Recommendations

It’s hard for me to fit in a new book. Once upon a time, I had so many books to read, I made a ten-year schedule. Then another. And then another. Right now I’m honing my fourth ten-year reading plan. When someone recommends a book, when am I supposed to read it? Often I just don’t.

But what if one of the books I read makes a recommendation? Lewis’s Surprised by Joy has added several things to my list. (In fact, I had to remind myself after rereading it the last time that this spiritual and intellectual autobiography was the inspiration for my whole reading project thirty years ago.) Seven years ago I read a history of Victorian literature that showed me there was a whole lot more to the era than Dickens, Thackeray, and Eliot; I devote a large portion of my Fourth Decade plan to Ainsworth, Kingsley, Oliphant, Gaskell, and others of the time.

Boswell and Dr. Johnson, of course, incessantly talk about literature, much of which I want to add somewhere in the plan. A couple of times in Boswell’s classic, he recommends Edward Young’s Night Thoughts – recommends it highly. He calls it “the grandest and richest poetry that human genius has ever produced” and says that its lessons are “solemnly and poetically displayed in such imagery and language, as cannot fail to exalt, animate, and soothe the truly pious.” I noted his effusive praise during my second ten years of planned reading and put the book on my third yen-year plan. And this month, its time finally came round!

I had a lot of trouble understanding the opaque grammar of this lengthy poem at first. After many pages I came to realize that Latin influenced Young constantly. Many sentences and clauses leave the verb “is” implied. Many compound sentences using the same verb in each clause omit it from the first clause (where a more modern elegant form would omit it from the second clause). With these two notes in mind, the poem became much clearer, and reading became smoother.

Young had lost his wife, step-daughter, and step-son-in-law and wrote Night Thoughts in answer to an infidel called “Lorenzo” in defense of faith in the light of tragic death. He offers views of death as nothing to be feared, proofs of immortality, expositions of Christian faith in a future state of both individual self and the world, an answer to the person who wants to be a “worldly” man, and much more. Altogether, Night Thoughts offers a thorough philosophical guide to the Christian who wants to think rightly about ultimate concerns.

I noticed in the poem three passages that certainly must have influenced Lewis: one gives an argument of immortality from desire (all the physical desires of my soul – hunger, thirst, sexual desire, etc. – find their object existing in the real world, so I may believe, based on my desire for ultimate happiness, that that object also actually exists), another outlines the benefits of pain, and the last, in a survey of the planets, asks, “And had your Eden an abstemious Eve?”

Fortunately, as regards my future reading plans, Night Thoughts is not like Lewis in one key feature. Where Lewis continually makes reference to books I want to read (or reread), Young recommends only one book: the Bible.

Shaksper

In my continued determination to write briefly after some computer troubles this month, I head this post with one of the shortest of the Bard’s signature spellings.

I don’t remember what made me add 3 Henry VI to my reading list this year, but I’m glad I did. This one is slow and tediously expositional at first. But once Richard of York (the future Richard III) gets involved, it becomes good and almost essential as a prequel to the really good play. And, yeah, Richard III is really good. This is one of the ones I plan to read every few years. I sometimes wonder ahead of time if it’s really worth the time to revisit some old dusty drama yet again. But Richard III never disappoints. Was the real Richard this evil? Did he really order the deaths of the two princes in the Tower? I don’t know. Let’s just say the play is not about the historical personage but is about the character that Shakespeare made out of the historical personage. However near or far the two lie in relation to one another, Shakespeare’s Richard is horrifyingly fascinating.

Hamlet never disappoints, either. The poor prince berates himself so much through the first four acts for trying to accomplish his deadly mission of revenge through nothing more than clever talk and “mad” wordplay. Then at the end of Act IV, after he sees Fortinbras head off to Poland ready to kill, he shouts, “O, from this time forth, My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!” The reader might think the line shows that Hamlet is now truly determined to obey his ghostly father’s commands. And yet he still does nothing until he finds that he has been stabbed with a poisoned dagger and has only a few minutes to live. Anyone who believes faith is dead without works and yet lives with unwilling flesh can’t help but find awe in the mirror Hamlet holds up.

Short

My apologies for the time between the last post and now. I had computer troubles. *uggh* Note to self: Next time go to James at TCS IT first!

So to help catch up on reporting about my reading, I’ll keep it brief today with some short notes about Dickens’s short fiction. My plan was to read everything under the rubric “Other [i.e. non-Christmas] Short Fiction” in a giant Kindle collection that claims to present the complete works of Dickens. Some stories included in this section were excerpts from the novels, but, having read all the novels several times each, I skipped those stories. “A Thousand and One Humbugs” is a satirical send-up of the Parliament of the day. Not knowing enough about enough of the politicians involved, I gave it up after a few pages.

I did, though, read and thoroughly enjoy “Hunted Down,” the best story in the section. I can hardly give any details at all without unfairly spoiling the story since it’s a murder mystery. But I can say that an insurance adjuster serves as the detective, that a disguise in the plot made me think that Conan Doyle must have known and enjoyed this story, and that the point about the validity of first impressions rings true although it may have been surprising at the time.

“George Silverman’s Explanation” is told by a man raised by oppressive parents very strict in their misguided version of Christianity. Upon hearing Jesus say, “Go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice,’ ” one might begin to obey by reading this excellent and heart-breaking story.