If you, like me, are feeling somewhat morally depleted by the petty squabbles and impoverished ethics displayed lately by the academic side of the blogosphere, perhaps you, like me, would be replenished by a good book.

I recently re-read Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, which I had read for an American lit course in college almost twenty years ago, but which I had not much understood at the time. All I had recalled from my collegiate reading was that there was a woman in the novel whose idea of housekeeping was never to throw anything away; I've always thought of the novel since then when my cupboards begin to overflow with the jelly glasses and mason jars that I can never quite bring myself to pitch. I discovered on re-reading what I thought I might discover, based on my reading of Gilead last year: Housekeeping is spectacular, a gorgeously written meditation on belonging and transience, family and place, forgetting and remembering, clarity and clutter. Ultimately, it's a very gentle coming-of-age story about a girl's recognition that for her, homelessness is a necessary condition of freedom.

Here's the first paragraph:

My name is Ruth. I grew up with my younger sister, Lucille, under the care of my grandmother, Mrs. Sylvia Foster, and when she died, of her sisters-in-law, Misses Lily and Nona Foster, and when they fled, of her daughter, Mrs. Sylvia Fisher. Through all these generations of elders we lived in one house, my grandmother's house, built for her by her husband, Edmund Foster, an employee of the railroad, who escaped this world years before I entered it. It was he who put us down in this unlikely place. He had grown up in the Middle West, in a house dug out of the ground, with windows just at earth level and just at eye level, so that from without, the house was a mere mound, no more a human stronghold than a grave, and from within, the perfect horizontality of the world in that place foreshortened the view so severely that the horizon seemed to circumscribe the sod house and nothing more. So my grandfather began to read what he could find of travel literature, journals of expeditions to the mountains of Africa, to the Alps, the Andes, the Himalayas, the Rockies. He bought a box of colors and copied a magazine lithograph of a Japanese painting of Fujiyama. He painted many more mountains, none of them identifiable, if any of them were real. They were all suave cones or mounds, single or in heaps or clusters, green, brown, or white, depending on the season, but always snowcapped, these caps being pink, white, or gold, depending on the time of day. In one large painting he had put a bell-shaped mountain in the very foreground and covered it with meticulously painted trees, each of which stood out at right angles to the ground, where it grew exactly as the nap stands out on folded plush. Every tree bore bright fruit, and showy birds nested in the boughs, and every fruit and bird was plumb with the warp in the earth. Oversized beasts, spotted and striped, could be seen running unimpeded up the right side and unhastened down the left. Whether the genius of this painting was ignorance or fancy I could never decide.

Thanks for sharing. One thing about these debates--they tend to bring out the ugly aspects of our nature.

Can I offer a few recommendations? There's a newish translation of Chekhov's novellas (or long stories) out. The translators are Pevear and Volkohlsky(sp). I'm told by those in the know that P's & V's translations are good. The stories are great.

Also, the newest volume of The Complete Peanuts is out. If you're a comic strip fan this is a must have--there's even a strip where Linus is playing guns but instead of "Cowboys vs. Indians" he's playing "liberals vs. conservatives."

Finally, thank a vet today. And save a thought for our men and women all over the globe.