Summer Reading

If this had been a normal year, I might have written a column on summer reading in mid-June, say, with a couple of relatively uneventful months stretching ahead. I might have anticipated which books I wanted to read about the cultural situation we face and the place of strong, traditional, liberal arts education in addressing it. But this has not been the usual summer, and my reading has been piecemeal and eclectic—but maybe that’s not a bad thing because I have followed the recommendations of friends.

Toward the end of June, friends who came over for dinner gave us a book called The Rosie Project by an Australian novelist named Graeme Simsion. I had never heard of the novel or the author, but I started reading it because our friends said it was so funny. Funny it certainly is. The narrator is a world-class geneticist and bachelor named Don Tillman whose social skills would not budge the needle from zero on any meter of emotional intelligence. He has his life completely organized for weeks in advance, and he now calculates that for purposes of propagation he needs a wife, albeit one who meets all the criteria on his substantial checklist. Enter Rosie, who meets none of them. I read the book in a day.

A steadier presence this summer has been Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds, a book no one ever read in a day. In fact, if you had a map of the United States and you were marking, week by week, the progress of someone hiking from San Diego to Portland, Maine, it would resemble the speed of my bookmark moving through the nearly 800 fairly dense pages of The Eustace Diamonds.

Friends have recommended Trollope’s novels before. In this one, the plot centers on the extremely valuable string of diamonds that the heroine, Lizzie Eustace—beautiful, unscrupulous, daring, and canny—received as a gift from her late husband. Her husband’s family considers the diamonds a priceless heirloom, and it wants them back. Hardly anything can be said to happen (no murdered pawnbrokers, no whale hunts), and my wife is bemused by the fact that I keep reading it, week after week. The fact is, though, every chapter has its pleasures. I’m not sure how Trollope does it. The novel embodies a different lived experience of time itself, if only because it assumes a world where the reader has time to read it and the action of these characters can unfold at its own pace. If you are looking at your United States map, I am somewhere (relative to my progress through the book) on a back road between Wichita and St. Louis.

Speaking of travel, I read our friend Dana Gioia’s delightful short book, Studying with Miss Bishop, as my wife, my daughter, and I were flying to and from California. Each chapter is memorable in its own way, but I found the meditation on his classes at Harvard with Robert Fitzgerald particularly illuminating about what good teaching can be. I was able to chat about it with Dana briefly at the Napa Institute. After Napa, we stayed for a night with former students in nearby St. Helena, where I learned of two books that I obviously need to read, St. John Paul II’s Man and Woman Created He Them and Theodore Gray’s wittily written and beautifully illustrated The Elements. Both arrived just yesterday.

My wife and I have also done a fair amount of driving this summer, including twice to and from Salt Lake City and two or three times back and forth to Denver. These trips accord well with the audible versions of C.J. Box’s Joe Pickett novels. Box has a whole series centered on this Wyoming game warden of great integrity, but many of the books also involve Joe’s less scrupulous friend Nate Romanowski, a former Special Ops soldier, now a falconer, who carries one of the world’s largest pistols and uses it well. These fast-paced novels (a long way from Trollope) enhance the listener’s experience of the landscapes of Wyoming, especially if you happen to be driving through those landscapes at the time. For example, Off the Grid begins with a rogue grizzly in the Big Horn Mountains but ends with the disruption of a terrorist plot in the vast Red Desert an hour or two southwest of Lander. The recent Disappeared had me so interested in Saratoga, a small town 20 miles or so off I-80 southeast of Rawlins, that I took the long way back from Denver to approach it from Colorado, if only to drive past the entrance to the A Bar A ranch and see the Hotel Wolf in Saratoga itself.

Fiction aside, I have been reading Isaiah and Jeremiah every morning—sobering reminders of what cultural disintegration and loss of the fear of God eventuate. Along with these meditations, Fr. Thomas Dubay’s Fire Within is without question the best book on prayer I have ever read. Based primarily on the writings of St. Teresa of Avila and St. John of the Cross, it offers lucid, no-nonsense explanations of what we should understand by prayer. What exactly are “attachments,” for example? What does “detachment” mean? Why is it that the life of prayer is not achieved by techniques such as centering or mindfulness but by purity of heart? It was recommended to me by our Byzantine chaplain, Fr. David Anderson, and I cannot recommend it too highly to others. I think of it especially this week, when we learned of the unexpected death of our close friend Fr. Joseph Koterski, godfather of our daughter Ruth. In our youth, when we both taught at the University of St. Thomas in Houston, we shared many a book and many a conversation on Homer and Dante, Shakespeare and Newman. I feel his presence and his friendship now even more intensely.

Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College‘s weekly newsletter.

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