Category: Books and Reading
One of the comments I often get from people who have read my book ROMAN Reading is “I could never write in my books.” It’s hard to get people to understand the value and pleasure of writing comments, thoughts and reactions in their books. But now I have a book to recommend to them: Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books by H. J. Jackson. I found this book in the Notre Dame bookstore, and I couldn’t be more excited to read it. From the back cover: Imaginative and amusing,...
Fred Saberhagen , one of my favorite science fiction writers, passed away from cancer on June 29, 2007 at the age of 77. Saberhagen is probably best-known as the author of the Berserker series, a set of science fiction stories about humanity’s war against self-repairing killing machines that roam the universe with the sole purpose of eliminating all life. Saberhagen used his Berserker stories to explore what it meant to be human, and several of them were based on works of literature such as Poe’s “Masque of the...
I’ve been playing around with StumbleUpon, and I came across The Modern Library’s List of 100 Best Novels. There are two lists, actually. The first was created by the Board of The Modern Library, and the second compiles the results of their readers’ poll. What first struck me is how at odds the Board seems to be with the readers. Take a look at the first five positions, with the Board’s choice listed first, the readers’ choice second: Ulysses by James Joyce vs. Atlas Shrugged by Ayn Rand...
In my book ROMAN Reading: 5 Practical Skills for Transforming Your Life through Literature, I mention that reading a book is like talking with a neighbor. William Faulkner expresses this idea in the following quote: The books I read are the ones I knew and loved when I was a young man and to which I return as you do to friends: the Old Testament, Dickens, Conrad, Cervantes–Don Quixote. I read that every year, as some do the Bible….I’ve read these books so often that I don’t always...
If you, like me, find the Harry Dresden series not to your taste, but like the idea of a magic-wielding detective, you might enjoy the Lord Darcy stories by Randall Garrett. Mix together Sherlock Holmes and Jonathan Strange, and add in a little alternate history, and you have an idea of what the Lord Darcy stories are all about. What if Richard Lionheart didn’t die, and what if the Protestant Reformation never happened? Garrett imagines an alternate history where in the twentieth century the Plantagenet dynasty still rules,...
What makes fiction so powerful and so poignant? Thornton Wilder sums it up in one of the most moving quotes I have ever read: If Queen Elizabeth or Frederick the Great or Ernest Hemingway were to read their biographies, they would exclaim, “Ah, my secret is still safe.” But if Natasha Rostov were to read War and Peace she would cry out as she covered her face with her hands: “How did he know, how did he know?” Is this what the pain of Purgatory might be like:...
I finished Storm Front: Book One of the Harry Dresden Files, and it wasn’t quite as good as I had hoped it would be, but it was still quite entertaining. In brief: What I liked: The setting: I particularly liked Harry’s house and office, and his idea about magic affecting complex machines The film noir elements combined with traditional wizard-lore Butcher’s conception of magic and how it works: a little Latin, a staff, some magical symbols, all the things traditionally associated with users of magic The action scenes...
This quote by Joseph Epstein rings true with me: Rereading can be…a humility-inducing activity, when, on rereading, one learns that the first time around with a book, one’s politics or fantasies or personal anxieties were in fact doing most of the work. Rereading books first read when young, one is inclined to weep for the naif one not so long ago was. And while at it one discovers, if one gets to reread the same book twenty years hence, one is even one now. I can think of...
I finally finished listening to the Don Quixote audiobook narrated by George Guidall, and it remains my favorite book of all time. It took almost five months to listen to (I have a very short commute to work), but it was worth the time. Guidall is deservedly known as the king of audiobooks, and his reading was masterful. In a book full of dozens of characters, he managed to give each one a separate personality and voice. I don’t want to say too much about the story itself,...
The Book-Lender’s Soliloquy by Nick Senger (with apologies to Shakespeare) To lend or not to lend, that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of a book lost forever, Or to hoard books against a sea of troubles, And by keeping them hide them? To read: to lend; No more. And by hoarding to say we end The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks That the librarian is heir to, ’tis a consummation Devoutly to be wished. To read, to...
I’m about a quarter of the way into Storm Front, book one of the Harry Dresden Files, and I wanted to answer a question posed by Maureen, who wants to know about its suitability for junior high/high school readers. It didn’t take long to get the answer to that question. Keep in mind that I believe in each parent deciding what their kids can read or watch, so don’t take my comments as gospel truth on this. Here we go: I’m really enjoying the book so far as...
My wife and I celebrated our seventeenth anniversary two nights ago by attending the Spokane Civic Theater’s performance of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music. The show was fantastic–elaborate sets, wonderful singing–a real treat. There were even a couple of songs that we had never heard before. It was also very special to see one of my former students in the role of Louisa Von Trapp. My wife loves The Sound of Music, so one Christmas I bought her the movie, the soundtrack and the original book....
