My 2017 Reads

Completed First Quarter:

The Book of Ecclesiastes, a book of the Old Testament, KJV Translation.

The Book of Song of Songs, a book of the Old Testament, KJV Translation.

The Iman’s Daughter: My Desperate Flight to Freedom, a confessional memoir by Hannah Shah.

The Future Church: How Ten Trends are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church, a non-fiction book by John L. Allen Jr.

The Book of Proverbs, a book of the Old Testament, KJV Translation.

Compassionate Blood: Catherine of Siena on the Passion, a non-fiction devotional by Romanus Cessario, O.P.

What Jesus Saw from the Cross, a non-fiction devotional by Antonin Gilbert Sertillanges, O.P.

The Wife of Pilate, a short novel by Gertrude von Le Fort.

Completed Second Quarter:

“The Magic Barrel,” a short story by Bernard Malamud.

The Book of Wisdom, a book of the Old Testament, Ignatius Translation.

“The Secret Sharer,” a short story by Joseph Conrad.

The Hunger Angel, a novel by Herta Müller.

The Book of Sirach, a book of the Old Testament, Ignatius Translation.

Vision of Fatima, a non-fiction book on his sculptures of Our Lady of Fatima by Fr. Thomas McGlynn.

“God’s World,” a short story by Najib Mahfuz. 

“Vitamins,” a short story by Raymond Carver.

“Bobcat,” a short story by Rebecca Lee.

Vol 3 of Les Misérables, “Marius,” a novel by Victor Hugo.

“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place,” a short story by Ernest Hemingway.

Completed Third Quarter:

Letter to the Galatians, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV and Ignatius RSV translations.

Letter to the Ephesians, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV and Ignatius RSV translations.

Letter to the Philippians, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV and Ignatius RSV translations.

Letter to the Colossians, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV and Ignatius RSV translations.

“Assisted Living,” a short story by Edith Pearlman.

“The Chosen Husband,” a short story by Mavis Gallant.

101 Places to Pray Before You Die: A Roman Catholic’s Guide, a non-fictional travel guide by Thomas J. Craughwell.

“Barn Burning,” a short story by William Faulkner.

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, a historical novel by Mark Twain.

Heart of Joy: The Transforming Power of Self-Giving, a collection of speeches from Mother Teresa, edited by José Luis González-Balado. 

First Letter to the Thessalonians, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV and Ignatius RSV translations.

“The Music on the Hill,” a short story by Saki (H. H. Munro).

Gospel According to Mark, a book of the New Testament, Ignatius RSV translation.

“Zone of Quiet,” a short story by Ring Larsen.

Second Letter to the Thessalonians, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV and Ignatius RSV translations.

Completed Fourth Quarter:

First Letter to the Timothy, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV and Ignatius RSV translations.

“Saint Ursula and Her Maidens,” a short story by Mary O’Connell.

Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew, a book of history and collected poetry by Max Egremont.

Second Letter to the Timothy, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV and Ignatius RSV translations.

“The Diary of an African Nun,” a short story by Alice Walker.

A Room with a View, a novel by E. M. Forster.

Letter to Titus, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV and Ignatius RSV translations.

Letter to Philemon, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV  and Ignatius RSV translations.

“Wunderkind,” a short story by Carson McCullers.

The Confessions, an autobiography by St. Augustine of Hippo, translated by Phillip Burton.

“What World is This? A short story by Gloria Whelan. 

“Achates McNeil,” a short story by T. C. Boyle.

“Gimpel the Fool,” a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

Henry VI, Part 1, a play by William Shakespeare.

Rock Crystal, a novella by Adalbert Stifter, Translated by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore.

“The Match-Maker,” a short story by Saki (H. H. Munro).

Unfinished Reads:

Julius Caesar: Life of a Colossus, a biography by Adrian Goldsworthy.

The Virgin and the Gipsy, a short novel by D. H. Lawrence.

Hildegard of Bingen: Selected Writings, a collection translated and edited by Mark Atherton.

It's been a very good year for reading.  Eight books of non-fiction, sixteen books from the Bible (some of them short though), six works of long fiction (four novels, two novellas), a book of poetry, a Shakespearean play, and eighteen short stories.  That's more than a book a month.  I didn't quite keep up with two short stories per month, but all those Epistles from St. Paul, which in most cases were read in two different translations, more than made up for the six short stories off pace.

First you can track back to my Plans for 2017, here, my 2017 first quarterly update, here, my second quarterly update here, and my third quarterly update here.  

Quite a bit of the longer works were selected as part of the Catholic Thought book club at Goodreads, which I've mentioned that I'm now moderator.  As moderator I can't quite skip reads I'm not interested in.  But I can't say I hated any of the reads.  Through the nominating system and the vote, we seem to pick interesting reads.  Of the eight non-fiction works, three I would categorize as memoirs (The Iman's Daughter, Vision of Fatima, and St. Augustine of Hippo's The Confessions), three I would categorize as devotionals (Compassionate Blood, What Jesus Saw from the Cross, and Heart of Joy), one I would categorize as a travel book (101 Places to Pray Before You Die), and one a book of information on Catholic Church trends, (The Future Church).  Hannah Shaw's The Iman's Daughter was a powerful testimonial, McGlynn's Vision of Fatima was wonderful reflection of how he came to sculpt the Our Lady of Fatima statue based on his conversations with Sr. Lúcia de Jesus dos Santos, at the time the remaining survivor of the Fatima apparitions.  See my blog post for pictures of the statue.  Antonin Sertillanges' What Jesus Saw from the Cross is the absolute best book for a Lenten devotional I have ever read.  I highly recommend it.

As you can see I continue to make progress reading through Bible.  Five books (Ecclesiastes, Song of Songs, Proverbs, Wisdom, and Sirach) were read from the Old Testament, books from the wisdom literature section.  Ten of St Paul's epistles were read, which now completes my reading of his letters.  (Actually the Letter to the Hebrews remains unread, but as some quip, it's neither a letter, nor written by Paul, nor written to the Hebrews; I'll be reading that this year.)  The book club read the Gospel of Mark, since we're in the B liturgical year, and so that was a re-read.  Of the works I read for the first time, I read it in the King James Version (KJV), and to repeat myself, I read in the KJV not because I enjoy it or think it a good translation (actually I think it's terrible) but because the language of the KJV was important to the development of English, I want to get one full reading in it.  Because the New Testament books are so important to understanding Christianity, I augmented my reading with the Ignatius RSV translation, which I think is one of the best translations.  The Books of Wisdom and Sirach are not in the KJV since Protestants threw them out of the cannon, and so I read them in the Ignatius.  Too bad, their loss.

With all the non-fiction books, I didn't get to read as many novels as I would have liked.  I'm continuing through the huge opus of Hugo's Les Misérables, reading one volume per year.  It is a great novel, and there are two more volumes to go.  Mark Twain's Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc was an excellent fictionalized account of St. Joan of Arc's life.  Though fictionalized, it was very close to the actual history.  A Room with a View was a good novel, though not up to the great novels E. M. Forster has written.  Nobel Prize winner Herta Müller's The Hunger Angel was a disturbing novel of Romanian ethnic Germans struggling to live in a post WWII Russian concentration camp.  Extremely well written, poetic, and very well translated by Phillip Boehm.  Le Fort's The Wife of Pilate and Stifter's Rock Crystal were both excellent novellas and highly recommended.  Interestingly, Le Fort's makes a great read around Lent and Stifter's makes a great read around Christmas.

I completed Max Egremont's Some Desperate Glory, which I had started last year and spilled over.  It was a collection of the WWI poets that fought in the war on the English side.  The book was uniquely structured to be both a collection of the poetry and biographical information on the poets.  I highly recommend it.  Because the historical events concerning Twain's Joan of Arc novel were fresh in my mind, I read Shakespeare's Henry VI, Part I, since it covered the same events, only from a different perspective.  It may have been Shakespeare's first play he wrote, so it had rough spots and not up to his great works. It was still worth reading if you are a Shakespeare aficionado.  It was one of the plays I had not read yet.  With it I've now read 29 of the authentic Shakespeare plays.  As I said in my blog post on this play, https://ashesfromburntroses.blogspot.com/2017/12/the-first-part-henry-vi-by-william.html "Some people have bucket lists of traveling across the world; my bucket list consists of reading all of Shakespeare."

Finally to the short stories.  As I’ve done in recent years, I’ll categorize the short stories between exceptional, good, ordinary, and duds.  If you see some unknown authors in the list, it’s because I made a conscious effort to seek out stories of contemporary writers.  I was not exactly overwhelmed with those.  Only two stories (Gloria Whelan’s and T.C. Boyle’s) made it above ordinary.  I rated Saki’s “The Match-Maker” and Edith Pearlman’s “assisted Living” as duds.  That’s the first Saki short story I was disappointed with.  I rated six stories as ordinary, the Egytian writer,  Najib Mafuz’s “God’s World,” Raymond Carver’s “Vitamins,” Rebecca Lee’s “Bobcat,” Ring Larsen’s “Zone of Quiet,” Mary O’Connell’s “Saint Ursula and Her Maidens,” and Alice Walker’s “Diary of an African Nun.”

Five stories were rated as good.  “The Chosen Husband” was about a young man who is sort of roped in to be the husband of one of the daughters of a declining Montreal family and had the usual Mavis Gallant subtlety in language and psychology.  Saki made up for the dud with a really fine story about a woman who killed in the woods by mysterious, horned beast.  “Wunderkind” was my first story I’ve read by Carson McCullers, and I was really impressed.  It was about a young girl who as a child was a prodigy on the piano but now entering puberty has lost her brilliance.  I nearly put this in the exceptional category.  Gloria Whelan’s “What World is This?” about a pair of girls who play a hoax about seeing an apparition of the Virgin Mary, was well written, and T.C. Boyle’s “Achetes McNeil,” about a young man in college who is estranged from his self-centered, though famous novelist father was hilarious.  I don’t think I’ve read a T.C. Boyle story yet that I didn’t find interesting and fun.

As it turns out, the five stories rated as exceptional are all classic short stories by preeminent short story writers.  There’s something to be said for sticking with the classics.  Bernard Malamud’s “The Magic Barrel” was about a young, shy rabbi who hires a matchmaker to find him a wife.  It was funny, theologically penetrating, and psychologically insightful.  Great short stories work on many levels, and that’s the difference between an exceptional rating and a good.  Joseph Conrad’s “The Secret Sharer” is about a young, inexperienced captain who secretly takes into his cabin a castaway who was swimming alongside his ship.  The castaway turns out to have been escaping another vessel where he was suspected of murder.  Hemingway’s “A Clean-Lighted Place” is about an old man who frequents a bar and keeps the waiters from closing down late one night because he insists on drinking.  The waiters speculate on why the old man drinks alone and why he has attempted suicide.  William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning” is about a young boy, Sarty, trying to understand his Civil War veteran and arsonist father, Abner Snopes, through the final events of Abner’s life, the events that led him to be shot and killed.  “Gimpel the Fool” by Isaac Bashevis Singer is about a man who throughout his life is taken advantage of, especially by his wife, because of his simplicity and willingness to believe other people.  It’s also a very funny story, but filled with the love of life and God that Gimpel exudes. 

As always I give a prize to the best short story I have read during the year, and this year it is nearly impossible to distinguish between the exceptionals.  But I need to pick and I must pick.  This is based on my impulse today, but tomorrow I could have changed to another.  First the runner-up will be “Gimpel the Fool” by Isaac Bashevis Singer.  The central theme of the story is overwhelming, and placed in the mouth of the rabbi Gimpel one day brings his problems.  The rabbi says, “It is written, better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil.  You are not a fool.  They are the fools.  For he who causes his neighbor to feel shame loses Paradise himself.”  And the winner for the best short story read this year…drum roll please…though difficult to choose, I have chosen William Faulkner’s “Barn Burning.”  In a swirl of history, symbolism, local Mississippian dialect, class consciousness, and family bonds, we see the inner nature of Abner Snopes, a combustible dysfunctionality.  He is pricked by his sense of lower class status to the point of outrage, and fire is a perfect symbol for his outrage and belligerence.  He retaliates through arson, as if that will reset the power struggle that has belittled him.  His being an arsonist is an outward expression of his inner combustible dysfunctionality.  It’s a powerful story, powerfully told. 

If you wish, you can probably read something within the blog on most of these books and stories I’ve read.  I haven’t blogged on all of them but I’ve blogged on most.  Just do a search in the upper left hand corner at the top of the blog page.  Also, I found listing the works by genre was easier to absorb.  I list it in this form below. 

Non-Fiction:

1.      The Iman's Daughter: My Desperate Flight to Freedom, a confessional memoir by Hannah Shah.

2.      The Future Church: How Ten Trends are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church, a non-fiction book by John L. Allen Jr.

3.      Compassionate Blood: Catherine of Siena on the Passion, a non-fiction devotional by Romanus Cessario, O.P.

4.      What Jesus Saw from the Cross, a non-fiction devotional by Antonin Gilbert Sertillanges, O.P.

5.      Vision of Fatima, a non-fiction book on his sculptures of Our Lady of Fatima by Fr. Thomas McGlynn.

6.      101 Places to Pray Before You Die: A Roman Catholic's Guide, a non-fictional travel guide by Thomas J. Craughwell.

7.      Heart of Joy: The Transforming Power of Self-Giving, a collection of speeches from Mother Teresa, edited by José Luis González-Balado. 

8.      The Confessions, an autobiography by St. Augustine of Hippo, translated by Phillip Burton.

Bible:

1.        The Book of Ecclesiastes, a book of the Old Testament, KJV Translation.

2.        The Book of Song of Songs, a book of the Old Testament, KJV Translation.

3.        The Book of Proverbs, a book of the Old Testament, KJV Translation.

4.        The Book of Wisdom, a book of the Old Testament, Ignatius Translation.

5.        The Book of Sirach, a book of the Old Testament, Ignatius Translation.

6.        Letter to the Galatians, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV and Ignatius RSV translations.

7.        Letter to the Ephesians, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV and Ignatius RSV translations.

8.        Letter to the Philippians, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV and Ignatius RSV translations.

9.        Letter to the Colossians, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV and Ignatius RSV translations.

10.    First Letter to the Thessalonians, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV and Ignatius RSV translations.

11.    Gospel According to Mark, a book of the New Testament, Ignatius RSV translation.

12.    Second Letter to the Thessalonians, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV and Ignatius RSV translations.

13.    First Letter to the Timothy, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV and Ignatius RSV translations.

14.    Second Letter to the Timothy, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV and Ignatius RSV translations.

15.    Letter to Titus, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV and Ignatius RSV translations.

16.    Letter to Philemon, an epistle from the New Testament by St. Paul, KJV  and Ignatius RSV translations.

Novels:

1.        The Wife of Pilate, a short novel by Gertrude von Le Fort.

2.        The Hunger Angel, a novel by Herta Müller.

3.        Vol 3 of Les Misérables, "Marius," a novel by Victor Hugo.

4.        Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, a historical novel by Mark Twain.

5.        A Room with a View, a novel by E. M. Forster.

6.        Rock Crystal, a novella by Adalbert Stifter, Translated by Elizabeth Mayer and Marianne Moore.

Poetry:

1.        Some Desperate Glory: The First World War the Poets Knew, a book of history and collected poetry by Max Egremont.

Drama:

1.        Henry VI, Part 1, a play by William Shakespeare.

Short Stories:

1.        "The Magic Barrel," a short story by Bernard Malamud.

2.        "The Secret Sharer," a short story by Joseph Conrad.

3.        "God's World," a short story by Najib Mahfuz. 

4.        "Vitamins," a short story by Raymond Carver.

5.        "Bobcat," a short story by Rebecca Lee.

6.        "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," a short story by Ernest Hemingway.

7.        "Assisted Living," a short story by Edith Pearlman.

8.        "The Chosen Husband," a short story by Mavis Gallant.

9.        "Barn Burning," a short story by William Faulkner.

10.    "The Music on the Hill," a short story by Saki (H. H. Munro).

11.    "Zone of Quiet," a short story by Ring Larsen.

12.    "Saint Ursula and Her Maidens," a short story by Mary O'Connell.

13.    "The Diary of an African Nun," a short story by Alice Walker.

14.    "Wunderkind," a short story by Carson McCullers.

15.    "What World is This? A short story by Gloria Whelan. 

16.    "Achates McNeil," a short story by T. C. Boyle.

17.    "Gimpel the Fool," a short story by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

18.    "The Match-Maker," a short story by Saki (H. H. Munro).