Books
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Leafing through a year-old issue of The New Criterion the other day, I came across a book review I'd forgotten. It's very relevant to something I wrote here back in March, "Socialism, National and International", in which I talked about the socialist element of Nazism. (I can never decide whether to say "Nazism" (or nazism) or…
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I've thought about this off and on since discussion on this post got into the desert island list area. Following the example of a couple of people in that conversation, I decided to try it with ten books. Here they are; you'll note that I remain unable to make a final choice in a couple…
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And difficult. I had a surprising, if not startling, conversation a couple of weeks ago with several younger people, by which I mean people in their 30s. All three of them (I think there were only three) were of the opinion that Tolkien is a very boring writer. They had tried to read The Lord…
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Craig Burrell at All Manner of Thing has an excellent review of a book I've long wanted to read, The Drama of Atheist Humanism by Henri de Lubac, S.J., which apparently makes a point similar to mine about Nietzsche and Dostoevsky. That's only part of the interest in the review, though–by all means read it…
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I finally finished it a week or so ago. Here are a few reactions, certainly not intended as any sort of presumptuous "review" of a book almost universally acknowledged to be one of the great literary monuments, but simply a record of my immediate impressions. I'm not making an attempt to summarize the plot, either,…
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"There are moments when people love crime," Alyosha said pensively. "Yes, yes! You've spoken my own thought, they love it, they all love it, and love it always, not just at 'moments.' You know, it's as if at some point they all agreed to lie about it, and have been lying about it ever since.…
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Every reader feels a sense of achievement on completing a book, which is why short books please. –Anthony Daniels, reviewing a book about W.H. Auden in The New Criterion I understand this very well. The other side of it is the intimidating quality of long books. I was halfway through The Brothers Karamazov (800 pages) over a…
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(NOTE: this is somewhat spoiler-ish, in a broad way.) I was travelling for several days over the past week, and of course needed to take some things to read. I'm about halfway through The Brothers Karamazov, and would have liked to have had it on the plane, but it's so bulky that I decided at…
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…desire truth and goodness, for desire fits one to receive what one desires… There is God, the Supreme Spirit. We can know almost nothing about Him; we can know that He exists by reason; so far as He can be revealed to our finite minds at all, He is revealed by Christ. We can't receive…
Light On Dark Water 