Read any good books lately?
Well, yes, as a matter of fact!
One of the good things about finishing up my graduate work is that I now have more time to read books about topics other than theology (although I’m keeping my hand in here and there).
A few months back, I went on a bit of a Ron Hansen tear, reading—more or less in a row—The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, Mariette in Ecstasy, and Exiles, Hansen’s novel about the shipwreck that promoted Gerald Manley Hopkins to write “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” I was prompted to read more of Hansen’s work because I had read and enjoyed Atticus several years ago. Hansen’s protagonists—Jesse James, Mariette, Hopkins, Atticus Cody—always have a certain mystery about them. It’s difficult to get inside their heads and you seem to pick up more from the reactions they provoke in others. Hansen’s fondness for writing about historical characters sometimes sets limits on where he can take them. But that’s a discussion for another time.
I’ve had another nice run of fiction more recently. It began when I decided to pick up Albert Camus’ The Stranger, which I hadn’t read since I was a junior in high school. It was a different translation, a new one by Matthew Ward that favors short, declarative sentences in the model of Hemingway. The translation “worked” in the sense of helping to convey Meursault’s disconnection from the world around him. In the end, though, I was left with the same feeling I had in high school, which is that the character of Meursault just doesn’t speak to me. He reflects Camus’ atheism and conviction of the ultimately absurdity of existence, but not Camus’ moral stance, which seems to me equally important. I think that the character of Dr. Bernard Riuex in The Plague gives us a better sense of Camus’ personal convictions.
After finishing up The Stranger, my wife recommended what turned out to be a delightful murder mystery by Matthew Pearl entitled The Dante Club. The novel is set in 19th century Boston. The premise is that a small group of America’s finest literary minds—Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., James Russell Lowell, and publisher J.T Fields—who call themselves the “Dante Club” are preparing the first American translation of Dante’s Divine Comedy. At the same time, Boston experiences a series of bizarre murders. The members of the Dante Club recognize that the murderer is staging scenes from Dante’s Inferno. They must leave their sheltered literary existence and join forces to find a killer.
The book is a slow start, but it is absolutely worth it. I haven’t enjoyed a mystery this much since Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, which also appeals to lovers of books. Pearl is a gifted writer and he brings to life a mid-19th century Boston with unhealed wounds from the recently concluded Civil War. To say any more would be to risk spoiling the mystery.
Finally, I recently completed a book I had been wanting to read for some time, Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose. Stegner is considered a “western” writer, perhaps the greatest western writer we have. At one point, the San Francisco Chronicle put out a list of the greatest fiction and non-fiction works about the West and Stegner topped both lists. Angle of Repose won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1971 and is generally considered his greatest work.
The book tells the story of Lyman Ward, a retired professor of history who returns to live in his grandparents’ house in Grass Valley, California. Confined to a wheelchair because of a crippling bone disease that has cost him a leg, Ward is sorting through his grandmother’s letters as part of his effort to write a book about her life. An eastern woman with literary and artistic talent, Susan Ward nevertheless choses to marry a man—a mining engineer—committed to the settling of the West and follows him on a number of ventures, most of which turn out to be failures. As Ward discovers more of his grandmother’s history, he is forced to reflect on its meaning for his own life.
The book succeeds on many levels. One of the aspects of the book that interests me most is Stegner’s approach to history. Written in the late 1960s when the “counterculture” of that era was still in full bloom, the book reflects Stegner’s frustration with the rising generation’s refusal to see any value in history or tradition. At the same time, Stegner refuses to idealize the history of the West and there is little romance in the hard lives his grandparents led. Although Stegner’s characters do not display deep religious sympathies, I find something deeply Catholic in this struggle to find a truthful past that is nevertheless a “usable past.”
So how about the rest of you? Read any good books lately?
I live very close to Grass Valley :)
A book I just read that I thought was really good though very grim was The Road by Cormac McCarthy. I’ve also been reading the novels by former journalist Daniel Silva about Israeli agent and art restorer Gabriel Allon.
In non-fiction I’m now reading The Big Questions in Science and Religion by Keith Ward, The First Jesuits by John O’Malley, and Horrendous Evils and the Goodness of God by Marilyn McCord Adams … all good.
I’ve been rereading some of the seemingly timeless essays of Irving Kristol, the giant of American conservatism who recently died. Here are some representative excerpts:
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It is ironic to watch the churches, including large sections of my own religion, surrendering to the spirit of modernity at the very moment when modernity is undergoing a kind of spiritual collapse. If I may speak bluntly about the Catholic church, for which I have enormous respect, it is traumatic for someone who wishes that church well to see it modernize at this moment. Young people do not want to hear that the church is becoming modern. Go tell the young people that the message of the church is to wear sackcloth and ashes and to walk on nails to Rome, and they would do it. The church turned the wrong way. It went to modernity at the very moment when modernity was being challenged, when the secular gnostic impulse was already in the process of dissolution. Young people, especially, are looking for religion so desperately that they are inventing new ones. They should not have to invent new ones; the old religions are pretty good.
“Christianity, Judaism, and Socialism” – 1979
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The liberal paradigm of regulation and license has led to a society where an 18-year-old girl has the right to public fornication in a pornographic movie — but only if she is paid the minimum wage.
‘’On Conservatism and Capitalism” – 1975
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What marks the true greatness of a writer is, first, the peremptory and sovereign way he imposes himself on successive generations of readers; and second, the mystery that attends his ultimate “meaning”, his inexhaustibility before the commentator. One is almost tempted to say that his mystery is his meaning: his words impress us as fragments torn from a greater silence, where the whole truth is to be found, though not by us.
“…And People Opening Veins in Baths” (On Tacitus) – 1956
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Many of Kristol’s essays are available at these sites:
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/searcharchive.cfm?title=&authorkeywords=irving+kristol&keywords=&stmonth=1&styear=1946&endmonth=9&endyear=2009&x=65&y=12
http://www.nationalaffairs.com/publications/page/irving-kristol-1920-2009
Peter–
I read “Angle of Repose” over the summer. I had read parts of it when I was younger, and for some reason it didn’t click with me then, but I very much enjoyed it this time around.
Our local public TV station ran a documentary of Stegner last evening. It was very well done and very informative, focusing both on his writing and on his conservation efforts in the West. When he taught writing at Stanford, he had former Supreme Court Justice Sandar Day O’Connor, Larry McMurtry, and Ken Kesey as students. O’Connor mentions how much Stegner influenced her views of the American West. The documentary also noted that Stegner and Kesey, well, never hit it off.
Several of the people interviewed in the documentary also heaped praise on Stegner’s “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” a biography about John Wesley Powell and his explorations of the Colorado River and the Grand Canyon. The interviewees lauded Stegner’s writing in particular, and some commented that the book opened their eyes to what the West is really about and how sad Stegner would be if he were still alive to see what development has done. I’ll have to add this book to my reading list.
Vinita Hampton Wright’s “Dwelling Places.”
And one of my very favorite author’s (PD James): “Death in Holy Orders.”
And if you can’t handle fiction, then read Bernard Wasserstein’s “Israelis and Palestinians: Why do they fight? Can they stop?”
Question #1 is answered in depth. #2: not quite so lucky.
Read a few books this summer on science and religion: Paul Davies’ Cosmic Jackpot, Henry Garon’s The Cosmic Mystique, Ken Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God, John Haught’s God After Darwin and Judy Cannato’s Radical Amazement. Jim Forest’s Ladder of the Beatitudes, his life of Thomas Merton and the Monks of New Skete’s In the Spirit of Happiness provided some wonderful spiritual reading. Henderson’s No Enemy to Conquer (Baylor U. Press, 2009) roams the globe and offers some astounding accounts of the power of forgiveness in our lives and world. Rene Rogeau’s All We Know of Heaven was a wonderful novel depicting Trapppist life. For fun, C.J. Box’s mystery novels, featuring game warden Joe Pickett and his wife and family in Wyoming, are great, easy reads. (Does anyone know how to put titles in Italics on this blog?).
Reading is one of the constant pleasures in life. Peace.
Rembert Weakland’s “A Pilgrim in a Pilgrim Church,” reviewed recently in Commonweal’s pages, affected me deeply. In addition to a powerful story of spiritual growth, Weakland makes vivid the sad tale of growing centralization in the Church. My book group found much to discuss in Brad Gooch’s “Flannery,” with the happy consequence that we will be (re) reading O’Connor’s short stories for our next meeting. Her “Revelation” is surely a masterpiece, the New Testament summarized. Less current, but definitely worth the time is Noel Streatfeild’s “Saplings,” one of her works of fiction intended for an adult audience. The book, which came out in 1945 and has been recently re-iussed buy Persephone Books in London, shows the devastating psychological effects of war on a happy, middle-class family. Also re-issued by Persephone, is Molly Hughes’s memoir, “A London Child of the 1870s” which has an insightful new preface by Adam Gopnik. John Williams “Stoner” has been the choice of several book groups in my area. An old-fashioned story of a man’s gradual assumption of his vocation (college teacher), this is beautifully written. Enough. I could go on and on. So many good things out there, including Timothy Radcliffe, Colm Toibin….