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.

While I was in Portland for the Tcl/Tk Conference, I naturally went to Powell’s books; and given my current interest, I raided the theology shelves. One of the books I found, with glee, was Frank Sheed’s Theology for Beginners.

I discover authors in two ways: sometimes I’ll just pick something up while browsing, and sometimes I’ll go looking for something because I’ve seen positive mentions from a number of different sources. And sometimes in the latter case, the book or author in question is hard to get a hold of. In Sheed’s case, I’d seen him mentioned by a number of writers whom I’ve come to trust, but I simply never found any of his books at the bookstore, and (having lots of other books to read first) never got sufficiently motivated to look on-line. Besides, there’s the thrill of the chase: it’s fun to hunt for things.

So anyway, I found it at Powell’s, read a few pages, and snapped it up, along with Sheed’s Theology and Sanity (which I’ve not yet read). And I am singularly impressed.

First of all, Sheed writes with the clarity of C.S. Lewis. It’s a clarity he earned, speaking and fielding questions in Hyde Park, and learning how to get across to all kinds of people. Second, where Lewis was inclined to emphasize “Mere” Christianity in his writings, Sheed is trying to convey the richness of Catholic Christianity in all of its fullness—and he does so clearly, thoroughly, and not at all dryly. Many things that I’ve come to understand in dribs and drabs over the last two years are all laid out neatly and in order. The book is fifty years old (and thus pre-dates Vatican II) but except for a handful of references to details of the Latin Mass it doesn’t feel dated at all.

Lewis famously described Christianity as a house with many rooms, and “Mere” Christianity a description of the whole house, or perhaps of the hallway between the rooms. If you’re a fan of C.S. Lewis you’re curious what they believe in the Catholic room, you could hardly do better than start this one book (which, I’ve just discovered, is available from Amazon).