2023: A Year in Reading

The following are books I read this year that struck and continue to strike me deeply. The list is ordered by when the books were read.  The bolded books are my “Top 5 Books of the Year”:

1. Deep Work

2. The Remains of the Day

3. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn

4. Into Your Hands, Father

5. Ruthless Elimination of Hurry

6. Four Thousand Weeks

7. Amusing Ourselves to Death

8. Why Boredom Matters

9. Seven Story Mountain

10. Dark Passages of the Bible

11. A River Runs Through It

For the 2nd half of this year, I was on a “reading streak” I’ve never experienced before.  It felt like so much (and at one point, all of) what I read was powerful in a truly life-changing and paradigm-shifting sort of way.  Beginning with the two books I read while on our 15th anniversary in the Dominican (The Remains of the Day & A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), I read 10 books I can safely say “blew me away in real and significant ways.”  I’m still unsure if I happened to stumble upon a slew of incredibly awesome books─or if I was in an emotional and psychological state in which the ideas and spirits of books had direct access to my spirit and psyche.  At this point, I think it must be a little of both.

The other fascinating thing is that, out of the 11 books that knocked me out of the water, only 4 of them were narrative, and only 2 of them were unequivocally novels.  In short, it was the year of nonfiction for me.  I don’t know if I’ll read more nonfiction than fiction this upcoming year, or ever again; I have no idea.  However, I do know I’ll be reading more nonfiction than I did in the past.  One reason, I think, is age.  In my 40s now, ideas, even historical facts, can appear to me as fascinating as, in the past, only narratives did.      

My Top Five

• I began Kazuo Ishiguro’s Remains of the Day on the plane to our 15th-anniversary celebration in an all-inclusive in the Dominican Republic.  This is a very good time to begin any book.  Interestingly, though, I was initially put off by what I labeled as “the overdone Britishisms of the classic butler,” but the narrator and his style ─ and his perspective and worldview ─ grew on me pretty quickly.  It was his voice (and by extension his worldview) as well as the history the book covers (an interesting take on the time between WW1 and WW2, as well as the real end of the British aristocracy) that made the content alive for me─and, to be honest, it’s a sort of love story.  Hauntingly beautiful.

• Wilfred Stinissen’s Into Your Hands, Father is a book of Catholic theology that claims, forcefully but brilliantly, that the whole spiritual life─and by extention, the whole of life itself─hinges upon our willingness to trust that God is good, that He loves us, and that we can and should, if we care about our peace and happiness, trust that everything we encounter is part of God’s will for our life─and that He is loving us intimately through it.  It is equal parts challenging and beautiful.

• Oliver Burkeman’s Four Thousand Weeks was a profound look into the problems with many productivity books, taking a rather philosophical look at time and being human.  The book could seem depressing; for example, he thinks the main reason we’re not as productive as we’d like is that we fail to accept our finitude (note that four thousand weeks is about the lifespan of a human).  But it is also liberating─especially if you read it from a Christian standpoint.  Ironically, the author thinks he’s anti-religious, but for almost every reason he states he’s against Christianity, he’d actually jive with it, if he understood it in any real and intellectual sense.  I’ll say that the ideas of this book have played a profound role in helping shape and guide my current perspective on life.

• Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death needs to be read by everyone in our current digital and image-laden age.  The entire book is an argument for a single idea:  A world in which text is the main medium of communication produces a world entirely different than a world/worldview from a world/worldview resulting from the image as the medium of communication.  Words assume meaning and cohesion, and they produce a world of rational argument.  Images assume none of these things, and they produce a world that has no relationship with rational argument.  Whether you agree with Postman or not, his book is a perfect example of rational argument.

• I only recently finished the semi-autobiographical novella “A River Runs Through It” by Norman Maclean, but I ended my reading of the book with a specific prayer I’ve prayed after finishing only a small handful of books, all of which remain my favorite books of all time:  “Please, please God, tell me there are more books like this.”  But, as with every other time I’ve prayed this prayer, I’m met with the unassailable conviction that, no, there are no other books like it.  (A Month in the Country and Gilead are other books I finished with such a prayer.)  Maclean is sentimental without any sense of artifice, spiritual without any heavy-handedness, and philosophical without condescension.  The book is Annie Dillard and Hemingway mashed together, while the experience of reading is more akin to Marilynne Robinson.  

(3) "Austerlitz," by W. G. Sebald

A few things to note while it's fresh on mind.  Like the other two Sebald novels I read, this is amazing.  Unlike them, though, there is a focused narrative here.  Yes, it has the meandering plot and prose you can lost in (I did quite a few times), but it generally follows the life of a single person, Austertiz, as he remembers his childhood and relates it to the nameless (often ethereal) narrator during a series of chance encounters over the course of decades.

Additionally, I was bored with this at many points, but the fault lies with me as a reader.  I know Sebald enough to know how you must give your all to your reading, leaving your anxieties & desire for contact via Smartphone or Internet (or work, or family) behind.  It didn't help that I was reading this at the same time as a couple of nonfiction texts.  When I read the only Sebald novel I haven't yet tackled, I will make sure I'm reading nothing else. 

A Decade of Reading: The 10 Most Significant Books, 2012 to 2021

Top 10

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Out Stealing Horses by Per Petterson

Silence by Shūsaku Endō

Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

A Month in the Country by J. L. Carr

The Evenings by Gerard Reve

Leisure: The Basis of Culture by Josef Pieper

The Crossing by Cormac McCarthy

Honorable Mentions

Mariette in Ecstasy by Ron Hansen

Suttree by Cormac McCarthy

Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson

Lila by Marilynne Robinson

Children of Men by PD James

The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald

Waiting for the Barbarians by J. M. Coetzee

A Handful of Dust by Evelyn Waugh

Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes

A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor 

Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov

The Trial by Kafka

A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess

Hannah Coulter by Wendell Berry

Old School by Tobias Wolff

Significant Authors Who Somehow Didn't Make the First List But Deserve Mention Because They Wrote a Lot of Books I Read and Loved Over the Past Ten Years

Tobias Wolff

Haruki Murakami

C.S. Lewis

Ron Hansen

Toni Morrison

Evelyn Waugh

Flannery O’Connor

W. G. Sebald

Some Final Thoughts & a Tentative Rubric

When I label a book a "favorite," what do I mean?  Is it different if it's a "favorite" of a particular year or of "all-time"?  In short, how do I determine the significance of a book to me?

Below is a two-criterion rubric for answering exactly these questions.  To be honest, for most years and most books, I distinguish between "significant" and "not significant" ─ or somewhere between these extremes ─  on a gut-level.  In fact, I created this rubric as an attempt to formalize my unconscious (or at least unreflective) responses to books.  The relationship between the two (the gut-response and rubric) might not be perfect; but after creating it, I've used it to reflect on other books, and it seems accurate, even if not perfect. 

Rubric

1.1.  A book is significant if and when the reading experience was powerful.  By experience, I mean emotional experience, as well as physical, psychological, or even spiritual.  But the root of this is phenomenological: the felt experience when I was reading was powerful.  1.2  A book is significant if and when the memory of the reading experience echoes, in some shape or form, the power and/or form of the initial reading experience.  The very thought of when I read the book (not just the thought of the book, but the thought of when I read the book) is enough to encourage a return to that experience.  (In this way, I both want to reread these types of books but am simultaneously afraid to do so.  My desire is rooted in an attempt to replicate or even deepen the original experience; the fear comes from the potential that neither will happen.)

2.  A book is significant if and when it changes me, if and when it speaks truth to me.  I bow to the words of Tobias Wolff here because he speaks exactly what I believe, but he said it first ─ and he said it a hell of a lot better: "I was changed by literature, not by cautionary or exhortatory literature, but by the truth as I found it in literature. I recognize the world in a different way because of it, and I continue to be influenced in that way by it. Opened up, made more alert, and called to a greater truthfulness in my own accounting of things, not just in my writing, in my life as well."  From a young child, what Wolff says is true for me.  

(2) "Breaking Bread with the Dead: A Reader's Guide to a More Tranquil Mind," Alan Jacobs

(1): "A Theology of Love: The Hermeneutics of Love," by Alan Jacobs

This was an amazingly interesting (and, often, fun) book to read.  It took me a bit to get through it, despite its relative brevity, because I wanted to always read it when I was able to give my full (completely awake) attention.  

The basic question Jacobs asks in this book is, if the law of love is the central Christian law (love of God and love of neighbor), should it not guide every other endeavor, literary interpretation/criticism included?  The second question, assuming the answer to first is a yes, is What does a hemerunics of reading look like guided by Christian charity?  The book is, in part, an extended reflection on  how best to define Christian charity, and then how this applies to the act of reading and interpreting.  I wished more for the latter, but Jacobs feels it necessary to focus on the former.  Early there's a lot of Aristotle and Augustine, both who offer a lot to say on the subject, even if they also offer only limited answers to the central question.  Bakhtin is probably the only figure (maybe Auden too) whose ideas Jacobs uses constructively and unconditionally.  

Reading into it a bit, it seems that Jacobs wants to protect reading against both sides of the culture wars, both of which want to "force" the text into a simple interpretative model, whether that's "cultural criticism" or "religious orthodoxy."  Neither of these give the type of attention to the text that true charitable reading requires.  

For now, I'll end by saying that this has sprung me into the world of Alan Jacobs.  Before even finishing this, I purchased two more of his books: the collection of essays published right after this one (which seems to be his earliest publication) and his most recent book, on the value of reading in an age of distraction.  I look forward to both.

2021: A Year Of Reading

In hopes of preserving some of my reading experiences from the past year, I’d like to say something very briefly about what I’m considering to be the “5 Most Significant Books I’ve Read in 2021.”  I’ve included, at the end, another 4 “honorable mentions.” 

I’d like to begin with a question: When can you determine that a book has been “significant” to you?  Some books that have deeply impressed me while reading leave little long-term traces in my mind and heart, while some that I’ve “pushed” myself through, or even openly criticized while reading, have stuck with me for years, sometimes even decades.  I suppose we could consider a 1-month test; then a 6-month, 1-year, 5-year, and 10-year test.  

At each stage, we could ask the following questions: 

• Which books continue to provoke the strongest emotional response, either a faint or strong echo of the original reading experience?

• Which books contain characters or events that live in my memory in a similar way to (perhaps indistinguishable from) real persons and real events?

• Which books, upon conscious reflection, are remembered in a spirit of gratitude?

• Which books still affect the way I think about and react to the world, whether I’m thinking about them or not?

This is all just to say that some of these books, those read in the first half of the year, are open to at least a 6-month test, while others can barely offer themselves up for the 1-month test.  But I choose to assess nonetheless.  

1. The Evenings, by Gerard Reve.  What a romp, this book is!  It’s like a genuinely funny Waiting for Godot (as opposed to the humor I now receive from teaching Godot, which is a result of reflection and repetition.)  This novel was also painfully piercing in its portrayal of small town life: its random focuses, its pettiness, but most of all, its boredom.  

2. The Emigrants, by W. G. Sebald.  Four meandering little character life sketches, told by outsiders seeking to know more about elusive and depressing characters.  I am mesmerized by Sebald ─ have been since reading The Rings of Saturn.  Also, he only wrote 4 novels!  And I’m presently reading the third…

3. The Coddling of the American Mind, by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt.  A conversationally written take on what’s going wrong with our youth, from college campuses to high schools to childhoods.  I found it equal parts depressing and refreshing.  It’s depressing in its presentation of stories and facts, but refreshing in the sense that it’s helped me put into words a lot of what I’ve observed and thought about over the past 5 years.  A seriously important book for today.

4. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, by Scott McCloud.  Hands down the best “comic book” / graphic novel/book I’ve ever read.  It helped me enormously in my understanding of “what to do” when I’m reading a graphic book.  Simply awesome.  On top of that, one of the best books on art and aesthetics in general.  While I don’t agree with everything, it wasn’t presented in any sort of authoritative way.  McCloud attempts, humbly, to define some terms, make some category distinctions, and offer some reflections.  Even his own ideas are amenable to changes and reconfigurations.  

5. Searching for and Maintaining Peace: A Small Treatise on Peace of Heart, by Jacques Philippe.  This is one of the great Philippe texts, the one most obviously focused on one of his central themes: inner peace.  Nowadays, I simply rotate between a few Philippe during my morning prayer/meditation.  This was amazing.    

Honorable Mentions

Maus, by Art Spiegelman

The song at the scaffold, by Gertrud von Le Fort

A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, by George Saunders

The Abolition of Man, by CS Lewis

December 14: "Dappled Things" Easter 2021 (2/2)

I very much enjoyed my reading through of the rest of this issue of Dappled Things, in particular the poetry.  Some of the Devon Balwit poems were really well done.  

Reading more of this publication lately has allowed me to realize that I dislike many of the book reviews, probably more than half.  The most common factor is that they try too hard.  They reveal what is always the potential weakness of publications like this: the amateur writer trying too hard to create the winning metaphor, the pristine image, or the poetic prose.  Perhaps it comes out in the reviews more often because they're trying to match the style or significance of the book they're trying to tell us is so good.  And that's another thing: they're always telling us the book is so good.  

But let not this rant obscure the fact that I enjoyed this issue quite a lot.  

December 8, 2021: "The Last Hurray," Edwin O'Connor

This is my second O'Connor novel, and my response to it is similar to the first:  I enjoyed it, some parts a lot, while a few parts dragged.  There were poignant moments, very emotionally affecting, but the overall effect was limited.  O'Connor is tremendous with character and (at times) building up a worldview and time-period.  At times, the dialogue is a slog to get through; and in general, the novels feel longer than they need to be.  All that said, I think the total effect of his novels (at least the two I read) require you to be with the characters and story for a while for the effect to work.

One interesting thing to note:  The main character, a roughish but complex and very likable Bostonian politician from the midcentury (a corrupt mayor and former governor, whose corruption is never about personal gain but rather bringing comfort and equality to the extremely poor Irish working class, an oppressed minority in Boston when the mayor grew up), asks his relatively apolitical nephew to follow this his last campaign, simply to witness the end of an era.  It's an era in politics but also in American history.  

It's clear that the nephew is, in some senses, Edwin O'Connor.  He's giving witness to an end of an era.  Like a few of the characters in the novel, O'Connor was a reporter covering Boston politics.  While O'Connor's presentation isn't quite objective and neutral, no good "histories" are, since we don't truly understand a person, time-period, or geographic place through objective recountings of facts and data.  We understand through the honest but charitable presentation of the lived experience of such a person, time-period, or geographic location.  This is exactly why novels in particular offer us something about history, human psychology, and the like that no objective discipline can offer.  In this view, O'Connor succeeds winningly.  

November 20: Threepenny Review, Fall 2021

Recently, I've made a commitment to either read the publications I get or else stop getting them.  For The Threepenny Review, I decided to read --- and I'm glad I did.  There is so much quality (even if quite various) writing throughout this issue.  Having a long short story by Wendell Berry (a regular contributor lately) helps, although this wasn't my favorite of his.  There was a terrific series of little pieces on childhood, led by the inimitable Tobias Wolff.  The last piece on travel (a recounting of a 3-year experience being a newsletter writing on a cruise ship) was a wonderful read.  I look forward to the next issue.  

November 17: "The Coddling of the American Mind Book" (Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt)

For now I'll just say that is the book I've recommended to the most people before even finishing.  It's so important for so many reasons.  Each main section and each major concern of the book is significant and compelling.  It matters little that I don't agree with every single point (what would the odds of that be?).  All of the questions and concerns are so well done.  I want to write on this book more at a later point in time. 

November 3: "Elizabeth Costello," J.M. Coetzee

A number of reviews mentioned how this "novel" wasn't quite a novel.  I'm not automatically against such a thing.  All of the "novels" of one of my new favorite authors, W.G. Sebald, were far cries from any sort of novel classification.  That said, I didn't like this text by Coetzee much.  

This book is sort of a series of essays or reflections on different topics, loosely following the tail end of the fictional novelist Elizabeth Costello's middle age to her later years.  The plot generally follows her reception of awards and the speeches involved thereof.  The topics she speaks about (or that others speak about, for a few other authors/award recipients make speeches too) are varied: on realism, animal rights, eros, and the African novel.

The bits I liked the most (and might have truly enjoyed, if they were within the larger context of a novel, with plot, character, development of both, etc.) were two of the final chapters, one on the problem of evil, and the second, the final chapter of the novel, dramatizing Costello's attempt, after her death, of crossing from a limbo type bureaucratic quasi-European village to the true "after life."  

In the former, Costello contemplates the evil as representing in a novel she recently read about the Holocaust, in which she is moved deeply by the evil re-presented.  She finds the narrative "remove" almost reveling in the evil, and she finds this repulsive.  But yet she, as a novelist, always saw her role as simply presenting life, not commenting or "teaching" about it.  She isn't sure what to do with the contradiction between her beliefs and her experience.  In general, Costello isn't religious or absolutist in any definition of the word, but she tends toward an understanding that total relativity is both shallow and contrary to our experience as humans.

In the final chapter, Costello is asked to give a statement of belief before she can enter the afterlife.  As a "secretary of life" (what she thinks of herself as a writer), she can write no statement of belief.  Meanwhile, she is a Kafkaesque nameless quiet European village, which acts as a sort of limbo or purgatory, replete with all cliches of the type (cliches Costello notes).  What does she stand for?  Or, more broadly, what does Coetzee stand for?  Must he stand for something?  The most Costello can get to is her belief in existence and life.  

All in all, what kept this novel together as a novel?  No compelling plot; no thematic unity, besides for the preoccupations of a novelist.  I suppose this could be enough, but I don't think Coetzee pulled it off here.  The random bits in the middle about animal rights fit nowhere.  They neither develop earlier parts (thematically, narratively, or character-wise), nor do they connect to the later bits.

One final point.  In one of the middle chapters, Costello's sister, a Catholic nun working in Africa, is given an honorary degree because of her humanitarian work with her order's hospital.  In her graduation  "speech" (one of many in this book), she basically outlines the history of literary criticism, beginning with Scriptural study (by extension, the need to learn Greek and Latin, and thereby reading the "classics).  It was a wonderful summation of the history, but I have no idea if it's true.  I'd love to look into it.  Either way, I've been very interested in this sort of narrative.

October 19: "Dappled Things" Easter 2021 (1/2)

The half+ I read was a bit of a mixed bag:  Some strong poetry by James Matthew Wilson and Devon Balwit.  A nice nonfiction piece by Brian Pugh.  But there was an inexplicably opaque fiction piece, alongside a too sincere on-the-nose (essentially didactic) prolife fiction story.  I tend to be most critical of Dappled Things' fiction, but I do wish we could find a space between these two extremes: the vagueness of the "artsy" story and the didacticism of the "religious" story.

I plan on finishing the second half soonish.

A Year (of Reading) in Review: 2020

I haven't had the time (or, more appropriately, I haven’t made the time) for one of these yearly reviews in quite a while.  Even this year, while I prioritized it and nearly forced myself to complete it, it’s taken until early February for me to actually get around to beginning it.  So why is this post, this reflection, significant?  Why does it matter to me?  I have a few answers ready, but I think the truest reason, while taking bits and pieces of these more stock responses, is something I can't quite put into words.  It has to do with how important books are to me ─ and when I say books, I mean a slew of things: physical books, the actually reading of the books, the self-reflection that books instigate within me, and the need I have after reading to enter into dialogue with someone or some group about the book, even if that only means reading a few Goodreads Reviews and perhaps typing up a short one of my own.  Apart from the things most objectively sacred to all of us ─ God, my relationship to God ─ and apart from my vocation as husband and father, books are the most important and even sacred aspects of my identity.  My point here isn’t to defend this as much as it is to simply put it into words.  My identity is inextricably wrapped up in the world of books, authors, the ideas books concern themselves with, and my ever-growing need to converse about books with other human persons.

In a more practical sense, my reflection here allows me to return to the most meaningful books I’ve read over the past year.  I will also use this post to explore two ideas about reading that have been bouncing around my head during the year 2020.

Part 1: The Top 3 Reads of 2020

I don’t usually rank my top books, but there’s only one that is an unambiguous pick for me this year.  I read it twice this year, even though my rereadings are usually separated by a few years or even decades.  I speak here of J.L. Carr’s A Month in the Country.  Like with most of my favorite books, the prose is spectacular.  (For me, clever plots or even well-drawn characters can only get you so far if the medium through which these are things are received ─ i.e. the narrator, and more specifically, the narrator’s language on a sentence level ─ are mediocre).  Carr’s prose takes a little to get into as he’s crafted a first-person narrator from the 1920s, but it's the kind of language that has the ability to evoke setting and emotion so powerfully without any cloying sentimentality.  I find it also has a number of other qualities that most draw me into a book: a powerful sense of place, with a focus on imagery and description of local setting; a book with a seeming lack of plot, made cohesive by genuine plot points that don’t drive the story as much as provide a bare bones structure through which the real book can meander contemplatively.  The book itself is about a Great War vetenrarn, suffering from post-war trauma both mental and physical, who takes a job restoring a medieval painting in an idyllic British countryside.  It is not only the best book I read in 2020, but it may be in my top 10 of all time.  In case it matters to some, it is quite short.

The other two books that finish out the top three are Journal of a Disappointed Man by W.N.P. Barbellion and Beowulf, read in a (newish) translation by Seamus Heaney.  I found the former difficult at times to get through, interspersed with moments of unbelievably apt reflection and deep human sympathy.  In particular, Barbellion (the author of this autobiography) felt so similar in mentality and personality to me as to make certain moments quite uncomfortable (especially  when his weaknesses and pride were concerned).  As far as Beowulf, I hadn’t read it since early college, and while it took me a bit to find the rhythm in Heaney’s translation, he set the stage wonderfully with his introduction to the book.  (The book is worth it for the introduction alone.)  And once I got rolling, I found Heaney’s expressions marvelously adept at expressing the ideas and expressions of the medieval classic.

Part 2: Reading is Always Reading In Context of Other Things

If you’re a reflective reader at all, I bet you’ve been conscious of the following experience: reading a book and being unimpressed with it but not being quite sure if your reaction was mainly the result of having just finished an absolutely amazing book.  I was dismissive of the ten books I read after finishing Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead, even though I knew it was in part due to the fact that none of them were written by Robinson.

But this year I spent some time reflecting on the other ways in which our reading of individual books is shaped by things other than the book itself.  Consider where you read the book.  I generally save a book or two I know I’m going to enjoy for vacation.  Some of my fondest reading memories are geographically set in beautiful Lake George.  But further consider where you read the book: in a favorite reading chair, in bed at night, etc.  I know that the power of a book can conquer all settings (I fondly remember reading James Wood’s How Fiction Works on line at the DMV), but other memories of books I have are wrapped up in specific places.  Orwell’s 1984 is forever read and completed in a drafty attic of the house I lived in during college.  As a child, when I was about to finish a book that was particularly powerful, I would save it for when I went to bed; and despite the fact that I wasn’t technically allowed to read in bed, I finished many of my favorite childhood books under the covers with a flashlight, spending 5 minutes under the covers followed by 30 seconds of gulping down cool fresh air above the covers, and then diving back under again.  

But there are so many contexts in which we read books.  Is your life busy or peaceful?  Did you just have a child or are you childless?  Did you read the book in a few sittings or over a few months?  Whether a book affects you powerfully isn’t always so easy to determine by how you answer these questions, but they play a significant role nonetheless.  

I think this is especially true of our memories of books, which is shaped so vividly by the physical reading of books ─ which itself is shaped by so many other physical and psychological contexts.  I’d like to expand on this idea at some point.

Part 3:  What You’re Looking for in a Book          

Although I’m always reading a book, I get into reading ruts when I find it hard to get into or believe in or be moved by any of the books I pick up.  Now, based on what I just explored in Part 2, I know that this is often a reflection of my life at that time and not the books themselves.  Regardless, this is a painful reality for me at times.  When I’m at this point in my reading life, I’m looking for a book that can rock my world, in some shape or form.  

When I was listening to a recent episode of the podcast Backlisted (which, in my opinion, is not only the best podcast about books and reading but also one of the best podcasts of all time), one of the guests expressed what I feel so perfectly.  This is one of the reasons I love words and dialogue: they can express what I already experience in words I didn’t have, and the consciousness I gain from the words helps me reflect more deeply on my own experience.  I hope that makes some sense.  Either way, the guest speaker was speaking about being in a “reading rut,” and that when she’s in moments like this, she’s looking for a book that (and I’m paraphrasing here) “will inspire, change, or devastate” her.  I thought: that is so perfect.  It captures the way books in general can affect you.  It captures as well why reading is so important to me, because it can literally do all those things to me, sometimes all in the same book.  And it can do those things in a way that often regular life cannot.  

Great books inspire me, sometimes not to be a better person, but simply fill me with inspiration.  I’m simply more happy to be a human at the end of the book than I was at the start.  I’ve contemplated ideas that may not be practically useful but seem deeply human in the truest sense of the world.  At times, great books do inspire change in me.  I’m struck by the shallowness of a character whose shallowness is my own; or I’m awed by the actions of another that are not my own but I wish were.  And great books also sometimes devastate me.  They fill me with grief, or I question the humanity of humanity.  This last part is sometimes met with befuddlement by nonreaders, or readers who don’t look for this in books.  Why torment yourself, they say?  I can’t say why, or at least not in a few sentences, but the truth remains: books can destroy me.  

The best books do all three: They devastate me, and in the process inspire me to be a better person.  And this is never because the author manipulated me into this change, and probably not often because they even intended to.  Instead, it is simply the byproduct of a writer contemplating life (the good, the true, the beautiful, alongside the tragedy and failures of life) through the medium of prose and narrative. 

The Sympathizer: Viet Thanh Nguyen

(4)

This brilliant novel is like a mash-up of Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Graham Green’s The Quiet American, Dostoevsky’s Underground Man and Brothers Karamazov, and Orwell’s 1984. The writing is fantastic; the plot interesting; the characters largely believable and engaging; and the “confession” conceit well done.

So why did I have a problem with it at various points, especially the end? I’m not entirely certain, but this is one take on my gut-reaction. It seems like the “heart” of the novel was ultimately didactic; it seems like the artistic trappings of the novel—the beautiful writing, complex characters, and multifaceted storyline—are all an attempt to make a rather specific ideological and historical point regarding the Vietnam War. In this sense, I felt a little cheated. Clearly Nguyen can write, but he seems to be using his art for a very didactic purpose. In the end, this made the novel feel too “complete." As Flannery O'Connor claimed and Dean Ready always reminded me, a good piece of fiction, while open to interpretation and literary criticism, ultimately resists a complete “interpretation.” This is because novels are art, not simple mouthpieces for the ideas of authors. It’s difficult for me to say of a novel that is clearly artistic that it “failed” at being art, but I think that’s what I’m saying.

Rating out of 10: 8.8

Red Harvest, Dashiell Hammett

(3)

Red Harvest is one of the oldest hardboiled mystery novels, so what might read as cliché or derivative was actually original in 1929.  The novel was fun, and the writing (the sparsely worded action, the ridiculously delicious and dry metaphors, and the detective/gangster idioms) was really quite enjoyable.  But I found the constant action and revelations of new and important information unrewarding, if only because I had little time to form any connection with (and sometimes even an understanding of) the vast sea of characters.  I found the nameless detective/protagonist’s slow decent into the world of crime, and his newly acquired bloodlust, to be the only interesting psychological aspect to this story.

One final point: I just listened to a podcast that cast the hardboiled detective as a dark but morally centered character, a type of character contemporary culture doesn’t have.  But I didn’t find Red Harvest’s protagonist to have any moral center. Even the classic “loyalty” that seems to direct most hardboiled detective’s actions seemed relatively absent.  But this novel may be an exception to the rule.

Rating out of 10: 7.5