Books
Discussion of books and book reviews
Book review: “Fragment” by Warren Fahy
I just finished reading a new science-fiction novel by Warren Fahy called “Fragment”. They can it an eco-thriller and it’s about an isolated island in the South Pacific, thousands of miles from the closest land that has been biologically isolated from the rest of the planet for 500 million years. Thus evolution has proceeded along a very different path, one that has resulted in an ecosystem so deadly and invasive that even one creature from it could result in devastation for every other organism on the planet. Of course, some folks stumble upon this island and the rollicking ride ensues.
By the third page of this book I had a pretty good idea of how it would end. Oh, not the details, mind you, but the overall arc mainly because it follows the predictable path trod before it by Michael Crichton’s “Jurassic Park”, the “King Kong” movies, and even Arthur Conan Doyle’s “Lost World.” In fact, “Fragment” falls squarely in the family line of novels that arose after the era of the Victorian Enlightenment, in which Man thought he had had conquered nature and was now its master. Inevitably, novels like Doyle’s rejected that hubris to show that however much Man thinks he’s in charge, Nature always triumphs. Or if it doesn’t, maybe it should.
Such thinking is even more fashionable today among those who warn of humanity's dire effects on the environment, and so Fahy takes up that banner. He does so very well with an entertaining and fast-paced read that includes one big twist and lots of scientific talk. (I’m not expert enough to know whether the science is accurate, but I can say it’s not so convoluted that a layman can’t follow. Or you can skip it and still enjoy the story.)
And yet, it’s still the Nature Triumphs over Man formula. You have the deadly but shadowy reveal of the “monster,” the disastrous first encounter by our hero, the retreat and then plucky advance, the dupe who blusters and is then lost, the villain who hopes to exploit Nature and his inevitable gruesome yet poetic demise, the heroic ending. If you’ve seen Spielberg’s movie, you can track the plot points even as the details change.
That isn’t to say I didn’t enjoy the story. It’s a pageturner as you follow along the hero’s progress and wait to see what new creation emerges from his fertile imagination. If you expect a popcorn-cinema experience, a good beach novel, then you’ll be satisfied. But don’t expect any innovation of the genre as it plays out strictly by the numbers.
A couple of additional points: The novel’s protagonists are not religious. They are scientists with a penchant for seeing religion as an anthropological construct or superstition. And the one or two religious minor characters in the book are just that: superstitious and hostile to science. It’s not fatal to enjoyment of the book, but it would have been interesting to see how a faith-filled scientist—one who sees science as an aid to his faith and vice versa—would have approached this island.
And as you might expect, the character development is somewhat lacking. Most everyone plays to the stereotype: The TV producer who cares only about ratings, not one whit for the human beings she lives with, the conniving mustache-twirling villain, the blockhead soldier, the oblivious scientist who lets his fascination lead to his death, and so on. Not to mention the Skipper, Gilligan, and Marianne. (I’m only half-joking.)
You won’t read this for a discussion of the philosophy of science or a good debate over man’s place in the universe. You will read it for the fast-paced action scenes and the fascinating flora and fauna of Henders Island.
Liberals wrestle with conscience over conservative artists
With the advent of blogs and Twitter and other avenues for personal expression online, it has become ever easier for public figures (and private ones as well) to make known their personal opinions on all manner of subjects unrelated to their cause for fame. What’s interesting is that when some fans find their favorite author/actor/artist/what-have-you espousing ideas they find repugnant they have an existential crisis.
Now, to be sure, this is nothing new for most conservative and/or traditionally religious people. The ranks of the cultural elites are filled with those who espouse all kinds of liberal notions that are the opposite of our own cherished beliefs, even going so far as to express disgust for that to which we hold fast. We’ve become accustomed to that actor in our favorite show/movie or this author of our favorite book giving us pause. And with these celebrities venturing onto the Internet where they can make their opinions even more transparent, this becomes a more common occurrence.
What’s interesting is that liberal fans are now dealing with this problem. I’ve seen this crop up most recently with regard to Orson Scott Card, the author of the sci-fi classic “Ender’s Game” and a devout Mormon who espouses social conservative political views. Card has been a newspaper columnist and commentator for some time, but recently he’s been very vocal about the travesty of courts redefining marriage as well as giving free rein to abortion.
Oldest copy of the Bible now available on online
Ten years ago when I was telling people about the Internet and how the Vatican was setting up a web site, an image I often used to described the promise of this new medium was that of access to previously difficult-to-access information. I would point out that the Vatican’s libraries hold ancient manuscripts, including millennia-old copies of the Bible, that only very few accredited scholars would ever get to see and wait until the day those manuscripts are imaged and put online for anyone in the world to see at their own computers.
That day has come.
The British Library has announced that it will make the complete Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest, most complete Bible in the world dating from around 350 AD, available online for the first time and all in once piece for the first time in decades. The Codex Sinaiticus, so named because it was discovered in St. Catherine Monastery on Mount Sinai in 1844, has been divided in pieces almost from the time of the discovery, with large sections being held in Britain; Leipzig, Germany; and St. Petersburg, Russia. As of Thursday, high-resolution images of 100 pages will be available at www.codex-sinaiticus.net and the rest will be added over the next year.
Think of what this will mean for scholarship of all kinds. Whereas research on rare or precious documents used to be limited to those with access and the ability to travel to far-flung places, now scholars and non-scholars will be able to get a better view of the document than even if they were physically present. (You’d never be allowed to actually touch such a precious treasure.)
Book club to discuss Ron Hansen’s “Exile”
InsideCatholic.com is announcing a new Book Circle, which I think is something like an online book club. From their announcement:
What is “Catholic” fiction? Is it simply fiction written by a Catholic? Must it include Catholic characters and treat distinctly Catholic themes? Does it reflect a “Catholic sensibility,” being a product of the “sacramental imagination”? Ought the Catholic reader — or the general reader, for that matter — even bother with such questions?
These topics get chewed over a great deal in our circles, but all too often flit about in the realms of abstraction, unmoored by careful reference to any particular text. In that light, Matthew Lickona, Amy Welborn, Joseph O’Brien, and Bishop Daniel Flores decided to sit down with Exiles
, the latest novel from Ron Hansen, to explore some of these questions.
The discussion of the book will take place on the InsideCatholic web site July 14 to July 18, and apparently the idea stems from a recent discussion kicked off by Todd Aglialoro’s article, “Whatever happened to Catholic fiction?”
Exiles is the novelization of how the real-life Catholic poet Gerard Manley Hopkins came to write his poem “The Wreck of the Deutschland.” Hansen also wrote The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.
GKC on the history of England
Thank you to all for your suggestions for books on European history. It will take me a while to sort through them all, but please keep them coming. It’s very informative.
By the by, has anyone read the book linked above, A Short History of England
I know I didn’t ask for history books on England because I think I know its history better than others, but my hunch is that Chesterton does a pretty good job and that would make entertaining reading nonetheless. What say you?
A call for suggestions of history books
Having just finished reading about the crusades, I realize my knowledge of European history, in general and in the medieval period in particular, has large gaps. I know British history best, primarily because of my reading various literature in English, but I’d love to spread my wings a bit.
Consider this an open request for suggestions of good books for popular consumption, both general surveys of medieval Europe, but also good books that focus on particular places or periods, like the Muslim conquest of Spain and their expulsion, or the Bourbon rulers of the Two Sicilies, or the history of the Holy Roman Empire or the like.
I know Warren Carroll has produced a massive multi-volume set on the history of Christendom, but I’m hoping for something that will help me dip my toe into the subject before I immerse myself in something that large.
Photo credit: Copyright Lars Aronsonn, 2005. Licensed under Creative Commons Share Alike 1.0 license.
Thomas F. Madden’s New Concise History of the Crusades
This is not a whitewash of the Crusades, but a well-researched and explained look at the successes, failures, and motivations of the Crusades from the intensely devotional to the mundane, being sure to examine the crusaders and their foes in the context of the times and culture they lived, not holding them to the standards of today or of our culture.
The book was updated after 9/11 to place the Crusades within the geopolitical context of today. The last chapter examines how the Crusades have been perceived since the seventeenth century and very relevantly among the Muslim people of today. You might be surprised (but then again you might not) that what you’ve been told in the media about Muslims nursing grudges against the West for the crusades for the past seven centuries is a lot of bunk. In his penultimate chapter, Madden concludes:
It is not the crusades, then, that led to the attacks of September 11, but the artificial memory of the crusades constructed by modern colonial powers and passed down by Arab nationalists. They stripped the medieval expeditions of every aspect of their age and dressed them up instead in the tattered rags of nineteenth-century imperialism. As such, they have become an icon for modern agendas that medieval Christians and Muslims could scarcely have understood, let alone condoned.
What could have been
The history of the Crusades fills me with sorrow because of the sorrow they wrought for all of Christendom. Along with many other failings during the Middle Ages—the political intrigues and ecclesiastical heterodoxy and more—the Crusades sapped the attention and resources of Europe as well as the prominence and esteem for the papacy and led to the Protestant Reformation as well as the so-called Enlightenment, which ended in the rejection of so much popular faith and devotion in the name of secularism.
Madden claims convincingly that Protestantism owes its existence to the threat of the Muslim armies of the Ottoman Turks:
The Protestants and the Turks had a mutually beneficial, although unintentional, relationship. The Turkish threat distracted the pope and the Holy Roman Emperor long enough for Luther to nurture his movement and secure his position. Because of his wars with the Turks and their allies, Charles V was unable to remove Protestants from his northern domains. As Kenneth Setton has noted, “without them [the Turks], Protestantism might conceivably have gone the way of Albigensianism.”
And yet if they had been successful in capturing the Holy Lands and beating back the armies that would have followed, including the Mongols and the various Turks and Tamerlane’s forces and what have you, would we be better off?
What I got at the RCAB yard sale
So, everyone knows that the Archdiocese of Boston is moving from its historic chancery grounds in Brighton, Massachusetts—having sold most of the property to Boston College—to its new Pastoral Center in Braintree. Among other things, the move lets us consolidate and go through sometimes decades of cruft that have accumulated in offices and storerooms.
Some of this material, while lacking utility for the current owner, might be just what someone else is looking for in another office, so we held a big employee “yard sale,” although it was not really a “sale” since no money was exchanged. Of course, my favorite section was the books. While there was plenty of stuff that—let’s just say I had no interest in—I did come away with a couple of nice finds.
The first was “The Grunt Padre”
The second was “What I Saw at the Revolution: A Political Life in the Reagan Era”
Anyway, I hope to be able to be allowed to write eventually about the new Pastoral Center and our move into that location. While it’s undeniably sad to leave behind the history and the beautiful campus in Brighton, there’s an excitement about the future and the exciting possibilities opened up by this opportunity.
Photo credit: US Navy/Marine Corps via Wikipedia Commons. Public domain.
Read the Bible in a Year (but not the whole Bible)
Ever wanted to read the whole Bible? At one point or another most committed Christians decide to tackle God’s Word and if they’re anything like me they peter out somewhere in the Book of Numbers.
Of course, the Bible-industrial complex is willing to help you out—for a fee. When I worked at a Christian bookstore we used to sell “Bible in One Year” books that subdivided the tome into 365 equal parts. They came in all sort of variations, and even Catholic ones.
But now you can dispense with the expense and the paper book with the BiblePlan site. Give it your email address, your preferred translation (sorry, no Catholic versions), your language, and how much of the Bible you want to read in a year—Gospels, Psalms, Old Testament, New Testament, or the whole thing, Numbers included.
Keep in mind that if you select the whole Bible or just the Old Testament, you’re not getting the whole thing. Apparently they offer just the “crippled” Protestant version without all the books we Catholics get to enjoy. They call them Apocryphal or Deuterocanonical. I call them the complete Bible.
But even with those limitations, you might find the service useful anyway.
Image: Wikimedia Commons; in the public domain.
Methinks he has missed the point
The Boston Globe’s religion writer takes this Easter Sunday to review several books on Christianity, including Phil Lawler’s “Faithful Departed”, upon which he levies both disapprobation and tempered praise.
Doubt - as essential to thoughtful faith as to assessing politicians’ utterances - is too scarce in some of this season’s religion books, if doubt means less than strict adherence to dogma. In “The Faithful Departed,” Philip F. Lawler comes off the Grumpy Old Catholic in bemoaning the failure of coreligionists, in Boston and elsewhere, to follow traditional church teachings, even before the priestly sex-abuse scandal torpedoed the bishops’ moral authority. He won’t persuade doubting Catholics who respectfully dissent from their church on matters like gay marriage, contraception, and female ordination, exercising their privilege under Catholic doctrine of following their informed conscience.
But bravo for his condemning bishops who covered up the priest sex-abuse scandal and escaped punishment. Lawler labels as a liar the Rev. John McCormack, formerly an underling in Boston, who Lawler says assured a parent that a priest was safe when McCormack knew the cleric to be an alleged abuser. McCormack remains bishop of Manchester, N.H.
I would have much to say in response to this review, but as usual Diogenes does a much better job in fewer words than I would use:
“Bravo” says a Boston Globe reviewer in his drive-by 5-sentence review of Phil Lawler’s book, The Faithful Departed.
Now to be perfectly honest, if you trouble yourself to read the whole thing, you might question whether “bravo” captures the essence of the review. Indeed you might wonder whether your Uncle Di even read the whole thing. Fair enough. But then I wonder whether the Globe reviewer read Phil’s book, so I guess we’re even.
A question about Madeline
Quick question: In the “Madeline” books by Ludwig Bemelmans, is Miss Clavell a nun. Is that a habit she’s wearing? Or is it some kind of headmistress outfit worn by French boarding-school heads? And if it’s a nun, why is she “Miss” Clavell and not “Sister” Clavell?
These are the sorts of questions that pop up when you’re reading the stories for the umpteenth time.
The longest book meme ever
Yes, it’s another book meme. At first I said I wouldn’t do it even if Melanie retroactively tagged me because it seemed so long and involved. But then I started thinking about it and came up with some answers so here goes.
Which book do you irrationally cringe away from reading, despite seeing only positive reviews?
I think that for me this is “Father Elijah: An Apocalypse” by Michael O’Brien. I know everyone loves it and I even started reading it once, but I just couldn’t get into it. Why? I don’t know, it’s not rational! Maybe it’s the apocalyptic theme, that just doesn’t interest me.
If you could bring three characters to life for a social event (afternoon tea, a night of clubbing, perhaps a world cruise), who would they be and what would the event be?
I think at least two of them would be Gandalf from “The Lord of the Rings” and Astrid from S.M. Stirling’s “Changeverse” trilogy. I would love to see how Gandalf would set that “silly” child straight that she’s not a real Dunedain. Plus, you know, she’d go ga-ga at the sight of him. Talk about crazy stalker fan.
And the third? Maybe Harry Potter just to see how Gandalf would react to him too: “My name is not Albus Dumbledore.”
(Borrowing shamelessly from the Thursday Next series by Jasper Fforde): you are told you can’t die until you read the most boring novel on the planet. While this immortality is great for awhile, eventually you realize it’s past time to die. Which book would you expect to get you a nice grave?
Melanie will kill me for this but I’d say that James Joyce’s “Ulysses” would do me in very quickly.
Come on, we’ve all been there. Which book have you pretended, or at least hinted, that you’ve read, when in fact you’ve been nowhere near it?
Well, there would be all those book in my high school junior year American Literature class like “Moby Dick”. These sad thing is I’d probably enjoy it today. (Got my only failing high school grade for that semester because I’d pretended to read the book when I hadn’t.)
As an addition to the last question, has there been a book that you really thought you had read, only to realize when you read a review about it/go to ‘reread’ it that you haven’t?
Like Melanie, this hasn’t happened to me. But also like Melanie, I’m far more likely to start reading a book only to realize I’d forgotten I’d read it.
You’re interviewing for the post of Official Book Advisor to some VIP (who’s not a big reader). What’s the first book you’d recommend and why? (if you feel like you’d have to know the person, go ahead and personalize the VIP)
This one’s a little too vague for me. Who’s the person? Am I recommending a book to get them to read more or to assist in a particular situation? I don’t want to answer this one.
A good fairy comes and grants you one wish: you will have perfect reading comprehension in the foreign language of your choice. Which language do you go with?
Easy one: Koine Greek, the ancient dialect of the manuscripts of the New Testament. I’ve enough of an understanding to look words up and get the general gist if I know the verse’s context, but not perfect reading comprehension. That would be so cool.
A mischievous fairy comes and says that you must choose one book that you will reread once a year for the rest of your life (you can read other books as well). Which book would you pick?
Another easy one: “The Lord of the Rings”. In fact, I read this once a year every year for about 16 years straight so it’s not that far-fetched.
I know that the book blogging community, and its various challenges, have pushed my reading borders. What’s one bookish thing you ‘discovered’ from book blogging (maybe a new genre, or author, or new appreciation for cover art-anything)?
Again easy: S.M. Stirling’s books. I would never have discovered them if not for Dale Price’s reviews and that Stirling is a regular in his comboxes. Learning a little about the author like that made me interested in his what his books had to say. One of the best blog-related book discoveries ever.
That good fairy is back for one final visit. Now, she’s granting you your dream library! Describe it. Is everything leatherbound? Is it full of first edition hardcovers? Pristine trade paperbacks? Perhaps a few favourite authors have inscribed their works? Go ahead-let your imagination run free.
Easiest answer of all: Go read Melanie’s answer. Yeah, ditto.
The Book Meme, again
I first did this meme back in May 2006, but since it’s come around again, I’ll take another whack since Tony at the “Will You Marry Me? —God” blog tagged me.
Book Meme Rules
- Pick up the nearest book ( of at least 123 pages).
- Open the book to page 123.
- Find the fifth sentence.
- Post the next three sentences.
- Tag five people.
Here are the three sentences:
You may find you have a tendency, while processing your in-basket, to pick something up, not know exactly what you want to do about it, and then let your eyes wander onto another item farther down the stack and get engaged with it. That item may be more attractive to your psyche because you know right away what to do with it—and you don’t feel like thinking about what’s in your hand. This is dangerous territory.
Can you guess the name of the book? The title is below the jump.
Of red books and bookshop memories
A delightful essay by George Orwell called “Bookshop Memories” and written in 1936. It details his thoughts on having worked in a secondhand bookstore in London and what it taught him about the book trade, book buyers and consumers (not the same thing), and his own attitude toward books.
It is very entertaining and amusing and made me reflect on the time I worked in a local Christian bookstore and church supply. I’ll have to post my memories of that, including a third-hand brush with the Dead Sea Scrolls. Here’s a taste of Orwell:
When I worked in a second-hand bookshop — so easily pictured, if you don’t work in one, as a kind of paradise where charming old gentlemen browse eternally among calf-bound folios — the thing that chiefly struck me was the rarity of really bookish people. Our shop had an exceptionally interesting stock, yet I doubt whether ten per cent of our customers knew a good book from a bad one. First edition snobs were much commoner than lovers of literature, but oriental students haggling over cheap textbooks were commoner still, and vague-minded women looking for birthday presents for their nephews were commonest of all.
Many of the people who came to us were of the kind who would be a nuisance anywhere but have special opportunities in a bookshop. For example, the dear old lady who ‘wants a book for an invalid’ (a very common demand, that), and the other dear old lady who read such a nice book in 1897 and wonders whether you can find her a copy. Unfortunately she doesn’t remember the title or the author’s name or what the book was about, but she does remember that it had a red cover.
I have to stop there and mention that I read this essay aloud to Melanie, but first we talked about our own experiences working in bookstores. I worked in the aforementioned Christian bookstore and Melanie has worked in both Waldenbooks (since eaten up by a still-larger chain) and her father’s Catholic bookstore in Austin.
One thing I recalled was the tendency of customers to come in and make the most inane requests, like, as Melanie recalled, “I want to buy a book for my nephew’s birthday. He’s 12.” As if every 12-year-old boy has the same tastes and a woman in her mid-20s would know what those are. Or, as I contributed, “The person who came in and said, ‘I don’t remember the title or author, but it has a red cover.’” I would swear on a stack of Bibles that this is what I said. In fact, “red cover” is how we described it back in the day at the store. For some reason it was always a book with a “red cover”. Are the titles of red-covered books harder to remember? Is their color more memorable than other colors, such as blue or purple? Very funny.
If you’ve ever worked in a bookstore or even just love books, you’ll like Orwell’s essay.
New book: “Faithful Departed” by Phil Lawler
My good friend and former boss, Phil Lawler, editor of Catholic World News, offers up a sneak peek of the first chapter of his new book on the Catholic Church in Boston, “The Faithful Departed: The Collapse of Boston’s Catholic Culture”.
In the book, Phil charts the rise of Catholicism in Boston out of the pits of bigotry and repression to become the single most dominant force in the life of the average citizen, only to see it fall so far out of influence in public life that even the most prominent Catholic public figures flout her principles with nary a thought. The pinnacle came in the middle of the 20th century:
Among those Catholics, about 80% attended Mass every week, and heard the doctrine of the Church proclaimed in sermons regularly. Many attended parochial schools, where their attitudes toward the world were shaped by the Sisters of St. Joseph and other religious orders. When the Holy Name Society organized a parade, 10,000 men marched through the streets of downtown Boston. A growing number attended Catholic colleges; Boston College and Holy Cross were attracting some of the brightest young men from the families of Irish and Italian immigrants. Lay Catholics joined the Knights of Columbus, the Women’s Sodality and the Altar Guild. They met their future spouses at CYO dances and Newman Club social hours. They identified themselves readily as Catholics, and on religious matters they identified Cardinal O’Connell as their leader.
How times have changed.
Obviously, as an employee of the Archdiocese it would be inappropriate for me to offer an endorsement of the book, but I am interested in reading Phil’s perspective. I don’t think we’ve had anyone weigh in on the situation in Boston from this particular point of view and it should be a valuable contribution.
