In lieu of a Podcast, which will doubtless be back next week, I thought I would meander around in a reminiscing way through 2018 and all the books I read. This was an interesting piece, by a person who reads more than 60 books a year, and this was wonderful, about how bookstores are making a come back.
But what if you don’t get to have a commute, and you live with a lot of people who make it hard to sit down and actually read the stacks of books lying there singing their siren song? And also you fall asleep after thirty seconds at night because of all the people clambering for your attention? What then? Well, audible, obviously. The reading crutch for the rest of us. And also, attempting to actually sit down and stare at a page. Which I’ve slowly been doing.
She (of the first piece) recommends reading instead of scrolling through your phone, which does, you’ll be surprised to learn, work—except in those places where you find yourself languishing with a tv blaring. And she also recommends reading lots of different kinds of books. I agree—reading on a whole range of subjects has helped me to break out of my rut, that deep furrow where I spent five years laboring through The Pickwick Papers and finally succeeding, but at what price?
The point I diverge is on reading one book at a time. And this is probably also because of my station in life. Mine is a scattered one, a flitting from one room to another and sipping out of the bucket of rage that there awaits me. Wherever I go there are thousand things to pick up off the floor, a thousand exhortations to deliver, a thousand ways to lose my train of thought. I couldn’t possibly keep hold of one book as I go from place to place. Instead I’ve learned to have books piled up everywhere, so that when I do happen to sit down, I can lay hold of whatever it is and start reading. After a while, different rooms and situations suggest different kinds of subjects to one. So that I usually feel like reading about food and theology in the living room, and in bed I just read PG Wodehouse. That’s the way it goes.
Anyway, let me see, what books hearken to me from the long days of 2018? The book I loved the best has to be What She Ate: Six Remarkable Women and the Food that Tells Their Stories by Laura Shapiro. This was such a wonderful book that words fail me when I want to talk about it. The combination of food and gossip absolutely made my heart sing.
On the literary, intellectual end I really loved Writing Down the Bones, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For His Hat, On Reading Well, and Love and Hate in the Heartland. These all were so good because the writing is beautiful and in each case I was desperately sorry when they were over.
This was also a year of novels. Elphine and I raced happily through almost everything by Angela Thirkell and then began our methodical journey into the Barchester series by Anthony Trollope. But I also really enjoyed the first installment of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy, about which I had heard so much.
Excellent and thoughtful books on the subjects of theology, faith, and modern life were Why Can’t We Be Friends, The Morals of the Story, Moral Combat, Deep Work, Born to Wander, Faith is Not Blind, and The Design of Everyday Things. In all cases the writing was excellent and I found myself stretched and curious about the world and the church as it is now, and how they came to be this way.
There were a few books I didn’t love, even if these set me outside of the bonds of our common humanity. If you love them, I hope you won’t stop being my friend. I didn’t love Bleak House the second time around as much as I loved it the first. I absolutely toiled through two Jen Hatmaker books—For the Love and Of Mess and Moxie. If you like that sort of thing, may God be with you, I had to push myself through every paragraph. And finally, I am embarrassed to say, I didn’t really love The Man Who Knew Too Much by Chesterton. I love the Father Brown stories, but this one was rather a trial.
I suppose I could look backward through the year at how much cleaning I did, or how our homeschool life unfurled—or unraveled, depending on the day—or whether or not I wrote anything. But frankly, it was the books that made 2018 the good year that it was. It was like coming out of a dark tunnel of stress, anxiety and fatigue into the bright sunshine of interesting ideas and words. Looking back over my lists I can see that I didn’t read anything very taxing. It wouldn’t kill me to put my mind to some deep subject and really study, especially since my oldest children are beginning to read interesting and heavy stuff—The Divine Comedy, Cicero, and this coming spring, Augustine.
To lure myself to join them I’ve been listening to Rod Dreher’s How Dante Can Save Your Life. That and my everlasting wander through Black Lamb. To which I’ve added as a special treat A Peace to End All Peace and my dear friend’s Sound, Sin, and Conversion in Victorian England. Her prose is so beautiful I could always cry, no matter what she is writing about.
The interesting thing about books, as I’ve discovered this year, and living so wholly in the age of the internet, is that books are really and truly about friendship. Reading is about knowing other people, about being pulled out of intellectual and spiritual isolation, about beginning the hard work of traveling into the mental and emotional landscapes of people very different from oneself. It’s one reason why I’ve always been cautiously careful about what I read—anxious about going into the world of another person and becoming tangled up in a life I can’t really live. But, as so many people have remarked (none of whom I can remember just now) reading is empathetic, is deliberately growing affection for the Other. Where everything about our modern life encourages a consumptive devouring of things and even people, reading a book written by another human person restores reason and humility as governors for the mind and heart. I probably plagiarized literally everything I’ve read in that single thought—so thank you, all you authors who wrote lovely things, living or dead—I’m grateful for a year of reading.
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