As usual, I’m unsure about conclusions from my year in reading. There is no advance plan apart from challenging myself (cupcakes are fine here and there), and I wing it as the days pass.
However 2024 incorporated innovation, in the sense that for the first time in a long while I permitted myself to reread a few books from the generally distant past, all of which I’d characterize as influential.
In each instance, I was amazed at how much I’d retained.
Bruce Catton’s “Army of the Potomac” trilogy of Mr. Lincoln’s Army, Glory Road and A Stillness at Appomattox was a Christmas gift, circa 1970. I was a Civil War buff as a kid, and read my way through most of the public library’s stock. Catton was not an academic historian, and his focus on the “great men” is discredited nowadays.
But Catton could tell one hell of a story, a skill in part gleaned from listening to Civil War veterans spin yarns in the ......
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