Books
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I heard someone use the word "blogosphere" the other day, and it sounded a little quaint. It's been some time now since blogs were the happening thing on the internet. Back when they were, roughly fifteen years ago, Dawn Eden's blog, The Dawn Patrol, was a popular one for a certain sort of Catholic, a…
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I did manage to read this book over Lent, as I had intended. That may not sound like much of an accomplishment; in fact it's not that much of an accomplishment. But it's a long book, 600-plus pages, and a fairly dense one. And aside from my disorderly and distracted temperament and habits, decades of…
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Men have always known that something was wrong with human existence; that everywhere stupidity, injustice, deception and violence were at work. Consequently there was always the feeling that someday things must be set right and fulfilled. Some expected this clarification to come from human history itself: humanity by its own powers would fight its way…
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Seeing is more than indifferently reflecting (as a mirror reflects all that passes within range). It is a vital process that directly affects our lives. To see, perceive, means to receive into oneself, to submit to the influence of things, to place oneself within their grasp. Necessarily, the will mounts guard over the vision. One protection…
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Because I didn't get out of it anything close to what Gary Saul Morson does in this New Criterion piece, "The Greatest of All Novels." Tolstoy had an amazing capacity to understand “particular moments” in all their unrepeatable complexity. Where theorists, and even other great novelists, saw a smooth curve, he detected the infinitesimal deviations from…
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I've been wanting to read Romano Guardini's The Lord for some time. This past Christmas I received it as a gift but had not so much as opened it, so I decided to make it my Lenten reading. If I had looked first and seen that it's 625 pages long I might not have chosen it.…
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In case you aren't in the habit of reading Craig Burrell's blog All Manner of Thing, here are links to his three annual best-of-the-preceding-year posts: Books. Music (mostly classical). Film. In addition to the always-interesting subjects and opinions thereon, Craig is an elegant writer and a pleasure to read. While I'm at it, Craig mentions,…
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Have at it, y'all.
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I meant to mention this a couple of weeks ago. After reading the book, I wanted to see the film, and did. I'm talking about the 1949 one, with Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark. Three-word opinion: it's pretty good. Slightly more expansive opinion: it doesn't do justice to the book, which of course you wouldn't…
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I have to report that I'm not enthusiastic about Phillip K. Dick's The Man in the High Castle. On the basis of this and the one other PKD novel I've read, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, I guess I'm not enthusiastic about his work in general. In both cases, however, I read the book after having…
Light On Dark Water 