“It’s all been said before,” a charming English professor from my college days commented so often that the words surface each time I remember him.
“But you can add your grain of sand,” he’d add with a twinkle in his eye.
Oh, those grains of sand! Where would our lives be without writers who take us out of our own time or open a window of insight into it? I suppose that’s why, though the wishlist lengthens and the bookstack burgeons, I still read the recommendations of other readers and still share my own. Those “grains of sand” feed us in ways other media cannot. They keep us in the flow of a timeless conversation toward a more meaningful life.
Besides, it hasn’t all been been said before.
And so as January closes while I’m still planning the reading year ahead, here are just a few highlights from my 2024 reading list, in in case you’re still planning your reading year, too.
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain (In Which Four Russians Give a Masterclass on Writing, Reading, and Life) by George Saunders
A Swim in a Pond in the Rain still glimmers in memory, reminding me why I am a reader in the first place.
The book is an exquisite pairing of seven short story gems from Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol with mini essays exploring how great fiction works. We read part of the story, then stop while Saunders reveals his reaction as a reader. What questions have surfaced that keep us hooked? How do these characters somehow reflect our universal human experience? Then we’re plunged back into the narrative for more. It’s simply addictive.
And that’s not all. Saunders also offers up fascinating details from each writer’s life and work along with his own cogent insights, not just on literature, but on our frail, fumbling humanity.
If you haven’t read the great Russian novelists because their books are as long as a Russian winter, read this book first. But I warn you: it may change your reading list forever. The Russians (maybe it’s those long winters after all) have a way of seeping into the soul.
Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist: The Philosophical Foundations of Flannery O’Connor’s Narrative Art by Father Damien Ference
Anticipating the release of Ethan Hawke’s Flannery O’Connor biopic Wildcat, books by and about Flannery O’Connor heavily influenced the first few months of my reading year. No regrets at all!
Among so many good books already written about O’Connor, Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist is unique. Father Damien Ference (who wrote his Ph.D. dissertation on O’Connor) has layered the writer’s story with insights gleaned from the contents of her library and letters. It all adds up to an accessible immersion into the writer’s life, to the Thomistic foundations of her faith and the challenges caused by the disease that cut her life short.
If you want to understand O’Connor better while reflecting on all the great questions our times pose, this is the first book I would recommend.
“All my stories are about the action of grace on a character who is not very willing to support it,” O’Connor said.
Understanding the Hillbilly Thomist provides a key to O’Connor’s view of modernity (the nihilistic “gas we breathe”) and the antidote she found in her thoroughly Catholic understanding of faith. I read Ference’s book in tandem with finishing the letters collected in The Habit of Being (a classic in its own right) and fell in love with her all over again. Jessica Hooten Wilson’s Audible Original Flannery O’Connor and the Scandal of Faith is also a fresh and insightful take on the Hillbilly Thomist.
How to Read (and write) Like a Catholic by Joshua Hren
If I could return once more to those “grains of sand” that build booklists and keep the inner fires crackling, let me promote How to Read (and Write) Like a Catholic as the best introduction to and argument for the reading life I’ve read in a long time.
Founder of Wiseblood Books and co-founder of the University of St. Thomas’ Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, Joshua Hren has gifted us with an insightful and passionate guide for readers who may already be in touch with the Tradition’s literary masters but wonder about literature in our own time as well.
Who is speaking into the “mood and mode of [this] fatigued age” (as one of David Foster Wallace’s characters put it)?
Read this book (and Hren’s short Contemplative Realism: A Theological-Aesthetical Manifesto) before you read anything else, and you’ll find out. Hren begins with the traditional canon (he quotes Flannery O’Connor more than any other author in the book) before moving to a thorough discussion of contemporary Catholic literary writers and secular storytellers infusing our current moment with soul: Toni Morrison, Christopher Beha, Oscar Hijuelos, Michael O’Brien and George Saunders (yes–the author of A Swim in a Pond in the Rain) and more.
Who knew the riches were so sparkling and varied? Hren did, and his book will be guiding many of my reading choices in the coming years. The contemplative life of the mind never looked so inviting. Penetrating moments of spiritual direction provided at no extra charge.
Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen
Having felt politically homeless for years, I decided to read political science professor Patrick Deneen’s 2018 book Why Liberalism Failed when I heard that both Barack Obama and J.D. Vance recommend it without subscribing to every part of its analysis.
Liberalism (the philosophy of individual freedom that drives different aspects of both the American left and right) has failed because it succeeded, Deneen argues.
Seizing different aspects of ideologically-driven politics, Deneen reveals how overweening capitalism on the right and unrelenting social moralism on the left have created a state unrecognizable to the founders of the American republic.
Deneen points us to the need for deeper, thicker relational webs, reminding us that “community is more than a collection of self-interested individuals brought together to seek personal advancement.” Rather, in the words of Wendell Berry, it “lives and acts by the common virtues of trust, goodwill, forbearance, self-restraint, compassion, and forgiveness.”
With so many of us unsatisfied by contentious political binary, it may be time to seriously consider how liberalism, the founding philosophy of our nation, has led to “a society and increasingly a world that has been remade in the image of an ideology.”
Why Liberalism Failed is a good place to start that reflection.
What books are staying with you from your 2024 reading year? I’d love to hear from you!
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You might also like Wildcat Was Worth the Wait and Books Before Newsbites: Curating the News with C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Day.
Image by Deborah Hudson from Pixabay.
Peggy,
Your posts are always delicious!So much to read.
I love Flannery O’Connor more than I can express in words!
Bless you,
Phoebe
It IS hard to express Flannery love in words, I agree, Phoebe! I was thrilled to see the attention she got because of the film. It’s available to stream now. I’d love your take on it if you get to see it.