1. Back in my teaching days, I used to (futilely?) encourage students to read the essays or books I assigned both forward and backward. I also encouraged students to reread what I assigned.
I understood then and understand now the difficulty of doing this. I know when I read, the impulse I always feel strongly is to move forward, enjoy the book, contemplate it, and move on to a new one.
I have found, however, that when reading War and Peace, I have to turn the encouragement I gave my students onto myself.
I need to reread, as it turns out, large chunks of what I've read once in order to keep characters straight (even as I take notes) and to get the storylines straight.
Today I went back and reread about fifty pages of war effort storytelling, with focus on two characters I had met in the early chapters of the book.
Tolstoy introduced Nikolai Bolkonsky and Andrei Rostov in the early chapters of War and Peace in aristocratic social settings. Silly settings.
But in Part 2 of Volume 1, these two young socialites are no longer attending soirees. They are part of the Russian/Austrian war effort in conflict with Napoleon's French troops.
I'm learning how they respond to this new world outside the cocoon of elite Russian society, elite society which is, by the way, available to them in the war effort among some of the military bureaucrats.
2. Over ten years ago, maybe even fifteen, Adrienne gave me a cookbook of bean recipes entitled Bean by Bean. I opened this terrific cookbook today in search of its baked bean recipe and I think I'll use it to guide my effort to bring tasty baked beans to our 4th of July family dinner.
3. Out of the blue this evening, Jeff Steve called and we had a terrific conversation about a lot of different things including how for both of us aging has meant being relieved of suffering from the past, suffering, in my case, that dominated my life at one time and that I, for one, thought would be with me forever and that I have no contact with today. What a relief.
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