Essays,  Novels

Quick takes: capsule reviews of recent reads

Who says you can’t teach an old dog new tricks? For years, I’ve been a one-book-at-a-time reader. But lately, this has changed. I seem to have multiple reads going all the time, and though it lengthens the time it takes to finish a given book, it doesn’t result in failing to finish anymore.

At the moment, I’m reading Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey; A Patriot’s History of the United States; C.S. Lewis’s collection of excerpts from George MacDonald; and The Magnolia Story (Chip and Joanna Gaines). I’ve fallen by the wayside (for now, at least) on Sarah Clarkson’s Caught Up in a Story.

Here are a few I/we have finished recently around here. YA books dominate, as they often do when I feel run-aground by my inexplicable penchant for picking up “good for you” books and need something to jump-start reading pleasure again:

The View from Saturday (E.L. Koningsburg). This has been a read-aloud that we completed today at lunch. I really enjoyed Koningsburg’s dry wit in this story about a 6th grade academic team competing in the state finals. Younger Daughter really enjoyed the humor as well. Older Daughter commented that she liked the structure, which intersperses the personal histories of the characters between scenes from the team’s competitive performances — a structure that mimics how someone who knew the characters would experience the competition as a member of the audience.

The Shining Company (Rosemary Sutcliff): A devastating depiction of a 6th century Celtic battle against the Saxons. The siege is memorialized in the medieval Welsh poem  The Gododdin, and Rosemary Sutcliff imagined her way back to the year before the battle, as well as its aftermath. Prospero, the novel’s narrator, captures for us the feel of the time and many details of the world around him both in nature and human character. I had no idea what the book was about when I first picked it up; I had seen the title somewhere, and it caught my fancy. It was an excellent, very affecting novel.

Fearfully and Wonderfully Made (Philip Yancey): This read-aloud took ages for us to get through, and in the end I felt somehow disappointed. I wanted to like it, and I feel obligated to. Yet. . . I didn’t. I chose it thinking it would supply a Christian perspective on the body, providing some interpretive context for biology study and health. But mostly it uses analogies to show how the human body helps to show dynamics of the Church. Along with the wonder over God’s creative work, there were callous references to drawers full of dead animals used as “specimens,” living animals used for experimentation, and human bones of the long-dead used for research. I found the juxtaposition odd and unpleasant.

The Outsiders  (S.E. Hinton). I revisited this for the first time since 9th grade, remembering little except the basic outlines, and that I liked it back then. I liked it this time as well. Hailed as the book that inaugurated YA fiction as something deeper and more gritty, this tale made me think of the radical changes in culture over the last 50 years. (I had a similar feeling reading My Side of the Mountain.) When the book was written, teens on both sides of the track were “free range,” seemingly existing in a world apart from adult influence (or care). The warfare between “Greasers” and “Socs” seems tame on the one hand (given our age of shootings, terror and gang violence), but high stakes nevertheless. This is class warfare through teenaged eyes in a world where both sides are left alone to battle it out. The language is tame enough — greasers say things like “glory” and “golly,” for example — that the 1982 movie, which I watched to complete the experience, apparently felt should be updated to a harsher glossary. But there is something more elemental about the book’s concerns than is now common in our insulated and digitized age.

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