What I’m Reading

Someone asked me the other day what I’m reading. I get asked this every once in a while. I usually shrug my shoulders and try to remember, mainly because it takes me just as long to read a book as write one, and I often forget. Another problem is that I read multiple books at the same time. Well, not exactly, but I’m in the habit of starting books that interest me without finishing them before I move on to another one. Right now, I am working on five. Some are high fiber and take a while to digest. Others–while not exactly fast food–are easier. Those are the ones in English.

The books are Barbara Tuchman’s excellent history, The Proud Tower: A Portrait of the World Before the War, 1890-1914 (1962); Whittaker Chambers, Witness: A True Story of Soviet Spies in America and the Trial That Captivated the Nation (1952); Roberto De Mattei, Pio V: Storia Di Un Papa Santo (2021); Antonin Gilbert Sertillanges, La Vie Intellectuelle, Son Esprit, Ses Conditions, Ses Méthodes (1921); and Sheldon Vanauken, A Severe Mercy, A Story of Faith, Tragedy, and Triumph (1977).

The Chambers account of the Alger Hiss trial is a beautifully written memoir not just of the trial but of Chambers’ experience with the underground movement in the American Communist Party. Eventually, he renounced allegiance to the Soviet Union and became a Christian (see “A Third Ending”). Pius V by De Mattei is a historical account of one of the most influential pontificates in the Roman Catholic Church with stories of the people and events that shaped the Reformation, Counter-Reformation, and conflict with Islam throughout the sixteenth century. Some of it, touching on forms of early modern torture, is grisly.

Admittedly, I first saw Sertillanges’ The Intellectual Life in English but thought I could read it in the original French. After all, I read Don Quixote in Spanish. What could go wrong? It’s been a grinding process in which I skip over words and make up my own translations based on what I remember from high school French and college courses on people like Molière. It’s not exactly enjoyable, which is why I am considering an online French course for help. Slogging through Martin Buber’s I and Thou (1923) in German was easier, although I’ll never try that again, either. It was big in Berkeley in the sixties.

I gave up on Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857). The introduction of the critical edition alone was sixty pages. I guess you could say I don’t read for enjoyment but to overcome a struggle. What struggle is that? The eternal struggle over myself. Still, I’m not foolish enough to try to learn Russian so I can read Dostoyevsky in the original. I’m not a masochist. Reading the psalms in Latin, while not the original Hebrew or later Aramaic translations, is still worthwhile spiritually. And Latin, being a dead language, is easier to study. Dead languages do not change despite neologisms like computatrum for computer. It makes you want to throw a tantrum, doesn’t it?

Vanauken’s A Severe Mercy is a memoir of his marriage to Jean Davy and his conversion to Christianity through his friendship at Oxford with C.S. Lewis. It is a tender tribute to his wife, who became ill and died in 1955, five years before Lewis’ own wife, Joy Davidman, died. Lewis commemorated his wife in A Grief Observed (1961). I count A Severe Mercy as one of the best memoirs or autobiographies I have read, along with Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759-1767), Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain (1948), and Chambers’ Witness.

As long as we’re on reading lists, I should add Svetlana Alexievich’s Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War (1989). Alexievich won a Nobel Prize in 2015 for her writing on “suffering and courage.” I should also add, although reluctantly, Bill James’ The Man from the Train (2017), which is a disturbing account of an early twentieth-century serial killer. Within the past year, I’ve read or picked up again Malachi Martin’s The Jesuits (1987) and Windswept House (1996), James Cardinal Gibbons’ The Faith of Our Fathers (2015), Joyce Lee Malcolm’s The Tragedy of Benedict Arnold: An American Life (2018), and Lin Yutang’s The Importance of Living (1937).

Speaking of “picked up,” I always order printed books, usually paperbacks but not always. If the hardcover is available and cheap enough, I’ll buy it. I avoid PDFs and digital versions the same way I avoid anything that promises to transform my life in five easy steps. I get right into the book, riffling its pages and smelling the spine as well as any photos or illustrations. Books have got to smell right before I take them to bed with me at night. It’s a full sensory experience, this reading business.

As you can tell, it’s a pretty eclectic collection without concern for style or genre. I don’t mind reading things that aren’t trending, but neither do I go out of my way to be contrary. I just like what I like. I do have a process, though. It consists of following up on themes or books mentioned in my current reading. For instance, Pius V is heavily documented, so I follow up some of the citations, which leads me to other books. Witness was the same way. That’s how I found Severe Mercy. Think of it as forensic reading or, to paraphrase Robert Frost, way leading on to way.

Now, reader, do it your way.

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