Virgil

The Power and the Glory, a novel by Graham Greene.
“Revelation,” a short story by Flannery O’Connor.
“In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,” a short story by William H. Gass.
“New York Nite Club—,“ a short story by Jack Kerouac.
Deuteronomy, a book from the Old Testament, KJV translation.
“Nature” (1836), an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
As I Lay Dying, a novel by William Faulkner.
“The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber,” a short story by Ernest Hemingway.
“Old Man at the Bridge,” a short story by Ernest Hemingway.
“Everything That Rises Must Converge,” a short story by Flannery O’Connor.
“A Good Man is Hard to Find,” a short story by Flannery O’Connor.
“Parker’s Back,” a short story by Flannery O’Connor.
The Gothic Cathedral, a nonfiction work by Christopher Wilson.
“The Other,” a short story by Jorge Luis Borges.
“What Men Live By,” a short story by Leo Tolstoy.
“The Lottery,” a short story by Shirley Jackson.
“The Divinity School Address,” an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
Kafka on the Shore, a novel by Haruki Murakami.
“The Traveler,” a short story by Wallace Stegner.
“Sonny’s Blues,” a short story by James Baldwin.
“Lips to Lips,” a short story by Vladimir Nabokov.
“A & P,” a short story by John Updike.
The Book of Joshua, a book from the Old Testament, KJV translation.
“Cathedral,” a short story by Raymond Carver.
“The Fat Girl,” a short story by Andre Dubus.
Silence, a novel by Shusaku Endo.
“Lions, Harts, Leaping Does,” a short story by J.F. Powers.
The Screwtape Letters, a novel by C. S. Lewis.
“Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
“Killings,” a short story by Andre Dubus.
“A Doctor’s Visit,” a short story by Anton Chekhov.
“The Swimmer,” a short story by John Cheever.
“The American Scholar,” an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
The Book of Judges, a book from the Old Testament, KJV translation.
Victory, a novel by Joseph Conrad.
The Book of Ruth, a book from the Old Testament, KJV translation.
Things Fall Apart, a novel by Chinua Achebe.
“The Willows,” a short story by Algernon Blackwood.
Jesus and the Jewish Roots of the Eucharist, a non-fiction work by Brant Pitre.
“Self-Reliance,” an essay by Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“Joy,” a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer.
The Gospel According to Mark, KJV & NAB translations.
For the Unfallen, a collection of poetry by Geoffrey Hill.
“A Respectable Woman,” a short story by Kate Chopin.
The House of the Seven Gables, a novel by Nathaniel Hawthorne.
“Civil Disobedience” [or “Resistance to Civil Government”], an essay by Henry David Thoreau.
“The Making of a New Yorker,” a short story by O. Henry.
“All’s Well That Ends Well,” a play by William Shakespeare.
The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric, a nonfiction work by Sister Miriam Joseph and Marguerite McGlinn.


I’m actually surprised at how much I read this year, especially given that Matthew takes up so much of my time.

I had planned to read through the American Transcendentalists: Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman; and then contrast them with the Anti Transcendentalists: Hawthorne, Melville, and possibly Poe. I had wanted to read at least six of Emerson’s essays, but to be honest, though the prose soars at times, I found him rather dull. Transcendentalism may have been a cutting edge movement in its day (really it’s just a reformulation of Wordsworth’s Romanticism), it’s rather hackneyed by today’s standards if you ask me. So I settled with only four of Emerson’s essays. I had planned to read Thoreau’s A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, and I thought I owned the book, but apparently I don’t. Given also I decided I didn’t have time the time for a book long work, I settled for just an essay. To call “Civil Disobedience” just an essay is a profound understatement. It is probably one of the most important essays of the last two hundred years. Both Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr. derived their non-violent resistance from it. I regret I had not read that before, and frankly it’s a work with an demonstrably Conservative outlook. It’s first three sentences articulate the Conservative skepticism of endowing power to a centralized government: “I heartily accept the motto, ‘That government is best which governs least’; and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe—‘That government is best which governs not at all’; and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient…” And he doesn’t soften that position anywhere. Who knew that Thoreau, the god of environmentalism, was such a Conservative. I had wanted to read something other than Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter or his short stories, so on a recommendation I took up The House of the Seven Gables. I was not disappointed, though it has a very 19th century slow start. But it did all hold together with a mastery of plotting. The gothic feel of the novel and the themes of the past coming to haunt the present made me label the novel as proto-Faulkner. I do think Faulkner learned something from it. I never got to Whitman’s Leaves of Grass or Melville’s Moby Dick, so I will start the year with them.

I had planned to read more non-fiction works this year, and failed. I had planned to read a couple of books on Gothic Cathedrals, one on the architecture and one from their engineering perspective. The book listed (by Christopher Wilson) is one on the architecture, but I don’t recommend it. While I learned from it, it’s not written for a layman. But that wasn’t even the problem. It wasn’t that he was speaking over my head (I looked up any term I didn’t understand); it always felt he was speaking around me. The author never seemed to speak to me. I did learn quite bit from other places – encyclopedias, a documentary, and the internet. It’s a rich subject, though. I never got to the second book. I read one theological book (Jewish Roots of the Eucharist), and I enjoyed that so much I intend to start a new tradition of one such book per year. The other nonfiction works that I never got to were on the subject of “complexity” (which I feel will give insight into some of my work projects) and a history of mathematics. I had intended to read them at work in spare moments, since the subjects expand on engineering. I got through fifty pages of one book on complexity and that’s it. I didn’t list it. I’ve had a very busy year at work in addition to Matthew at home. I had also wanted to learn Latin, and did that for about two weeks. That effort was just plain foolhardy.

I made progress on long standing goals. I must have read over a couple of hundred pages through the Bible (Deuteronomy, Joshua, Judges, Ruth, and Mark’s Gospel). The Book of Ruth is a fine little read, a short story actually, and I was surprised to find how finely crafted Mark’s Gospel is. I had read it before, but this time I noticed (I had read commentary that pointed this out) the scenes are spliced together with integrated meaning. While there is an overarching narrative progression, the internal scenes are not necessarily linear with time, and the juxtapositions and the repetitions that Mark creates just flower with meaning. I think Mark’s Gospel is most akin to complex modern storytelling. Other long standing goals were getting through Hemingway’s short stories and Shakespeare’s plays. “All’s Well That Ends Well” is a minor play. With it I have now read 26 of the Bard’s 36 plays. Shakespeare’s minor plays are better than most major plays by other authors. I enjoyed this, though the ending was not credible. Like all plays one needs to see it acted out and that would be the true test of credibility. “All’s Well” is one of his “problem plays,” not a tragedy though not quite a comedy, and unlike the other problem plays, “Measure for Measure” and “Troilus and Cressida,” I don’t think Shakespeare finds a cohesive way here to cobble together the two. Actually I don’t really feel that the problem plays are a combination of comic and tragic. My insight, take it for what it’s worth, is that the problem plays stand in contrast to the idealism within both the comic and tragic plays. Good values always are clear and win out in both the comic and tragic, but in the problem plays it’s not clear what good actually is, and so the resolution of a muddy value is muddy as well.

I read eight novels throughout the year and twenty-six short stories. There were no duds in the novels I read, though some were only average. I’m not exactly sure why I started reading Greene’s The Power and the Glory at the beginning of the year; I think it was just staring at me from the bookshelf. It turned out to be a fantastic read. For several years I had tried to read As I Lay Dying and would stop within ten pages. Sometimes – no, many times - a Faulkner novel is hard to grasp at the beginning. This time I just got a list of the characters (each very short chapter is told from a different character’s point of view) and kept a cheat sheet as to who they were. It helped and so I was soon loving it. It’s one of those you wish would never end. You get to know the characters inside out and are engaged with their psychology. It’s definitely one of the great Faulkner novels. I started reading Kafka on the Shore first because I had it and had wanted to read Murakami and second because of being in sympathy with the Japanese people after that horrible earthquake. It’s not a great novel, average at best, but it does have a couple of really good comic scenes and one gut wrenching scene. Not being overwhelmed and still wanting to read a solid work from a Japanese author, after a bit of research I hit upon Shusaku Endo and in particular his greatest achievement Silence. Besides his rating as a great Japanese novelist, what caught my attention was that Endo was a Catholic, a Japanese Catholic, which I found odd. And I found a statement by Graham Greene that Silence was the greatest Catholic novel ever written. With that I had to read it and I was overwhelmed. It’s a historical novel set in 17th century in a world of Catholic missionaries and Japanese persecutions. It took a little bit of historical reading to understand the situation. Endo doesn’t provide exposition.

There are better novels by Conrad than Victory but this may be his most humane and tender. It was a second reading for me, having read it many years ago as an undergrad. It’s a very good novel. Actually I did a little experiment while reading it. I had the print version and the Kindle version, and so in wanting to evaluate the pros and cons of a Kindle, I alternated every forty or fifty pages between print and electronic. I had wanted to blog on the pros and cons but never had the time. Things Fall Apart and The House of the Seven Gables were both good novels and enjoyable. I took up the Achebe novel after that debate we had here several months ago on Achebe’s claim that Conrad was a racist. (It started in Qimi’s blog and I started up my own blog when the discussion got long. Look through my blogs to find it.) Orphan-Pip recommended I read his work after I claimed his essay on Conrad was shotty. The novel seems to have two halves to it, and the first half (the half that establishes the African customs) is much more engaging than the didactic second half. The Screwtape Letters is an ok work. Too didactic. Like the second half of the Achebe novel, didactic works don’t overwhelm me.

I went on a short story frenzy this year. I just started reading some and kept going. What’s not to like: A different author every time, a short compact work, a range of emotion and story line. I picked many of the best short story writers. I read a few by Flannary O’Connor. It got started when I happen to sit in a talk by someone who was doing his PhD on her work. The stories I read were all great. “Parker’s Back” is an absolute classic, possibly among the best short stories I’ve ever read. Other standouts were Stegner’s “The Traveler,” Dubos’ “Killings,” Cheever’s “The Swimmer,” and Singer’s “Joy.” I had never even heard of Stegner and Dubos until this year. I found them on a lark from some random endorsement. Hemingway’s “Francis Macomber” and Carver’s “Cathedral” were both better this time around than I remembered them to be. The only stories that were below average for me were the Nabokov, the Chekov, and the Chopin stories. Those are great writers, and I’ve enjoyed their work but these particular stories I picked were not their best.

As I was coming to the end of the year I realized I had not read any work of poetry. I had heard of Geoffrey Hill as being one of the best living poets and so I picked up one of his works. As it turns out it was his first published work and it was impressive. I will need to find some of his more mature works. Finally another tradition I have in my reading is picking up one work on writing every year. This year I picked up The Trivium, a work based on the nature of writing as it was taught in the middle ages. This was mind opening. You can see how this is so Aristotelian, starting from the nature of words, to the relationship of words, to the logic of grammar, the nature of argument, and so on. I have argued that they don’t teach writing correctly in school, from elementary through college. Writing for me was always self learned, and mostly through trial and error. Teachers never spent time to show you how it’s done. They expect students to absorb it. Baloney. It needs to be catalogued, organized, and drilled. The book I read was an edited down version by McGlinn from a larger work published in the 1930s by Sister Miriam. You can’t beat those old nuns, especially if they have a ruler to whack your hand when you get it wrong. One thing I learned from this book that was noteworthy was how much of rhetorical argument is based on a simple syllogism and expansion of syllogistic analogues. Why wasn’t I taught any of this? Do yourself a favor and just read the Amazon customer reviews on this book.

As to plans for the next year, I’m going to complete my review of the Transcendentalists and their dissenters, continue with my reading through Hemingway’s short stories, through the Bible, and Shakespeare’s plays. Actually I may back track on Shakespeare. In my reading up on “All’s Well,” I came across an insight on Hamlet that might put the play into a different perspective. I’ve argued that Hamlet is the greatest flawed play ever written, and had some famous arguments here on Lit Net over it. By the way, Samuel Johnson and TS Eliot have both argued similarly, so it’s not an outrageous claim. That insight I came across requires reading Hamlet, Macbeth, and King Lear together since the relationship between the plays is what puts Hamlet into perspective. So I’ll be doing a bit of Shakespeare. I’ve got a slew of biographies I’ve picked up and are backlogged. I’m going to try to read three or four. I’ll continue with the book on complexity and hopefully get to the history of math. I must read something from antiquity and the middle ages. I just don’t know what yet. And I’ve so enjoyed this short story frenzy that I’ll keep it going and try for another twenty-five stories. Happy reading.