I’ve seen a number of so-called pandemic reading lists over the past few days and thought it would be fun to ask you all—the most readerly of blog readers—for book recommendations. What I would like to know is what has been your favorite novel or work of nonfiction in the last five years? The book can be a classic or newly published. It does not have to deal with illness or the end of civilization. (We could all use a break, right?) You can just provide author and title, but if you want to add a note, feel free. If I receive enough recommendations, I’ll create a separate post at The American Conservative so everyone can find the list easily, and I can update it as recommendations are submitted. Let’s help each other out!

Did you know that W. H. Auden had planned to write a book about J. R. R. Tolkien for Eerdmans? Tolkien thought it would be a “premature impertinence.”

Stuck at home? Visit one of these museums virtually.

Thieves steal three artworks from an Oxford University gallery, including a Van Dyck: “Van Dyck’s A Soldier on Horseback (1616), Salvator Rosa’s A Rocky Coast, with Soldiers Studying a Plan (1640s), and Annibale Carracci’s A Boy Drinking (1580) were taken from the Christ Church Picture Gallery late Saturday night. A report by the Times estimated that the works pilfered from the British museum could be worth an estimated £10 million (or about $12.2 million).”

The achievement of Walter Kempowski: “For much of Kempowski’s career, he was put down by critics as an edgeless, even crude, stylist whose anti-socialist politics made him anathema to the West German literary scene. Kempowski’s determination to excavate the depths of German suffering in the Second World War only made him more suspect. ‘The secret therapist of the German middle class,’ ‘the manic memory guardian,’ ‘the knight-errant of the archive’: These were some of the epithets pinned on him in the feuilletons. The recent translations of Kempowski into English invite a less encumbered assessment of this stubborn German writer, who was, if anything, more pitiless than his peers in his reckoning with the past.”

The art and sanctuary of gardens: “We are fed up with snow and floods and sad, bad news. Many of us—myself including—simply want to get into the garden. In tune with this mood, thank goodness, the Garden Museum in Lambeth is showing an exhibition called Sanctuary: Artist-Gardeners 1919–1939. During World War I, when soldiers thought longingly of home, their minds often turned to the garden. Indeed, they made small gardens in the trenches, planting bulbs in empty brass shell-casings. In a catalog essay, the Garden Museum’s director, Christopher Woodward, quotes Ford Madox-Ford’s No Enemy: A Tale of Reconstruction (1929), on the soldier’s dream of return, not to a landscape but ‘a nook rather,’ at the end of a valley ‘with a little stream, just a trickle level with the grass of the bottom. You understand the idea—a sanctuary.’ So the focus of the show is not on great estates but on domestic landscapes and individual plants, and implicitly on the garden’s allegorical power: the myths of Eden.”

Essay of the Day:

Christa Lesté-Lasserre writes about the science behind the restoration of Notre Dame:

“At LRMH, the laboratory tasked with conserving all the nation’s monuments, Magnien and her 22 colleagues apply techniques from geology to metallurgy as they evaluate the condition of Notre Dame’s stone, mortar, glass, paint, and metal. They aim to prevent further damage to the cathedral and to guide engineers in the national effort to restore it. President Emmanuel Macron has vowed to reopen Notre Dame by 2024, and he has appointed a military general to lead the operation, which involves many government agencies and has drawn philanthropic pledges of about €1 billion. But it is the LRMH scientists who lead the critical work of deciding how to salvage materials and stitch the cathedral back together. And even as they try to reclaim what was lost, they and others are also taking advantage of a rare scientific opportunity. The cathedral, laid bare to inspection by the fire, is yielding clues to the mysteries of its medieval past. ‘We’ve got 40 years of research coming out of this event,’ says LRMH Assistant Director Thierry Zimmer.

“The LRMH researchers work in the former stables of a 17th century chateau in Champssur-Marne, in the eastern suburbs of Paris, that once housed a horse research center. Here, they have analyzed samples from France’s top monuments—the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe—in the same rooms where some of the world’s first artificial insemination experiments in horses occurred 120 years ago. The neighborhood is quiet, with a quaint brasserie and a shop offering €10 haircuts. But on a day in January, the lab is anything but sleepy. ‘It’s an ambiance of speed!’ says Zimmer, sporting a brown wool beret and a bushy mustache.

“Véronique Vergès-Belmin, a geologist and head of LRMH’s stone division, was sorting cathedral stones until 10 p.m. last night. This morning, she’s the first to unlock the laboratory’s ancient oak door.

“She slips a hazmat suit over her dress clothes and slides on a respirator mask—necessary when dealing with samples contaminated with lead. In the lab’s high-roofed storage hangar—once a garage for the chateau’s carriages—she presents several dozen stones that fell from the cathedral’s vaulted ceiling. Fallen stones hint at the condition of those still in place, which are largely inaccessible. The scientists can’t risk adding their weight to the top of the vault, and debris falling near the holes in the ceiling makes it dangerous to inspect the structure from below. Many of the samples in the lab were retrieved by robots.

“Heat can weaken limestone, and knowing the temperatures endured by these fallen stones can help engineers decide whether they can be reused. Vergès-Belmin has found that the stones’ color can provide clues. At 300°C to 400°C, she says, iron crystals that help knit the limestone together begin to break down, turning the surface red. At 600°C, the color changes again as the crystals are transformed into a black iron oxide. By 800°C, the limestone loses all its iron oxides and becomes powdery lime. ‘It’s an entire progressive process,’ she says, enunciating carefully through the muffle of the mask. ‘Any colored stones or parts should not be reused.’

Read the rest.

Photo: Turkish Window in Perchtoldsdorf

Receive Prufrock in your inbox every weekday morning. Subscribe here.