Summer Reading 2015

Of the reading of books there is no end. Now that the summer violin workshop I was teaching at is over, it is time to read. More.

First thing, I have been reading already this summer, since summer began. (When it began is hazy. I think it started sometime March, but then again maybe it didn't.) I have read about ten books over the last four weeks, depending on how you do the math and whether you think summer begins in March:

1. Poems - Emily Dickinson. The Project Gutenberg edition is the first published edition, which means that a lot of Emily's idiosyncrasies -- dashes, bizarre capitalization, unorthodox syntax -- are edited out.
2. The Epic of Gilgamesh and Gilgamesh - trans. David Ferry, and trans. Andrew George. Read the latter a week after the other. George's is leaps and bounds better.
3. The Lost World of Genesis One - John Walton. Introduction to Walton's theory of the functional ontology of Genesis One. No, I'm not sure I really get it either.
4. Paradise Regained - John Milton. A disappointment in light of Paradise Lost. Go read the gospels of the KJV or Douay-Rheims instead. (But it does have some very insightful asides.)
5. The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert - Rosaria Champagne Butterfield. A startling account of a lesbian English professor's conversion to Christianity, which sheds new light on issues I never thought much about before.
6. The Wisdom Books: Job, Proverbs, and Ecclesiastes - trans. Robert Alter. Alter, comp lit professor at UC Berkeley, has some valuable notes on the passages, chiastic structures, and ideas of the wisdom books. The translation itself doesn't meet expectations, though. (A telling example: he translates the verse in Job, usually rendered along the lines of "Though he slay me, yet will I trust in him," as something like "He slays me; I have no hope.")
7. The Chosen Ones - Alister McGrath. An uneven wannabe Narnia book.
8. Lancelot - Walker Percy. The more I read Percy the more I think he wrote a lengthy Variations on a Theme of Existentially-Crisised Middle-Age Southern Chick Boy. Lancelot is funny, perceptive, almost prescient, but not as much as Lost in the Cosmos.
9. Poems - Ranier Maria Rilke. Nice ethereal, almost mystical atmosphere in this collection.
10. Bach, Beethoven, and the Boys: Music History as It Ought to Be Taught. Impertinent humor and an off-kilter focus on the details. A book has not made me laugh so much in a long time.
11. The Iliad - trans. Robert Fagles. See blog post three back.
12. Godric - Frederick Buechner. See previous blog post.

So that's it.

And here's what I hope to finish this summer:

1. The Hauerwas Reader - Stanley Hauerwas. Started it last year.
2. I Am an Impure Thinker - Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy
3. The Emergence of the Catholic Tradition (100-600) - Jaroslav Pelikan
4. Collected Fictions - Jorge Luis Borges
5. Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
6. Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
7. Silence - Shusaku Endo. The book cover of which has to be one of my favorites:

On a side note, Martin Scorsese is currently making a film based on it.

Better read the book before it comes out.

8. The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays - W.H. Auden
9. Selected Poems - W.H. Auden
10. Gilead - Marilynne Robinson
11. How (Not) to Be Secular - James K.A. Smith
12. Imagining the Kingdom - Jamie Smith, who is the same person as above.
13. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao - Junot Diaz
14. Both Flesh and Not: Essays - David Foster Wallace
15. Some poetry by Keats
16. Maybe Dante's Inferno
17. Perhaps the first part of Don Quixote
18. Noli Me Tangere? In order to rectify one of the biggest failures of my high school reading life?
19. El Filibusterismo? See above.

And so ends this pessimistic idealist's reading list.

fin

Frederick Buechner's Godric

My book review from Goodreads:

This is without doubt the most important book that I've read thus far this year, perhaps that I've read as a teenager. Not that it's my favorite — it's too personally vulnerating for me to say it's my favorite — but that it's the book I need. There are full-blown theological treatises on sin out there; I daresay none of them are as effective as Godric. I have never read anything like it — and never read anything so slowly: it spans a measly 175 pages, with large font to boot, but took me nearly a month to finish. I never read more than ten pages in a sitting. Sometimes four pages was enough for a day. One chapter was so stunning and painfully relatable that I was left almost physically dazed and too scared to open to the next. What's more, the language Frederick Buechner, a Presbyterian minister, uses is simply gorgeous, imitative, if only speculatively so, of English cadences predating King James:

Once in a while the sea would crest, but mostly it was great blue hills with foam for heather. A swell would rise and glitter in the sun, then slide and sink into a dale. A dale would heave into a hill.

Every sentence seems as if calculated with a poet's precision, and hardly one comes along that sounds prosaic, although prose is Buechner's chosen vehicle.

The book could be thought of as the confession of Godric to the reader, of an aged hermit to a novice monk. Godric dwells on his impiety, his wicked youth, the evil he did and does and the good he left and leaves undone, but Buechner manages to avoid all mawkishness. He even manages to avoid any allusions to an actual "Confessions", although Augustine is a rather obvious influence. But the monk Godric "confesses" to, Reginald, wishes to write a biography. It's the middle ages, and he doesn't conceive of Godric's recollections the same way. Reginald's final product, a hagiographic biography (a chapter of which is tacked on as a sort of epilogue), is nothing like the wizened Godric intends. Where Godric deprecates himself for his sin, Reginald the scribe writes of the unflinching piety of his subject. Godric often retorts with an explanation of his less than holy intentions and this leads to some of the best humor in the book, the beginning of Reginald's interviews being perhaps the funniest, yet remaining insightful, a la Flannery O'Connor:

"The god means God.... The ric is Saxon reign. So God and ric means God reigns, Godric....." 

"Fetch me a bowl to puke in," I tell him. He's got him such a honeyed way I'm ever out to sour it. 

"Godric will have his little jest," says Reginald. 

So then I teach him other ways to read my name. "God's god for sure. You hit that square. But ric is Erse for wreck," I say, not knowing Erse from arse. "God's wreck I be, it means. God's wrecked Godric for his sins. Or Godric's sins have made a wreck of God." 

... 

"There are other ways as well," I say. "Rip Godric up another seam, and what you get is goand drick." 

"What's drick?" says Reginald. 

"A foul Welsh word not fit for monkish ears," I say. 

"How great is your humilitas, Father," Reginald says. 

I say, "Yet, Mother, not so great as is my drick." 

Why is it that the best in him calls forth the worst in me?

You read that passage you've read all the conversations between Godric and Reginald.

Godric spends most of his hermit life praying, praying "the way he breathes, for else his heart would wither in his breast". His prayers are striking in style and content:

Gentle Jesu, Mary's son, be thine the wounds that heal our wounding. Press thy bloody scars to ours that thy dear blood may flow in us and cleanse our sin.

Dear Lord, strew herbs upon my hermit's dreams to make them sweet. Have daylight mercy on my midnight soul.

While on a parade through the streets of Durham, being touched by all sorts of people and being given all sorts of presents, Godric prays silent:

Dear Father, see how these children hunger here. They starve for want of what they cannot name. Their poor lost souls are famished. Their foolish hands reach out. Oh grant them richer fare than one old sack of bones whose wits begin to turn. Feed them with something more than Godric here, for Godric's no less starved for thee than they. Have mercy, Lord. Amen.

Buechner fosters a healthy irony throughout the tale. Once, when Godric uncharacteristically had no inclination to pray, lying on the grass and wallowing in sin's "drowsy peace so deep [he] hadn't even will enough to loathe [him]self", he receives a vision of a "man's green, leafy face". "When I deserved it least, God gave me most. I think it was the Savior's face itself I saw," he says, and you can see him shaking his hoary head in wonder.

Like Homer's Nestor ("Well might I wish, could mortal wish renew / That strength which once in boiling youth I knew; / ... But heaven its gifts not all at once bestows, / These years with wisdom crowns, with action those." Pope's translation), Godric, his head filled with memories of his youth's adventures, laments his infirmity in old age (but eagerly anticipates his death: "You're tough, old man," Godric is told, who responds: "Though I deserve it, God would never be so cruel."). He exerts titanic effort to move his decrepit arm. Sometimes he speaks for paragraphs, until he realizes that no sound has come out of his mouth. He still continues to pray, and becomes God's reluctant means of grace to many who meet him, although he says that his "war" is all private and inside himself. 

Godric is a saint, undeniably, but he is a saint who is not the superhuman holy man Reginald would have us imagine: he is a saint, weak, struggling, and human.

I had never heard of Godric of Finchale before. I have never read his Wikipedia page, and have no desire to do so (lest I be disillusioned; I am a romantic coward). The portrait of Godric Buechner paints might not resemble the Godric of history one fig; but I suspect Buechner wasn't out to be constrained by a historical-factual vice. With an earthy, sensible imagination, Buechner explores depravity, newness in Christ, and the Christian struggle against the flesh, the world, and the Devil; and does so without so much as an expressly theologizing or philosophizing passage. He chronicles a Christian life without resorting to allegory, and tells a story steeped in visceral and disarming honesty. I have a presentiment that this won't be my only read.

clarityclarence.jpg

you can't lick the words

on the screen of a Kindle

Two unrelated quotes from awesome poets

From Milton, on books and prudent, character-ful reading:

... However, many books,
Wise men have said, are wearisome; who reads
Incessantly, and to his reading brings not
A spirit and judgment equal or superior,
(And what he brings what needs he elsewhere seek?)
Uncertain and unsettled still remains,
Deep-versed in books and shallow in himself,
Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys
And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge,
As children gathering pebbles on the shore. (Paradise Regained)

From the ever so clever Regina Spektor (nearly a full song, in fact), some technological metaphor for cold hearts:

You went into the kitchen cupboard
Got yourself another hour
And you gave half of it to me.

We sat there looking at the faces
Of the strangers in the pages
Until we knew them mathematically. 

They were in our minds
Until forever,
But we didn't mind
We didn't know better. 

So we made our own computer
Out of macaroni pieces,
And it did our thinking
While we lived our lives. 

It counted up our feelings
And divided them up even
And it called our calculation perfect love.

... 

So we made the hard decision,
And we each made an incision
Past our muscles and our bones,
Saw our hearts were little stones. 

Pulled them out, they weren't beating
And we weren't even bleeding
As we lay them on our granite counter top. 

We beat 'em up against each other.
We beat 'em up against each other.
We struck 'em hard against each other.
We struck 'em so hard, so hard 'til they sparked. 

Hey, this fire, this fire
I'm burning us up.

.... ("The Calculation")

Two poems

Thoughts on college no. 4

In the blinding daylight
Of gilded future,
A boy releases a bird –
Two birds, five birds, and another –

And sits and stares and bathes
In the undulations of the daylight,
Blank-eyed, bleak-eyed, dead-eyed;
And the daylight dims as vision vanishes.

And out! a whirlwind – and a bird
Bearing a branch half-withered,
And another a twig, and another the same,

And another a branch bearing buds –
Almost alive, as though struggling to be alive –
And another a branch which had atrophied
Suspended in purgatorial stagnation –

And a last bird (a dove were it not trite)
Bearing a branch, a bird that told of the
Quiet deluge, that the flood was nearly over,
And that there would soon be dry ground –
For the boy hung in empyreal daylight –

And that the boy must soon descend
And dig his toes into the earth,
And grasp his fear and toss it
As a handful of wet dust,

And taste the fruits of the kingdom
And realize that the kingdom is not yet,

And feel the limestone edifices
And feel the marble, holy columns,
And feel in his heart a half-satisfied longing,

And feel a hand come over his eyes
And feel the earth come into his eyes
And feel the deadness come out of his eyes,

And that he must See
Into the gilded future, and See
Inside the gilded future, and See
Beyond the gilded future –

That he must See
And become a man.
____________________

Why I read fiction

On deep blue bedsheets
I knock on the door of a paper house
And open it, unbidden,
For no one is inside to let me in;

And in I go.

Sometimes I knock
On the door of a house
Not of paper, but of pixels;
I knock –

And in I go –

To Spain, to the gothic South,
To be excited, to get depressed;
In I go
In order to be moved

Without moving.

i. can't. read

went to Booksale two days ago and bought
    a translation of Gilgamesh,
    a book by Alan Jacobs (Wheaton professor at time of publishing, now at
   Baylor - surprising find)
       on testimony: narrative theology but focused on the
                  individual contra
                         Hauerwas (heh);
      and a book on Spanish
            (embarassing, but I did
             just read Pablo Neruda
             and it doesn't seem a huge
             stretch: Tagalog, Bisaya, Latin, what could possibly
              go wrong? [Dunno, maybe
                  the fact that you might
                  not actually read it?!])

- and added a few poetry books to my incessantly expanding hoard of ebooks:
      Robert Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins
GERARD. MANLEY. HOPKINS.
Who in the world is
                              this guy?
What the heck is he trying
                                        to do?
Not only unconventional English,
   but also
      baffling, almost Greeky-Latiny word order (and if you've made acquaintance with either you know
       the struggle, the labyrinthine mud-miasma glare blur slap-facey struggle
[and such constructions as this are not beyond Gerard])
        baffling poems with the exception of
        "God's Grandeur" and a couple others
         striking evocative lines
              but only two and then
                  "let me revert to
                  nebulosity again plox.
                  thx."
Twenty poems in and I'm still all
      Wuuuuuuuu
          uuuuuuuuu
            uuuuuuuuu
              uuuuuuuuu
                uuuuuuuuu
                                t

- but
             anyway -
      
      Browning, Gerard Butler Leonidas Hopkins,
      Andrew George's translation of Gilgamesh (heh)
         [and this Alan Jacobs fellow has piqued
           my interest in Auden]

and I bought Jonathan Franzen's
     The Corrections
           500 pp.
   and do I have the time?
        Yes yes nope yes

But
         I
             Can't
                        Reeeeeead

The distractions
                                    T.V.

       Keyboard (BACH BACH BACH BACH)

               the Interwebs
                                     
                .                        Mooar books

(you ever get the feeling that you want to read something anything so bad you end up reading nothing and instead find yourself retreading the saccharine staircase down into the depressing dregs of the internet
     horrid
              feeling)

I read a chapter and it's still
  wuuuuuu(u-jollywell-near-infinity up-up-up the y-axis)t

    And mp3 music (muzak?)
        on my phoan

"I hear in my miiiind
all this muuuuusic
and it breaks my heart
and it breaks my heart
And it breaks my he-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-e-eart..."
              ~ Regina
                     Spektor

Interestingly, I read best when listening to Bach or to Mahler or
to Jack White's weird croons
   and Meg White's brutal beats,
"but that ain't whatchu wanna hear
  but that's what I'll do."

Frustrating frustrating
Frust
                                        
                     ra

                                         ting.

Updated Summer Reading List

I didn't anticipate the busyness of this summer, but, still, to have read about ten books over two months is pretty good, considering my abysmal reading rate at the moment. I added and subtracted from my last book list, and I very likely won't be adding any more, since school year starts next year.

Final list (unless nothing short of a miracle happens and I finish some other book before the end of the week):
1. John Green - The Fault in Our Stars
2. Dorothy Sayers - Whose Body?
3. John Currid - Against the Gods
4. Orson Scott Card - Ender's Game
5. Dorothy Sayers - Clouds of Witness
6. Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner
7. Chaim Potok - The Chosen
8. Padraic Colum - The Children of Odin
9. Truman Capote - In Cold Blood. If all nonfiction were written this well, my fiction books would lie dusty.
10. O. Henry - The Gift of the Magi and Other Stories. I read it sparingly, since twist endings lose effectiveness when taken in rapid doses.
EDIT: Miracle happened. I finished another book since this post. I bought a hardcover edition of Leif Enger's So Young, Brave, and Handsome at Booksale (along with the Capote book above).  It was an easy read, hence, my fast pace. The book itself was a disappointment, in light of Enger's first book, Peace Like a River. It felt forced and unbelievable, which Peace Like a River could easily have been. That said, it still is a better book than the usual trash paperback.

What I left unfinished:
Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. 62% through, about 600 pages. EDIT: If you consider Kristin as a trilogy, similar to LotR (this is how many publishers go on about publishing this work), then I've finished two more books: The Wreath and The Wife; but you may count that as a desperate attempt to look impressive.

Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. I stopped when I had to read through the uncomfortable cross-dressing incident, but I've added it to my required reading this quarter.

Flannery O'Connor's Complete Stories. I think I've read a bit more than half of the stories in here, but nearly all are worth rereading, and I've done that multiple times. Moved to required reading.

Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica. No surprise that I didn't finish this. I enjoyed the quinque viae section, but it's only about 0.2% of the whole Prima Pars (First Part). It's the most daunting book I've ever picked up.

G.K. Beale's New Testament Biblical Theology. Kindle stopped reading PDFs, and so, I haven't made progress whatsoever, which is a pity, since the subject matter was becoming quite interesting.

(something I forgot to add to my list last time) Existential philosopher Soren Kierkegaard's Practice in Christianity and The Sickness Unto Death. I started reading both on the same day; I initially enjoyed Sickness Unto Death, which deals with despair and, eventually, original sin, more than Practice, which, after a not short first part, deals with Kierkegaard's famous leap of faith (or leap to faith), but reading about despair is not as uplifting as discussions about belief and faith; hence, I've read more of Practice than Sickness.

I dropped a few books altogether. I hope to improve next summer, but that's not likely.