Category: books (Page 6 of 7)

the internet is such a strange and glorious place. where else could a little term paper and my decision to drop out of grad school stir up passions amongst a bunch of strangers.

seems my library search got picked up on lisnews.com and several folks decided to weigh in.

it’s not about the money, silly. it’s about my time, and with whom I spend it.

as Gillian Welch once sung it:

never minded working hard -- it's who I'm workin' for

The hot buzz book in lefty circles right now, Thomas Frank offers a provocative theory on why many American conservatives vote against their own economic interests. He re-frames the current political clash as a struggle between classes, over the rightful claim to who is the authentic American.

He doesn’t spend enough time looking at the psyche of the American evangelical, who he caricatures accurately enough but doesn’t understand internally. The rest of his book is spot on: entertaining, insightful, and I want to re-read it with a notebook in hand.

I am a long-time fan of Shusaku Endo, the Japanese writer. I have read (I think) nearly all of his books available in English translation. I discovered this book of short stories during my recent adventure at the St Paul Public Library.

If you have read Silence or any of the other Endo novels, you might find this collection interesting. He used many of the short stories (and, to be accurate, personal essays) as exercises for working out many of the characters that appear in other novels.

If you read one Endo novel, I’d recommend Silence or Deep River.

If your tastes run more to nonfiction, I highly recommend his A Life of Jesus, one of the most thoughtful and moving retellings of the Christian story that I have read. Note: in The Final Martyrs is an essay talking about the experience of writing Life and he mentions that he re-wrote it, feeling very dis-satisfied with the original edition. I’d like to read both editions now, to see if I can understand his feelings.

I finished Frank’s Kansas much quicker than I expected (though it bears a more thorough re-read) and picked up Chaim Potok’s novel from my in-laws’ shelf. It got me thinking about the complicated feelings America has toward the Jews who live here and in Israel, and the horrific events of the Shoah.

On that thread, I highly recommend James Carroll’s Constantine’s Sword. I read it a couple summers ago and was all fired up to start a grad program in ancient Jewish studies…till my lack of ancient Hebrew finally got in my way. A piercing history of the Church and the Jews. There are lots of holes in his academic theories, but they are very interesting holes, and his case is very compelling.

I’m a reader: magazines, newspapers, cereal boxes, flyers. But I love books. Love the heft of them, the smell of them. Old hardcovers with the ragged paper edges; silky trade paperbacks, where the silkiness seems to rub off on my fingers; cheap mass markets I buy at the airport to divert me from the un-reality of jetting across the globe.

Love those books. Here’s what I’ve been reading lately.