broken ground: Reading

Showing posts with label Reading. Show all posts

12/28/24

Books Finished 2024

Here is a list of books I've finished this year (2024):

1. How Soccer Explains the World: An Unlikely Theory of Globalization, Franklin Foer. This is a fascinating look at the culture of soccer around the world. Understanding various places/peoples' relationship to soccer truly does explain so much about societies around the world. I found this book fascinating. (Thanks to Coach Pill for the recommendation.)

2. The Ring of the Nibelung, Richard Wagner, translated by Andrew Porter. This is a translation of the lyrics to the entire Ring Cycle of Richard Wagner. I wanted to learn more about Wagner, since he is a major influence on both Lewis and Tolkien (and is probably an even bigger influence on modern Western culture through movies/film). The Ring Cycle is loosely based on Nordic mythology, and is bleak and strange, but it certainly has power to get into the imagination.

3. The Ring and the Fire, Clyde Robert Bulla. A concise summary of the Ring Cycle in prose.

4. Ivanhoe, Sir Walter Scott. A fun, adventurous read with knights and maidens and Robin Hood and Friar Tuck and battles and jousts. Although this is a little sensationalistic at times, I enjoyed it.

5. Hamlet, Shakespeare. I went on a Hamlet kick for a few weeks and read it three times. Love this play.

6. Born Again, Charles Colson. A wonderful testimony that God does amazing, unlikely things. God sovereignly saved a cutthroat political figure and made his life a shining testimony of grace.

7. The Professor and the Madman, Simon Winchester. Absolutely fascinating. The story of the relationship between an American doctor who went insane as a result of his experience in the Civil War and the editor of the Oxford English Dictionary.

8. King Lear, Shakespeare. Bleak but powerful. One of my favorite Shakespearean plays.

9. The Road, Cormac McCarthy. I read this because of McCarthy's place in modern/postmodern American literature. Not a fan. Too dark. Proof that a worldview without God makes no sense. Dark, atheistic books like this one make me thankful for the hope I have in Jesus Christ, for life without Him would be utterly bleak.

10. Making It So, Patrick Stewart. A fascinating look at the life of an incredible stage/TV/film actor. Stewart is mainly known for his portrayal as Captain Picard, but his Shakespearean knowledge is ferocious. I found it incredibly sad that Stewart sacrificed his relationships with his family for his career.

11. The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, Alan Jacobs. This was my second time reading this book. Jacobs is one of my favorite thinkers, and he promotes the development of a love of reading by "reading at whim" rather than seeing reading as a matter of eating one's vegetables. His views have affected me profoundly. Great book.

12. The Aeneid, Virgil. I went back and forth between translations by Fitzgerald and Fagles, depending on whether I was reading on my Kindle or in print. This work really illumines my reading of Dante even more.

13. Driving Mr. Yogi, Harvey Araton. I'm not a Yankees fan, but I admire the team's traditions. This book was more detailed than I was interested in, but I enjoyed it.

14. Dante's Inferno. Finished this for probably the fifth or sixth time. Read a combination of Musa's, Ciardi's, and prose translations.

15. Cliffs Notes on Plato's Republic. (I know, I know, I need to read the real thing.) It's important to consider what makes a good society. Plato and Aristotle (even in Cliffs Notes form) make me think about very important questions I don't otherwise think about a lot.

16. Cliffs Notes on Plato's Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, and Phaedo. Socrates was an amazing guy. By telling his story, Plato makes us consider what makes for a truly virtuous life.

17. The Hobbit, Tolkien. Maybe the seventh time or so. Always wonderful.

18. Robinson Crusoe, Daniel Defoe. First time through. I'm ashamed that I had never read it. I was prompted to read it when a teacher at our church pointed out that Spurgeon had actually preached a sermon on this novel. I know it's one of the first novels ever, and I respect its place as a pioneer in the genre, but in terms of the story's quality, it loses a sense of unity about three quarters of the way through, becoming somewhat sensationalistic. At the same time, it develops the theme of God's providence in some rich ways. As a side note, I would like to dive a little more into the life of Defoe after reading the afterword in the edition I read.

19-22. The Rookies, books 1-4, Mark Freeman. As an 11-year-old kid, I read part of this subliterary series about three friends who go from playing high school ball to playing in the major leagues. I never finished the series, but I looked back on these books with nostalgia for years. A couple weeks ago, I found it online, and bought it. I'm enjoying the series not for its quality, but because it's fun to go back in time to 1989.

Currently reading or on temporary hold:

1. A Time of Gifts, Patrick Leigh Fermor. Really, really enjoying this!

2. Great Books: My Adventures with Homer, Rousseau, Woolf, and Other Indestructible Writers of the Western World, David Denby.

2. Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, Walter Isaacson.

3. Cliffs Notes on Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics.

4. A Shropshire Lad, A. E. Housman.

5. The Fellowship of the Ring, Tolkien.

6. In my daily Bible reading, I have read through the Old Testament from Genesis to Job this year. I'm currently reading the Literary Study Bible (ESV).

5/14/24

When evening has come, I return to my house and go into my study. At the door I take off my clothes of the day, covered with mud and mire, and I put on my regal and courtly garments; and decently reclothed, I enter the ancient courts of ancient men, where, received by them lovingly, I feed on the food that alone is mine and that I was born for. There I am not ashamed to speak with them and to ask them the reason for their actions; and they in their humanity reply to me. And for the space of four hours I feel no boredom, I forget every pain, I do not fear poverty, death does not frighten me.

Niccolo Machiavelli, qtd. in Alan Jacobs, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

5/8/24

If we pay no attention to words whatever, we may become like the isolated gentleman who invent a new perpetual motion machine on old lines in ignorance of all previous plans, and then is surprised that it doesn't work. If we confine our attention entirely to the slang of the day--that is to say, if we devote ourselves exclusively to modern literature--we get to think the world is progressing when it is only repeating itself.... [I]t is only when one reads what men wrote long ago that one realizes how absolutely modern the best of the old things are.

Rudyard Kipling, "The Uses of Reading"

4/9/24

11/14/19

Mick Herron on re-reading the novels of John le Carre:

Re-reading is often deemed comfort reading, and of course it can be. But books that are embedded in your history are rich in association, and picking them up often retriggers the emotions they provoked the first time, emotions allied to the feeling of being young. Comfort reading can be the most uncomfortable kind of all. I remember buying The Honourable Schoolboy at a bookshop in Newcastle that no longer exists; I remember taking it on a marathon coach journey, the length of the country; and I remember reading much of it in my first ever hammock in blistering sunshine – my first foreign holiday, not far from Nîmes. Similarly, it matters to me that my copy of Smiley’s People – a first edition given to me as a birthday gift – is identical to the one I borrowed from my local library in 1979 or 80. When I pick it up, I feel my younger self tugging at my sleeve, asking for his book back.

Samo Burja has some good advice about reading books vs. following the news:

A few years ago, I was asked by a friend what news sources they should follow to understand the Syrian Civil War. I replied they shouldn’t follow any news at all. My recommendation instead was a six month break from Syrian news, supplemented by leisurely reading through six books on Syrian politics, economics, and culture. I pointed out they could read them on their phone just as conveniently as they could read tweets or articles. My friend was taken aback but followed the advice.

Critiques of news media are much more in vogue now than they were in 2015. People bemoan the poor factual accuracy or manifest political bias of today’s media, whether that means established newspapers like The New York Times or social networks like Facebook. But there is a more fundamental problem with news: it can provide information, but isn’t structured to educate you into someone who could understand this cherry-picked information. Formal education often fails to provide this vital foundation.

After six months, my friend thanked me. They said they now barely follow any news on Syria, but when they do it has gone from perplexing to understandable. The fragments of information no longer landed only as emotional bursts of excitement or anxiety, but rather helped contribute to a solid picture of the region. They asked me a more difficult question: what books should they read to understand not just Syria, but global society as a whole?

Books are incomplete instruments for instruction. They don’t respond to the reader and cannot directly answer questions, and they require a strange and systematic process of study that goes beyond mere reading. In physics education, for example, one will pair up the mastery of theories with tests of solving mathematical puzzles as well as a course of practical experiments that tie those to one’s senses. For the study of society, there would have to be analogues.

Further, true autodidacticism is a rare gift. To maintain motivation over a few months, learning has to be its own reward. This reward of learning must somehow be tied to understanding the world as it is, rather than pursuing theories for the sake of entertainment.

Much has happened throughout human history, and much is happening right now. Too much to ever fully catch up on. The focus should rather be on equipping someone with the theory and skills needed so they will process, absorb, and retain the information they encounter throughout their intellectual lives. This merits a methodological approach tailored to individual investigation and practical application.

The order in which one reads also matters. Important parts of certain books are unlocked by the understanding gained from another. This is obvious for disciplines like theoretical physics, but the same goes for a serious study of society.

Samo Burja, "Eight Books to Read"

11/4/18

This morning I came across a passage in a letter from John Wesley to another preacher, whose preaching was apparently ineffective. One part of Wesley's advice to him was to read:

What has exceedingly hurt you in time past, nay, and I fear to this day, is want of reading. I scarce ever knew a preacher read so little. And perhaps, by neglecting it, you have lost the taste for it. Hence your talent in preaching does not increase. It is just the same as it was seven years ago. It is lively, but not deep; there is little variety, there is no compass of thought. Reading only can supply this, with meditation and daily prayer. You wrong yourself greatly by omitting this. You can never be a deep preacher without it, any more than a thorough Christian. O begin! Fix some part of every day for private exercises. You may acquire the taste which you have not: what is tedious at first, will afterwards be pleasant. Whether you like it or not, read and pray daily. It is for your life; there is no other way; else you will be a trifler all your days, and a petty, superficial preacher. Do justice to your own soul; give it time and means to grow. Do not starve yourself any longer. Take up your cross and be a Christian altogether. Then will all children of God rejoice (not grieve) over you.

This is good advice not just for preachers, but for all believers.

6/29/16

The modernist Bible is a format of the Bible that was created in the modern period. All of the additions we’ve made to the Bible and the way we’ve laid out the text is a modernist phenomenon. Before that the Scriptures were not mass-produced—the printing and mass producing of the Bible coincided with this new format of the Bible, but it wasn’t until the 16th century that chapters and verses came together into a single Bible.

The Geneva Bible brought them together, and sadly made every single verse number a separate paragraph in two columns on the page, which effectively obliterated any literary aspect of the text at all. Suddenly what the Bible looked like was a list of numbered spiritual statements, each of them individually paragraphed, and the message visually was these are meant to be read alone and understood alone and out of context.

The contention in my book is that this new modern format, which we then added cross-reference systems, which were first developed in the same period—section headings, footnotes—all this additional material created the Bible that was really a modern reference book rather than a reading book. In fact, our practices have followed the new form.

. . .

There was no such thing as proof texting before the appearance of the format of the modern Bible. Before that you just don’t see the practices in the church. Nobody produced a list of supposed biblical doctrines and then backed them up with a list of proof texts. That way of using the Bible was born when the format of the Bible became something that was conducive to that. It tells people that the Bible is a certain kind of thing, and it can be used a certain kind of way.

When you change the form of something, you change what people perceive the content is. Instead of seeing a letter, a song, a story, a proverb, a prophecy, what you see is a numbered list of statements. It all looks the same. You’re inclined to not pay attention to literary genre because they just look like a list of propositions. It harms our apprehension of the Bible in very specific ways when we change the way the Bible looks.

Glenn Paauw in "Reformat the Bible: An Interview with Glenn Pauw"

6/20/16

By reading more slowly, I paid more attention to the language. I understood more deeply the emotional impact of the echoes of Anglo-Saxon alliteration. I appreciated the intentionally archaic, almost liturgical language J.R.R. Tolkien uses to evoke the royal dignity of the Court of Gondor. I caught at a deeper level the characterization caught in the voices of Gollum—so slimy and slippery—or Sam, so simple and true. I also slowed down and took time with Tolkien’s long passages of geographical and scenic description. He saw the contours of Middle Earth. Instead of racing over them for the plot as I had done before, I took time and allowed my imagination to see the landscape and thus feel the mood. The effect of the language and the descriptions is to evoke emotion, and the philologist Tolkien did not fail. At several points I was caught up in the emotion and wept real tears.

Dwight Longenecker, "The Lord of the Rings: Read It and Weep"

1/5/15

The social media world encourages us not to do things for their own sake, but rather for the approval and attention of our burgeoning online audiences. We don’t just read according to the suggestions of others; we don’t just join book clubs. Rather, we Instagram pictures of ourselves reading, join a social network where we can show off our huge bookshelves, and post smart-sounding quotes on Facebook. I’ve done this—perhaps we’ve all done this. The problem is that it uses the author, the book, and the protagonist for our own personal, selfish ends. It makes the book about us, rather than about the story itself.

There’s also the siren call of list-making: we all love watching a list of accomplishments grow and grow. This is perhaps the largest reason I find Goodreads dangerous, personally: it enumerates the books I’ve read, and organizes them into admiration-worthy lengthy lists. It encourages me to look not at the quality of reads, not at the specific beauties of various works, but to admire and venerate the amalgamated monstrous whole. Thus, I begin to rush: I want to finish this book, that book, and the next—not to meet a deadline, necessarily, not because I’m so engrossed in the book I can’t stop—but merely because I want to check another book off my list.

Perhaps, as a writer and occasional book critic, this sort of self-conscious reading will be somewhat inevitable in the future. But . . . [t]here is a beauty to the imagination that deep-reading requires. Whenever we read for criticism, for an audience, or for the joys (and dangers) of list-making, we will always have another besides the story in mind: whether it be ourselves, or our audience.

Gracy Olmstead, "Why I'm Leaving Goodreads"

10/27/14

Douglas Belkin of The Wall Street Journal asked Brian Casey, president of Depauw University, "If you could wave a magic wand and make one problem at your school disappear what would that be?" Here's his answer:

I would like to wave a wand and for just some portion of every week have some students removed from the Internet and from telephones, smartphones and social media, and buy themselves time to read. Students these days aren’t natural readers of longer books, and I can recall from my own college days those moments when you fell in love with a book and sat for a sustained period with an important work and lived with that author for a period. They are bombarded with short bits of information constantly, and I would love to free them from that for just a short period of every week. I think they would discover more about themselves, they would learn how to engage with complexity in ways they avoid in certain ways now. They would experience the act of being quiet and alone with their thoughts.

The full interview is here.

8/12/14

I have often counseled people who tell me that they don't see anything when they read the Bible, "Go home and this time, write the text, instead of just reading it. If anything stands out as helpful, make a mark and write down your ideas about it. Keep writing till you are done with that insight. Then keep reading and writing the text till you see something else to write about, or until you are out of time."

The main value in this is that writing forces us to slow down and see what we are reading. Some of us have very bad habits of passive reading that certain types of formal education have bred into us, by forcing us to read quickly when we ought to be reading slowly--thinking as we go. Writing is a way of slowing us down and opening our eyes to see what we do not otherwise see.

John Piper, When I Don't Desire God: How to Fight for Joy, p. 124

7/10/14

Lewis points out in Chapter 3 of An Experiment in Criticism that to truly understand a work of art, music, or literature, we must surrender to the work on its own terms. This doesn't mean that we must agree with it, but that we must slow down and let the work be what it is before we evaluate it or impose our own meaning on it.

We must begin by laying as completely as we can all our own preconceptions, interests, and associations. We must make room for Botticelli's Mars and Venus, or Cimabue's Crucifixion, by emptying out our own. After the negative effort, the positive. We must use our eyes. We must look, and go on looking till we have certainly seen exactly what is there. We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)

7/9/14

In An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis argues against "literary Puritans"--people who think the right sort of reading must be serious, as in "grave" or "solemn." Instead, Lewis says to read correctly, readers must surrender to the spirit in which a work was written:

The existence of these literary Puritans ... has deterred me from applying the word serious to the right sort of readers and reading. It suggests itself at first as just the word we want. But it is fatally equivocal. It may mean, on the one hand, something like 'grave' or 'solemn'; on the other, something more like 'thoroughgoing, whole-hearted, energetic'. ...

A thing may be done seriously in the one sense and not in the other. The man who plays football for his health is a serious man: but no real footballer will call him a serious player. He is not wholehearted about the game; doesn't really care. His seriousness as a man indeed involves his frivolity as a player; he only 'plays at playing', pretends to play. Now the true reader reads every work seriously in the sense that he reads it whole-heartedly, makes himself as receptive as he can. But for that very reason he cannot possibly read every work solemnly or gravely. For he will read 'in the same spirit that the author writ'. What is meant lightly he will take lightly; what is meant gravely, gravely.... He will enjoy a kickshaw as a kickshaw and a tragedy as a tragedy....

This is where the literary Puritans fail most lamentably. They are too serious as men to be seriously receptive as readers. I have listened to an undergraduate's paper on Jane Austen from which, if I had not read them, I should never have discovered that there was the least bit of comedy in her novels. After a lecture of my own I have been accompanied from Mill Lane to Magdalene by a young man protesting with real anguish and horror against my wounding, my vulgar, my irreverent suggestion that The Miller's Tale was written to make people laugh. And I have heard of another who finds Twelfth Night a penetrating study of the individual's relation to society. We are breeding up a race of young people who are solemn as the brutes ('smiles from reason flow') ... Solemn men, but not serious readers; they have not fairly and squarely laid their minds open, without preconception, to the works they read.

7/8/14

In An Experiment in Criticism, C. S. Lewis lays out several differences between two types of readers, which he calls the many and the few.

In the first place, the majority never read anything twice. The sure mark of an unliterary man is that he considers 'I've read it already' to be a conclusive argument against reading a work. We have all known women who remembered a novel so dimply that they had to stand for half an hour in the library skimming through it before they were certain they had once read it. But the moment they became certain, they rejected it immediately. It was for them dead, like a burnt-out match, an old railway ticket, or yesterday's paper; they had already used it. Those who read great works, on the other hand, will read the same work ten, twenty or thirty times during the course of their life.

Secondly, the majority, though they are sometimes frequent readers, do not set much store by reading. They turn to it as a last resource. They abandon it with alacrity as soon as any alternative pastime turns up. It is kept for railway journeys, illnesses, odd moments of enforced solitude, or for the process called 'reading oneself to sleep'. . . . But literary people are always looking for leisure and silence in which to read and do so with their whole attention. When they are denied such attentive and undisturbed reading even for a few days they feel impoverished.

Thirdly, the first reading of some literary work is often, to the literary, an experience so momentous that only experiences of love, religion, or bereavement can furnish a standard of comparison. Their whole consciousness is changed. They have become what they were not before. But there is no sign of anything like this among the other sort of readers. When they have finished the story or the novel, nothing much, or nothing at all, seems to have happened to them.

Finally, and as a result of their different behavior in reading, what they have read is constantly and prominently present to the mind of the few, but not to that of the many. The former mouth over their favourite lines and stanzas in solitude. Scenes and characters from books provide them with a sort of iconography by which they interpret or sum up their own experience. They talk to one another about books, often and at length. The latter seldom think or talk of their reading.

11/30/13

The written word is weak. Many people prefer life to it. Life gets your blood going, and it smells good. Writing is mere writing, literature is mere. It appeals only to the subtlest senses—the imagination’s vision, and the imagination’s hearing—and the moral sense, and the intellect. This writing that you do, that so thrills you, that so rocks and exhilarates you, as if you were dancing next to the band, is barely audible to anyone else. The reader's ear must adjust down from loud life to the subtle, imaginary sounds of the written word. An ordinary reader picking up a book can't yet hear a thing; it will take half an hour to pick up the writing's modulations, its ups and downs and louds and softs.

An intriguing entomological experiment shows that a male butterfly will ignore a living female butterfly of his own species in favor of a painted cardboard one, if the cardboard one is big. If the cardboard one is bigger than he is, bigger than any female butterfly ever could be. He jumps the piece of cardboard over and over again, he jumps the piece of cardboard. Nearby, the real, living female butterfly opens and closes her wings in vain.

Films and television stimulate the body’s senses too, in big ways. A nine-foot handsome face, and its three-foot-wide smile, are irresistible. Look at the long legs on that man, as high as a wall, and coming straight toward you. The music builds. The moving lighted screen fills your brain. You do not like filmed car chases? See if you can turn away. Try not to watch. Even knowing you are manipulated, you are still as helpless as the male butterfly drawn to painted cardboard.

Annie Dillard, The Writing Life

1/10/13

The habit of reading is absolutely critical today, particularly for Christians. As television turns our society into an increasingly image-dominated culture, Christians must be people of the Word. When we read, we cultivate a sustained attention span, an active imagination, a capacity for logical analysis and critical thinking, and a rich inner life. Each of these qualities, which have proven themselves essential to a free people, is under assault. . . . Christians, to maintain their Word-centered perspective in an image-driven world, must become readers. --Gene Veith, Reading Between the Lines

8/27/12

Books and the Teenage Reader by G. R. Carlson
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

As a college educator who frequently sees the product of both homeschools and Christian schools, I've seen that both can be done well, and I've seen that both can be done badly. Sadly, many homeschool and Christian school students that I've had in the college classroom have not developed a love of reading. One reason for this, I believe, is that some parents and educators simply do not understand how young people develop into lifelong readers. This is a book that can remedy that problem.

As Carlsen points out, educators often force-feed books to students that are simply not ready for them: "Oddly enough, adults do not seem to realize that teenagers are changing in their literary tastes just as in their physical bodies. They assume that [if a young person has a reading level beyond his/her age,] the teenager is ready to move into great literature. Nothing is further from the truth. Recognizing that teenagers are still passing through reading phases is important in nurturing enthusiasm for reading."

This reminds me of my own high school education: for years, I had little interest in Victorian literature or Charles Dickens in particular because I was forced to read A Tale of Two Cities in 11th grade, before I was ready for it. Unfortunately, my own Christian school thought heavy doses of Shakespeare and Dickens were better for highschoolers than Newberys and books on a highschooler's reading level. (I never even read a Newbery winner till I was an adult.)

Carlsen counters that type of methodology in this book: "Reading patterns have been carefully mapped through research studies conducted with thousands of adolescent subjects, coming from diverse home backgrounds in all parts of the country. According to these studies, chronological age is more important than mental age in determining what a child will enjoy reading. The average and above-average 13-year-old are interested in reading books with the same subject matter and themes. . . . Accelerating the intelligent child by giving him or her the adult classics of literature will not increase the enjoyment of reading."

In my own experience, I can see that Carlsen is right. The students who I find most consistently to be serious readers tend to be public school students, students who were taught the Newberys and have had access to a lot of YA (Young Adult) novels.

To sum up, this book would be a great resource for home school parents and Christian school teachers who want to better understand how young people grow in their literary tastes. Carlsen has extensive bibliographies full of resources and novels for each stage of reading that an adolescent passes through. Although it's out of print, you can easily find it used on Amazon and other sites.

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