Intro
This is Time's Corner, an occasional newsletter by Christian Leithart. I’m co-founder of Little Word and editor of Good Work magazine. By day, I teach, and by night, I edit this newsletter.
I’d be delighted to hear your replies to the question at the bottom of this newsletter. I send them out in the Thursday edition.
Read Less
For the last several years most of my annual goals have boiled down to the basic resolution, “Write more.” Unfortunately, it’s been awfully easy to justify reading as a form of writing, or at least a necessary step in the process. No matter how much writing time I gave myself before work or on the weekends, a big chunk of it went to input, not output.
So, in January, I set myself a challenge: “Read less.” Whenever I had a few minutes, instead of opening a book, I would dig into a writing project. And it worked. This year I wrote a play, three short stories, three articles, a handful of poems, and countless drafts of various projects that may or may not ever see the light of day. It was the most productive year, writing-wise, I’ve had in a long time.
I did cheat, though. During breaks (from school, between projects), I binged books like a marooned sailor. A few days ago, I read my forty-first book in 2024, not counting plays, graphic novels, and books I took large bites of but didn’t finish. You can see the full list on my website, but here I want to highlight three of the ones I enjoyed most.
The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien
I hadn’t read this in at least a decade, perhaps longer. It had been so long that I was surprised at how different it was from the movies, not just in its tone but in the details, too. (For example, Frodo and company face the Black Riders at the foot of Weathertop, not the summit.) Predictably, I enjoyed the songs and the slower parts of the story (Lothlorien, the Houses of Healing) much more than I did when I was younger.
I was also surprised by the sense of fun that pervades the book. In my circles, folks quote Tolkien like ancient Greeks quoted Homer, so I associate The Lord of the Rings with wisdom and profundity. It is wise and profound, but it’s also a fun adventure story, borderline goofy at times. Gimli and Legolas joke about how many orcs they can kill. There’s a tribe of loincloth-clad jungle men! C. S. Lewis has the reputation for writing silly stories, in contrast to Tolkien’s serious ones, but I don’t think there’s a moment in The Lord of the Rings as dark as the battle between Ransom and the Un-man in Perelandra.
Anyway, I stand by my prediction that Tolkien’s work will still be studied and enjoyed centuries from now. Like the best predictions, there’s no way of knowing whether it will come true till after we’re all dead and gone.
Swallows and Amazons, Arthur Ransome
Some books leave you empty, wishing the final page was anything but. Some books leave you full, so that, when you’re finished, you’re content to sit quietly and stare out the window. And some books leave you with an itch to go out and do something, like climb a tree or sail against the wind. Swallows and Amazons falls into the last category.
The story concerns four children (the Swallows) who camp on an island in the middle of a lake for the summer. The adventures they have are almost entirely pretend, but no less fun for that. Two local children (the Amazons) challenge them to a war in which each side tries to steal the other’s boat. They also declare war on a houseboat belonging to a man they’re sure must be a retired pirate. The most conventionally dramatic adventure involves some burglars who have buried a box of valuables on a small, deserted island, but the most exciting part of the book is when the Swallows have to sail at night in complete darkness, constantly at risk of running afoul of rocks.
If you’ve ever felt a burning desire to sail, don’t read this book. It will only fan the flames.
Apocalypse Never, Michael Shellenberger
It’s not a comedy, it’s not satire, but it did make me laugh out loud several times from sheer delight. Shellenberger is a climate scientistic and activist, which gives him the cred necessary to attack the standard dogmas of environmentalism. His basic position is this: Humans are creative. Adequately equipped, they can solve the problems they face. Instead of enforcing environmental policies that restrict human creativity, we should empower people with food, energy, and resources so they can solve their problems.
In order to support his position, Shellenberger has to dismantle the radical, fearmongering claims environmentalists love to make, the ones that cause people to panic and make dumb, counterproductive decisions. Watching him do so is, as I said, delightful.
Some examples:
Humanity is not on the brink of starvation. Humans today produce enough food for 10 million people, a 25 percent surplus.
Climate change policies hurt food production by making energy more expensive and land more scarce. The hurt they cause is worse than any projected damage to food production caused by a global temperature rise of 4 degrees Celsius.
The global poor most vulnerable to climate change (rising temps, etc.) are already more vulnerable to the weather than people in developed countries. A Congolese farmer would rather have a well-built house, fertilized land, and plenty of electricity today than a slightly cooler planet a hundred years from now. If the Congo was full of healthy, well-equipped people, they could afford to stop burning wood fuel and chopping down gorilla habitats.
“Globally, new tree growth exceeded tree loss for the last thirty-five years, by an area the size of Texas and Alaska combined.” More: “A major study of fifty-five temperate forests found higher growth than expected, due to higher temperatures resulting in a longer growing season, higher carbon dioxide, and other factors.”
Plastic materials are better for the natural world, overall. Paper grocery bags would need to be used forty-three times to have a smaller impact on the environment than plastic ones. Switching from fossil-fuel plastics to bioplastics would require expanding farmland in the United States 5-15 percent. Plastic materials have ended the markets for ivory and turtleshell, essentially rescuing elephants and hawksbill turtles from extinction. Best of all, in 2019, a group of scientists at MIT announced their finding that sunlight and ocean water easily break down polystyrene, one form of plastic, into organic parts in a period as short as decades.
“Buying cheap clothing, and thus increasing agricultural productivity, is one of the most important things we can do to help people [in developing countries], while also creating the conditions for the return and protection of natural environments, including rainforests.”
Fun stuff.
Dispatch from Broken Bow
We had a quiet Christmas here at Broken Bow. There were presents. There were stockings. There were cinnamon rolls. There was ‘nog. I kept a wood fire alive almost all day. As my daughter said, “This was the best Christmas ever.”
Upcoming
Little Word will have a book table at the upcoming Trinity Conference in February
My next play, The Wizard of Oz, opens February 27. I didn’t write this one, but you should still come see it.
Up To
Reading: The Adversary by Michael Crummey
Watching: To Be or Not To Be (1942), one of my favorite movies
Listening: You know, Christmas stuff
Eating: For Christmas Day, beef Wellington
Thursday Question
Thursday’s issue will be devoted to your replies to this question:
What are some of the best books you’ve read this year?
About
I’m Christian Leithart, a writer and teacher living in Birmingham, Alabama. I’m not active on social media, but you can read my blog here. Use the button below to share this issue of Time’s Corner, if you so desire. Thanks much for reading.