by Richard Subber | Dec 27, 2025 | Human Nature, Reflections, Tidbits
…always more to learn…
“…people whose lives
have been made various by learning…”
Mary Ann Evans “George Eliot” (1819-1880)
English novelist, an icon in Victorian literature
from Silas Marner, p. 24
It’s so easy to think that learning is only about knowledge.
Learning changes lives and living. I don’t mind thinking that what I have learned in my life, and the learning that I continue to enjoy, has made me more various than I otherwise might have been.
You could say that variousness is the spice of life…some people might say it another way…
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review: American Colonies
So many and so much
came before the Pilgrims
by Alan Taylor
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Writing Rainbows: Poems for Grown-Ups with 59 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Dec 25, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Joys of reading, Language
“…I feel a goneness…”
Book review:
Golden Tales of New England
May Lamberton Becker, ed.
New York: Bonanza Books, 1931
378 pages
Writers used a different kind of language to create feel-good stories in the 19th century.
Golden Tales of New England is a feel-good sample of 17 of them.
You’ll recognize some of the authors: Hawthorne, Thoreau, Louisa Alcott, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Harriet Beecher Stowe…
The others might be new for you, as they are for me, like the offering of Rose Terry Cooke (1827-1892), “A Town Mouse and a Country Mouse.” It’s an authentic, ample exhibition of New England patois and sturdy New England character. Meet “Mandy” and “M’lindy,” two aging sisters who were born Amanda and Melinda, and who were fated to share their living, mostly at a distance but, in the end, so inescapably together.
Here’s Amanda sadly recounting her sister’s death: “I guess I’ve got through…[Melinda] went an’ married that old Parker, an’ then she up and died. I wish’t I’d ha’ stayed with her longer; mabbe she wouldn’t have died. She wa’n’t old; not nigh so old as I be…I feel a goneness that I never had ketch hold o’ me before…”
Hawthorne’s “Old Esther Dudley” is a dainty adoration of a venerable lady who never gave up being a Tory during the Revolutionary War, and persisted in being the almost ghostly guardian of Province House in Boston after the British departed.
The other Golden Tales are equally exotic morsels of what entertained the citizens of the Republic long before television and Twitter.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 74 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Dec 23, 2025 | My poetry, Poetry, Reflections
the birds we do not know
knowing
I know being
and I know anticipation
and I know expectation,
and nonetheless I know surprise
and I know remembrance
and I know fear
and I know wonder…
what is it that I do not know?
what remains to be not unknown?
…which slowly singing bird
will pick my window
for her morning melodies?
September 20, 2025
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My poetry. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Book review:
Moral Tribes by Joshua Greene
sincere, but off the mark…
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My first name was rain: A dreamery of poems with 52 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
Your comments are welcome—tell me what you’re thinking.
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by Richard Subber | Dec 21, 2025 | American history, Book reviews, Books, Democracy, History, Politics, Power and inequality
“nationalism” is an obstacle
Book review:
This America: The Case for the Nation
by Jill Lepore
New York: Liveright Publishing Corp., 2019
150 pages
The United States has been a recognizable entity barely—barely—long enough to be a nation.
Today we barely acknowledge our American Indian heritages, which could be part of our nationhood if we thought about it once or twice.
Jill Lepore offers what she is so good at offering: a sensible and informed discussion of what “nation” means, and why “nationalism” is an obstacle to the good life, and why “liberalism” should be what we like to talk about.
Read This America to get her details. Read it and talk about it.
Of course, her book is a political discourse, but it is not rabidly partisan. It’s something to think about.
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Book review. Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
Old Friends (book review)
Tracy Kidder tells truth about old age…
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Above all: Poems of dawn and more with 74 free verse poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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by Richard Subber | Dec 18, 2025 | Tidbits
ain’t it the truth…
“It does not require many words
to speak the truth.”
Chief Joseph or Hin-mah-too-yah-lat-kekt (“Thunder rolling down the mountain”) (1840-1904)
Chief of the Wallowa of the Nez Perce (Niimiipu)
Let’s keep telling the truth about what’s going on in America.
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Copyright © Richard Carl Subber 2025 All rights reserved.
A Farewell to Arms (book review)
classic Ernest Hemingway
with relentlessly realistic dialogue…
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Seeing far: Selected poems with 47 free verse and haiku poems,
and the rest of my poetry books are for sale on Amazon (paperback and Kindle)
and free in Kindle Unlimited, search Amazon for “Richard Carl Subber”
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