John’s Blog

Christmas Stories

Nutcracker cover

I was twelve when I first saw The Nutcracker performed. It was a community production presented in the high school auditorium by The Little Ballet Theater, the local ballet school in my hometown. The Sugarplum Fairy was portrayed by a girl in my class named Tricia. To be perfectly honest, she was the entire reason why the twelve-year-old son of a commercial fisherman in a Pacific Northwest fishing and logging town paid for a ticket and sat through the entire performance of the first ballet he had ever seen and about which he previously knew nothing more than that the name of it sounded very much like something he dreaded happening during dodgeball in P.E.

The Argonautica of Apollonius Rhodius

Argonautica cover

For those who might not know it, my first and still true scholarly love is not in fact natural history but rather the classics. Indeed, I took up the study of religion at university due to the fact that it was the department in which I could study Greek. However, life being what it is, I “chose a different path” after my undergraduate studies and for some years have neglected my studies in that area. Realizing this and determining to rectify this neglect, I have recently returned to my reading again this subject area.

Stig Dagerman’s German Autumn

John in Victoria recropped

For the first review to be published in my new “all sorts” blog, I’ve chosen Stig Dagerman’s eye-opening as well as discomfiting collection of reports from post-World War II Germany titled German Autumn.

Something New

John in Victoria recropped

Like most – if not, in fact, all – of you, I read much more widely than just books of natural history. And just as I do with those I read for review in The Well-read Naturalist, I write reviews of them as well. My problem has been that I haven’t been able to find an appropriate way to bring those reviews to a public readership.

Mastodon