I loaded mine with cpr-vCodex. It has some useful features, and it gets updated almost daily. I find the “reading achievements” a bit gimmicky, but it’s otherwise a solid firmware option.

In ten days, I’ve read J.-K. Huysmans’s Durtal tetralogy, Nancy Maguire’s An Infinity of Little Hours, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, and I’ll finish Bernanos’s Diary of a Country Priest this evening. I don’t think I’ve ever read at this pace with physical books. There’s something about being able to pull out the X4 rather than my phone wherever I am that has really made a difference for me, and the tiny screen allows me to find my place immediately and dive back in. Even when I carry around physical books, I don’t always carry them in places with me, forget them in the car, etc.

This only works for a certain kind of reading—mainly novels. But it has been a remarkable development for me. I don’t think I’m a convert away from physical books, but my wife appreciates that I can now put novels on there rather than trying to find more space in our house for books!

If someone was entirely unwilling to be present and engaged or couldn’t go fifty minutes without access to a screen, that student could just be absent from class (with the consequent negative grade impacts).

My strategy was to print out copies of an unassigned shorter poem by an author covered in lecture. Then I’d hand it out at the beginning of class, and we’d spend the whole time walking through a close reading of that poem.

It kept students engaged, since it was a collaborative process of building up an interpretation on the basis of observation, and anyone is capable of noticing patterns and features that can be fed into an interpretation. They all had something to contribute, and they’d help me to notice things I’d never registered before. It was great fun, honestly. (At least for me, but also, I think, for some of them.) I’d also like to think it helped in some small way to cultivate practices of attention, at least for a couple of hours a week.

Unfortunately, you can’t perform the same exercise with a longer work that necessitates reading beforehand, but you can at least break out sections for the same purpose.

Apparently, I now live in one of the other places where there is a tower (Carmel, IN), but I’ve never heard changes rung on it. It doesn’t appear from the website that it has any local players, which is too bad.

Plus, surface readings are only a small part of the atmospheric picture; you need weather balloons to generate a more holistic reflection of the atmosphere at a site. There are also data generated from aircraft, but those are more one-dimensional (in the sense that they are only sampling conditions at a single altitude) than twice-daily balloon launches from selected sites. Until someone decides to implement a private, nation-wide radiosonde network, there probably won’t be a numerical prediction model that operates independently of NOAA data.

“No.”

My favorite is a copy of Martin Thornton’s The Function of Theology, which had been deaccessioned from the library of the Seminary of the Southwest at some point. I happened to flip to the back to glance at the loan card. It had been borrowed precisely one time—October 23, 1987—but it had been borrowed that one time by a priest who became a friend of mine in 2021 during a course at a different institution. The small world of Anglican theology! I texted him a picture of the book, and he still remembered checking it out.

I picked up a complete set of his Lives of the Saints that was being discarded from a seminary library a few years back. It’s a delight (in part owing to what Walther describes as the “inordinate” attention he pays “to the most minor details of his subjects' terrestrial existences”).