Hardihood Books Roundup - November 2024
Happy Thanksgiving
Hi,
Welcome to the Hardihood Books November Roundup. I hope autumn is in full swing where you are. Where I am, we are still having summer it appears.
What I Published in November:
My first post this month (free) was, “Carrying the Fire,” in which I drew on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to reflect on the duty of each generation to pass the torch to the ones to come. Every generation makes mistakes, but so does the father in The Road. We see painfully that he doesn’t really know what he is doing, but that his actions are redeemed through his love for his son. While none of my posts this month were explicitly Thanksgiving-themed, this strikes me as altogether seasonally appropriate. After all, what is Thanksgiving but a celebration of the blessings we have inherited from those who have come before us and built all the we have known and enjoyed?
After that, I posted “Red Leaves” a short story which I quite like, which picks up on themes from September’s “A Proper Dog.” I’m not really an animal person, but I find fascinating the role canines played in the development of civilization, and in turn the way in which they were shaped – in all likelihood more than any other animal – by civilization. As Jack London well knew, dogs are a perfect lens to examine civilization and wilderness, for each dog has within it an ancient instinct which has not been tamed by centuries of careful breeding.
I posted my final installment in, “Civilization in the Wilderness.” This is the ending I originally had in mind several years ago for the story, and I’m not sure that I pulled it off quite to my satisfaction, but it felt fitting for an early western. Next month, I’ll double up on chapters in “War in the Galaxy” instead of beginning a new novel. I may continue to do that for some time. As I’ve been writing it, “War in the Galaxy,” has begun to expand and my hope is that it will be a full-length novel by the time its finished. Which means that if I want to finish it before 2026, I will need to post four chapters a month for a little while.
My second essay, “Musings on Autumn,” was alright. I hit on the themes I wanted to cover, but what began as a quick series of musings on cultural topics on my mind these past months spiraled into a much darker note than I had intended. I suppose that’s where my mind is at these days. I’m not a pessimist, but I’ve grown more pessimistic over time. Some of our newest technologies are indeed cause for celebration and others are cause for worry. But technological prosperity can’t fill the hole in the culture which is increasingly evident, despite my attempts for many years to ignore it. Science can give us a kind of progress, but it can’t give us a reason why we should go on at all. In my essay, I suggested a Third Great Awakening might be the only remedy for the current malaise, but there is little appetite for that kind of thing these days.
“Dragons in the Woods” is a fantasy story. The point of the story dovetails with my previous point. The protagonist believes mythical creatures are for children and that science has disenchanted the world of superstition. He discovers to his horror that “there is more in Heaven and on earth than is dreamt of in [his] philosophy” to paraphrase Shakespeare. I opened with a quotation from G.K. Chesterton about dragons and children, which is where the title comes from. There are no dragons in the story.
Finally, I released my latest installments in “War in the Galaxy.” These are free to read. More chapters will follow next month.
From the Archive:
“Thanksgiving in Waremouth” is a classic. It’s free to read. It remains one of my favorite Thanksgiving-themed stories.
“Thankfulness and Literature” is an essay which is also free to read. Although the philistines out there who are determined to abolish the capital-c Canon probably aren’t as grateful for the Great Books as I am. I accepted long ago that I’m an elitist on this subject and made peace with it.
In Closing:
I intentionally write a wide variety of material because I know that different readers are going to like different posts. And most readers will not like every post. Most readers also don’t have time to read every post, so I expect that readers will select the ones they want to read and ignore the ones they don’t. I’ve introduced tags to aid with that process, but if you have suggestions for ways to make this process easier on the reader, please send them my way.
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Cheers,
Ben Connelly