I’ve been tagged by Lindsay Gafford, and as such, here we go.
One book…
that changed my life: East of Eden. I’ve read it twice, and it’s blown me away both times. It’s John Steinbeck at his most inspired.
that you’ve read more than once: The Great Divorce. It’s one worth reading several times, packed with rich images and metaphors. When I was riding through the Scottish Highlands, I thought of how he describes Heaven here.
that you’d want on a desert island: The Complete John Updike Short Stories. I’d finally be able to sit down and read some of them. My brother Evan gave me this for Christmas two years ago and I’ve only barely cracked the front cover. When I get done with Soul Survivor, which has been pretending to be my bedtime reading for a year now, I’ll get to this one. I. swear. That, and John Updike is the catfish of modern fiction, swimming in the depths and absorbing the bottom of life, where most writers play in the shallow reeds.
that made you laugh: Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ’s Childhood Pal. One of the funniest things I’ve ever read in my life. I was crying in parts. And then I was tearing up at the end.
that made you cry: A Prayer for Owen Meany. I never knew literature like this could be written after 1957. In many ways, this book began a long process of helping me to believe in providence again. There’s only a handful of books that I really mourned being done with, and this was one of the first.
that you wish had been written: The Church in the World, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He died in prison before being able to really put it all together, and we’re left debating what might have been. One of the great tragedies of theology.
that you’d wish was never written: Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust. Seriously: it’s a ridiculous number of pages, and no one’s seriously read the whole thing. It would give literary poosers one less round of ammo.
that I wish I’d written: The Brothers K. It’s just too good to actually be a book. Some of the chapters could stand alone as short stories. It almost makes mad to think about it. David James Duncan, where are you when we need you?
that you are currently reading: Truth and Method by Hans-Georg Gadamer. Slit. My. Wrists. I’m sure that in a month or three, I’ll be raving about how this book changed my life, but at the moment, it’s like swallowing concrete. Dense. Difficult.
that you want to read: The Crucified God by Jurgen Moltmann. The first book I read in seminary was by him, and it’s been an on-again, off-again affair as I try to figure out what I think about his method and results. This one’s his landmark work.
I hereby tag:
Ace
Sean
kevin–this means you have to post one more.
Vernon
Ally
Tommorrow is the first day of class. At this stage in the game, you don’t so much think about what you’ll wear the first day of class, but what you’ll be doing to survive the first day of class. In my case, it involved going for a run tonight and finishing up the 200+ pages of history reading for the first seminar. I’m not a history guy directly, but reading this afternoon about the religious history of America around the Civil War era was absolutely fascinating. I won’t go into a lot of details here, but you check out this book for a fairly good social history of what was going on in the South following the defeat of the Confederacy.
It was a little oversimplified, I think, and follows Emile Durkheim’s sociology a little too much for me, but insightful none the less. I think it’s fair to say, as Wilson does, that cultures have a “religious” sense to them, but only provisionally. While at one point, cultures may have had the cultic flavor that he wants to give to the Old South, with rituals, rites, and creeds designed to pass on a transcendent reality, cultures today are much more fluid and transient; for my generation, regional cultures don’t have the draw they once did, as we’re more apt to float from place to place, life to life. It’s hard for me to identify with the Old South, though in many ways, it’s deep in my bones. I can almost smell it when I go into the small parts of Louisiana. You can see it in the monuments, the names of hospitals, the way that people move slowly as if at any moment, the call to arms is going to be sounded.
Anyway, the semester’s starting. Tommorow. In 10 hours. Year number two. Of PhD work.
It’s a full one. Religious History in America since the Civil War. Aquinas. Gadamer. Dante. With those four, it’ll be a wild ride. There may be an audit squeezed in there, but on top of work, I’m not sure that I can handle much more than this and keep my sanity. Following my stint at the farm, it’ll be much harder to want to do some of the inane work that comes with academia. Life is too short and too rich, and God knows that there’s more to metaphysics than Aquinas. As Aristotle, Aquinas’ philosopher, pointed out, knowledge of the good is impossible apart from its practice.
Holding breath….
One of my favorite writers is a guy who, every ten years or so, puts out a novel of such backbreaking beauty that it would throw the cosmos into a dither if he were to publish again that decade.
So, he doesn’t. He sits back, writes articles, the occasional introduction and anthology contribution, and bides his time, which is fine by me. I’ve read The Brothers K, The River Why, while My Story Told By Water has been mocking me for nearly two years. This summer, it’ll get it’s desserts.
But in the meantime, he’s coming out with what looks to be another gem, and one that dovetails nicely with my current program. Who says you can’t read fun stuff while school’s in session? Do yourself a favor and read The Brothers K: it made Neil cry and me fall in love with baseball again.
I’ve been in Kansas City for the last four days, and have had the luxury of seeing Kevin, E, and Sean for varying amounts of time. In my trusty satchel, I brought all manner of academic stuff, books on ethics, theology, doctrine, Robert Pirsig…and spent the whole of Kevin and my mutual reading time with Stephen King’s Skeleton Crew. It’s a collection of vintage King short stories, ranging from one about a crazy milkman to the one about the murderous oil slick. They’re great.
To keep with the theme of the week, we rented Creepshow, a collection of short vignettes for film, written by the King in which a zombie comes looking for a Father’s Day cake, Leslie Nielsen gets it at the hands of Ted Danson, and the Abominable Snowman eats the nagging wife. They’re all from the early ’80s, so, take them for what they are, and don’t hope for the Golden Globe. Although, the one starring Stephen King himself is pretty funny for no other reason than a Maine guy playing a hick is just enjoyable.
But, Myles, you graduated with a B.A. in literature! You read Dostoyevsky and Tolkein and Updike! How can you like and recommend Stephen King?
Well, faithful reader, it’s only because, of the modern novelists, King knows his powers, commands them well, and has no aspirations to write the Great American Novel. He sticks to the spooky and the not-so-spooky, and writes about things that people imagine, but don’t believe. In short, he’s the apostle of the sub-concious. We’ve all imagined about the supernatural, but King writes about a world in which these things take place, where the dreamed about becomes manifest.
I poo-pooed King through college, as he wasn’t a “real writer”, but after reading his “The Long Walk”, I was hooked and repented of the errors of my ways. He’s now my guilty pleasure, and gratefully so. Reader, one of the main drawbacks to the modern world is that we have naturalized the supernatural so much as to make no place for this reality: that who we are is not purely containable, and that part of us is connected like-it-or-not to something inexplicable and beyond our grasp. It is that connection which makes a mockery of our closed universes and belittles our attempts to ground faith in the empirical. In his own way, King brings the world we dream of, but are too ashamed to believe to life.
And Faitful Reader, to bring this into coherence with my current line of work, he’s written some crazy theological musings on the nature of evil. Read the last chapter of The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, the entirety of The Stand, The Green Mile, and Needful Things if you don’t believe me. Last I checked, he’s a Methodist, and no fiction writer today has such a grasp on the question of the nature and action of evil than any author I know of. Seriously. If you want a wild ride, start with The Long Walk, and know that this man is more than just a hack.
He’s just a lapsed Flannery O’ Connor.
