Tag: reading

SubscribeStar Saturday: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2026, Part II: Non-Fiction

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Today’s post includes Amazon Affiliate links to the books referenced. I receive a portion of any purchases made through those links, at no additional cost to you. If a book is linked, it is an Amazon Affiliate link.

See Part I here, and read the full post here. —TPP

I’m back with Part II of The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2026, with a focus on non-fiction. As a history teacher and a writer primarily focused on non-fiction, I possess a particular interest in non-fiction writing of every stripe. While I do love reading history, I enjoy reading broadly, so today’s list will have works of non-fiction from multiple genres.

Typically I leave the full list behind the paywall for paid subscribers; however, as several of these authors are indie/self-published and/or newer authors, I would like to boost their works more broadly (and, naturally, gain access to those sweet, sweet affiliate clicks). So, here are four books I’ve read and/or am currently reading that I highly recommend you order:

  • Nicholas R. Ochs, Age of Rot: A Right Wing Dissident’s Prison Dispatches from a Torn America – Nicholas Ochs was arrested following the Epiphany Protests for covering the events as an independent journalist. His association with the Proud Boys made him an easy target for Biden’s Justice Department, and he ended up with a four-year sentence (!) in a maximum security prison in Butler, North Carolina, where he faced a number of abuses (including an arbitrary stint in solitary confinement in winter without a mattress or blanket for his cot; he burned so many calories trying to stay warm that he became dangerously emaciated). This book is his collected prison writings, and it is a stark window into the political persecution and prosecutions that faced so many patriots in 2021.
  • Landis Brown, Life Under the Shadow of the Almighty: A Journey Through Psalm 91 – My pastor while I was living down in Lamar wrote this book. Pastor Dana, as we call him (his middle name is “Dana”), had an issue while preparing his manuscript: his editor backed out of the project. Pastor Dana contacted me and asked if I could edit the last four chapters, which I did last spring. I finally ordered a physical copy earlier this week, so I am excited to read the first two chapters (and re-read the four I edited). It’s an interesting blend of scholarly work and devotional.
  • H.H. Scullard and A.A.M. van der Heyden, Shorter Atlas of the Classical World – I picked up this delightful little survey of the classical world, which focuses on ancient Greece and Rome, when I was a teenager. I devoured it, cover-to-cover, and I love all the maps and the lithographic plates.
  • Walter Martin, The Kingdom of the Cults: An Analysis of the Major Cult Systems in the Present Christian Era – I borrowed—and never returned, gulp!—a copy of this book from my Aunt Cheryl some years ago. It is the “textbook” on the various cults of the twentieth century from the perspective of an Evangelical Protestant Christian theologian and historian. Martin gives detailed historical information about the foundation of a number of cults, including the Nation of Islam and Mormonism, and offers Christians useful theological and historical grounds for arguing against these movements. My (well, my aunt’s) edition is from the twenty-fourth printing in 1977, and it certainly reflects the cultic activity of the time (some of the movements are now just footnotes in religious history, while others are still thriving).

More below the punch. That said, each of these books if quite affordable on Amazon, and you can scoop them all up for under $70.71 at the time of writing.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: Minecraft Camp 2026

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Part II of The Portly Political Summer Reading List 2026 will be out next week! If you missed Part I, read it here. —TPP

Minecraft Camp was this past Monday through Thursday, and it was another fun week of crafting and King’s Hawaiian Rolls. I can never quite remember when the first Minecraft Camp was, but it was likely either the summer of 2013 or 2014, which means the camp has been going on for over a decade.

When it began, a former colleague of mine got us setup with this gloriously old version of MinecraftEDU, based on Minecraft 1.7.10. That ancient version, one of my knowledgeable counselors informed me, was right before a number of major updates to the game. It’s fun seeing kids come in each year and trying to figure out why their preferred building material and/or mechanic isn’t available (no dolphins, sorry). That said, they all come to adapt to the older version; indeed, many of the veterans insist that we keep it.

Our version is also based on an old Java install that exists on a handful of USB sticks and a backup hard drive. Microsoft purchased Minecraft and MinecraftEDU some years ago, but our school computers at the time lacked the proper version of Windows to run it (I think we needed Windows 10 and our computers were running Windows 7). I’ve kept using this version out of inertia and, again, due to popular demand. I just did a search, and it seems it is available for download, so if you want to try the version we play, download and give it a shot.

All technical talk aside, let’s get into the heart of this year’s camp.

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Lazy Sunday CCCXC: Summer Reading Lists of Yesteryear

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Book titles in this post have an Amazon Affiliate link. I receive a portion of purchases made through those links, at no additional cost to you. —TPP

It’s been one of those rare, near-perfect Sundays, the kind of Sunday that is so peaceful, it’s hard to believe it’s possible. I know that Sunday is the Lord’s Day, the Sabbath, a day of rest, but I don’t think it’s ever really been that way for me.

Growing up, Sunday was a marathon of excessive churching, in which a hot, sweaty nap would be squeezed between seemingly endless church services and band practices. I’m very thankful for that upbringing in many ways, but it always meant Sundays were an exhausting scramble, usually topped off with finishing math homework after we finally got home at 9:30 PM.

As an adult, Sundays have become a working day. After church, the day is spent prepping for the week, with lesson plans, scheduling music lessons, and the like. Sometimes that includes hammering out succulent blog posts for the week ahead.

Top that off with the “Sunday scaries”—that vague sense of dread and anxiety that settles in around 4 or 5 PM on a Sunday afternoon—and I’ve never much cared for the day, or thought of it as all that restful. Church is great (and you should go, just probably not for eight hours every Sunday), but by the time I’m home from it, the weekend is essentially over and work begins. It’s why I try to take Saturdays as my “Sabbath,” when I truly do try to rest and recuperate.

That said, today has been what I think Sundays are supposed to be. Dr. Wife and I had a quiet morning and headed to church, after which we had lunch and picked up groceries. We came back and knocked out some chores around the house and in the yard, and then took a glorious nap with the dogs, from which we both got up from a short while before I wrote this post. Minecraft Camp starts tomorrow and I have a few lessons to schedule, but I don’t feel rushed. Dr. Wife usually has to drive back on Sundays to North Carolina, but because of the nature of her new rotation (which starts tomorrow), she won’t have to leave until tomorrow morning, and she’ll leave when I head out for camp.

The net effect is that it’s been a glorious and restful Sunday. Even as we’ve gotten things done around the house, it’s been a day both to celebrate and worship the Lord with other believers and time for rest and reflection. There is a peace over the house that I’m almost hesitant to articulate, lest the momentary blessing be somehow broken.

Well, enough of that waxing poetic (and complaining about going to church, which is somewhat hypocritical of me). For today’s installment of Lazy Sunday, I thought I’d look back at various Summer Reading Lists of yesteryear:

So there you have it! A little late, but a Lazy Sunday bursting with summertime freshness.

Happy Reading—and Happy Sunday!

—TPP

SubscribeStar Saturday: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2026, Part I: Short Fiction

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

Today’s post includes Amazon Affiliate links to the books referenced. I receive a portion of any purchases made through those links, at no additional cost to you. If a book is linked, it is an Amazon Affiliate link. —TPP

It’s summertime! That means yours portly is getting in a ton of reading, especially in my favorite format: short fiction.

“Short fiction” here is a catch-all for both short story collections and shorter novels/novellas. Two of the works on today’s list are technically novels, but they’re both 250 pages or fewer (in the case of Jake Barter’s The Sniper, the book is exactly 250 pages). 250 pages might seem generous, but these are works that can be read over the course of several evenings, and are paced briskly enough that they won’t be piled on your nightstand for months or even years.

Typically I leave the full list behind the paywall for paid subscribers; however, as several of these authors are indie/self-published, I would like to boost their works more broadly (and, naturally, gain access to those sweet, sweet affiliate clicks). So, here are four books I’ve read and/or am currently reading that I highly recommend you order:

  • Jake Barter, The Sniper – “Jake Barter” is the nom de plume of blogger photog, proprietor of the excellent blog Orion’s Cold Fire. As far as I can tell, this book is his first outing. It’s the next on my “to-read” list after the next entry, but knowing photog’s writing, I can already recommend it. He’s been working on this book for years, and it’s not a hastily slapped-together book like one of mine.
  • Erang, Midnight Under the Monsters’ Mask – “Erang” is the nom de plume of, well, Erang, a mysterious, masked French musician who is among the pioneers of dungeon synth. I’ve just started reading Midnight in the English translation, and the stories so far are delightfully creepy. It’s a mix of horror and weird fiction that really shows Erang’s early exposure to horror flicks as a kid in the 1980s. Erang’s whole schtick is championing imagination over all else, and he creates in his music entire fantasy realms. Having listened to his music for years—over a decade, at this point—I can “hear” it in his writing.
  • Various authors, Amelia: Counterrevolution (the second anthology from authors of the “Lemurverse“) – this collection of short stories and poems found inspiration in Amelia, the viral, pro-British, pro-nationalist, anti-immigration character of a government-sanctioned video “game” that was intended to spook teens away from online “radicalization” (basically, becoming right-wing). The fatal flaw, however, is that the game designers made Amelia into a cute goth chick with a chic aesthetic and, well, commonsense arguments against flooding Britain with unassimilable invaders. It’s a fun collection and priced right at just $5.99 in paperback. Note that it does use AI-generated images, but not writing, as illustrations between stories, so if that cuts against your principles, be forewarned. However, the writing is 100% human!
  • John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids – a classic of 1950s British sci-fi, Triffids is a chilling tale of a world in which everyone is blind—and giant, carnivorous plants called “triffids” shuffle around killing people. But there’s way more to it than that; the work is post-apocalyptic, but it’s quaint in how “high-trust” post-apocalyptic Britain is portrayed—a stark reminder of how much that once-great nation has changed. I read Wyndham’s Foul Play Suspected earlier this year and can heartily recommend it as a tense crime thriller with an appropriately English sense of restraint and pacing.

More on Amelia and Triffids below the punch. I’ve read both of those in their entirety. That said, each of these books if quite affordable on Amazon, and if you’re a fan of short stories or shorter novels/novellas, you can scoop them all up for under $50.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2023

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Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.  For a full rundown of everything your subscription gets, click here.

It’s that time of year again:  summer!  That means we’re due for The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2023!

For new readers, my criteria is pretty straightforward.  To quote myself from the 2016 list:

The books listed here are among some of my favorites.  I’m not necessarily reading them at the moment, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t!

Pretty vague, I know.  Additionally, I usually feature three books, plus an “Honorable Mention” that’s usually worth a read, too.

For those interested, here are the prior installments:

With that, here’s The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2023:

1.) “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and Other Stories from The Sketch Book, Washington Irving – There are dozens of compilations of Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent.  The book has been in continuous print since its first publication in 1819-1820, which is remarkable:  at the time, American literature was in its infancy, struggling to differentiate itself from the flood of European novels, poetry, and short stories coming out of the Old World at the time.  Irving, along with his contemporary James Fenimore Cooper, launched American literature beyond our own hardscrabble frontiers into the wider world, and both authors became the first Americans whose works were read widely in Europe.

I picked up this Signet Classics edition (ISBN: 0-451-5301-8) approximately fifteen years ago, largely on the strength of its two most famous short stories:  “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and “Rip Van Winkle.”  These tales account for the vast popularity of the collection, but aside from a few other essays on American life, the vast majority of the collection takes place in England.

One of the most memorable essays from my first reading was “Westminster Abbey,” about the impressive abbey near London.  Here’s the first very first paragraph:

On one of those sober and rather melancholy days in the latter part of autumn when the shadows of morning and evening almost mingle together, and throw a gloom over the decline of the year, I passed several hours in rambling about Westminster Abbey. There was something congenial to the season in the mournful magnificence of the old pile, and as I passed its threshold it seemed like stepping back into the regions of antiquity and losing myself among the shades of former ages.

How’s that for setting the scene and the mood?  There is something mystical about that period in late autumn that is “rather melancholy,” and everything seems to have a certain shadowy gloominess cast over it.  I’ve always thought that the best time to learn about colonial American history—especially the history of New England—is in late autumn, when that damp crispness enters the air.  It feels like Plymouth Rock, or Salem Town, or the backwoods of New Hampshire.

This summer, I hope to reread this collection for the first time in fifteen years.  The essays on Christmas—“Christmas Eve,” “Christmas Day,” and “Christmas Dinner“—are instantly charming, and explain much of the more ancient English traditions of celebrating Christmas, including ghost stories around the fire (which became more popular in the Victorian era).

Needless to say, The Sketch Book has had an immense influence on my own writing, particular my travel writing.  I’m no Washington Irving (or Geoffrey Crayon), but my second book Arizonan Sojourn, South Carolinian Dreams: And Other Adventures clearly illustrates Irving’s influence upon my writing style.

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Bible Study Update II

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An eager commenter on my original “Bible Study” post prompted me to give a second brief update on my daily Bible reading (I wrote the first update back in July 2022).  Apparently, my humble daily regimen inspired the reader to establish a schedule of her own.  To that, all I can say is, “To God Be the Glory!”

That said, it’s satisfying to know that the words I scribble down on this self-indulgent blog do, indeed, reach people.  There are probably fewer things more pleasurable to a writer than to find that his words have made some impact on his readers, and the pleasure is enhanced when it’s a stranger.  We all understand that we influence those close to us, for good or for ill, because we can see the effects more clearly.  But the idea that a stranger might be reading our words is a small sign that we’re expanding beyond our immediate familial and social circles to wider audiences.  It feels good.

But I digress.  This post is about studying the Bible, not tooting my own saxophone; pride, after all, is a sin.

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Supporting Friends Friday: Andrea the Illustrator’s Children’s Book

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I should probably not trumpet so triumphantly and assuredly the death or hiatus of any given thing, especially as it pertains to this blog.  I’d decided to give Support Friends Friday a rest for a bit—and I did, for two weeks!—because I was running out of friends to support.  At least, I was running low on new friend-generated content to champion.

Then good old Andrea the Illustrator went and published a book with a bunch of contributors.  It’s called Creative Gems, Volume I, and it’s out in paperback, hardcover, and Kindle editions now.

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Bible Study Update

The Portly Politico86 Comments

For the past month (roughly) I’ve been dedicating my mornings to Bible study.  I became very negligent about spending time in God’s Word over the past school year—and, really, over the past few years—so I have been doing my part to mend my relationship with Him and to immerse myself in His Word.

I’m pleased to report that, so far, I have largely stuck with it, only rarely missing a day’s reading.  I started simply:  reading through Proverbs.  A very common Bible study tactic is to read one chapter of Proverbs a day; in thirty-one days, or one month, you’ll have read the entire book.  I adapted that slightly, sometimes reading a couple of chapters a day.  As June has only thirty days, and I started late, I managed to end the month with Proverbs 31.

After finishing Proverbs, I realized I needed to expand my reading further.  To that end, here is my current reading schedule each morning:

  • Three chapters of Psalms (with 150 chapters, it should take fifty days to get through Psalms, although Psalms 119 might be its own day)
  • One chapter of Proverbs, corresponding with the date (for example, this morning I will read Proverbs 12)
  • One chapter of Isaiah, also corresponding with the date until I get to Isaiah 32 on 1 August 2022, at which point I’ll keep reading one chapter a day until I have completed the book (again, this morning I’ll read Isaiah 12)
  • A New Testament passage from a little “read-the-New-Testament-in-one-year” Bible someone gave me years ago (today’s passage will be Romans 1:1-17)
  • Some days, I do a reading from a little devotional, Our Daily Bread

In total, it takes me anywhere from forty-five minutes to an hour to complete this reading, as I try to read slowly and take notes in the margins (I also start readings with thorough prayer time with God, praying prayers of thanksgivings to Him; praying specific prayer requests; and praying for His Hand in my life and my budding relationship) and if I see connections to other Scriptures—which is happening more and more frequently lately—I will take time to note the parallels and tie them back.

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SubscribeStar Saturday: The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2022

The Portly Politico5 Comments

Today’s post is a SubscribeStar Saturday exclusive.  To read the full post, subscribe to my SubscribeStar page for $1 a month or more.

It’s that time of year again:  summer!  That means we’re due for The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2022!

For new readers, my criteria is pretty straightforward.  To quote myself from the 2016 list:

The books listed here are among some of my favorites.  I’m not necessarily reading them at the moment, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t!

Pretty vague, I know.  Additionally, I usually feature three books, plus an “Honorable Mention” that’s usually worth a read, too.

For those interested, here are the prior installments:

With that, here’s The Portly Politico Summer Reading List 2022:

1.) Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood: A Novel (2021) – This novel—Tarantino’s first—is a novelization of his film Once Upon a Time in Hollywood (2019), a flick I really enjoyed, even though it appears I have not reviewed it on the site.  What makes it so fun is that it’s written like a pulp novel about the waning days of Hollywood’s golden age.  I’m only nine chapters (about 142 pages of 400) into the book, but as a fan of the film, I can heartily recommend it.  Like an novel (or, in this case, novelization) it can explore scenes and characters and backstories in more detail.  Considering the film is a daunting 161 minutes—nearly three hours—in length, it’s remarkable how much more can be explored in a book.

The novel shifts perspectives between different characters, but the main characters are washed-up cowboy actor Rick Dalton and his stunt double and personal driver, Cliff Booth.  Dalton’s career isn’t exactly dead, but his glory days are behind him, and he’s playing bit-parts as the “heavy” on Westerns.  Booth, a veteran of the Second World War with a fairly dark past, plays babysitter to the bipolar, alcoholic Dalton.  While it seems Dalton gets the better part of this arrangement, the pair form a mutually-beneficial bond—when Dalton works, Cliff does.

Dalton’s career is slowly starting to improve against the backdrop of the Manson Family, which begins its murderous spree in Los Angeles.  The film version presents an alternate version of the Sharon Tate murder, and I imagine the book is heading in the same direction.

For fans of Old Hollywood and Westerns—and, of course, the Zeitgeist of the late 1960s and early 1970s—it’s a must-read, and very fun, too.

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Bible Study

The Portly Politico15 Comments

Now that summertime is here, I’m using the bit of extra, unstructured time to try to develop some good habits.  This past school year was pretty brutal, between a heavy load of classes and up to twenty lessons a week.  I was thankful for the income from lessons and for the security of work, but it really took its toll as the academic year wore on.

Unfortunately, one of the first things I let go was daily Bible study.  I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve always been spotty about reading the Bible daily.  I’m often more interested in listening to someone else’s commentary on God’s Word than reading it for myself, as if I’m a medieval Catholic.

But there’s no substitute for the real thing—daily Bible reading and study.  So I’ve established a routine now that summer is here, and it’s really helped me keep on track.

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