Category Archives: Books

Jhegaala, by Steven Brust

Posted on by

This, of course, is the most recent volume in Brust’s long-running “Vlad Taltos” series. It takes place immediately after Phoenix, so far as I can tell. Vlad’s on the run from the Jhereg, and has headed East to his ancestral homeland of Fenario. For a city kid who’s used to living among the non-human citizens of the Dragaeran Empire, other humans are a new challenge for Vlad, and he rises to the occasion. Well, sort of.

As is usual with Brust I read this aloud to Jane. We both enjoyed it well enough–Brust is always fun–but it’s not one of the stronger books in the series, alas. I was hoping for more.

For those who came in late, if you like fantasy you need to go get a copy of the first Vlad novel, Jhereg; it’s also collected with its two successors in an omnibus volume, The Book of Jhereg.

Questions and Answers, by Pope Benedict XVI

Posted on by

This slim is a collection of questions asked of the Pope during various public meetings, along with the Pope’s off-the-cuff answers. The questioners range from small children just making their First Communion to youths preparing for World Youth Day to diocesan priests (by far the largest group). The answers are to the point, suited to the audience, and (as always with this Pope) loving, well-stated, gentle, and insightful. My favorite moment involves a priest who, as a seminarian, was gently chided by his spiritual director for loving football (soccer) more than Eucharistic Adoration. The Pope’s answer to the priest’s question includes the following:

I would therefore be against having to choose between either playing football or studying Sacred Scripture…. Let us do both these things!

He goes on to say,

…we cannot always live in exalted meditation; perhaps a saint on the last step of his earthly pilgrimage could reach this point, but we normally live with our feet on the ground and our eyes turned toward heaven. Both these things are given to us by the Lord and therefore loving human things, loving the beauties of this earth, is not only very human but also very Christian and truly Catholic.

Recommended.

Good Omens, by Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman

Posted on by

Now, I’m a big Terry Pratchett fan. I’ve been reading Terry Pratchett since his second Discworld book, back in the early 1980’s. I have bunches of his books in hardcover. I’ve read most of them aloud to Jane. I like Terry Pratchett’s stuff.

And yet, until just this week I had never read Good Omens…well, not really. I got a copy of it in hardcover when it first came out, and began reading it to Jane, and shortly got to a scene where Hastur and Ligur, two important demons, begin a conversation with another demon by praising Satan. And I said to Jane, “I can’t read this aloud!” So we stopped. And somehow I never picked the book up again, and eventually I got rid of it. (D’oh!)

But I keep hearing from other readers I trust (notably Julie at Happy Catholic) about how fun the book is, so the other day I got a copy. And I’m afraid I was underwhelmed.

This undoubtedly says more about me than it does about the book. At the lines of prose level it was funny, and there were lots of bits I had to read aloud to Jane. The problem is the subject matter: the authors are dealing with real supernatural material, stuff that matters, and getting it wrong. Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files? Set in the real world, but clearly imaginary. The Discworld? Heck, the Discworld is so imaginary that it’s held together only by vast quantities of magic. But Good Omens, alas, it edges a little too close to home. I kept finding myself saying, “But it isn’t like that.”

Earth to Will: Pratchett and Gaiman were trying to be funny. The book isn’t meant to be taken completely seriously. Yeah, I know. The problem is, the book has a point. And the point is tied into a theology that’s completely screwy. And theologically-unsophisticated readers (which is nearly everyone) are all too liable to read it and agree with P&G’s point and walk away thinking they’ve learned something, when all they’ve really done is to reject an absurd strawman. This bugs me. (You might think I exaggerate, but I remember being 15, when Harry Harrison’s Deathworld Trilogy threw me into a atheistic tail spin. Granted, I was kind of looking for reasons not to believe at that point.)

But your mileage may vary; I’m just explaining why I’m having trouble giving the book an even break. Oh, well.

The Life of Saint Dominic, by Augusta Theodosia Drane

Posted on by

This life of St. Dominic was first published in 1857 in England; apparently it remains one of the best lives of St. Dominic in the English language, though it has its blind spots. In 1857, it was understood by everyone that the Rosary was given to St. Dominic by the Blessed Virgin Mary herself, and promulgated widely by him; more recent research has shown that the first mention of the Rosary in any text follows Dominic’s death by quite a long time, and that the origin of the Rosary is correspondingly more recent. There are likely other similar errors. But I gather that there aren’t that many biographies of Dominic in English; and one of the reasons, which is hinted at in the book, is that Protestant England has generally looked on Dominic without fondness.

Protestant England, as everyone knows, was frequently at war with Catholic Spain. The Elizabethans were skilled propagandists, and one of their favorite topics was the Spanish Inquisition, which consequently everyone expected. I wouldn’t want to whitewash the Inquisition, but a lot of what we English speakers think we know about it goes back to British propaganda. Now, as everyone knows, St. Dominic preached against the Albigensian heresy; and in fact the Inquisition was founded to combat the Albigensian heresy, and many of the early inquisitors were Dominicans. Dominic, in fact had nothing to do with the founding of the Inquistion (and it wasn’t the Spanish Inquisition in any event), and though there were excesses in the crusade against the Albigensians, so far as I can tell the inquisitors weren’t responsible for them. But be that as it may; Dominic was Catholic, and Spanish, and was around when the Inquisition was founded, and so, three centuries and more later, England used him as a symbol of everything she hated. Drane says remarkably little about all this, under the circumstances, but she takes some slight pains to clear the good names of St. Dominic and his early followers.

I found the book both interesting and frustrating. We are told quite a bit about the saintliness of Dominic’s life, and about his travels, and about various miracles that took place in his vicinity, all of which are interesting and about which I am glad to be informed. But Dominic founded the Order of Preachers, and I was really hoping to know just what he preached about, and how he preached it. Alas, his sermons generally weren’t preserved. Part of being a saint is the possession of the virtues in heroic measure, and that includes humility; where we know a lot about a saint’s life from the saint’s own hand, it’s generally because the saint was ordered to write about themselves by some superior. So Dominic wasn’t inclined to preserve his own words in writing, and apparently nobody else was either, alas, whether out of deference to him or out of a sort of corporate humility.

So. I enjoyed reading it; and I was left wanting much, much more.

Book Tasting

Posted on by

Fellow-Tcl’er and bookstore investigator Michael Cleverly has started a new blog, Wisdom from the 42nd Page. He plans to “taste-test” three books a day, giving a slight bit of info about each, and showing the entire 42nd page. He writes about his motivations at his old blog. The schedule sounds a little ambitious, but it’s a neat idea.

What Would Thomas Blog?

Posted on by

Phil at Brandywine Books suggests that St. Thomas might have blogged the Compendium Theologiae himself, had blogging been invented in his day. To which I respond:

It would seem that, if St. Thomas Aquinas were alive today he would be a blogger. On the contrary, St. Thomas could not possibly have written so many great works of philosophy and theology had he spent his time at the keyboard. I answer that St. Thomas would have had a collection of bloggers with laptops close to hand at all times, to whom he would have dictated blog posts in round-robin fashion, in between dictating paragraphs of the Summa Contra Gentiles and the like.

More Blogging Aquinas

Posted on by

I’ve got posts up at the Blogging Aquinas blog on the first two chapters of St. Thomas Aquinas’ Shorter Summa. Surely there’s someone who can drop by and help me relieve my ignorance? I’m actually going to try to post something there every day, as I work through the book; we’ll see how it goes.

Cities of God, by Rodney Stark

Posted on by

This is a fascinating book.

Subtitled, somewhat flamboyantly, “The Real Story of How Christianity Became an Urban Movement and Conquered Rome,” Stark’s book takes a quantitative and statistical look at how Christianity spread between Christ’s death and the year 250 AD. That sounds dry, but it’s anything but.

Stark begins by selecting the thirty-one major cities of that time, and then quantifying various facts about them. Did they first have a Christian community by 100 AD? by 180 AD? by 250 AD? Were they port cities or inland? Were they more or less Hellenic in culture? Were they centers of the cults of Isis or Cybele? Did they have sizeable Jewish communities? Then, given these and other data items, he begins to test a number of statistical hypotheses. For example, his results support the hypotheses that Christianity tend to first appear in port cities, and in cities that were part of the Jewish Diaspora. These are obvious conclusions, and most historians would agree with them; but as it notes, if his quantitative method is valid it should give the obvious answer when the answer is really obvious.

It’s his later conclusions that I found most interesting. He spends a great deal of time on the early Christian heresies, especially those which are collectively termed “gnosticism” these days. Some writers, notably Elaine Pagels, have in recent years claimed that there were many Christianities in the early days of the Church, that the Catholic Church suppressed the gnostic Christians, and that perhaps the gnostics had as much right to the name of Christian as those who retained it. Stark investigates this position and finds that it was far otherwise.

A digression. There are quite a few documents found in the last century that have been termed “gnostic”, mostly because it’s a convenient term. Of these, some had sizeable groups associated with them; some had small groups; of others, nothing of their authors or readers is known. The more sizeable groups all tended to share a similar set of beliefs: that the physical universe was not created directly by the One God, but by an evil deity, subordinate to the One God and disobedient to him, called the Demiurge. According to these groups, our souls are creations of the One God, but our bodies and all the things of the physical world are irredeemably evil. This led some groups to extreme asceticism, and others to extreme debauchery—if body and soul are separate, why not let your body do what it likes?—but on the evils of the physical world they were agreed.

Stark compares the locations of known “demiurgist” groups with those of known Christian congregations, and also with those of non-gnostic Christian heresies, the Marcionites and the Montanists. He finds that Marcionite and Montanists groups appeared in the same places as Christian congregations, which is what you’d expect of Christian heresies; they were drawing on the same pool of potential converts, and also from the orthodox groups. The presence of the Manichees and the Valentinians shows a significantly different pattern. These groups are correlated solely with the larger cities (then, as now, more able to support oddball groups), and particularly with those cities in which paganism remained strong the longest. He finds no significant correlation between the presence of Christian and gnostic congregations.

The conclusion is obvious: although the gnostic groups used semi-Christian imagery, they were not really an outgrowth of Christianity at all. On the contrary, they were outgrowths of classical paganism.

As I say, interesting stuff. Moreover, Stark provides all of the numbers (including the correlation coefficients, regression results, and so forth) that underly his conclusions (in an appendix, I hasten to add—the casual reader need not fear). I studied quite a bit of statistics once upon a time, and though I’ve not used it recently I’ve no doubt I could repeat his results with a bit of work, given the data in the book itself.

The book’s not perfect; I had a few quibbles here and there, and being a work of social science it naturally looks only at human-scale explanations and mechanisms, the truly divine being out-of-scope. That’s to be expected, though, and within those limits I think the book is outstanding.

Hell’s Gate, by David Weber and Linda Evans

Posted on by

I found this book interesting and annoying by turns.

The premise is neat. About forty year prior to the action of the present novel, the inhabitants of a planet called Sharona discovered a portal that led to another planet: a planet almost exactly like Sharona in its topography, but completely uninhabited by men. In that universe they found a second portal, to yet another planet, equally like Sharona, but also uninhabited. As the story opens they have colonized widely, running rail lines through the portals and providing ferry links where need be, and they are exploring yet another, the forty-something universe they’ve found. All of them have been uninhabited and open for exploitation.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the multiverse, the inhabitants of a planet called Arcana long ago discovered a portal that led to another planet, a planet exactly like Arcana in its topography, but completely uninhabited. They’ve been exploring the network of universes, colonizing as they go, and as the story opens they are exploring yet another. All of them have been uninhabited and open for exploitation.

Until now, of course, when the two exploration teams collide with disastrous results.

There’s a lot to like about this book. The civilizations of Sharona and Arcana are nicely realized, right down to the global geopolitics of each; neither is truly monolithic, but has a full array of cultures and subcultures. Although Sharona and Arcana are both at a roughly 20th century level of sophistication, they have vastly different technologies. The blurb and the cover leads you to believe that Sharona is a high-tech society similar to our own, while Arcana is based on magic, but it’s a lot more complicated than that. Arcana’s magic is highly developed, and extends to a variety of computer-like gadgets that run “spellware”. In many ways, Arcana feels more like home. Sharona’s technology is larged steam-based…but many of the inhabitants have various telepathy-based “Talents”. Each civilization has its own strengths and weaknesses, but on the whole they are evenly matched.

Another neat touch is that the topography of all of these planets is clearly that of our own Earth; all of the names and cultures are different, of course, but it’s fun to match up places from the little hints that are dropped.

The main problem I have with this book is that the characters are doomed to lose. The authors are setting up a multi-volume epic (as if this volume weren’t big enough, at over 1200 pages), and are clearly going to explore the military and political implications of the two sets of cultures and technologies during the course of a long, drawn out war. And the galling thing is, the war is thoroughly unnecessary. Both sides have a policy of peaceful first contact that is subverted initially by surprise, then by errant and repeated stupidity, and ultimately by malice–but it was clear early on that despite men and women of good will on both sides, Peace wasn’t going to happen. And because there are likable characters on both sides, that’s really a pain.

In short, I liked everything but the plot. I might read subsequent volumes; I’ll have to see what they look like.

On Being Catholic, by Thomas Howard

Posted on by

This book is one of the best I’ve read all year, and maybe longer. I can already tell that it’s one I’ll come back to, time and again–it’s that good. The author, a cradle fundamentalist, converted to Roman Catholicism as an adult, and wrote a book about it entitled Evangelical is Not Enough. Ten years later, he wrote this book, an extended meditation on what it means to be a Christian of the Catholic variety.

Any religion has three components: a moral code, a set of beliefs, and the day-to-day practices. Howard skips over the moral code, which Catholics and other Christians largely agree about it; and he discusses doctrine only to the extent that Catholics and other Christians disagree about it. By far the largest chunk of the book is about the day-to-day Catholic practices that give serious non-Catholics the heebie-jeebies: praying with the saints, for example, but most especially and beautifully the Sacrifice of the Mass. He goes into great and beautiful detail about the Mass, and what it means, and why we Catholics do what we do.

This is not a dry, technical book, I hasten to add. What this is, really, is a love-letter to the Roman Catholic Church, and to Christ its Head, in thanksgiving for all of His many and great blessings. I learned a lot from it, not so much in terms of specific facts, but in terms of how everything in Catholic practice works together. He didn’t just show me the landmarks; he revealed all of the terrain between them.

If you’re a Catholic, and you want to get more out of your faith, I’d suggest reading this book; and if you’re a Protestant who’s worried that his Catholic friends might not be saved, I’d definitely suggest reading this book. And if you’re no kind of Christian at all, you might find it interesting to see what all the noise is about. Highly recommended.