Read This!

That said,

Here are some things I have recently read and recommend.

• Charles Stross has decided to do something interesting in Saturn's Children. The book is an homage to the old space operas, and specifically to Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. But Stross does not really believe that space travel around the solar system is really a plausible thing for human beings to do, so he has postulated a robots-only society. Humans have become extinct. That leads to some interesting thoughts about what would happen to robots constrained in Asimovian ways if human beings disappeared.

  Overall, it's a fun book, good summer reading. I'll admit, though, that I don't quite get the point of the title. Sure, the narrator is one of several "descendents" of a sex robot called Rhea, so she is presumably Saturn's daughter. But why the choice of names? [August 2008]

• I decided to finally read the Aeneid (my son told me I had to). I had the translation by Robert Fagles, so that's the one I went with. I decided to just read it, ignoring most of the notes and the scholarly discussion. It makes pretty good sense without all that, I think. In fact, I'm amazed at how modern Virgil's narrative seems. [August 2008]

• I enjoyed reading Best of Saki, a collection of short stories by "Saki" (whose real name was H. H. Munro). Written early in the 20th centuries, the stories are funny in a strange and lopsided sort of way. Nothing deep going on in them, but fun. [February 2008]

• And Wolfe's Pirate Freedom. It'll mess with your mind. On the surface it's a pirate story, fun and adventure. But then you start wondering whether this incredibly deadly and destructive "fun" actually deserves the name. The narrator is a monk who became a pirate who became a priest who... This is a much deeper book than it seems on the surface. [February 2008]

• Joseph Epstein's latest collection of essays is called In a Cardboard Belt!. The title is a reference I don't get, alas. The book is definitely worth reading. In fact, I had read most of these essays in their original magazine appearances, and I was nevertheless delighted to read them again. Epstein is particularly good when he is on the attack, but he is always interesting and often quotable.

  This book includes "I'm History," his farewell essay as editor of the Phi Beta Kappa quarterly, The American Scholar. If he were still the editor, I'd get a subscription in a flash. I never got a chance to subscribe while he was editor, which is something to regret, since today I do not find it very interesting. [November 21, 2007

• My review of Equations of God, an attempt to track the relations between mathematics and religion in Victorian England and America, appears in the December issue of First Things. I didn't really like the book very much, though I do think the subject is important. [November 21, 2007]

• Jay Lake has made quite a name for himself with his short stories, which are a strange blend of science fiction and surrealism. Mainspring is his first novel, and it is quite good, if perhaps not as good as one might have hoped. It is set in a very strange alternate earth in a clockwork universe: the Earth is kept rotating by a spring, and orbits the sun on a metal rail that can be seen in the sky. In this universe, the "argument from design" hardly needs an argument: the design is visible to everyone. This setting ups the ante quite a bit, suggesting a deep meditation on religion and related themes. We don't quite get that, but we do get an interesting picaresque novel with quite a bit of spectacle. An impressive first book, but not a masterpiece yet. [November 21, 2007]

• I just finished reading Canon and Biblical Interpretation, a collection of essays from the Scripture and Hermeneutics Seminar. Lots of very interesting things to think about here. The main issue is how to read and interpret Scripture while taking seriously both its historical character and the fact that it is, in fact, received by the Church as authoritative. The emphasis is on Brevard Child's "canonical approach," which I think has much to commend it. This is actually the seventh volume published by the SAHS folks, and all of them look very interesting.[February 2007]

• Mix spy thriller, Lovecraftian horror, science fictional mathematics, and some postmodern irony, and you get Charles Stross's The Atrocity Archives and The Jennifer Morgue. Nothing serious going on here either, but lots of fun. Both editions I read include some short material at the back. The "extra story" in the first book is ok, but the one in the second is quite weak. Skip the non-fiction stuff.

• By golly, Soldier of Sidon! To prepare for it, I re-read Gene Wolfe's two older "soldier" books, Soldier of the Mist and Soldier of Arete. Both of those are set in Ancient Greece shortly after the end of the Persian wars. They are told by Latro, a former merceneray in the Great King's army who has lost his long-term memory and records daily events so that he can keep track of what is going on. I've always felt they were among Wolfe's best work. Soldier of Sidon returns us to Latro, for whom, as for us, many years have past. He is still searching for a way to be cured of the curse that is upon him, and this time he goes to Egypt to see what he finds there. The result is a fascinating picture of late-ancient Egypt, a dose of Egyptian mythology, and a clearer picture of Latro. It's, quite simply, wonderful. (January 31, 2007)

• I just finished Mathematics With Love, a very strange book in lots of ways. It contains the courtship correspondence between Barnes Willis, an early 20th century engineer, and his future wife. Her father put restrictions on what Willis could write about, and one excuse for writing was to help her with her mathematics. So the correspondence includes lessons in calculus, trigonometry, and some very simple physics. But the really interesting thing is to follow how courtship happened in the 1920s, how the two writers avoided forbidden subjects but still managed to make their feelings pretty clear. It's more "love with mathematics" than it is "mathematics with love," but I'm still glad I read it. (October 16, 2005)

• I first read Maurice Leblanc's The Exploits of Arsène Lupin when I was a child. I liked it then. Now Wildside Press has reprinted it, and, lo and behold, I still like it. Lupin is an old-fashioned character: a gentleman burgler who is honorable, suave, elegant. The fun is to see him make fools of the police in the most subtle and sophisticated ways. Definitely worth a look if you like this kind of thing. (October 16, 2005)

• Marilynne Robinson wrote, many years ago, a marvelous novel called Housekeeping (based on which a movie was made that never got close to the qualities of the book). Since then, she has been publishing mostly non-fiction, including the marvelous collection of essays, The Death of Adam. Her second novel, Gilead, has just been published, and it's a wonder. The book is the letter that an old man, a pastor in a very small midwestern town, writes to his son. The narrator expects to die soon, and the book consists of what he would have liked to tell his son had he lived to see him grow up. The result is a fascinating look at the history and personality of a fascinating man, a look at the life of faith "from the inside", a book so emotionally intense I had to read it in small bits.

• I have lots of commentaries on books of the Bible, and lots of books of poetry. What those two have in common is that I rarely read such books through. (There are exceptions, of course: Gordon Fee's 1 Corinthians, James Dunn's Galatians, Marie Ponsot's Springing, Mark Jarman's Unholy Sonnets...) Instead, I read as necessary and as desire and interest strike. That said, I've just read all of read Denise Levertov's The Stream and the Sapphire, a selection of her "poems on religious themes". (I'm delighted that she didn't choose to use the word "spiritual", which seems to have become fashionable simply because it is so vague.) There are several very nice poems in this little book. People who are interested in religion and who want to start reading poetry could do worse than to start with this one. (June 20, 2004)

• Daniel Pinkwater's Uncle Boris in the Yukon is in the chatty memoirist tradition of his NPR essays. Not as good, perhaps, as the truly glorious Fish Whistle (now published together with another book of essays as Chicago Fish, Hoboken Whistle), but that is an impossibly high standard. This book is great fun. Pinkwater is one of those folks that deserves wider recognition, but will probably never get it because he is too good and too unwilling to cater to fashion. (June 20, 2004)

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, Touchstone, 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.