Read This!

That said,

Here are some things I have read and recommend.

• Still working on that Algebra guide... One of the books I discovered in the process is T. Y. Lam's A First Course on Noncommutative Rings. What a nice book it is! I particularly like the section where he does a quick tour of the representation theory of finite groups, showing that the structure theory of artinian rings yields most of classical representation theory quickly and beautifully. Very nice.

• Also interesting, insightful, and thought-provoking: R. R. Reno's commentary on Genesis in the Brazos Theological Commentary series. It's too short, of course, and inevitably the primeval history gets more attention than the later parts of Genesis. But Reno is consistently interesting, readable, and attentive to the great tradition of theological thought and interpretation.

• This year I've been reading a lot of older books. Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie was a lot of fun; it makes fun of a kind of approach to education that is flattering to the educator and perhaps not all that beneficial to the students.

  I enjoyed most of The Isle of Voices and other stories, a collection of short stories by Robert Louis Stevenson. A few of the stories weren't very impressive, but Stevenson in good form is a lot of fun.

  In the summer, I decided that I needed to read Homer's Iliad and Odyssey. I decided to read them in Richmond Lattimore's translation, partly because they were easy to carry around and partly because of Lattimore's approach to translation. The first thing one discovers is how much fun these are. The second is just how strange Homer's world is. Reading him will give you a sense of the depth of history and of how people of ancient times were just plain different. And it'll be fun as well. [September 2010]

• One of my tasks this summer was to work on a "guide to groups, rings, and fields" for MAA. So I read a lot of bits and pieces of abstract algebra books. Favorites this year: Anderson and Fuller's Rings and Categories of Modules, Berrick and Keating's An Introduction to Rings and Modules, Rotman's Advanced Abstract Algebra, and Bourbaki's treatment of Galois theory. None of them are books an undergraduate can read easily, but they're very good. A belated discovery was Lam's First Course on Ring Theory, which I'm looking at now with great admiration. [September 2010]

• Sometimes book reviews make me read things that I wouldn't normally have read. An example is Sam Lipsyte's The Ask, a novel about a loser who, having been fired from his job in a small college's development office, is brought back to see if he can succeed in one final "ask", that is, in getting a gift from a potential donor. The book has its good points, but in the end I wanted redemption, and all I got was self-destruction. [June 2010]

• Yeah, anyone who visits this page occasionally will be tired of hearing about Gene Wolfe. Still, The Sorcerer's House, his latest, is a lot of fun. It's a story told through letters, so one must be suspicious from the start about the reliability of the several letter writers. One might worry that this would make the book just a big puzzle, but instead it proves to be interesting and affecting. Read it! [May 2010]

Not read all that recently, but still recommended:

• Every so often, I go back to Dante's Commedia... I first read it (in prose translation) when I was 11 or so, and every so often I go back and read it (or parts of it) again, usually in the Sayers translation, since that gives me a chance to meet two old friends at one time. Dante is fascinating on many levels. He is one of the greatest Christian poets, a master of the "affirmative way" of mystical Christian devotion. It's interesting to contrast his moral conviction with the twentieth century tendency to excuse all evil, his belief in redemption with our determinism. His attention to detail is amazing, and he even gets some of his science right.

• If you've visited this page before, you've seen my comments about Gene Wolfe. Wolfe writes science fiction and fantasy that is literate, tricky, subtle, and philosophically serious. (Those who don't think science fiction is ever like that are hereby challenged to read his books and see!) A recent article about him in Washington Post Book World even suggested that he might be among the best of American living writers.

  I recently re-read his There Are Doors, a fascinating book about "falling in love" and its effects, both good and bad. Wolfe's work is never easy, and this is no exception, but I still think it's both wise and fun.

  If you haven't yet read Wolfe's earlier work, you should. The "Sun" sequence includes The Book of the New Sun (which you can find in two volumes, Shadow and Claw and Sword and Citadel), The Urth of the New Sun (a kind of coda to the previous one), The Book of the Long Sun (now in two volumes also: Litany of the Long Sun and Epiphany of the Long Sun), and finally The Book of the Short Sun (in three volumes at this point: On Blue's Waters, In Green's Jungles, and Return to the Whorl). Together, these books make up an amazingly complex cycle of novels. Compelling characters, strange situations, deep philosophical, ethical, and religious issues, twists and turns, mysteries and revelations: it's all there. And the writing is gorgeous too.

  There are several other novels, too. Of particular note are: Latro in the Mist, which collects the two novels (originally published in the 1980s) about Latro, an amnesiac (along the same lines as in the movie Memento, I understand — I haven't seen the movie, but that's what those who have tell me) soldier in Ancient Greek times; The Fifth Head of Cerberus, about cloning, identity, colonialism, and a lot more; Free Live Free, a comedy about freedom and what it might consist of; and Peace, a very difficult novel that is one of Wolfe's most subtle.

  Also worth looking for are several wonderful short story collections, including Strange Travelers, The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories, Castle of Days, Storeys from the Old Hotel (this seems to have been remaindered recently, so right now is a good time to pick up a cheap copy), and Endangered Species.

  They're all worth reading. Some (the New Sun) are far-future stuff, so far in the future that our time is only a distant memory. (There's a neat scene near the beginning where the narrator tries to make sense of a photograph of an astronaut planting a U. S. flag on the moon, and has trouble placing it because there are no trees...) Others (e.g., Free Live Free and Peace) are set in our own time. But they're all subtle and intelligent. (Updated June 19, 2004).

• I read lots of magazines and journals. Some of my favorites are The New Criterion, The TLS, The Spectator, The Weekly Standard, First Things, Locus, The Wine Spectator (and other wine mags), Books and Culture, plus several (too many!) others. I won't even try to list them all. (If I do, it may make me realize how many I actually get...)

• Finally, I recommend anything written by Dorothy L. Sayers. From her detective novels to her religious plays to her translation of Dante, Sayers is worth listening to. I'm particularly fond of her two essays on women's issues, collected in Are Women Human? and of her cycle of radio plays on the life of Jesus, The Man Born to be King. Look also for Barbara Reynolds' biography of Sayers, which I think is the best one available.