Read Again

Summary: Retelling of Huck Finn from the perspective of Jim.

I have hosted an online book club for about six years now. James was the first fiction book we have read and it was very well received. When we started most of the group had read Huck Finn, but no one had read Huck Finn within 20 or 30 years. (I had not read Huck Finn when the group started reading James.) As we read both myself and another person read Huck Finn. And as much as I did not like Huck Finn, I do think I understood James better because I read Huck Finn.

I am not going to repeat my previous post on James, but I am going to repeat that the act of discussing a book in a group will cause you to understand it more than reading it alone. (My one negative is that I pretty consistently have found that I love a book that I have read on my own, that I often like it less after reading it with a group.)

While much of the book is constrained by the framing of the original Huck Finn story, I was surprised by how much was different. In both Huck Finn and James, I kept being irritated by how naive Huck was portrayed in one scene and then how mature he was in another scene. I do think there is a sense of truth in that because teens can be both mature and childish. But I also think that this was a bit of a crutch because the a lot of racism was hidden in that naiveté.

Read more

Summary: An untrustworthy narrator tries to excuse his failures. 

Note: This post has a lot of spoilers because I am trying to grapple with how Ishiguro uses the unreliable narrator to grapple with what really happened to the protagonist and those around him. The book also has been out for over 30 years and there is a movie adaptation, so I am not particularly concerned about revealing spoilers. 

I have been revisiting books that I have liked and adding more fiction this year than I normally do. My daughter is currently studying the lead up to World War 2 and I helped her work on a project reading several original documents about Chamberlain’s appeasement policy and then she had to make an argument about whether it had been the right policy or not.

It is almost impossible to put yourself in the position to really make these arguments when you are aware of the result of WWII. Personally, I lean toward pacifism, even if I am not completely pacifist. I think we should try diplomacy as much as possible prior to war. And so reading The Remains of the Day while helping my daughter with her project really does make me appreciate what Ishiguro is trying to do here. Almost no one thinks that appeasement was a good policy at this point. And at the time it was controversial.

The main positive arguments, according to the documents my daug

Read more

Summary: Beautifully written utopian tragedy.

I am not sure if I am feeling nostalgic or tired of non-fiction or if something else is going on, but I have very much been drawn to fiction this year. Generally I am a non-fiction reader. But year to date, about half of the reading I have done has been fiction, and two of the non-fiction books have been biographies of authors.

Bel Canto is the third book this year that I have re-read. It read it about 10 years ago. That time it was all on audiobook. And this time, it was about half audio and half in print. The audiobook narrated by Anna Fields was well done. (She also narrated Children of God.)

Bel Canto is a tragedy and you anticipate it as a tragedy almost from the very start. There is a dinner in honor of a Japanese businessman, who the country was wanting to encourage to build factories in the (fictional and unnamed) South American country. The dinner was hosted at the Vice Presidential home and attended by many ambassadors and business people from around the world. The highlight of the event and the reason that the businessman agreed to the dinner is that a world famous soprano opera singer would perform. And that businessman’s only real love in the world was opera, that singer in particular. But the dinner was interrupted by guerrilla terrorists who mistakenly believed that the President of the country would be there. I believe that this was inspired by a real hostage crisis in Peru in 1996.

As I said in my last post about the book, a type of uneasy utopia eventually develops. But a utopia could never last. And tragedy is the end result. That really is the whole story and it feels like I have described too much of the story even while I haven’t even named a character.

Read more

Takeaway: One of the most effective books for discussion my book group has had.

Last fall the book group I have been leading for about six years read The Gospel According to Baldwin. It was an odd choice for the group because other than myself, no one has ever read James Baldwin and only two had seen I Am Not Your Negro. But we read it and the group  really enjoyed that book and was interested in Baldwin.

We tend to take off the Christmas season and so when we got together to come up with our next book, The Fire Next Time seemed like a good choice. It is a short book, just over 100 pages. There are two essays. One is framed as a letter to his nephew on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation.

And then the remaining 80 pages is a long biographical essay, written in three parts. The first part is mostly about Baldwin’s life growing up in Harlem and the way and how race and puberty and poverty impacted him. The second part was mostly about having dinner with Elijah Muhammad in Chicago in 1961 and the attraction that the Nation of Islam had, but ultimately why he could not be a part of the group. Part three is more about the way forward.

Read more

Summary: A theological novel about a woman grappling with God about her life. 

Recently I recommended Lila to someone that I thought would enjoy the novel. I recommended it, not just because it is a well written novel, but because of the theological content. I thought they needed to see someone else grapple with God about wrong done to them as a way to reframe the way that they thought of God.

It has been just over 10 years since this novel came out and since I read it twice in quick succession. I have said a number of times that Lila is probably my favorite novel, or at least in the top ten. And I am not changing my mind with that on this third reading. But I think I am more aware of some of the weaknesses of the novel. Just like Gilead (a novel based on John Ames, the husband of Lila), this is a novel without any chapters. There are pauses and breaks in the narrative, but as someone that does a lot of reading at night before I fall asleep, not having a clear chapter break means that I tend to keep reading too long. That structure makes sense of this being a stream of conscience novel mostly in the head of Lila. When you are thinking, you often jump from topic to topic without clear logical progression.

Lila reveals much of her history (and trauma) as the novel progresses, but it is not a linear retelling of her life. We get a glimpse of one period of time and then a different look at a different time once Lila is able to processes and look again at that event with new eyes. Lila is uneducated, but as John Ames can see, that does not mean she isn’t smart. She is wickedly smart, but her lack of training and her lack of confidence means that she assumes that her thoughts are invalid. She has to gain language to describe her life and then process her experiences through that new series of lenses which she did not have previously.

Read more

Summary: A second adventure for Taran and his companions. Taran sees the problems of seeking glory and honor and the weight of leadership. 

I have been in a bit of a reading rut lately. So many books I want to read theoretically, but I have been not finishing much while starting a lot.

I stumbled across The Black Cauldron because there was an update to the Kindle edition, which pushed it to the front of my kindle. Last weekend I read through it in two sittings. These children’s books seem so much simpler reading them as an adult compared to my memory of them as a child. They are not simplistic, but the plots are much less detailed than some modern children’s books like Harry Potter and certainly less than many adult fantasy books.

What I like most about Lloyd Alexander as an adult and I think what drew me in as a kid was how seriously he takes Taran and Eiloiwy. They are not just some kids, but they are unique individuals, and while they are flawed people, they can grow and change, be self-reflective, and do important things. Unlike some kids books that have the kids do big things because the adults are incapable, Alexander has kids and teens do extraordinary things because there are important things to be done. This isn’t a rejection of adults, but part of the maturing process of becoming an adult.

I am about halfway through a book on discernment by Thomas Green (Weeds Among Wheat) that I am reading for my Spiritual Direction class. Green suggests that often when thinking about discernment, we believe God is either the puppet master, who controls all the things, so discernment doesn’t matter. Or we think about God in deistic ways with God not being involved in the world at all. Green thinks a better social imaginary is God as the parent of adult children. There are times that a parent of an adult will intervene and get involved, but there are times when the parent of adult children will allow their children to make their own decisions and live with the consequences as part of the process of growing up.

Read more

Takeaway: Being a spy, influencing the other side is difficult to do and prone to morally questionable decisions.

The Spy Who Came in from the Cold is the book that first made John le Carre’s name (or made John le Carre, a pseudonym famous.) John le Carre was a spy who became a writer. At about the same time Ian Fleming was becoming famous with James Bond, he came to prominence. In many ways, he was the anti-Bond.

Bond is known for action and individualism. George Smiley is overweight and a bit dumpy. He is an intellectual and an analyst. Carre’s books are slow and have complex plots. Fleming’s books are much shorter, are much more action based, and idealize the work of a spy.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold is the first of le Carre’s books I have re-read. And it reminds me much how soul-deadening le Carre makes intelligence work. There is some action and understanding of the west being on the right side of the cold war. But that doesn’t mean that the west is always right in its actions. John le Carre, if he had not read Niebuhr, he at least understood the basic concepts that Niebuhr wrote about in the Irony of American History.

Read more