some things about my reading: I always skip the songs, which almost always […]
On Bereavement and Raptors
Helen Macdonald’s memoir H Is for Hawk received outstanding reviews and several prestigious awards last year. It is the beautifully written story of her grief after her father’s sudden death, the depression that followed, and her attempt to lose herself in falconry. Macdonald is a member of the research faculty at Cambridge University’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science, and her skills as both researcher and historian are on display throughout the book. She weaves her personal story into the larger world of falconry […]