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.