"High and fast his heart beat"
Field Notes: February 2026
I know, I know—we are full-speed ahead into the second half of March, and I’m just now compiling my February Field Notes. Sorry about that. Textbook overthinking. I was on the fence about publishing a related article before this one, because it is about the reading experiment I conducted in February that helped me finish eight books in 28 days. But the more I equivocated about the order in which I should publish the two articles, the longer it took to finish writing just one. So stay tuned for a follow-up piece about that reading experiment, what made it so good, and why I’ll probably never do it again.
Without further delay, here is some of what I read, watched, and listened to in February:
What I Read
The Winter King, by Bernard Cornwell — Most modern books about King Arthur can be classified as either historical fiction or fantasy. Bernard Cornwell’s Arthurian trilogy, The Warlord Chronicles, is the former. The first volume, The Winter King, is infused with mystery but not necessarily the supernatural. Merlin and Nimue are Druids here but it’s unclear whether they, their gods, or the new Christian God have any real power in Britain. Drawing primarily from Welsh and British sources that long pre-date Chrétien de Troyes or Thomas Malory, Cornwell presents Arthur not as king but as a warlord oath-bound to protect the kingdom of his half-brother Mordred. Arthur is honorable, patient, and loath to make war despite being very good at it. When he marries Guinevere—the one time he follows his heart rather than his duty—Britain is thrown into chaos.
Cornwell is one of my favorite storytellers.1 He also knows how to make the ancient world come alive. He puts the “dark” in the Dark Ages. His Britain is cold, muddy, bloody, and brutal. The narrator of the story is Derfel Gadarn, an Anglo-Saxon orphan raised by Merlin who becomes a great warlord in his own right and a close confidant of Arthur. Derfel is based on the real St. Derfel who is said to have fought with Arthur at his final battle, later becoming a monk.
Yet as much as I loved The Winter King and the rest of The Warlord Chronicles—I finished books two and three in March—my experience reading them was marred by Cornwell’s cynicism. Perhaps because he was raised in a Protestant cult, Cornwell often presents Christians, and Christianity, in his novels as sniveling, hypocritical, money-grubbing, weak, and ineffectual.2 It was a weird thing as a Christian to find myself rooting against Christians, and even for the pagan gods Merlin and Nimue are trying to coax back to Britain. I also came to hate once-beloved characters from the Arthurian legends.
Reader, this series will remind you what it’s like to get lost in a great epic story. But also, reader, beware.
Dracula, by Bram Stoker — This was my first time reading Dracula, and I was shocked at how…Christian…this horror novel is. I wrote a separate newsletter about that here. I like how my friend James Tower summed up the theology of Dracula in his comment on my piece: “[Dracula is] an inversion of the gospel and the story of redemption. Christ gives his blood to atone for the sin of others and give the gift of eternal life, while Dracula takes the blood (of the relatively innocent) selfishly, to give himself a twisted inversion of eternal life that is really ‘undeath.’”
Water, Water: Poems, by Billy Collins — I reckon I’ve been reading Billy Collins since The Art of Drowning came out in 1995. I appreciate his use of humor, the way he winks at poetic convention, how accessible he is to poetry newcomers, and especially how he uses poetry to elevate the everyday: shoveling snow, making a lanyard for his mother, or imagining his readers over breakfast. That said, Water, Water wasn’t my favorite. I remember when Kate and I went to Italy on our honeymoon, the servers at restaurants asked us if we wanted our water naturale (still) or con gas (sparkling). At his best, Billy Collins can make the ordinary effervescent. Sadly, for me, Water, Water needed more gas. But, as ever, I’m excited for his newest collection, which is all about dogs.
The Serviceberry: Abundance and Reciprocity in the Natural World, by Robin Wall Kimmerer — Has this ever happened to you? There’s a friend who knows you well, and whose own reading tastes are in harmony with your own, so much so that a history of your friendship could be told alongside a shelf of the favorite books you have in common. And this friend has been urging you since forever to read a particular author, a particular book. And then you finally do. And then…meh. You tried, you really did. But somehow the book(s) did nothing for you.
I’m embarrassed to say that’s been my experience with Robin Wall Kimmerer. I say embarrassed because Kimmerer is a botanist, a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, and the author of the much-loved book Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. I picked up Braiding Sweetgrass multiple times; I just couldn’t get into it. Yet it’s sold two million copies worldwide, so that means there’s something wrong with me…right?
The Serviceberry is much, much shorter than Braiding Sweetgrass. It also discusses topics that are inherently interesting to me: abundance, about which we have a whole chapter in Slow Church; biomimicry, or the practice of addressing human challenges by emulating nature’s time-tested designs, which has yielded breakthroughs in everything from agriculture to medicine to urban planning; and an approach to economics that is holistic and local, even neighborly. I was primed to like this book. But it felt lightweight compared to many of Wendell Berry’s essays on economics, or to Wes Jackson’s writings on “nature as measure.”
This is my fault, not Kimmerer’s. I was expecting a meal but she was offering only a taste. I also broke one of John Updike’s cardinal rules for reviewing books: “Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.” I plan to re-read The Serviceberry, experiencing the book for what it is rather than what I wish it is. I also want to put it in conversation with two other recent books—Abundance, by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson (a book I found even more disappointing on the first read), and perhaps Walter Brueggemann’s Grace Abounds: God’s Abundance against the Fear of Scarcity.
Praying Circles around Your Children, by Mark Batterson — This little book draws on Batterson’s bestselling The Circle Maker. I haven’t read that one yet, though last year I went through Draw the Circle, his 40-day prayer challenge, and that was (literally) life-changing. There have been seasons of parenting where I felt like I was apologizing to my kids multiple times a day. For losing my cool, for joking around when they needed me to be gentle, for laying down the law when they needed me to listen, for not being patient, not being more interruptible. Batterson says encouragingly, “You’ll never be a perfect parent, but you can be a praying parent.” My daughters have a perfect Parent, but it’s not my wife or me. God loves my kids deeper and better than we ever could. They also have many adults in their lives who have been praying for them for years, what Batterson calls their “prayer genealogy”:
If you were to map out your spiritual history, you would find countless answers to prayer at key intersections along the way. Before you were even born, even named, many of you had parents and grandparents who prayed for you. At critical ages and stages, family and friends interceded on your behalf. And thousands of complete strangers have prayed for you in ways you aren’t even aware of. The sum total of those prayers is your prayer genealogy.
The Lion, the Witch, and The Wardrobe and The Magician’s Nephew, both by C.S. Lewis — Julia and I started re-reading The Chronicles of Narnia this month. With all due respect to Mr. Lewis, I believe the Narnia series should be read in publication rather than chronological order. Not because publication order is sacrosanct but because The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe is a better introduction to Narnia. How much richer is it to know that the Lion who sings Narnia into existence in The Magician’s Nephew is the same Aslan who saved Edmund and help defeat the White Witch in Wardrobe? Julia and I are now reading The Horse and His Boy. That’s always been my least favorite of The Chronicles of Narnia, but, as my friend said earlier this week, “The ‘worst’ Narnia book is still a great book.”
Sir Gibbie, by George MacDonald — George MacDonald was a 19th-century Scottish novelist, poet, and minister who has been called the “father of the Inklings.” C.S. Lewis said of MacDonald: “I have never concealed the fact that I regarded him as my master; indeed I fancy I have never written a book in which I did not quote from him.” MacDonald is most famous today for his influence on Lewis, Tolkien, and Chesterton. His fantasies and fairy tales are also much loved. His realistic novels, including Sir Gibbie, are less well-known today. By me too. This is the first of MacDonald’s realistic novels that I’ve read.
The title character is a poor boy, Gibbie, who doesn’t know he’s a nobleman. When his father dies destitute, little Gibbie obeys his final cryptic command, following a river out of the city and up into the Scottish Highlands. Gibbie is non-verbal, for which he is misunderstood and sometimes abused. At last he is taken in by a loving older couple. They live on top of Mount Glashgar where Gibbie becomes a shepherd. Gibbie is both intelligent and pure-hearted, and his simple faith allows him to experience the mountaintop as a kind of thin place. I’ll quote a favorite paragraph at length to give you a sense of the spirit of this book:
Thus, as the weeks of solitude and love and thought and obedience glided by, the reality of Christ grew upon [Gibbie], till he saw the very rocks and heather and the faces of the sheep like him, and felt his presence everywhere, and ever coming nearer. Nor did his imagination aid only a little in the growth of his being. He would dream waking dreams about Jesus, gloriously childlike. He fancied he came down every now and then to see how things were going in the lower part of his kingdom; and that when he did so, he made use of Glashgar and its rocks for his stair, coming down its granite scale in the morning, and again, when he had ended his visit, going up in the evening by the same steps. Then high and fast his heart beat at the thought that someday he might come upon his path just when he had passed, see the heather lifting its head from the trail of his garment, or more slowly out of the prints left by his feet, as he walked up the stairs of heaven, going back to his father. Sometimes, when a sheep stopped feeding and looked up suddenly, he would fancy that Jesus had laid his hand on its head and was now telling it that it must not mind being killed; for he had been killed and it was all right.
My experience of Sir Gibbie reminded me quite a bit of reading the Port Royal fiction of my favorite writer, Wendell Berry. Both MacDonald and Berry seem obedient to a call higher than merely good stories and good prose (as honorable as those can be).
Berry is sometimes critiqued for presenting an idealized vision of rural community in his fictional town of Port Royal, Kentucky. One of his characters, Burley Coulter, says, “The way we are, we are members of each other. All of us. Everything. The difference ain’t in who is a member and who is not, but in who knows it and who don’t.” In Port Royal, more people seem to “know it” than don’t. There’s plenty of darkness too, but the fidelity of many of Port Royal’s people to their place and to one another is inspiring while still being artful.
Turns out, George MacDonald was criticized in his day for something similar. “People,” MacDonald once remarked, “find this great fault with me—that I turn my stories into sermons. They forget that I have a Master to serve first…”
What I Listened To
Prizefighter, Mumford & Sons — I almost got to meet Mumford & Sons. Almost meeting rock stars is a lame story except that the profile of the band I was assigned to write, but which was abruptly cancelled, came with a consolation prize from the band’s management: two tickets to see them live at the Crystal Ballroom in Portland. This was back in 2010 and Mumford & Sons had suddenly blown up. They had to triage, making decisions like whether to do an interview with a freelancer for a little Christian magazine, or talk to, you know, Rolling-friggin’-Stone. My feelings weren’t hurt. Plus that show was one my wife and I won’t forget. Mumford & Co. got after it. The Crystal Ballroom has a standing room capacity of 1,500. (The band would be back the next year to play for tens of thousands at the Rose Garden Arena.) This was the Sigh No More era and the lads stomped, wailed, jangled, suspendered, and harmonized their guts out, literally shaking the floor of that little theater. Kate and I were stunned, and I’ve been a fan ever since.
Prizefighter is their newest album. It kicks off with two fantastic collaborations, “Here,” featuring Chris Stapleton, and “Rubber Band Man” with Hozier. Then it moves into the empathetic “The Banjo Song”—which I can’t help but imagine was inspired (at least a little) by the departure of the band’s banjoist Winston Marshall in 2021—and my personal favorite track, “Run Together”:
But when we run, we run together
When we’re apart, we fall apart
I will love you now and ever
Really the album is so good from start to finish.
I didn’t “know them when,” but how fun is it to follow a band closely for 16 years and see them flourish and mature and struggle and evolve and just keep making great music?
What I Watched
Detectorists — No sooner had my wife and I finished the last two seasons of Detectorists than we started missing the characters. I’ve thought a lot about why Detectorists delighted us so much. Its tenderness, yes, and also its humor. Its quirkiness and also its lovely portrayal of friendships. (I’m begging my own best friend of the last 30+ years to watch it.) Its celebration of the amateur spirit. The way the very landscape is alive with human history. And also that it is set in a rural community—or at least a small town—without depicting as rubes the people who live there. The plot of the final season even involves a decision made in a distant city that will impact little Danebury and the surrounding land.
Who else here has watched it? And, be honest, how close were you to getting your own metal detector?
What I Noticed
February got off to a dry start, but by the end of the month the Willamette Valley got some much-needed rain. I snapped this full rainbow with my phone as I was driving through Mt. Angel.
Finally, I’ll share a video I made for my wife for Valentine’s Day. She loves squirrels and $0 gifts. So I set up an action cam and put out peanuts to get some up-close shots of her favorite critters. The squirrels came, but so did the scrub jays and a few other birds.
Cornwell’s 13-book Saxon Chronicles was the basis for the The Last Kingdom series on Netflix.
There are some notable exceptions, including his portrayal of King Alfred in The Saxon Chronicles.
That first dog poem was WOW. Thanks for sharing! I recently head Andy Squires read The Lanyard poem and I think he read it even better than Collins himself.
I adore The Detectorists. And its theme song is arguably the best television theme song in recent years. (Though, Somebody Feed Phil is in close competition.)
Thank you, John. Really good.