Given how busy this month was (preached in view of a call at South Garland Baptist Church at the beginning of the month, bought a house, went on a 2 week European vacation, moved out of our apartment, and prepared for my first Sunday as pastor at SGBC), I wasn't expecting to read as much this month as I normally would. But thanks to a lot of time on planes and trains in Europe, I wound up reading about as much as usual, to my delight. Take a look!
2 Articles I Like This Month
"Faith, Friendship, and Tragedy at Santa Fe High" by Skip Hollandsworth, Texas Monthly. 42 minutes.
The moving story of the friendship between an evangelical freshman from Santa Fe, TX and a Muslim foreign exchange student from Pakistan, and of the shooting which ended one of their lives. Powerful stuff from the always excellent Skip Hollandsworth.
"Let's Teach Our Teens to Show a Little Kindness" by Ioanna Roumeliotis, The Globe and Mail. 5 minutes.
An achingly gracious call to arms by a parent tired of seeing his autistic child bullied. Frustrated by the failure of conventional responses to bullying, the writer sees only one way forward: in a world that gives so much attention to cynicism, snideness, and meanness, we must must make kindness cool. A simple yet thoughtful message.
OF MICE AND MEN by John Steinbeck
In January, I tackled—and deeply enjoyed—East of Eden, arguably Steinbeck's opus. So this month, with limited reading time available to me, I decided to read through two of his novellas. I'll get to The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck's most famous book, eventually, but I'm in no rush.
First up was Of Mice and Men, which I actually read previously in middle school. At the time, it was required reading for the summer and, me being me, I put it off until the week before school started. I remember how the book sucked me in at the time, and I wound up reading it in one sitting. I took a little longer with it this time, but it was still a quick read, and it packed the same emotional punch (despite me knowing the ending this time around.) Telling the story of Lennie, a giant, mentally disabled farmhand, and George, his traveling companion, Steinbeck weaves themes about innocence, loneliness, and dreams of a better life in the tragic tale of how an accident forces their dreams to confront cold reality. If you've never read this, do yourself a favor and pick it up; you can't help but be moved by it.
As for novella #2, The Pearl, well, I planned to read this the week before we moved. Needless to say, that didn’t happen. Maybe next month!
In the fall of 2018, I became mildly obsessed with Robert Caro, the two-time Pulitzer Prize winner whose magisterial, multi-volume The Years of Lyndon Johnson was captivating me on a daily basis. The books, which had long intimidated me with their size (all told, they're more than 4,000 pages, with a final volume currently in the works), proved to be not only fascinating and well-researched, but a master class in storytelling. Before long, I was not only reading the books, but spending my lunch breaks watching Caro interviews and lectures on YouTube. Like I said, I was slightly obsessed.
Working is a compilation of the kind of material he was often asked about in those interviews and that he volunteered in those lectures, stories about interviewing interesting subjects, his writing process, and what intensive, turn-every-page research looks like. Some of the material is new for the book, but much of it is recycled from previous magazine and newspaper pieces, now collected for the first time.
So in one sense, I didn't get much new here. Other than a chapter at the end which previews his final LBJ volume, I'm not sure I learned anything from Caro that I hadn't heard or read him say elsewhere. But as has proved to be the case with everything I've ever read from Caro, the way he tells a story is just as important as the story he's telling. With a novelist's eye for detail and a journalist's sense of immediacy, he manages to make the mundane come alive, and his passion for his subjects reels you into the narrative.
If, like me, you love "process stories," i.e. stories about the details and routines of a person's work, you'll eat this up. Caro gives great insight into not only the historic people he researched, but the way he went about that work, whether that work came in an exclusive reading room at the New York City Public Library, the LBJ Presidential Library in Austin, or an office he rents in the Bronx. I read this entire book in one day (albeit a day day spent on planes and trains, with ample time to read), and would have loved to read more. Great stuff, and I can't wait for the fifth volume of the LBJ series.
It's become something of a cliche for Americans in Paris to read A Moveable Feast, an account of Hemingway's time in the City of Lights, during their stay. So, having never read it (or, for that matter, anything by Hemingway) I decided to embrace the cliche during our 2-week European vacation. Every morning we spent in Paris, I started the day by making a pot of coffee and curling up with this book with the Eiffel Tower in full view.
Part of the fun of reading A Moveable Feast is reading about all of the places Hemingway spent time during his years living in Paris with his first wife, Hadley Richardson, many of which remain popular spots for tourists and Parisians alike. Whether he's writing about borrowing books from Shakespeare & Co., a bookstore frequented by him and other members of literature's Lost Generation, eating at cafes along the Champs de Mars, or attending the horse races at Auteuil, the book serves as something of a narrative checklist of places to visit while in the cultural capital of the world.
But the real joy of the book is Hemingway's descriptions of his writing process, the tremendous care he took to be disciplined in his work while also living life to the fullest. Whether he is sitting in a cafe drinking an aperitif, name dropping another member of the Lost Generation (F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein were all friends of his) and talking about his visits with them, or sitting at home by a fire, Hemingway always seems to think of himself as a writer first. Telling stories—and telling them honestly—was both his livelihood and his calling, and he took it seriously.
Having never read Hemingway before, I nevertheless knew his style by reputation, and it was as advertised, straightforward and undecorated. But what struck me—what makes him Hemingway, and not just a guy who didn't like long sentences—was how honest his writing is, absent of pretension or desire to impress. He's telling it like it is, unworried by whether he'll offend or by how it makes him (or others look). That's not to say he's trying to offend, like some literary shock jock, just that he is more concerned with telling the straight truth than with telling a tidy, attractive story.
Paris, Hemingway said, is a moveable feast, a joy you take with you long after you leave it. This book, I suspect, is the same way.
It's funny...George Orwell is unquestionably one of the most important authors of the 20th century, but I suspect you can't name anything he wrote except 1984 and Animal Farm (I know I couldn't.) Those novels, while seminal, are only parts of a larger career which included hundreds of essays. Books v. Cigarettes, part of the Penguin Great Ideas series of slim, affordable volumes of classical literature, collects seven of Orwell's essays, with mixed results.
The first three are all about Orwell's relationship to books. The titular essay, published a year after World War II ended, sees Orwell systematically picking apart the argument that books are too expensive for the common man by pointing out how much people spend on other vices and frivolous pursuits and arguing that, whatever else you may say for literature, it offers incredible bang for your buck. "Bookshop Memories" is a cautionary tale about his stint as an employee in a bookshop, telling about the strange customers who frequent such establishments and warning lovers of literature from making a career out of the bookselling business. Similarly, "Confessions of a Book Reviewer," my favorite essay in the collection, cautions readers from become book reviewers, with Orwell explaining that when your job is to not only read but recommend books, it changes the way you read—and not necessarily for the better.
The next two essays are political in nature, and disturbingly relevant for today. "The Prevention of Literature" deals with the role literature plays in subverting totalitarian thought, and how literary prose more than anything else helps keep free thinking alive when the state or culture demands conformity. "My Country Right or Left" is a forgettable essay about the importance of patriotism on both sides of the political aisle.
The final two essays are snapshots of a specific time and place, with "How the Poor Die" offering a glimpse of the horrendous conditions of British public hospitals in the early 20th century and "Such, Such Were the Joys" doing the same for English boarding schools. The latter is done as a memoir that clocks in at over 60 pages (half the length of the entire collection), though the prose makes it a quick read.
All in all, this collection probably doesn't represent the best of Orwell (I don't exactly understand what prompted Penguin to choose these 7 essays out of the 500+ he wrote), but they're all enjoyable and insightful in their own way, and it was a quick read. Nevertheless, your English classes had the right idea: when it comes to George Orwell, start with Animal Farm and 1984.
In so many ways, the Internet is a sewer. But occasionally it offers the world an amazing gift. Shea Serrano, formerly of Grantland, is one of those gifts, and his Basketball (And Other Things) is one of the most delightful books I've read in a long time.
The book's premise is a series of questions about basketball (almost exclusively the NBA), ranging from the serious and insightful (Which was the most important duo in NBA history? What's the most important NBA championship?) to the...less serious and insightful (Was Kobe Bryant a dork?). Each chapter tackles one of these questions with varying degrees of analysis, speculation, and laugh-out-loud humor. It's Internet writing at its best, but bound in a paperback book and complete with colorful illustrations by Arturo Torres.
I read this book almost entirely on European trains, and it was perfect for those commutes—easy to read for an hour if I wanted, but equally easy to read for 5 minutes and then put back down. For NBA fans, this is a must read and my favorite basketball book I've ever read. Serrano's first book, The Rap Year Book, has rocketed up my to-read list, so keep an eye out for it in a future reading log.
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