My daughter Lauren's book "Amelia's Journey to Find Family" was featured in a review in the Lancaster Newspapers today.
She published the book this summer after caring for a 14-year-old rescue Labrador Retriever named Amelia for the last year of her life. I wrote about Lauren's book and her love for dogs in a post in June last year.
If you want a copy of the book, you can order it here.
It's wonderful to see Lauren share her love of dogs in this way.
Her Dad is very proud!
In 2021 I read fourteen books under the vast category of fiction. The oldest of the books was written in the 14th Century. The newest were published this year. The authors as close as my own family and as far away as Russia. The setting of one novel is more than two thousand years ago, another is in the near future.
In an earlier post I listed the non-fiction books I read in 2021.
In another post I said that my favorite book of 2021 was a work of fiction I did not finish: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. But having a favorite does not mean there were any books on the list I did not like. They are so different. But The Decameron was very much in my mind in our pandemic world.
Just the list for now. The highlighted links connect to my reviews of the book.
In 2021, I read fifty books. But the first and best book of the year for me is the book I have not yet finished. It's a book I first read in 2015 and went back to last year: The Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio. Also known as The Human Comedy in contrast to Dante Aligheri's Divine Comedy, The Decameron inspired Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well and Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales among hundreds of other writers and their works over the past eight hundred yers.
For me and many others, these tales written and published during the worst years of the Black Death in Florence have been a source of fun and inspiration during the current pandemic.
I have loved the Divine Comedy for decades, but had not read Boccaccio nor Francesco Petrarch. The lives of these three Florentines overlapped in the early thirteen hundreds. Dante died in 1321 when Petrarch was 17 years old and Boccaccio was eight. The two younger poets became friends after Boccaccio published The Decameron in 1352. Together the three poets are known as The Three Crowns of Florence.
After reading and re-reading Dante for 35 years, I read Boccaccio and Petrarch in 2015 in class on Medieval Italian Literature taught by Chelsea Pomponio at Franklin and Marshall College. I was delighted by Boccaccio, less so by Petrarch. In 2020 as the pandemic sent the world into crisis, I went back to Boccaccio and to the sonnets of Petrarch. Now I read both regularly, thinking about how they survived the terrible plague of their time and created stories and poems that inspired and delighted people ever since.
My favorite book of 2021 is the book I have not yet finished: The Decameron.
In 2013, Joan Acocella reviewed the translation of The Decameron by Wayne A. Rebhorn in a long review in the New Yorker. It's a good review and gives a lot of background on the book. Here is the link.
My top three in this category are (in publication order)
Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond. He says geography is the reason western culture came to dominate the world in the past half millennium.
Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, who charts the history of the species Sapiens including highs like civilization and medicine and lows like all the misery that ensued when we left hunter gatherer lives to settle down and become the servants of wheat.
These Truths by Jill Lepore traces the history of America from its discovery to the present with a focus on women and minorities. Her stories of the lives of slaves and native Americans and the first abolitionists are amazing.
I am currently becoming a fan of Niall Ferguson. He was a guest on the "Honestly" podcast by Bari Weiss. The discussion was centered on Ferguson's latest book Doom but ranged across his long ouevre. I picked Civilization because it has a half millennial timeline form 1,500AD to the present, tracing the way western civilization came to dominate the world and why.
The chapters are the reasons why the west dominated the rest. At the beginning of the second chapter, Science, Ferguson quotes Jesus saying "Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar's and give to God the things that are God's." Ferguson said the separation of Church and state is fundamental to Christian faith.
It took the Reformation and the Renaissance to break the hold of the Catholic Church on western culture and allow science to flourish freely. Ferguson then lists 29 great innovations in science between 1530 and 1789 that happened after two millennia of relative stagnation.
He also charts in detail the reasons China and the Ottoman Empire, both much stronger than Europe in the 1,400s, fell under European dominance by the 19th Century. Tyrants who allowed the suppression of science and innovation are the reason both empires went from dominance to decline.
I am barely into the second chapter and love the book. If I get obsessed there are 14 more to go!
His most famous, a book I have read and re-read, is Amusing Ourselves to Death. That book covered the rise in communications technology in our lives and how it corroded our ability to think. It was published in 1985, before the internet rotted our brains more than ever. Before social media, Postman was worried about a divided nation.
His advice was to resist the worst of Technolopoly, but with a goal of preserving what is good about America. At the end of Technopoly, Postman tells his readers to become "Loving Resistance Fighters."
(I am transcribing a very long passage because it is so good.)
Postman says, "I can, however, offer a Talmudic principle that seems to me an effective guide for those who wish to defend themselves against the worst effects of American Technolpoly. It is this: You must try to become a loving resistance fighter. That is the doctrine, as Hillel might say. Here is the commentary: By "loving" I mean that in spite of the confusion, errors and stupidities you see around you, you must always keep close to your heart the narratives and symbols that once made the United States the hope of the world and that may yet have enough vitality to do so again. You may find it helpful to remember that, when the Chinese students in Tianamen Square gave expression to their impulse to democracy, they fashioned a papier-mache model, for the whole world to see, of the Statue of Liberty. Not a statue of Karl Marx, not the Eiffel Tower, not Buckingham Palace. The Statue of Liberty. It is impossible to say how moved Americans were by this event. But if one is compelled to ask, Is there an American soul so shrouded in cynicism and malaise created by Technopoly's emptiness that it failed to be stirred by the students reading aloud from the works of Thomas Jefferson in the streets of Prague in 1989? Americans may forget, but others do not, that dissent and protest during the Vietnam War may be the only case in history where public opinion forced a government to change its foreign policy. Americans may forget, but others do not, that Americans invented the idea of public education for all citizens and have never abandoned it. And everyone knows, including Americans, that each day, to this hour, immigrants still come to America in hopes of finding relief from one kind of deprivation or another."
When I finished reading Technopoly a couple of weeks ago, I began reading a biography of Thomas Jefferson and reading the Federalist Papers. Jefferson was 32 years old in 1776 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence. Alexander Hamilton was either 30 or 32 years old (his birth date is either January 11, 1755 or 1757) when he wrote most of the Federalist Papers. The brilliant young men who led America in the greatest and one of the only successful revolutions in history gave us something worth preserving.
I want to be a Loving Resistance Fighter.
In 2018 I read two mysteries in which Agatha Christie is a character: Murder Will Out and Hiddens Sins. I also read the mystery centered around Alison's fascination with the Higgs Boson and particle physics: Dying to Know. At that point I had not read the Sister Agnes series of mysteries that began her career as a mystery writer in the 1990s. By 2000 there were six Sister Agnes novels.
This year I saw Sister Agnes was back in a pandemic mystery What Dark Days Seen. It was fascinating to see a mystery solved by a person dealing with all the pandemic restrictions. Since the pandemic began I was re-reading stories from The Decameron and Love in the Time of Cholera. Once I read the pandemic mystery I went back and The Quick and the Dead one of the early Sister Agnes novels and am now reading The Darkening Sky which is influenced by Alison's love of the Divine Comedy.
In The Quick and the Dead Sister Agnes has a deep crisis of faith. It is a very good mystery. I had no idea "Who done it" until the murderer was revealed. But the spiritual crisis of Sister Agnes is beautifully done. I would recommend the book even to those who are not fans of the mystery genre. More than twenty years ago, I read all of the Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries written by Dorothy Sayers. The mysteries were fun, but the character of Lord Peter Wimsey kept me reading until the series was finished.
I was very glad to return to London. And it seems I picked a window between the Delta and Omicron variants that still allowed easy travel between the UK and Paris. It was my first trip on the Eurostar train through the Chunnel.
For avid readers of mysteries, I would suggest beginning with the Agatha Christie homage books. It's fun to see Agatha herself in the story. Anyone who has experienced a crisis of faith or wants to read about faith facing tragedy, The Quick and the Dead is fantastic.
Two weeks ago I saw the musical "Fun Home" an adaptation of a memoir of the same name by Alison Bechdel. A week later, I started reading the graphic memoir which the musical is based on. I finished it this morning.
This sad, compelling story presents the pain and mystery of the suicide, or maybe not, of Bruce Allen Bechdel, Alison's father. Bruce was gay. Alison finds out her father was gay only when she discovers she is a lesbian while at college. Bruce's suicide or accidental death happens soon after Alison comes out to her family.
Though presented in a musical and graphic format, the memoir is serious and deeply revealing. I felt the love Alison had for her father, the tension between her parents, the confusion Alison felt throughout her childhood about herself and her family, and the isolation each member of the family lived in.
In the graphic book, Alison uses maps to show the small area in which her father lived his life: a circle of a few miles covers his birth, life, work and death. Alison notices on recordings of her father's voice she heard after his death that he had a local accent. And yet, he aspired to the world: loving beautiful things and teaching great literature.
Alison is 20 when her father dies. She goes on to become as notably out as her father was closeted. She created the comic strip "Dykes to Watch Out For" which is where she introduced the Bechdel Test: a measure of the representation of women in fiction. It asks whether a work features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added.
I have read many memoirs. They are among my most and least favorite books. Truth, unvarnished truth, must be at the center of memoir, because we readers will sense when we are being served the public relations story rather than reality. This memoir is among my favorites. The struggle of Alison finding who she is had me from the first act and the first page.
This book reminds me why I love book discussions so much. Each reader brings his or her own life to the book. The discussion brings those perspectives together to clash or harmonize, reinforce or raze, and otherwise share the wonder each person brought to the book.
The premise of the book is that the world has become disenchanted. The author tells how we became disenchanted, then tells how he, and we, could become re-enchanted.
I liked the beginning of the book, particularly connecting our disenchantment with the reformation. He makes a good case for the unintended consequences of blasting the foundations of Catholicism. In Beck's analysis, the Enlightenment and the Scientific Revolution are more layers of the disenchantment cake Luther and Calvin baked.
For me, the Scientific Revolution and the wonder of the Enlightenment re-enchant the world of faux spirituality that grows in a world of religion plus ignorance, but I know that makes me very marginal among believers.
I have a favorite author among those who explain relativity physics. I wrote him 25 years ago to tell him I love his book. In that book, Spacetime and Special Relativity, M. David Mermin writes a long aside explaining why fundamentalists are wrong. I also told Mermin that I am a believer and found the fact that light was the speed limit of the universe made my faith more vivid. He wrote back and told me he was working on a sequel that dropped the criticism of belief. A few year later It's About Time was published with even better illustrations of the inextricable relations of space, time and special relativity.
To return to Beck, after he makes the case for disenchantment, I found his case for re-enchantment difficult. Not what he did, but the context in which he writes. He teaches in Texas. The book was written after 80% of Evangelicals and nearly as many conservative Catholics voted for a game show host who believes himself entitled to sex with anyone he wants and has no need of forgiveness. And Beck returned to spiritual health in the company of charismatic believers. They may, as Beck says, have a grip on the reality of the ministry of the Holy Spirit that other Churches lack, but the charismatic Churches are also the source and propagators of the horrendous prophecies declaring Trump a modern day Cyrus, chosen by God to rescue the Church, and after the 2020 election, charismatic groups more than any other promote the lie that Trump won the election and will be returned to office by God. The false prophet of Revelation is clearly legion.
Can re-sacralizing spaces help re-enchant the world? It can't hurt. But I wonder what would have helped the German Christians expelled from Churches in 1935 if they had one Jewish grandparent. In this world, all spiritual practice exists in a political reality. Among the first martyrs were those who refused to worship Caesar. If a Church is enthusiastic about worship and also believes every lie from Trump's mouth (only worship does that) is it a Church. Reading about the expulsion of the Jewish believers in Holy Week 1935, I wondered if that building and congregation was a Church the following week. The definition of love that leads to that end is utterly Orwellian.
So here's my letter to Beck. No answer so far:
As a member of several book groups, I occasionally see a list of the top 10, 25, 50, 100 books of all time or some time or recent time. On nearly every list are books I love and books I loathe.
So I decided to make my own list. It was supposed to be a top 25, but it got longer. I stopped at 61. This list presumes no expertise other than that of an avid reader who found these books especially delightful and therefore memorable.
What's Your list?
My Top 61
If I were asked to name one thing that defines the life of my oldest daughter, I would say, "Lauren loves dogs!"
We got our family's first dog when Lauren was eight years old. The German Shepherd named Lucky was the whole family's dog, but Lauren really loved that dog. Except for when she lived in college dorms, Lauren has had dogs ever since. She currently has two rescue dogs named Guinness and Watson, but she wrote her first book about a dog named Amelia.
Lauren adopted Amelia last year and kept her alive and as healthy as possible until she passed away last month on May 20, National Rescue Dog Day at the age of approximately 12-14. The book is a story told by Amelia about finding her last and final family. If you would like to get the book for a child in your life (or yourself), order here.
Lauren volunteers for Lu's Labs, a Labrador Retriever Rescue organization. Lauren fostered thirty rescued labs over the past five years before deciding to keep Amelia.
Over the past year, Amelia posted daily on the Lu's Labs site as well as her and her brother's instagram page. These posts detailed her transition to Lauren's home, old lady ailments, the difficulties of training the humans and attempting to understand their behavior, and about finding the simple joys and things to be grateful for in each day. These posts had hundreds of followers.
In her passing, Amelia received over a thousand messages from people telling her how her posts inspired them, taught them about love and gratitude, helped them through difficult times in their lives, the uncertainty of COVID, and how reading her daily posts became part of their morning coffee routine or part of family dinner each night. These messages also had another common and incredible theme, so many people spoke of the incredible love they had for dog they'd never met.
Lauren is currently posting on Facebook at Team Wag Forever.
On Instagram: Amelia Writes Books and Guiness Watson and Friends.
Lauren shared with me many of the hundreds of comments she received. I was really moved by the comment from her soccer coach at Juniata College, Scott McKenzie. I only went on one college visit with Lauren and that was the college she picked. I remember little of the visit except the first moment of meeting coach McKenzie.
Lauren and I walked into McKenzie's office. He was sitting at the desk looking at some papers, looked at Lauren then bolted straight up out of his chair, hands raised like he was in Church and said, "Praise the Lord. A five-foot ten goalkeeper wants to play for my team."
Lauren played every season, but missed a lot of her senior season after an open fracture of her finger in a pre-season game.
Here is Coach McKenzie's response to Amelia's passing. Lauren's nickname on the team was "Goose."
A good friend of mine lost one of her dogs this morning. Not just any friend and not just any dog! Goose (my friend) competed for me while a student-athlete at Juniata College. Goose was a terrific goalkeeper for our women’s soccer team. She’s an even better human being who has dedicated her professional life to caring for others. It makes sense, then, that this tendency towards care would carry over to her personal life in the dedication she shows to her family and her pets. Goose volunteers for an organization called Lu’s Labs, which connects available dogs with their forever families.
In Amelia’s case, the cards were stacked against this wonderful chocolate lab. Elderly dogs and dogs with compromised health are tough to place. In steps Goose (about a year ago) and becomes Amelia’s foster and then forever Mom. Goose and her husband welcomed Amelia into their family of two other labs and they became a family of five.
Goose and Amelia wrote a children’s book together about finding a home and being loved. I can’t wait to get my “pawtographed” copy.
Goose gave Amelia a voice and many of us have followed their wonderful journey together.
This morning, that journey ended as Amelia earned her wings and will be waiting for her families at the Rainbow Bridge.
Before she left, Amelia asked for a favor from all of us. She asked us to consider an elderly or ill dog if/when you adopt. She proved, over the past year, that they can give love and laughs with the time they have left. I believe this to be true.
So, please learn more about adoption. Visit Lu’s Labs online. Consider Amelia’s book as a good read for you or a friend.
Most importantly, open your heart to the possibility of the great amount of love that remains in our dogs, no matter what their age.
Amelia, I never met you but my eyes were filled with tears of heartbreak when I learned of your passing.
Good dog Amelia. Good dog.
Goose - you’re an amazing person and I thank you for allowing many of us to join you in loving that good dog.
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