Category Archives: Books

Stuff I’ve Been Reading

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I’ve not been highly motivated to write book reviews over the past month or so, and so there are a number of books I’ve read that I’ve not reviewed. I thought I’d give ’em a mention and move on.

The Deathstalker Series, by Simon Green.
I’ve been working on this one for a while; finally got all the way through it. It ended much as it began: long on super powers, violence, and brightly colored mayhem, short on plausibility and character development. It isn’t the best space opera I’ve read, not by a long shot, but it provided a bit of diversion. The real question is whether I’ll ever feel motiviated to read them again.

Princeps’ Fury, by Jim Butcher.
This is a great series; it’s not as hip and ironic as Butcher’s Harry Dresden novels, but it’s outstanding high fantasy. I won’t bother describing it; if you read fantasy, go get a copy of Furies of Calderon.

St. Dominic: The Grace of the Word, by Fr. Guy Bedouelle, OP.
This is a biography of St. Dominic I picked while we were on vacation last August, and read a month or so ago. I’m sure there was some good stuff in it, but nothing particularly stands out in my memory. In particular, if I were unfamiliar with St. Dominic I’d start with a different book; this one is more an analysis of aspects of Dominic’s life than a description of his life and I think would be fairly opaque to anyone who didn’t know the broad outlines.

Neglected Saints, by E.I. Watkin.
I picked this one up in October, at Powells Books in Portland. It’s a series of short pieces on the lives of nine not very well-known saints, and was written in 1955. I was interested to read about the various saints, and particularly Blessed Jordan of Saxony, the second master of the Order of Preachers, but the author annoyed me a bit. The style at the time he was writing was to downplay any obviously supernatural occurrences in the lives of the saints—to either omit them altogether, or to include them with a bit of a sheepish expression. Given the far-fetched occurrences in some of the medieval hagiographies (did you know that St. Martha of Bethany ended her days in France, where she rid a community of a river dragon?), some filtering clearly needs to be done, but Watkin takes it a bit too far, I think. On top of that, he has an unpleasantly condescending attitude toward the medievals, referring to them as being like children. They had both their characteristic virtues and their besetting sins; ours are no doubt somewhat different. But that doesn’t mean we’ve any grounds for arrogance.

The Dominicans, by William A. Hinnebush, OP.
This is something of a biography of the Dominican order as a whole, from its founding in the early 13th century until the time of writing in the 1970’s; I read it as an assignment from my Lay Dominican formation group. It’s a short book, and rather dry, and useful, I think, more as a foundation for further reading than as a satisfying read in and of itself.

St. Edmund Campion, by Evelyn Waugh.
This is another book I picked up at Powells, and I enjoyed it thoroughly. Edmund Campion was a student at Oxford early in the reign of Elizabeth I, and for a time was the protege of one of her counselors, the Earl of Leicester. But as the sanctions against Catholics grew worse, and as Campion’s convictions grew, he fled England and was eventually ordained a Jesuit priest. After some years of study and of service, the order sent him back to England with a number of others, to minister to the those who refused to abandon their Catholic faith. To say mass or hear confessions was punishable by death, and he returned knowing that he would likely be caught and killed in short order—as, indeed, he was.

Brideshead Revisited, by Evelyn Waugh.
Having enjoyed St. Edmund Campion, I decided to give one of Waugh’s novels a try, and so picked up Brideshead Revisited a week or so ago. I never know what to say about real novels; but it kept me reading, and though it isn’t primarily a comic novel there was one passage that had me laughing harder than I’ve laughed at a book in ages. (For those who have read it, it’s the one where Cordelia discovers that Rex believes all of the absurd lies she’s been telling him.) I might well look up some more of Waugh’s work.

Bone

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I am perplexed.

A few weeks ago, some blogger I read recommended a graphic novel called Bone, by Jeff Smith. Bone was originally published as individual comic books in the usual way, and then in a sequence of collections; but the blogger was particularly excited because the entire thing was now being published in one volume.

I’m perplexed, because I just went back to the blog I thought I saw it one, and it’s not there.

But anyway, it looked like fun, and I was in a susceptible mood, and I ordered a copy. And I have to say, I enjoyed it thoroughly. I not infrequently laughed out loud; and unlike Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, there’s nothing here I’d be unwilling to share with my kids.

I’m trying to figure out how to describe it without giving too much away, and I’m failing. If you like fantasy, and you like things that are funny, it’s well worth your time.

Mormonism

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My friend Michael Cleverly sent me a book entitled Mormonism: A Very Short Introduction, by Richard Lyman Bushman (along with
God’s Mechanics, which I reviewed some time ago). It’s a brief book, unsurprisingly; I found it to be sympathetic yet balanced, accentuating the positives about Mormonism without whitewashing the low spots in Mormon history.

I read it with some interest, as we have many Mormon friends and acquaintances, Michael not least, and because my previous exposure to Mormon belief has been minimal. I once read a book on Mormonism, plucked from a friend’s bookshelf in a fit of boredom, that was written by an evangelical Christian of the Dispensationalist variety. It was a highly polemical work, and I’ve never regarded what I read in it as particularly authoritative. So far as that goes, I found the author’s Dispensationalism almost as odd as what he had to say about Mormonism. Consequently I received it gratefully, as an opportunity to correct (or verify) the things I think I know about the religion.

I don’t intend to talk about Mormonism as such here, though I may later; I’ll simply say that it’s different in many ways from what I believe, but that we Catholics could learn a great deal about dedication from them.

God’s Mechanics

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My friend Michael Cleverly was kind enough to send me God’s Mechanics, by Brother Guy Consolmagno, S.J. Consolmagno is a Jesuit brother (not a priest); he’s also an astronomer, working at the Vatican Observatory. He describes himself as a “techie”; and he has lots of friends from MIT, the University of Arizona, and a wide variety of other places who are also techies—engineers, scientists, and the like. A fair number of them find his religious faith puzzling, and of those some are genuinely curious how a fellow techie can be religious. How does it work? What’s it all about? Why does he believe it, and what does he get out of it?

Brother Guy wrote this book to answer these questions, writing as a techie for other techies. As he’d be the first to admit (I know this, because he does so), he had to write it as a techie, rather than a theologian; as a theologian, he’s a good astronomer. More than that, he’s not writing to convince; he’s writing to explain.

The thing that surprised me most is how little I match the “techie” pattern that he describes. I mean, I’ve been doing software engineering for two decades, and I’m active in the Tcl/Tk community; surely this qualifies me? But my background is in mathematics and modeling, not in engineering or the hard sciences, and that’s the community he’s really addressing. Maybe it’s just that mathematicians are more used to dealing with eternal verities than engineers and scientists are, I dunno. More than that, though, Brother Guy was writing techies who aren’t religious, a group that I’ve never been in.

My only real complaint about the book is that I think Brother Guy is unduly harsh on Aristotle’s Physics. Newton’s physics are far more useful, but Aristotle wasn’t really addressing the same problem as Newton. But I digress.

If you’re a techie, and you don’t understand how I can possibly be religious, perhaps Brother Guy’s book will help you understand. How well, I’m afraid I really can’t say.

The Lord-Protector’s Daughter

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The Lord-Protector’s Daughter is the title of L.E. Modesitt, Jr.’s latest paperback release, a singleton novel set midway between the two trilogies of his Corean Chronicles. And it’s a sufficiently odd duck that I have to wonder whether something happened during its composition, or perhaps whether Modesitt suddenly needed money really fast.

At first glance, Modesitt’s following his usual formula: individual discovers magical powers, and uses them lethally to resolve the problems facing them/their family/their society. We’re definitely on familiar ground, here. But the pacing of the book is just…weird.

Mykella, a descendant of Mykel of Alector’s Choice and its sequels, is the daughter of the Lord-Protector of Lanachrona. We know from the back cover that her father and other family members are doomed to be short-lived, and that only her magical powers will save her. My presumption going into it was they’d die pretty quickly, and the rest of the book would be Mykella trying to work her way out of the resulting bad situation using her newfound powers. Not so.

Spoilers lurk below, if anyone cares.

Instead, the entire book is build-up. There are financial irregularities, and the possibility of an arranged marriage, and plots against her father that her father refuses to see. Throughout the entire book, Mykella simply learns how to use her powers, continues to investigate the plots, and copes with the details of marriage negotiations. And then, in the last tenth of the book, the plots come to fruition, her father is buried, the usurper is about to be crowned, and in a dramatic climax Mykella reveals her powers, kills all of the conspirators, and claims the throne as her father’s eldest surviving child. The end.

Seriously, that’s it. The only real action is over in a few minutes. Oh, she has some run-ins with an Ifrit while learning to use the Table under the palace, but even those aren’t particularly suspenseful.

Modesitt is often formulaic, but his characters usually go through some fairly harrowing experiences and reversals during the course of a book. This book is simply far too many repetitions of “Oh, dear, this is happening, oh, dear, that might happen, Oh, wow, I can do this,” followed by Mykella pulling her own deus ex machina. It’s also much shorter than most of his books, which is OK; given what it is, I’d scarcely want it to be longer. Crisis in the family? Contractual obligation? I dunno, but I was disappointed.

Relic of Time

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Ralph McInerny is a Thomist philosopher of some note; and he also writes thrillers. I’ve not read any of his works of philosophy—I know his name primarily from an introduction he wrote to a new edition of Jacques Maritain’s Introduction to Philosophy—but given that I’m aware of him as a philosopher, I picked up his book Relic of Time when I found it at B&N the other day.

As the book begins, the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is stolen from the basilica of Guadalupe in Mexico. For the non-Catholics in the audience, the image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is said to have appeared miraculously on the cloak of an Aztec peasant, a Christian convert named Juan Diego, in 1531, when very few natives were Christians. It is a particularly sacred relic to the people of Mexico, and indeed to Latin Americans in general, and when the leader of an American militia group claims to have stolen it, the fecal matter hits the proverbial fan. Vincent Traeger, retired CIA agent, is called out of retirement and given the job of finding the image and getting it back to its home, as the border between Mexico and the United States goes up in flames.

First, the good. The book held my attention; I wanted to know what was going to happen, and stayed up too late at night finishing it.

Next, the odd. This is a very Catholic book. Most of the characters are either present or former Catholics, and many of them take the Catholic faith very seriously indeed. Note that this is a book I’d expect to find with the thrillers, and not in the Christian fiction section; but nevertheless, it’s unusual to find a thriller that takes religion seriously. In fact, I don’t think I’ve read anything that compares.

Next, the ugly. There were some weird errors of fact. Some of the characters fly into San Francisco International Airport in a private jet, for a hand-off taking place in the long-term parking lot. McInerny has them fly over Dodger Stadium. Now, it’s quite likely that they’d have flown over Candlestick Park, where the Giants play; and getting the Dodgers and the Giants confused is just too funny. Another character is the Bishop of the Diocese of Orange in Orange County, who refers to himself as the Bishop of Disneyland and Busch Gardens. Now, there used to be a Busch Gardens amusement park in Southern California…at the Anheuser-Busch plant in the middle of the San Fernando Valley, in the Archdiocese of Los Angeles. It closed decades ago. I’m at a loss for why McInerny would have thought that there’s a Busch Gardens in Orange County.

But those errors are just silly. The truly bad part is that the action sequence at the end baffled me. There were a lot of people running around and shouting and shooting, and I knew why some of them were there, but not others, and I was really unclear as to why they were doing what they were doing. That might be realistic, I suppose, but it wasn’t all that satisfying. And a number of plot points seemed highly unlikely, even at the time.

I dunno. I enjoyed parts of the book quite a bit, but it just doesn’t quite hang together.

The Catholic Church and Conversion

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Whilst I was raiding the theology shelves at Powells Books in Portland, I came across G.K. Chesteron’s The Catholic Church and Conversion, which I’d not previously read. Which is to say, I sometimes felt like I’d previously read it, as it turns out that many of the Chesterton quotes one runs across from time to time originated here.

My own journey of faith has been rather different than Chesterton’s. His family were English Unitarians, and he came only slowly to Christianity, first as an Anglican, and then as a Catholic. I started out as a Catholic, became an Anglican, and then returned. So my experience is rather different than his, and large portions of this book seemed somewhat remote (although I enjoyed them anyway). But there is one passage that very much describes my feelings on re-discovering the Catholic Church and its teachings:

Nothing is more amusing to the convert, when his conversion has been complete for some time, than to hear the speculations about when or whether he will repent of the conversion; when he will be sick of it, how long he will stand it, at what stage of his external exasperation he will start up and say he can bear it no more…. The outsiders, stand by and see, or think they see, the convert entering with bowed head a sort of small temple which they are convinced is fitted up inside like a prison, if not a torture-chamber. But all they really know about it is that he has passed through a door. They do not know that he has not gone into the inner darkness, but out into the broad daylight. It is he who is, in the beautiful and beatific sense of the word, an outsider. He does not want to go into a larger room, because he does not know of any larger room to go into. He knows of a large number of much smaller rooms, each of which is labelled as being very large, but is quite sure he would be cramped in any of them.

The feeling Chesterton describes, of having stepped from a smaller world into a larger one, is very much the feeling that I’ve had for the past couple of years. The Protestant project, these days, seems to be, “What’s the minimum of doctrine we all have to agree on in order to be considered Christian?” Catholicism says, “Let’s be sure of everything we possibly can know.” And when you add the principle that truths known by divine revelation and truths known by examination of the world around us cannot, in the final analysis, be in conflict (for God revealed the one and created the other), the Catholic perspective takes in not only all of the world of faith, but also all of the world of science as well. Nothing true is alien to the Catholic mind, despite all of the foolishness one hears about the Church being anti-science. (Did you know that the Big Bang was first theorized by a scientist who was also a Catholic priest? True story.)

Deathstalker Destiny

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I’ve now completed the first part of Simon R. Green’s Deathstalker series, with the fifth volume, Deathstalker Destiny, and I think I’ve finally got the series pegged. If Neil Gaiman’s Sandman books are “graphic novels”, then the Deathstalker books are “non-pictorial comic books”. Superheroes in Space, in fact, complete with origin stories, angst, and everything. There’s buckets of blood galore to disguise the fact that the mayhem isn’t particularly graphic, nearly instantaneous healing, folks both bad and good who can take more punishment than a company of marines and keep fighting, super villains, implausibly brief conclusions to long-running story arcs…it’s all here, in vivid four-color prose.

It’s a lot of fun, but good sense it doesn’t make.

There’s a follow-on series of three books, starting with Deathstalker Return; I’ll be getting to it soon enough.

Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide

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Philosophy is hard. The terminology is complicated, the words often don’t mean what you think they mean, and there’s over 2500 years of philosophical tradition to digest. Even when you think you understand what a philosopher is saying, you’re almost certainly you’re missing something.

And if you’re not a trained philosopher, it’s even harder.

For the last year or so, I’ve been trying to make headway with the philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas. With the help of quite a many books, a lot of hard work, and encouragement from a surprising number of folks on-line, I begin to think that I’m at last beginning to understand a little of the very basics. (To quote Steven Brust, I might be putting that too strongly.) I know what some of the terms mean, and what they don’t mean; I know how some of the ideas go together. And one of the experiences I’ve had over and over again, as I read through something by St. Thomas and seen him pull yet another principle out of the air in the course of an argument, is a strong wishing for book I’ve mentally titled, Things St. Thomas Takes For Granted. St. Thomas has a number of basic assumptions, axioms, and self-evident (to him, at least) principles that he uses, and I’ve been longing to know what they are and how they fit together.

Edward Feser’s Aquinas: A Beginner’s Guide is the closest thing I’ve yet found, and I more or less devoured it.

Not only does he explain what St. Thomas is talking about, on such topics as metaphysics, natural theology, psychology (one of those words that doesn’t mean what you think it means) and ethics, he explains how modern philosophers typically mis-read St. Thomas, and why their objections and arguments against him fail.

I found it clearly written, explaining many hard and easily misunderstood concepts plainly and well, including a variety of my own misunderstandings, and when I got to the end I wanted more.

No doubt some of the bright light that went on in my head was illusory: things I thought I understood will slip away as I go back to wrestle with what St. Thomas actually said. And it’s entirely possible that I wouldn’t have found the book so helpful and enjoyable if I hadn’t put in all of the work I’d done previously. But as it is, I like, and I highly recommend it.