Today we turn the page in our Pocket University Guide to Daily Reading (1925).

Learn to be good readers– which is perhaps a more difficult thing than you imagine. Learn to be discriminative in your reading; to read faithfully, and with your best attention, all kinds of things which you have a real interest in.

Thomas Carlyle

Is it too grammar-Nazi to comment on “which you have a real interest in”?

An honest question. Can there be a tension between being discriminative, and the things in which you have a real interest? For example, recall that Missy is a most discriminating reader. She abhors pulp fiction. (She does not care for the movie, either). Her tastes run much more toward Literature. On the other hand, Rocky loves him a good detective story, especially British mysteries and detective stories, though he makes room for Ellery Queen. They are both voracious and faithful readers. Is one a better reader than the other?

Why, yes! I did get a new crappy old book in the mail yesterday. How’d you guess? Golden Multitudes: The Story of Best Sellers in the United States (1947).

Moving right along…

Today in the year 1922 it was Mother’s Day!

Daily Readings May 14

• Branch’s “Songs for My Mother“
• Emerson’s “Each and All“
• Carlyle’s “Battle of Dunbar” [from Cromwell’s Letters and Speeches]

Battle of Dunbar, September 3, 1750; Battle of Third English Civil War.

Britannica:

The execution of Charles I, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland, in January 1649 created a constitutional crisis. While England became a republic, the rest of Charles’s dominions—including five colonies in North America—recognized his eldest surviving son, Charles II, as king. The Scots mobilized an army to press his claims, but in June 1650 Cromwell decided on a preemptive strike and led the army of the English Republic toward Edinburgh. On his way up the country, it was reported that the only people Cromwell encountered were women, children, and old men, as Leslie had called all men of fighting age to Edinburgh. Leslie ultimately commanded a force of 23,000 troops to oppose Cromwell’s army of 11,000 infantry and cavalry. Leslie also had enacted a scorched-earth policy ahead of the English advance, and Cromwell’s plan to resupply his army by sea was frustrated by foul weather.

Cromwell, after a war of maneuver near Edinburgh, was compelled by heavy rain and want of supplies to withdraw to Dunbar.

Here’s Poetry Foundation’s biography of Carlyle. Be forewarned, its TL/DR and to me looks to have been written by at least two, if not three people, and quite possibly not edited for years. (“By 1985, 12 volumes of the Duke-Edinburgh edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle… (Duke University Press), had appeared. Volumes 13 through 15 are expected in 1987,… .”) Skim it if you’re interested.