November 20, 2009
 
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| InsideCatholic's Summer 2008 Reading List |
| by the InsideCatholic staff and friends |
| 6/27/08 |
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The staff and friends of InsideCatholic have a variety of interests and backgrounds. But we do have one thing in common: We all enjoy reading. In the hopes that you're a reader as well, we thought we'd share some of the better titles we've recently come across. You should find something here for every interest and temperament -- from fiction to history, light to complex.
If you do pick up a copy of a book we recommend, let us know what you think of it. And by all means, please add your own personal picks in the Comments section.
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As I have mentioned previously, this is the 100th anniversary of Chesterton's Orthodoxy. Whether you have or have not read it before, it really should be read again, it is such a profound and delightful book.
Msgr. Robert Sokololwski's new book Phenomenology of the Human Person is one of the really fine books to have been published in a long time. It is a remarkable study in the meaning of truth and its relation to our experience and capacity to speak of it.
Another book that I have learned an enormous amount from is Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger's Eschatology: Death and Eternal Life, a book that was published in English by the Catholic University of America Press in 1988. All the theoretic background of Spe Salvi is here. If you read these three books this summer, plus Spe Salvi, you will come close to knowing everything about what is really the point of human existence.
Rev. James V. Schall, S. J., teaches political science at Georgetown University. His latest book, The Order of Things, is recently published by Ignatius Press.
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Jesus of Nazareth, by Benedict XVI
Benedict's handling of Scripture (law, prophets, psalms, synoptics, Johannine, Pauline, and Petrine texts) is glorious -- and magisterial. Also his irenic but mordant scrutiny of the disastrous drift of biblical studies for the last 150 years.
Christian Spirituality in the Catholic Tradition, by Jordan Aumann
A complete canvass of "spirituality" from the apostolic age to the 20th century. Immensely rewarding.
This Dominican philosopher mounts a crushing rejoinder to the apostle and high priest of the "new" atheism.
Tom Howard is retired from 40 years of teaching English in private schools, college, and seminary in England and America.
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The Last Princess: The Devoted Life of Queen Victoria's Youngest Daughter, by Matthew Dennison
A fascinating read, bringing to life the completely vanished Britain of the 19th century, the veneration in which Queen Victoria was held, and the mixture of magnificence and manipulation that she brought to her task as sovereign. Ideally, this should be read at or near Osborne on the Isle of Wight, overlooking the Solent, with a big pot of tea and a lot of strawberries. But anywhere will do.
Letters from a Lost Generation: First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends, edited by Alan Bishop and Mark Bostridge
Tender and haunting, it will make you very, very solemn, and nothing else around you will be able to lift that for a while -- but the young men who are at the heart of this book deserve that. Impossible to put down until you reach the last page, and impossible to forget.
Ratzinger's Faith: The Theology of Pope Benedict XVI, by Tracey Rowland
If anyone has told you that Joseph Ratzinger's theology is hard to grasp, they are lying. Let this book be an introduction to his fascinating and refreshing insights into the Christian faith. You'll be startled and challenged, and you'll enjoy it all hugely, too.
Joanna Bogle is an author and broadcaster living in London.
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I'm on a Tim Powers jag right now. The guy's amazing -- as fertile an imagination as I've run across in some time. Mentored by Philip K. Dick (who dedicated Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to him), Powers is an orthodox Catholic who writes what he calls "secret histories," tales of the fantastic that include historical characters. Powers makes it a rule to always make certain the known historical facts about the character fit the action of the novel. So if Kim Philby, the British double agent responsible for the betrayal of many Western operatives to the Soviets, was in a certain city on a certain date doing such and so, then Powers makes sure he is doing it in the story.
But Powers, like a delightfully undemented Art Bell listener, then asks (in his novel Declare), "What was the character really doing? Why did he make that cryptic remark recorded by his biographer? What accounts for this anomaly in the historical record?" The answer will include djinn, fallen angels, MI-5, the horrors of Lubyanka prison, Noah's Ark, and a story that moves seamlessly from a John LeCarré-style spy thriller to a bizarre tale of the occult: "spycraft meets Lovecraft," as Powers puts it.
So, for instance, when Lord Byron records in a letter that friends of his swear to seeing him in London on a particular date when Byron knows he was lying sick a-bed in Greece, Powers goes to work to provide the real explanation in The Anubis Gates. That explanation will involve Egyptian sorcerers, an evil clown, time travel, and a magic spell for switching bodies, plus a great deal more.
Similarly, in Three Days to Never, we will be thrown into a story in which Albert Einstein and Charlie Chaplin somehow play a role in creating a device that can alter the past and simply uncreate people by preventing their births -- all involving English professors, Israeli agents, and sinister cults that get their intelligence by consulting ghosts and employing a blind woman who can only see through the eyes of others.
Highly recommended!
Mark P. Shea is a senior editor at www.CatholicExchange.com and a columnist for InsideCatholic.com. Visit his blog at www.markshea.blogspot.com.
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I have just finished reading While Europe Slept by Bruce Bawer (Doubleday). Fascinating . . . and scary, too. If Bawer is correct, Western Europe is well on its way to being overwhelmed by expanding Muslim enclaves that cling to values incompatible with liberalism and democracy.
I'm in the middle of reading a wonderful old novel (1946) by Helen Howe, We Happy Few, a satirical look at some Cambridge/Harvard types circa 1940. Often hilarious. For example, our heroine's mother believed that "Jesus Christ was a very, very good man who quite possibly never existed."
I'm also rereading some of Plutarch's Lives, in particular those of Athenians of the 5th century BC: Themistocles, Aristides, Cimon, Pericles, Alcibiades, and Nicias. One never grows tired of Plutarch.
David R. Carlin is the author of The Decline and Fall of the Catholic Church in America (Sophia Institute Press, 2003).
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Willful Blindness: Memoir of the Jihad, by Andrew McCarthy
I listened to McCarthy on the radio for nearly two hours talking about his experience prosecuting the "Blind Shiekh" for the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, and I was totally engrossed. McCarthy speaks with the voice of authority warming us that we accept politically correct views of Islam at our own peril.
The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, by David Wroblewski One of those heavy-looking novels that surprise you with their lightness. This one reads beautifully from the first page and the story, and thus far, is seems totally original -- its doesn't derive from any kind of contemporary fiction I am familiar with.
Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out, by Mo Yan A Chinese novelist writes about life under Mao in a fractured but entertaining style -- a novel about survival.
Deal W. Hudson is the director of InsideCatholic.com and the author of Onward, Christian Soldiers: The Growing Political Power of Catholics and Evangelicals in the United States (Simon and Schuster, March 2008).
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The Life You Save May be Your Own, by Paul Elie
This one's a few years old, but it's worth a look. Elie writes a fascinating and inspiring account of how Catholicism shaped the lives and writings of Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Flannery O'Connor, and Walker Percy.
The Yiddish Policeman's Union, by Michael Chabon
If you like a good mystery, but are deflated by the poor writing of the average summer thriller, there's hope! Chabon's novel, published last year and now available in paperback, is both a hard-boiled detective story and an alternative history: The setting is Sitka, Alaska, which replaces Israel as the Jewish refuge after World War II.
Rob Roy, by Walter Scott
Before J. K. Rowling, Scott was the Wizard of the North. He's at his best here: A young man trying to save his father from financial ruin finds himself caught up in the intrigues leading up to the Jacobite rebellion of 1715. Plenty of romance, action, and Scottish scenery -- and a fair share of anti-Catholic sentiment from the narrator. (I recommend the Oxford World's Classics paperback edition.)
Christopher Scalia is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Virginia's College at Wise. He joins InsideCatholic as our Literary Editor.
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Exiles, by Ron Hansen, is a slim volume of some of the most evocative prose it's been my pleasure to read. The novel is a fictionalized account of the tragic shipwreck of the Deutschland in 1875. Aboard were five young religious sisters, exiled victims of Bismarck's purgation of religious orders, en route to St. Louis via England. The morning after the wreck, a Jesuit seminarian, Gerard Manly Hopkins, read an account in the London papers of the death of the ship's passengers, and was moved to write his famous "The Wreck of the Deutschland." Hansen's story weaves in and out through the lives of the sisters and the Jesuit poet they had never met. Along the way, the reader catches glimpses of life at 19th-century Oxford, tea with John Henry Newman, and the rigors and rewards of Jesuit formation at Stonyhurst. Don't miss this elegantly written novel by the author of Mariette in Ecstasy and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford -- and the entry under consideration in InsideCatholic's upcoming Book Club.
Trianon: A Novel of Royal France, written by Elena Maria Vidal, sweeps one into the streets of Revolutionary France. This sympathetic portrayal of Marie Antoinette and Louis XVI has been meticulously researched, yet its history is offered as lightly as a one of Proust's Madeleines. Marie and Louis lean on their faith, grow in courage, and provide images of love and hope in a time of unremitting horror. This historical novel is suitable for older teens, too.
Frankenstein, by Mary Shelley, is a classic whose relevance slashes through contemporary headlines. We modern societies are at war over the meaning of the human person; Shelley's artificially created "monster" has already asked what his place in the "human kingdom" might be. Does he have a soul? Was he stitched together from the good and the bad? It is impossible to read this novel without an immediate projection of its force onto our own near-future world of cloning, embryonic stem cell research,h and the manufacture of "surrogates" for body parts. The moral questions posed will chill your summer day. (Also treat yourself to the movie Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, starring Kenneth Branaugh and Robert De Niro.)
Mary Jo Anderson is a contributing correspondent for www.WorldNetDaily.com and a columnist for InsideCatholic.com. She is also the co-author of Male and Female He Created Them: Questions and Answers on Marriage and Same Sex Unions (Catholic Answers).
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This book has everything one could want in summer reading -- a true story of romance, conversion, and loss, with C. S. Lewis acting as best friend and spiritual parent to the narrator and, by extension, the reader. Be prepared to find Vanauken and his wife somewhat unsympathetic at the start of the tale -- their initial romantic bond is what Erich Fromm called a selfish "nation of two" -- but stick with it and you will discover a deep and compelling vision of Christian love. The founder of the Christophers media ministry may not have been as compelling a writer as his contemporary Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen (whose Peace of Soul is another great summer-reading tome), but those wishing to share Catholic values this election season would do well to read his 1948 treatise on evangelizing the culture. Still in print and available from the Christophers (www.christophers.org), You Can Change the World is a quick, inspiring, and surprisingly relevant read, even for -- especially for -- those of faith who have been working in journalism and PR for some time.
Dawn Eden is author of The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On (Thomas Nelson, 2006) and has been featured on NBC's Today show and EWTN's Life on the Rock. She lives in Washington, D.C. Visit her online at thrillofthechaste.com or her blog, The Dawn Patrol.
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