The second book I also heard of from DW’s EiI blog. The other book of aphorisms I heard of thanks to EiI were those of NGD.
I got the books on Amazon.
At 16:00, I attended the Saturday Mass which was a Palm Sunday Mass.
You can see palms in the photo. We stood a long time as the story of Christ’s Passion was read. Father Oliver walked about the chapel blessing palms with holy water.
I was able to borrow some books from a K of C bookshelf and snag some palms that had been blessed.
Went to my two favorite places in Brandon.
I bought a book about the pitfalls of Spanish and a book by Sir Alec Guinness.
I then went to Saint Augustine’s to pray the stations of the cross. I had the place to myself.
Back in the day, I was fascinated by JD Salinger, not so much by his writing, as by his mystique. I found Catcher in the Rye to be annoying, and much more appreciated his Glass family stories. And his disappearance from the public view into Sasquatch like mysteriousness was what really held my fascination. I thought it was the greatest thing to find a copy of Catcher in the Rye that had his photo on it -- this was in the daze before the Internet.
But then I matured, and got more reactionary in my outlook, and so I forgot about him. I took note of him again when he died. I was able to see more pictures of him, and I assumed he was a family man who valued his privacy. I remember this detail about his thoughts about Burger King food being mentioned in a personal letter. It seemed his taste in food was pretty pedestrian.
At the recent Rotary book sale in Brandon, I bought a copy of his Nine Stories. I am not sure why I did other than an urge to see how it read after all these years. I had reread a novel by Henry Miller, another young-me fascination, and saw that that book had some literary merit.
Recently, I was listening to a Coffee and a Mike Podcast where JD Kunstler talked about his recently published novel which had Salinger as a character. Kunstler mentioned that there was this documentary about Salinger put out in 2013. Kunstler also discussed the details of Salinger's life. Salinger was a strange cat to say the least. In the next paragraph, I will go into the details. Suffice to say that Salinger was a man with literary ambitions who suffered from what they would call PSTD symptoms on account of his time in World War Two where he experienced and witnessed a lot of horrific things.
The podcast prompted me to find the documentary online and I watched it right away. The details, some of which I found surprising, I got from the documentary: Salinger, for a brief time, was married to a Nazi. Salinger did a bit to foster his reclusive turn on success image. Salinger was into Buddhism. Salinger had a mother who was Catholic. Salinger was meticulous in his writing: caring a lot about punctuation and being angered if editors added even one comma. Salinger remarried. Salinger had platonic relationships with young girls. Salinger was a better parent to his literary characters than to his real children. He built a bunker in the forest where he would spend weeks on end writing. Salinger was in combat for over 200 days and he apparently never got over it. Salinger had a girlfriend who married Charlie Chaplin. Salinger had another who was also in a relationship with Orson Welles. He tastes in Music included Lawrence Welk. He loved watching old movies.
The documentary was okay and included appearances by Gord Vidal, Martin Sheen, John Cusack, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman. The assassinations of John Lennon and Ronald Reagan were mentioned because the assassins had a fascination with Haulden Caufeld from Catcher in the Rye. However, we were never told what Salinger's reactions to these events were. In fact, the documentary came to an abrupt ending. And the documentary was a hodge-podge of styles, and facts thrown in without a consistent theme. The documentary ended with a promise of Salinger's unpublished writings that don't seem to have actually come out. It was a three stars out of four.
My ultimate assessment of Salinger. I appreciate his hatred of the modern world. However he could have better dealt with its phoniness if he had embraced Catholicism. This world is what it is and there has to be a better one we can aspire to it while we are in it.
It doesn’t seem to have snowed last night, but I’ll look at the backyard to be sure.
It hasn’t, so no shoveling today.
On David Warren’s recommendation, I’ll try to tackle this book:
It’s a thesis, I would like to be true.
Here are the books, AKIC and AKIC read in 2025:
Catechism of the Catholic Church
The Liturgical Year: Christmas by Dom Proper Gueranger
Selected Poems of Francis Thompso
The GK Chesterton Calendar
A year with Mary by Paul Thigpen
A Chesterton Calendar
The Book of English Verse 1250-1900
Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins
The Way by Jose Maria Escriva
Nicolás Gómez Dávila Aphorisms edited by AKIC
Escolios a un texto implicito by Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Scholia to an implicit text by Nicolás Gómez Dávila
Dave Collum’s 2025 Year in Review: Peak Prosperity
The Liturgical Year: Advent by Dom Proper Gueranger
Father Goirot by Honore de Balzac
The Land of the Dollar by G.W. Steevens
The Arabian Nights
An Open Letter to Open-Minded Progressives by Menicus Moldburg
Politics and the English Language by George Orwell
Values by Mark Carney
Reflections of a Russian Statesman by K.B. Pobyedonostseff
The Fellowship of the Ring by JRR Tolkien
The Two Towers by JRR Tolkien
The Return of the King by JRR Tolkien
On Prayer and the Contemplative Life by Saint Thomas Aquinas
Striving towards Being: The Letters of Thomas Merton and Czeslaw Milosz
Orthodox Daily Prayers
Way of the Samurai by Yukio Mishima
Ubik by Philip K. Dick
Miscellaneous Aphorisms by Oscar Wilde
The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany
Prayers of the Middle Ages: Light from a Thousand Years
Prayers of the Early Church
The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change
Genius of Christianity by Viscount De Chateaubriand
The Characters of Jean de La Bruyere
Lament for a Nation by George Grant
Moments of Insight for Busy People by Sister Angelita G. Marave
I'm afraid there are some books that i read but got deleted when I was coming to Canada.
I made these lists previously on my China blog.
I do have a few online classes to teach.
I have a fundraising thing to do on Sunday in Portage La Prairie. I’ll have to prepare for that.
I’ll have to recover from the three beers I had yesterday.
Page views have been down a lot on this blog recently. It must mean that my religiosity is warding off potential readers. Whatever! My videos still have okay numbers on WeChat, Though again, they have been getting no views on Rednote. Rednote is a very censorious platform. It will ban or block you on chat channels if you speak country names. It has been blocking me as well when I discuss marriage. On YouTube, I have my moments. There, I am close to having had three million views.
Here is my latest Youtube upload;
It is a Simone Weil quote on the unreality of evil. Recently, I have been doing the quotes with multiple cuts. That is, I have been recording a part of a quote at a time and then splicing the parts together.
I’ve started reading Dave Collum’s 2025 year in review. You can download it here.
It snowed a little last night.
