Light On Dark Water

Books

  • 52 Authors: Week 43 – Madison Jones

    I first came upon the name Madison Jones ten or so years ago while reading Flannery O’Connor’s letters. In a letter to “A” dated July 6, 1963 Miss O’Connor says that she was currently reading Jones’s new book, and goes on to say “It’s a shame about his books. They are excellent and fall like…

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  • 52 Authors: Week 42 – Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J.

    Hopkins ranked with Yeats among the poetic enthusiasms of my college years. This was in part the result of the influence of my roommate, who was a couple of years older than I, and of a teacher for whom we shared a great admiration. At the time it meant nothing to me that Hopkins was…

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  • Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus

    When Craig Burrell wrote about Thomas Mann for Week 32 of the 52 Authors series, I decided that the next fiction I read would be Doctor Faustus. I had been irrationally prejudiced against Mann, somehow imagining his books to be very dull novels of not very interesting ideas. But Craig made him, and especially this book,…

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  • 52 Authors: Week 41 – Louise Fitzhugh

    In researching for this piece, I discovered that Louise Fitzhugh (1928-1974), the author of two of my favourite childhood books, was a lesbian. The two books, Harriet the Spy (1964) and its sequel, The Long Secret (1965) are peopled by strongly drawn eccentric characters. Few of the figures in her novels are simply ‘eccentrics’, but…

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  • 52 Authors: Week 40 – Mary Douglas

    In the late 1940s Mary Tew, an Oxford doctoral student in anthropology, was looking around for a suitable place to do fieldwork. These days that could mean anything (Kate Fox’s Watching the English is an entertaining example of turning an anthropologist’s eye on one’s native surroundings), but in the 1940s, in a European context, it…

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  • 52 Authors: Week 39 – Graham Greene

    Christ-haunted. In the past couple of months I’ve read 7 ½ novels by Graham Greene and that phrase has occurred to me over and over again. And recently, when I re-read a post that Maclin wrote in 2011. It is the world as viewed from within the Church that fascinates me, and what fascinates me…

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  • 52 Authors: Week 38 – Chaim Potok

    When I was fourteen we took a trip to Chicago to visit a friend of my mom’s. On the way we stopped to visit my mom’s “St. Louis relatives.” I had previously met my Great-uncle Theo, who was deaf, but had not met any of his progeny. Almost immediately upon entering their house it dawned…

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  • 52 Authors: Week 37 – Alexander McCall Smith

        We don't forget, thought Mma Ramotswe. Our heads may be small, but they are as full of memories as the sky may sometimes be full of swarming bees, thousands and thousands of memories, of smells, of places, of little things that happened to us and which come back, unexpectedly, to remind us who we…

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  • 52 Authors: Week 36 – Charles Dickens

    I am not an expert on Charles Dickens, but I do enjoy his writing immensely. I have gone through periods where I thought I liked other Victorian authors more: Anthony Trollope and George Eliot notably, but I always return to Dickens with vigor and realize that he is the best. Wasn’t there an old McDonalds…

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  • Christopher Lasch: The Culture of Narcissism

    Forty years or so after it created a great stir, I finally got around to reading this book. I have to say it is not what I expected. I expected less, to tell you the truth. I expected a look around the culture of the times, and perceptive commentary on it. I didn't expect erudition…

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