Tag Archives: bookreview

Listening to Scout Finch

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Sissy Spacek’s performance
is one of the very best I’ve ever heard,
of all the audio books I’ve enjoyed.
The southern lilt of her voice was
an impeccable match for Scout Finch’s narrative.

Our family sat in the living room and listened
to the final three discs last night.
Scout, Jem, Atticus Finch, Dill, Boo Radley…
these are characters which have
taken up residence with us.

Why not consider listening to a book together?

If your local library doesn’t have this, consider
asking them to purchase it.
Or add it to your personal library.
You’ll want to listen more than once.

I Wanted to Slap Him!

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Can you imagine who?  John Bunyan!  Gracious!  I was reading his spiritual autobiography, Grace Abounding, the true story behind the allegory in Pilgrim’s Progress. The two books are natural companions.  According to W.R. Owen in the introduction, “Conversion, according to Bunyan’s view of it (unlike that of some later evangelicals) was no instantaneous event or abrupt redirection of the spiritual life but a long and arduous progression.” 

Arduous, indeed!  His pilgrimage to grace was a tortured, tormented, harrowing, distressing, despairing, vexing, perplexing, troubled, tossed, afflicted, wringing, gnashing, twining, twisting, trembling, pining, grievous, groaning and moaning journey [descriptive words taken from the text].

Dotted among trials and temptations of the soul were a few moments of relief, some words of comfort which assuaged his fears, a sprinkled punctuation of hope.  But did they last?  No, no, no  – back to the miry bog we went.  I laughed aloud (in sympathy) when after one of those moments of sweet relief  Bunyan wrote,

Where I said in my soul with much gladness, well, I would I had a pen and ink here, I would write this down before I go any further, for surely I will not forget this, forty years hence; but alas! within less than forty days I began to question all again.  p. 26 emphasis mine

Reading this book felt like reading and watching The Two Towers.  A year of dark nights, a constant battle with darkness, a weary, dreary struggle.  I came to the point where, I admit, I wanted to slap him and say, “Stop It!”  Bunyan did eventually come to the point where the chains fell off, temptations fled away and he had assurance in the work of Christ to keep his soul. 

And you know what?  His great struggles made him a better pastor.  The section about his ministry (265 – 339 – the paragraphs are numbered) should be required reading for every pastor, really for every serious Christian.  Bunyan writes that one of the causes of his protracted struggle with assurance was

…that I did not, when I was delivered from the temptation that went before, still pray to God to keep me from temptations that were to come:  p. 61
 

Compare that to this to a reflection from Christiana:

Alas, said Christiana, we were so taken with our present blessings that dangers to come were forgotten by us;   ~ Pilgrim’s Progress p. 255    

* Grace Abounding is available to read on the internet here.*

Finished Kristin Lavransdatter

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Previous posts on Kristin here and here.

I just finished the last page of the last book in the Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy.

I read the first book in one day, the second over a few weeks and then bogged down in the third.  I think the third book was difficult because Kristin was reaping the results of decisions made in her youth.  The hot/cold relationship with her husband went mostly cold/cold.  Kristin watches as her boys follow in the sins of their father or their mother. She sees herself in her sons and begins to understand what it is her own parents went through.

It didn’t exactly make for jolly fireside reading. However, the insights I knew would be there compelled me to pick it up and finish.  Revived, I marveled again at the powerful prose which  distilled everyday emotions into their essence.

In her father’s soul there had dwelt somewhat else besides that deep, sweet tenderness.  She had learned, with the years, to understand it — her father’s wondrous gentleness came not therefrom that the saw not clear enough the faults and the vileness of mankind, but that he was ever searching his own heart before his God and bruising it with the repentance for his own sins. p.224

I find myself wanting to loan my copies out to this friend and that; and yet, simultaneously, wanting to hold on to the books so these sentences are at my beck and call.

I think of my friend Btolly who loves her cow when I read this:

She went to the byre herself to help in the milking.  It was ever pleasant to her, this hour when she sat in the dark close in to the swelling cow-flank, and felt the milk’s sweet breath in her nostrils. p.20

…and my friend Tanabu Girl, who learned Latin with me from Magister Dilectus and now teaches it:

And the year Björgulf and Nikulaus were at Tautra cloister with Sira Eiliv, they had sucked–so said the priest– at the breasts of Lady Knowledge with fiery zeal.  The teacher there was an aged monk, who, busy as a bee, had gathered learning his whole life long from all the books he could come by, Latin or Norse.  Sira Eiliv was himself a lover so wisdom, but, in the years at Husaby, he had had little chance to follow this bent towards book-lore.  For him the fellowship with Lector Aslak was like sæter-pasture to starved cattle.  And the two young boys, who, among the monks, clung to their home-priest, followed, open-mouthed, the two men’s learned talk.  And brother Aslak and Sira Eiliv found delight in feeding the two young minds with the most delicious honey from the cloister’s bookshelves, whereto brother Aslak himself had added many copies and excerpts from the choicest books.  Soon the boys became so skilled that the monk had rarely need to speak to them in the Norse tongue, and, when their parents came to fetch them, they both could answer the priest in Latin, glibly and without many slips. p.138

Oh, if you have a thoughtful reader on your list, especially–but not necessarily–a young woman, these books would be a wonderful gift.

I gave the new translation  to my sister Dorothy for her birthday.  I’m eager to talk with her about it.  I am ready to read the trilogy again in that translation in 2008.

Kristin Lavransdatter.

In the top three of the best books I’ve ever read.

Home

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Home

Some books are read simply for pleasure.  Let’s call them Baby Bear books.  Some books are read primarily for education or information.  These would be Papa Bear books.  But some books are a pleasure to read while they instruct.  Home is a perfectly just-right Mama Bear book. 

I had great expectations for this book, recommended as it was by George Grant.  The first chapter was disappointing, focusing on Ralph Lauren, nostalgia and invented tradition.  Beyond chapter one, however, the book was an absorbing and satisfying read.

Home is a culture history of comfort. 

The idea of comfort has developed historically.  It is an idea that has meant different things at different times.  In the seventeenth century, comfort meant privacy, which led to intimacy and, in turn, to domesticity.  The eighteenth century shifted the emphasis to leisure and ease, the nineteenth to mechanically aided comforts – light, heat, and ventilation.  The twentieth-century domestic engineers stressed efficiency and convenience.  p. 231

As a confirmed word-bird, I particularly enjoyed all the little etymological notes, some of which I cannot resist sharing with you:

~ comfort originally meant to strengthen or console » comforter meant someone who aided or abetted a crime » ample, but not luxurious » physical well-being and enjoyment, a word used often in Jane Austen’s novels

Take a word like “weekend,” which originated at the end of the nineteenth century.  Unlike the medieval “weekday” that distinguished the days that one worked from the Lord’s Day, the profane “weekend” – which originally described the period when shops and businesses were closed – came to reflect a way of life organized around the active pursuit of leisure. p.21

~ Saturday (Lørdag)  only day of week in Scandinavian countries not named after deity; “a day for bathing”

Differences in posture, like differences in eating utensils (knife and fork, chopsticks or fingers, for example), divide the world as profoundly as political boundaries.  Regarding posture there are two camps: the sitters-up (the so-called western world) and the squatters (everyone else). p.78

If you have someone in your life interested in architecture, interior design, or just in a comfortable home, this would make a wonderful gift. 

More quotes from Home from previous blog entries: Interior Space and Privacy.

Snoring = Sleeping With Enthusiasm

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“My grandma always said that people who snored
were sleeping with enthusiasm.”

       ~ Jenna Boller in Rules of the Road by Joan Bauer.

I’ve been immersed in a genre that I rarely read: Young Adult Fiction. 
This book is one of the best of that bunch. 
Joan Bauer is a new favorite author of mine.

Jenna Boller is five-foot-eleven-inch, sixteen-year girl.  Living with an alchoholic father has made Jenna, the oldest daughter, strong and resilient.  “I was always cleaning up after him.”  The combination of a flourishing work ethic and good training has made her a valued sales associate at Gladstone’s Shoe Store.  Mrs. Gladstone, the opinionated seventy-three year old owner of a well-respected chain of shoe stores, hires Jenna to drive her from Chicago to Dallas.  Along the way they visit shoe stores, Mrs. Gladstone upfront as the owner and Jenna as a secret shopper/spy.

The Shoe Warehouse wants to buy Gladstone’s stores, substituting plastic for leather, inflating the bottom line but decreasing quality, omitting service, and changing the mission from “great shoes at fair prices” to “decent shoes at warehouse prices.” 

There is a buoyancy in Bauer’s writing, an innate but subtle humor which saturates every chapter.  That’s why I’ll be hunting more of her books.

“And now, young woman, how much experience have you had driving in storms?”  ~ “Not much, ma’am.”  I opened the back door for her and watched her get in. “Unless you’re talking metaphorically,” I added, “and then I’m a total ace.” p. 47

Two Golden Sales Rules:
1) Care about people more than what you’re selling.
2) Never miss a good opportunity to shut up. p. 150

You know you’ve been with old people too long
when you can pick out the subtle differences between
Count Basie’s and Duke Ellington’s piano playing. p.115

For too long we just let Dad’s drinking go by without anyone
saying anything much about it, calling it a little problem.
You’ve got to call a thing by its full name and that’s what
lets the truth out where it can get some fresh air. p.84

“You just remember, never go punching
a man who’s chewing tobacco.” p.95

 

A Different Perspective on Ivanhoe

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Whenever I think about Ivanhoe, I think of my nephew Will.  Will has many credentials: he knows every country and capital in the world; he’s read every issue of National Geographic, he’s a great rugby player, he’s been to 85% of theart museums in the world; he speaks Farsi, and he’s taken a solo trip to Iran.  Some day Will will give me a guided tour through the best museums in NYC.  That Art History degree needs to be used occasionally. But I digress.

Will voluntarily picked up Ivanhoe and read it when he was in the fifth grade.  And he understood it!! Move over, Will.  Whenever I think of IvanhoeI now think of this review, written by my friend JT (Btolly‘s daughter) for a collegeclass.  I begged her to let me post it.  She graciously agreed, sweet girl!

While I don’t share her scorn for this book, her ferocity is entertaining.

Here is a book with a weak hero, a dead boring plot line and enough smarm to cover all other literary works of the 19th century. What was Sir Walter Scott thinking? Listen to the eloquence: “Alas, fair Rowena,”returned De Bracey “you are in the presence of your captive, not your jailer.” One might just as well read a Harlequin Romance and get the same story. It is sickening to the stomach.

The whole book is a grease slick for the characters to ooze through with continual dialogs of unimaginative, unoriginal, doe-eyed, pansy-pantsed love speeches. Scott’s desperate attempts to save this “classic” is to throw in the ever controversial anti-semitism twist. But, alas, it works too well. Rebecca far outshines Rowena as a woman of substance, not fluff. If Ivanhoe was at all a real man’s man, he would go for tying the knot around Rebecca and not his lance.

Ivanhoe, whose real name is Wilfred, spends most of his time brooding in the forest with a fat friar, ordering his good friend “the fool” around. Gird your loins and defend your country, man! Go save your King! Scott should be shouting this from the highest parapet, but instead he locks his love-tortured heroine there. Just when you think it couldn’t possibly get any worse, the villain gets slain. This of course is to ensure the happy ending; the return of the king andthe blessed marriage of two ridiculous dunces.      ~ JT

 

Child Prodigies

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When I read Poiema’s review in March, this book went on my list of books to be read.  In the distant country of my childhood, I played the cello; a lingering fondness for that instrument permeates my soul.  The fact that the author was also a cello player made me eager to read his work.

About a third of the way through the book I had convinced myself that I really didn’t need to keep this book.  I’m still undecided; I loved parts about music intersecting with life, the grown up child prodigy teaching a young child prodigy.  The back story of the trial for the murder of a Buddhist monk didn’t interest me. There are, however, some passages too wonderful to escape my journal. 

[Maestro’s instructions] That is the way to approach your music.  Every piece, every time you play it, is unique and irreplaceable.  Your should open your ears and heart to every phrase, every note and squeeze every drop of beauty you can from it. Take nothing for granted!

[Reminiscent of Robert Greenberg’s Frame of Silence]  This immediately made me think of the kind of silence I used to love, the instant before I would start a piece and the audience would quiet down to absolute stillness.  I always held the bow over the strings for a few seconds too long, just to relish that incredible vacuum, when a hall filled with hundreds of people could become so quiet.  No one ever, ever sneezed, coughed or budged until I offered release with the first note.

Bach, there can be no doubt, brought classical music to perfection. He expressed his musical ideas with devastating precision and understatement.  Each piece is like a finely cut diamond: clear, simple and almost mathematical in appearance, but underneath the surface what complexity and structural integrity! The possibilities for interpretation are limitless; just as there are countless ways to project light through a diamond, no two performances of Bach can be the same because each musician’s unique personality has its own spectrum of feelings that can be conveyed freely through Bach’s inventions. 
When I was very young one of the reasons I was able to hear a piece of music and then play it right back without having to look at a score was that for me each musical phrase had not so much a color or flavor as a texture…

The whole subject of child prodigies fascinates me.  So many prodigies seem very close to prodigals, not in the sense of extravagant waste, but in the sense of being  far away, socially and metaphorically.  During the time that I read The Soloist, I previewed the movie Hilary and Jackie (too dicey to recommend, although the music was gorgeous), about the life of the du Pré sisters, particularly the tormented and fragmented life of the cellist Jacqueline du Pré.  This book and that movie both left me feeling sad: sad for the weight of great giftedness and sad for the lack of appropriate parenting of the children with such gifts.

I’ve always admired and respected Yo-Yo Ma, who has a short appearance in the second chapter of The Soloist.  In contrast to most prodigies, Mr. Ma’s life seems very balanced.   He is passionate about music, but his life evidences an integrity and wholeness that many performers lack.

Stuck on Steinbeck

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I have a teeny-tiny obsessive compulsive streak that occasionally comes out in my reading.  I find an author that either I really like or I’m really intrigued by and I keep reading until I’ve read all his/her works.  This happened back in the eighties with Michener and Uris.  Those were long days. And even longer nights.

I honestly don’t believe I’d read more than an excerpt  of Steinbeck when a neighbor who enjoyed book talks placed East of Eden in my hand and said, “Carol, you need to read this.”  We’ve heard that sentence before, haven’t we?  And the rebel in me heartily resists unless the source is well known and trusted. (Never mind that often I’m the one placing books in others’ hands with those words.  Never mind, I said.)

I have a shelf in which I keep borrowed books so they don’t get co-mingled with my own collection.  This shelf was getting thick and so, after a year, I picked up East of Eden and started in.  And suddenly I couldn’t put it down.  That modern re-telling of Cain and Abel was painful, raw, provocative and beautiful all at once. 

Since our library has several Steinbeck books on tape, I listened to The Grapes of Wrath another disturbing but compelling book.  It provided context for the limited knowledge I have about life in America in the Thirties. Next, I listened to The Pearl a parable of sorts. 

Cannery Row is a narrative which knits the yarn of short vignettes into a whole piece. Many of the chapters could stand alone as examples of fine writing to study.  We see a slice of the lives of Doc, a marine biologist; Dora, a madam; Mack and his buddies, general drifters; and Lee Chong, the owner of a grocery store.  They are collected together in a sketchy neighborhood of abandoned canneries.

The opening sentence can compete with the best of opening sentences: “Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise; a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream.”

Steinbeck’s similes and metaphors are stunning:

Why did his mind pick its way as delicately as a cat through cactus?

…casting about in Hazel’s mind was like wandering alone in a deserted museum.  Hazel’s mind was choked with uncatalogued exhibits.  He never forgot anything but he never bothered to arrange his memories.  Everything was thrown together like fishing tackle in the bottom of a rowboat, hooks and sinkers and lines and lures and gaffs all snarled up.

He was such a wonder, Gay was–the little mechanic of God, the St. Francis of all things that turn and twist and explode,
the St. Francis of coils and armatures and geats.

No one has studied the psychology of a dying party.  It may be raging, howling, boiling, and then a fever sets in and a little silence and then quickly quickly it is gone, the guests go home or go to sleep or wander away to some other affair and they leave a dead body.

Doc awakened very slowly and clumsily like a fat man getting out of a swimming pool. His mind broke the surface and fell back several times.

Next up is John Steinbeck’s trip across America in Travels with Charley.

Friends for the Journey

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Friends always have a lingering, lasting effect on us.  Their kindnesses remain with us long after they have departed.  Their example inspires us.  Their words continue to impact our thinking. They intrude upon our daily concourse with a gentle but certain regularity. Remembrance has thus always been an essential element of the friendships of great men and women, a kind of eternal trophy of a gracious endearment.  
~ George and Karen Grant in Best Friends


We have lost a friend this week in the passing of Madeleine L’Engle.  She was eloquent.  Provocative. Challenging.  Perceptive.  We will remember her.  Her words will continue to impact our thinking.  I’m often uncomfortable with her theology, but I press on because she got the essence of life right and she could express it with magnificent grace.  When something reminds me of Madeleine, I call it L’English.  It’s one of the most delightful words in my personal lexicon.  

One of my favorite L’Engle books is her collaboration with Luci Shaw on Friends for the Journey.  In this book they explore together the topography of friendship. 

“Our contact was never superficial;
it started out, as it has continued,
with God talk and book talk,
the elements of the kind of friendship
we both find most satisfying.” 

You may or may not be familiar with Luci Shaw.  I’ve had a fondness for Luci Shaw since my childhood, because she was one of my dad’s favorite poets.  He stopped me one day to listen to one of her poems from her first collection, Listen to the Green.

The book is a quilt of many colors, shapes and textures of mystic, sweet communion.  Some chapters are written by Madeleine, some by Luci.  Interspersed throughout the book are poems of both writers.  A few chapters are transcripts of conversations between Madeleine and Luci.  It is such a gift to get a glimpse of the inner workings of their friendship.  I’ve read several books of this sort, but this is by far the richest, fullest expression of friendship that I’ve read.   Friends for the Journey is a book to take down on a regular basis, a book to share with the friends in your life, a book that will nourish your soul.

“One of the most important things about friendship
is that we allow the friends of our heart to see us,
not as we would like to be
(none of us is what we’d like to be),
but as we really are,
with our weaknesses, flaws, and faults.”
~ Madeleine L’Engle

“In the funeral service in the Book of Common Prayer these words are said: “Remember thy servant, O Lord, according to the favor which thou bearest upon thy people, and grant that, increasing in knowledge and love of thee, he may go from strength to strength, in the life of perfect service.”


I believe that.  Our identity, our self, our soul, goes on growing to a deeper fullness in love of God, leading us toward the kind of maturity God planned for us in the first place. For now, that is all I need to know.”
         
           ~ Madeleine L’Engle  11-29-1918 – 9-6-2007

The Pearl

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“In the town they tell the story of the great pearl, how it was found, and how it was lost again.  They tell of Kino the fisherman and of his wife Juana, and of the boy Coyotito.  And because the story has been told so often, it has taken root in every man’s mind.”

This short novella by Steinbeck immediately brought to mind The Pearl of Great Price, the parable of the man who sells everything to get the pearl. When Kino  finds the mother of all pearls he sees it as the end of poverty and the beginning of opportunity for his family.   In the end it costs him what is most dear to him.  The Pearl is a portrait of greed; no one is immue.  Steinbeck began this story after The Grapes of Wrath had won the Pulitzer Prize, while he was pondering the impact of personal prosperity.

In discussions of the lottery (which I think of as a voluntary tax) this would be good reading.  Studies have concluded that many lottery winners eventually end up miserable. No profanity in this one, just great writing and  much to discuss.  I highly recommend it.