Category Archives: Carlyle

Bible study, Carlyle, Church History Novels, Documenting America, Genealogy, goals, poetry, The Candy Store Generation

2024: Possible Writing Projects

January 5, 2024 David Todd Leave a comment

In my last post, recapping my 2023 writing work, I said that my next post would be goals for 2024. But before I set those goals, I want to take a moment to think through all the writing projects I have going. Some are actually in progress, some are close to the surface, others were started and buried in the past. Still others are nascent, just starting to come together in my mind. They may never get beyond the idea stage, but they are there. I need to talk through this, think about what I can accomplish given life constraints. Bear with me though this thinking-out-loud post.

So here are the projects worth putting in the mix for actual goals for 2024.

Finish editing A Walk Through Holy Week, Part 1. I’m almost there right now.
Write Parts 2, 3, and 8 of A Walk Through Holy Week. Publish Part 2.
Pull Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution into book form and publish it as a stand-alone book.
Reasearch (and possibly write) the next book in the Documenting America series. I have two possibilities for what the next one will be. Both need reading for research.
The next book in the Church History Novels series. I’ve identified what it will be and have brainstormed the plot. But nothing is yet on paper.
Transcribe the letters from our years in Saudi Arabia—maybe just half of them this year.
Next book in The Forest Throne series. I have made a minor start on it and discussed the plot with my granddaughter, who is my consultant on this volume. But this is unlikely to happen in 2024, unless it’s late in the year and after much other work is completed.
Begin the Alfred Cottage mysteries. I have made a minor start on the first volume and have planned out the series.
Update The Candy Store Generation for recent data and republish. I think this is about a two-week project.
Flesh out One Of My Wishes, a hoped-for poetry book. I made a start on this and have it half done. But the hard part remains.
A genealogy book. I’m torn between two books in the Cheney family. One has much research done and is mainly writing left. The other requires research from scratch.
One of the two books about Thomas Carlyle I’ve started. One I think I could have done with a month of intense work. The other I started and laid aside so many years ago, I’m not sure where I was on it, though possibly 60 percent done.
And last, take some time to decide what to do about a tentative project, Nature, The Artwork Of God. I’ve been thinking about this for a few months. It seems like it would be a good book. In some ways it’s a bit scary to think I could write a book that blends science and religion, so I’m going to take a long time to ponder this. I think that at most this year I’ll complete some reading research and flesh out a table of contents.

I’m not saying all of these are things I’ll work on in 2024. I’m just trying to figure out what are real prospects for this year. For sure I’ll be pondering these projects over the next few days, as I have been for nearly two weeks, and will have some firm goals for the year set in my next post.

Carlyle, family, holidays, home improvements, The Forest Throne

This Piece of the Universe, This Section of Eternity

November 27, 2023 David Todd Leave a comment

Games were on the schedule over Thanksgiving week.

Oops! I didn’t make a post on Friday, the first time in a long time to totally miss a day. I’ve been late a few times, but I didn’t even think of the blog.

What captured my attention? Family. Our daughter, son-in-law, and their four children came in Monday evening and left on Saturday. Our son and his husband came in on Wednesday, delayed a day due to airplane troubles. We had the normal Thanksgiving meal on Thursday, followed by a 1.6 mile hike on a trail loop near us (part of the route is on city streets).

Some of us put together a 1,000 piece puzzle. Some played games. We had other meals and conversation. Once I got up early to get grandson #1, Ephraim, out on his run on our semi-rural streets. Two other times I drove him to a track in Bentonville, where he ran timed miles. The first time he equaled his personal best. The second time he beat that by about 7 seconds, setting a new personal best.

With #2 grandson, Ezra, I drove to the airport on Wednesday to pick up our son and his husband. That gave us some time to talk. He also helped me work in the yard on Tuesday. He and a friend of mine about his age, Liam, helped me move some large logs, both cut and deadfall, and cut out some wild thorn bushes that encroach on the blackberries. He earned his money. I also had him doing some leaf blowing, which he seemed to enjoy.

With granddaughter, Elise, I had a lot of conversation. We worked together on the plot of the next book in The Forest Throne series. This will feature the one daughter in the Wagner family, Elizabeth. Elise and I worked out a prologue and discussed various plot lines. Tomorrow I will put some of those into a word document, filed away for writing a couple of books from now.

The 2023 photo, perhaps never to be done again.

With my youngest grandson, Elijah, I had a good time with a little roughhousing. We read together, and I gave him his first word exercise, now that he’s in 1st grade. He’s still a lot of fun, and wanted to work in the yard like others did. Almost all the baby toys we had for the kids are too young for him (and obviously the others), so I’ll be getting rid of them.

In the late evenings, after the games, puzzles, or whatever, we watched back episodes of Shark Tank. The three youngest kids seemed to enjoy it a lot, as did some of the adults. Mornings started with 30 minutes of reading. Ezra chose The Fellowship of the Ring, which is certainly a challenge for anyone, let alone a 12-year-old.

Saturday morning, as our daughter’s family were soon to leave, I remembered we had not yet recreated the photo from 2019 of me and all four kids. We shot that photo because at that time, a popular Facebook activity was to post photo comparisons from 2009 and 2019, ten years later. In 2009, I was on the floor reading to Ephraim, who was our only grandchild at the time. So we did a posed shot of me and the four grandkids on the floor. We wanted to do that again, and we just did fit it in before the trip was over. This is likely the last time we will ever get to do that shot.

Saturday, once our daughter’s family was gone, we had a quiet day with our son (his husband having left on Friday for business). We watched a couple of movies, ate leftovers for lunch, read, and went out for a simple dinner. An early morning airport run on roads we expected to have some frozen stuff on them turned out to be easy. Came home, rested, went to church to an excellent worship service.

Yesterday. I got back into reading Thomas Carlyle’s letters. He was visiting places in his native Scotland. In a letter he named the place he was at and said that this place was a piece of the universe and the time of his visit was a section of eternity. The place and time, “is very beautiful; doubly beautiful to me whose head has long simmered half-mad with brick wildernesses, dust, smoke, and loud-roaring confusion that meant little.”

That’s kind of how I feel. The last week, Thanksgiving, was doubly beautiful for taking me out of my routines. Today I’ll be back at it: writing in the Bible study in progress, trading stocks, doing housework. But last week will always be doubly beautiful, and I will think about it for a long time.

book reviews, Carlyle, letters

Book Review: Carlyle Letters Online

September 18, 2023 David Todd Leave a comment

Regular readers of this blog (all two or three of you) know that I love letters. Not just to receive them, or write them, but to read them in historical collections. Some years ago, I acquired electronic files of Carlyle’s letters with Ralph Waldo Emerson. Somewhere I picked up a print copy of one of the two volumes, and then a print copy of other letters of his.

The Carlyle Letters Online is a project I’ve used frequently, with many hours of pleasurable reading and research.

From an internet search, I learned about the Carlyle Letters Online. This is a project to put all of the letters of Thomas and Jane Carlyle online in a searchable and highly usable database. This followed the print edition of the letters, which took place from 1970 to 2023, is composed of 50 volumes.

The online version began in 1999. By that time, many letters by the Carlyles that had escaped earlier detection and collection had been found. The number of letters in the online collection is over 9,000 in all, more by Thomas than by Jane.

This review is really only over the first ten volumes of the online collection. which cover the period from 1812 to 1838. I have no idea if I will ever get to the other 40 volumes. In fact, I confess to not having read every letter in Volumes 1, 2, and 3. At that time, I was trying to find letters about specific topics. Beginning with Volume 4, I have read every letter in each volume. It’s taken me a few years to do this, reading one or two letters many nights right before going to bed.

Many of the letters are to family members. Though Carlyle was a man of letters, in the volumes I’ve read, there weren’t many letters to literary men. There were some, of course. By 1838, Carlyle was just starting to gain a following. Soon his circle would expand and include more than Emerson, Mills, and Sterling. I’m anxious to get into those letters.

Thomas often writes in typical Victorian language: flowery, hard to understand, complicated sentences, many references that are now obscure. Sometimes the letters were hard to understand, at least beginning to end. He used a lot of private references we would call coterie speech.

A sample of how using the index works. Very useful and efficient.

Fortunately, the CLO has copious footnotes on many subject, making the obscure more understandable. It also has a good indexing system. A few years back the index showed on each letter—links to the items in the letter that were indexed. Type about anything Carlyle-related in the index and it brings up results with links to the letters you’ll find that item in. The illustration with this paragraph shows an example of references to one of Carlyle’s less well-known essays.

I don’t know how much time I’m going to put into reading these letters for a while. After finishing Vol. 10 I’m taking some time off from reading them. Oh, I still open the database from time to time and read a letter. I’ll get back to it in a bigger way, maybe next year some time.

While the collecting of the Carlyles’ letters took over a century, and is not over yet, it’s a massive project that has a very specialized audience. I don’t necessarily recommend people rush out and buy either the print letters or start perusing the online letters. For me, they are a source of pleasurable reading.

book reviews, Carlyle

Book Review: Mr. Froude and Carlyle

July 14, 2023 David Todd Leave a comment

This book claims Froude did a poor job on the bio he wrote of Carlyle, but could Froude be right and Wilson wrong?

I have been reading more and more and more books on my phone lately (my Nook having reached obsolescence a year ago). I’m always reading a print book, or two, but I enjoy the convenience of having the e-books available wherever I am.

One of these books I finished in May. Mr. Froude and Carlyle, by David Wilson. Published in 1898, seventeen years after Carlyle’s death, the book appears to have been written to counter the four-volume biography of Caryle that James Anthony Froude had written and published in the mid-1880s.

It seems that Froude, at least in Wilson’s mind, had been very hard on Carlyle. But that was only in relation to Carlyle’s wife, Jane. It seems that Wilson thought that Jane could do no wrong and Thomas no right whenever there was a dispute between them. Wilson didn’t like that. He took up each of those disputes and re-cast it as favorable to Thomas and negative to Jane.

I have not yet read Froude’s four-volume work. After having read Wilson’s book, I started on Froude’s but haven’t read very far into it yet. That Froude’s biography of Carlyle would be inaccurate is puzzling, since it was an authorized bio and Froude had access to all of both Thomas’s and Jane’s papers.

I found the book a bit comical. Wilson wrote it in a format something like this:

Froude wrote about this incident in 1848, indicating how Thomas treated Jane shabbily.
But I, Wilson, have looked into that incident and in fact it was Jane who was in the wrong.
How could Froude have been so far off the mark? He must have wanted to run Thomas down.
Oh, and Froude regularly redacted critical information from letters or journals. Shame on him.

I’m anxious to get further into Foude’s book to see if it’s as lopsided against Thomas as Wilson said. I began that book at Volume 3, because all of Wilson’s examples were in that time period or later. For the 60 pages I’ve read in it, I can find no fault.

This book by Wilson is something that would be of interest only to Carlyle scholars and amateur scholars, like me. It’s certainly not worth picking up and reading for anyone else.

Carlyle, Church History Novels, Documenting America, The Forest Throne, The Gutter Chronicles, Writing

The Lasting Effects of “Genre Focus Disorder”

April 24, 2023 David Todd 2 Comments

I’m hoping that, by the end of the year, this will not be the only Bible study in my bibliography. Alas, I wrote that caption in 2022, and here it is 2023 and it’s still my only published Bible study. But I’m much closer to that goal.

Since early February, my main writing focus has been the Bible study on Holy Week that I developed. I wrote about it here. With a good writing day Saturday, reaching back to work on Part 5 (Part 7 being caught up), I got to the point where I can see light at the end of the tunnel on both Part 5 and Part 7. An introduction for the series, to go in the as-yet-un-started Part 1 also came to me this weekend.

Thus, it’s time to be thinking about the next thing to write. The second book in The Forest Throne series, The Key To Time Travel, is done, just waiting on cover creation. I will most likely give it the once over, checking to make sure the dates are correct. That’s a one-day task at most.

This was one of my two new publications in 2022. The sequel will be out within two months. When will I do the next one?

Somewhere around June 1, I will be looking to start something else—unless I take a month off from writing to do some major decluttering work, in which case July is the more likely date for writing something new. I actually started something else last week, the first volume in the Alfred Cottage Mysteries. That was mainly to have something to bring to critique group. I don’t know if I’m ready to begin work on it as yet.

But what do I write next? My Genre Focus Disorder (GFD) is so severe, I have any one of several directions to turn. I’ve spoken about GFD before, and if I can find the posts, I’ll put in a couple of links. It is a self-defined, self-diagnosed writing condition. It’s the inability to stick to one genre and build an audience in it. I’ve got it bad. I’ve met a few other writers with it, but I believe their cases are less severe than mine. Now that it’s time to pick a new direction to go in, what do I choose?

This was the last volume published in my Church History Novels series. When Ill I do the 5th?

I could write the next book in the Documenting America series. I have sold more in that series than any other. I did the reading research for the next volume, which will be titled Documenting America: Run-Up To Revolution, around two years ago. Hopefully my notes are comprehensive enough that I can jump right into the writing.

Or how about the next book in the Church History Novels series? I have four books in that complete. That’s my second-best selling series (which isn’t saying much). I know what the next volume will be about, though I’m not sure of the title yet. Actually, I know what the next three or four books in the series will be.

It’s been a long time since I wrote most of the poems in this, around 2005-6, I think.

Then there’s a book of poetry I’d like to write. It’s tentatively titled On Of My Wishes. I created the document last year and grabbed close to 30 poems from my “inventory” that will fit the theme. Alas, inspiration for the 20 to 30 others I need to write to flesh out the book hasn’t come. I’ve been so busy with prose, poetry is almost a distant memory. Could I rekindle the desire to write it, at least for one more book?

I could keep going with the Holy Week Bible study. I’ve completed Parts 4 and 6, and, as I said earlier, and very close to done with Parts 5 and 7. That leaves Parts 1, 2, 3, and 8 to be written. I could just continue on with them while that’s what’s been on my mind. Or, I have another ten Bible studies developed and taught, and a few more in development that would probably make decent books. Maybe that’s where I should go.

I have one Carlyle book published and two more started. And essays about him on my mind. It’s probably an obsession that I ought to get treatment for.

A couple of other non-fiction projects I started on are about Thomas Carlyle. One was a comprehensive, chronological bibliography. I’m well along with that, maybe 70 percent of the work, with the hardest parts complete. I pulled the document up Saturday evening to check to see if I had a certain of his compositions in it. I did, including documentation from his letters. Also, I began putting together a book about Carlyle’s Chartism, a pivotal work for him I believe. That may also be around 70 percent done, though I haven’t looked at it for at least five years. Why do either one of them, when the one volume about Carlyle that I edited and published doesn’t sell? Beats me. Mainly to complete unfinished projects. I hate leaving things unfinished.

A period of intense research is what led to this book. What will come of this new time of research?

Another thing that’s nagging at me is a genealogy book about my wife’s immigrant ancestor, John Cheney of Newbury, Massachusetts. I actually have much work done on it as far as research of his personal life is concerned. I researched, wrote, and published books about two of his descendants. I’d like to do a book about him, and maybe about four or five more about his children. This is more a dream, a hobby almost. Still, I’d like to get that done.

I could always stick with the Alfred Cottage Mysteries. They are cozy mysteries based on young Alfred’s genealogical studies. For some reason, I think they would sell. More dreaming, I guess.

One more short story to go in this already published collection has come to mind. Maybe that will be next?

And that’s not all that’s available for me to add to. The Gutter Chronicles could use a third volume. Ideas for series that I’ve fleshed out include The Waterville Dome, one about stock trading that’s partly planned, and…it seems that I’m forgetting something else. Oh, yes, the next two volumes in The Forest Throne series. The next one is partly planned out. And I haven’t even mentioned short stories.

See what I mean about Genre Focus Disorder? Maybe I do need to take that month off from writing, get some serious decluttering/dis-accumulation done, then see where to go. Whatever I decide, I’ll report it here.

Bible study, books, Carlyle, Christianity, Emerson

A Coincidence of Reading

January 16, 2023 David Todd Leave a comment

I completed this book yesterday, from a Word doc from Project Gutenberg, uploaded to my Kindle library. My second reading of it.

I’m usually reading several things at once. I have a reading pile in the sunroom, where I go around noon most days to get a break from my tasks. That reading usually consists of printed books, and sometimes a magazine. I have a reading pile in the living room as well, and a basket of magazines I’m way behind on. This is usually evening reading, after all else is done for the day.

Then there’s my phone, through which I read using a Kindle app, a Nook app, and Google books. My phone I might use anywhere, and the things I read on it usually are easier reads. That may not be the best description. But I think they take a little less concentration and can be read in places such as waiting rooms, restaurants, coffee shops, etc. Any place I have a few minutes and want to engage my mind with more than people watching.

So yesterday, I read a little more than normal, and to my surprise, I finished reading four different items on the same day. How odd is that?

I always enjoy reading Poets & Writers magazine, and, on those rare occasions when I buy an issue, I read it slowly, enjoying each article. I even look at the ads.

In the sunroom, I finished reading an issue of Poets & Writers magazine. I buy one of these at Barnes & Noble from time to time. While this mag is very much oriented towards the Master of Fine Arts crowd and is far from my writing world, I enjoy it more than other writing mags. Anyway, I had only two pages left in this particular issue, and finished those pages yesterday. At a future writers meeting I will pass this along to someone.

Still in the sunroom, I next looked at an essay I’ve been slogging through on Jesus’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem. Years ago I downloaded this from the Bulletin for Biblical Research and printed it (at a time when the company I worked for had a generous policy of making personal copies). I may have read most of it before but, having come across it in a notebook while working on my near-continuous dis-accumulation efforts, I decided it was time to read it, absorb what it said, and get rid of it. The essay is about 60 pages long, heavily footnoted.

While I enjoyed reading it, the article was a bit of a chore to get through. When I started yesterday, I had about ten pages left to read. Maybe I had come to an easier part of the magazine, or maybe my mind was better engaged, but I got through those last pages. I’m not quite ready to discard the sheets, but within a couple of months I’ll extract the info I need from it to go into a future Bible study I plan to write.

Then, in the evening, I finished the last nine pages (of 633 total) in a biography of David Livingstone. This tome took me three months to get through, though admittedly I laid it aside several times to read other things. Other than the small print, and smaller print on the extensive quotes from Livingstone’s letters and journal, it wasn’t a hard read. Ten pages at a time was fairly easy to get through. And if I hadn’t been reading other things simultaneously, I think I would have been able to finish this in a month. It’s done now, and will likely take two blog posts to review.

Lastly, I finished re-reading Volume 1 of the correspondence between Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Years ago, long before Google Books and Kindle, I found this at Project Gutenberg, downloaded both volumes, and formatted them in Word for a blend between tight printing and easy reading. Using those printing privileges, I printed them and put them in notebooks. Meanwhile, I have recently learned how easy it is to upload a Word document to Kindle for your personal library. I did that with Vol. 1.

As I’ve said many times before, I love reading letters. Wanting something “light” for those odd moment reads, I sent this to Kindle and began reading it perhaps a month ago. I found it delightful, as I did perhaps 20 years ago. Yesterday, I came to the end of Volume 1.

This is sort of waste-of-time reading, since I have so many things to get through. But it was quite enjoyable. I was able to read it fairly quickly, including in the hospital last week with Lynda. At some point yesterday, I read a letter by Emerson to Carlyle, and was surprised to find it the last in the volume. So I promptly found Vol 2 on my computer and uploaded it to my Kindle library. Not sure when I will start this.

So, that’s the story of the strange circumstances that had me finishing four very different reads on the same day. It’s unlikely to ever happen again.

Time to pick up some new reads. One I’m already 40 pages into. What else will I pick up next?

Bible study, Carlyle, Christianity, Church History Novels, critique group, Documenting America, Genealogy

Casting About

May 16, 2022 David Todd Leave a comment

The Centennial book is done. I have my copies in hand. Full distribution starts on Sunday May 22.

Ack! It’s almost 11 a.m. and I’m just now getting to writing my blog post for today. Something must be wrong with me.

Yes, something is wrong with me. I’ve been too busy. It began last Thursday, when a Zoom meeting about our upcoming church Centennial celebration was still going strong after 2 1/2 hours, and I hit a wall. I couldn’t go on. I abruptly ended the meeting, took a break, and a few hours later got back to the task we had been working on—now alone. Yes, I still work better alone than with someone else.

Not the final cover, but some thoughts I had on a draft. The artist is working on it.

Friday and Saturday are blurs to me now. I know some heavy yardwork and a daily walk were involved. I had a number of e-mails about the Centennial, also about There’s No Such Thing As Time Travel. Saturday evening was taken up with study to teach Life Group on Sunday morning. Sunday was the usual church, Life group, fast-food takeout. Then we went to the high school graduation reception for our neighbors’ daughter. Through a comedy of errors (which included my not understanding the invitation), that took us a while to even get there. Back home, tiredness set in and I didn’t get a lot done during the afternoon. In the evening I went back to the Centennial work I have been tasked with, and got a little more done. I also did some in-depth critiquing of a piece send by a member of our critique group. This morning, the first thing I did was finish that critique and e-mail it to her.

Back on TNSTATT, we must finalize the book cover, create the publication files (e-book and print book), decide whether it will be on Amazon only or go “wide” to other publishers. I think it was on Friday that I got most of the final formatting done. Today I re-read a couple of the later chapters and made a few edits. I declared it done around 8:15 a,m. and began the final formatting. This includes such things as adding in a listing of my other books which, for some reason, is never up-to-date. I spent time getting it up-to-date, and creating a system for keeping it up-to-date henceforth.

I have another hour and a half of work on the print book, then an hour or so on the e-book. Then I will be ready to work on something else. What will it be?

I ought to get back to the second of two Bible studies I was writing, as described in this post. I had pulled off the second while waiting on feedback on the first. But last night I learned that the man I sent it to for review never got the e-mail. I re-sent it last night, confirmed he got it, and so now I wait. I may get back to that. The Scribblers & Scribes meet this Thursday evening, and I’d like to have something to share. But what? I’m not sure they will want to review and critique pages of a Bible study.

Or, I may start on something completely new. I don’t want to go into too much detail. Tentatively titled Tales Of A Vagabond, it would be the start of an autobiography. I actually started it when I realized I needed to write my blog post.

Whatever I ultimately do with Tales Of A Vagabond, I know that finishing the two Bible studies will be my next main writing tasks. But after that, what? I’m kind of itching to do some work on a genealogy book about one of Lynda’s ancestors. My two partly-complete and temporarily-abandoned Thomas Carlyle books are starting to look attractive again. There’s always the next Documenting America book, for which I have completed the research. If TNSTATT takes off, I may hop right on Book 2 in that series. I just don’t know.

That’s not really the full list. I will be taking time soon to pray about this and see if I get some divine direction. The problem is, God has never given me such specific guidance. He usually leaves it up to me, and I have learned to pray that he would direct my footsteps as I make the best decisions I can. I suspect this will be one of those times.

book reviews, Carlyle

Book Review: Sartor Resartus

January 28, 2021 David Todd Leave a comment

Of the many books, essays, and articles written by 19th Century British author Thomas Carlyle, perhaps none is more iconic than Sartor Resartus: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdröckh. Written in 1830 and 1831, serialized in 1833-34, published in the USA in 1836 and in Great Britain in 1938, Carlyle’s life changed from landed poverty to the beginning of success by the time it came out in London. Throughout Carlyle’s life it grew in popularity. The year he died it sold seventy-thousand copies in an inexpensive edition. For the life of me I don’t know why.

This photo shows Carlyle perhaps close to the age when he wrote “Sartor”.

I’m slowly working my way through Carlyle’s works, in the chronological order they were written. About five weeks ago I came up to Sartor. Having read little bits of it and knowing it was a hard book to understand, I waited a little while before tackling it. Finally I did, reading an e-book version. At times I read with good concentration; at other times I read in distracted conditions. Generally when I did the latter, I went back and re-read the section again in a quieter time. Did I understand it better? Alas, no. The more I read, the more I determined to stick with it and understand it, the more I would zone out after five or ten minutes.

I have no idea what the purpose of the book is/was. The fictitious professor, Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, is said to have written a (fictitious) book on the philosophy of clothes. That much I knew before I read it. But in the book, I found precious little about clothes. D.T.’s life history is given. His lost love is described. Endless words describe…endless nonsense. Or so to me it seems like nonsense.

I purposely didn’t read commentary on Sartor before reading it, allowing me to get it for myself. But I didn’t “get it.” I found the flow of ideas almost unintelligible. I think Emerson said it well in his first letter to Carlyle in 1834: “I have now received four numbers of the Sartor Resartus…has literature any parallel to the oddity of the vehicle chosen to convey this treasure? I delight in the contents; the form, which my defective apprehension for a joke makes me not appreciate, I leave to your merry discretion. And yet did ever wise and philanthropic author use so defying a diction?” If Emerson had problems with it I guess I’m in good company. To give you an idea of the difficulty of reading Sartor, go back and read the second sentence in this review. I purposely made that complex. Yet, it would be one of the simpler sentences in Sartor.

Carlyle’s early works I understood well. The further into his career, he found his “diction” and “style” and became less understandable. His pivotal work as to style was his essay “Novalis”. I had to read and reread that to understand what Carlyle was saying. I read it all thrice and parts of it four times and felt that I came to a basic understanding of it. The essays between that and Sartor were a mix of difficulty and clear writing. But Sartor made “Novalis” seem like a Little Golden Book.

I can’t give Sartor any more than 2-stars. Perhaps, if I read it again as planned, and come to a better understanding, I’ll come back and edit this review. If I had a paper copy of Sartor, I would keep it as part of my larger Carlyle collection, but not because I think it’s good. I’ll re-read it again someday, probably in the near future. Perhaps I’ll even understand it.

ancient letters, Carlyle, Documenting America, letters, self-publishing, The Teachings, Writing

Still Not Making a Lot of Progress

October 2, 2020 David Todd Leave a comment

Dateline 1 Oct 2020

“Adam Of Jerusalem” is a prequel to “Doctor Luke’s Assistant”, and is the first in my church history novel series. “The Teachings” fits in as book 3 of the series.

In January of this year I began writing The Teachings, the third (chronologically) novel in my Church History series. I had been reading for research some time before that. I worked on it consistently through January and February, then bogged down in March. My problem was I wanted to be historically accurate to events in 66-70 A.D., but didn’t want to overdo the historical stuff and not have the novel interesting for the characters and the plot. I started re-reading my main source, Josephus, but that just made me more uncertain of how to proceed.

So, as I have a habit of doing, I went to another project, my family history/genealogy research into the children of John Cheney of Newbury (1600?-1666). Genealogy research is always a pleasure and I figured it would be a brief, rejuvenating diversion. Some years ago I began this work on his youngest child, Elizabeth, who married the mariner Stephen Cross of Ipswich. I found much about them (mainly about Stephen, but that helped define Elizabeth’s life as well), and realized it would be a stand-alone book about them. I brought that book to about 60 pages in 2018, then set it aside. In March I picked it up again as the diversion, and by April 3 I had it up to around 80 pages and, I thought, close to finished.

The colonies did well governing themselves, until the King of England tried to impose new government on them. Resistance to that became the seeds of the American Revolution.

On April 3, Lynda went into the hospital with her burst appendix and was in 19 days, requiring two surgeries. It didn’t look good for a while. Since due to the pandemic I couldn’t be with her at the hospital, to keep myself occupied I worked feverishly on the Cross-Cheney book. Before long I had it up over 100 pages. Lynda finally came home though was still weak and recuperating. I got the book up to 116 pages, polished it, and published it. So far, with 1 sale, it’s doing about as expected. A few of the figures were of poor quality, so I haven’t advertised it to the Cross or Cheney genealogy boards and won’t till I get those figures replaced.

After getting my diversion done, it should have been back to The Teachings, right? Well, a little bit. But soon I was working on another diversion. It started as decluttering, going through the many papers my mother-in-law left behind at her death. But that soon evolved into transcribing our Kuwait years letters. That took the better part of August and early September. That’s now done. I will someday turn that into a book for my children and grandchildren. That will take editing, adding commentary, and illustrating it with photos. I don’t see doing more on that for the rest of this year—although, I don’t rule out occasionally opening the file and adding some commentary.

Published in 2011, I really need to do something with this, update it for later publications and correct some formatting errors. So, I began the editing work in early September 2020, and hope to re-publish by the end of September.

That brought me up to mid-September. Time now to work on The Teachings. Except I still didn’t feel like it. I decided I would take another Amazon Ad Challenge in October, and that I would focus on the first Documenting America book as the next to advertise. But this book needed significant work. It was the first I published, long before I understood formatting. I also figured I should add new material to bring the book up to date for 2020. I worked on this the second half of September, and began the re-publishing process on Sept. 28th. The last couple of days have been sufficiently busy with life that I haven’t had much time to work on it. But that’s now a today task for the e-book. I’ll have the proof copy of the print book on Saturday, so by Sunday Oct 4 the re-publishing process should be complete.

Then what? Work on The Teachings, finally? Maybe, maybe not. I want to get the Cross-Cheney book figures corrected and that book re-published and advertised. There’s always file maintenance. Plus, evenings in front of the television, I do e-mail “maintenance” and saving my correspondence to Word documents. That’s a tedious but fun process, something I can do multi-tasking, a non-urgent item to make progress on. But next on the list of items I posted on Monday is The Teachings. Will I finally get back to this?

Today, instead of working on finishing the Documenting America changes, I dusted off my Thomas Carlyle Bibliography. Last night, as part of my TV-watching-multitasking, I opened the Carlyle Letters On-line and read a couple of letters. I discovered a short translation he did of a Goethe autobiographical passage that wasn’t in my list of his writings or publications. How could this possibly be? I have three other full Carlyle bibliographies, plus a partial bibliography that covers the period in question. Why would they leave this out? I documented it on paper and, since it was late, went to bed.

This morning, as my first item of business after devotions, was to add this entry in my bibliography. First, however, I found the document on-line, at a previously unknown (to me) site called the Biodiversity Heritage Library. Sure enough, in the January 1832 issue was the Carlyle translation. I checked the two thick bibliographies on my shelf and confirmed that this composition wasn’t in it. Maybe they didn’t add it because it’s a translation with just a paragraph of Carlyle commentary rather than an original piece? Maybe so, but those bibliographies include his other translations. I added all this to my bibliography. While I was at this, I found an essay on Carlyle I hadn’t seen before and downloaded it for future reading.

The fact that I keep pulling off my novel in favor of other, less important publishing tasks, is perhaps testimony that I’m not thrilled with how the novel is going. Or that it’s consuming a lot more brain power and I’m unwilling to expend that brain power at present. I’m not sure what it is, but, if I ever hope to get this novel completed and published, I need to get on it. Even if it takes a lot of brain power.

Stay tuned to find out if I manage to get to it.

Carlyle, reading, research, self-publishing, Writing

Still Reading Thomas Carlyle

April 1, 2019 David Todd Leave a comment

My first book on Thomas Carlyle, published 2014

Most of my posts lately have been related to my immediate works-in-progress or my other reading, with an occasional dabble in an inspirational post. I have a thought for the latter, based on study for yesterday’s Life Group lesson. I’m not quite ready for that yet.

So, I’ll stick with what I intended to post about today, which is my current reading in the writings of Thomas Carlyle. It’s been a while since I’ve written about him. “Carlyle” is a category for my blog posts, so you could easily check and see what I’ve written about him before.

I have published one book about him, a gathering and reprinting of his articles written 1820-1823 for the Edinburgh Encyclopedia. So far as I know, my book is the only time all his articles for that publication have been gathered in one publication.

I’ve been slowly, over several years, working on two other books about Carlyle. One is about his book Chartism. The other is a Comprehensive Chronological Composition Bibliography. Both of these works have stalled, mostly because they are simply lower on my writing priority list than others. Perhaps that will change one day, but it’s the case for now.

Carlyle changed from being a compassionate man to a promoter of slavery. How that change came about is the subject of my Carlyle studies.

But I’m back to reading him. From 1827 to 1833 Carlyle’s main writing was a series of articles for the Edinburgh Review and other literary magazines. Emerson gathered these and published them in three volumes around 1839. It was so popular in the USA that a British edition soon followed. Today they are considered one of Carlyle’s major works.

I’ve read a couple of the articles before, and started a couple more, but never got very far with it what have come to be called Carlyle’s Miscellanies. I haven’t wanted to put money into buying them in print (or e-book), and had never found an e-copy of good quality of a public domain version. About two weeks ago I went looking for them again, and, lo and behold, I found an e-book re-issue of the essays, of excellent quality, all in one volume, I think.

I’m reading them on my smart phone. That’s not a totally new experience, since I recently read Locke’s Two Treatises of Government on my smart phone. Still, reading books on phones will be somewhat new for a while. I’m enjoying it there, however. I turn the phone sideways and slightly enlarge each page to fill the window. So far I’ve read two of the essays, the first two in chronological order: “Jean Paul Friedrich Richter” and “State of German Literature”, both from the Edinburgh Review in 1827. I finished the second one last night.

Why am I doing this? Why distract myself from my writing or research for my writing. I can only plead a reduction in sanity, or perhaps an increase in delusion. I sometimes think myself a scholar and want to read something that either is or seems to be scholarly. Carlyle seems to fit. And, in case I ever do get around to finishing that Chartism book, these readings might actually play a part in it.

The Richter article was easy enough to understand, and I found it informative and even enjoyable. The German Literature article was tedious, even boring. I think this is where I bogged down before in my reading of his essays. The book has some good parts to it. I think I would grasp more with another reading. Carlyle, like so many writers of his time, wished to write poetry along with prose. He left a number of poems to us, none of which are highly thought of. I may pull out some of his thoughts on German poetry, really about poetry in general, and see if I couldn’t make essays out of them.

Queued up on my phone is his third essay in the book, “Life and Writings of Werner”. I don’t believe I’ve rad this one before. I don’t know Werner, so am not looking forward to reading it, except to know it will perhaps sate my need to be reading something intellectual. If I can get through this third essay, there’s hope that I will get through the entire book.

Meanwhile, should you buy and read my previous book on Carlyle? I’m really just an editor in that book. I wouldn’t recommend it, not unless you want to make study of Carlyle a significant intellectual enterprise. If you do, be forewarned that, after publication, I found an embarrassing error in the chapter on Pascal. I corrected it in the e-book, but it remains in the print book, awaiting my taking the half-hour needed to make the correction and republish. Seeing as I have to migrate all my print books from CreateSpace to Amazon KDP, I’m planning to get that correction done during the migration.

David A Todd