Books
Discussion of books and book reviews
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.
Listen to the Professor speak to the BBC
Someone has dug up a 1971 BBC radio interview with J.R.R. Tolkien and posted it to YouTube. In addition to the actual interview, it’s also a chance for some fans to hear his voice for the first time.
I’d heard his voice before. When I was a kid, I received for Christmas a record (an actual vinyl disc!) of Tolkien reading excerpts from his works, including the Lay of Beren and Luthien and A Elbereth Githoniel. It was fascinating to hear how to properly pronounce all those names and Elvish words. It was from Caedmon, I recall.
Among the amusing bits in this interview are the Beeb interviewer questioning Tolkien on why he chose the one of that unheroic race of hobbits to be an unlikely Christ-figure. Tolkien responds that he didn’t choose Frodo, but that he was simply continuing on from The Hobbit and it had to be a hobbit who carried the Ring in the Lord of the Rings. What the interviewer seems to overlook is that Christ Himself was an unlikely Christ-figure!
“He grew up like a sapling before him, like a shoot from the parched earth; There was in him no stately bearing to make us look at him, nor appearance that would attract us to him. He was spurned and avoided by men, a man of suffering, accustomed to infirmity, One of those from whom men hide their faces, spurned, and we held him in no esteem.” (Isaiah 53:2-3)
It is precisely this point that Tolkien was traveling with in Frodo and hobbits. God’s ways are not those of men, and God often works in ways that man would not. He doesn’t come on a white charger, a worldly army at His back and a worldly crown on His head. Likewise, the Ringbearer doesn’t assault Sauron with an army at his back nor is he a Numerean or one of the Eldar.
Books: Venusians and Crusaders
I just finished reading the new book by S.M. Stirling book “The Sky People”, which looks to be the first of a new trilogy I think. The proposition in these books is this: What if the Venus and Mars of all those pulp science fiction novels of the first half of the 20th century—planets full of dinosaurs and other fantastic creatures and human civilizations—were real? What if space probes in the 1960s discovered that Mars and Venus were inhabited by a fantastic menagerie? How would that affect subsequent history and how would Earth’s nations respond to this reality? Most importantly, how could such things happen?
All the familiar Stirling elements are here. The extremely capable, yet down-to-earth (so to speak) heroes, the strong-of-mind-and-body heroines, the betrayers, the detailed description of flora and fauna, and oh yes, blimps. Stirling loves blimps.
This is enjoyable pulp, a pretty quick read that was a bit slow to get started, but then really took off. Some of the plot threads seemed to get lost, but perhaps they’re merely dormant, waiting to picked up again in the next book. I recommend this one for any fan of Stirling’s other books. It’s not quite at the level of the “Emberverse” books, but easily the equal of “Conquistador”.
Meanwhile, I’ve next started reading Thomas F. Madden’s “The New Concise History of the Crusades”. This is a survey of the Crusades written for a general audience by a well-regarded historian, using the most current scholarly research. The book was updated after 9/11 to reflect the renewed interest in the Crusades, especially with the terrorists referring to all Westerners as “crusaders” and calling the War on Terror a new crusade.
I’m only a few pages into the book, but I do have one quibble. Already Madden has said several times that “Only recently, in the aftermath of September 11, have westerners discovered that religion remains a reason to wage deadly war.” Really? I suppose for some people, but I think a lot of people have been aware of it since at least the Iranian hostage crisis in 1980. Certainly, the rhetoric used at the time was distinctly Islamist.
I don’t think this is a fatal flaw for the book. I look forward to reading what Madden has to say about this period of history that remains so relevant today.
2008 Tolkien birthday toast
Today is the 116th birthday of J.R.R. Tolkien, born on this date in 1892. The Tolkien Society encourages everyone to offer a toast to the Professor and author of “the Lord of the Rings” tonight at 9pm wherever you are, in whatever time zone you happen to inhabit.
Now this is a book review
This is the greatest review on Amazon ever. EVAH!1!
Amazon.com: R. Bundy’s review of The Odyssey (Penguin Classics)
5 of 80 people found the following review helpful:
By R. Bundy - See all my reviews
★☆☆☆☆ THIS BOOK WOULD BE BETTER IF IT WERE BURNED!
THIS PATHIC BOOK MAKES NO SENSE ONCESOEVER!!! HOMER IS A HORRIBLE WRITER!! DO NOT WASTE YOUR TIME ON THIS!!! NOT EVEN WORTH ONE STAR!!!!
Also where were Marge and Bart and Lisa? Not to mention there wasn’t a single Odyssey in sight.
[via Kung Fu Grippe]
Update: To be clear, the awesomeness of this review has nothing to do with the awesomeness of Homer. I think the Odyssey and Homer are great. The review is great in and of itself because of how it represents the “glories” of the “community-driven content” Web 2.0 movement.
My salvo in the Harry Potter debates
I finally finished the “Harry Potter” series of books by J.K. Rowling. I’d got a late start only picking up the first book earlier this year. I’d been meaning to read them, but only got serious when I heard that the final book had a big ending that I didn’t want to have spoiled for me.
With that in mind, if you haven’t read the books, I suggest you stop reading now. Otherwise, the rest of you can click through the jump to read my impressions.
Has the Theology of the Body changed your life?
Marcel Lejeune of TheCatholicEvangelist.com and the Aggie Catholic blog writes about a project he’s working on and he needs your help.
I am putting together a book entitled The Gift of Love: How John Paul II’s Theology of the Body has Changed Lives. It will be a book about Catholics whose lives have been changed by John Paul the Great’s Theology of the Body. Therefore, this book will be a compilation of stories from a cross-section of Catholics.
I am currently looking for good stories of those who have been changed by JPII’s Theology of the Body. If you have a story about how JPII”s TOB has changed your life, then please submit a story. If you know others who might be interested in submitting a story for the book, then I ask you to invite them as well. The authors of the stories will receive a free book, if their story is accepted and published.
A page on my website is currently up to take submissions.
Hoisting a few with the Inklings
Oh, to have been a fly on that wall.
Not that all of them were ever present at the Magdalen reading meetings: often no more than six or seven would turn up, while the rest preferred to save themselves for the more raucous social gatherings in the Oxford pub The Eagle and Child. Inkling James Dundas-Grant recalls a typical scene:
“we sat in a small back room with a fine coal fire in winter … back and forth the conversation would flow. Latin tags flying around. Homer quoted in the original to make a point … Tolkien jumping up and down, declaiming in Anglo-Saxon.”
“Down the pub with Tolkien and C. S. Lewis” - Times Online, a review of “The Company They Keep: C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien as Writers in Community” by Diana Pavlac Glyer.
Happy Birthday!
Today is a very important day on the calendar, the birthday of not one, but two important fellows, Bilbo and Frodo Baggins.
Happy birthday! Now, let’s go have a big party under the Party Tree and then light off some fireworks in the shape of dragon. Oh, those hobbits know how to party.
Your name in headlines
Here’s quick and fun meme (which is the only reason I’m doing it): Go to Amazon, click on Books, and then advanced search and type your first name in the title field. Choose the most interesting or amusing title.
I chose two:
- “Domenico Dragonetti in England (1794-1846): The Career of a Double Bass Virtuoso”
- “Domenico Scandella Known As Menocchio: His Trials Before the Inquisition (1583-1599)”
That first one is uncanny! 
Frankly, I was just surprised to find even one book with my name in the title.
[Tips to the Llama Butchers.]
