“All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.”

Walter Benjamin. Clippings from a Google image search screen shot.

I have always been an opportunistic reader, reading whatever happened to be at hand. I am also a disciplined reader; give me a list of required reading and I read through it. (Always excepting Ulysses by James Joyce--I tried and tried and tried again. Three strikes and out.) First and foremost, I am a meandering reader. When I read a book that mentions a book, I often go find that mentioned book and read it. I adore footnotes and bibliographies where more books can be found. Some of my most influential books and favorite authors were discovered in this way. Reading and the discovery of books is for me a metaphor for life: interconnectedness, chance, and serendipity.

Larry McMurtry was an instructor, writer-in-residence, when I was an undergraduate at Rice University and I happened to be assigned to his section of English 100, 1967-68. At the time I was a science/engineering student or I would have missed that opportunity since potential English majors were assigned to English professors. Chance. Serendipity. Because I knew McMurtry, I  follow his career and read  his books, dutifully checking them off the list, although in general his books do not number among my favorites and I'm lagging behind the list.
I have always most enjoyed McMurtry's non-fiction:
   In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas (1968), Roads: Driving America's Great Highways (2000); Books, a Memoir; and my favorite Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond (1999).

 So having read McMurtry, I read Walter Benjamin's Illuminations: Essays and Reflections . 
Interconnectedness. I read it slowly giving myself time to reflect and think.
Serendipity. I had read bits and pieces of Benjamin long before; my German professor was fond of having us translate paragraphs re. Kafka and Lestov. I had gathered a few English quotes for a paper on Kafka. Kafka is on my "do not like list" just ahead of James Joyce. While I do not share Benjamin's admiration for Kafka, I forgive him all those awful German paragraphs because he was my introduction to Proust.

Harry Zohn's translation with Hannah Arendt's excellent introduction was, and is, pure joy. A joy I had forgotten--Benjamin has a lot to say about remembering and forgetting--until I stumbled upon Maria Popova's Brainpickings: Walter Benjamin on Information vs. Wisdom which presents a nice selection of quotes with commentary on Benjamin's essay: The Storyteller: Reflections on the Works of Nikolia Leskov.
 http://www.brainpickings.org/2015/03/09/walter-benjamin-illuminations-the-storyteller/

The Mundaneum.  Cataloging the World:
Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age.

I loved this early 20th Century photo!

Quoting Popova's blog: "The most dazzling such transmutation takes place in an essay titled “The Storyteller,” in which Benjamin uses the work of 19th-century Russian writer Nikolai Leskov as a springboard for a higher-order meditation on the role of storytelling in society, the dangers of its decline, and how it shapes our relationship to truth, both public and private. The picture Benjamin paints begins in darkness but reaches toward the light."

It is easy to see all the modern digital experience as interconnectedness, chance, and serendipity.
 My  favorites of Benjamin's essays are probably quite predictable to those who know me.
Of course I want to visit his library and learn about the life he reads:


"Unpacking My Library: A Talk about Book Collecting" jogs my memory. I have not yet finished Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night which has spent well over a year at my bedside. Somehow it was displaced and lies neglected but I look forward to the life I read tonight. Serendipity, indeed. And one of my favorite McMurtry books is also about collecting books.

Quoting Benjamin:

“I am unpacking my library. Yes I am. The books are not yet on the shelves, not yet touched by the mild boredom of order. I cannot march up and down their ranks to pass them in review before a friendly audience. You need not fear any of that. Instead, I must ask you to join me in the disorder of crates that have been wrenched open, the air saturated with the dust of wood, the floor covered with torn paper, to join me among piles of volumes that are seeing daylight again after two years of darkness, so that you may be ready to share with me a bit of the mood -- it is certainly not an elegiac mood but, rather, one of anticipation -- which these books arouse in a genuine collector.”
  

Screen shot of Google image search, March 2015

I had just begun to learn Hebrew so that I could better understand the biblical Psalms when I first read "The Task of the Translator" and realized that:
“All human knowledge takes the form of interpretation.”
 
"Fragments of a vessel which are to be glued together must match one another in the smallest details, although they need not be like one another. In the same way a translation, instead of resembling the meaning of the original, must lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification, thus making both the original and the translation recognizable as fragments of a greater language, just as fragments are part of a vessel.”

 

Technical Reproducibility.

"The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction"  should be on every one's reading list. It anticipates and contributes to the discussion re. STEM and the humanities and why the humanities (history! literature! art!) are essential. Its relevance might be more easily recognized if the translation of the title had been truer to the German: "Das Kunstwerk im Zeitaler seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit" which Zohn revised to "The Work of Art in the Age of Technological Reproducibility" and I (with only my librarian's German) am bold to suggest "The Work of Art in a New Age of Technical Reproducibility." Given the very long time that art, literature, storytelling, history existed before the fairly recent advent of the scribe, the press, print, audio and video, digital ad inf. this Age is always New. The great thinkers of the past, like Walter Benjamin, help us navigate these uncertain waters.

“Every morning brings us news of the globe, and yet we are poor in noteworthy stories. This is because no event comes to us without being already shot through with explanation. In other words, by now almost nothing that happens benefits storytelling; almost everything benefits information. Actually, it is half the art of storytelling to keep a story free from explanation as one reproduces it. . . . The most extraordinary things, marvelous things, are related with the greatest accuracy, but the psychological connection of the event is not forced on the reader. It is left up to him to interpret things the way he understands them, and thus the narrative achieves an amplitude that information lacks.”  

“The value of information does not survive the moment in which it was new. It lives only at that moment; it has to surrender to it completely and explain itself to it without losing any time. A story is different. It does not expend itself. It preserves and concentrates its strength and is capable of releasing it even after a long time.”

“We do not always proclaim loudly the most important thing we have to say. Nor do we always privately share it with those closest to us, our intimate friends, those who have been most devotedly ready to receive our confession.”

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes: "With the outbreak of war in 1939, Benjamin was temporarily interned in the French “concentration camps” established for German citizens. On his release a few months later he returned to Paris and there continued his work in the Bibliothèque Nationale on The Arcades Project. The notes for his unfinished research were left in the safekeeping of librarian and friend, the writer Georges Bataille, as Benjamin fled Paris before the advancing German army in the summer of 1940. The last few months of Benjamin's life reflect the precarious experience of countless other Jewish Germans in Vichy France: a flight to the border and preparations for emigration by legal or illegal means. Lacking the necessary exit visa from France, he joined a guided party that crossed the Pyrenees in an attempt to enter Spain as illegal refugees. Turned back by customs officials, Benjamin took his life in the small, Spanish border town of Port Bou, on September 27, 1940."

What a horrible loss to all of humanity!
Blame the Nazi Holocaust.
Blame the petty bureaucrats at the border.
Blame ourselves because we never seem to learn the basic lessons of compassion and peace.

“In the end, we get older, we kill everyone who loves us through the worries we give them, through the troubled tenderness we inspire in them, and the fears we ceaselessly cause.”

Oh the back roads of Texas, I never stop at a Dairy Queen without remembering McMurtry and Benjamin and meandering through the life I read.

“Deep down I know I could never be that innocent again..."

World Toys and Gifts where I listened to their story...

“Deep down I know I could never be that innocent again, however much I'd like to be.”  

This quote and others in this blog are from Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl.
When I first read this book I was a freshman in high school and the same age as Anne was when she was writing. I finished it with sobs and immediately read it again.  I gave myself completely to the book.
 “If I read a book that impresses me, I have to take myself firmly by the hand, before I mix with other people; otherwise they would think my mind rather queer.”  
 I was of course reading the original version, the only one available at the time.  I have recently read the 2010 "diary as Anne Frank wrote it" that includes the approximately 30% of Anne's diary--largely those sections dealing with her sexuality and her conflict with her mother--that were excised by her father Otto Frank. (And who can criticize a father who wished to preserve the innocent child that he would never see as an adult?) Nonetheless, the young teen reader I once was would have identified with those issues. The recognition of sexuality and maternal conflict are hallmarks of female adolescence and neither Anne nor I were exempt. During the time that I read the original I was quite depressed and I am not over stating when I say this book and taking Anne's advice saved me:
 “The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely, or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quite alone with the heavens, nature, and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be and that God wishes to see people happy, amidst the simple beauty of nature. As longs as this exists, and it certainly always will, I know that then there will always be comfort for every sorrow, whatever the circumstances may be. And I firmly believe that nature brings solace in all troubles.”  
{How I wish that I could be certain, as Anne was, that "the simple beauty of nature" would "always" exist but I have also read Rachel Carson, Annie Dillard, and a host of environmental writers and am quite aware of our assaults on the earth that savage habitats while our haze and blazing light darken the sky and dim the stars.}
At a time when my faith was most weak, Anne Frank was one of my best teachers:

“People who have a religion should be glad, for not everyone has the gift of believing in heavenly things. You don't necessarily even have to be afraid of punishment after death; purgatory, hell, and heaven are things that a lot of people can't accept, but still a religion, it doesn't matter which, keeps a person on the right path. It isn't the fear of God but the upholding of one's own honor and conscience. How noble and good everyone could be if, every evening before falling asleep, they were to recall to their minds the events of the whole day and consider exactly what has been good and bad. Then, without realizing it you try to improve yourself at the start of each new day; of course, you achieve quite a lot in the course of time. Anyone can do this, it costs nothing and is certainly very helpful. Whoever doesn't know it must learn and find by experience that: "A quiet conscience makes one strong!”  
Decades later I would learn that a Jewish teenager had been my first teacher in the Daily Examen of Ignatian spirituality.

Having  revisited the friend of my youth, I am now considering reading  her other writings. This link is worth clicking to look inside and see the wonderful photographs (from the Peter Harban's hardcover edition) of Anne and of her handwriting.
I think I would like to also consider Anne Frank as a feminist writer. “And now I have a question for you. 'Do you also put clothes on the flowers you've picked and refuse to talk about their delicate parts? I don't think there's a very big difference between people and nature, and since we're also a part of nature, why should we be ashamed of the way nature made us?”  

Houston is home to Holocaust Museum which I have not visited and may never visit despite the fact that I worked with and greatly admire Dr. Milton Boniuk whose name is on HMH Library and who, with his wife Laurie in memory of their son, founded Rice University's Boniuk Institute for the Study and Advancement of Religious Tolerance.
I don't go  because I am convinced that I have a very good sense of the horror and  just hearing or saying the word "holocaust" roils my stomach and can give me nightmares for weeks.
I don't go because I heard the first hand account of the two lovely sisters who ran World Toy and Gifts that is pictured at the top of this posting.
This street view no longer exists, torn down, gentrified, gone to all but those of us who remember.

 I spent countless hours visiting the Rice Village; my first off-campus date with DMP was probably at the theater. I seldom walked to the Village without stopping at the toy store. I loved the things of childhood and the respite a good browse brought from academic stress. I often bought small gifts there for my friends because even adults, maybe especially adults, need the pleasure of play. Mostly I dropped in to say hello to the elderly sisters I had come to love.
Once I brought them Valentine cookies that I had made. They reminded me of Grandma Wieland.

I never knew their names. They weren't posted anywhere. I doubt they knew mine; my purchases were always small and in cash. By the time our relationship had grown into a friendship it would have been awkward to ask or perhaps we were just past the need for naming.

We chatted; they were always asking me questions about where and how I grew up.
They laughed and shared happy childhood memories.
They learned my mother's family was German and that they had come to America in the 19th Century, "so before the war?" They asked that question more than often.
They asked about what I read, what I studied, what I thought.
"Have you read Anne Frank's Diary?"
Then one day they rolled up their long sleeves; they wore long sleeves even in Houston's hot, humid summers. Even when the store was warm and stuffy.
The older hesitated and the younger prodded her, "Sister, we decided... you know... we must tell the story."
Their arms were tattooed with numbers.
The older sister would not meet my eyes. She said, "You understand what this means."
"Yes, a concentration camp during the war."
And then she said she was "ashamed" of the numbers and what it meant. These dear ladies were ashamed to have survived when others had not. And it broke, it still breaks, my heart.
Over the next several years whenever I visited the toy store and there were no customers, they shared their story.
I listened.
Sometimes they lapsed into German which I understood only in bits and pieces.
Twice they sang songs to each other.
Sometimes we cried.
I have few regrets but I deeply regret that I did not go straight back to my dorm room and write down every word of their story me.
I too often choose the demands of my daily ordinary life over what is truly important.

I no longer remember their words but I will never forget the sound of their voices, the burden of their grief, the way the older would shake her head, the way the younger would pat her arm, the way they wrapped one arm around each other in a sort of sideways hug to get them through the ugly details.
That is why I will not visit HMH. Because I know there are many voices telling the story of the Holocaust because we must not forget but I want to remember their voices, the voices of two sisters.
The voices of my dear friends telling the story that was uniquely theirs.

Although in truth it was not much different from many others.
Not much different from Anne Frank's:

 "Jews and Christians wait, the whole world waits, and there are many who wait for death...”  
“No one is spared. The sick, the elderly, children, babies, and pregnant women - all marched to their death.”   

“...don’t believe the war is simply the work of politicians and capitalists. Oh no, the common man is every bit as guilty; otherwise, people and nations would have rebelled long ago! There’s a destructive urge in people, the urge to rage, murder and kill. And until all of humanity, without exception, undergoes a metamorphosis, wars will continue to be waged, and everything that has been carefully built up, cultivated and grown will be cut down and destroyed, only to start allover again!”  

“If we bear all this suffering and if there are still Jews left, when it is over, then Jews, instead of being doomed, will be held up as an example.”

“Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness.”  

 “How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.” 

Quotation: Books

"Better economize in the purchasing of furniture or carpets than scrimp in buying good books or papers.
"Our sitting-rooms need never be empty of guests or our libraries of society if the company of good books is admitted to them."
p. 354
Benham, Georgene Corry: Polite Life or What is Right in Etiquette and The Social Arts.  Illustrated. Copyright 1895 by Robt. O. Law.
A book in my collection written for "the ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls of America."

The 1891 edition is available in digital text: from Google books.

http://books.google.com/books?id=GSYMAAAAIAAJ&pg=PP1&lpg=PP1&dq=Benham+georgene+corry&source=bl&ots=UCbaC66bhZ&sig=YmpT3JGmrTf5dmz4rwUEE4JYYhM&hl=en&sa=X&ei=uNhfUojMNaKo2wW4-oC4Dw&ved=0CCkQ6AEwADgK#v=onepage&q=Benham%20georgene%20corry&f=false

Mrs. Georgene Corry Benham
from the frontis with signature
 

"Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic."

DMP and I went today to see Harry Potter:  The Deadly Hallows, Part 2.  We read/loved/lived the books and were very pleased with the movies.  To quote DMP:  DHpt1 was  "confusing, meandering, dark and just really not a very good movie but I thought the same thing about the first part of the  book."  This final episode redeemed Part 1 and was a very satisfying conclusion to the story.  In some ways, Part 2 wins the rare accolade:  It was better than the book. 

It's always interesting to see the changes that are made in going from print to screen. Spoiler alert here:  perhaps my favorite moment in the movie is when Neville Longbottom pulls out the sword of Gryffindor and the movie gave that bit a much better heroic frame than the book.  But then, the actor who played Neville has developed quite satisfactorily; at least in my view.  I have an ingrained attraction to the nerd as romantic lead.   

I also thought the conversation at King's Cross was better in the movie than the book and I wonder if Rowling didn't write it with the movie visuals in mind. My favorite line from the movie--"Words are our most inexhaustible source of magic."--do not appear in the book; at least not that I remember and I didn't find them when I re-read that last couple of chapters of the book.
 A similar line from the book (page 209):  "And his knowledge is incomplete...  That which Valdemort does not value, he takes no trouble to comprehend.  Of house-elves and children's tales, of love, loyalty, and innoncence, Voldemort knows and understands nothing.  Nothing. That they all have a power beyond his own, a power beyond the reach of any magic, is a truth he has never grasped."

That reference to "children's tales" is a good point to turn this blog to the final installment of ChLA 2011.  Since it relates to the movie I'll begin with Friday's session on Reading, Education, and Girl's Development.  Caroline McAlister presented a paper on "Bookworm as Heroine from Frances Hodgson Burnett to J.K. Rowling."  McAlister cited Shakespeare's McBeth:  "a woman's story at a winter's fire, authorized by her granddam."  She discussed a Burnett heroine: "if reading is the source of her isolation, it is also her way back into the public world."  She traces an arc from the "passive habit of reading" which leads to empathy which leads to active citizenship, a sympathetic responsiveness to others.  She explains this as "the training of the imagination."  This arc is in fact the goal of all didactic writers whether Harriet Beecher Stower, C. S. Lewis, George McDonald, or my dearly beloved Evelyn Whitaker.

Hermione Granger is another example of one whose passive reading leads to active citizenship, in particular her concern for the house elves. Q&A was dyanmic:   Are Hermione's concerns due to her reading, her inherently sympathetic nature as female, or her humanity?  Hermione is a muggle and one presumes attended muggle schools and knows muggle history.  There are also some concerns that in the Rowling books "there is no literature--no one reads anything but text books" or books in search of information. This observation is quite disturbing, given that the Harry Potter books are credited with saving books and promoting literacy.   Literacy is not necessarily literature; literature is part of what makes us human.   We live a world that increasingly values "knowledge.. incomplete... takes no trouble to comprehend... children's tales... which have... power."

Leftovers...

I like leftovers, especially all those left from luscious holiday feasts.  This post deals with a few things that are left over from 2010. 

My house is still fully decorated and will remain so for a few more days and, yes, I'm still listening to Christmas music.  I'll play Handel's Messiah while taking down the tree, probably on Wednesday. 

I want to share my favorite decorating tip which might prove useful at other times.   Note the brass candle holders.  I pressed them into floral foam and used the foam to secure the bright red elongated ornaments.  The visual effect is candle-like but it was much safer than a lighted flame close to my drying-out-by-the-minute Noble fir.  I keep thinking of using this trickwith things other than ornaments.  Maybe pussy-willows, or tree limbs, or peacock feathers?

I monetized this blog several months ago.  Being an Amazon associate allows me to display images of book covers and provides an easy link for readers wanting more information.  In the interests of full disclosure, I would receive  a small % of any sales which my links generated.  To date, there has been no money.  If there are ever any proceeds, they will be donated to a library or children's reading program.

What I'm reading:

Among my Christmas celebrations was a reading of  The Children's Book of Christmas Stories edited by Asa Don Dickinson and Ada M. Skinner, originally published in 1913, a Project Gutenberg eBook downloaded to my Kindle for free from manybooks.net although it is also available at Amazon's Kindle store. 

I have added links to several of my favorite sources for Kindle books to My Favorite Web Places in the right side bar.

Alter, Robert: The Book of Psalms. A translation with commentary. New York:  W.W. Norton & Company, 2007.  This is my current bedside book and I'm lingering over a psalm or two each night.  I have read through the 53rd Psalm of this superb and well-annotated translation.  Alter's notes compel me to notice how much the Psalms are related to the Prophets--particularly Isaiah and Micah--and of their commonality with Wisdom literature--particularly Ecclesiastes and Proverbs.  A note on Psalm 48:17:

"Like Your name, so  Your praise--

to the ends of the earth.

With justice Your right hand is full."

Alter comments on the word justice:

"the Hebrew  tsedeq can also mean "victory" or "bountiful act."

What a rich and challenging concept is God's justice!

As I read the Psalms in this translation, I note the frequent repetition of the word "breath" and am reminded of a by-gone resolution which, as I kept it, helped restore my health.  Both spiritual and bodily health and, indeed, life itself require breath.  The only New Year's Resolution currently on my list is:  Breathe deeply.

In my Annie Dillard Reader, Kindle edition, I've read her Poems and The Book of Luke (1989)which made wonderful Advent reading.   Kindle location 3899 "It is a fault of infinity to be too small to find.  It is a fault of eternity to be crowded out by time."  3922 "This Bible, this ubiquitous, persistent black chunk of a best seller, is a chink--often the only chink--through which winds howl.  It is a singularity, a black hole into which our rich and multiple world strays and vanishes.  We crack open its pages at our peril."  3925 "...it is the book that kidnaps the children, and hooks them."  The author writes about her experiences in Christian summer camp and Sunday School and offers insightful commentary on the Gospel text, concluding with these selected quotes:  4095 "What a pity, that so hard on the heels of Christ come the Christians.... flawed to the core, full of wild ideas and hurried self-importance....  They are smug and busy, just like us, and who could believe in them?  ...Who could believe that salvation is for these rogues?"  "Unless, of course--  Unless Christ's washing the disciples' feet, their dirty toes, means what it could, possibly mean:  that it is all right to be human."  4109 "If they were just like us, then Christ's words to them are addressed to us, in full and merciful knowledge--and we are lost.  There is no place to hide."  Annie Dillard's lovely meditative prose, her keen observations, and the way her mind interweaves everything make her one of my favorite authors.

At least a half dozen of my friends have urged me to read The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows, Dial Press, 2009.  I finally found time for a nice uninterrupted reading of this book which I enjoyed at least as much as my friends thought I would.  I knew nothing of the German occupation of the Channel Islands during World War II.   Kindle location 145 "That's what I love about reading:  one tiny thing will interest you in a book, and that tiny thing will lead you into another book, and another bit there will lead you to a third book.  It's geometrically progressive--all with no end in sight, and for no other reason than sheer enjoyment." 

I suppose I've just added a second, continuing, resolution: Read as many good books as I can and  share them in my blog with as many friends and strangers as possible.
I've been downloading many, many samples as I explore titles and plan my reading for the New Year.

My favorite Christmas present:

DMP insisted that he be allowed to up grade my original Kindle to the latest generation Kindle with Wi-Fi and 3G. I'm really enjoying the upgrade which came loaded with my media library from the first Kindle. The first night I opened my Kindle and began reading where I'd left off. The improvements are really improvements and I love the larger memory and the ability to organize my eBooks into collections on the home page. It's much faster, too. The e-Ink Pearl offers better resolution and more choices for fonts and line spacing. Wow!

Some sort of eBook reader is the future of reading. No one loves the "book experience" more than I, but a Kindle in a leather cover is an acceptable substitute. It opens up a world of reading materials that I couldn't otherwise find or afford.

Remember that you can download all Kindle books on multiple devices and have your reading synced across devices.visit Amazon to download free reading apps.

Happy New Year!

What I'm Reading...

When I start a novel, any novel but especially a good one, I want to read it all the way through from start to finish with as few interruptions as possible, which is of course not at all possible most of the time.  Vacations are an exception.  Earlier this month while on vacation, I indulged in a fiction binge:

Braddon, Mary Elizabeth:  Lady Audley's Secret, Kindle downloaded from  Project Gutenberg.  Braddon (1857-1915) first published her "sensation" novel about bigamy in 1862 and it was a sensation of the popular sort, going through nine editions in the first year.  I was surprised at how much fun it was to read this book--a murder mystery with a bit of romance and family dysfunction.  The character of Robert Audley (the nephew/sleuth) and some of the book's tone remind me a bit of the much later comic novels of P. G. Wodehouse.  A quote re. Lady Audley's relationship with her adult step-daughter:  "There can be no reconciliation where there is no open warfare. There must be a battle, a brave boisterous battle, with pennants waving and cannon roaring, before there can be peaceful treaties and enthusiastic shaking of hands."    Another favorite:  "Sir Michael Audley made that mistake which is very commonly made by easy-going, well-to-do-observers, who have no occasion to look below the surface.  He mistook laziness for incapacity.  The thought because his nephew was idle, he must necessarily be stupid.  He concluded that if Robert did not distinguish himself, it was because he could not.

"He forgot the mute inglorious Miltons, who die voiceless and inarticulate for want of that dogged perseverance, that blind courage, which the poet must possess before he can find a publisher; he forgot the Cromwells, who see the noble vessels of the state floundering upon a sea of confusion ...  and who yet are powerless to get at the helm...  Surely it is a mistake to judge of what a man can do by that which he has done....  The game of life is something like the game of ecarte, and it may be that the very best cards are sometimes left in the pack."

Yonge, Charlotte M.:  The Heir of Redclyffe,  Kindle downloaded from Project Gutenberg, first published in 1853 and the best selling of Yonge's novels, "the most popular novel of the age."  Yonge (1823-1901) used profits from her  books for charity.  Her father told her upon the success of The Heir of Redclyffe "that a lady published for three reasons only: love of praise, love of money, or the wish to do good."  She is sometimes called the novelist of the Oxford Movement and was a life-long Anglican Sunday Schools teacher.   I read this book long ago, probably in imitation of  Jo March in Alcott's  Little Women.  I enjoyed reading it again.  Yonge is  a bit "preachy" even for my taste (despite my complete sympathy with her religious views and, as readers of this blog have undoubtedly noted, my predilection for all things theological) but dear Charlotte does go on and on and on and...  Perhaps that's one more thing I have in common with her.

I've started Wright, N.T.:  Surprised by Hope.  Rethinking Heaven, the Resurrection, and the Mission of the Church, Harper-Collins, 2008.  This is the book selected for Sunday Bible study in the Open Door class which I'm reading in a digital edition  on Kindle and I'm hopelessly behind the class in my reading.  I'm greatly enjoying the DVD discussion by N.T. Wright and the discussion questions.   A few years ago I read this author's  The Last Word: Scripture and the Authority of God--Getting Beyond the Bible Wars (2006) and would put it on my short lists of books that made a significant difference in my world view because it finally made clear to me the questions asked by post-modernist thinkers. p. iv "Almost all Christian churches say something in the formularies about how important the Bible is.  Almost all of them have devised ways, some subtle, some less so, of ostentatiously highlighting some parts of the Bible and quietly setting aside other parts."  p. xi "How can what is mostly a narrative text be "authoritative"?  [How can we] "speak of the Bible being in some sense "authoritative" when the Bible itself declares that all authority belongs to the one true God, and that this is now embodied in Jesus himself."  p. 14 "My present point is that these older ways of thinking about the world have left their mark on the study of the Bible, on the way it has been taught... and that these ways of thinking have themselves become discredited in the mainstream culture."  p. 16 "integrity consists not of having no presuppositions but of being aware of what one's presuppositions are and of the obligation to listen to and interact with those who have different ones."  My copy of this book is very heavily highlighted and I recommend it with enthusiasm.  I'm hoping that I will be able to enjoy reading N.T. Wright as much on the Kindle with bookmark/highlight tabs as I did in print with my yellow highlighter in hand.

I continue reading Annie Dillard (previously blogged) and greatly enjoyed revisiting Total Eclipse and An Expedition to the Pole from Teaching a Stone to Talk.  I found her short story The Living a bit odd and disturbing, as Dillard can be.  I'm reading a collection of her works on my Kindle.  Dillard is one of the finest nature writers I've encountered and I greatly enjoy her writing style and her powers of observation.  She makes unexpectedly connections and helps me see how intricately all of life is interwoven.  Interwoven--what a great name for the book I'll never write.

And as previously blogged  I'm reading through everything by Carlyn G. Heilbrun who will undoubtedly merit a blog dedicated solely to her one day.  I recently finished The Last Gift of Time. Life Beyond Sixty. This author gives voice to my thoughts and I know no other author (who did not live in the 19th Century) who mirrors by interior life and thoughts so well.  p.2  "...aging might be gain rather than loss, and... the impersonation of youth was unlikely to provide the second span of womanhood with meaning and purpose."   p.4 "Perhaps I am one of those who are born... blessed with the gift of eternal old age."  p. 35 "As Sartre said, not to choose is to have already chosen.  The major danger in one's sixties--so I came to feel--is to be trapped in one's body and one's habits, not to recognize those supposedly sedate years as the time to discover new choices and to act upon them."  p. 120 "What one remembers is, I think, a clue to what one wants to be."  p. 137 "To find unmet friends, one must be a reader, and not an infrequent one.... Reading--like those more frivolous lifelong pursuits, singing in tune, or diving, or roller-blading--is either an early acquired passion or not:  there is no in-between about it, no catching up in one's later years."   and p. 182 "Life seemed simpler because I was young and simple."  p. 150 quoting Samuel Johnson:  "the enduring elegance of female friendship." ...perfectly describes the relationship of a woman reader with a woman writer whose work she has encompassed, reread, and delighted in."  Thank you to my "unmet friends for that "enduring elegance:  Jane Austen, Evelyn Whitaker, Elizabeth Barret Browning, Grace Livingstone Hill, Beatrix Potter, Christina Rossetti,  Annie Dillard and, yes, Elaine Showalter and Carolyn G. Heilbrun.


I finished the second of the poetry books DMP gave me for Christmas last year.  Gluck, Louise: Averno.  New York:  Farrar, Straus and Giroux,  2006.  She is an excellent poet and I'll probably keep  this book on the shelf and may reread it in a year or two but it was much to dependent on the Persephone myth to be quite my cup of tea.  full text available at the floating library

I'll close this month's reading list with another quote from Carolyn G. Heilbrun (p. 182): 
"True sadness which is not nostalgia can, I have found, be dispelled by reading: by that same literature which seemed, in my youth, to hold both excitement, wisdom, and all I could discover of truth; and by today's newly perceptive books.  Lifelong readers continue to read, finding in books... the means to enjoy life or to endure it." 

It's a mystery

When I was in the 4th Grade at South Plains School, J.B. Williams, became the principal and every two weeks (or maybe only once a month) he went by the public library in Floydada to check out a collection of books for his "country school" students.  I think the librarian selected them for him.  The books filled the large back seat of his car and the older boys carried then into the classrooms, sorted by grade levels.  My classroom had books for girls (Nancy Drew and stories about nurses) and books for boys (Hardy Boys and sports stories) and dog and horse books.  I usually managed to read all the girls' books, all the dog and horse books, and several of the boys' books before Mr. Williams brought the next bunch of books.

The Nancy Drew books were the most coveted;  all the girls wanted to read Nancy Drew.  I sometimes spent recesses and lunch hours telling the slower readers the stories so that they would give their books to me, which probably undercut the purpose of Mr. Williams hauling all those books around.  I read the first 37 books of the series, mostly in the editions illustrated by Bill Gillies:  Link to see Nancy Drew dust jackets   The Nancy Drew mysteries are "formula" ficition.  Carolyn Keene was a name owned by the publisher and the books were actually written by several people.  The first books (perhaps the first 23 in the series) were written by Margaret Wirt Benson for $125 each.  Benson wrote other books, many of which I read.  Link: Mildred Wirt Benson

After I finished whichever Nancy Drew books were in the stack, I read all the dog stories by Albert Payson Terhune, the first author's name I learned because someone else wrote dog stories that I didn't like at all.  I remember looking carefully at two of the books and discovered that the author made a difference.  I also remember showing the books to Mr. Williams and telling him which ones to bring next time.  I was a bossy little girl.  Some would say I never outgrew it.  

I also loved the books by Mary O'Hara; My Friend Flicka is the most well known probably due to the TV series.  I liked the one about the white stallion Thunderhead and in fact searched that book out for my collection.  Green Grass of Wyoming and Wyoming Summer are other titles.

The nurse books were the Cherry Ames mysteries by Helen Wells and the Sue Barton series by Helen Dore Boylston.  When I declared my intention to be a nurse, my parents said I should become a doctor instead because I liked to be in charge.  See, I really was a bossy little girl.

As I grew I read and read...  Mysteries were a big part of what I read:  Victoria Holt (one of the pen names of Eleanor Hibbert)  and Mary Stewart and the canon of classic mystery writers:  Eric Ambler, John Buchan, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Graham Greene, Dashiell Hammett, Helen MacInnes, Dorothy Sayers, Rex Stout, Josephine Tey, and Erle Stanley Gardner who wrote the Perry Mason series that my Gran Cummings loved and DMP continually rereads.

I know a lot of people who read mysteries--who in fact still read the mysteries I read.  My husband, and at least 2 of my sisters-in-law and my mother-in-law...   One of sisters-in-law in fact writes mysteries.  Link to Dee's website.  Houston has a whole bookstore devoted to mysteries which I visit with DMP two or three times each and every month.   {Sigh!}

I, however, don't read mysteries.  Somewhere between ages of  25 and 30 years, I pretty much quit.  I stopped reading mysteries and formula romances around the same time.  It was not a conscious decision as much as my having tired of the formulaic genres.  Around that time I wrote a romance novel which was never published and in retorspect I'm very glad it wasn't.

I read a lot of Victorian authors, I read some literary fiction, I read some theology but I don't read mysteries.

What I'm Reading...

This month has been yet another slow reading month.  There have been busy distractions but I think a need for new glasses may be the root of the problem. 

DMP and I have also been making full use of our NetFlix Subscription which means 2 movies of week, which means 2 fewer evenings for reading.  Movies:  Paint Your Wagon, Chronicles of Narnia:  Prince Caspian, The High and the Mighty, High Noon, The Sun Also Rises, Rio Bravo, The Philadelphia Story, Master & Commander.

I have done a couple of "quick and dirty" medical literature reviews:

• macular degeneration for a private client
• Vitamin D
• is there an assoication between urinary tract problems/sugery and myasthenia gravis?

I've skimmed, clipped, filed, and recycled a 2 1/2 foot stack of periodicals.

I've begun transcribing my recipes.

I've been entering books into the church library catalog.

A couple of ideas have grabbed my attention in my lectionary reading and I'm starting to explore these biblical ideas, mostly in Hebrew Scripture:

• staff, the meaning of Aaron's staff in Numbers and it's implications in other passages
• robe, Elijah/Elisha is the source of my current curiosity but it is a recurrent motif

What I'm reading (I include picture links to Amazon where you can browse the book):

Brueggemann, Walter: The Prophetic Imagination. 2nd edition. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001.  There is hardly a page on which I didn't highlight something.  An extraordinary book!  "The riddle and insight of biblical faith is the awareness that only anguish leads to life, only grieving leads to joy, and only embraced endings permit new beginnings."  p. 56  There is commentary on Psalm 137 p. 62.  "Speech about hope cannt be explanatory and scientifically argumentative; rather it must be lyrical..."  p. 65 "I believe that, rightly embraced, no more subversive or phrophetic idiom can be uttered than the practice of doxology, which sets before us the reality of God, of God right at the center of a scene from which we presumed he had fled." p. 66  "...exile is first of all where our speech has been silenced and God's speech has been banished." p. 69  "Compassion constitutes a radical form of criticism." p. 88  "That tradition of radical criticism is about the self-giving emptiness of Jesus...  The emptying is not related to self-negating meditation, for it is a thoroughly political image concerned with the willing surrender of power..." p. 98  "Without the cross, prophetic imagination will likely be as strident and as destructive as that which it criticizes.... Prophetic criticism aims to creat an alternative consciousness with its own rhetoric and field of perception....  This kind of prophetic criticism does not lightly offer alternatives, does not mouth reassurances, and does not provide redemptive social policy.  It knows that only those who mourn can be comforted, and so it first asks about how to mourn seriously and faithfully..." p. 99  "...all functions of the church can and should be prophetic voices that serve to criticize the dominant culture while energizing the faithful....  Thus, the essential question for the church is whether or not its prophetic voice has been co-opted into the culture of the day." p. 125

Peterson, Eugene H.:  A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.  Discipleship in an Instant Society.  2nd edition.  Downers Grover IL:  Intervarsity Press, 2000.  I'm fairly certain I at least scanned the first edition, 1980.  A devotional reading of the Psalms of Ascent, Psalms 120-134.

Fiction: 
Schweizer, Mark:  The Organist Wore Pumps, a liturgical mystery.  SJMP Books, 2010.  Funny!  "It's tradition... when society started, women were not thought of as 'literary'... That's true.  Well, if you don't count Emily Dickinson, Christina Rosetti, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Dorothy Parker, or the Bronte sisters."  See previous posts for more detailed descriptions of these books (Organist is the 8th in the series) which DMP and I both find hilarious.  I include the Amazon links for those who may want to browse but we buy our mysteries at Murder by the Book in Houston. link: Murder by the Book
This is a real bookstore with staff who knows their books and get to know their readers.  I love the $1 shelf at the back where I find treasure.  Unlike DMP, I don't read mysteries, except for the couple of authors who make me laugh.


Poetry:
Browning, Elizabeth Barrett: Sonnets from the Portuguese and other love poems. Illustrated by Adolf Hallman. Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1954. My friend, Konny, gave me this book and I've greatly enjoyed reading these poems.   The illustrations are particularly lovely in this gift book edition.  Adolf Hallman, 1893-1968, is a Swedish illustrator; his drawings for this book have the sparse look and muted colors of much Scandinavian art.  I usually look for vintage books like this one at estate sales and used book stores. When I must have it now I use  IOBA   or biblio.com  or abebooks.com or alibris.com   or, yes, Amazon.  When a book is in the public domain (as most books first published prior to 1923 are), it's a good time to read it digitally and this is my favorite starting point:  onlinebooks at U Penn and read EBB now at the poetry foundation.  "We walked beside the sea, After a day which perished silently, Of its own glory..."  "I thank all who have loved me in their hearts, With thanks and love from mine.  Deep thanks to all...  Love that endures, from Life that disappears."