Finished: Crossing to Safety by Wallace Stegner 💙📚
★★★★★ What a beautiful and poignant book. Hopeful and joyous at the possibilities of life, but bookended by the realities of disappointment and loss.
You can plan all you want to. You can lie in your morning bed and fill whole notebooks with schemes and intentions. But within a single afternoon, within hours or minutes, everything you plan and everything you have fought to make yourself can be undone as a slug is undone when salt is poured on him. And right up to the moment when you find yourself dissolving into foam you can still believe you are doing fine.
Finished: Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain 💙📚
★★★★☆ Fascinating deep dive into the world of introversion and extroversion. Some meaningful parts of our temperament are genetic and passed down from our parents. If you’re a fussy, highly sensitive baby at four months, there’s a good chance you’ll grow up to be introverted. There seems to be a biological connection between high physical sensitivity and introversion.
This has been an eye-opening book for the ways that extroverts and introverts differ. Bloggers, who Cain suggests are almost all introverts, will share personal details with an online multitude they would never disclose at a cocktail party. This hits close to home!
This month, I finished a multi-year reading of Will and Ariel Durant’s The Story of Civilization, an eleven-volume opus considered one of the finest narratives of world history ever written.
Durant published the first volume in 1935 when he had just turned 50. The tenth volume, Rousseau and Revolution, won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction in 1968. Will and Ariel, his spouse and co-author, published the final volume in 1975, a culmination of forty years of writing and scholarship. No author’s body of work has even come close to the scope and duration of this epic history set. Excluding reference notes, the text spans ten thousand pages, covering human civilization from the earliest recorded history through Napoleon’s meteoric rise and fall.
I’ve wanted to read these books since I inherited them from my Grandmother more than twenty-five years ago. I made a few attempts but never got past the first hundred pages. I was too busy or preoccupied with other things to devote the time and focus.
This time was different. First, as a recent retiree, I have the energy to dedicate to a project like this. Second, I approached the reading like a real project. I mapped out the volumes and page counts and calculated that if I read just thirty pages a night, I could read the entire series in a little over a year. I stuck with it, and the little bit of reading every night soon became a habit.
I didn’t finish the books in a year like I planned. The reading stretched out to almost two years. On average, I read just under fifteen pages a day. Yet, it’s striking to see how a little bit of reading each day can add up.
In terms of consistent effort, I’d place the reading of these books on par with the work I put in to earn my MBA degree twenty-five years ago. That two-year program helped me professionally and monetarily; these Durant books changed me in perhaps an even more profound way.
Last year, I wrote about the personal reasons I wanted to read these books. In this post, I’m sharing some reflections on the benefits I’ve taken away from this monumental reading assignment.
Before we get to that, I have some quibbles. While Durant is a masterful storyteller and sometimes poet, the writing feels necessarily dated at times. The focus is too heavily weighted towards Western civilization and Europe. Durant’s interest in the sexual proclivities of historical figures surprised me at first, given the time this was written, but later became tedious. The extended descriptions of famous art and architecture were well-written, but there are easier and better ways to study those now. I found myself skimming a lot of those sections.
Criticisms aside, the Story of Civilization is truly a masterpiece of history. After thinking back on this multi-year reading journey, I’ll group the value I’ve received in three areas:
1. The Past Explained
Before Durant, my knowledge of world history stemmed from high school classes and isolated deep dives into specific events and people. My internal timeline of when and where things happened over the eons was a mixed-up jumble.
The Story of Civilization corrected all that. It starts at the very beginning with a patient professor chatting beside you the entire way. It’s the same wise voice describing the Pharaohs of ancient Egypt as the Goths invading Rome, the dark ages of inquisitions and crusades, a spark then roaring fire of the Renaissance, the return to science and reason, before ending with Napoleon stewing in exile in St. Helena. It’s one continuous story with no gaps or omissions.
These books exposed me to every notable event and person in our shared history. Not just the Kings and Queens, but the composers, the artists, and the philosophers; the writers and scientists and architects; the prophets, the saints, and the heretics. It is not just about major events or people but also insights into the economies, the everyday life of peasants and the middle classes, their religious beliefs, their customs and morals, and their ideas on family and community.
By reading these books in a relatively short time span and taking hundreds and hundreds of notes, I now have a well-calibrated compass of the when, what, and why of human history. I’m able to draw from this knowledge with most everything else I read. I can place the context of practically any historical figure or event in reading that my eyes might have glossed over before now. This has made my post-Durant reading life a much richer experience.
2. Perspective on Humanity
Taking in the entire written history of civilization definitely gives you a new perspective on human nature. It’s not good. Reading example after example of the corrupting effect of power held by the few over the many is depressing. Or how organized religions are both awful and necessary to the stability of civilization. Or how freedom and equality seem like natural feel-good bedfellows but are, in truth, mortal enemies. Or how the rich get richer and richer until the poor rise up. Or how democracy as a form of government rarely lasts.
A sorry spectacle of generals climbing over slain rivals to power, to be slain in their turn; of pomp and luxury, eye-gouging and nosecutting, incense and piety and treachery; of emperor and patriarch unscrupulously struggling to determine whether the empire should be ruled by might or myth, by sword or word.1
History provides a needed perspective to help us navigate turmoil and uncertainty. Study enough past civilizations, their rise and their fall, and you can’t help but see consistent patterns and inflection points in the world around us. No one can truly predict the future, but surely our shared history is a powerful guide, given how consistently the past repeats itself.
In so many ways, history shows what a privilege it is to be alive during this time of democracy and relative peace. Our past is riddled with countless atrocities, warfare and pointless bloodshed, inquisitions, dictatorships, and crazed emperors. Yet, witnessing so many civilizations fail over the millennia, we must acknowledge this current peace and tranquility will not, cannot last.
That said, there’s room for optimism. For every hundred tyrants, there’s a philosopher or scientist or artist whose gifts to humanity have pushed us forward as a society. Here’s Durant:
Let us agree that in every generation of man’s history, and almost everywhere, we find superstition, hypocrisy, corruption, cruelty, crime, and war: in the balance against them we place the long roster of poets, composers, artists, scientists, philosophers, and saints. That same species upon which poor Swift revenged the frustrations of his flesh wrote the plays of Shakespeare, the music of Bach and Handel, the odes of Keats, the Republic of Plato, the Principia of Newton, and the Ethics of Spinoza; it built the Parthenon and painted the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel; it conceived and cherished, even if it crucified, Christ. Man did all this; let him never despair. 2
3. The Meaning of Life
During the height of my working life and career, I dreamed of one day retiring to my little book-lined study to read and think through the mysteries of life. I’m not religious. I studied philosophy in college and maintained an avid interest in Stoic thinking, but I never had the proper time to bear down on the crux of the problem: why are we here? What is the meaning of all this?
I hoped one day to find the answers buried in the pages of my many books.
I didn’t realize when I started reading The Story of Civilization that Durant was a seeker of these same questions. With every spiritual movement, every religion, every saint, every philosopher, he was there by my side, poking and probing for the answers to questions that bothered us both.
Did Durant help me find what I was looking for? Did I discover the true meaning of life? Not exactly. Maybe the answers I seek can’t be found in a book. And yet, I did find comfort in the parallels between the we-are-all-one views of the ancient Upanishads, repeated and examined so logically by Lucretius and unearthed once more by the 18th-century free-thinking Deists.
You often hear that ancient philosophers conversed with one another over the centuries, adding to, refuting, and affirming each other like some modern-day Reddit thread. Durant’s moderation of these thinkers throughout the books made that conversation come alive in ways I would have surely missed had I studied this piecemeal. I came here for history but found insight in philosophy. I am wiser for Durant’s company.
What does it matter by what road each man seeks the truth? By no one road can men come to the understanding of so great a mystery. — Symmachus 3
A Personal Legacy
My Grandfather gave my Grandmother the first six volumes of The Story of Civilization as a Christmas gift in 1959. He passed away five years later, the year before I was born, so I never got the chance to meet him. As a widow, my Grandmother read these books carefully, as proven by her many cryptic scribbles in the margins. I knew her as a devout Presbyterian, but her underlining and exclamation marks show that, like Durant, she also questioned her religion, faith, and life’s true purpose. She donated most of the books from her large family library when she downsized to a senior living apartment. She kept the Durant books and just a few others. She cherished these books.
I wish I had realized she didn’t own the complete set. I would have bought them for her. I ended up buying the remaining five books on eBay. Her marginalia ends after six volumes; mine continues.
Maybe in thirty or forty years, my daughter will pull one of these well-loved books down from her shelves and flip through the yellowed pages, scanning all the scribbles and vertical lines and exclamation points in the margins, stopping to puzzle over why a particular sentence or paragraph was marked. You can tell much about a person from what they write in books. Maybe that is legacy enough. Or, maybe, when the time is right, she will decide to embark on the same voyage as her father and great-grandmother, walking along amiably with Durant and two silent pilgrims.
Reading Advice
The physical books that make up The Story of Civilization are long out of print, but you can sometimes find a nice set collecting dust in a used bookstore. eBay usually has sets for sale in the $100-$200 range, which is considerably cheaper than the cost of an MBA.
You can buy the complete set on Kindle, but I don’t recommend it. The file size caused my Kindle to lock up, though the individual books work fine. When I traveled, I left the hefty physical books at home and read on Kindle instead. Amazon has periodic sales of various books within the series for as low as $2 each, and I ended up buying most of them that way.
You can buy or borrow audiobook versions on Libby. I listened to parts of the series on walks and drives but found them more challenging to follow than in print.
My advice is to buy the set in hardback. Put the books on your shelf. Let them marinate. Pick up a volume and thumb through it every once in a while. And when you’re ready, go easy. Read a little every day. Harvest the time you might have wasted on social media. Savor the writing and the story. Write notes in the margins. Reflect on what you’ve learned. You might be amazed at the distance you’ll travel.
Have you read The Story of Civilization or have plans to read it? Let me know in the comment section below.
Will Durant, The Age of Faith, page 428.
Will and Ariel Durant, The Age of Louis XIV, page 657.
★★★★★ This short book oozes with wisdom with the help of Ken Liu’s wonderful translation and notes. Read this one slowly and set aside time for reflection. So much of the advice is contrary to conventional western views that it can seem non-sensical. But try, you must.
Can you open yourself to your senses—quieting the mind like water?
Death is good. Senescence is good. The beginning is good. The end is good. You are, like all things in the cosmos, swimming in the flux of Dao.
To solve the hard you must begin with the easy; To do something big you must start very small. All difficulties must be resolved through simple steps. All grand deeds must be performed through tiny details.
Finished: Creative Nonfiction: The Final Issue by Lee Gutkind 💙📚
★★★★☆ An interesting selection of essays from the print run of the Creative Nonfiction literary magazine. There were some essays that appeared to stretch the boundaries of truth, but that’s the creative part I guess.
★★★★☆ The eleventh and final volume of the Story of Civilization, covering the years from the beginning of the French Revolution through Waterloo. Napoleon’s rise, dictatorship, stunning victories and ultimate defeat were thrilling to read.
From the sublime to the ridiculous is but a step. — Napoleon
★★★★★ Donald Sutherland did a wonderful job narrating this audiobook. It was nice to reacquaint myself with Hemingway’s short and simple sentences, yet so full of energy. Made me yearn for the ocean.
★★☆☆☆ I tried to like this book. It has all the elements of a book I would love: etymology, 19th century England, a diverse set of characters, magic, and an academic setting (Oxford, no less!). But I found it slow and repetitive, filled with one-dimensional, unlikable characters, and lecture after lecture on how the rich and powerful mistreat the poor, especially those who aren’t white and British, except for those that are poor and British. It took me almost two months to finish this, and it was a struggle.
I appreciate the idea behind the story, but not how it was told. Not every book is for every reader.
An entertaining book filled with practical advice on how to improve your storytelling, whether in front of a live audience, on a date, or in a written essay. Dicks shares examples of his own stories, then breaks down why they work. ★★★★☆
<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/125484/2025/dd54e41e-b5b4-42ca-bc9a-83d3b708188c.png" width=“600” height=“337” alt=“Quote from Storyworthy by Matthew Dicks: “Storytellers end their stories in the most advantageous place possible. They omit the endings that offer neat little bows and happily-ever-afters. The best stories are a little messy at the end. They offer small steps, marginal progress, questionable results."">
In 208 eloquent pages, Durant shares his views on death, religion, education, war, politics, spirituality, and, through it all, the meaning of life. Truly a gift to humanity from a scholar who devoted his long life to the study of history. ★★★★★
On a quest to read the few Stephen King books I missed along the way. I forgot how great of a short story writer King is. Probably some of his novels should have been short stories! Gingerbread Girl and N were my favorites in this collection.
I read the book during a recent visit to New York City and watched the movie on the plane ride home, which made for an immersive experience. The movie stayed very true to the book, though some big sections were left out. I loved reading the backstory of how young Vito Corleone eventually became the Don. Yes, some of it is dated, and yes, there were a few choppy parts that felt in need of editing, but I was pleasantly surprised by how really good this book was. If you loved the movie, you’ll enjoy the book.
Highlights
The word “reason” sounded so much better in Italian, ragione, to rejoin. The art of this was to ignore all insults, all threats; to turn the other cheek.
a friend should always underestimate your virtues and an enemy overestimate your faults.
What a delightful book. The first chapter reeled me in with the story of how the Moleskin notebook exploded in popularity in the 1990s. The author clearly has been bitten by the same notebook fetish bug. He cites brand names of notebooks that are all too familiar to me. He decided to write a history of the notebook about ten years ago and proceeded to fill four or five notebooks with scribbles and quotes and references that ultimately became this book.
Allen used effective storytelling techniques to share dozens of examples of notebook usage over the past six hundred years from accounting ledgers in the 1400s, artist sketchbooks in the 1500s, Darwin’s field notes, to modern day journaling. Definitely a niche book, but great for any lover of notebooks and journals.
I read 53 books last year, split about evenly between physical and e-books, and listened to just one audiobook. I usually listen to 10 -15 audiobooks a year, but in 2024, I decided to leave the AirPods behind on long walks to be more present. This felt like a fair exchange.
Favorites
The best non-fiction book I read last year was An Immense World by Ed Yong. The book shares how other animals sense the world in ways humans cannot. The book covers dozens of species, from an elephant’s incredible sense of smell to how spiders sense and surf on electric charges in the Earth’s atmosphere. You can’t read these amazing stories without shifting uncomfortably in your chair. We think we understand reality but are too limited by our senses. We are not seeing the whole picture. This is a mind-expanding book.
2024 Favorite Books
My favorite novels spanned three centuries:
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan is a short, spare novella written in 2021 and set in 1980s Ireland. In just 109 pages, Keegan puts you squarely in the mind and body of its protagonist, Furlong. You feel the pangs of long-ago childhood angst, the chill of an Irish cold spell, the ugliness of small-town bigotry, the warmth of a coal stove, the despair over human cruelty. The Irish dialogue rings out like music or birdsong, making me wish American English wasn’t so flat and ordinary. I felt sad to leave Furlong’s side after so short a visit and longed to know what happened next, but the tale and ending were told in just the right way, with just the right words. Keegan is a poet masquerading as a novelist.
To The Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf had been on my to-read pile for years. I was leery of the stream-of-consciousness writing style, and its Goodreads reviews were concerning. Yet I loved it. Perhaps it wouldn’t have clicked with me if I had read this book ten years ago. Sometimes, a book finds you when you’re most ready for it. I was ready. No spoilers, but prepare to be gutted in the second half. You can judge the impact of a book on how long you think about it after you’ve read it. Eight months later, and I am still thinking about this one.
Finally, I adored David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. I read this as homework for the highly touted Demon Copperfield by Barbara Kingsolver, a modern retelling of this classic. Stepping into a Dickens novel requires a certain faith that the vocabulary and style and flood of characters will eventually make sense. My head spun with each new character, some appearing for such a short visit that I complained to myself that Dickens was being indulgent. I should have known better. By the end, no matter how minor, every character returned, and I understood their part in the story. Sure, this involved unlikely coincidences for our protagonist, but I loved the resulting tapestry of those many loose threads woven together. After spending almost 900 pages with these characters, some incredibly kind, some evil, I felt reluctant to part with them. Reading the book right ahead of Demon Copperfield made it feel like Kingsolver wrote high quality fan fiction. Dickens was indeed a true master.
The Story of Civilization — A Marathon, Not a Sprint
In 2024, I continued my multi-year reading of Will and Ariel Durant’s epic eleven-volume Story of Civilization. I read six more books, taking me from Renaissance Italy to the eve of the French Revolution in late 18th-century Europe. I should complete this journey in early 2025 with final volume, The Age of Napoleon. I’ll write a follow-up review of my takeaways from the complete series when I finish volume XI, but for now, let me say that the experience has been incredibly rewarding.
The 11-volume set of The Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant
Stephen King — Scraping the Bottom of the Barrel
I have read more Stephen King novels than any other author, dead or alive. Last year, I vowed to tackle the ones I missed to read all 75 of this amazing storyteller’s works. I read three more from his backlog in 2024, none of which hit the mark. I have another twelve more books to complete this quest, but my enthusiasm has waned. I guess there was a reason I didn’t read these last books: even the greatest writers have their duds. However, his latest book of short stories, You Like It Darker, was fantastic. Some writers truly do get better with age.
My Reading System
I use the Bear note-taking and writing app to keep my reading notes and links to my personal note system. I switched over from Craft at the beginning of 2024, and I have been pleased with the added capabilities and aesthetic sensibilities of Bear.
I use Readwise to collect and review notes and highlights from my reading. Last year, I added over 700 new highlights to the system for a total of 2,400 collected passages.
I started using tags in Readwise about midway through 2024. I’m not sure why it took me so long. During a morning review of random highlights, adding one or more tags to a passage is simple. Tagged quotes accumulate into a digital commonplace book within Readwise, almost replicating what I have in Bear. Sharing a beautifully formatted quote from Readwise is easier and better than anything I could do from Bear:
A shared Readwise quote example
The Readwise app hasn’t received any new features in years, as the team has focused almost exclusively on its read-it-later app, Reader. However, a recent Reddit comment from a member of the Readwise team shared that significant improvements are coming in 2025. I’m heartened to know they haven’t forgotten the humble book in their quest to dominate online reading.
In addition to Bear, I store my book notes in a Day One reading journal. I love how easy it is to review the books I’ve read in the timeline view or see the book covers of all the books in the media view. I’ve imported seven years worth of book notes, so the “on this day” review in Day One shows the books I read alongside my journal entries. It’s another great way to reflect on my reading.
Book Journal in Day One
The Great TBR Reset of 2025
Over the holidays, I reviewed my ever-growing To-Be-Read list of books. All serious readers have a TBR, and mine had grown so large that I realized I would never get to all of them. I decided it was time for a purge.
Out of a list of 400 books, I marked each with my current interest level: low, medium, high. When I finished, I had narrowed the list to just 50 books, each of which I’m genuinely excited to read. I could work through the entire list in a year, though I know I won’t. It’s impossible to resist that perfect book that comes out of nowhere. Still, looking at my TBR list with more excitement than dread feels much better. If your TBR list has gotten out of hand, the new year is a great time to consider a reset.
The tenth volume of the Story of Civilization by Will and Ariel Durant. This one provides an immensely readable history of Europe leading up to the French Revolution. This series has been such an education. ★★★★★
This one missed the mark for me. Too many characters — almost the entire town of Castle Rock. With so many, I had a hard time connecting with any of them. Any other author would get a two stars, but King gets a pass. ★★★☆☆
A guide to the Zettelkasten method of note-taking. Writing and linking atomic notes feels so non-intuitive and…nutty? The examples late in the book of the poor quality of published books compiled from atomic notes did not help the cause. ★★★☆☆
Continuing my quest to read all eleven volumes of Will Durant’s Opus, The Story of Civilization. Volume IX centers on science and philosophy overtaking religion through thinkers like Voltaire and Diderot. The church did its best to stop it, but in the end, the French Enlightenment steered the faithful away from religion toward the beginnings of existentialism. While this movement addressed religious corruption and the horrors of inquisitions, there is also a feeling of great loss as civilization let go of its rudder of morality and faith. ★★★★★
I came for the essays on the craft of writing, but stayed for her views on RV life, dogs, opera, marriage, friendship, etc. An eclectic collection, but all Ann Patchett. What a writer. ★★★★☆
