For my final book of 2022, I read Hemingway’s For Whom The Bell Tolls. I had 5 days to finish my 100th book and asked Elle to pick one off my shelf. She picked this classic that I read over ten years ago, and it was a joy to revisit it and take my time reading it. While it’s not my favorite Hemingway, and I find parts of the novel offputting (like the antiquated mawkish dialogue and the self-censorship), when the book is good, it’s very good.
Next year I am recommitting to another 100 books. This newsletter was an incredibly helpful accountability tool - so thank you to everyone that read with me along the way or even just signed up to help me hit my goal.
Next year, I likely will avoid commentary for the majority of my posts and just share some of my favorite quotes from each book. I was committed to spending less than five minutes on each of these write-ups (since the goal was to read more books and not grow this newsletter), but I can’t shake the feeling that the commentary I did provide was so generic and repetitive that it would have been better to avoid any commentary at all. In the future, I might decide to share thoughts on books that were particularly compelling or especially bad, but for the most part, will just post the book and some quotes. I will still be using Good Scribes Only as my main platform for sharing thoughts about reading, and those discussions with Jeremy will be (and have been) far more substantial than any postings here.
With that said, I hope you’ll remain a subscriber in 2023.
Happy new year!
Favorite Passages:
There is nothing else than now. There is neither yesterday, certainly, nor is there any tomorrow. How old must you be before you know that? There is only now, and if now is only two days, then two days is your life and everything in it will be in proportion. This is how you live a life in two days. And if you stop complaining and asking for what you never will get, you will have a good life. A good life is not measured by any biblical span.
How little we know of what there is to know. I wish that I were going to live a long time instead of going to die today because I have learned much about life in these four days; more, I think than in all other time. I'd like to be an old man to really know. I wonder if you keep on learning or if there is only a certain amount each man can understand. I thought I knew so many things that I know nothing of. I wish there was more time.
Dying was nothing and he had no picture of it nor fear of it in his mind. But living was a field of grain blowing in the wind on the side of a hill. Living was a hawk in the sky. Living was an earthen jar of water in the dust of the threshing with the grain flailed out and the chaff blowing. Living was a horse between your legs and a carbine under one leg and a hill and a valley and a stream with trees along it and the far side of the valley and the hills beyond.