Author: David Rodeback

This Writer and That Marching Band

Posted on by David Rodeback

For a change, this month’s column is not about reading books. You could say it’s about reading hope in some local high school students.

Human civilization is built over generations in fits and starts and at enormous cost. On a good day we build it slightly faster than its enemies dismantle it. In real life as in Dostoevsky’s novels, good’s margin of victory over evil is narrow indeed. We may disagree on who is building and who is dismantling lately, and how and why. But we sense there haven’t been enough good days recently.

True, we’re surrounded by good things. Some things are the best they’ve ever been. But it’s easy to lose hope, especially if we imbibe the 24/7 news cycle and the endless, performative musings of the professional commenting class. It’s easy to look ahead and look around and despair for the future.

I’ve found an antidote in the past, and it still works: spending time with local youth. It hasn’t always been the American Fork High School Marching Band. It doesn’t have to be a band at all. But lately it has been, again.

The Lusty Month of May (Bookish Version)

Posted on by David Rodeback

Remember that song in Camelot, “The Lusty Month of May”? If not, I’ll wait while you divert to YouTube for a moment. Search “lusty month of May Sierra Boggess.” If you’re in a hurry, skip the first 2:40 of the introduction. But seriously, don’t be in a hurry.

Now that you’re back, a proposition: May, not February, is the month of romance.

We’ll chat here with two Utah romance authors. I’ll note some believable and unbelievable statistics I found. And we’ll visit a romance bookstore in Lehi to ask, of all things, do men read romance? Should they? Why? We’ll finish with a line from Shakespeare.

We Also Read to Heal

Posted on by David Rodeback

If we’re not taught to loathe reading from an early age, we soon find many reasons to read, including learning and enjoyment.

The first book I remember not buying was a thin paperback at the grocery store. It promised to explain how weather works, and I wanted to learn. I asked my parents to buy it for me, but they bought me a book about Native Americans instead. I cried. Then I read it and learned some things, but not about the weather.

The first book I remember buying for myself was a Hardy Boys book, The Arctic Patrol Mystery. A classmate loved the series and encouraged me to try it. In Kmart’s book section I chose the one with an airplane on the cover. The blue hardback cost less than two dollars. I eventually read the entire original series, all 58 mysteries.

For Holy Week: Mostly Music

Posted on by David Rodeback

This post grew from Palm Sunday to Easter, as I added music for each day of Holy Week, plus links to passages in the New Testament Gospels about each day (except Wednesday).

(I’m using embedded YouTube videos for the music. For most of you that means adds, usually skippable. Sorry about that.)

Music for Holy Week

Palm Sunday

I remember visiting Old Jerusalem, walking through its gates, viewing it from the Mount of Olives. My time there wasn’t quite the same as the New Testamant describes, but for me it was a remarkable day.

Here Stanford Olsen, an acclaimed veteran of the Metropolitan Opera, sings “The Holy City” with the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square. I remember singing this splendid anthem as a teenager in a much smaller choir. I recall hearing my father-in-law sing it too.

Bookstore Memories

Posted on by David Rodeback

A teenage son and I were at Powell’s City of Books in Portland, a recurring pilgrimage. I was browsing in Fiction when his distress call came.

He was half a building away, lurking in his favorite subsection of History. He had filled an entire basket with books to buy, and he needed help.

To his credit, he already knew he needed two kinds of help. He needed time to reduce his selections to a manageable stack of several. That took him most of an hour. Then he would still need more funds than he’d saved for books. He solicited and quickly received contributions from bookish family members, and he came away with a heartwarming but reasonable stack of books.

I like to listen to people in bookstores. I’ve overheard one sort of conversation many times, especially at used bookstores. The child in it can be a first-grader or a teen, and it goes about the same.

Reading Aloud Is for Adults Too

Posted on by David Rodeback

Wednesday, February 5, was the 15th Annual World Read Aloud Day. Its creator, LitWorld, focuses mostly on the benefits of reading aloud to children. Good reasons for doing that reach far beyond language skills and a lifelong love of books.

The benefits of reading aloud for youth and adults get far less attention, but they’re real. I don’t mean just reading a witty or scandalous social media post or a short excerpt of an article. I mean reading entire essays, stories, even books aloud.

Granted, reading aloud can be bad manners—on a train, plane, or quiet library floor, or anywhere else we would disturb people to whom we’re not reading. And it’s slower. There’s not time to read all the books anyway. We’d compound that problem if we always read aloud.

In Which I Read My Fiction Aloud for World Read Aloud Day 2025

Posted on by David Rodeback

Today is World Read Aloud Day — or WRAD, because the world needs more acronyms. Is this the first you’re hearing of it?

The website says “15th annual,” but I first encountered WRAD only last year. I was not in time to do anything about it, except to make a note to do something about it this year.

A nonprofit called LitWorld created WRAD “to celebrate the power of reading aloud to create community and amplify new stories, and to advocate for literacy as a foundational human right.” Worthy causes all. Their website, LitWorld.org, has an activity packet, a social media kit, a web form to report your own activities, and many other resources, including links to – you guessed it – people reading aloud.

LitWorld and WRAD mostly focus on reading aloud to children, and we could make a long list of the benefits of doing that. But just between you and me, good things happen to youth and adults too, when we read aloud or are read to. I submitted a column to a local newspaper this week on that very topic. (I’ll link to it here if and when it’s published.)

To me, the obvious thing to do for WRAD is (ahem) to read aloud. So I got up early to read into a good microphone Monday morning before work, did some light editing after work, and now it’s just under 20 minutes of audio, with me reading three pieces of my own fiction aloud.

Poke the Algorithms in the Eye: Read Books in 2025

Posted on by David Rodeback

Intricate modern algorithms have their place but don’t seem to know their place. They and their faceless custodians would rule, not serve, the world, and never mind the human cost. Some people blame algorithms for our intellectual, political, and cultural bubbles and the toxic tribalism that results. I blame them too, in part.

Social media algorithms would rather please or provoke than inform or connect. They aim to keep us scrolling, clicking, sharing, flaming, and otherwise engaging at the expense of everything else, including work, family, friends, neighbors, quiet introspection, real-world compassion, and calm perspective.

Amazon’s algorithm, understandably, likes to show me things I might buy. It’s not very clever sometimes. A good half of those “We’ve found a book you’ll love” e-mails point me to books I found myself, online or IRL, and already added to my Amazon wish lists. I don’t remember the last time I loved any of the other suggestions.