"Adventures Among Books" by Andrew Lang

Andrew Lang (1844-1912) was a journalist, novelist and literary critic, who is most remembered for the twelve volumes of fairy tales that he did in collaboration with his wife. (Ten of them are free for Kindle as well as dozens of other books he wrote.) Knowing his literary bent, I was intrigued to see this collection of essays on bookish subjects. I will be highlighting only the first essay, which was by far my favorite in the book.

Lang calls this essay his literary biography saying that he has a much easier time remembering books than he does people. He writes, Some are soldiers from the cradle, some merchants, some orators; nothing but the love of books was the gift given to me by the fairies.

From an early age he was surrounded by books and those who loved to read them. He remembers “reading” Midsummer Night’s Dream as a small boy in a candlelit room where someone was playing the piano; he was sitting by the fire looking at an edition with pictures of fairies in it. The fairies seemed to come out of Shakespeare’s dream into the music and the firelight… It seemed an enchanted glimpse of Paradise.

At age four he began to teach himself to read by picking out the words and letters of a poem he had heard so often that he had it memorized: Elegy on the Death andBurial of Cock Robin. At age nine, he read his first novel, which was Jane Eyre. This was a creepy tale for a boy of nine, and Rochester was a mystery, St. John a bore. But the lonely girl in her despair, when something came into her room, and her days of starvation at school, and the terrible first Mrs. Rochester, were never to be forgotten.

He tells how he hated Greek until he discovered Homer. The very sound of the hexameter, that long, inimitable roll of the most various music, was enough to win the heart, even if the words were not understood. But the words proved unexpectedly easy to understand, full as they are of all nobility, all tenderness, all courage, courtesy, and romance…. After once being initiated into the mysteries of Greece by Homer, the work of Greek was no longer tedious.

He summarizes his love of all things Greek by writing, We cannot find any wisdom more wise than that which bids us do what men may and bear what men must. Such are the lessons of the Greeks, of the people who tried all things, in the morning of the world, and who still speak to us of what they tried in words which are the sum of human gaiety and gloom, of grief and triumph, hope and despair. The world, since their day, has but followed in the same round, which only seems new: has only made the same experiments and failed with the same failure, but less gallantly and less gloriously.

“AdventuresAmong Books” was written in 1872 when Lang was still a young man. Near the end of the essay, he writes about how he became interested in folklore and anthropology. Little did he know that his most memorable life’s work would grow out of that interest. The first “Fairy Book” was published in 1889.

Blessings,

Reading for the Love of God by Jessica Hooten Wilson

Why and how we read matters as much as what we read. 

It is not enough to read the Bible; you must eat the book 

(quoting Eugene Peterson and Ezekiel 3:3).

The premise of Reading for the Love of God is that words must get inside you and change you. This is transformation vs. information. If you want to know how to "eat the book," learn how to read – not only the Bible but other great books as well – as a spiritual practice.

Wilson’s book often reminded me of the Literary Life Podcast because both she and they emphasize the folly of reader-centered education (where students are asked how the text makes them feel thereby missing most of what the text is actually saying). She suggests that one way to avoid that is to use the ART metric. In it, the Author, Reader and Text are given equal emphasis. Yes, the readers emotions are involved, but only after he begins to pay attention to what the text is actually saying - all the while being respectful of the author’s point of view.

To be a critic is to stand over the text making the reader judge and master over the text. This standing over prevents the understanding necessary to be transfigured by the reading. The reader should approach the book in the way a student draws near a teacher, with a willingness to learn, to receive, from the books. (p. 11)

Wilson places a strong emphasis on how medieval Christians saw deeper meanings in everything they read in the Bible, and criticizes Luther (and the Reformation) for making the literal meaning of the text paramount thereby excluding the other “senses” (allegorical, tropological, and anagogical). I find this to be problematic because it leaves too much room for heretical interpretations. One of her main examples of a saint whose reading style we should imitate is Juliana of Norwich. But Wilson doesn’t mention that Juliana’s zeal to see the love of God in every verse of Scripture caused her to negate the possibility of wrath, judgment or hell.

Apart from that caveat, I appreciated Wilson’s deep love for the written word and her encouragement to keep reading deeply.

A life of reading counteracts the malformation of screen and digital technology…. In contrast to many other pastimes, reading demands engagement. It asks something of the participant. It cultivates that person’s imagination and increases their vision of the world. (p. 15)

Blessings,

Surprised by Joy by C. S. Lewis

Lovers of great literature will revel in Surprised by Joy, the biography of a man who was led to salvation by his reading diet. The progression of “great books” in Lewis’ life worked on him like drops of water on a stone. Eventually their Christian themes made a groove in his heart that he could no longer ignore.

The “joy” he writes of is not happiness as the world defines it, but the pang of inconsolable longing (p. 62) This longing for joy led Lewis to finally embrace theism and, soon afterwards, Christianity. Interestingly, once he became a Christian, he no long sought after those stabs of joy as before. He still had moments of intense feelings (“tastes of heaven”), but he no longer idolized those experiences. He took them as moments of grace pointing to an eternal reality yet to be experienced.

The book recounts his miserable days as a school boy, his difficult relationship with his father, his first friendships, and the heart change brought about by books.

In his penultimate chapter called “Checkmate”, he writes: All the books were beginning to turn against me. Indeed, I must have been as blind as a bat not to have seen, long before, the ludicrous contradiction between my theory of life and my actual experiences as a reader. George MacDonald had done more to me than any other writer; of course, it was a pity he had that bee in his bonnet about Christianity. He was good in spite of it. Chesterton had more sense than all the other moderns put together; bating, of course, his Christianity. Johnson was one of the few authors whom I felt I could trust utterly; curiously enough, he had the same kink. Spenser and Milton by a strange coincidence, had it too. Even among ancient authors the same paradox was to be found. The most religious (Plato, Aeschylus, Virgil) were clearly those on whom I could really feed. On the other hand, those writers who did not suffer from religion and with whom in theory my sympathy ought to have been complete – Shaw and Wells and Mill and Gibbon and Voltaire – all seemed a little thin… It wasn’t that I didn’t like them. They were all entertaining; but hardly more. There seemed to be no depth in them. They were too simple. The roughness and density of life did not appear in their books.

One of my favorite books of 2023.

Blessings,

The Duchess of Bloomsbury by Helene Hanff

Consider this a belated review of 84 Charing Cross Road which I enjoyed in 2021 and again in January of this year. I am a fan of epistolary novels so the 20 years of correspondence (1949-1968) between Helene Hanff (book lover from New York) with Frank Doel (a book seller from London) was pure delight.  The audio version is spot on in highlighting their differences of manner. And the 1987 movie, with stellar performances by Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins, is one of my favorites. (You can watch the trailer here.)

Because of her success with the book 84 Charing Cross Road, Helene is finally able to afford a trip to London. The Duchess of Bloomsbury recounts her dream-come-true:

All my life I've wanted to see London. I used to go to English movies just to look at streets with houses like those. Staring at the screen in a dark theatre, I wanted to walk down those streets so badly it gnawed at me like hunger. Sometimes, at home in the evening, reading a casual description of London by Hazlitt or Leigh Hunt, I'd put the book down suddenly, engulfed by a wave of longing that was like homesickness. I wanted to see London the way old people want to see home before they die. 

Marks and Co., the bookshop that had been her main supplier, has closed and so she meets a host of new people who offer to show her the town. She's a bit overwhelmed with the modest fame that her book has brought her and jokingly calls herself "The Duchess of Bloomsbury" since that is where her hotel is located. Many of the characters she meets are as quirky and endearing as she is. 

This is a must for every bibliophile if only to identify with how easy it is to go off on to rabbit trails while reading a good book. Helene remarks that one set of books by Arthur Quiller Couch took her eleven years to read because of all the books she read in between to better understand his comments. She so identifies with Couch that she nicknames him "Q" (which explains the title of her next book, Q's Legacy.) 

I was fascinated by the fact that though she had not read as widely as she would have liked, she had read deeply; My problem is that that while other people are reading fifty books I'm reading one book fifty times. I only stop when at the bottom of page 20, say, I realize I can recite pages 21 and 22 from memory. Then I put the book away for a few years.

I'd love to be able to do that. 

I was able to get these first two books via digital download from my library, but it looks like Q's Legacy may cost me $6!

Blessings,

Thoughts on The Song of Solomon

Song of Solomon is one of those books that caused me great embarrassment as a young Christian for its glorification of physical attraction and its awkward expressions of admiration such as the bride's hair being "like a flock of goats and her teeth like a flock of shorn ewes."

As I matured in my faith I learned to appreciate the book's place in the biblical canon because it debunks the myth that God is a cosmic killjoy and that physical intimacy is sinful. (Of course, it has to be read in the context of the rest of Scripture!)  

In Matthew Henry's commentary, he prefers to treat the entire book as a spiritual analogy, reflecting Christ's love for His bride. While I agreed with all of his conclusions, I did not see how he reached them from certain verses (the ones in my first paragraph, for example.) Some applications seemed incredibly forced. The other resource I used for this study was Kay Arthur's Walking With God in Every Season, which took the Song of Solomon more at face value (a love poem with potential spiritual applications). I found it interesting that one of the assignments in Kay's book was to make lists of the compliments the couple give to each other, noting which ones had to do with their characters and which had to do with their appearance. Only by really stretching my imagination, could I come up with one non-physical accolade for the bride and the groom, which amazed me. 

Although I loved Matthew Henry's eloquence and fervent love for God, I was occasionally miffed at his heavy-handed applications. Kay Arthur's probing questions left more room for prayerful reflection. As I meditated on repeated themes and phrases, I found myself longing to think of Christ as "the one whom my soul loves." I'm happy I took some time to go through this book more carefully.  

Blessings,

Honey for a Teen's Heart by Gladys Hunt

Why would I read about books recommended for teens when my teens are grown? Why would I add almost a hundred titles to my already overwhelming list of "books to read someday"? Because I'm nuts. Nuts about books, that is. And I'm fond of Gladys Hunt whose Honey for a Child's Heart led us to many happy hours of family read-alouds.  AND because a really good YA book can be read and enjoyed by an adult. (Two of my very favorite books are The Giver and Tuck Everlasting.)

I also like books that make me think. The subtitle of Honey for a Teen's Heart is: "Using Books to Communicate with Teens" and Hunt offers hundreds of suggestions for family read-alouds that will open up the floor for discussion of crucial subjects. Some of her choices are more gritty than I like, but probably necessary because of the sordid world we live in. Each recommendation is followed by several paragraphs of explanation about its theme or its author's world view. Very helpful!

The book is divided into sections by genre/subject. (Mostly fiction titles since stories offer wonderful fodder for discussion.) A small percentage of the books fall into the "twaddle" category, but every parent has to make book choices based on their child's interests and reading level. There are dozens of tried and true classics listed, but many more modern and new (to me) books.

Since I abhor most of the rubbish that has been written for children in the last 60 years, I'm thankful for someone like Gladys Hunt who has sifted through the chaff and brought out the wheat. I can hardly get wait to get back to the U.S. to look up some of these titles. (two months from now!)

I look forward to sharing my thoughts about these books in the near future.

Note: There is a small issue with the Kindle formatting which sometimes puts information from the sidebar into the middle of the text.

Kindle Deals - Books about Books

Sometimes I like to pretend my TBR list isn't already a thousand books too long and I pick up a book about books (with a zillion more recommendations). That happened again last night when I saw these Kindle deals at Amazon:

Honey for a Woman's Heart: Growing Your World through Reading Great Books - 99 cents 

Honey for a Teen's Heart: Using Books to Communicate with Teens - 99 cents

Lit!: A Christian Guide to Reading Books - $1.99

The Christian Tradition in English Literature - 99 cents (I bought this one a few weeks ago, but since it's still on sale, I decided to add it to the list.)

The Western Canon by Harold Bloom

In this 560-page tome Bloom highlights twenty-six writers whose writings set the standard for all literature  that followed them. (Shakespeare, Dickens, Milton, Tolstoy, etc.)

I admit it.  I’ve been in awe of Harold Bloom as the “guardian” of classic literature ever since I first heard about him.  I have struggled through several of his books, but The Western Canon was the last one I’ll ever have to read because it knocked him off his pedestal.  I still appreciate, but no longer idolize, him. It's partly because I’ve become more sure of my own reading tastes and am no longer inclined to swallow someone else’s opinions about what I “should” be reading. It's also due to his disturbing view of the Bible. Although he has tremendous respect for it, he believes the Old Testament was written by a woman and that it has been revised beyond recognition from its original texts. Listen to this gobbledygook:

After Shakespeare, the greatest representative of the given is the first author of the Hebrew Bible, the figure named Yahwist or J by nineteenth-century biblical scholarship.  J, like Homer, a person or persons lost in the dark recess of time, appears to have lived in or near Jerusalem some three thousand years ago, well before Homer either lived or was invented.  Just who the primary J was, we are never likely to know.  I speculate, on purely internal and subjective literary grounds, that J may very well have been a woman at King Solomon’s court… [Probably] Bathsheba, mother of Solomon… The J writer was the original author of what we now call Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers, But what she wrote was censored, revised, and frequently abrogated or distorted by a series of redactors across five centuries, culminates with Ezra, or one of o his followers, in the era of the return for Babylonian exile….J’s Yahweh is human – all too human; he eats and drinks, , frequently loses his temper, delights in his own mischief, is jealous and vindictive, proclaims his justness while constantly playing favorites, and develops a considerable case of neurotic anxiety … By the time he leads that crazed and suffering rabblement through the Sinai wilderness, he has become so insane and dangerous, to himself and to others, that the J writer deserves to be called the most blasphemous of all authors ever. (p.4, 5)

Really? When you read drivel like that about a book Bloom considers to be one of the absolute greatest in the Western Canon, how can you continue to hope that his other thoughts will be enlightening?

But Bloom isn’t considered the Protector of Great Literature for nothing.  He believes (and rightly so) that great literature will continue to exist, not because it’s “good for you”, but because true readers actually enjoy the stuff.  Sadly, however, (and he’s right again here) colleges and universities will have less and less lit majors.  What are now called “Departments of English” will be renamed departments of “Cultural Studies” where Batman comics, Mormon theme parks, television, movies, and rock will replace Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, and Wallace Stevens. (p. 484)

Dismal but true. This book is worth skimming through to find out why the Great Books are worthy of the name.

The Invisible Child by Katherine Paterson

The Invisible Child (subtitled "On Reading and Writing Books For Children") is a collection of speeches and essays written by Katherine Patterson over the course of her career.  I have mixed feelings about some of her books, but I thoroughly enjoyed this one; I was particularly impressed with how integral her faith is to her writing.  All her books are ultimately about characters who are homesick for Eden.

Some choice quotes:

On good writing: I suppose it would be possible to write a book whose plot jumped all around like a frog on pep pills, but that's not what books are about.  If that's the kind of writing you want to do, I think you should be in a more hectic medium.  Books are meant to be read slowly and digested.  These days people don't pray much or go to services of worship, they don't commune with nature - why, they hardly go to a national park without a TV set, a laptop, and a cell phone.  The book is almost the last refuge of reflection - the final outpost of wisdom.  I want children to have the gifts that books can give, and I don't believe they can get them from a book that attempts to imitate the frantic fragmentation of contemporary life. (p. 55)

On dark themes in children's books: There was no way my parents could have protected me from the world as it is.  I had already seen too much.  What I needed was not an outer guard but an inner strength.  I needed to know that one could endure the loss of Paradise.  "That's what we were put on earth to do," says Margaret Drabble, "to endeavor to face the impossible." This is what reading The Yearling helped me to do - to endeavor to face the impossible. (p. 177)


On classics:  I was always told that I should read the Odyssey.  It popped up in small doses in English and Latin textbooks as I was growing up.  But somehow I never got around to the whole thing until I was forty-six years old. . . . Do you know why the Odyssey has lasted for nearly three thousand years?  Because it is simply a marvelous story.  Why did people keep telling me that I ought to read it so I could be an educated person?  Was it because they had never read it themselves, but had always meant to?  I can't imagine anyone who had ever read it, certainly not Rouse's translation, anyone who had ever really read it, telling someone else to read it because it was good for him.  Read it because it's one of the best stories you'll ever read. . . . (from a 1979 lecture on "Words")

Quote on "Slow Reading" by Susan Hill

Susan Hill on the advantages of slow reading:

A strange competitiveness has emerged among some readers in the last few years.  I have known book-bloggers boast of getting through twenty books a week, as if they were trying for a place in The Guinness Book of Records.  Why has reading turned into a form of speed dating?  The best books deserve better.  Everything I am reading has so much to yield but only if I give it my full attention and respect by reading it slowly.  

Fast reading of a great novel will get us the plot.  It will get us names, a shadowy idea of characters, a sketch of settings.  It will not get us subtleties, small differentiations, depths of emotion and observation, multi-layered human experience, the appreciation of simile and metaphor, any sense of context, any comparison with other novels, other writers.  Fast reading will not get us cadence and complexities of style and language.  It will not get us anything that enters not just the conscious mind but the unconscious.  It will not allow the book to burrow down into our memory and become part of ourselves, the accumulation of knowledge and wisdom and vicarious experience which helps to form us as complete human beings.  It will not develop our awareness or add to the sumo of our knowledge and intelligence.

Read parts of a newspaper quickly or an encyclopedia entry, or a fast-food thriller, but do not insult yourself or a book which has been created with its author’s painstakingly acquired skill and effort, by seeing how fast you can dispose of it.

(Gleaned from Howards End Is on the Landing, pages 171-173)

Howard's End is on the Landing by Susan Hill

Call me a book skeptic.  I’ve read gazillions of books on books and the most recent ones contained more personal information than I cared to know.  Besides, I had never heard of Susan Hill and wondered if she even had a right to impose her opinions on me.  So in the midst of packing up for our move, I grabbed Howards End Is on the Landing and plopped on the couch with an air of self-resignation.  If it didn’t appeal to me within the first few minutes, I’d go back to sorting our stuff.

Fortunately, I was charmed from the very first page.  Hill (who I now know is a successful British author) tells of a day that she spent in search of a particular book.  Going from room to room, she rummaged through various bookshelves, noticing books she had always intended to read and others that she wanted  to re-read.  She decided to put a moratorium on book buying and spend a year reading forty choice books from her own collection.  Each chapter details the process of narrowing down the list.

She discusses everything from e-readers, to her favorite fonts, to famous authors she has known, to her dislike of Jane Austen, but she never gives you so many personal details that you want to squirm.

I liked her gentle sense of humor and her writing style even when I didn’t always agree with her point of view.  (How could I dislike an author who uses words like peripatetic and inchoate?)  Apart from one or two off-color comments, I thoroughly enjoyed my literary stroll with the companionable and articulate Miss Hill.  

Classics for Pleasure by Michael Dirda

Some time ago I read Michael Dirda’s Classics for Pleasure. Dirda is a Pulitzer prize winning book critic who writes for the Washington Post, and while I agree with him that many great books are overlooked, I disagreed with his definition of a classic.  Often the “pleasure” in his chosen titles was directly related to their bawdiness.   One reviewer at Amazon summed it up well: “Too many of Dirda’s picks seem to assume an inexhaustible taste for the macabre, decadence, vulgarity, sexual perversion, and/or cynicism, despair and psychosis”

However, since I’m ever eager to increase my knowledge of the Western Canon, I plowed through the book and obtained many mouth-watering tidbits of information. 

On Alexander Pope: “Thackery called him the greatest literary artist that England has seen”.

On Henry Rider Haggard’s book: “C.S. Lewis said, ‘What story in the world opens better than She?’”

On Georgette Heyer: “She’s as witty as any writer of the past century, as accomplished as P.G. Wodehouse in working out complex plots, as accurate as a professional historian in getting her background details right…. She composes superb historical novels, laced with comedy, intrigue, delightful characters, and yes, romance.  Clear-eyed realism lies behind all of Heyer’s work, no matter how giddy the goings-on beforehand.”

On James Agee’s Let Us Now Praise Famous Men: “glorious, lyrical excess”

And, finally, his thoughts on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight: “It conveys a wonderful Mozartean lightness and wit, an air of make-believe and festivity, tinged with real darkness.  It’s a perfect adult Christmas story.”

And, so, I’ve added to my constantly expanding list of authors/books to explore.  Although I did not agree with all of Dirda’s choices, I enjoyed his fine writing and his obvious love of good books.

The Battle of the Books by Jonathon Swift

Swift's satire, The Battle of the Books, has been on my TBR list for years. Written in 1697, it describes the battle between ancient and modern books. At that time, "ancient" referred to the Greek classics and “modern” referred to books written in the 17^th century. It was a rebuttal to authors who were writing that modern knowledge had surpassed the knowledge that had been available in earlier books. Swift argued that the essential ideas taught by Aristotle and others were just as valid and important as ever.

As for any obligations they owed to the Ancients, [Modern books] renounced them all: For our horses are of our own breeding, our arms of our own forging, and our clothes of our own cutting out and sewing. Plato was by chance upon the next shelf, and observing those that spoke to be in ragged plight, their horses lean and foundered, their weapons of rotten wood, their armor rusty, and nothing but rags underneath; he laughed aloud, and in his pleasant way, swore, by God, he believed them. (p. 107-108)

Later in the book “Moderns” are compared to spiders: For, pray Gentlemen, was ever anything so Modern as the Spider in his Air, his Turns, and his Paradoxes? He argues on behalf of You his Brethren, and Himself, with many Boastings of his native Stock, and great Genius; that he Spins and Spits wholly from himself, and scorns to own any Obligation or Assistance from without. Then he displays to you his great Skill in Architecture and Improvement in Mathematics… Erect your Schemes with as much Method and Skill as you please; yet, if the Materials be nothing but Dirt, spun out of your own Entrails (the guts of Modern Brains) the Edifice will conclude at last in a Cobweb: The Duration of which, like that of other Spiders Webs, may be imputed to their being forgotten, or neglected, or hid in a Corner. (p. 111)

I’m a fan of 19^th century classics (not Swift’s definition of the word) and tend to disdain lack of depth in modern “usurpers” (You can see why I liked the cobweb analogy!) so I thoroughly enjoyed Swift’s criticism’s. It’s a pity that his razor sharp wit is cloaked in archaic language and spellings. Take heart, though. It’s only twenty pages long and worth the effort. It also helps to read an article about the essay beforehand so you can recognize the authors whose names are being mentioned.

Ex Libris by Anne Fadiman

Ex Libris came highly recommended by fellow bibliophiles because of its witty and incisive essays about books. And there was a lot to love about this book. Fadiman grew up in a bookish family (She used her father’s set of Trollope novels as building blocks) and both of her parents were writers.

In her preface she writes, “Books wrote our life story, and as they accumulated on our shelves (and on our windowsills, and underneath our sofa, and on top of our refrigerator), they became chapters in it themselves. How could it be otherwise?” Later she adds, “Between them, our parents had about seven thousand books. Whenever we moved to a new house, a carpenter would build a quarter of a mile of shelves… Other people’s walls looked naked to me.” (p. 125)

Bibliophiles can be a quirky lot and I chuckled with understanding over her confession of being a compulsive proofreader. “If you are a compulsive proofreader, you know it, since for the afflicted it is a reflex no more avoidable than a sneeze…” (p.82) She differentiates between readers who keep their books in pristine condition as “courtly” lovers from those who devour (i.e., dog ear, underline, love to pieces) their books in “carnal” fashion.

For years I collected lists of “must read” classics, but after a few decades I realized I could never read them all and had to choose those which really interested me. Fadiman assuaged my guilt with her essay on her parents’ diverse home library. She compares it to the library of another writer’s parents by telling of Diana Trilling “who had to wash her hands before she extracted a book from her parents’ glass-fronted bookcase.” Trilling’s parents are chided for this cold, calculating treatment of books. But “by buying his set of leather-bound classics en bloc from a door-to-door salesman, Trilling’s father committed the additional heresy, unimaginable to us, of believing that a library could be one-size-fits-all.” (p. 124) Hooray, I can finally justify my eclectic library!

I have mixed feelings about this book. On one hand Fadiman is an eloquent writer. And funny too. I loved it when she wrote, “I’d rather have a book, but in a pinch I’ll settle for set of Water Pik instructions.” (p. 113) On the other hand she’s indiscreet about her personal life which interfered with my enjoyment of the book. I know it’s hard to believe, but I managed to be inspired by her father’s books without one single reference to his paramours.

If you love books about books, don’t miss this one.