"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,

The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey

What if you were accused of a crime that you did not commit when the accuser had all the evidence against you, and you had nothing to prove your innocence? That is the premise of The Franchise Affair by Josephine Tey. Though it is the third novel in the Inspector Grant series, he plays only a small part.

The “star” of this book is Robert Blair, a small-town lawyer who has spent his life in moderate tranquility, living with a maiden aunt, playing golf on his off hours, and working mostly with people who want their wills written. As the novel opens, he is sitting down to his habitual afternoon tea: At 3:50 on every working day Miss Tuff bore into his office a lacquer tray covered with a fair white cloth and bearing a cup of tea in blue-patterned china, and, on a plate to match, two biscuits.

Suddenly the monotony rankles him. “Isn’t there more to life?” he wonders. Within moments he receives a desperate phone call from a woman he has never met pleading with him to help prove her innocence. His life changes abruptly as he is drawn into the troubles of Marion Sharpe and her elderly mother who have been accused of kidnapping a 15-year-old girl.

The rest of the novel shows Robert acting as amateur sleuth, following up every possible lead to discover the truth. With all the evidence against them, the reader sometimes wonders if the Sharpe women are lying to him, which adds to the tension of the story. Though most of the townspeople turn against Marion and her mother, there is a rich cast of characters who risk their standing in the community to support them and they do their best to help Robert solve the case.

The characters are well drawn and the writing is lovely. There is a hint of romance, but it takes a back seat to the mystery. I liked this book when I read it a few years ago, but I loved it this time around because of the excellent audiobook narrated by Karen Cass.  

This was an especially timely read because it shows how trusting people can be of the media, never questioning if something in print might be true or not. Tey is not heavy-handed about this, but it is interwoven into the story in a way that kept me chuckling throughout.

A very unusual mystery!

Blessings

The Literary Lives of the Inklings by Philip and Carol Zaleski

My greatest challenge in reviewing this 500-page book (600 if you count the endnotes) is knowing what quotations to leave out since the whole thing was so wonderfully written.

Philip and Carol Zaleski have given us a great gift with their painstaking research on each of the major inklings (J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Charles Williams and Owen Barfield) and how their lives and writings intertwined. The name “Inklings”, according to Tolkien, was little more than a “pleasantly ingenious pun suggesting people with vague or half-formed intimations and ideas, plus those who dabble in ink.” But History would record that, however modest their pretensions, their inkblots were no mere dabblings.

The group came together at a strategic time. WWI had left many in despair, but in others it had instilled a longing to reclaim the goodness, beauty, and cultural continuity that had been so violently disrupted. The Inklings came together because they shared that longing; they believed, as did their literary and spiritual ancestors, that ours is a fallen world yet not a forsaken one, which was a belief that set them at odds with many of their contemporaries. Lewis described the Inklings to Williams as “a group of Christians who like to write.” The Zaleskis add that they shared more common characteristics than that including intellectual vivacity, love of myth, conservative politics, memories of war, and a passion for beef, beer, and verbal battle.

The book highlights the idiosyncrasies of each member of the group beginning with Tolkien’s rapid, slurring, unintelligible lectures, which students endured because, as one student remarked, “Tolkien could turn a lecture into a mead hall in which he was the bard and we were the feasting, listening guest. Speaking in Anglo-Saxon turned Tolkien’s leaden tongue to gold.” I was particularly interested in the details of Charles Williams' life because of C.S. Lewis' glowing accounts of him in his letters. The Zaleski's paint quite a different picture of him as a very strange man!

They also describe the periodic friction between the members, particularly Tolkien’s impatience with Williams because he disliked William’s fiction, but also because he distrusted Williams’ fascination with the occult. Lewis and Barfield disagreed often (and strongly) on the principles of anthroposophy. At times Tolkien and Lewis clashed in their literary views, but their friendship endured through the decades. When Lewis died, Tolkien wrote, “So far I have felt the normal feelings of a man of my age – like an old tree that is losing all its leaves one by one, but this feels like an axe-blow near the roots.”

Of course, in 500 pages, you are bound to find lots more information (trivia?) than in other books. It was fun to read that some of the early reviews of The Lord of the Rings called it “juvenile trash” and “an overgrown fairy story” (!)

According to the Zaleskis, By the time the last inkling passed away on the eve of the 21^st century, the group had altered, in large or small measure, the course of imaginative literature, Christian theology and philosophy, comparative mythology, and the scholarly study of the Beowulf author, of Dante, Spenser, Milton, courtly love, fairy tale, and epic; and drawing as much from their scholarship as from their experiences of a catastrophic century, they had fashioned a new narrative of hope amid the ruins of war, industrialization, cultural disintegration, skepticism, and anomie.

For three months this was my bed-time book, and it brought me many hours of pleasure.

Blessings, 

Worthwhile Movie #23 - The Quiet Man (1952)

BBC period dramas and classic black-and-white films are my entertainment of choice, but it has taken me a few years to learn to appreciate John Wayne. I thought he was good in The Searchers and okay in 3 Godfathers. The first hint that I had of his charisma and charm was in Stagecoach, but the other Wayne movies I’ve watched seemed like run-of-the-mill westerns.

When Anthony Esolen featured The Quiet Man as his film-of-the-week (Substack newsletter), I decided to give Wayne another try. I had seen the movie many years ago and thought it a pleasant bit of romantic fluff, but Esolen gave me eyes to look at it in a new way. He said that the movie is actually about quietness. 

He writes, Prizefighter Sean Thornton, an Irish-American living in Pittsburgh, has killed his opponent in the ring. It’s an accident, but Sean can’t accept that. So Sean will never fight again, but instead moves back to the old family homestead in a village in Ireland, to farm and pick up the rest of his life, as a peaceful man. He’s made a vow never to throw a punch again. That’s what he intends, but sometimes a man has to fight, regardless of what he’d like, especially if he is fighting for something — or someone — he loves.

In addition to the excellent acting by both Wayne (playing Sean Thornton), Maureen O’Hara (playing Mary Kate Danaher) and the rest of the cast, the scenery is gorgeous and John Ford’s filming is stunning. Mary Kate and Sean fall in love, but his refusal to fight for something that she believes to be her right, gets their relationship off to a rocky start.

Esolen concludes his essay, In many ways, The Quiet Man is a film for those who believe in marriage and who know that what men and women do is that staggering and monumental thing, so closely related to tending the soil with love and care: they make children. The dialogue is priceless, yet it all seems perfectly natural, not stylized. We like everybody in The Quiet Man, even granite-jawed old Will Danaher, and there are gestures in the film that are unforgettable for a kind of down-to-earth nobility that I can’t find so well expressed in any other film except for John Ford’s own How Green Was My Valley. Ford was a poet of scene and dialogue and music, and of silences that are more filled with meaning than any words can be. But above all, when you watch this film, have fun! And thank God for the two great sexes that animate the world, because if it weren’t for them, where would we be? 

The only free version of the film is a video tape transfer at Internet Archive. If you watch the movie, you will greatly appreciate reading this article about the film AFTER you view it. I loved it, but I'm glad I didn't read it first because of all the spoilers.

Blessings,

Is Kindle Unlimited Worth It?

A few years ago, I gave Kindle Unlimited a try, but wasn't too impressed. Of the thirteen books I read, only four were memorable. In the years that followed, I would occasionally see a book I was interested in offered as a KU title and I began a KU list "just in case" I ever signed up for it again. Two years later I had a bit more success and read several excellent books including Tech-Wise Family, Trojan Mouse and quite a few D.E. Stevenson titles.

When I saw "three months of KU for 99 cents" last December, I took the plunge again. Because of my curated list, I didn't have to waste time on mediocre books. (Be aware that some of their titles come and go, but others are always there.) Yes, there were a few duds, but for the most part, I really enjoyed my recent foray into KU-land. These were my favorites: 

Light fiction: The Wayne Family trilogy by Elizabeth Cadell (reviewed here), Family Grandstand and Family Sabbatical by Caroly Ryrie Brink (of Caddie Woodlawn fame, both reviewed here)

Heavier reading: Ascent to Love - A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy by Leithart. Extremely helpful commentary for people like me who are clueless when it comes to Dante, but would like to learn. I also took advantage of Gerald J. Davis' translation of Paradiso because I was struggling with the more stilted version that I was using. 

                         

Excellent non-fiction: O Come Ye Back to Ireland, and Pages from a WWII Chaplain's Diary (easily one of my favorite books of the year). Speaking of which, they have many WWII P.O.W. memoirs, which are just my cup of tea.

A surprisingly good (but heavy) novel was The Words Between Us by Erin Bartel. It's a love story about books, but also about very broken people.

I also appreciated being able to leaf through some beautiful magazines like "Vintage Cottage," and peruse several clean eating cookbooks, especially 100 Days of Real Food on a Budget.

If you like light reading that isn't pure fluff, KU has many D.E. Stevenson and Miss Read titles. And the wonderful British mysteries compiled by Martin Edwards (21 books on the list are available via KU.)

Their audiobook options were pretty trashy, so I can't recommend anything there. Still, once every few years, I will probably look for the year-end deal and sign up for it again. The only downside to the deal was that I felt pressured to read as much as possible during the three-month offer (as if 99 cents was a lot of money!) and had to force myself to slow down and savor the books. I was not always successful at that.

In all, I read 20 books (half fiction and half non-fiction) and was pleasantly surprised at the gems I discovered. Has anyone else every tried it? Any recommendations?

Blessings,

Recommended Poetry Books

As a follow-up to last week's post on the importance of poetry, I'm linking to some of my favorite poetry books. 

I always say that the best poetry primer for someone who has no clue where to start is Robert Louis Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses. The poems are light and lyrical without being too sing-song-y. Even as an adult, I continue to delight in them and have put quite a few to memory. (I've linked to the Kindle Free version, but there are many beautifully illustrated hard copies to choose from when buying one for your personal library.) I extol the glories of one his poems in this post.

I created a list of poetry books especially for children here. A decade after I wrote that post, I discovered the lovely Sing a Song of Seasons, which for a modern book has an amazingly small amount of tripe. (I reviewed it here).

Of course, poetry must be read aloud for you to be able to appreciate its cadences so I highly recommend this audio recording of 81 Famous Poems. (Reviewed here.) Sadly, no corresponding book is available, but there is a similar book of classic poetry, Best-Loved Poems, that I reviewed here.

Finally, if you already love poetry and are ready for something a bit meatier, I highly recommend these two books of devotional poetry: Poems of Faith (Dover publications, not the Helen Steiner Rice title) and The Oxford Book of Christian Verse -1940. (Don't pay any attention to the Amazon price; I found it at a used book store for $5.) Of the two, Poems of Faith is a bit easier, but the OBCV is one of the most treasured books in my entire library. 

Let me know if you've enjoyed any of these or if you have a favorite book of poetry that is not mentioned here.

Blessings,

Why Poetry by Matthew Zapruder

I love poetry, and am always interested in how and why it can leave us speechless with astonishment. Anna Quindlen once wrote, People who are knowledgeable about poetry sometimes discuss it in that knowing, rather hateful way in which oenophiles talk about wine: robust, delicate, muscular. This has nothing to do with how most of us experience it, the heart coming around the corner and unexpectedly running into the mind.

When I saw Zapruder’s book on Kindle Unlimited, I was eager to see what he had to contribute to the discussion. I was delighted with his opening sally that Poetry isn’t in any danger, and never has been. And I’m quite sure there will be poetry as long as there are people who can speak, and probably even after. [And this delightful jab:] Probably even robots will write it, just as soon as they get souls.

The central question of the book is how poetry creates a heightened sense of awareness (what Zapruder calls “a poetic state of mind.”) It happens through the form of the poem, which guides the mind of a reader. It happens through leaps of association. And it happens as the poem explores and activates and plays with the nature of language itself.

He contends that there is no such thing as poetic language. The words used in poetry are every day words, but their energy comes primarily from the reanimation and reactivation of the language we recognize and know. In poetry, we see how language can be made deliberately strange, how it becomes “difficult” in order to jar us awake. One of the ways that poetry reanimates language is in its use of unexpected associations or metaphors. (Like when Emily Dickinson calls a snake a “whip-lash” or when Richard Crashaw writes that “Graves are beds now for the weary.”)

He also insists that poetry is not a secret code, and that it is not written to be deliberately elusive or obscure. (I would agree up to a point since I find most modern poetry to be purposefully vague. Ironically, the second half of the book is filled with examples of modern poems, which Zapruder painstakingly explains because otherwise they make no sense.)

In general, says, Zapruder, poetry requires no special knowledge, only attention. The meaning of the poem resides on the page, and is available to an attentive reader. Paying attention is essential and this close reading of the text is essential not only for literary enjoyment, but he would add, it’s necessary for survival in this modern world. The more we are colonized by our devices and the “information” and “experiences” that they supposedly deliver, the more we need a true experience of unmonetized attention.

The first half of the book was helpful and insightful; he detours off a few times to decry the evils of climate change, terrorism, inequality, environmental issues, etc. which didn’t seem to have anything to do with the topic. And, as I wrote above, the second half had many examples of difficult poetry that, instead of encouraging people to read it, would scare them off permanently. Still, I enjoyed gaining insights into how poetry makes its impact, and look forward to continuing my journey toward understanding it better.

Blessings,