Category Archives: books

Opinions of Books of 2009

books

These are not reviews, but I’m afraid if I wait until I get my own computer back and write a decent review or two, someone will already have started reading an inferior book just because I didn’t warn them.

You might guess from the list of Abandoned Books that those would not be recommended, and you’d be right. But even some of them might be worth the reading for someone else. I just don’t have time–I’m counting the minutes, almost, and easily get impatient, if I start to feel that there isn’t enough return for my efforts.

But of the books that I completed, there are also some that I would put on the Worst Books Read in 2009 list:
Pig Tale
Living With the Laird
The End of Suffering

And my Favorites of the Year were:
The Architecture of Happiness
The Birds Fall Down
A Thousand Splendid Suns
The Inner Kingdom

I plan to write further on Architecture and Suffering. And in the upcoming year I want to keep better account of what I read, and maybe do a better job of reviewing, so that next January it will be a snap to post my lists, and they will have more information attached.

To all my reader readers, may your books be nourishing in 2010!

Three 2009 Booklists

books, history

I compiled these lists after reading that semicolon is putting a new twist on the first Saturday Review of Books of 2010. Normally one links to a book review on one’s blog, or goes to the Review to read miscellaneous reviews. But this time you link to a list of books. I didn’t have one, but it sounded like a good idea. So I made three. None is in chronological order.


Making a list of books is way easier than writing a review, and I find the idea of doing something easy to start the new year quite appealing! I will get on with writing some reviews after I finish celebrating at least 12 Days of Christmas.


Books I completed reading in 2009:

  1. The Birds Fall Down by Rebecca West
  2. Ah, But Your Land is Beautiful by Alan Paton
  3. Long Ago in France by M.F.K. Fisher
  4. How to Cook a Wolf by M.F.K. Fisher
  5. The Folding Cliffs by W.S. Merwin
  6. Mark of the Horse Lord by Rosemary Sutcliff
  8. M.F.K. Fisher and Me by Jeannette Ferrary
  9. The Architecture of Happiness by Alain de Botton
  10. The Endless Steppe: Growing Up in Siberia by Esther Hautzig
  11. A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
  12. Bread and Water, Wine and Oil by Fr. Meletios Weber
  13. Scent of Water by Elizabeth Goudge
  14. A Good and Faithful Servant (Saint Innocent) by the University of Alaska
  15. At Large and Small by Ann Fadiman
  16. Pig Tale by Verlyn Flieger
  17. Towards the Mountain by Alan Paton
  18. Creators: From Chaucer and Durer to Picasso and Disney by Paul Johnson
  19. The Inner Kingdom by Bp. Kallistos Ware
  20. The End of Suffering by Scott Cairns
  21. Living With the Laird by Belinda Rathbone
  22. I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Books I got into but eventually abandoned:

  1. East of Eden by John Steinbeck
  2. Diary by Anaïs Nin
  3. Reading, Writing, and Leaving Home by Lynn Freed
  4. Elizabeth Costello by J.M. Coetzee
  5. Slow Man by J.M. Coetzee
  6. A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
  7. The Shell Seekers by Rosamunde Pilcher
  8. The Kitchen Boy by Robert Alexander

Books I am still reading at the end of 2009 and plan to keep reading:

  1. The Everlasting Man by G.K. Chesterton
  2. Orthodox Dogmatic Theology by Michael Pomazansky
  3. The Winter Pascha by Fr. Thomas Hopko
  4. For the Time Being by Annie Dillard
  5. Tree and Leaf by J.R.R. Tolkien
  6. On the Cosmic Mystery of Jesus Christ by St Maximus the Confessor
  7. Mary Through the Centuries by Jaroslav Pelikan
  8. Byzantium by John Julius Norwich
  9. Sister Age by M.F.K. Fisher
  10. The Hacienda by Lisa St. Aubin de Teran
  11. The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language by John McWhorter

(The photo was taken in Chinatown earlier this month.)

    Silence and Music

    books, Christmas, poetry, quotes, , , , , , ,

    My last post remembering Saint Herman prompted Pom Pom to ask me if I had read The Music of Silence, book she had just received in the mail. I haven’t read such a book, so I googled it and immediately have several tangents to run along now. I don’t know if she meant this memoir of Andrea Bocelli, or this one about singing the Hours or services of the church through the day in Gregorian Chant.

    One reviewer wrote of the latter book:

    “Nothing is as ordinary, or as sacred, as time. Far from being an infinitesimally small unit of measurement or a means of separating one event from another, time provides the means by which the still, small, silent voice of God may be heard.”

    Silence….hmmm….I know so little of it.

    When I read about music, silence, solitude, it can be an inspiration and a reminder, but my readings and thinkings are typically like so many rabbit trails, to use a term that hints at the fun of scurrying from one author or thought to another. A rabbit is doing what he was made to do, and glorifies God by it. I was made to live by the Holy Spirit in communion with my Creator.

    So I need to STOP on the trail and pray–and maybe even get off the trail sometimes! It wasn’t books and ideas that made it possible for Father Herman to sing with the angels. It was prayer. The kind of prayer St Isaac of Syria is talking about when he says:

    “The wisdom of the Holy Spirit is much greater than the wisdom of the entire world. Within the wisdom of the Holy Spirit, silence prevails; the wisdom of the world, however, goes astray into idle talk.”

    My mind is given to talking idly with itself. So much of my remembering of my Savior is like the awareness I might have of an earthly friend when she is in the room with me, but I am not paying close attention. I might hear her talking without really listening, I might even speak with her–but not make eye contact.

    Don’t we all have this weakness in our human condition, worsened by modern life, that we can’t settle our minds down firmly even when in prayer? Abba Dorotheus of Gaza says:

    “Just as it is easier to sin in thought than in deed, correspondingly, it is more difficult to struggle with thoughts than with deeds.”

    But C.S. Lewis encourages us:

    “Virtue–even attempted virtue [I hope this includes attempted prayer]–brings light; indulgence brings fog.”

    So I will keep struggling in prayer, to push past the distractions, to listen for the Silence that is God’s music.

    It’s not the wonderful blog posts and the writers of them that are my problem. Nor my own writing, because just the discipline of organizing the chaos at least gets me on the road to taking every thought captive to Christ, though my readers might legitimately question how often I get to my destination. With God’s help, I know His presence and see His working in the world by the goings-on of the blogosphere and the piles of books throughout my house. Glory to God for all things! Lord, have mercy!

    One more rabbit trail, leading quickly to the spot where all those paths ought eventually to end up, was brought to my attention this month, a poem by George Herbert:

    Christmas

    The shepherds sing;
    and shall I silent be?
    My God, no hymn for Thee?
    My soul’s a shepherd too;
    a flock it feeds
    Of thoughts, and words, and deeds.
    The pasture is Thy word:
    the streams, Thy grace,
    Enriching all the place.
    Shepherd and flock shall sing,
    and all my powers
    Outsing the daylight hours.
    Then will we chide the sun for letting night
    Take up his place and right:
    We sing one common Lord;
    wherefore he should
    Himself the candle hold.

    I will go searching, till I find a sun
    Shall stay, till we have done;
    A willing shiner, that shall shine as gladly,
    As frost-nipped suns look sadly.
    Then will we sing, and shine all our own day,
    And one another pay:
    His beams shall cheer my breast, and both so twine,
    Till ev’n His beams sing, and my music shine.

    -George Herbert

    Putting Books on Shelves, Taking Them Off…

    books, quotes, , , , , , ,

    Earlier in the month I told how I got worked up when parts of my book order began to arrive in the mail. I admit, I do feel a bit sheepish, buying more books and telling about them, when there are plenty of good ones already on my shelves. But that’s me, a glutton.

     

    These are mostly used, almost all from different sellers, and the shipping totalled way more than the books themselves. Most of the titles have been on my wish list for months or years, and I know that some of the books, now that they are in my possession, will sit on the shelf for at least months, more likely years, before I get to them. But they have a better chance of being read now.

    Not to mention, they are now available for me to remove from the bookcase briefly, to open and lovingly turn a few pages–even when there isn’t time to give my full attention to the contents. Winston Churchill gave an admonition to book-lovers to do just that. I read the saying in a London museum, and it appears I’ll have to return there if I am ever going to find it verbatim.

    In some cases it is a mystery how I heard about the book or why I wanted it. The Golden Book of Writing looks valuable, and I can always use help in that department, but it will have to remain uncredited as far as who recommended it. Maybe it was my friend at Amazon.com who always says, “We have recommendations for you!”

    John McWhorter has been interviewed a couple of times on Mars Hill Audio, so I’ve been familiar with him and wanting to read more from his mind. Linguistics is a subject that grabs me ever since I was privileged to take a tutorial in the subject as a freshman in college. Perusing the titles of McWhorter’s bibliography feeds my book greed.

    Dana Gioia is another author whose acquaintance I first made through MHA, and I mentioned that meeting here already. I only owned one book of his poems before–now I have two, and two collections of essays. Disappearing Ink is a collection of essays subtitled Poetry at the End of Print Culture.

    Kristin Lavransdatter I loved so much that I snatched up sets whenever I’d see them, in the old translation that so many people despise–I didn’t. But now I want to read it in Tiina Nunnally’s rendition.

    Because I dearly love my friend, whom I will call Bird, I bought The Lady’s Not for Burning, a play by Christopher Fry. Bird is 98 years old, and this play is one of her favorite pieces of writing, I think partly because it was something she enjoyed with her late husband. Bird is terribly hard of hearing, but she can hear me when I sit nearby and we talk about how thankful we are to God for many things. She is a little worried that her eyes will fail her and she won’t be able see the print on the pages of her books; I told her I will come and read to her then.

    I think she would really like Kristin Lavransdatter.