Book Report 2020, Book Groups In this year of Pandemic and Social Distancing

In this year of Pandemic and Social Distancing, I am part of more book groups than ever in my life. Most of the discussions are on Zoom, but also on the phone. Zoom is not as much fun as talking in person, but distance does not matter, so I can connect with people in Germany as easily as here in Lancaster. 

ESL Book Group 

Four years ago, I volunteered with a local ESL (English as a Second Language) group run by Andrea Bailey. While volunteering I met Sarah Gingrich and Emily Burgett. We talked about books sometimes and asked each other about books we read or wanted to read. We ended up reading the same books, then getting together to talk about them. We became with a book about a Russian Holy Fool. The book is a novel titled Lazarus. 

From there we have read books about faith, the plague, and many other topics. Other people have joined depending on the book. In the past two years, Andrea moved to Wisconsin and Emily moved to Massachusetts then joined the Army, but with Zoom we can still meet. This summer, in the midst of the pandemic, we discussed Decameron.  For that discussion, we were joined by Chelsea Pomponio, a professor whose research is in Medieval Italian Literature focusing on Boccaccio. After Decameron our book was Love in the Time of Cholera.  As part of that discussion, Sarah Reisert gave us an impassioned critique of that book as beautifully written sexism, racism, child molesting and promotion of patriarchy.  It was delightful. I love a negative review. In October we talked about Free Will by Mark Balaguer.  The next book is Breaking Bread with the Dead by Alan Jacobs. It is not a book about sharing Avacado Toast with Zombies. 

The World Conquest Book Club 

This summer I talked with a former co-worker who returned to the library and museum where we both worked as a director. We were talking about leadership and decided to start a monthly book group to prepare Michelle to go from director of the library to ruling the entire world. We settled on six books that would be the basis of world domination. Naturally, the first was The Prince by Machiavelli. Next was The Art of War by Sun Tzu, followed by Plato’s Republic and a critique of Republic by Karl Popper called The Open Society and its Enemies. In November we will read Lioness a biography of Golda Meir. I have been promised a cabinet position in the Michelle World Government. 

Writers in Residences 

This is a monthly book group organized by the Jewish Community Alliance in Lancaster in cooperation between local Synagogues. This month we are reading Witness: Lessons from Elie Wiesel’s Classroom by Ariel Burger. It will be the first time I am participating in this new format. We will discuss each book with the author. So Ariel Burger will be on the Zoom call. In February I will be introducing the author Raffi Berg as we discuss his book Red Sea Spies: The True Story of the Mossad's Fake Diving Resort. 

Pre-COVID, the Hillel group on the campus of Franklin and Marshall College had book discussion group during the normal academic year that I would attend when I could. 

The Evolution Roundtable 

This group has met Monday’s at Noon on the campus of Franklin and Marshall College since the early 1990s. Most regular attendees are retired professors, along with some current professors, and members of the community like me. I joined about a decade ago. Each semester the group reads a book about some aspect of evolution. The current book is The Deep History of Ourselves: The Four-Billion-Year Story of How We Got Consciousness. In past years we have read books on many aspects of evolution including The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins, Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, and, of course, The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. In the late 90s Stephen Jay Gould joined the group for one of its meetings. 

Virtual Reading Group: The Hannah Arendt Center at Bard College 

Like the Evolution Roundtable, this group meets weekly to discuss books by the philosopher Hannah Arendt. We are currently finishing Essay in Understanding: Formation, Exile and Totalitarianism 1930-1954. The 90-minute discussions have a lot of context and background and different interpretations. The group will start again in January looking at The Promise of Politics followed by the book I most admire of all Arendt’s works The Human Condition. I have written on every page of the copy I read in 2012. 

Torah Study 

Each Saturday morning my Synagogue has Torah Study. The book each week is The Torah. We go through in a cycle determined by the Hebrew calendar. This group is very different on Zoom than in person. In the Synagogue, Rabbi Jack Paskoff clarifies points in the Torah using his white board and explaining often ambiguous Hebrew. On Zoom the Rabbi has to manage the discussion much more than in person. 

The New York CS Lewis Society 

I joined the NYCSL Society in 1979. Since 1980 I have been able to go to monthly meetings once or twice a year to the meetings in NYC. Last year I went to the 50th anniversary celebration on Long Island. I have not been to a meeting this year but hope to join the Zoom meeting this month. It will be a discussion of books by Lewis and G.K.Chesterton written in wartime.

 

Books with Friends

I am also reading books with friends on topics we agree and disagree about. A very sincere friend from Greece who is living in Germany asked me to read a book with him about Trump: Evangelicals at the Crossroads: Will We Pass the Trump Test?

I like Dmitri, so I read the book. I hated the book but discussed why with Dmitri and with our mutual friend Cliff. Following that book, Cliff and I are reading a book on abortion titled Beyond the Binaries by Thomas Horrocks. We will be discussing it next week.     

Another friend, Christina Hu, and I are talking about creating a podcast. This summer we discussed basing the podcast on books about America, its place in the world, and its effect on the world.  We read Nothing Ever Dies: Vietnam and the Memory of War and Band of Brothers.  We are now talking about something different than a book-centered podcast.  But the books led to some really good discussions.

                   

Book Report, Part 3: Books on Faith

The last post was about a book that combined worldwide nuclear war with faith among the few survivors.  It was a bridge of sorts between the 15 books I read about war and the books I read about faith. In this essay, I will discuss seven the books I read in 2016 about faith and religion. 

The first book on faith I read this year was the novel Laurus about a Russian healer and mystic. We follow Laurus from his apprenticeship to a healer near the end of his life, through love and loss, to Laurus finding that he is now a healer himself, a greater healer than his mentor. Then the story takes a long and funny detour. Two thousand miles away, the son of an Italian merchant comes to believe he must travel to rural Russia and find this Laurus in order to know when the end of the world will be.  The Italian goes to Russia, takes Laurus on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land and the tale takes even stranger twists from there. Laurus is a great story, and a picture of the harrowing reality of a truly spiritual life. 

Which led me to re-read Letters toMalcolm: Chiefly on Prayer by C.S. Lewis.  Since I first read Mere Christianity in 1977 in Germany, I have read or re-read at least one of Lewis’ 40 books every year. Reading Laurus made me feel shallower than a pie plate spiritually and Malcolm pointed right at one of my weaknesses. 

In the fall I read four books for an ancient Greek language class. They were (1) The Gospel of Mark in Greek in a recent edition, The Gospel of Mark in English in Richmond Lattimore’s translation, and two commentaries by Michel Focant and Mary Ann Beavis. In Greek, the words of Jesus are at once more harsh and more clear than any English translation could convey.  Jesus turned down every form of power and riches offered Him. He healed and fed the poor. He publically condemned to rich and powerful.

While I read these unambiguous words, millionaire TV preachers notably James Dobson and Jerry Falwell, Jr. endorsed a candidate who brags of sexual conquest, of having riches, power, and fame, and of having no need of forgiveness—the center of the Christian message.  The health and wealth heresy is now mainstream, the public religion of America.  But you can’t find a word of that in Gospels. 

On Wednesday night, I help out with an English as a Second Language (ESL) ministry at my Church.  In one class I asked the students about studying their Holy Books.  One of the students was from India, one from Ethiopia, one from Afghanistan.  They each said it was strange that in America you could “study” the Bible in translation.  In no other religion could someone be considered as studying a Holy Book if they did not know the language of the Book.

I could tell the students the only writer of the New Testament who was a native speaker of Greek was Luke. The other half dozen were GSL (Greek as a Second Language) writers.  And all of the words of Jesus were spoken in Aramaic or Hebrew, so even the Greek New Testament is a translation of the His words.  By the time you read the words of Jesus in English it has been translated twice: once by the Apostle who heard Jesus speak and translated His words to Greek, then a second time when the Greek was translated to English.  I had a co-worker who learned Aramaic before he learned Greek because he wanted to be able to get a sense of what Jesus said in His language.

The last book in the faith group is Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse.  This lovely book follows the life of two young men who are novices in a monastery at the beginning of the story.  One leaves, one stays but their lives remain intertwined until the prodigal comes home and dies in the arms of his life-long friend.  The book really captures the devotion and drive that leads to a life of faith and how that devotion and drive can be turned to art.  This book is in many ways unlike Laurus, but alike in the intense, lifelong and sometimes funny spiritual journey of the main character(s).

The next post will be books on politics.

Book Report, Part 2, Nuclear War and a Monastery

Before I turn from war to peace, I will add one more book to the war list in which the war is seen only in its effects. That book is A Canticle for Leibowitz, which I re-read for the fourth time this year.  The book is set in the Utah desert in an Abbey hundreds of years after “The Flame Deluge” of the 1960s, a nuclear war. Most of the world was killed. Those that survived had mutant children, the misborn. 

Shortly after the nuclear holocaust, the world turned on the scientists and intellectuals who the survivors believed caused the war.  One of the scientists, before being killed, called the mob “Simpletons.” They took the name as a badge of honor, like the Breitbart followers who embraced being “Deplorables.”  They called themselves “Simpletons from Simpletown.” They burned books as well as killing the learned. They ushered in the “Age of Simplification.”

Some of the survivors started hiding books. The Church hid books in monasteries in the desert.  One of the people who hid books was a nuclear scientist named Isaac Edward Leibowitz.  He was eventually caught and martyred—hung over a burning pile of books.  The Abbey was named for Leibowitz who has been nominated for sainthood when the book opens. 

The book follows life in the Abbey from that time until civilization is reborn. This darkly ironic book is one of my favorites.  With nuclear threats in the air, mistrust of intellectuals common and Deplorables now a moniker for millions, this 1950s book seems sadly contemporary. 

Curl up and wait for the mushroom cloud.  You won’t be disappointed! The New Yorker published a long and thorough review of the book and how it came to be written.

Book Report: The 50 Books I Read in 2016, Beginning with the War Books

In 2016 I read 50 books, more than a dozen for the classes I took in in the spring and fall of the year, many more because of the reading I had done for those classes.  One of the first questions I had in making this list is how to sort it? By author? By Title? By trade category: fiction, non-fiction, etc.?

Since the list is a spreadsheet, I sorted it by the language of the writer or the subject.  With that sort method, 25 of the books are by Russians or about the Russian language, plus a biography of Vladimir Putin, which has a very Russian subject.  Next is 15 books by english-speaking writers, then four by Greek writers, two by Hermann Hesse (German), two by Italian writers, one by an Israeli and one book in French.

Another column told me 15 of the 50 books are about war--some about war itself, some about the effects of war on civilians, some about life after war.

First on the war list is Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman. As vast as Tolstoy's War and Peace, the book weaves together lives in Russia centering on the Battle for Stalingrad in 1942.  The book includes descriptions of the Holocaust more wrenching than anything I have ever read. A short book of Grossman's dispatches from Stalingrad titled "From the Front Line" shows where he did his research.

Then a completely different book I will say much more about in the next few weeks:  Grunt by Mary Roach.  This is actually a popular science book about the science of keeping soldiers alive, restoring their health, or at least learning from their deaths.  It is a darkly funny book by a brilliant writer.

Three of the four books I read by Kazuo Ishiguro are about before and after war. I wrote about those three books here. The fourth was Nocturnes, five stories of love and music set in Venice.

Returning to sad war stories, Zinky Boys about the Soviet war in Afghanistan, 1979-89.  All of the stories are first-person heart wrenching, especially the mothers.  This book should be sold with a Kleenex box.

Just a few years before the Soviet Afghan War was the Yom Kippur War in Israel in 1973.  The Lover is a dream-like tale set in the time of that war. It seems to unravel in the middle, but comes together in a very strange way at the end.

The Italian writer Primo Levi tells us about life before, during and after World War II in his native land in the book The Periodic Table. Another book covers the time Levi spent in a Nazi Concentration Camp. The saddest section is when Levi knew his fate and could not avoid it. Levi is a chemist and the chapters are elements.

Three more Russian war stories in three different eras:  A Hero of Our Time by M. Lermontov depicts life during a border war in the Caucuses in the early 19th Century. It has many similarities with the Afghan War in "Zinky Boys" and with Russia's War in Chechnya.  In the book Sin by Z. Prelepin tells us the story of his life in glimpses of his childhood, young love, his service in the Chechen War and how he lived after the war.  The book, by its many glowing reviews in Russia, tells the wrenching truth about life in 21st Century Russia. In between is a book not exactly about war, but about a Russian soldier who wanted to be a warrior and ended up a prison camp guard.  The Zone by Sergei Dovlatov, tells the story of life in a Soviet Prison Camp where the guards are not much better of than the inmates.

Finally, two war books from Ancient Greece: The Iliad and The Odyssey.  I read the first chapter and parts of several others in my spring Ancient Greek class.  The Odyssey is certainly more popular, but the Illiad is the real soldier's story.  It had been two decades since I last read Illiad. I had forgotten how well Homer knows the life and motivations of soldiers.  I read Illiad in translation.  If you read either, I suggest the translation by Richmond Lattimore.

I also used Lattimore's New Testament in the my fall Greek class. I have read a dozen translations of the Bible. Lattimore's New Testament is the best. Most Bibles are translated by a committee and all the writers sound the same. In Greek the individual writers are as different as Mark Twain, Hermann Hesse, Robert Frost and Junot Diaz. Lattimore gives the reader the writer's true voice, not a dozen writers in a blender.

Next post is the books on peace, or at least the absence of war.