Tag Archives: reading

Joan was a perfectly practical person.

history, quotes, women, , , , ,

It’s been a long time since I read Mark Twain’s Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc. When I came across the quote below it made me want to read it again — though I can see the good in reading a different biographer.

The Scholé Sisters presented again their idea of the 5×5 reading plan. You pick five topics or genres of books and try to read five books in each category. Personally, I won’t be officially joining the group challenge, but this organizing of my stacks does sound appealing. Already “Women” was one of the categories that immediately came to my mind, and a book about Joan of Arc would fit very nicely. I wish Chesterton had written one; this is from his book Orthodoxy:

“Joan of Arc was not stuck at the Cross Roads either by rejecting all the paths like Tolstoy or by accepting them all like Nietzsche. She chose a path and went down it like a thunderbolt. Yet Joan, when I come to think of her, had in her all that was true either in Tolstoy or Nietzsche — all that was even tolerable in either of them.

“I thought of all that is noble in Tolstoy: the pleasure in plain things, especially in plain pity, the actualities of the earth, the reverence for the poor, the dignity of the bowed back. Joan of Arc had all that, and with this great addition: that she endured poverty while she admired it, whereas Tolstoy is only a typical aristocrat trying to find out its secret.

“And then I thought of all that was brave and proud and pathetic in poor Nietzsche and his mutiny against the emptiness and timidity of our time. I thought of his cry for the ecstatic equilibrium of danger, his hunger for the rush of great horses, his cry to arms. Well, Joan of Arc had all that and, again, with this difference, that she did not praise fighting, but fought. We know that she was not afraid of an army, while Nietzsche for all we know was afraid of a cow.

“Tolstoy only praised the peasant; she was the peasant. Nietzsche only praised the warrior; she was the warrior. She beat them both at their own antagonistic ideals; she was more gentle than the one, more violent than the other. Yet she was a perfectly practical person who did something, while they are wild speculators who do nothing.”

G.K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy

Books became the only reality.

books, education, quotes, , , , , , ,
Scene from Leningrad after seige.

Joseph Brodsky was born in St. Petersburg, what was then Leningrad, in 1940. He writes in the first, title essay of his book, about his generation in postwar Soviet Russia, how they were “somewhat spared” the full experience of what their country had become: a “drab hell, with a shabby materialist dogma and pathetic consumerist gropings.”

“We emerged from under the postwar rubble when the state was too busy patching its own skin and couldn’t look after us very well. We entered schools, and whatever elevated rubbish we were taught there, the suffering and poverty were visible all around. … The empty windows gaped at us like skulls’ orbits, and as little as we were, we sensed tragedy. … The amount of goods was very limited…. we didn’t develop a taste for possessions. Things that we could possess later were badly made and looked ugly. Somehow, we preferred ideas of things to things themselves….”

I can’t help comparing the cultural environment in which Brodsky came of age to that of the generation currently in their teens and twenties. When those young people in Leningrad were trying to survive the privations at every level of their being, they didn’t have the option of comforting themselves with marijuana or escaping to the metaverse. Their daily life didn’t include such diversions as shopping at the mall for the current fashions in jeans or phones. What they did have was books:

“If we made ethical choices, they were based not so much on immediate reality as on moral standards derived from fiction. We were avid readers and we fell into a dependence on what we read. Books, perhaps because of their formal element of finality, held us in their absolute power. Dickens was more real than Stalin or Beria. More than anything else, novels would affect our modes of behavior and conversations, and 90 percent of our conversations were about novels. It tended to become a vicious circle, but we didn’t want to break it.

“In its ethics, this generation was among the most bookish in the history of Russia, and thank God for that. A relationship could have been broken for good over a preference for Hemingway over Faulkner; the hierarchy in that pantheon was our real Central Committee. It started as an ordinary accumulation of knowledge but soon became our most important occupation, to which everything could be sacrificed. Books became the first and only reality, whereas reality itself was regarded as either nonsense or nuisance. Compared to others, we were ostensibly flunking or faking our lives. But come to think of it, existence which ignores the standards professed in literature is inferior and unworthy of effort. So we thought, and I think we were right.”

-Joseph Brodsky, Less Than One

This passage gives me a clue as to a question I’ve had about Brodsky: How, born a Jew and growing up under atheist Communism, did he come to be a “Christian poet”? Not only does he say (quoted in a previous post about him) that he tries to be a Christian, but Wikipedia tells us:

Daniel Murphy, in his seminal text Christianity and Modern European Literature, includes Brodsky among the most influential Christian poets of the 20th century, along with T. S. Eliot, Osip Mandelstam, Anna Akhmatova (Brodsky’s mentor for a time), and W. H. Auden (who sponsored Brodsky’s cause in the United States). Irene Steckler was the first to categorically state that Brodsky was “unquestionably a Christian poet”.

What the writer tells us about this education he and his friends got for themselves shows the power of the vicarious experience that can be had from reading good stories. The best books helped them to endure  the “nonsense or nuisance” of totalitarian society, and at the same time gave them a broad, universal understanding of Reality. What a blessed bookishness; as Brodsky says, Thank God for that.

A good narrator lets me get lost.

books, the language, , , , ,

Earlier this year I was prompted to think about who were my favorite audiobook narrators. It was soon revealed how very many I have! I was glad the request was for the narrators who I find truly add to the reading experience, and not the ones to avoid, because that would not be as pleasant an activity as I was engaged in, perusing through the titles I have listened to.

I’m thankful that the “bad” narrators are much fewer than the good. A good narrator lets me get lost in the story, and the bad ones are distracting in the various ways they draw one’s attention to their reading instead. I will list the narrators along with one or more books that made me love them:

Ralph Cosham (Geoffrey Howard) in How Green Was My Valley and many C.S. Lewis books, e.g. the Ransom Trilogy.

Peter Bishop in The Witness of Poetry.

Mike Fraser in The Timeless Way of Building.

Ellie Heydon in Mary Stewart novels.

 Arthur Morey in The Technological Society.

Andrew Sachs in Silas Marner.

Tom Stechschulte in Up and Down California.

Julie Harris in Out of Africa (unfortunately abridged).

Derek Perkins in G.K. Chesterton books.

Flo Gibson

Flo Gibson, in books about adventurous women, such as A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains, and Letters of a Woman Homesteader.

Eleanor Bron in Elizabeth von Arnim books.

Neil Hunt and David Rintoul in Nevil Shute novels.

Stefan Rudnicki I first heard reading The Aviator, and I thought he was perfect for that story told in the first person. I began searching on Audible to see what other books he had narrated, and that is how I came to read Blitzed: Drugs in the Third Reich.

I started listening to a Joseph Conrad novel done by him, and was amazed at how differently, but also smoothly, he narrated that character’s voice — and not just the accent.  Seeing that he was the narrator of the Ursula LeGuin novel City of Illusions made me willing to try it, and his narration of The Captive Mind was just right for conveying Czeslaw Milosz’s writing voice.

Stefan Rudnicki

The protagonist of The Aviator is Russian, and I wondered if the narrator was Russian — how did he get that accent so well, but not overdo it? That’s why I researched Stefan Rudnicki more than any other narrator, and I learned that he was born in Poland. I also found this video in which he, along with other skilled veteran readers, leads a Round Table Discussion with several relatively new narrators, on the topic of improving their narration.

The whole narration “industry” is fascinating. It seems that participating in it is a satisfying way for older actors to keep working, at a pace that fits their slower stage of life. From reading reviews, I can tell that we listeners don’t all appreciate the same narration style. Are any of these your favorite narrators, too?

Drinking the meadow with Heidi.

book characters, food and cooking, , , ,

Our women’s book group read Heidi recently, and then met on the patio at church one evening to talk about the book. There were ten or twelve of us, and we ate pizza and drank wine together, too. But before any of that, we were served fresh goat cheese made nearby, to connect us via our taste buds to our beloved protagonist; it put us in the right mood. And then — goat milk fresh from that morning! Some of our party didn’t want even a taste, so I drank a couple extra shot glasses myself. It tasted like a Swiss mountain meadow.

This reading of the book was for me by means of an audio recording, and I can’t remember the picture on the cover of the book we gave our daughter long ago, which she keeps. When I searched for a picture, I noticed the lack of depictions of Heidi as she is described in the story, with black hair. I guess illustrators (and movie directors, too) tend to think Swiss = blond.

I read that “thirteen English translations were done between 1882 and 1959” from the German of the original, and “about about 25 film or television productions of the original story have been made.” We talked a little in our gathering about the movies we have seen and how they aren’t faithful to the book, and typically leave out any reference to prayer.

In Switzerland tourists can visit Heidiland, where one of the associated villages was renamed “Heididorf.” I wonder if visitors there can drink fresh goat’s milk, from the morning’s milking? I bet at least one of my readers has that experience at your own kitchen table. Cheers!