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I tend to be a voracious reader, and I read widely. This list has its origins in an old signature file which I would update periodically with the current book that I was reading. That gradually transmogrified itself into the current massive archive with brief reviews.
| What I've been reading lately |
| Number of books read and reviewed each year | |
|---|---|
| 1995* |  (28) |
| 1996 | (47) |
| 1997 | (74) |
| 1998 | (61) |
| 1999 | (62) |
| 2000 | (27) |
| 2001 | (51) |
| 2002 | (60) |
| 2003 | (37) |
| 2004 | (36) |
| 2005 | (32) |
| 2006 | (46) |
| 2007 | (109) |
| 2008 | (78) |
| 2009 | (65) |
| 2010 |  (15) |
| * Partial year | |
[Finished 5 March 2010] This was one of the first books on Catholic theology that I read. Coming back to it a couple decades later, I can see the clear influence of a second hand in the book, that of the American editor and co-translator James Conway who indicates that he felt free to expand, delete and edit many portions of the book as he saw fit. It’s hard at times to determine how much of the book is Wilmers and how much is Conway. The only clearly designated addition is the appendix which contains a list of church councils, the texts of several creeds in Latin and Pius IX’s Syllabus of Errors.
It is interesting to note how little of the book is dedicated to questions of moral theology and how much to more abstract theology. There are a few passages which betray a surprising conception of space, time and causality which seem more appropriate to someone writing in the late twentieth century than the mid-nineteenth.
The Mass in Slow Motion by Ronald Knox
[Finished 19 February 2010] A chatty little book adapted from a series of catechetical sermons Knox gave to the students of a girls school evacuated to Shropshire during World War II. It’s an interesting and informal look at the details of the Tridentine mass. An interesting note is that et cum spiritu tuo, which had previously been translated into English as “and also with you,” and has been a bugbear for many liturgical traditionalists, is translated by Knox in his comments as “the same to you.”
I re-read this largely hoping to get some details on the celebration of the mass for use in my current novel, and I got some of that, although a great deal of what Knox focuses on is the inner thoughts of himself as he celebrates the mass and the thoughts he would like the members of his congregation to have as they hear the mass.
A World of My Own: A Dream Diary by Graham Greene
[Finished 16 February 2010] Greene’s epitaph to his life’s work. The preface by his last mistress, Yvonne Cloetta makes it clear that this was the last work he assembled from a lifetime’s records of dreams and it was arranged to conclude with Greene’s dream of his own death and the poem he wrote as is own obituary.
The prose takes on a poetic quality that is generally absent from Greene’s fiction, allowing Greene to manage the difficult balance between the reified and immaterial that is essential in any good account of a dream. Not an essential work, certainly, but a wonderful conclusion to Greene’s ouevre.
[Finished 12 February 2010] There’s something interesting inherent in a book which begins with Book Three and has the prologue after the beginning and epilogue before the end. Sadly, the whole thing ends up being a bit of a hash. There are really two separate narratives here, the surrealistic Lanark story and the naturalistic Thawe story, each with its own merits, but with what seems only a tenuous connection (something acknowledged by the author in the epilogue). I feel like there were two good books here, but the postmodern narrative managed to sink them both into a bit of a morass.
[Finished 12 February 2010] The Stephenson that I’ve read previously has all been set in the same universe of 17th and 20th Century earth, focusing on questions of cryptography and the nature of money, so coming into Anathem which is set in a distant future and alien world was a bit of a shock. Add onto that the fact that Stephenson decided to create his own vocabulary for a number of things and I found the book off-putting at first. Creating a world is difficult enough, creating a language is much harder and tends to fall flat unless the writer is someone skilled in linguistics (like Tolkien) or who takes an existing language and modifies it for his ends (like Burgess did in A Clockwork Orange). Stephenson is certainly not a linguist and while he uses some latinate vocabulary to good end in the book, his deviations from that tend to way down the narrative, especially given that he doesn’t consistently distinguish between his “Fluccish” and “Orth” words.
The story itself is an interesting one with some nice discussions of mathematical concepts (Stephenson’s forte, by far is mathematical fiction), although the conclusion ends up devolving into a bit of nonsense (but then that could be said of the other Stephenson novels that I’ve read as well). But even with the flaws, I had a hard time putting it down and I found myself flying through its nearly 1000 pages in short order.
[Finished 11 February 2010] Part of my project to read recent first novels. St. John Mandel’s prose has a glowing dreamlike poetic quality that is hard to put a finger on and makes me really really wish that my writing were like that. She manages to do a great job of unravelling her story through non-chronological storytelling, although towards the end it feels like she doesn’t really have a good sense of what to do with her characters and falls into some cliches of storytelling, but I look forward to reading her next novel.
[Finished 9 February 2010] We’re slowly seeing the characters grow and mature and finally getting some clues as to the whole VFD/Eye mystery. It was neat to see Sunny really get a chance to shine this time around.
[Finished 2 February 2010] A hodgepodge of stories from across Greene’s career including those deleted when 19 Stories became 21 Stories. There are some delightful surprises in the mix, “The Man Who Stole the Eiffel Tower,” being chief in the mix, a wonderful bit of whimsy telling precisely the story the title promises. Some bits were tedious, most notably, “Work Not in Progress,” which is more a description of a story than a story in and of itself. It’s surprising, though, to note that the story comes from the 50s and not the 80s.
[Finished 1 February 2010] This book is really the definition of commercial fiction: Plot-driven, difficult to put down, but not necessarily of any great depth. One of the comments that many others of my acquaintance who’ve read the book is that there’s a lot of information on cathedral building in the book. Perhaps, although I don’t feel, joking to the contrary, like I can go out and build a medieval cathedral in my back yard now that I’ve read it.
The story, as I noted, is compelling and fast-paced. The 900+ pages of the book fly by with amazing celerity. But characterizations are not necessarily very deep. There doesn’t really seem to be more than one dimension for almost every character in the book. Aliena shows the greatest depth and even she doesn’t run especially deep.
But this is commercial fiction. We read it for the story, not for the characterizations and certainly not for the prose. We get a touch of an idea of what medieval life is like and a story that makes the reader want to just read a few pages more before bed. And in that, it succeeds quite well.
[Finished 26 January 2010] When this book first popped to the top of my reading list, I assumed that the title used the term “lambs” metaphorically, to talk about innocents in London, and while ostensibly, the Lambs of London are in fact, Charles and Mary Lamb (of Lamb’s Tales from Shakespeare), I think that there’s some merit to my original assumption, as Charles and Mary are, in a way, secondary characters in the novel, overshadowed by William Henry Ireland. I read this somewhat ignorant of the real Ireland’s history so the twist, that he was a forger and not a discoverer of lost texts, was one that caught me by surprise (it also helped that I hadn’t read the jacket flap copy). In all a delightful diversion.