What has everyone been reading lately? I have a few selections that I liked.
One of them is Work in Progress, by Father Jim Martin, SJ. It is a coming of age memoir, telling the story of the jobs he worked before becoming a Jesuit priest, starting with the one where he worked in an ice cream parlor as a young teen in 1976. Of course everything was about the bicentennial then. It sounds like he was having more fun in his hometown of Quaker Meeting, PA, in the bicentennial year than we are having now. He had a bunch of other young people starter jobs, and one bigger one working for General Electric before he decided to become a Jesuit at, I think, the age of 29.
It sounds like he was a funny, goofy kid, with a lot of friends. The book said nothing about LGBTQ things, except to mention that he became an advocate later. It doesn't say that he himself is a member of that community, despite what people assume.
Another book I read was Homeschooled, by Stephan Miller Block. The author's mentally unwell mother took him out of regular school for five years starting in the fourth grade. She wasn't qualified to be a teacher, she basically was using him to cure her own loneliness. The book isn't a polemic against homeschooling, but he advocates for accountability. Of which there was none in his state of Texas. During the five years he was homeschooled, no one checked in to see if he was okay or if he was learning anything. My thought was that the author's father needed to take a more active role, but he was focused on his own career. The author took himself out of homeschooling as a high school freshman and struggled mightily to catch up. Which he eventually did, and later thrived.
I seem to be in a non-fiction streak lately, and the other book I have read lately is The Soul of an Octopus, by Cy Montgomery. It is described as a "soulful account of a soulful invertebrate". Amazon describes the author as an combination of Emily Dickinson and Indiana Jones. She is a naturalist who volunteers at the Boston Aquarium, and befriended several octopuses (she said that the plural of octopus "is not" octopi). I found it an entertaining read, and sad at times. Octopuses do not live very long, only 3 to 5 years. But they crowd a lot of life into those years.
I have been in escape mode again. I have been reading some of the cozy mysteries on the New York Times “ best” cozy mysteries list— most recently “The Thursday Murder Club,” which was also made into a movie with an all- star cast including Helen Mirren, Pierce Brosnan, Ben Kingsley and Celia Imrie. It is targeted at old folks—older cast playing retirees in a British retirement complex who solve murders. It is now a whole series.
ReplyDeleteIf you like cozy mysteries, you might like the new series "You're Killing Me" available on IMBD (I think that's Prime?). Starring Brook Shields as the Boomer fiction writer teaming up with Gen Z college student Eden solving mysteries that seem to happen a lot.
DeleteIMBD is a data base listing all kinds of Hollywood related everything including movies, actors, musicians and other Hollywood professionals. Even our grandson is there but he hasn’t had an acting gig for a few years and has moved on. It isn’t a streaming service like Prime Video.
DeleteMy husband said we actually got it on Acorn.
DeleteI haven't been reading much in the last few years. I don't know exactly why. But in order to move out of my apartment and take up residence in the OFH (old folks home), I had no choice but to give up the bulk of my book collection, which I found very difficult to do both practically and emotionally. I had sold a large number of books years ago to The Strand, which claims to be "the largest independent bookstore in New York City [which] carries more than 2.5 million used, new, and rare books [and at] whose flagship location alone, the shelves stretch over 18 miles—and counting." Years ago they came, packed the books, and transported them to the store free of charge. No more. To make a long story short, this time I had to hire a moving company to pack and transport the books. And because The Strand has a very limited schedule of times they will accept deliveries, the first date offered was June 21, to which we agreed. But the mover then realized the 21st was Father's Day and had to cancel. He has kindly and generously agreed to store the books (35 boxes, picked up June 2) free of charge and deliver them on a date early in July but not yet specified.
ReplyDeleteDeciding what to keep was somewhat like choosing one book to take on be in exile on a desert island. I wound up taking John P. Meier's five-volume A Marginal Jew: Rethinking the Historical Jesus and J. G. Dunn's trilogy Christianity in the Making (Jesus Remembered, Beginning from Jerusalem and Neither Greek Nor Jew: A Contested Identity). I remember Father Komonchak spoke very highly of Dunn.
I am not entirely sure of what to make of my own choices, particularly because one of the two other books I felt the need to keep was J. L. Mackie's The Miracle of Theism: Arguments for and Against the Existence of God because I am leaning toward atheism.
Finally, I keptThe Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets by Helen Vendler.
Of course, I have literally thousands of Kindle books and Audible audiobooks, but still giving up the physical books was painful.
Goodness, David. No light reading for you😉. I have given away thousands of books during the last 50+ years, mostly to a Catholic girls school that had a huge book sale over three days every spring. I still have four bookcases full. I donated, but bought a whole lot there also. They stopped doing it a few years ago after 50 years because they didn’t have enough volunteers to do the continuous all- year sorting and organizing into boxes by genre, and, when the sale was on, to load and reload the tables in the two gymnasiums holding several dozen tables each . All the moms were working by then.In the early years very few moms worked outside the home so they had enough volunteers. The rare book sellers lined up outside the gyms the night before, ready to rush in and find those first editions that the donors didn’t realize were anything other than old books. I have a copy of one of Kung’s books that I found there, signed by him.
DeleteWe donate books we've read to our local public library. Some of them make it to the shelves, but the great majority are put up for sale at book sales which the library runs once or twice a year as fundraisers.
DeleteOnce in a while, we take books we've read to a go to a second-hand bookstore chain called Half Price Books that will offer us a little money (usually very little) for used books. I will say they are good for finding out of print books, and the price is usually right.
Since the school book fundraiser stopped operations, I started taking ours to the library too - they do the same as yours— sell most of them to raise money for more copies of recent books.
DeleteI know what you mean about the physical books. I prefer them to the electronic ones, though I own some e books and borrow them from the library. When I run out of shelf space I figure it's time to donate some books to the Friends of the Library store.
ReplyDeleteMy mom used to donate books to the county jail, but when we checked into that, they said they couldn't accept books from outside. I suppose people might smuggle drugs between the pages, or something.
My husband has a lot of books on Biblical scholarship and exegesis, his shelves are running over. The deacons ought to develop a resource library. But not in our house, there isn't room.
DeleteOur parishes prison ministry used to do a Bible collection each year for inmates in Illinois corrections facilities. But recently the Department of Corrections informed us that it can't accept Bibles. So now our ministry is requesting monetary donations that can be put into a fund so the prisons can purchase their own Bibles. Somehow it doesn't seem as compelling to just write a check.
DeleteOne of my former Catholic parishes has an extensive library that parishioners can borrow books from. The EC parish we belonged to had a single standalone bookcase where parishioners could pick up books or leave books as a donation. It seems a good thing for parishes to offer loan books from their library to parishioners. It’s not only deacons who want to read these books. I donated a lot of specifically Catholic books that I no longer wanted to keep to the RC parish library.
DeleteWe really like the Thursday Murder Club books! Great fiction? Not really. Highly readable? Yes. And every once in a while, the author drops a little observation or nugget that makes you go, Hmmm...
ReplyDeleteI'm reading a John Grisham book, The Last Juror. Got it from the library because my Kindle's sort on the fritz. It's pretty good. I've read a few Grisham novels over the years. This is his best effort of those I've read.
ReplyDeleteI was on retreat this past weekend, and was able to stop in at the seminary bookstore. Picked up three books on theology and spirituality. Those will last me for a while.
Just finished Ordeal by Hunger, the un-put-downable 1930s classic (updated in the 1960s) about the Donner Party. Serves as a real-life template for any dystopian novel: Society collapses due to natural disaster (or war, pandemic, evil extra terrestrials, AI, zombies, etc.), but what really finishes us off, body and soul, is each other.
ReplyDeleteNow reading After Oscar, by Merlin Holland, Oscar Wilde's grandson. Fascinating and exhaustive study of Wilde's literary reputation after his death in 1900 and its reverb on friends and family. Re-reading Wilde's prison essay, De Profundis, alongside. He seems to have had what Greeley called "the Catholic imagination."
Also have Kevin Wilson's Head for the Hills for (dark) comic relief and Trollope's He Knew He Was Right on audio.
Hi Jean. Good to see you, how are things going?
Delete"...what really finishes us off, body and soul, is each other.".
Isn't that the truth!
Welcome home, Jean.
DeleteJust finished a big bunch of wildly expensive tests for cardiac surgeon who wants to fix my leaky mitral valve with open-heart surgery. Hopefully, seeing the lumps on my liver, pancreas, and thyroid will prompt him to get serious about managing congestive heart failure and a-fib instead of using it to scare me into the OR.
DeleteNot much energy for online groups, but I glance here occasionally, and book talk is like catnip to an old English major.
Glad to hear good news about your cancer follow-up. Hope everyone else is able to sit up and take nourishment, as my dad used to say.
Jean, I’m very sorry that you are juggling so many health issues. Given that my husband’s congestive heart failure has been effectively managed with medication for 7 years now and several family and friends have had their Afib effectively managed with meds also, I can’t help but wondering if your cardiologist has prescribed them and they didn’t work? I know that these heart issues vary in different individuals and there are no one size fits all solutions. Since you are an in- depth researcher and analyst, I’m sure you are aware of the alternatives and have discussed them. I’ve succumbed to using AI for my health issues . I don’t trust it to be right but I find it useful in helping me with raising questions for the docs. I know nothing about mitral valve problems really ( I was told almost 50 years ago that I have one but it has not caused serious problems). AI says there are several kinds of surgery depending.
DeleteI might take a look at your book on the Donner tragedy. As a young person in California, learning about it in our required California state history class, it so sickened me that I’ve always avoided reading more about it or watching documentaries. Now that I know that the chemo sword won’t be crashing down I might move beyond the Thursday Murder Club, even though they are good fun. Ridiculous actually. Now back to King Donald’s latest - creating a promenade from the Lincoln Memorial to the riverfront, suspended over a major commuter road called the Rock Creek Parkway. According to him— “ “they” think it should be named the Trump Promenade.” No hint about whom” they” are. No price tag announced yet.but that doesn’t matter. The cost will skyrocket.
Who not whom. Autocorrect strikes again.
DeleteWhen we downsize someday, hopefully to our own (smaller, single story) house on one floor, I may have to cull the books again. If we can avoid assisted living and move to our own house, we can renovate to open it up for my husband's wheelchair and add a wall of bookcases. Interesting to me that the first book I thought of when considering what to save (after reading David's comment) was a book called after reading David's comment was "The City of Joy", a 1985 novel by Dominique Lapierre. It impacted me tremendously, sparking what became a bit of an obsession in my life--concern for the global poor. No other novel has impacted me with the same force. I have read a bit of conventional Catholic literature, but most didn't touch me at all. I lean to contemporary spiritual writers, not theologians or biblical scholars. I think theology is an interesting intellectual exercise, but ultimately a pretty hopeless attempt to understand what can't be understood by limited human minds. I don't read much by liturgical scholars, since liturgy doesn't interest me a whole lot. Much of what I will save are books by contemporary spiritual writers. I will save our oversized coffee-table books with beautiful photos of places we've loved - Cape Cod and Nantucket, the Chesapeake Bay region, France, England-- because they give me a lift when I look at them. They bring back many happy memories. I will give away our many gardening books (my d-in- law in Colorado wants them) but keep one on container gardening, which is all I can manage these days. My husband did most of the gardening. I will save some classics of literature to re-read, such as The Aeneid, the Iliad and the Odyssey, Plato's Republic, etc, and a couple of children's literature classics like Little Women, Anne of Green Gables, and The Secret Garden. I have a lot of religious/spiritual books on the shelf that I bought but never read. Since I’m housebound pretty much these days I hope to start trying to read through them all finally. I have already given away a lot of books- when we first got home and thought we would sell right after that Christmas. So my religious/spiritual book library is down to a single tall bookcase. But instead of buying any new books for a while, I will start reading the un-read books on the shelves. It's an eclectic collection of mostly contemporary spiritual writers of different religious backgrounds. Not much fiction these days except for escape fiction. No depressing non-fiction. Now that I'm almost through the cancer stuff I might feel up to reading about tragedies again.
ReplyDeleteDavid, I’m glad you have your collection of online books!
I received good news today - my oncologist got the results of a test that would indicate whether or not I should get chemo this second time around with cancer. No need! My last day of radiation is tomorrow.
Anne, I'm so glad you won't have to do chemo, and are almost finished with radiation. I have my one year check-up with the doctor who did my surgery next week. The six month check-up went fine, so I'm hoping this one does too.
DeleteI read "The City of Joy" years ago and thought it was good. For some reason I thought it was non-fiction, but I see that it is a novel. I think it was based on a true story. I see that the author donated half the proceeds from the book to a charity which helps the slum children of Calcutta.
If we had to seriously downsize, among the books I would want to keep are the ones about nature. Such as the big coffee table one I had given to my dad about the oldest living plants in the world. It was funny, Dad and I had a philosophical difference of opinion about it. The author included clonal organisms such as the Pando grove of aspens in Utah. He didn't think those those examples ought to be counted as oldest, since they hadn't actually been here for thousands of years.
DeleteKatherine, yes, I’m pretty sure that City of Joy was based on a true story. In reading my comment I see that my brain fog was pretty bad when I wrote it. Great news about your cancer follow- up at 6 months. I’m hopeful that the one year will be just as good.
DeleteThe author of City of Joy also wrote “Paris Brûle-t-il?” ( Is Paris Burning”. This was based on the story that, when Hitler ordered his generals in Paris to burn the city when leaving before the allies arrived that he called one and asked if it had been done. Allegedly, one of the generals refused to burn the city. The book was made into a movie that premiered in Paris when I was a student there. They used lighting on monuments and famous buildings all over Paris to simulate flames. Very dramatic — I have never forgotten that sight. The book was good too. I might read it again. In English. 😉 From Goodreads “ 'Is Paris Burning?' reconstructs, in meticulous detail, the network of fateful events...day by day...moment by moment... that saved Paris, the City of Light, from the Nazis.”
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