OK, Here's What I'm Reading

In recent weeks I've had several of my Bible Study participants ask me what I'm currently reading. I'm not sure why they'd want to know; after all, my reading habits are likely no more interesting than anyone else's. Anyway, my tastes in books can also be a bit off-putting to some folks. For example, I rarely read modern novels, and by "modern" I mean anything written during the past 30 or 40 years. There are exceptions; indeed, one of the books I'm currently reading would certainly be labeled a modern novel, but I was introduced to other works by the same author and enjoyed them. The reason I avoid most modern fiction? There's far too much of it and I have so little time to sort out the bad from the not-so-bad. There's really very little good. I hate to waste precious time (and inflationary cash) on something not worth reading, so it's safer to wait several decades and ask a few simple questions:

• Is it still in print? This isn't always a good benchmark, but it does limit the field. Multiple printings tell us little about the critics, but a lot about the general public; and I trust the latter more than the former. The public isn't always right, but it's more right than most critics.
• The above leads to another set of criteria: Who likes it and who doesn't? Is it on the "must read" list of someone I know and trust? Or is it on the "hated list" of someone whose opinions I regularly dismiss as foolish? A "yes" answer to both questions is a definite plus.
• Is it a seminal work, one of those truly influential books that has changed the world? Its impact might have been horribly negative, like Mein Kampf or Das Kapital, or very positive, like Augustine's Confessions or Russell Kirk's The Conservative Mind. I read them all, since ignoring them leaves one ill-equipped to cope with their consequences.
• Finally, is it a book I will simply enjoy? For example, Flannery O'Connor's letters, published posthumously as The Habit of Being is one of those books to which I often return. O'Connor was always interesting and usually quite funny. I also enjoy the works of Jane Austen, Gene Wolfe, Alice Thomas Ellis, G. K. Chesterton, V. S. Naipaul, P. G. Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh, Mark Helprin, Maurice Baring, and so many others.

At any given time, I'm usually reading more than one book, all stacked neatly on the table next to my comfortable, squishy easy chair in our living room. Diane thinks this is weird, but it works for me. I simply choose the book that seems to suit my current mood, something that changes often enough. If a book is interesting and well-written, I have no trouble picking up where I left off when I last put it down. And so, here are a few of the books I've recently read or am reading now. 

Winter's Tale, by Mark Helprin (1983). Helprin is a wonderful writer, and I often find myself checking to see what he's published lately. I've read many of his works, novels and short stories -- I especially liked A Soldier of the Great War -- but somehow missed this novel, one of his earlier works. A remarkable love story, touched with fantasy, but for me utterly believable. 

The Seven Storey Mountain, by Thomas Merton (1948). I first read this book when I was a freshman at Georgetown, but that was 60 years ago. As I recall I found it too personal and too spiritual. But what did I expect? After all, it's an autobiography of a man who becomes a Trappist monk. Personal and spiritual? Well, yeah! Right now, I'm smack dab in the middle of it and truly enjoying it. It takes me back to the Church and the world I experienced in my youth. And reading Merton's life, I encounter pieces of my own and my struggles to make my way past many of the same obstacles that confronted the author. Interesting that I didn't recognize any of this during my first reading when I was 18. As college freshmen we were sure we were oh so smart, when in truth we were amazingly stupid.

The Stripping of the Altars 1400-1580, by Eamon Duffy (1992). This absolutely fascinating (and very long) book is another through which I'm now making my way. It's one of those books that has changed how many people, both Catholics and Protestants, understand the role the Catholic Church played in the lives of the English people before and during the early years of Reformation. Duffy focuses on a particular period (1400-1580) and demonstrates that late medieval Catholicism remained the religion of the people throughout. He also writes convincingly of the means by which this truth has been grossly distorted. 

Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, by Walker Percy (1983). With this book, Percy, a medical doctor and successful novelist, offered us a work of non-fiction designed to help you and me discover, as he phrased it, "who you are not and even (an outside chance) who you are." Percy looks intently, and with his own brand of humor, at man and the universe in which God has placed him and tries to make sense of it all by providing us with a cosmic survival guide. I just finished reading the book, enjoyed it immensely, but in truth preferred Percy's novels, especially The Moviegoer and The Second Coming.

The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race and Identity by Douglas Murray (2019). If you're sick and tired of all the wokeness that is continuously streamed into your life and that of your family, then this is the book for you. Douglas Murray, a British political commentator and an editor at The Spectator, takes a hard look at the plague of identity politics, its Marxist roots, and its manifestations regarding race, sexuality, and gender. He also examines how technology and the online culture it has spawned has negatively altered human relationships. It's a wonderfully researched and well-written book. You might consider giving copies to grown children and grandchildren, assuming they can still read and have the attention span necessary to make their way through almost 300 pages.

Here are two others on the subject of Sacred Scripture, books that tell us much about modern Scriptural scholarship.

The Case for Jesus (2016), by Brant Petre. This little book should be read by all Christians who have become confused thanks to the work and commentary of so many of today's New Testament scholars. Brant Petre, a Catholic Scriptural scholar, lays bare the false assumptions and conclusions of the form critics who unfortunately have led so many Christians astray and been the cause much lost faith. Focusing on the Gospels, Petre digs deeply into the original manuscripts, as well as the works of Early Church Fathers, proving, as the Church has always taught, that the Gospels were actually written by Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John and relate the truth about the life and public ministry of our Lord, Jesus Christ. Although written for the layperson, Petre provides detailed references and documentation for anyone who desires to pursue the subject in greater depth.

The Decline and Fall of Sacred Scripture (2021), by Scott Hahn & Benjamin Wiker. Here we have another wonderful book focusing on the truth of Sacred Scripture and the attempts by many scholars to turn the Bible into just another book of tall tales. The authors provide an overview of the degradation of Scriptural scholarship over the centuries, and its negative effects on the faith of millions of Christians. From Marsilius and Ockham in the late medieval period, through the Reformation, and into our modern times, we are shown how Sacred Scripture has been radically attacked by generations of scholars who, in the words of one reviewer, left "an incoherent mess" in their wake. 

Doors in the Walls of the World, by Peter Kreeft (2018). I've been reading Peter Kreeft for decades and he never disappoints. This little book is no exception. Its subtitle, Signs of Transcendence in the Human Story, is a perfect description of its content. Although barely 125 pages, it took me several evenings to make my way through it. Almost every page left me with something to think about more deeply and I found myself questioning my own habits of thought. Here's just one example, from p. 43: 

"Divine design is either nothing or everything; and if it is everything, then it extends even to randomness and apparent meaninglessness, to the puzzling presence of evil and the absence of scientific proofs. The hypothesis of faith may not be provable, but it is believable. The doors in the walls of the world may be only loose threads, but they are there."

Because I've long accepted God's omniscience and omnipotence, I had never believed in mere coincidence. Here Kreeft extends this to include a rational disbelief in both randomness and meaninglessness. It's a wonderful book.

And that's enough. Blessings and God's peace...

A Prophecy

One look at the titles in my home library and you would notice, with a few exceptions, most of the fiction was written by writers who are no longer with us. The exceptions include such novelists as Mark Helprin, Gene Wolfe, Dean Koontz, V. S. Naipaul, Michael D. O'Brien, and a few others. I enjoy the work of authors who write well, who accept the reality of objective truth, and who believe in what T. S. Eliot called the "permanent things" that make us human beings what we are and lead us to what we are destined to become. You will find few atheists or relativists among the novelists residing in my modest library. I hear enough from them in the popular media.

Jane Austen and The Cottage in Chawton, Hampshire

I've written often of my fondness for that early nineteenth-century moral theologian, Jane Austen, a woman so unlike those dark, brooding Brontes. And I continue to enjoy and reread the work of Charles Dickens, Herman Melville, and Anthony Trollope. In truth, these days I don't read Trollope but instead listen to him during my early morning walks, thanks to the good folks at audible.com and the Apple engineers who made my iPhone. Trollope is really quite listenable. And then there are the writers whose stories and novels make me laugh again and again, authors like P. G. Wodehouse (1881-1975) and H. H. Munro (aka, Saki, 1870-1916). I've also come to enjoy the somewhat strange novels of the late Alice Thomas Ellis (1932-2005) and the ghostly stories of Russell Kirk (1918-1994). I remember my surprise when I learned that Kirk, one of the intellectual fathers of the American conservative movement, also wrote these wonderfully spooky tales. 

A Young Mackenzie

All of this talk of authors and books has brought me to Compton Mackenzie (1883-1972), another writer in whose works I delight. I first encountered him about 30 years ago when I picked up a used copy of his farcical novel, The Monarch of the Glen, a book I thoroughly enjoyed. Since then I've probably read a dozen of his novels. But one day, while browsing in the aisles of my favorite Cape Cod bookstore -- Parnassus Books -- I picked up a copy of Volume 3 of Mackenzie's My Life and Times. I soon discovered that his autobiography was a massive work, filling ten volumes -- yes, that's right, ten! Each volume covers an "octave," eight years of this man's remarkable life. 

Since reading that third "octave", I have searched for and purchased the other nine volumes and, believe me, few lives are more interesting than Mackenzie's. He knew everyone from Kaiser Wilhelm to Winston Churchill, from T. E. Lawrence to D. H. Lawrence, from William Faulkner to Lawrence Olivier. The child of a theatrical family, Mackenzie graduated from Oxford, was a lifelong Scottish nationalist, converted to Catholicism, and developed a deep distrust of invasive government. He also liked cats, a odd trait which I can overlook.

Last evening, while reading Volume 8, which covers the war years (1939 to 1946), I came across something Mackenzie had written late in 1940. This was a most difficult time for the British. In 1939 Stalin and Hitler had signed the Molotov-Ribbentrop non-aggression pact, an agreement conceived in hell, one that would last until broken by Hitler in mid-1941. It would be well over a year before the United States entered the war after the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941. At the time Mackenzie was writing, Britain stood virtually alone against the most powerful army the world had ever seen. And that army had just blitz-krieged its way through France and the Low Countries forcing the British troops and a contingent of allied forces to evacuate at Dunkirk. Were it not an island nation, Britain too would have fallen, probably quickly.

Mackenzie's comments were published as the forward to a volume designed to raise money for a charity called the War Orphans Fund. Given that they were written almost 80 years ago, in the early years of World War Two, they are both insightful and prophetic. I have included some excerpts here.

"If would be more comfortable to believe that this great war was merely the result of the last Great War. We might then feel fairly certain of achieving a real peace, for we have learnt a lesson and are in the mood to benefit by it. If this war is part of an evolutionary struggle, whatever the result we cannot hope to see the world securely re-established, because our victory must in time be challenged again but our defeat would be final, at any rate for too long a period to make speculation worth while. 

"I believe that we may soon be witnessing the death agony of that habit of thought and system of economy which is too loosely called capitalism, too loosely as it seems to me because it overstresses the economic aspect and I am not a dialectical materialist who can accept Marx's theory that man's circumstance is entirely determined by this. I regard our period as the beginning of the reaction against the trend that was given to Western development by the Renaissance and the Reformation and the discovery of America, which led to an exaggerated conception of the rights of the individual and an insufficient appreciation of his duties. The process has been accelerated by the abuse of mechanical progress from printing to flying, by the corruption of the ideal of popular education, by the substitution of humanitarian theory for religious practice, by the continually growing power of money, and by the encouragement of an illusory freedom of thought at the cost of real freedom of action. The result has been that never in recorded history was the ordinary man so completely at the mercy of his environment as he is today. The liberty that seemed within his grasp at the beginning of the fifteenth century is now farther away than ever, and is likely to recede still farther as long as man elects to be the slave of self rather than the servant of God."

At this point Mackenzie refers to a drawing of the Holy Family fleeing into Egypt and writes:

"They too were refugees...but they are refugees at this moment. What that Holy Family stood for mankind is even now being driven more brutally into the desert by material progress than ever by Herod's violence...

"After the Great War of 1914-1918 people sat back and declared that another great war would mean the end of civilization. Pamphlets were published to warn the world what appalling weapons and poisons would obliterate humanity. Pacifism was feverishly preached on the text that war was too horrible; its missionaries forgot that only experience teaches and that a younger generation would be excited but not warned by books like All Quiet on the Western Front. Meanwhile for two fatal decades audiences sought a deliberate thrill from gangster films and plays and readers procured themselves a kick from tough novels.

"And then suddenly in September 1938 audiences and readers woke up to the fact that the thrills and kicks they had been administering to themselves, thrills and kicks more pernicious to moral stamina than any hashish or cocaine could supply, were expressions of such a zeitgeist as not even the far-sighted Goethe discerned upon the wing...

"In one last desperate effort to travel out of the respectable past into the disreputable present Neville Chamberlain flew to Berchtesgaden to allay the whispers of politicians who had betrayed their country out of laziness because it was easier not to disturb an electorate with warnings of a storm which after all might not break. To politicians willing to betray their country out of laziness it did not seem a grave offense to betray what Mr. Chamberlain called a 'remote country' like Czechoslovakia out of cowardice. Not that such cowardice was not immediately justified, let it be quickly said; war was impossible for Britain and France. Neither was ready..."

Neville Chamberlain and Adolph Hitler in Munich

Mackenzie goes on to address the muddled thinking of both the Left and the Right in the years leading up to the war, and then writes the following:

"The seat of the trouble was that confused thinking which led to the failure to recognize that Fascism and National Socialism were only different expressions of the same basic evolutionary drive as inspired Communism. Black ants or red ants, they are both ants. The initials of Liberté, Egalité and Fraternité provide the first three letters for the LEFT, and T stands for Totalitarianism...

"The Communist secure in a positive material creed declares the condition of Europe to be evidence that the death agony of capitalism has begun. The Catholic equally secure in a positive creed which transcends materialism .declared the condition of Europe to be the logical result of turning aside from the way of life God Himself indicated when He was Man..."

Interesting stuff by a man who served actively on foreign soil in British Intelligence during World War One. I look forward to reading more of his thoughts as he describes life during the war years.

Mackenzie who wrote upwards of 100 books, also penned a four-volume memoir of those years as an intelligence officer in and near Greece during Word War One -- something else to search for...

God's Peace, the only True Peace...

Homily: Monday of Holy Week

Readings: Is 42:1-7; Ps 27; Jn 12:1-11
__________________________________

Mark Helprin is perhaps my favorite modern novelist, a writer whose stories not only plumb the depths of the human condition, but also soar to the heights of the divine image within humanity.

Page from the Daianu

This week I happened to read one of his essays in which Helprin, a Jew, mentions a song that is a part of the Passover service. The song, called "Daianu," means "sufficient" or "it was enough for us." In the song God is thanked for His gifts, but as the song progresses, each verse eliminates these gifts until only the gift of life itself is left. At the end we're confronted only by the existence of God; and this is enough. Yes, God's existence is sufficient for us.

Helprin states that, "If one thinks that way, one can pass any test." Amen.

As I read those words the other evening my thoughts turned to today's Gospel passage, an incident in which we encounter two very different people, two very different attitudes about God, about Jesus Christ, about life itself. These two - Mary of Bethany and Judas - offer us a remarkable contrast.

The timing, of course, is crucial, for it takes place six days before the Passover, six days before Jesus sacrifices His life for us on the Cross at Calvary, six days before His lifeless body is placed in the tomb.

And so Mary, in the house of her brother, Lazarus, kneels before her Savior and pours expensive perfumed unguent all over the feet of Jesus, filling the house with its fragrance. She then dries His feet with her hair - all done, as Jesus reminds us, in anticipation of His burial.

Mary says nothing, but in her actions we can hear the words of today's Psalm:

"The Lord is my light and my salvation; whom should I fear?" [Ps 27:1]

For Mary, just the presence of her Savior is sufficient, and it calls her to worship Him fearlessly and lavishly. Yes, His presence is more than enough for Mary.

Indeed, this is the only anointing Jesus' body will receive; for a week later, on that Resurrection morning, the women who carry their oils to His tomb will find it empty.

But the Gospel passage doesn't stop there, does it? Another is present: Judas Iscariot. He confronts and criticizes Mary for her extravagance. Like all materialists, Judas is spiritually blind, and in a fit of sheer hypocrisy, asks aloud:

"Why was this oil not sold for three hundred days' wages and given to the poor?" [Jn 12:5]

This, John tells us, comes from a man who would have stolen the funds for his own use. Is it any surprise that Judas will trade the life of Jesus for a handful of silver coins?

Jesus responds to Judas by defending Mary. For Jesus, Mary's action is nothing less than a sign of her great love for Him. But then He adds:

"You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me" [Jn 12:8].

This is no derisive comment by Jesus. He's not telling us to ignore the poor. On the contrary, He simply reminds us that only those who with a deep love for God can extend that love to the poor and to all those in need. 

Sadly, Judas does not understand this. Indeed, he is already forming his plan, and through his treachery will bring about Jesus' death. Mary anoints Jesus for His burial, a burial that will be brought about by the betrayal of the apostle. The betrayal is deliberate. We don't really know his motives, but it was still a cold and calculated act.

Later John tells us that Satan entered into Judas when he rejected Jesus. That's what Satan does, brothers and sisters, but only if we let him. He twists love and turns it into hate. He turns holiness into pride, discipline into cruelty, affection into complacency, trust into despair.

And, believe me, Satan is active in our world today, a world filled with threats that lead so many to fear, and from fear to despair. But fear is nothing but the absence of faith.

If you and I, like the Jew at Passover, or like Mary at the feet of Jesus, if we can express our thankfulness for God's gift of life, for the simple fact of His loving, forgiving existence, then "we can pass any test."

Oh, yes, brothers and sisters, we are all sinners. We all betray the Lord. But what kind of betrayers, what kind of sinners are we? Are we like Mary who turns to her merciful Lord in abundant love or are we like Judas who can only despair, only hate himself and the One who loves him?
____________________

Mark Helprin, "Falling into Eternity", First Things, March 2017; p.23

My Holiday Reading

The table beside my living room easy chair is always weighed down with, in Dear Diane's words, "an unsightly pile of books." This "pile" consists of the books I'm currently reading and its size allows me to select a book based on my mood or interest at any given time. That's another nice thing about being retired: I am free to read whatever I like. But every year, for some reason, I set aside a few special books to read during the period between Thanksgiving and the new year. I'm not sure why I do this unless it's a holdover from my school days when I read strictly for pleasure during the Christmas vacation.

Because we sometimes travel during this holiday season, or play host to children and grandchildren, I usually limit my holiday reading to only three or four books. But this year, because we were at home most of the time and had guests only for a few days, I expanded my list slightly. I enjoyed every last one of the books I read this year, so it seemed only right that I should include them here.

Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives, by Pope Benedict XVI, Image, NY, 2012.

This, the third and final volume of Pope Benedict's study of Jesus' life, is a marvelous little book (132 pages). Reminiscent of Jean Daniélou's 1967 book, The Infancy Narratives (a rather rare book which I also recommend if you can locate a copy), it focuses solely on the gospel stories of Jesus' infancy and childhood and is filled with wonderful insights that I had never before encountered. I especially enjoyed his commentary on Mary's unique role in the Incarnation. For example, during his discussion of the archangel Gabriel's annunciation to Mary, Pope Benedict writes:

I consider it important to focus also on the final sentence of Luke's annunciation narrative: "And the angel departed from her" [Lk 1:38]. The great hour of Mary's encounter with God's messenger -- in which her whole life is changed -- comes to an end, and she remains there alone, with the task that truly surpasses all human capacity. There are no angels standing round her. She must continue along the path that leads through many dark moments -- from Joseph's dismay at her pregnancy to the moment when Jesus is said to be out of his mind [cf. Mk 3:21; Jn 10:20] , right up to the night of the Cross [p. 37].

Later in his commentary on the journey of the wise men from the East, the pope briefly addresses these visitors and their wisdom:

The men of whom Matthew speaks were not just astronomers. They were "wise." They represent the inner dynamic of religion toward self-transcendence, which involves a search for truth, a search for the true God and hence"philosophy" in the original sense of the word. Wisdom, then, serves to purify the message of "science": the rationality of that message doesnot remain at the level of intellectual knowledge, but seeks understanding in its fullness, and so raises reason to its loftiestpossibilities [p. 95].

Although I purposely read this book during the first week of Advent, it is fitting reading for any time of the year. I ended up reading it twice, once rather quickly and the second time much more slowly.

Beginning at Jerusalem: Five Reflections of the History of the Church, by Glenn W. Olsen, Ignatius, San Francisco, 2004.

Dr. Olsen, a Professor of History at the University of Utah, has provided the general reader -- that includes folks like me -- with a fascinating study of the Church as it made its way through five key periods of its history: early Christianity; early medieval times; high middle ages; the confusing time from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment; and modern times.

I was particularly impressed by Dr. Olsen's discussion of the early Church and its appreciation of the central doctrines of Christianity, an appreciation sorely lacking among many Christians today. The following excerpt highlights this concern:

Many contemporary assumptions make it very difficult to appreciate the central Christian doctrines of the Trinity, original sin, redemption through the saving act of Christ, baptism, the Eucharist, and the communion of saints. In each case the individualism of a noncontemplative society stands between us and the appropriation of these doctrines. Our society teaches us that the individual is its basic unit, and we have become so used to the assumption that the individual is a kind of ultimate reality, autonomous and atomistic, that we have become psychologically removed from earlier points of view, which always saw the individual as defined by something larger, a family, a tribe, or city, by being born into some form of relationship [p. 35].

The book is filled with similar insights, each encouraging today's Christian to accept and learn from both the wisdom and the errors of those who preceded us. Here, for example, Dr. Olsen expands on this theme by providing us with another insight particularly valuable for today's married couples:

For him [Aristotle] as many ancients, there is a sense in which "you are me", and "I am you." The ancient Christians expressed this in the idea that the married couple must seek each other's salvation, that likely they would find salvation together or not at all [p. 37].

This is something I've stressed in marriage preparation programs over the years. Inevitably when I tell the engaged couple that each is at least partly responsible for the other's salvation, it usually results in looks of mild surprise. And when they question this, I just refer them to Jesus' words in which He stressed particularly that with marriage the two are now one:

But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, no human being must separate [Mk 10:6-9].

If you would normally prefer a visit to the dentist to reading a book on Church history, this book should change your mind. It's well-written and tells an exciting and interesting story. But more importantly the author constantly brings the reality of the past into our present lives, showing us how the Church, although she develops to meet the challenges of history, also retains her essence, the unchanging and essential doctrines revealed through Jesus Christ and the Apostles.

Ancestral Shadows, by Russell Kirk, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 2004.

For many, the late Russell Kirk is one of the fathers of the modern American conservative movement. He certainly had a significant impact on my thinking from the moment my father handed me a copy of his book, The Conservative Mind, back in 1961 during my senior year in high school. Kirk simply makes so much sense. As a result my home library is littered with his books. But what a lot of folks -- even many of his most ardent fans -- don't know is that he was also a writer of fiction, but not just any old fiction. No, Russell Kirk wrote ghost stories, and wonderful stories they are, brimming over with moral truths and reminders of the "permanent things" that must be preserved if we are to preserve our humanity.

This anthology includes 19 stories that Kirk wrote and published over his long (but not long enough) career as a man of letters. Kirk, who converted to Catholicism in mid-life, found unique and subtle ways to inject his theological and philosophic ideas into his stories, in which evil is destroyed and good conquers.

Even if you've never liked spooky, supernatural stories, even if you're a died-in-the-wool liberal, you'll still love these stories. Read them...preferably at night.

Toward the Gleam, by T. M. Doran, Ignatius, San Francisco, 2011.

This novel was perfect reading for the holiday season. I can't tell you too much about it without spoiling the heart of the story. Like a good mystery, it's one of those books where half the fun is in deciphering the clues and uncovering the true identity of the characters.

Set in England between the two world wars, the novel tells the story of a professor, a philologist, who finds a beautifully crafted box containing a mysterious manuscript written in an unknown language. This discovery leads him to a lifelong quest to decipher the manuscript and understand its implications, a quest that introduces him to a steady stream of interesting characters. His discovery, however, also attracts the attention of another whose intentions are not quite so benign and may actually threaten the professor and those close to him.

Let me say only that you too will enjoy this novel if, like me, you are a Tolkien and a Chesterton fan. A fun book.

A Soldier of the Great War, by Mark Helprin, Harcourt, New York, 1991.

For some unknown reason I had never read a book by Mark Helprin...until now. I had meant to, but just never got around to it. In fact, I actually checked this book out of a local library on Cape Cod back in the mid-nineties, but work or other seemingly important demands -- the stuff of daily life -- got in the way and I had to return it or pay the fine. After that the book and its author slipped into one of those rarely accessible corners of my mind. And then a few months ago I came across a review of one of Helprin's recent books and was reminded of my earlier failure. So I logged onto Amazon.com and ordered A Soldier of the Great War. Two days later it was in my hands and I began to read.

It's not a short book -- 860 pages -- but I hated for it to end. Indeed, I can think of no greater praise for any novel than the reader's desire for more.

Helprin has written a remarkable story, the story of a life that witnessed and experienced tragedy and joy, cowardice and heroism, brutality and mercy, love and hate, loss and gain. It reveals the life of a man, Alessandro Giuliani, who spent several long and perilous years as an Italian soldier in World War I, that horrific, senseless and prophetic war that gave us the twentieth century and all of its man-made calamities. It's a story told by its hero many years later to a young illiterate worker whom he encounters by chance along the road outside Rome. In the telling the old man comes to terms with his remarkable life and the young man comes to an awakening of what life and love are really all about.

This is a book I will read again some day.

I read two other books during this Advent and Christmas season, but it's late and I need my sleep. I will, therefore, simply list them along with a brief comment or two. They, too, are well worth reading.

The Fortunes of Permanence: Culture and Anarchy in an Age of Amnesia, by Roger Kimball, St. Augustine's Press, South Bend, 2012.

Roger Kimball, editor and published of one of my favorite journals, The New Criterion, offers us a collection of wonderful essays on Western culture and the threats it faces.

The First Thousand Years, by Robert Louis Wilken, Yale, New Haven, 2012.

In this, another book on Church history, Dr. Wilken introduces us to the revolution that was Christianity during its first 1,000 years. If you've never read Dr.Wilken, this book would certainly be a good place to start.

Off to bed...pax et bonum...