Reading Revived!

 All of this winter weather has been good for my reading life.  After a lackluster reading year in 2025, I'm off to a quick start in 2026.  In the beginning of the January, I finished Provocations of Virtue, a book on teaching writing and rhetoric with a focus on ethical discourse by a professor at Notre Dame, John Duffy.  He provides some thoughtful approaches to encouraging the careful composition of words and ideas. I appreciated his focus on an ethical approach to writing - not just that students to persuade their readers to make ethical decisions, but that writers make ethical decisions about the way they treat their audience. By envisioning their audience as readers/listeners who deserves respect and whose trust must be earned, writers and speakers write with more precision and consideration. As a teaching text but also a researched text, Duffy's book was practical and interesting, challenging and motivating. I intend to return to it regularly for guidance on moderating difficult discussions, steering students towards reliable sources, and providing suggestions for addressing different points of view.  

After exercising my brain by reading Duffy's book, I gave my brain some junk food by reading the prequels to the Hunger Games trilogy, Ballad of the Songbirds and Snakes and Sunrise on the Reaping.  I have mixed feelings about the Hunger Games books, as do many readers.  I didn't encourage my kids to read them, but some of them did as high schoolers. I see middle schoolers reading them, but unless you have a really mature 8th grader, I wouldn't recommend them for preteens. The themes are dark and the violence is too much, even sometimes for me, but maybe I'm more squeamish than some (I really had to steel myself to remove dead mice - the last two days I've caught mice under the sink in snap traps. After seeing one scurry under the dishwasher the other night, I had to take action. Glue traps weren't working, and I'm afraid of poisoned mice smelling bad. Snap traps may not be humane, but they work. Where there are two, there are probably more - I'll be setting the trap again tonight, to the peril of my fingers! Rodents creeping indoors is a drawback to winter not mentioned in my friend's reel...) A debate could be held about whether Suzanne Collins perhaps could tell her story without descriptions of decapitation and animal attacks.  People make an argument for the value of the books in highlighting injustice and depravity, but even though I tear through these books in a matter of hours, I don't really recommend them. Perhaps they fall into the category of books described by Stephen King in this essay. 

What I would recommend is any book by Wendell Berry. Like many other Berry fans, I love stepping into his world for a few hours. Marce Catlett: The Force of a Story is a slim book. It's not so much about Marce, grandfather of Andy Catlett who lost his hand, (although that episode doesn't figure in this text, something that I thought might be included) as it is about the story of a day he failed to sell his crop for what it was worth and about how the story of that day became a mythic part of the communal memory and a driving force in the family history.  Many critics are opining that this is Berry's last novel. However, in some ways, it is not quite a novel. It is a reflection on the power of story telling. It is an elegy for a lost way of life. It is a call to community and to advocate for the land that shapes communities.  It is a recollection of an education in the land and a love story to it. It is not my favorite of Berry's books; it seems slight, although it does have some evocative descriptions - descriptions that might do more to preserve a way of life than an essay calling for just compensation for agricultural products and for people to stand by the land. I'll try to share some excerpts later. I read somewhere that someone thought this book seems to be Berry's concession he has lost his battle to preserve family farms, even though he himself has managed to continue to stand by the land and stand by words. But I'm not so sure the battle has been lost. More people than ever are reading Berry, and in communities like the one where my parents live, people are still farming, helping each other out, coming together for meals, and preserving a small town way of life.  No doubt the creep of suburban and industrial development keeps coming closer, especially as data centers erupt overnight in rural communities, like the one not too far from us.  (I might be a fan of sending data centers to space, as has been proposed.) But if Berry's work continues to circulate and be discovered by new readers, it may yet call more people to return to the land.

But back to reading: a couple other short synopses: The Chosen by Chaim Potok. I LOVED this book when I first read it back in high school. It seemed so foreign and yet so American; it helped formed my imagination of ethnic communities in New York City. Potok's book is full of faith but also maintains a detached tone. It's the story of two young Jewish boys living in 1940's post-War II Brooklyn who become unlikely friends because they are the sons of very different fathers. One father is a Zionist Talmud scholar, and the other is a Hasidic rabbi who is against establishing a Jewish state. The two boys become friends despite their fathers' differing views and their own friend groups who don't overlap. It is a welcome description of the necessity of friendship, and how deep friendships can overcome difficulties. Despite the connection between the two boys, they go their separate ways at the end of the novel.  Readers can hope their friendship endures (and read the sequel, The Promise, which I have on my list).

The  most recent book I finished was The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams. This is a different book than Robert MacFarlane's The Lost Words: A Spell Book illustrated by Jackie Morris, which has been in my wish list for a long time. Williams' book was recommended by my sister-in-law. It is another one of those books that are hard to put down, but that for one reason or another won't make my favorites list. This one falls in the genre of "Stories about women in the past who react against their limitations to become unrecognized heroes in their sphere of influence." One of these I just finished at the end of last year - Rachel Kadish's The Weight of Ink about a Jewish girl in 17th c England who becomes an amanuensis for an old rabbi and then starts writing her own letters of philosophic inquiry to characters like Spinoza. I enjoy the historical settings and the development of the possible lives for intelligent women unrecognized by history, although sometimes the plots seem a little forced and there is always some romance shoehorned in. Williams's book is set during the construction of the Oxford English Dictionary. The main character, Esme, grows up in the Scriptorium where her father is one of the editors for the dictionary, which takes decades to complete. We see her grow up amongst words and become an editor herself eventually. Details about the dictionary and the history of the women's suffrage movement and the advent of WWI are fascinating, and the book seems well-researched. Esme begins collecting definitions of women's words for her own dictionary, some too coarse and some too domestic to be included in the OED.  The developments of friendships and love affairs move the book along. Esme becomes pregnant, even though she is not in love with the father, but the book provides a positive depiction of adoption. Even with these difficult topics and the love affair with words in both of these books, they read like popular rather than literary fiction and don't have the heft of Potok's or Berry's books, despite being much longer. 

Now on to the next thing! I've got several different books going now, but need to take a momentary break from "fast fiction" because it keeps me too late!

From the stacks

Life has settled into a routine here for the most part: rise, run, school, run around for errands and practices, eat, and then organize stuff with my husband or tend to busy work in the evenings while he works on building desks and lofts and bookshelves for the boys' room. But I broke out of that routine the last few of days and ignored a to-do list and piles of books and photos and knickknacks that need a home to indulge in escapist fiction.  I actually started to post part of this on Reading for Believers last week and pulled it down while I read more. But now I'll throw it up here, since I haven't written anything else lately. 

First: the best book by far was The Book Thief, which I did post about on Reading for Believers.  It really caused my heart to pause. It's the story of Liesel Meminger, a young German girl during WWII, who "steals" books she can barely read.  As she learns to read and learns the power of words, she also relearns how to love others after losing her little brother and being abandoned by her mother.  Even though the book was not suspenseful - it is narrated by Death who tells you what is going to happen - you don't want to stop reading because you care about each character. And Markus Zusak writes beautifully about the power of language.

The beauty of this book stood in stark contrast with the books I read right before and right afterwards that weren't nearly as redeeming. I don’t know why I persist in reading books that I don’t really like. But I devoted a substantial amount of time to finishing Anne Rice’s Feast of All Saints, because I bought it new, and I wasn’t going to let my $8 go to waste, gosh darnit. 

The story of Rice's book: I bought this lengthy novel over a year ago when we visited Faulkner House Bookstore in New Orleans, a delicious bookstore full of delights. I walked away with Faulkner’s first book Soldier’s Pay, of which I’ve read about a chapter and never finished, and this Anne Rice book. Why this cheap mass market paperback, when there were so many good books there for the choosing – lots of Faulkner, of course, but also Welty and O’Connor and Percy and the other big-name Southern Classic authors?  I guess I was in the mood for something light and wanted to read something about the city. Plus, I have to admit the title lured me in. Rice had just denounced her Catholic roots again, but the title of this book, published in 1979, seemed to presage her reversion 20 years later. Or maybe her inability to escape the Catholicity of her upbringing and life in New Orleans.

Sad to say, the book has little to do with saints and a lot to do with sinners.

The book’s story: The novel is historical fiction about free people of color, gens libre de coleur, in the late 1840’s - early 1850’s New Orleans.  The main characters are Marcel, the son of a rich white planter and a free Haitian named Cecile, his sister, his friend Richard, an undertaker’s son, and his teacher Christophe, who has just returned from Paris where he made his name with a romance novel and was free from the burdens of being colored and gay in 19^th century America. The most likable character was Annabella, the girl whom Marcel loves but who is too dark to be his wife.

You could argue that this is a bit of historical fiction, but it has way too much melodrama to be read as serious literature. It really belongs on the romance novel shelf, although the bits of historical information about the Haitian diaspora were interesting, and I did enjoy reading about life in the French Quarter prior to its becoming a tourist attraction. I almost gave up on it more than once when the tortured love affairs were dragging on and on. I couldn’t hold a good image of Marcel in my head, which is a problem since he was the main character.  And I really couldn’t get a good handle on why it was title The Feast of All Saints, other than maybe the irony of all these conflicted souls meeting up at Mass and funerals. I put this book in the giveaway pile without hesitation because I don’t see myself ever going back to read it or handing it to my kids to read. Not one sentence stood out as beautifully written, nor was there one bit of dialogue or description that stood out as particularly luminous.  Entertaining, but empty.

The other book that I haven’t finished but can’t bring myself to give up on totally is Eternal Echoes by John O’Donohue, an Irish poet whom I heard interviewed on NPR awhile ago. I was loving the interview in which he was talking about the relationship of beauty and transcendence, so when I saw this book at a rummage sale, I scooped it up. However, while it has some beautifully written lines – he is a poet after all – the more I read, the less I get out of it and the more fed up I get with the unnecessarily poetic diction.  It’s supposed to be a book of spiritual insight, and I first I was taken in by the description of the soul’s desire for a place of belonging, but the initial promise is never fulfilled. Lots of “join the dance” type drivel. It’s still sitting on the back of the toilet seat, where occasionally I take a look at it for some brief inspirational message, but I think it will soon join Rice’s book in the giveaway pile.

The other books I gobbled up were the Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, which I finished in a couple of sittings. They are the kind of books you can't put down, and because they read quickly, and each chapter ends with a cliffhanger, I stayed up way too late a couple of nights thinking to myself, “just one more chapter, just one more chapter.”

I think a movie is being made based on this series. The Hunger Games is the first of a trilogy, followed by Catching Fire and Mockingjay. It's easy to see why these would make good movies: they're plot-driven, apocalyptic tales about a young girl, Katniss Everdeen, who gets drawn into a reality show-type game run by “The Capital.”  She survives to get drawn into a revolution.  There's action, suspense, hints of romance, moments of nobility. 

I wish I could love these books more. The concept: sometime in the future, most parts of the world have reverted to a more simple, impoverished existence because "The Capitol" conquered the world and divided it into districts that have distinct economies: mining, farming, orchardists, etc. Every year two teen-aged contestants are picked from each district to fight to the death in the Hunger Games.  When her younger sister is chosen in a raffle, the main character, Katniss, volunteers to take her place in the Games, even though she is her family’s main food provider.  At first I was loving this book – self-sacrifice! Familial duty! References to classical myths! Great themes for YA lit. 

But as the book goes on, some things concerned me.  My older boys already read the trilogy last spring, so I’m sorry I didn’t read the book earlier, but I think most of the implications went over their heads. For instance, the games involve violent deaths. Katniss and her co-contestant, the son of the baker who’s in love with her, are long shots to win because they are from a very poor coal mining district.  Of course, you can guess whether or not Katniss dies in the games.  That bit is not a part of the suspense. But some of the deaths of the other contestants are not pretty.  Katniss only kills one contestant directly and that is in self defense, but she is willing to kill innocent people in order to survive.  In the end, a suicide pact is threatened by Katniss and Peeta so that one will not have to kill the other.  While the baker’s son is in love with Katniss, she doesn’t have romance on her mind. There’s some kissing, but they sleep in the same cave without any suggestion of uncomfortable feelings.  

Violence in YA lit was the topic of a Wall Street Journal piece a few months ago.  The author suggested that the newer YA fiction is too explicit in its violence. Compared to The Book Thief, the amount of violence in The Hunger Games isn't especially greater or more explicit, but it seems less meaningful. The beating of the Jews in The Book Thief didn't strike me as glorified, and really I can't say I felt very squeamish about the deaths of the other contestants in The Hunger Games.  They seemed cartoonish in comparison.  

I was interested enough in what happens to Katniss that I checked out the second and third books from the library.  They were easy to finish in a couple days.  Neither the violence nor the relationship between Peeta and Katniss elevates to a concerning level. More concerning is the lack of higher ideals.  Rarely is Katniss's will to survive and defeat the Capitol articulated in terms reflective of a belief in human dignity. Rather, she just wants to live. She doesn't want to be hungry or for her family to be hungry. She doesn't want good people to die in vain. But she doesn't have any qualms about killing her enemies, even though at a few points it wasn't really clear who was her enemy. No vision is offered for what kind of society will take the place of the Capitol if it is defeated. In fact, if anything the alternative government, the rebel District 13, is just as totalitarian.

So while I enjoyed the story, and Collins’ style is engaging, although not particularly distinctive, but a few ideological quibbles prevent me from loving this one and wholeheartedly recommending it.  It took me awhile to pick up on, but finally the use of Roman names for people in the Capitol (Seneca, Octavia, Caesar), the name of the regime for the outlying area (Panem, short for Panem et circenses: bread and circuses, ie. please the masses to keep them under control), and the whole idea of fighting to the death in an arena hit me over the head with the fact that the worldview of this society is modeled after ancient Rome: a dictator, a profligate and superficial upper class, a warrior class, suicide as a higher good than death at the hands of the enemy, a lot of slaves in the outer edges of the country, and finally the use of propaganda to motivate and frighten the working class.  And fighting against Rome is the untamed nature girl, Katniss, named for a plant, her sister Primrose, Haymitch, Gale, Peeta (named for a peat bog?) So nature vs. civilization?  

That idea is kind of fun.  The action is exciting. The characters are interesting. I just wish they were fighting for a higher cause. 

So that’s the latest from here.  Has anyone else read Hunger Games or The Book Thief? They’d be great books for discussion because of some of the difficult themes.  I'm willing to reconsider my take on The Hunger Games. And maybe The Book Thief isn't quite as good as I think. But other than enjoying nostalgia for New Orleans, I can't raise my evaluation of Rice's book.