Summer is well underway. So is our summer reading. Speaking of which—what are we reading?
Luke C. Sheahan, Editor
I like to divide my summer reading between works of imagination, those for sharpening the saw, and ones read for professional reasons, either scholarly or Bookman-related. My imagination category consists entirely of fiction. Every year I re-read Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Road, beginning my trek on December 21, the shortest and darkest day of the year. Over the last few years, I have made my reading last for months, even most of the year, savoring every delightful morsel of McCarthy’s masterful prose. I finished this week. Also, on the agenda is G.L. Gregg’s new young adult novel The Stag and the Spear and a rereading of The Sporran, Gregg’s first novel. (Check out David Bonagura’s review of The Sporran in the Bookman for a preview). My autographed copy of Jack Carr’s seventh installment of the James Reece series, Red Sky Mourning, arrived last month. A former Navy SEAL, Carr not only autographs a number of copies, but also shoots a hole through the title page. No doubt I will lose sleep to many late-night reading sessions this summer as Carr’s indomitable alter ego takes on some new bad guys.
Abraham Lincoln famously remarked, “Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.” Each summer, I set aside time to hone the tools of my craft. This summer, I’m reading Cal Newport’s classic Deep Work and Helen Sword’s Air & Light & Space & Time and Stylish Academic Writing and implementing their sage advice.
A number of recently released books on the family are making waves, including Brad Wilcox’s Get Married: Why Americans Must Defy the Elites, Forge Strong Families, and Save Civilization, Tim Carney’s Family Unfriendly: How Our Culture Made Raising Kids Much Harder Than It Needs to Be, and Catherine Pakaluk’s Hannah’s Children: The Women Quietly Defying the Birth Dearth. I’ll read through those this summer to wrap my mind around the family’s free-fall and possible solutions. I should get some time to think about the New Humanism of the early twentieth century with Eric Adler’s Humanistic Letters: The Irving Babbitt-Paul Elmer More Correspondence. Free Speech and Intellectual Diversity in Higher Education, edited by James Stoner, Paul Carrese, and Carol McNamara, Gateway to Statesmanship: Selections from Xenophon to Churchill by Johnny Burtka, and Heroic Fraternities: How College Men Can Save Universities and America by Anthony Bradley are belatedly on the agenda as well.
I see Book Gallery episodes in my future.
Darrell Falconburg, Humanities Editor
This summer is proving to be one of my busiest yet. Fortunately, though, I have still found ample time to read. While the majority of my reading has been for research and writing purposes, still some of it has been for leisure.
Currently, I am working on a writing project on Russell Kirk’s educational thought. This project has led me to a variety of fascinating books, most of which are now out of print. First and foremost, I have been rereading The Crisis of Western Education by Christopher Dawson and Christianity and Culture by T.S. Eliot. In addition, Bernard Iddings Bell’s Crowd Culture and Crisis in Education have been extremely enlightening, and so too have Mortimer Smith’s And Madly Teach and The Diminished Mind. This is not to mention Jacques Barzun’s Teacher in America, Gordon Keith Chalmers’s The Republic and the Person, as well as Arthur Bestor’s Educational Wastelands and The Restoration of Learning, among others. The mid-twentieth century saw the publication of a rich plethora of educational criticism, much of which is deeply relevant to our present educational discontents. I highly recommend all of the above-mentioned authors and books to those interested in the renewal of education in our time.
Earlier this summer, my wife gave birth to our first child, Sophia. Since we have been married, my wife and I have enjoyed occasionally reading together. But now that we have a growing family, we hope to make it a more regular practice. Along these lines, a copy of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, illustrated by Norman Rockwell, recently came in the mail. We have also read a few of Grimm’s fairy tales, and we plan to read together the essay “The Case for Not Sanitizing Fairy Tales,” recently published by Haley Stewart at Plough.
As I write this, my growing book collection—quickly becoming a small private library—sits next to me. Fr. James Schall was right that we should prioritize building our own private libraries. Our libraries grow with us, and they remind us of where we have been and where we hope to go. In the very near future, I plan to read James Matthew Wilson’s T.S. Eliot: Culture and Anarchy (2024), published by Wiseblood Books. I am also looking forward to reading Tracy Lee Simmons’s On Being Civilized: A Few Lines Amid the Breakage (2023), published by Memoria College Press. Both books are coming in the mail.
David G. Bonagura, Jr., Religion Editor
I have done a fair amount of scholarly work on Joseph Ratzinger’s theology, and I am always delighted to read or reread his work. There is so much of it that the old line, “He who says he has read all of Augustine’s works is a liar” now applies to Ratzinger, Augustine’s greatest twentieth-century student. So first on my reading list this summer is Ratzinger’s Faith and Politics, a collection of essays and speeches that span twenty years of the late pope’s impressive theological career. For Ratzinger, politics is an application of a community’s understanding of the truth, which is known through reason. Faith aids in the recognition and contemplation of truth, for it stems from the mind of God, who himself is Logos, or creative reason. (See Casey Chalk’s review of this book for the Bookman here.) After this, as it has been a while since I read a book about Ratzinger/Benedict, I will take a look at Richard DeClue’s The Mind of Benedict XVI, which was just released in May.
I am a huge Christopher Dawson fan, and for several summers I have wanted to read his biography by his daughter, Christina Scott, entitled A Historian and His World. Years ago, I read Kirk Center Senior Fellow Brad Birzer’s biography of this brilliant English historian, so I am looking forward to comparing their styles.
In college I read the trilogy of Alasdair MacIntyre—After Virtue, Whose Justice?, Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry—which opened me to the life of the mind and changed the course of my life. I am currently reading the extraordinarily thorough doctoral dissertation of Bookman contributor Rev. Joseph Scolaro, which presents MacIntyre’s work on tradition and compares it to that of Cardinal John Henry Newman. It has been a great joy to revisit MacIntyre’s work, to see his development of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas’s thinking, and to read a well-written summary of realist epistemology.
Lastly, I am currently editing a volume of essays and reviews by the late Bookman editor Gerald J. Russello for publication later this year. Gerald wrote for almost every publication that is conservative or conservative Catholic. The quantity of reviews, in particular, that he generated is astounding. It has been a great blessing to read and reread the many works of my dear friend who, though taken from us too soon, lives on in our hearts and in his many written works that testify to what he loved most in life: God, family, community, conservatism, America, history, and literature.
Isabel Dobbs, Managing Editor
A novel that I have started reading this summer is Tiina Nunnally’s translation of Olav Audunssøn by Sigrid Undset. I read Kristin Lavransdatter a few years ago, and was enchanted by Undset’s portrayal of medieval Norway and her attention to the religious and moral psychology of her characters. As the Olav series, which is sometimes translated as The Master of Hestviken, is purported to be quite similar to Kristin Lavransdatter, I am curious to see how it compares to Undset’s more famous historical series. Rod Dreher has praised Tiina Nunnally’s translation of Kristin Lavransdatter over Charles Archer’s “fusty” century-old translation. I personally liked the archaic feel of the Archer translation, but decided it was worth giving Nunnally’s more modern prose a chance this time around. As the book is set in Norway, perhaps it is more appropriate to read in the winter. Since it is a four volume novel, though, I may not be done with the series until Christmas.
Undset’s work shows the potential of the novel to shape the moral imagination, a topic Joseph Epstein explores in his discussion of the literary form The Novel, Who Needs It? Published last year by Encounter, this book “goes a long way toward convincing the reader that the novel still plays an important part in civilizing the mind,” according to one Bookman reviewer. I’m interested in Epstein’s arguments for the novel and how the novel’s capacity as a civilizing force compares to other (often older) types of literature. On conservative topics, I’m interested in another title from Encounter Books, Arthur Milikh’s edited volume Up from Conservatism (2023). As a collection of essays, it is not a manifesto, and as I have not yet read it I cannot comment on any of its criticisms of conservatism as a movement. The collection’s authors include a number of prominent names on the right, though, and, as one review comments ‘the essays are more variable than one might expect. Some are reflective and insightful.”
As the mother of a toddler, I have read Make Way for Ducklings at least 20 times this summer. I expect to reach 100 readings of the ducklings’ journey to the Boston Public Garden by the end of the summer. Other current toddler favorites include Katie’s Picture Show and Katie and the Mona Lisa, both by James Mayhew. My daughter is fascinated by the pictures in these stories about a British girl who visits art galleries, and I am personally flattered that my daughter insists that the Mona Lisa is “mama.” The downside of these books, though, is that your toddler may imitate the book’s main character and decide it is acceptable to touch framed oil paintings.
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