Part Two of my 2023 update begins with fiction and a book recommended by my daughter Lauren; Anxious People by Fredrik Backman. This book is so funny I was laughing on every other page. Read and laugh out loud! I wrote about the book here.
After watching the movie "Living" by Kazuo Ishiguro, I re-read The Death of Ivan Ilych by Leo Tolstoy, on which the movie is (loosely) based. It is such a lovely story that and a haunting view of life and death.
After reading a story about the main character dying, I read Eternal Life by Dara Horn, about a woman who could not die. It was strange and beautiful and reminded me of novels I read fifty years ago.
Poetry for 2023 includes a seventh re-reading of Inferno by Dante Aligheri, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Thank You For Your Service, poems about the Vietnam War by Richard Epstein, and Beowulf translated by Seamus Heaney.
In philosophy, I read The Jewish Writings by Hannah Arendt, a book of hers I had not read before. I read two books with the title Free Will. One was the "Oxford Very Short Introduction" to the subject which I read after reading Sam Harris' book of the same title. I deeply disagree with the premise of the Harris book, which is that we have no free will. But in one of the weird coincidences of modern life, I subscribed to his podcast last month after hearing his long essay on the events of October 7. I could not agree with him more on Israel and the necessity of destroying HAMAS and all other Jihadist groups if we want to live in a civilized world.
In the category biography I read Oppenheimer by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. It's the book on which the movie "Oppenheimer" was based. I saw the movie four times in three countries, the last time with French subtitles. The book has much more depth and reveals even more of the complexity of Robert Oppenheimer's character. The two complement each other well.
I also read Someday You Will Understand by Nina Wolff. It is a biography of her father who escaped The Holocaust, came to America and served in the American Army in World War II. The book is based on her father's letters. It's an amazing story of survival and building a life in America after the war.
Another biography of a very young man who became a great man twice was Hero of Two Worlds by Mike Duncan, a biography of the Marquis de Lafayette, the young French general who made American independence possible and then helped to pull France together after the fall of Napoleon.
Finally, my favorite book of the year: That All Shall Be Saved by David Bentley Hart. In the book Hart, an Eastern Orthodox Theologian asserts that there is no eternal Hell. Further he says that Hell is contrary to the character of God and is a terrible thing to believe about God.
Hart made me realize that the belief in an eternal Hell is so deep in western culture that I believed in Hell even as a vaguely agnostic teenager. Not sure about God, sure about Hell.
A beautiful part of Hart's argument is that God intends every person who ever lived to live forever, together. He deals with Hitler and other horrible people in the argument. And says that belief in eternal Hell means being separated forever form those we love: which ever side of the Heaven/Hell divide we would end up on.
Before I read this book, I re-read Inferno and felt even more revulsion at Dante's celebration of eternal punishment, which only echoes the theology of Thomas Aquinas. Hart showed my why I was so repelled.
I agree with Hart completely and since reading the book have looked at the world differently.
I wrote about the other books I read in 2023 here.
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