Bookwi.se

Summary: A novel about World War II where the war is just some of the reality of the world.

Francis Spufford is a novelist that I avoid all spoilers and descriptions and just buy the book as soon as I see it. Nonesuch was released last week and I started it as soon as I finished my last book. I never like to give away too much when writing about fiction books.

One of the things I really like about Spufford is that he writes very different novels from one another. This one feels like Charles Williams and Neil Gaiman were inspirations (treating the supernatural as very real, with a little bit of almost creepiness, but never really being creepy and enough sex for it not to be a young adult book but it not to feel gratuitous). There is also a hint of CS Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, but only a hint.

I won’t give it away, but Spufford is also very much known for last minute twists to his books. This one is no different and I won’t give it away, but this time I didn’t love the twist. It makes sense, I understand why he did it. But while I think the twist in Golden Hill made the book, I think it was a net negative here. In some ways, I think it changed the book from a historical fiction book that had great characters and really felt like it was a book about the war and the problems of war, to being a book that “was about something.” I don’t want to be too negative, because I loved the novel. But I just don’t think the twist was quite right.

Iris Hawkins is driven young woman. She works in a brokerage house and she wants to succeed. She also is clearly trying to control the world around her and seems to be running from something. In the days leading up to World War II, she stumbles on the reality of the supernatural and gets drawn in to a bigger story than she really wanted to.

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Summary: A beautifully told story in letters. 

There is some irony that just a couple of days ago I wrote a post about not liking to read letter collections and how I always get bored before I finish them. And today I am going to strongly recommend a fiction book that is formatted as a collection of letters. I know not everyone is an audiobook fan, but if you do audiobooks, I would start with this on audio. The production and editing is top notch and the various voices reading the letters give context to the letters. It is going to vie for my favorite audiobook ever. (Colin Firth’s narration of The End of the Affair by Graham Greene has been at that place for a long time, but this is right there.)

This is a book that I have great appreciation for, in part because it is pushing back against speed and efficiency in a helpful way. The story is about Sybil, a divorced, retired woman who lives alone just outside of Washington DC. She was a lawyer in private practice with a long term friend. And when he was appointed to a judgeship, she took the pay cut and became his chief clerk. She retired when he retired after 28 years on the bench.

The story unfolds slowly as she writes letters to friends and family and various celebrities, especially authors. I don’t know if Virginia Evans got permission to write in the voice of various authors, but Sybil is a great reader and letter writer and when she reads a book she loves, she writes the author and tells them. And as she says throughout the book, a surprising number of people will write back if you write them. So in this book of fiction that takes place over about 10 years, there are multiple letters to Joan Didion, who she has developed a friendship with, but also a teen boy of a law clerk she mentored, and a friend who she has been writing for nearly 60 years.

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Summary: An astronaut works to recover his memory and save humanity.

I was surprised when I looked back at the Martian that it has been 12 years since I read it. I purchased Project Hail Mary four years ago when it was on sale and just had not gotten around to listening to the audiobook. It won a number of awards when it came out and I have had more than a few people comment to me that it is their favorite audiobook. (My favorite audiobook is the Colin Firth narration of The End of the Affair by Graham Greene.)

I have purchased, but not yet listened to Artemis. Generally that has not been as well liked as Project Hail Mary and The Martian. But there is a similar thread to the two books by Weir. It is not that the stories or themes are the same, but there is a dogged determination that is the same. I would argue that “life is worth living” is part of what people like about these books. Yes they are well written hard science fiction. Yes, Weir is writing good character and compelling plots with lots of action. But I think what draws people to them is that the protagonists don’t give up and the reader gets to root for a hero that lives up to their hero status.

The protagonists are not perfect. There are lots of mistakes, both “wrong calculations” type of mistakes and character flaws. But those are humanizing flaws. The actual brass tacks of the story have protagonists that do what it takes, but also are good honorable people. And the world needs more stories that have flawed humans that are still good honorable people.

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Summary: Modern translation/paraphrase of the spiritual direction letters of François Fénelon.

As I regularly say, I appreciate book clubs in part because they make me read things I might not read on my own. This was the second book in this year’s Renovare book club.  Generally I do not participate in any of the online message boards for the book club and I do not go to any of the in person meetings that I could go to. But I do listen to the podcasts about the book. This one was with Winn Collier, who was responsible for editing this book.

Spiritual direction is an old practice. And I think that many people met with their spiritual directors in person, but we only have records of spiritual direction that was done by letter because no one as the audio or video of spiritual direction from the 16th century. And except in the cases of spiritual direction supervision, which often has the practice of the spiritual director transcribing their memory of the sessions for purposes of discussion and learning, spiritual direction is intended to be private. As a spiritual director I don’t share about the people I meet with except with my own spiritual director who occasionally gives me advice. I occasionally do write about my work of spiritual direction because I find writing to be helpful as I clarify to myself what I think about things. But I tend to get rid of those writings immediately because I want to honor people’s privacy.

I have read several other collections of spiritual direction writing from Henri Nouwen and Evelyn Underhill and some others, but I just don’t tend to like the type of short writing that letter collections tend to be. I get bored and I rarely finish them. I did finish this one, but it took me about four months. I rarely read more than two letters at a sitting. I tended to read them at night before I go to bed. I often read a couple chapters of whatever I am currently reading until I am too tired to read and for this book I would often read one or two of these and then do my regular reading. The problem with this is that I am not giving myself time to think about them. It would be better if I read them and then went on a walk and was able to reflect on them for a while.

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Summary: A secular historian’s perspective on what impact Christianity made on the world.

Dominion is not a new book. It has been out for about seven years at this point. I have been hearing people praise it since it came out. And it is not the kind of book that has a corner of Christianity praising it. I have seen progressive process theologian Tripp Fuller and SBC seminary president Al Mohler praise it. And it largely seems to be well received in the secular and academic world as well. This very long and detailed review on the History for Atheists blog closely read the book and traces the nuances of the argument well.

But I mostly was avoiding Dominion because I kept seeing it used badly as either a type of apologetics or as a defense of Christian dominionism support. Those who are now largely labeled as Christian Nationalists tend to believe that the western world and its culture was shaped by Christianity. Which is a simple form of Holland’s thesis. Holland is suggesting that the world that Christianity arose in (Greek influenced Roman world) was shaped by power, wealth and a rejection of care for the poor and vulnerable. It is anachronistic, but the section on Friedrich Nietzsche details why Nietzsche was rejecting Christianity as being weak precisely because of the cultural influence that Holland is describing.

One of the points that is made several times in the book, but it most effectively made in chapter five, is that charity is seen by the Roman authorities who opposed the church as an effective tool to persuade the people. There are some letters from Roman officials to non-Christian religious figures that they should start engaging in charitable work as part of their religious duties (which they had not done before) because by the 3rd century or so, common people started to see how the early Christians were caring not only for their own people, but also for the broader community. That movement, to see charity for people outside of your group as a good, is a significant shift in the culture of the era, but it is also important to note that the evaluation here isn’t because people are worth caring for broadly, but because it shifted public opinion. While Holland’s evidence here is outside of the church, you can see how this works inside the church in the centuries since then. Pragmatism, not theological conviction, often is the main driving force in cultural change.

Holland is not presenting a simplistic narrative. Christianity and the west did not actually follow the principles of Christianity quite often. But there were many times where it did. One of the good examples of this is Alcuin was an advisor to Charlemagne. Alcuin not only became an advisor to Charlemagne, but convinced him that killing non-Christians was a violation of Christian ethics. Alcuin instead encouraged education and missionaries who could persuade people to become Christians voluntarily because Alcuin argued that you can force people to be baptized, but not to believe. Charlemagne revoked the death penalty for not being Christian and stopped using war as a means of conversion.

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Summary: An exploration of God’s mercy and the ways that God seems to change.

One of the reasons that I like to read widely is that I learn things in one area that has relevance to another area. That always means that I am potentially drawing inappropriate conclusions because I don’t know enough about multiple things to be an expert, and that if I knew more, I might not draw the same conclusion.

One of the areas that I have been fairly interested in recently is law, especially Supreme Court legal theory. Part of what interests me about that is that in some ways it is the study of Hermeneutics, but through a secular lens. I am a very avid listener of Advisory Opinions, a legal podcast. They primarily cover high level legal theory, more than working out individual cases. One of the things that is emphasized in legal theory is the limiting principle. Because so many concepts in law are not universally true at all times, the concept of the limiting principle tries to map out what the limits of the use of that concept is.

Right now, there is a discussion about the Unitary Executive. There are different versions of this concept, but overly simplistically, the Unitary Executive theory is that all of the power of the Executive Branch is vested in the single figure of the President. So there can’t be independent areas within the executive branch because there is only one president at a time. But that idea runs up against the concept of the limiting principle. Even in earlier generations, no one can really operate in all areas of the executive. There are some areas of expertise where we want career experts not just political appointments. There are other areas, like corruption investigations, where without some level of independence, the executive branch cannot do the job it has been tasked with.

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