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Happy springtime, readers!

I hope that wherever you find yourself in the world you are enjoying some extra sunshine and blooms as we finally are here in Chicagoland after what felt like a never-ending winter.

I am delighted to be introducing you to our May book club pick: The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

It has been a longstanding tradition here at Reading Revisited to participate in the Norwegian practice of reading detective/mystery stories during the Easter season. Below are some that we have selected in previous years:

• The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins (RR 2025)

• The Innocence of Father Brown by G.K. Chesterton (RR 2024)

• Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens (RR 2023)

• Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayers (RR 2022)

• Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie (RR 2021)

Though detective fiction often gets a bad rap for being a “guilty pleasure ”, I can confidently say that some of our best book club discussions have come out of our time spent with these stories, and I am certain that our first foray into Sherlock Holmes will be no exception!

As we dive in, I invite you to take a moment to check out what fellow substackers and had to say about The Hound of the Baskervilles back on our book drop day post!

Reading Revisited

May Pick (Book Drop Day 2025)

Welcome to Reading Revisited, a place for friends to enjoy some good old-fashioned book chat while revisiting the truth, beauty, and goodness we’ve found in our favorite books…

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a year ago · 10 likes · 7 comments · Hannah Suire, Jacob Allee, Ruth Gaskovski, and Kelsie Hartley

Below I’ll share a few (spoiler-free) preliminary thoughts, resources, and discussion questions as we kick off another great month of reading!

A Few Things I Love:

• We get some extra bang for our buck with this novel as it is both a classic detective story and a prime example of the Victorian gothic novel. Doyle seamlessly blends the two genres which makes for an extremely compelling read. The literary forms themselves give Doyle an excellent arena to explore what happens when “legend” (the realm of the gothic) meets “logic” (the realm of the detective). I appreciate that he doesn’t just send his detective into into an old spooky mansion, throw in some moors, and call it “gothic” (though, don’t worry, we get PLENTY of excellent atmosphere); rather, he creates a story that is really of the genre in that it is exploring themes of terror, secrets, evil, and the supernatural in an honest way. And he does it all while keeping us in the playful, curiosity-driven mode of the detective story.

• I love the way that this quick scene on page one serves to subtly introduce the reader to the mystique of Holmes’ methods:

  “‘Well, Watson, what do you make of it?”

  Holmes was sitting with his back to me, and I had given him no sign of my occupation.

  “How did you know what I was doing? I believe you have eyes in the back of your head.”

  “I have, at least, a well-polished silver-plated coffee-pot in front of me,'“ said he.” (p. 1)

  We will find ourselves, quite often, playing the role of Watson here, and wondering, “HOW DID HE KNOW? IS IT MAGIC?” And our friend Holmes will quite enjoy revealing the trivialities that we missed, obvious though they should have been.

• This novel is quintessentially Holmes. His method and personality shine through and we see a quality in him that will be very familiar to the connoisseur of detective fiction: the detective as a godlike figure. This is something we see quite often in later literary detectives, (most notably in “Papa Poirot”). This quality is evident not only in Holmes’ immaculate track record and apparent omniscience in any given situation, but also in his own comically strong sense of self.

  I love this bit of dialogue in chapter three, when Watson returns to Baker Street to find Holmes studying a map. Holmes says:

  “I have been to Devonshire.”

  “In spirit?”

  “Exactly. My body has remained in this arm-chair and has, I regret to observe, consumed in my absence two large pots of coffee and an incredible amount of tobacco. After you left I sent down to Stamford’s for the Ordnance map of this portion of the moor, and my spirit has hovered over it all day.” (p. 35)

  This allusion to Genesis is a telling one - Holmes is approaching the mystery as a creator preparing to bring order out of chaos.

• The structure of this novel is intriguing. One thing that is unique here amongst Doyle’s other Sherlock stories is that we will get a chance to see Holmes and Watson split up and work independently for a time. Up to this point in the Holmes canon we have come to know Watson in the light of Holmes, so this book provides an interesting chance to dig deeper into his character in its own right. Before we see them working apart, though, we see them working together in London, out of Baker street. This is structurally significant - Holmes and Watson working together is the proper order of things and that must be established before there is a separation.

• Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born and raised Catholic, but abandoned his faith early in adulthood before becoming a committed spiritualist. I’m interested in the way his spiritualism informs his view of the world and how that comes through in his work. Sherlock Holmes’ great feats of crime-solving, especially in the most pivotal moments, are almost always accompanied by his abuse of opium, heavy smoking, under-eating, and lack of sleep. For the spiritualist, the body is seen as something like a “temporary vessel” that is of far less import than the soul. In light of this, I find it intriguing the way that Holmes’ intellectual powers often seem to reach their greatest height at the moment that his material body is being most “maltreated”.

A Few Reading Resources:

• Ignatius Critical Edition of The Best of Sherlock Holmes - a collection of Holmes stories which includes several essays that would pair well with The Hound of the Baskervilles

• episode covering The Hound of the Baskervilles (available for paid Close Reads Subscribers only)

  Close Reads Podcast HQ

  Monthly Mystery: The Hound of the Baskervilles

  As we begin our second season of Monthly Mysteries, it’s time to finally discuss the most famous of all detectives. Join us as we dig into Sherlock Holmes and John Watson’s adventure in a mysterious village as they pursue a villainous murderer. As always, we go dig into what makes…

  Listen now

  a year ago · 24 likes · 10 comments · David Kern, Heidi White, and Sean Johnson

• The Folklore Podcast episode 66: The Hound of the Baskervilles

• offers a study guide for The Hound of the Baskervilles through Study the Great Books

  Study the Great Books

  The Hound of the Baskervilles

  Everyone knows the name of Sherlock Holmes. He is indisputably the most famous fictional detective in the world. As great as Lord Peter Wimsey, Father Brown, and Hercule Poirot are, they are still sadly unknown by name to a great many and even when someone makes the case that one of these or some other literary sleuth is more admirable, interesting, or …

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  a year ago · 24 likes · 8 comments · Jacob Allee

• BBC’s “Sherlock” S2E2: “The Hounds of Baskerville” - *note that the adaptation here, like most in this series, is EXTREMELY loose, but it’s fun if you take it for what it is! Though this is the only one I’ve seen, there are also MANY other acclaimed adaptations - apparently Sherlock Holmes is recognized by Guinness World Records as the “most portrayed literary human character in film and television history”

  

A Few Themes/Ideas to Keep In Mind:

• Gothic Story Elements:

  • Setting: Grimpen Mire (dark, isolated, gloomy, PERFECT setting for some gothic drama)

  • The “hound” (the black dog/hound is a recognizable symbol of doom…think of “the grim” in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban)

  • Ancient family curse (and manuscript)

  • (at-first) Unexplained phenomena

• Detective Story Elements

  • Godlike/brilliant detective and much less astute “Watson”

  • Detective as “last hope” when authorities have failed to achieve justice

  • Red Herrings (we see several of these even within the first third of the novel)

  • Observation of minute details (the scene from the first few pages where Holmes and Watson observe the walking stick is a prime example)

• Frame Narrative Style (nearly all of the Sherlock Holmes stories and novels are presented as a written record kept by John Watson)

• Originally publishes serially (in nine installments) between 1901 and 1902.

• Place in the “Holmes Canon”

  • in 1893, Doyle had killed Holmes off in “The Final Problem”, but the public was so eager for more “Holmes” that he brought him back for this (and several other) stories.

A Few Discussion Questions:

• Where/how did you first “meet” Sherlock Holmes?

• Why do you think his character has endured even amongst other detective heroes/heroines?

• How does this novel compare to other gothic novels you have read? Detective novels?

• Can you identify anything in Holmes character/approach that you see developed in later detective fiction?

• Did you suspect the resolution prior to the end? What clues stood out to you?

• Which characters stood out as untrustworthy along the way?

• Did you find the “horror” of the story effective? If so, at what points did you find yourself most fearful?

• Is justice done in this story? Did you find the end satisfying?

We hope you are all planning to read along with us this month! Please let us know in the comments any other resources, thoughts, or themes we should keep in mind as we begin!

What We’re Reading Next:

May

The Hound of the Baskervilles by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

Paid Subscriber Read-Along

Paradise Lost by John Milton

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

We have turned on paid subscriptions which will allow you to support the work we are doing here.

If you would like to make a small contribution to the work we’re doing here at Reading Revisited, we invite you to do so with the Buy (Us) a Coffee button below. We so appreciate your support!

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*As always, some of the links are affiliate links. If you don’t have the books yet and are planning to buy them, we appreciate you using the links. The few cents earned with each purchase you make after clicking links (at no extra cost to you) goes toward the time and effort it takes to keep Reading Revisited running, and we appreciate it!

Welcome to Reading Revisited, a place for friends to enjoy some good old-fashioned book chat while revisiting the truth, beauty, and goodness we’ve found in our favorite books.

Subscribe now

Hello Readers,

It is finally time to meet (or revisit) Kristin Lavransdatter and medieval Norway and I cannot wait!

Each winter/Lent we read a long book over the course of a few months. What better time for a long book than when you are stuck inside contemplating life?For this year’s long book we are reading Kristin Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset.

I am so excited to introduce you to my second favorite book of all time! We will be spending the next three months with my “literary patron saint” (yes, I think these exist and don’t tell me I’m wrong because I need it)! She is a melancholic of melancholics. You will love her and a page later will want to smack her upside the head. But, I pray and hope that through reading this story you will know yourself better and see the beauty in this ordinary and broken life that we all live.

Kristin is a character that I have not gotten out of my head since I met her eight years ago. She is a character that I relate to so strongly that I actually tremble at the thought that people will know me too well after meeting Kristin. So be warned…you may see yourself (or myself) in this book and it might be a little painful.

This book is not simply a love story, but the whole life of a girl who grows into womanhood and then must deal with the consequences of the life she has chosen. You will go through every emotion while reading this book. Some people report being so frustrated with Kristin at times, to which I reply, “Yes! That is exactly how Sigrid Undset wanted you to feel!” But at the same time you will also be encouraged that even the most flawed among us can seek forgiveness and redemption.

I got my copy off the shelf to write up this (hopefully) enticing introduction and I am already engrossed in this story just by opening and reading random scenes. I don’t know how Sigrid Undset wrote this, but we should all be thankful!

If you want to hear , , and I talk about it on the podcast from Book Drop Day you can fast forward to exactly the one hour mark to hear!

A Note on Translations

Translation matters. It always does. But it especially matters when you are going to spend 1,124 pages and three months with a book. I am a firm believer in the Tiina Nunnally translation. This is the newer translation and the translation itself has won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize in 2001. While it reads like it is updating the text, I have been assured that Undset actually wrote the book that way and this is a more accurate translation.

In my personal experience, I started reading the older translation (Knompf or Archer/Scott) not knowing that there were options and I could not get into the book for the first 200 pages. Once I switched translations (to Nunnally) I was almost immediately hooked and couldn’t put the book down. I’ve since reread the beginning in the Nunnally translation and absolutely love it!

Even if you like the older language, be aware that there are important scenes cut because the translators thought they were inappropriate.

The translation note in the Nunnally edition is very helpful, though I do admit that the last sentence is a bit ridiculous (as noted by Amy Fahey in Women of the Catholic Imagination).

Best Editions and Audiobook Comments

Instead of being one long book, this is actually three moderately sized books. So we will be reading one book each month. The most cost effective way to acquire the book is in one volume⁶ so that is my official recommendation. It is a very sturdy paperback for such a long book (clocks in at 1100 pages or so). If you haven’t heard me wax eloquent about Penguin Deluxe Classics then you will just have to trust me. Somehow it even miraculously stays open where you want it to.

However, it can definitely be annoying to carry around a brick for three months so you can also buy each book separately (which I recently did for this very reason. It is a little pricier, but it is nice to have a smaller book to lug around. They are also published by penguin, but not in the deluxe version. I won’t lie to you, they are inferior that way. But here are links to get them individually:

• The Wreath

• The Wife

• The Cross

Again, just be aware that if you buy these used double check the translation. There are many other editions out there, but everything that is not published by Penguin is the older translation. If you do end up reading the older translation I would love to hear your thoughts! If anyone wants to write an essay comparing the two, let me know!

As for audiobooks: I have been informed that there is a better version on audible now but it is not fantastic. So depending on your audiobook pickiness level, that could be an option. It is the one on audible published in 2023 (and I believe the only option currently available to purchase). It was the same cover as the penguin deluxe so should be easy to recognize!

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Is This a Russian Novel?

No! I emphatically say that no, this will not feel the same as a Russian novel. However there are two similarities. The length (as already talked about at length) and so many names! So here is a chart that might be helpful to print out and stick into your book in case you are forgetting how people are related. I definitely read it the first time without this information and still followed the story, but if you are wanting to make more connections this will definitely be helpful!

Some of My Favorite People Talk About Kristin

My Husband

I cannot bring myself to shorten my lovely husband’s () efforts to convince everyone to read this book…it is too compelling. So if I haven’t convinced you yet, I leave you in his capable literature teacher hands….

When the history books recount the era of the Reading Revisited Empire©, they will tell that it all began with me. Well, at least Kelsie’s third of the empire. I met her in 2012 in Chicago on the corner of LaSalle Boulevard while with a group headed for Oak Street Beach off of Lake Shore Drive. It is I, reader, who take not a small degree of credit for my wife’s sharp literary industriousness. At least I take credit for the literary part. I got her into Chesterton and Lewis, I told her how much I loved Hawthorne and got her to read him. I told her that she needed to read Homer. And what has happened since? The Reading Revisited Empire© has become the fastest growing literary triumvirate Substack may have ever seen. From that hot day in that cold city on the way to Oak Street Beach a friendship blossomed into a romance, dueled through tragedy, and danced into a comedy. I think right now it might be sailing through the shoals of a contemporary medieval Norwegian epoch; which is where I plan to drop an anchor.

For all the credit I feel like I can take for my wife’s literary project I must admit that it was she who dropped this novel on my bed stand. She must have said something like, “I know it’s about a girl but its medieval Norway and it’s cool. It’s like gritty and inspiring and sad and I just think you would think it was cool.” To which I dutifully began reading. The next time she found me with the book I was weeping. And I’m like a really strong dude who is like really tough!

Sigrid Undset had introduced me to Kristin, the daughter of Lavrans, the wife of Erland and told me the story of her life. That’s it, that’s what Kristin Lavransdatter is about. Kristin’s life from her birth to her death. Oh yah, she’s gonna die at the end.

In Kristin, I peered into the joys, temptations, failures and hopes of a woman who was very much not like me. She’s scrupulous and shy, controlling and nervous. But I knew Kristin in another way. Because woven into Kristin’s story were joys, temptations, failures, and hopes of Erlend, her husband without whom this story would not have been written. Kristin’s chaotic spouse is in many ways why this novel is worth reading. Not that Kristin isn’t interesting in and of herself, but the catalyst of her story is Erlend. So Undset was introducing me to myself. Which I guess may be the purpose of all great literature.

I imagine that if Erlend had written this story he would have thought that he was the reason behind the story. He was the catalyst for the most important moments in Kristin’s life. He was the reason all of the things that happened in the book happened. But of course, Undset wrote this book, not Erlend; and she knows better. You see what Undset realizes is that Kristin herself is not the hero even of her own story. The mosaic that Undset lays tells the story not merely of the marks left by the characters upon each other, but the marks made by God upon their souls. Undset’s Kristin reflects this truth in a way no other book I have read does. There are passages of this novel I cannot read again without genuinely weeping (and remember, I’m like really big and strong, I like to hunt!). Undset does all of this by telling us about how Kristin’s vocation, replete with all of the trials of marriage, is the tool by which God is shaping her soul. And mine. Because in Erlend Nikulausson I met my wife’s husband. I saw why she loved him, what she feared for him, how she cared for and resented him, and how she would get him to heaven and vice versa.

So read this book if you want to get to know Kelsie better! And uhh, ignore all of Erland’s faults cause he’s really cool. But more importantly read this to see how God uses our vocations to shape our souls. And finally, to all the Historians, remind me to tell you about when I thought about starting a podcast and told Kelsie that she should start one about books with her friends.

Christy Isinger

One of my favorite bookish influences, , kindly agreed to help us introduce Kristin for our Book Drop Day…here’s what she says:

There is definitely too much to say about Kristin Lavransdatter. It is at once a historical epic precisely depicting medieval life in fourteenth century Norway, but also one of the most authentic and accurate novels detailing what it means to be a woman. The interweaving of culture, societal pressures, the intimate relationships of father, daughter, husband and wife, the experience of motherhood in its fullness from birth to death, the depth of the spiritual life, and the cost of personal sin have never been brought together in a single story to such powerful effect.

The three part saga of Kristin Lavransdatter will at times make you angry, bewildered, frustrated, excited, happy, and then emotionally devastated. It is a complete ride of a reading experience that not only gives you an intense look at a woman’s life in medieval Norway, but a mirror to seeing your own life and experiences. Undset has the incredible ability to weave story and drama around the very human and universal experiences that most of us will have at some point in our lives. But it is the honesty and beauty that Undset brings to these experiences that will surprise you. Kristin Lavransdatter isn’t just a classic that should be read at one point in your life, it is a book that will not only stay with you through characters you come to believe are real and that you know intimately, but it will pierce your soul.

The Divided Soul

Another one of our favorites literary ladies, (of Close Reads Podcast fame), also wrote a lot about Kristin in her latest book, The Divided Soul. Chapter 8 is fully devoted to Kristin, but the whole book would be a great contribution to your next few months of reading. The chapter is called Agents and Objects: Feminine Desire in Literature. Here are a few quotes to whet your appetite…

In Poetics, Aristotle proposed a literary criteria for tragedy, which he considered the highest form of narrative because it contains “an imitation of people who are better than we are.” According to Aristotle, characters are tragic because of actions they take in excess of their virtues. Since desire ought to be the seed of virtue, tragic characters meet tragic ends when they want to be happy but fail to be good. (44)

(Kristin’s) heart is the battleground between her father’s duty and her lover’s desires…Kristin is not an ideal woman; she is a real one. (151-152)

Medieval Norway and the Modern Heart

If Aaron has not already convinced you that this book is for men too, then please go read this amazing essay by Tyler Blanski beautifully titled Kristin Lavransdatter and Your Nordic Medieval Catholic Heart. He will convince you to love Kristin, but is especially helpful if you want to know that it is by no means only a “girl book.”

(I encourage you to read this article in full…but just in case you don’t, here are a few of my favorite parts!)

I will not sleep, I will not even sit down, until every man goes to bed with a paperback copy of Sigrid Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter.

In these high fourteenth-century mountains, priests still visit the sick shouting, “God help those in this house!” as they raise a cross to all four corners of the room and splash holy water everywhere. Wolves and bears still reign in the forest, and goblins and elves still hide under every rock. Swords slash at you from every page and the ecclesiastical Latin will keep you reaching for your dictionary. On second thought, maybe it’s best if you don’t take this epic trilogy to bed. What will you say to your wife when the crumbs of lefse and dried reindeer fall out of the opening chapters? What will you do when the homebrewed ale spills out of the paragraphs and stains your pajamas?

“Is it safe?” a friend asks.

“Safe?” I say. “Who said anything about safe? Of course it isn’t safe. But it’s good.”

….

Adam was standing next to Eve when she ate the forbidden fruit. He was right there. And he was silent. Kristin Lavransdatter is in fact the story of Eve as she deals with the consequences of Adam’s silence. It’s as if someone handed Eve a typewriter, and she told the story of a sinful world in Adam’s shadow—the New Adam’s shadow as he hangs from the bloody cross. Christ has spoken once and for all from the cross, and Kristin throws this challenge to every man: will you join Him? Your life rises or falls on this one question: will you speak from your cross?

Women of the Catholic Imagination

In a book recently published by Word on Fire and edited by there is a whole chapter on Sigrid Undset that is focused on Kristin Lavransdatter. So grab yourself a copy of Women of the Catholic Imagination and learn more about Undset and what makes Kristin such a literary masterpiece. Full disclosure: The author disagrees with me about the translation question and makes a good argument! Here is a good introduction to Kristin from Amy Fahey:

After its saga-like opening, the novel introduces us to young Kristin, daughter of the saintly Lavrans and the moody, melancholic Ragnfrid, and proceeds to trace her entire life in a manner that combines the spare, stark tenor of an Icelandic saga with eh psychological realism and descriptive richness of the modern novel. The result is, paradoxically, a novel that speaks intimately to each reader precisely because it is set in a time and place so seemingly removed from our own. Kristin lives in a world where the reality of the supernatural - both heathen and Christian - is assumed, and the reader is thus able to enter into Kristin’s external and interior struggles without having to directly acknowledge the modern burden of unbelief.

-Amy Fahey (Women of the Catholic Imagination, 27)

Close Reads Bonus Podcasts

If you become a paying subscriber of ’ Close Reads Podcast then you can listen to many, many podcasts featuring , , chatting about this beloved book. It is worth a few bucks a month!

Read With Us

I deeply hope that you decide to read with us over the next three months. I am thoroughly convinced that if you give Kristin time, she will change your life. As you start reading please tell us what you are thinking and as always, we hope you enjoy your In Person or Virtual Book Clubs!

If you are looking for an in person group, message me and I can either help you find one or start your own. If you’d like to join a virtual option, message me as well. We now have two time zone options for those of you wanting to participate in Europe!

Feel free to share this Introduction with any reader you know who might want to read along with us during Lent! And let us know how your read of Kristin is going as well!

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We are still running our Christmas Sale on Paid Subscriptions if you were hoping to read along with us for Paradise Lost! You have til Candlemas (February 2nd) to save money!

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What We’re Reading Next:

January

Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

February-April

Kristen Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset

Paid Subscriber Read-Along

Paradise Lost by John Milton

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

We have turned on paid subscriptions which will allow you to support the work we are doing here.

Subscribe now

If you would like to make a small contribution to the work we’re doing here at Reading Revisited, we invite you to do so with the Buy (Us) a Coffee button below. We so appreciate your support!

Buy (Us) a Coffee

Reading Revisited 24-25 List

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*As always, some of the links are affiliate links. If you don’t have the books yet and are planning to buy them, we appreciate you using the links. The few cents earned with each purchase you make after clicking links (at no extra cost to you) goes toward the time and effort it takes to keep Reading Revisited running, and we appreciate it!

“The quality of mercy is not strain’d,
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.”

(“Portia” from The Merchant of Venice, IV.i.184-186)

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A joyful joyous season to you fellow friendly readers!

I am delighted to share with you this Resource Roundup for our January book club read: The Merchant of Venice by—none other than—William Shakespeare.

This summer, and gracefully assisted us in introducing this play in the January Book Drop Day post - be sure to read what they had to say!

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In this Resource Roundup you’ll find:

• My initial thoughts on the first Act, which inform the rest of my reading .

• A list of additional resources (from podcasts to essays to books).

• And some themes and discussion questions for your book clubs - enjoy!

Initial Thoughts on Act I

Act I Scene i

This scene, with it’s multiple sets of characters running in and off stage, can be tricky to track.

I’m going to suggest we use the book of Job as a lens.

Recall in Job the moments after Job has learned he’s lost everything; recall him sitting on the ruins of everything he ever had as his friends come to sit next to him on either side; and recall how they list the reasons they think he’s downtrodden.

And recall that to each of these friend’s reasons Job says, “No. That’s not right.”

Now look how Antonio can be read in the role of Job. See how he sits in weary depression while his friends surround him with conjectures as to the cause. It’s as if our protagonist sits in a Job-like-state, but prior to any actual physical loss. Perhaps Antonio sees the vanity of passing things before he’s lost them? Like in Job, will the answer to the problem of seemingly meaninglessness be God Himself? — an answer which is both head-bangingly, unsatisfactorily frustrating and (somehow) mysteriously, deeply satisfying.

First Set of Friends - Solanio and Salerio

The first set of friends, Solanio and Salerio—whose names are derivations of the Italian word for “salary”—make three conjectures as to the cause of Antonio’s sadness, and (like Job) Antonio responds: “No. That’s not it.”

1. First Conjecture: Antonio must be preoccupied with fears of financial ruin, he has so many ships out there!
   First Rebuttal: His assets are diversified, he’s safer than any man from financial ruin.

2. Second Conjecture: Antonio is in love.
   Second Rebuttal: Antonio succinctly denies and dismisses this.

3. Third Conjecture: He is sad simply because he’s not choosing to be happy.
   Third Rebuttal: None given, interrupted by second set of friends

The main weight of these friends’ argument is in the first conjecture. Men named “salary” spend 30+ lines to delineate all the reasons why fear of losing money would reasonably lead a man into worried sadness.

Antonio denies this conjecture with a rebuttal which material-minded (or mercantile-minded) men will understand—diversification of assets:

My ventures are not in one bottom trusted,
Nor to one place;

(“Antonio,”I.i.42-3)

But also, there can be a deeper, less mercantile, truth to these lines. The gloss to the words “one bottom” in my ICE says: one source (here, one ship or group of ships). Antonio can be read to be saying something like: my ventures are not in one source trusted. This leads me to hear that perhaps Antonio is saying that his “state” (or state of being) rests on a more stable foundation than mere money, and that the adventure of his life and state of his soul is entrusted in a truer source.

It is in this light, that I wonder if Antonio can be read as a Man of Sorrows:

I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,
A stage, where every man must play his part,
And mine a sad one.

(“Antonio,” I.i.77-9)

A Man of Sorrows in the tradition of Isaiah 53, and also—again—Job:

Naked I came forth from my mother’s womb,
and naked I shall go back again.
The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away;
blessed be the name of the Lord!
We accept good things from God;
and shall we not accept evil?

-Job 1:21; 2:10b

But I jump ahead.

This first set of friends is swept away by the arrival of Lorenzo, Gratiano, and Bassanio.

Second Set of Friends - Lorenzo & Gratiano

Gratiano advises Antonio: not to put on a long expression just to seem wise.

But, similar to how the third conjecture of Solanio and Salerio (which said Antonio just didn’t choose to be happy), wasn’t given any time to be answered, this conjecture of Gratiano’s also feels dissatisfyingly answered.

Which, for me, keeps the question dangling out there: why is the man sad?

Gratiano and Lorenzo leave.

Third Set of Friends - Bassanio

We’re finally left with just Antonio and Bassanio. Not a crowd of friends, but one friend sitting beside the hero.

And the reader, I think, senses in the tone that here at last are two good friends. Perhaps these are friends whose affection approaches Aristotle’s highest love: philia.1

Also in their conversation, I finally start to sense some action, something to begin to answer: what is this story about?

Antonio promises to financially support his indebted friend, Bassanio, so that this friend (already fully indebted to Antonio) may seek to win the love of a virtuous, wealthy lady.

The stakes appear to be:

• Love and Money.

• Gifts and Debt.

• Grace and Necessity.

And to continue building on the idea of love, it also appears that this story may be a conversation about the Four Loves:

• Storge - natural affection

• Eros - erotic/romantic love

• Philia - deep friendship

• Agape - self-giving love

Act I Scene ii

We move from the city, to the country, specifically Portia’s Belmont.

I’d like to compare Antonio’s first line of scene i with Portia’s first line of scene ii:

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad

(“Antonio,” I.i.1)

By my troth, Narissa, my little body is a-weary of this great world.

(“Portia” I.ii.1)

Portia is like Antonio: surrounded by people who are very concerned (perhaps disingenuously concerned) with her wealth.

As dissimilar as the externals are (city vs. country, man bombarded by male friends vs. woman with one female friend bombarded by male suitors) I believe this scene can be satisfyingly read as a continuation of the conversation begun about/with Antonio.

Remember the lack of an answer to the question: why is he sad? I believe the answer is here, in the conversation of two friends, two virtuous women.

Nerissa says that those who have too much wealth are often as sick as those who have too little. Portia confirms Nerissa’s words as “good sentences.”

St. Paul says:

The willing is ready at hand, but doing the good is not. For I do not do the good I want, but I do evil I do not want.

(Romans, 7:18b-19)

And Portia wittily paraphrases the Apostle, saying:

If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions; I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than to be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.

Identifying the wound is the first step in treating it.

With Portia and Nerissa, I begin to identify the wound.

It seems Antonio and Portia are both suffering from world-weariness, from that heaviness one gets sometimes when looking at all that one has and all that others have, and yet seeing so much greed and lack of love and lack of contentment and desire for more and no real gratitude and no real purpose or achievement behind these scramblings for riches. It’s that feeling of when the curtain is drawn aside, and reality feels too much.

Then the two women suddenly seem to abandon the problem of malaise in order to laugh at the suitors from the various countries.2

And this, I believe, is actually the beginning of the solution.

First, genuine laughter which loves the lovable imperfections of man. (i.e. taking ourselves less seriously - something any good comedian or Comedy can help us do, and which I think Shakespeare does by opening a comedy with the dramatic line “I’m sad!” Nothing funnier than an overly dramatic tragedian who almost doesn’t realize he’s in the wrong play.)

And then, obedience.

In the essay Revisiting Lazy Murder, I defined the vice of acedia, which can manifest itself as a lacklusterness like that which Antonio and Portia are struggling against. The remedies to defeating this malaise involved: acknowledging that one needs to be saved (i.e. taking oneself less seriously, and calling out for help); prayer and work; using Scripture to contradict the temptation; meditating upon death; and persevering in one’s duties in obedience.

Through that lens, I believe it is possible to read these lines from Portia very satisfyingly:

If I live to be as old as Sibylla, I will die as chaste as Diana, unless I be obtain’d by the manner of my father’s will.

(“Portia,” I.ii.106-8)

Antonio’s answer to beating his malaise is self-giving love for a friend.

Portia’s answer to beating her malaise is obedience to her father’s will.

If we combine these two answers, we get a Christ-like answer.

Christ’s answer to the problem of life, to a malaise which wonders what’s the meaning of all this effort, is: complete, loving obedience to the father’s will.

So, in this play I’m going to look for love to be the answer.

And this is a Comedy. So this feels like a good hunch, since we’re in the right framework for love to have the final say — and laughter of course.

Act I Scene iii

Now, after saying all that stuff above, where does this final scene fit into the pretty framework we’ve been building?

It is easy to read The Merchant of Venice as anti-Semitic. But I believe that making this the lens through which you read this play is a misreading, similar to over-reading race in Othello. It’s there, but if I let it take over the play, the story begins to fall apart, or close up on me, or become disjunctive.

Instead, let’s allow Shylock to bring into this story a discussion of: justice vs. mercy.

I’ll share what my thoughts felt like as this “justice vs. mercy” way to read Shylock’s role in the play emerged:

As I read, I was struck by the exactitude of the Old Law which we all fell under, and how desperately and justly condemned we all were, as sinners, under that Law. And when comparing Shylock’s incredibly just justice to the magnanimity of Antonio’s gifts to his friend Bassanio, I saw - as if in relief - how great a gift the New Law is for us, that the one, perfect Lamb came and paid the price that had to be justly paid, so that once and for all we could be forgiven. I saw how this extreme fulfillment of justice by incalculable mercy suddenly caused us to be able to be reborn in order to live in the freedom of grace and forgiveness.

And this reading of Shylock’s thematic role in the play began to open the story up to me. When I stopped reading Shylock as “the other,” and began reading Shylock as my former self, the man I would be, but for grace, I began deeply loving what Shakespeare was showing me. I began being grateful in a fresh way for the gift of the life-changing Messiah (which seems like an obvious thing to always be grateful for, but, alas, we all enter into lacklusterness and…forget).

Then along came a lot of people whose perspectives I deeply value, which also read Shylock’s role in a similar way! See the Close Reads episodes I link below in the Resources section, as well as this fantastic quote from Joseph Pearce:

The moral focus during the drama of the trial revolves around notions of justice and mercy, or questions concerning the nature of law and ethics, not about the hostilities between gentile and Jew. These hostilities are present, of course, and even prominent, but they are present as accidents, philosophically speaking,3 and are not essential to the moral thrust of the plot. Unfortunately, the expression of these hostilities has distracted most critics from the essential morality of the play in pursuit of the red herring of its accidental qualities. Uncomfortable with the invective leveled against Shylock, the critics have leapt to his defense, enthroning him as the play’s downtrodden hero and as its principal focus. This is absurd. Shylock is entirely uninvolved in two of the three pivotal turns in the plot and is only marginally and implicitly involved in the play’s climatic denouement. To make Shylock the hero or the principal focus is to miss the whole point of the play. The play, we should remember, is not called The Jew of Venice as an echo of Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. Marlowe’s play focuses on the Jew; Shakespeare’s does not. In focusing too closely on Shylock, we lose the wider focus necessary to see the play as a whole.

(Joseph Pearce, Introduction to the Ignatius Critical Edition of The Merchant of Venice)

As a last note on Shylock, we must address: usury

As a modern, middle-class American who has grown up with Dave Ramsey and the S&P 500, interest is something which I’ve always thought of as a benefit, something which made “my money work for me.” Little did I know (until reading The Merchant) that there’s over 4,000 years of writing (from the Old Testament, through Aristotle, Aquinas, Dante, and many Church counsels) condemning the charging interest on a loan as unnatural, immoral, and similar in degree of offense to murder and blasphemy.4

The Magna Carta prohibited the king from accepting any interest on certain types of loans. Subsequently, canonical law prohibited usury. Eventually, King Henry VIII altered the law to allow for loans charging up to 10 percent; Edward VI abolished the allowance, prohibiting all interest; and Elizabeth reinstated the legal limit of 10 percent. While interest was legally allowed in Elizabethan England, there was little change in the perceived morality of usury. It was, in this respect, much like modern laws of adultery; while it was not a crime, there are few who think the act morally acceptable.

(James E. Hartley, “Breeding Barren Metal: Usury in The Merchant of Venice”)

Dante sat usurers to idly burn in the seventh circle of Hell. In the pamphlets from Elizabethan England written about the sinfullness of charging usury:

There is an understanding of lending as a means of charity in which the rich can help the poor meet their needs. To refuse to lend if one cannot charge usury is every bit as bad as to be a usurer.

(Hartley, ibid)

I’d never thought of how lending without interest is an active way to live the virtue of poverty; to live out the understanding that all I have is a gift, and so I must also freely give. Suddenly modern discussions of 21st century adult bondage to debt have a much older context.

Knowing that lending without interest was considered an act of justice, whereas lending with interest was considered an act of injustice, suddenly shifts every paradigm in this play.

Shylock, throughout the play, constantly demands justice. If you view charging interest as just, and charging no interest as merciful, than Shylock’s plea for justice and the fulfillment of his bond ring true and just, though still harshly absent of mercy.

However, if morally speaking it is unjust to charge interest, than Shylock is demanding justice be paid for his unjust actions.

And suddenly we are back at being able to see ourselves in Shylock. How often do I—and men throughout salvation history—demand justice for myself, as if I were pure, innocent, and justified, when in reality no one is just, and I am condemned by my own unjust sins, and I should not be begging for justice but for mercy.

We stand with Shylock at the end, crumbling and looking at all our fine perspectives about ourselves crumbling. And it can be considered a great mercy that we receive mercy even before we fully desire it.

Final First Thoughts

A Few Reading Resources

• Reading Revisited ep. 30: Why Read Shakespeare and Scripture w/ Fr. Tom Pressley

  • In this episode, Fr. Tom Pressley (a dear friend, and godfather of my second daughter) gives us excellent, prayerful reasons for reading Shakespeare, poetry, the Psalms…in a word, he inspires you to read what is beautiful.

• Reading Revisited ep. 86: Intro to The Merchant of Venice w/Heidi White

• Reading Revisited - Why Read Shakespeare is an essay I wrote in order to admit the biases and perspectives I bring to Shakespeare, and which will give you better footing to accept or reject my thoughts on the bard.

• Reading Revisited - Othello Introduction and Reading Schedule has an essay for each Act of Othello, as well as our podcast episode on that play— more discussions on Shakespeare always add to further discussions on Shakespeare!

• William Shakespeare was Catholic - Here’s the Evidence by Joseph Pearce, is an excellent article looking at the facts of Shakespeare’s life (not finding hints in his fictional writing) which enable scholars to form insights into the bard’s religious views, which can assist with understanding (and not misreading) characters and plot decisions in the play.

• The Quest for Shakespeare: The Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome by Joseph Pearce is the full book on the topics mentioned in the above essay. It deals with the facts of Shakespeare’s life and times, leading Pearce to present the conclusion that Shakespeare was a believing Catholic living in very anti-Catholic times.

• has some thought provoking essays on his Substack: Shakespeare is Catholic

• episodes on The Merchant of Venice are fantastic—highly, highly recommend:

Themes & Discussion Questions

• Grace vs. Law or New Testament & Old Testament

  • Track where grace is given, or the law demanded. Track how the two Testaments weave into one cohesive story.

  • Examine how (thematically) the ending works very well.

    • the price paid (3,000 ducats) by the Jewish people (Tubal’s money which he lent to Shylock) is the price which allows the bridegroom (Bassanio) to marry the bride/the nation/the church (Portia) which is what gives the bride (the church/Portia) the means to save the man who is laying down his life for another (Antonio) which leads to the full restoration of the Jewish people (i.e. Shylock becomes a Christian).

    • Said simply (and still thematically, from a viewpoint of salvation history): God’s chosen people have been given the wealth which brings them into the full covenant

    • Said again, another way: Justice pays the price which brings forth mercy.

    • Think about the ending of “The Ballad of the White Horse,” and how King Guthrum, king of the Danes and enemy of King Alfred, is baptized. A fully satisfying ending is not the defeat of a human enemy, it is the defeat of the spiritual enemy behind the human enemy, and then the salvation and the reunification of the human enemy into communion with true society through baptism. Thus, in this Comedy, we have a marriage of sorts between the Old Testament and the New through the conversion and baptism of Shylock into the Christian faith.

  • Question: Did you find this a helpful lens through which to read the story?

• Money

  • How the money everyone has was given to them:

    • Tubal gives money to Shylock who gives it to Antonio who gives it to Bassanio

    • Portia inherits her money from her father

    • And how understanding that we’ve all been given what we have, is the basis for the prohibition against usury. I.e. to those who have been freely given, they should freely give.

  • Giving without counting the cost vs. demanding repayment with interest.

  • Usury

    • Antonio’s treatment of Shylock is problematic in reading Antonio as a Christlike figure and hero. However, if we read Shylock’s practice of usury as a similar action to the money changers in the Gospels, perhaps Antonio’s actions can be seen as righteous anger against a rich man who enriches himself at the expense of those in need.

    • See longer note on usury above

    • Question: Discuss the history of usury and how it challenges an assumption of charging interest today

• City vs. Country (or Venice & Belmont)

  • Questions:

    • Did you track any themes as being more present in the city vs the country?

    • Was the country (perhaps) a place of clearer vision than the city? (Asking this when thinking about how scene ii, which is in the country, gives answers to questions which were merely raised in scene i, which was in the city).

• Women and Men

  • The roles they play; the disguising of women into men; etc. (Note: I do not read Portia’s disguise as a male attorney as giving her more “power” or “agency” than what she holds as mistress of Belmont.)

• Job

  • Question: Did you find the storyline of Job a helpful lens? Or nah?

• The Four Loves

  • Storge - natural affection

  • Eros - erotic/romantic love

  • Philia - deep friendship

  • Agape - self-giving love

  • Question: which characters did you find practicing these different types of loves? Which character’s actions do you believe rose to the highest love of agape?

• Share a favorite quote, scene, or character from the book

• Discuss the title of the book.

  • I read the title as an identification of Antonio as the hero. Do you read the title similarly? What does it do to our understanding of the story that Antonio is identified with his occupation and his city, and not by his name?

  • Do you think someone else is the hero? Do you think a different merchant could be being referenced by the title?

• What do you make of the ending? Were you surprised? Are you satisfied with the way it concludes?

• Will you put this play on your: TBRA (to be read again) list?

We hope you are all planning to read along with us this month! Please let us know in the comments any other resources, thoughts, or themes we should keep in mind as we begin!

What We’re Reading Now/Next:

January

The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

Kristen Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset

Paid Subscriber Read-Along

Paradise Lost by John Milton

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

We have turned on paid subscriptions which will allow you to support the work we are doing here.

If you would like to make a small contribution to the work we’re doing here at Reading Revisited, we invite you to do so with the Buy (Us) a Coffee button below. We so appreciate your support!

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Reading Revisited 24-25 List

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*As always, some of the links are affiliate links. If you don’t have the books yet and are planning to buy them, we appreciate you using the links. The few cents earned with each purchase you make after clicking links (at no extra cost to you) goes toward the time and effort it takes to keep Reading Revisited running, and we appreciate it!

If you have just read The Ballad of the White Horse, then brace yourself for a serious vibe shift and enjoy the deep dive into poetic devices that Mary Oliver so concisely delivers in A Poetry Handbook. If you have a chance to reread The Ballad of the White Horse following this poetry crash course, I highly recommend it! It is so fun to realize the extent to which Chesterton is a good, true, and beautiful writer by appreciating his mastery of various poetic techniques.

Of course, A Poetry Handbook is not merely valuable as a means to reading Chesterton. It is a gem in its own right, full of insights into art and the creative experience, pithy advice on how to write (and read!) well, and exemplary poems. Oliver is brilliant, witty, and clear as she teaches the language of poetry, successfully sharing with her readers her deep love and profound understanding of this beautiful literary genre. For more praise of Oliver and A Poetry Handbook, please revisit our Book Drop Day Post featuring Katie Marquette from the Born of Wonder Podcast and Substack, and Shari Dragovich from The Reader and the Writer Podcast and Substack.

Reading Revisited

December Part 1 (Book Drop Day 2025)

Welcome to Reading Revisited, a place for friends to enjoy some good old-fashioned book chat while revisiting the truth, beauty, and goodness we’ve found in our favorite books…

Read more

a year ago · 15 likes · 8 comments · Sarah Van Hecke, Shari Dragovich, Katie Marquette, Elise Boratenski, and Kelsie Hartley

Now, in the interest of not over-explaining an already explanatory book, I will spare you all the full play-by-play and instead share a few of my favorite things:

Favorite Things

• In the Introduction, Oliver first presents an idea that she returns to numerous times throughout the book: that while “poets are born and not made in school,” there is nevertheless “a great deal that can, and must, be learned.” Oliver sees art as the love child of grace and skill, where the heart, if open to beauty, can join forces with the mind to capture that beauty via appropriate techniques and thus share it with the world. In the first chapter, “Getting Ready,” she draws out this analogy, noting that the heart and mind must make and keep regular appointments with each other if the love affair is to succeed in producing art.

• I love Oliver’s comparison of the content of a poem to its soul, and the techniques of a poem to its body. Just as a man’s body reveals truths about his soul, so too should the techniques chosen by the poet reveal truths about the poem’s content. Likewise, knowledge of a man’s soul reveals truths about his body, and knowledge of the content of the poem can make obvious which techniques are being used (or should be used) to communicate the content effectively.

• In “Reading Poems,” Oliver makes the case that studying the poetry of the past is essential if one wants to read or write modern poetry. After all, she claims, “the truly contemporary creative force is something that is built out of the past but with a difference.” To those unsure of their ability to connect meaningfully with ancient literature, she reassures that “The subjects that stir the heart are not so many, after all, and they do not change.” I appreciate this reminder that even though it can be intimidating to dive into an era or genre of art that is unfamiliar, we can rest assured that the same human experiences of wrestling with love, pain, loss, free will vs. fate, duty vs. desire, friendship, sacrifice, etc. haven’t changed at all over millennia. Thus it should not shock us when the list of “themes” for The Iliad, Harry Potter, Pride and Prejudice, and Wicked all share broad overlap despite their being produced by vastly different eras and being of vastly different styles.

• In her chapter “Sound,” Oliver explores the division of alphabetical sounds into vowels (a,e,i,o,u, and sometimes y and w), consonant semivowels (f,h,j,l,m,n,r,s,v,w,x,y,z, and soft c and g), and consonant mutes (b,d,k,p,q,t, and hard c and g). She then illustrates how the different sound families have different felt qualities; namely, semivowels are smoother, softer, gentler, and more fluid, whereas mutes are striking and more abrupt, which can heighten attention or cause amusement. Oliver focuses primarily on how the use of semivowels vs. mutes can be used to play with the attention of the reader, but I want to focus on how inherently funny mutes are for just a moment! For example, if you google the “funniest words in the English language” you find a list with quite a disproportionate number of b’s, d’s, k’s, p’s, t’s, and hard c’s and g’s… everything from the crass humor of words like “booty” or “egghead” to the slightly more classy but equally absurd “discombobulated”, “nincompoop”, or “flibbertigibbet”. made me promise to point out that Dwight would agree…

• After a very technical chapter, Oliver takes a moment to remind the reader why this kind of deep dive study into language is important for the aspiring writer. She notes:

“Verbal skills can be learned. They can be discussed and practiced. Then, a wonderful thing happens: what is learned settles, somewhere inside the chambers of the mind, where - you can count on it - it will “remember” what it knows and will float forth to assist in the initial writing.”

• Confession time, this is the main reason why we have assigned A Poetry Handbook alongside The Ballad of the White Horse. Language skills don’t only help with initial writing, but with initial reading as well. Without the subconscious interpretive lenses that have “settled somewhere inside the chamber of the mind” it is challenging to read poetry and connect with it meaningfully. Poetry can feel like a foreign language, producing confusion instead of connection if there is no linguistic common ground. However, A Poetry Handbook sets out to provide a comprehensive summary of those missing lenses and links. Thus it is our hope, that armed with a poetically enabled subconsciousness, we can, after reading Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook, more fully enjoy Chesterton’s genius, and the genius of other poets and artists as well.

• More Devices of Sound - Speaking of the Ballad, I dare you to open up The Ballad of the White Horse again to find examples of alliteration, consonance, and assonance! Chesterton is an absolute master of these poetic techniques. My favorite example is from the Dedication:

         “O go you onward; where you are
Shall honour and laughter be,
Past purpled forest and pearled foam,
God’s winged pavilion free to roam,
your face, that is a wandering home,
       A flying home for me.”

• Oliver’s defense of free verse, not as a rejection of traditional metrical poetry, but as the natural result of the shift in how poetry is primarily consumed (from a primarily auditory experience to a primarily visual one) is a powerful reminder to critics of modern art to ask why tradition has been forsaken instead of merely decrying that it has been… it might be more of a practical matter than a moral one in some cases!

The regular, metrical line gave assistance to a listener who sought to remember the poem; the more various line breaks of the “visual” poem gave assistance to the mind seeking to “hear” the poem.

• Oliver’s discussion of how universal images come primarily from the natural world also reminds me of Jason Baxter’s Why Literature Still Matters. Both

  “The reader without perceptual experience with the natural processes is locked out of the poetry of our world”

  and

  “If the poem is thin, it is likely so not because the poet does not know enough words, but because he or she has not stood long enough among the flowers”

  remind me of Baxter’s argument that we must physically experience the universe through nature and travel in order to participate fully in literature, which uses natural images help us feel connected to people and places that we otherwise could not fathom.

• I love Oliver’s closing comparison that just as athletes must nurture their bodies: “Writers must similarly take care of the sensibility that houses the possibility of poems.” The idea that creative output flows from and reflects the soul of the artist is both Aristotelian and Thomistic. If we make a habit of dishonestly calling ugly things beautiful, eventually they do in fact seem to be beautiful to us. Thus artists must take care to be true to reality, lest in losing the true, they lose the beautiful as well.

Discussion Ideas

• Are you familiar with any of Mary Oliver’s poetry? If so, what is your favorite poem of hers, and why?

• I find the quote Oliver shares from Flaubert: “Talent is long patience, effort of will, and intense observation, all of which can be practiced” to be so very encouraging! What talents (literary or non) do you want to recommit yourself to practicing this advent, or in this coming new year? Or should I say, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

• Oliver highlights the fact the modern poetry is intentionally intimate, with poets preferring to approach the reader as a friend rather than presenting ideas as a teacher. What do you think has contributed most to this shift? Which style of poetry do you prefer?

• And a less personal and more intellectual one: how might Keat’s concept of negative capability relate to Caryll Houselander’s concept of “emptiness” as a prerequisite of creative potential as seen in the first chapter of The Reed of God?

Reading Resources

• Close Reads did a wonderful tribute podcast on Mary Oliver on the occasion of her death in 2019. Great listen for anyone interested in learning more about Oliver and her influence on the modern poetry scene!

Close Reads Podcast HQ

Remembering Mary Oliver (with A.M. Juster and Allison Backous Troy)

Welcome to Libromania, a podcast for the book-obsessed from the Close Reads Podcast Network. Each week David Kern will be chatting with authors, biographers, designers, collectors, critics and other people who help make book's so worthy of our attention…

Listen now

7 years ago · Goldberry Studios

• Reconciling Oliver’s spiritual depth with her stark breaks from tradition and orthodoxy in her personal/faith life can be a real challenge. Mary Oliver and the Shapes of God by Andrew Callis provides an interesting defense of Oliver’s spiritual priorities, citing her joy, profound appreciation of mystery, understanding of teleology, and love of nature and beauty as reasons why Christians should feel confident in enjoying her work. I have numerous theological critiques of both Oliver and Callis’ article… but I will here refrain from throwing the baby out with the bathwater. After all, the baby is very cute, and has an abundance of ontological goodness despite its flailing about in murky water.

• If you are interested in reading more poetry, I highly recommend The Top 500 Poems, edited by William Harmon, who also provides excellent commentary on each poem. This is my go-to anthology!

• Finally, in case you missed it, here is our intro podcast for The Ballad of the White Horse and A Poetry Handbook!

Reading Revisited

ep. 82: Intro to The Ballad of the White Horse and A Poetry Handbook w/ Sarah Van Hecke

Welcome to Reading Revisited, a place for friends to enjoy some good old-fashioned book chat while revisiting the truth, beauty, and goodness we’ve found in our favorite books…

Listen now

6 months ago · 6 likes · Hannah Suire, Kelsie Hartley, and Sarah Van Hecke

What We’re Reading Next:

January

Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

February-April

Kristen Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

We have turned on paid subscriptions which will allow you to support the work we are doing here.

If you would like to make a small contribution to the work we’re doing here at Reading Revisited, we invite you to do so with the Buy (Us) a Coffee button below. We so appreciate your support!

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*As always, some of the links are affiliate links. If you don’t have the books yet and are planning to buy them, we appreciate you using the links. The few cents earned with each purchase you make after clicking links (at no extra cost to you) goes toward the time and effort it takes to keep Reading Revisited running, and we appreciate it!

Welcome to Reading Revisited, a place for friends to enjoy some good old-fashioned book chat while revisiting the truth, beauty, and goodness we’ve found in our favorite books.

Subscribe now

Hello Readers!

Welcome to our first Resource Roundup for December, focusing on G. K. Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse.

If Die Hard is a Christmas movie, then this poem is certainly a Christmas poem, or at very least an advent one. Therefore, as the darkest and coldest days of the year approach, let us warm our hearts and brighten our minds by entering into this work together. Let us wrap hope around us like a familiar blanket and learn of humility by firelight. Let us prepare to meet a king!

If anyone needs more than the promise of Advent vibes to get excited about reading poetry, please revisit our book drop day post introducing The Ballad of the White Horse:

Reading Revisited

December Part 2 (Book Drop Day 2025)

Welcome to Reading Revisited, a place for friends to enjoy some good old-fashioned book chat while revisiting the truth, beauty, and goodness we’ve found in our favorite books…

Read more

a year ago · 11 likes · 3 comments · Kelsie Hartley, Sarah Van Hecke, and Elise Boratenski

In it, of The Common Place Catholic, shares her love of Chesterton’s great work alongside the renowned Chesterton scholar Mr. Dale Ahlquist, who generously gave us permission to quote his excellent lecture on The Ballad of the White Horse.

Though adding thoughts of my own to their skillful summaries seems so prideful that I hardly dare write about humility, I will nevertheless choose to hope that I might be likewise able to enrich your reading experience. So without further ado, here are a few thoughts to take with you as you dive in:

Major Themes to Keep in Mind

Hope

• Hope is the virtue in between the opposing vices of presumption and despair. Chesterton does an amazing job of illustrating the interconnectedness of hope and free will. When Mary refuses to let Alfred know whether he will triumph over the Danes or whether he will continue to lose everything, including his life, she is not denying him hope, but rather making sure that it remains possible for him to continue to have hope at all. After all, should she assure him of victory, hope would too easily give way to presumption. Likewise, should Mary counsel Alfred of his impending doom, it would be nearly impossible for him not to despair.

• The virtue of hope instead lies in freely choosing to do the right thing blindly: not with the promise of gain or with assurance against loss, but simply because it is the right thing, and God has asked it. This supernatural virtue of hope contrasts with the pagan sense of fate, which must necessarily lead to presumption or despair, as we will see later in the lives and philosophies of Guthrum’s chiefs.

Humility

• The other virtue at the forefront (ironically) of the Ballad is the virtue of humility. When Alfred lets the cakes burn in Book IV, the old woman slaps him across the face in anger. For a moment, his pride rears up and he considers utterly obliterating her, but instead he laughs, recognizing that humility makes for a good king while pride makes for a tyrant.

• After he seems to have failed yet again at Ethandune, Alfred yet AGAIN rallies his troops to recharge the Viking line, despite having lost all of his chiefs and most of his men. This unyielding resilience, rooted in humility and hope, is compared to a child at play:

  Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

• Chesterton’s ability to viscerally connect childlikeness, hope, humility, and the capacity for triumph is part of why this Ballad is such a beautiful work to read during Advent!

The Eternal Revolution

• The Eternal Revolution is the title of the seventh chapter of Chesterton’s great work, Orthodoxy. In it, Chesterton notes that all earthly goods constantly degrade, and thus every good, true, or beautiful thing in this life requires constant upkeep in order to stay good, true, and beautiful. This upkeep, this scouring, this eternally required revolution against sin, heresy/falsehood, and chaos, is asked of every Christian man and woman in their own lives, but is also necessary for every family within their home, and for every country within its borders.

• The White Horse exemplifies this, and symbolizes the eternal revolution perfectly because it is a prehistoric monument that has survived even into the present day despite being made out of grass and chalk. For the White Horse to have survived for the last several thousand years, every single generation from the time it was first cut until now has had to refashion or “scour” the image. Preservation requires constant renewal, and goodness, truth, and beauty are worth the price of ongoing multi-generational revolution.

The Role of Legend in History

• When Chesterton writes in the Prefatory Note that:

“King Alfred is not a legend in the sense that King Arthur may be a legend; that is, in the sense that he may possibly be a lie. But King Alfred is a legend in this broader and more human sense, that the legends are the most important things about him.”

• and

“…it is the chief value of legend to mix up the centuries while preserving the sentiment; to see all ages in a sort of splendid foreshortening. That is the use of tradition: it telescopes history.”

• you can really tell how much he influenced Lewis and Tolkien!

“The heart of Christianity is a myth which is also a fact. The old myth of the Dying God, without ceasing to be a myth, comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history.”

―C.S. Lewis, God in the Dock: Essays on Theology and Ethics

“After all, I believe that legends and myths are largely made of ‘truth’, and indeed present aspects of it that can only be received in this mode...”

―J.R.R. Tolkien, The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien

• I love how the idea of tradition as a telescope of history fits in with the image of the white horse! The horse is so large that if you were standing within it, it would be quite difficult to discern the work of art. To see the image, you have to view it from a distance. Likewise, it is impossible for us to conceptualize history properly when we view it only from the fixed point that we are currently living. Tradition helps us to get the perspective necessary to see the full picture!

Other Observations

Just Epic Things

• Though a ballad in name and meter, The Ballad of the White Horse was actually titled The Epic of the White Horse in an early draft. Chesterton carefully fulfills the literary requirements for both a ballad AND an epic. As you read, keep your eyes open for “epic conventions,” which are characteristics that epic poems use to give the ideas conveyed by the narrative the strength and gravitas appropriate to them. All great literary epics, such as The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, or Paradise Lost, use these tools to grab and direct the attention of the reader, like signposts saying, “Pay Attention! What is happening here is not ordinary in size or scope, and it effects YOU.” I especially want to call attention to the following epic conventions:

  • Invocation - Epic poems usually begin with the invocation of a muse, thanking the muse for inspiration and/or asking continued blessing in the telling of their story. For Homer and Virgil, the nine goddess muses fill this role, whereas Milton prays to the Holy Spirit. In the Dedication of the Ballad, Chesterton paints the picture of his wife, Frances, as his muse, thanking her for her role in his conversion, pledging his respect, love, and faithfulness, and noting that it is only through her spiritual influence that he has become capable of writing this work.

  • Divine Intervention - Simply put, purely natural scenarios aren’t epic. If your story doesn’t have God/gods, monsters, and a knock down drag out physical fight that also hauntingly symbolizes the high stakes spiritual battle taking place invisibly but constantly in the soul of every, man, woman, family, and nation - then it just isn’t epic enough to be an epic poem. The line between physical and spiritual warfare is thinner in an epic than in other literary forms: the supernatural almost always ends up getting their hands dirty, whether that looks like the gods taking sides in The Iliad and The Odyssey, or whether that looks like the mother of God appearing with a sword in hand in the middle of the battle of Ethandune.

  • Other fairly self-explanatory epic conventions include stock epithets (i.e. “Ogier of the stone and sling”), starting in medias res, prophetic warnings that highlight the tension between free will and fate, elevated language with a didactic tone, an omniscient narrator, long formal speeches, epic similes, a descent into hell (IV:41-52), a vast setting, and heroes that embody the ideals of their civilizations. Not surprisingly, Chesterton deliberately checks all of these boxes with The Ballad of the White Horse. He wants the reader to know that this narrative poem he is crafting isn’t just a stirring ballad… it is also an epic in the tradition of the greatest works of literature.

Who even are all these supporting characters?

• In Book III’s great sing off, we meet the enemy in person for the first time, and we learn that the four main “bad guys” are very different people. Harold, Guthrum’s young nephew, is all about enjoying the plunder, be it wine, women, food, or gold. The middle-aged Elf is much the opposite: he has seen that all earthly pleasures are fleeting and is now sad and depressed. Ogier, an older man, has sat with that same sorrow for so long that it has intensified into hate. When Ogier goes to war, it is to lash out in fury against whatever gods may be. Finally, we meet Guthrum, the King of the Vikings. He is older still, and he no longer feels desire, sorrow, or hate as a result of his paganism. Rather, he believes that “The soul is like a lost bird, the body a broken shell.” When he goes to war, it is to forget, even for a moment, how very pointless and meaningless life is.

• Thus each of Guthrum’s chiefs represent, among other things, a “stop” along the path to true nihilism. (worship of pleasure, worship of sorrow/despair, worship of rage/hate, worship of nothingness/apathy).

• The differences in character between Alfred’s three chiefs is likewise significant. Colan is associated with mystical/contemplative/natural spirituality, Mark with intellectual spirituality, and Eldred with practical/active spirituality. We can also further associate Colan with beauty/appetite, Mark with truth/intellect, and Eldred with goodness/will.

• Armed with this knowledge, the line up of the battle in Book V becomes quite interesting. To the left, Harold is across from Colan; in the middle, Guthrum and Ogier square off against Alfred and Mark; and to the right, Elf will fight Eldred. While the “surface level” action of the battle is exciting to read, the allegorical layer is so rich that I can scarcely plumb the depths. My favorite detail in this regard is that Colan (associated with beauty) strikes the first blow of the battle against Harold (associated with materialistic hedonism), and that Colan is also the last of Alfred’s chief’s to fall. The idea that beauty is both the first and last defense against paganism reminds me of this quote by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn:

“And so perhaps that old trinity of Truth and Good and Beauty is not just the formal outworn formula it used to seem to us during our heady, materialistic youth. If the crests of these three trees join together, as the investigators and explorers used to affirm, and if the too obvious, too straight branches of Truth and Good are crushed or amputated and cannot reach the light—yet perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will make their way through and soar up to that very place and in this way perform the work of all three.

And in that case it was not a slip of the tongue for Dostoyevsky to say that “Beauty will save the world,” but a prophecy.”

Discussion Ideas

• What phrases or lines from the Ballad made special impressions on you, and why?

• Do you think that Chesterton could have communicated what he does in the Ballad in any other way? In prose? In a novel? If he had, what would be clearer, and what would be lost?

• We see Alfred “shaken of the joy of giants, the joy without a cause” (II:3-4) after having his hope renewed by Mary’s appearance. How are the virtues of hope and joy connected?

• When we first meet Alfred, his appearance and situation is anything but kingly. He is destitute, alone, and is “a conquered king.” He has only a sword, a harp, and the clothes on his back. What other biblical/literary kings does he remind you of?

• What stage of paganism most afflicts you? (Personally, or through friends and relationships) How can we lean into the virtues highlighted by Colan, Marcus, and Eldred in order to fight the specific stages of paganism around us? Which stage of paganism do you think we are at on a cultural level, and does it run in cycles?

• How can we apply the concept of the eternal revolution to our moral lives? To our homes? To our friendships/relationships/marriages?

Reading Resources

• The Joshua Christensen audio version of the ballad is quite good, and free through YouTube via LibriVox! It can also be found on Spotify as an audiobook.

• I definitely recommend listening to the work, especially if you are unsure about whether or not you will enjoy reading poetry. The beauty of the ballad form comes through when it is spoken aloud! Additionally, most audio versions are under two hours long, which can make tackling a long form work of poetry feel much more approachable!

• Bob Wiesner’s essay The Ballad of the White Horse: An Introduction and Analysis, printed for Seton Magazine, is brilliant! Bob goes into some of the Norse background and how Harold, Elf, Ogier, and Guthrum can also be seen as corresponding to Loki, Baldur, Thor, and Odin, and he notes how Chesterton’s contextualization of Norse mythology within modern Christianity paved the way for The Lord of the Rings. Very cool stuff! He also does a great job of highlighting real villains and saints who exemplify the “types” found in the Ballad, (e.g. St. Francis was a mystic with an affinity for nature, much like Colan.)

• Malcolm Guite also does a wonderful read though of the entire ballad on his podcast, recorded for the 100th anniversary of the poem in 2011! He also highlights the parallels between the Ballad of the White Horse and The Lord of the Rings!

• The Society of G. K. Chesterton website has a wealth of information and resources to learn more about Chesterton, including the Chesterton University series, which covers just about every facet of Chesterton’s life and writing!

• The following book review published on Astral Codex Ten is also very insightful. I love the section on how free will and hope are necessary for good story telling!

Astral Codex Ten

Your Book Review: The Ballad of the White Horse

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2 years ago · 171 likes · 245 comments

• One of my favorite podcasts, Classical Stuff You Should Know, has featured episodes on The Ballad of the White Horse twice! Ep.121 “The Ballad of The White Horse, or “Black Beauty II, The Prequel” and Ep. 263 “The Ballad of the White Horse and Some Dudes Who Sing” cover a lot of the same material, but are both fun.

• Finally, please do check out our intro podcast for The Ballad of the White Horse and A Poetry Handbook!

Reading Revisited

ep. 82: Intro to The Ballad of the White Horse and A Poetry Handbook w/ Sarah Van Hecke

Welcome to Reading Revisited, a place for friends to enjoy some good old-fashioned book chat while revisiting the truth, beauty, and goodness we’ve found in our favorite books…

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6 months ago · 6 likes · Hannah Suire, Kelsie Hartley, and Sarah Van Hecke

We will have a second Resource Roundup this month to focus on Mary Oliver’s “A Poetry Handbook.” Until then, we wish you a very merry holiday season free of nihilistic Viking warlords!

What We’re Reading Next:

December

Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton

AND

A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver

January

Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

February-April

Kristen Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

We have turned on paid subscriptions which will allow you to support the work we are doing here.

If you would like to make a small contribution to the work we’re doing here at Reading Revisited, we invite you to do so with the Buy (Us) a Coffee button below. We so appreciate your support!

Buy (Us) a Coffee

Reading Revisited 24-25 List

Previous Lists

*As always, some of the links are affiliate links. If you don’t have the books yet and are planning to buy them, we appreciate you using the links. The few cents earned with each purchase you make after clicking links (at no extra cost to you) goes toward the time and effort it takes to keep Reading Revisited running, and we appreciate it!

The night is darkening round me,
The wild winds coldly blow;
But a tyrant spell has bound me,
and I cannot, cannot go.

The giant trees are bending
Their bare boughs weighed with snow;
The storm is fast descending,
And yet I cannot go.

Clouds beyond clouds above me,
Wastes beyond wastes below;
But nothing drear can move me;
I will not, cannot go.

-”The Night Is Darkening Round Me” by Emily Brontë

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Hello, Readers!

I am delighted to share with you the Resource Roundup for our November book club read: Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë. We are all looking forward to some lively book club discussions this month as this book may be the most polarizing on the list. Love it or hate it, this gothic novel is most certainly worthy of our time and discussion!

I truly hope, as I mentioned in our book drop day post, that this month finds you curled up under a blanket with a warm drink while gazing out upon a cool, gray autumn to truly get you into the gothic mood. But whatever the externals may be, I have every confidence that Emily Brontë will bring us into the autumnal spirit.

We had two lovely substack friends help introduce this book for us in our aforementioned book drop day post, so be sure to check out what and had to say as we dive into our reading this month.

Reading Revisited

November Pick (Book Drop Day 2025)

Welcome to Reading Revisited, a place for friends to enjoy some good old-fashioned book chat while revisiting the truth, beauty, and goodness we’ve found in our favorite books…

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a year ago · 14 likes · 11 comments · Rhea Forney, Olivia Marstall, Hannah Suire, and Kelsie Hartley

Below you’ll find some preliminary thoughts (spoiler-free, of course) as we prepare to dive in to the story:

A Few Things I Loved

• Despite our distance from the action given the narrative style, I love the way that Emily Brontë pulls us right into the story from the outset. Seeing Wuthering Heights (the house) first from Lockwood’s perspective is powerful. She so brilliantly opens the book with a house full of mysteries, and the story slowly unfolds each one. In other words, the book is, if nothing else, structurally brilliant.

• The biblical/theological imagery in this story runs DEEP. I love the way that Brontë thematically weaves a thread throughout the story of the four last things (death, judgments, heaven, and hell). Alongside the several physical deaths that occur throughout the narrative, we also find lots of discussion around heaven, hell, and the life to come (both physical and spiritual). This emphasis, along with the (forgivable) melodrama, keep before us the reminder of just how high the stakes are within the world of this story.

• I love the way that Emily Brontë holds up a mirror to her readers. We are faced with an unforgettable (read: mostly unlovable) cast of characters, and find ourselves asking the same questions about them that they are asking about themselves. Are they truly this wicked? Are they better considered as victims or offenders? Can they be saved? Can they escape their fate? Considering where we’re inclined to give our sympathy, antipathy, and even our apathy, offers us an interesting, if sometimes painful, self-examination.

• There are so many extremely memorable scenes and passages from this story, but there are two that come to my mind without fail every time I think of this book. Without giving too much away for new readers, I’ll just say, I LOVE the entire “I am Heathcliff” speech/scene and think that her prose in that section is absolutely masterful. The second scene that I love (and by love I really mean, “am utterly haunted by”) is the scene with Hindley and Hareton on the staircase (IYKYK).

A Few Reading Resources

• Reading Revisited ep. 16: Intro to Jane Eyre and Gothic Novels w/ Eleanor Bourg Nicholson

  • in this episode, special guest Eleanor Bourg Nicholson gives us an EXCELLENT introduction to gothic novels (and the Brontës)

• Reading Revisited ep. 78: Intro to Wuthering Heights w/

• “Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights” in The Common Reader by Virginia Woolf

  • a short, but poignant essay highlighting the genius of the Brontë sisters

• The Brontës: A Life In Letters by Juliet Barker

• The Annotated Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë, ed. by Janet Gezari

• The Emily Brontë Collection: Wuthering Heights, Selected Poems

• “Whatever Stuff Our Souls” by

  • this essay is a delightful and helpful guide for putting WH in context

• My Brother’s Keeper by

  • Eleanor Bourg Nicholson first told us about this book in our above-listed podcast episode. It has ancient pagan shrines, werewolves, AND the Brontë family…sold. A great companion read for Wuthering Heights.

• episodes on Wuthering Heights

A Few Themes To Keep In Mind

• Names

  • Names (and those who are unnamed) are of the upmost important in this novel. They can be hard to keep track of, but it’s worth noting when a name stands out to you!

• Isolation vs. Society

  “In all England, I do not believe that I could have fixed on a situation so completely removed from the stir of society. A perfect misanthropist’s Heaven” (5)

• Nature

  • The relationships of the characters to the outside world is extremely important. This book is very physical. The story is very tied to the physical landscape (i.e the Yorkshire moors). As with all gothic novels, it’s important to keep in mind the way that the exterior world relates to the interior world of our characters.

• Frame Narrative

  • We are several layers distant from the action of the story - it’s important to keep these layers of narration in mind

• Determinism vs. Freedom of the will

  • Is it possible to overcome your circumstances/upbringing?

  • Nature vs. nurture

• The Last Things (Death, Judgment, Heaven, Hell)

  • who, in this story, can be saved?

• Haunting/Ghosts

• Darkness vs. Light

• Motherlessness/Fatherlessness

A Few Discussion Questions

• What, if any, was your impression of this novel before reading it? Has your impression changed?

• Share a favorite quote, scene, or character from the book

• Discuss the title of the book

• How does this novel compare to Jane Eyre or other Brontë/Gothic novels you’ve read?

• Where do you see the gothic elements in this novel?

• Discuss the lack of parental figures in the book

• Are there any Good characters in this book? Which characters do you feel most sympathetic towards?

  • Discuss the main characters: Cathy, Heathcliff, Nelly, Edgar/Isabella, Catherine, Linton, Hareton

  • Who would you identify as the protagonist?

• Aside from the obvious, how do we see generational patterns in this story?

• Discuss the supernatural elements of the story

• What do you make of the ending? Were you surprised? Are you satisfied with the way she concludes?

• Is this novel’s contentious reputation deserved?

We hope you are all planning to read along with us this month! Please let us know in the comments any other resources, thoughts, or themes we should keep in mind as we begin!

What We’re Reading Next:

November

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

December

Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton

AND

A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver

January

Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

We have turned on paid subscriptions which will allow you to support the work we are doing here.

If you would like to make a small contribution to the work we’re doing here at Reading Revisited, we invite you to do so with the Buy (Us) a Coffee button below. We so appreciate your support!

Buy (Us) a Coffee

Reading Revisited 24-25 List

Previous Lists

*As always, some of the links are affiliate links. If you don’t have the books yet and are planning to buy them, we appreciate you using the links. The few cents earned with each purchase you make after clicking links (at no extra cost to you) goes toward the time and effort it takes to keep Reading Revisited running, and we appreciate it!

Did we get “there?”

I’m going to start with some honesty: this last section of the novel was very hard for me to read.

As your Eleanor-like guide on this raft journey, I was really hoping to bring some clear, “tie-it-all-up-in-a-bow” thoughts to this novel. I was hoping we’d end these guides feeling like this:

And though we kind of get the happy-family feels at the end of this book, like we get in the car ride at the end of Peanut Butter Falcon, the feeling that remains is more of:

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The first two parts of this novel were easy going and light. The first half was farcical, and people barely got hurt by the farce. I can take Twain’s “notice” at the beginning at face value, and agree that I will not attempt to “find a motive in this narrative” or a “moral” or a “plot” (4). I run no risk of being prosecuted, banished, or shot.

But in the latter half of this book…I’m in danger.

If I don’t seek to find some sort of value behind the dark comedy, I flounder. But then, when I allow myself to seek a motive, moral, or plot in this novel, it’s suddenly as if the raft is drifting away, leaving me doggy paddling, asking, “But, why?”

I don’t like what Twain is showing me: the nasty underbelly of relatively “fine folks” in an otherwise good enough society, if it weren’t for slavery…Ay, there’s the rub.

Structure

What do I do when I can’t find answers? I take a glance at the structure.

We’ve got 43 chapters in this book, meaning I can divide the book into quadrants, with three central chapters like this:

• 10 Chapters (chapters 1-10)

  • Central Chapter (chapter 11)

• 10 Chapters (chapters 12-21)

  • Central-Central Chapter (chapter 22)

• 10 Chapters (chapters 23-32)

  • Central Chapter (chapter 33)

• 10 Chapters (chapters 34-43)

Then I glance at the central chapters, to see what their content can reveal about themes, and hope to find some hope.

Chapter 11 - Huck goes ashore disguised as a girl (but is found out to be a boy), claims 3 different aliases (none of them his true name), learns that the woman’s husband is going to Jackson Island to recapture Jim, and Huck gets away as soon as he can to warn Jim.

Chapter 22 - At a small town along the river, a mob swarms Sherburn’s house to lynch him because he has just shot a drunk fool in the street. Sherburn gives a long speech on what it means to be a man, and why Southerners are cowards. The crowd runs away with their tails between their legs. Then at the traveling circus, a “drunk” man “convinces” the ring master to let him ride the circus horse. The “drunk” rider terrifies Huck with his antics and dangerous riding, making Huck sure the “drunk” is about to die in a violent and meaningless way, but then the whole thing gets resolved when the “drunk” reveals that he is a part of the circus as well, and is in fact a master performer. The chapter ends with an advertisement for the King and Duke’s “Royal Nonesuch” show, which will scam all the men in the town (no women or children or slaves (?) allowed) into watching a king with no clothes cavort about the stage.

Chapter 33 - Huck (under the alias of Tom Sawyer) meets Tom on his way to his aunt’s home. Tom initially thinks Huck is haunting him from the dead, does not reveal that Jim has been freed from slavery, arrives at his relative’s home under an alias as well, kisses his aunt (who gets deadly angry), then “reveals” that he is Sid Sawyer. At the end of the chapter, Huck goes to warn the King and Duke that the towns people are ready to expose their “Royal Nonesuch” scam, but the boys do not arrive in time, and instead witness the tarred and feathered King and Duke being ridden out of town on a rail. We get Huck saying, “Human beings can be awful cruel to one another” (257) and, “it don’t make no difference whether you do right or wrong, a person’s conscience ain’t got no sense” (258).

If you weren’t demoralized before, do you see why I am now?

At the center places of this novel are stories of:

• hidden identity

• scam

• violence

• slavery

There’s a bit of hope in the death and resurrection themes which Twain develops at the beginning of chapter 33, but the second coming these themes lead us to is one of ridiculous-Romanticism and unnecessary trouble, which barely avoids real death.

I can’t find any hint that Twain believes there’s a sure way to find or promote real goodness in people.

When Huck goes to warn the King and Duke, I react: WHY?

And then when they are the subjects of painful violence, I no longer know what to think. I certainly can’t celebrate with the crowd.

loves to ask about a character’s salvation, “Dare we hope?”

But here, at the end, I’m no longer sure Mark Twain does dare to hope. Or, to be more accurate. It seems as if he desperately wants to dare to hope, but all he sees is sludge.

Mark Twain —born Samuel Clemens—loved little about Christianity. He loved even less about the Catholic Church. He didn’t like her priests. He didn’t like her sacraments. And he didn’t like her Scriptures.

“It’s ain’t those parts of the Bible that I don’t understand that bother me; it is the parts that I do understand,” he once quipped.

Yet, for all that Mark Twain disliked about the Church, there was one Catholic he loved: Saint Joan of Arc.

…

“Whatever thing men call great, look for it in Joan of Arc, and there you will find it,” he wrote, adding, “She is easily and by far the most extraordinary person the human race has ever produced.”

(The American Catholic Almanac, A Daily Reader of the Patriots, Saints, Rogues, & Ordinary People who shaped the United States, Brian Burch & , 162)

I ran across the above excerpt, thankfully, while finishing this read. It helped.

I don’t think I am wrong when I find little solution (or hope) to the problem of evil in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Perhaps this is why Twain firmly warns us not to look for a motive, moral, or plot. Perhaps, he just can’t, with the evidence he can see around him, bring himself to believe that there is a motive, moral, or plot to the world.

And I find this crushing.

For me, therefore, the end of this novel is a massive reminder of how parched life is without faith,1 and that faith is in fact a gift. Not only in the sense that we don’t choose to have it and can’t make it happen in us, but also in the sense that we should be so enormously grateful for those moments when faith’s deeply meaningful lenses are on our eyes and we can see that life is worth living.

But, lest I be over dramatic. Despite the story’s determination not to provide any form of a moral resolution, it does not (I believe) commit firmly to nihilism either. This comedy is dark, but it is still comedic. Twain can’t give us a narrative where the hero comes home, but he also can’t keep his hero from ending in a home. There’s a sliver of hope that, in Twain’s honesty, I don’t believe he can fully deny the hope that there is resolution, though he also can’t believe it. Ah, this book irks me.

Anti-Romanticism

So, to continue to make sense of this story, I’ll turn to solid literary criticism.

In the first Read Along Guide, I quoted from one of the essays in the Ignatius Critical Edition as regards Twain’s relationship with the Romantic movement. I’d like to bring Byrne’s thoughts on the ending, namely on Jim’s pointlessly elongated and rat-infested captivity, to bear here:

Twain does an excellent job illustrating the dangers of Romanticism, but this takes him to a dead end…One could say that the only alternative Twain offers to Romanticism is, essentially, nihilism…Twain senses Romanticism’s flaws and hence demands its rejection, but he can himself offer no source for meaning, purpose, or morality in the modern world.

(William F. Byrne, “Huckleberry Finn as a Response to Romanticism,” 350)

We saw it in the sinking of the Walter Scott steamboat, and in the white-washed sepulchre-home of the Grangerfords. We see it here with Tom Sawyer’s absurd and almost-deadly game with Jim.

Twain looks at the South’s honor and pride, and (it seems to me) he says: you fools, you murderous fools, you boys who continue your childish, bookish fantasies into adulthood.

Throughout this latter-half of the novel, with its stages, farces, violence, and acting-in-real-life, I kept hearing Macbeth:

Tommorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow
Creeps in this petty pace from day to day
To the last syllable of recorded time,
And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!
Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player
That struts and frets his hour upon the stage
And then is heard no more. It is a tale
Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,
Signifying nothing.
(William Shakespeare, Macbeth, V.5.22-31)

And, we’re back to nihilism.

But, but, but, I must press against fully believing this book is trying to say that life is not worth living. Because Twain was not a poor reader of Shakespeare. He would have known that the proud murderer Macbeth could not have had a true perspective on reality. Though the force of this speech is the current I feel in the latter half of this narrative, I also don’t feel I can definitively say it is the only current.

In the Epic Journey/Odysseus Tradition

My last attempt to find meaning will come in the form of comparing Twain to one of the traditions he is working within. I can admire a book for what it is doing.

In the Book Drop Day post, expertly guided us to keep in mind the structure and story sequence of an epic journey:

People are either Iliad people or Odyssey people…I suspect Mark Twain was an Odyssey person…Just like the original Odyssey, the plot involves sailing along not-quite-clearly-charted waters and encountering danger after danger and hoping for rescue to come each time at the last possible moment…Secretly, we're all Odysseus or Huck Finn, both longing for great adventures, and realizing (especially mid-dangerous adventure) that what we most want is to come home.

Let’s compare and contrast a few things from this last section of Twain in relation to Homer.

Huck Finn (our Odysseus) has reached the end of his journey, which, if following Homer, should be home. However, he is 1,100 miles further from home than when he started, and (at least at the beginning of this week’s section) he has lost his companion (Jim) and is further from his journey’s mission (to free Jim) than when they started.

Huh.

But, look at this clever turn Twain performs.

First, he has Huck arrive as someone else (just like Odysseus returned disguised), and then, by having Huck assume the identity of Tom Sawyer, the nephew of this house, it is as if Huck is, in a way, returning to family, a source of home.

Then the scene of Tom kissing Aunt Sally draws into the narrative the Odyssey scene of the annoying suiters who Odysseus’ wife, Penelope, must fend off.

And the rather farcical, but truly dangerous “battle” at midnight between the farmers and no one (except if you count the boys and Jim), resonates enough with the routing of Odysseus’ suitor ridden hall for me to check off that epic box, and confirm that the Odyssey is present here, and that I can bring it into my reading as a helpful way to conclude.

Therefore, lastly, when Aunt Sally “threatens” in the last sentences of the novel to adopt Huck, I am able to read the ending of this novel, and Huck’s journey, as Huck arriving home, since he’ll gain mother, father, family, and home to a better degree than he had before.

It’s an Odyssey alright, but Twainified and Southerned.

A Final Notice

Friends attempting to find an attempt in me to find a motive behind this book and put it into these Read Along Guides for all to use as a means to best love this book are correct; friends attempting to suggest that I did not fully appreciate this book or the depth of moral weight it packs or that I could have done a much better job at finding all there is to love in Twain are correct; friends attempting to forgive my plodding attempts at being a fair guide through this most-American of books will be greatly appreciated.

Miscellany & Discussion Questions

• Americanism

  • Compare this book to other American books we’ve read. (Peace like a River, Death Comes for the Archbishop, Jayber Crow, The Great Gatsby, Trust, just to name a few). Can we draw out what makes a book American? Is this a hopelessly broad question? And even if so, why do we still feel it is important to ask?

  • One of the common themes I get, when comparing the above list of books to Huck Finn, is the sheer breadth of geography that is covered. (Even Nick Carraway’s narrative of Gatsby, which is mostly set in New York, begins and ends 1,000 miles away in the midwest.) Does the size of our nation impact our literature?

  • When I compare Death Comes for the Archbishop to Huck Finn, the vignette nature of both strikes me. Is there an instinct in American literature that we must collect these stories about the various and separate peoples in our land, before they are gone, before they are all melted into the great 2,800 mile-wide pot of America?

  • Hernan Diaz, author of Trust, mentions that there is an American myth making instinct. It seems to me that this insight could provide insight into this book.

• Morals & Ethics & Slavery

  • An obvious, and great, conversation starter is a discussion on what happens in a society when vice is legalized, and virtue is demonized. (Specifically, the “moral dilemmas” Huck finds himself in due to his friendship with Jim.)

  • Discuss Jim.

• Language

  • Which passages did you think were beautiful prose?

  • Discuss the extreme vernacular style of the dialogue, and the narrative voice.

• Childlike Innocence

  • In the first Read Along Guide, I mentioned that (1) children loved justice; (2) children were precise with words; and (3) children were traditionalists. These traits (to me) were amusing and admirable at the start of the book, but here, at the end, when Tom employs all these same traits to cause unnecessary misery to Jim’s life, and almost death to themselves (because of the warning notes, and farmers with guns), do these positive traits get exposed for foolishness? When boys become men, must they shed these Romantic notions so they may see and act more clearly? If the novel seems to say so, do you agree?

• Time/Seasons

  • I believe, if I tracked it right, the journey down river begins at the beginning of summer, and ends at the end of summer. Anyone else track it better, and get anything different or more specific?

  • Any insights you have into the impact which the time of year or season has on the story?

• Shakespeare

  • Think about the moments Shakespeare’s plays made an appearance in the narrative. (I mainly think about the influence of Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, and Macbeth.) How did the great themes and moral momentum of Shakespeare’s plays, when inserted into this story, deepen your understanding/reading of Huckleberry Finn? Did Shakespeare reveal what was going on? Or make it less clear, more complex, and therefore more uncertain?

• The River

  • What role does it play? How does it fit into the greater tradition as regards rivers? As in, when Sophia Grangerford and Harney Shepherdson cross the river, are they as good as dead, like those who’ve crossed the river Styx? Or, is the river, as water, also a source and symbol of life, and home, and beauty? Is it, perhaps, like the Grangerfords, and the South, and America, a mixture of both?

  • You Can’t Get There From Here - just as there’s only one direction to a river if you only float along with the current, is society hopelessly journeying the wrong direction, unless a massive effort (like inventing a steamboat) is undertaken? Is there hope to turn around?

  • Helpful map:

    

• The South

  • Discuss/respond to this Flannery-esque view of the South:
    “Here in the South, Lecesne says, ‘people still see their mark of Cain clearly’ and the region’s ‘manners, tragic history, and whispered sins’ are ‘the stark truth’ of God ‘striving for possession of suffering and violent souls alike’ (“Darius Lecesne’s Seers of All Time,” Richard Barnett).

• Humor

  • In ep.73 Introducing the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn w/Karen Swallow Prior, mentions that we should not forget that Twain is a humorist. (I forgotten this hint.) Does reading the final scenes with a posture of readiness to belly-laugh change your reading of the ending? Does picturing this scene played out by a slap-stick comedy crew help you read the scenes of the final battle and the identity reveals, better?

• Which character do you like best in this book?

• Which parts made you laugh? Which made you cry? Are they the same parts?

• What do you think about Huck never returning home to the Widow Douglas? (I kind of miss her, and feel her loss.)

• What do you think about Huck’s pap being dead, and Jim having found him at the very beginning of the story in the floating house?

• Discuss the Shepherdson & Gangerford feud.

• Discuss the King and the Duke.

• Will you put this on your TBRA (To Be Read Again) stack? Or, asked another way, do you feel more or less capable of talking about this book when it is assigned to a highschooler close to you? (And if the answer is “no,” to either of these questions, is reading Huck Finn in 2026, so tune into them for always amazing insights - I know I will!)

Virtual Book Club

A final note, please, please join our Zoom call for book club this month! This conversation would really benefit from some Huck Finn lovers, so please come!

What We’re Reading Now/Next:

October

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

November

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

December

Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton

AND

A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

We have turned on paid subscriptions which will allow you to support the work we are doing here as well as receive Read Along Guide PDFs each month and voice recordings of the Read Along Guides.

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Welcome to Reading Revisited, a place for friends to enjoy some good old-fashioned book chat while revisiting the truth, beauty, and goodness we’ve found in our favorite books.

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Hello Friends,

I hope you are enjoying The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as much as I am! I just finished this morning and I was so delighted. I will not spoil it in case you are still in the midst of reading, but this was my first read and I am so happy to see where Mark Twain took the story.

If you have not yet gotten a chance to read ’s Read Along Guides, please do! I will link them below. If you are a paid subscriber then below the paywall you will be able to listen to Jess herself read all of the Read Along Guides.

If you are not yet a paid subscriber, then this is your reminder that we keep all of our guides, book clubs, and podcasts free so that everyone can participate. But, it does take time and money to run so we so appreciate all of our paid subscribers and would love you to join the ranks of Reading Revisited supporters!

Thanks again to all of you who support us in any way. We love doing this, but it is lovely to have support along the way!

Huckleberry Finn Read Along Guides

• Introduction and Reading Schedule

• ep. 73: Introducing The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn w/

• Chapters 1-16

• Chapters 17-21

• Chapters 22-31

• Chapters 32-43

What We’re Reading Next:

October

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

November

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

December

Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton

AND

A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

We have turned on paid subscriptions which will allow you to support the work we are doing here as well as receive Read Along Guide PDFs each month and voice recordings of the Read Along Guides.

Subscribe now

If you would like to make a small contribution to the work we’re doing here at Reading Revisited, we invite you to do so with the Buy (Us) a Coffee button below. We so appreciate your support!

Buy (Us) a Coffee

Reading Revisited 24-25 List

Previous Lists

*As always, some of the links are affiliate links. If you don’t have the books yet and are planning to buy them, we appreciate you using the links. The few cents earned with each purchase you make after clicking links (at no extra cost to you) goes toward the time and effort it takes to keep Reading Revisited running, and we appreciate it!

Song: Into The Light Music composed and recorded by Oak Studios. Link:

• [Background Music] Into The Light - C... | Creative Commons - Attribution ND 4.0

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Where are we going?

Over 75% through with the book, and does anyone know where we are going?

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Forget, for a moment, that all your life you’ve known of Huckleberry Finn as a great novel. Imagine, for a moment, that no one has recommended this book, you don’t know that “everyone” considers it a masterpiece, there’s no one to trust. Where does that leave your thoughts?

For me, stripping away the accolades allows me to ask: where are we going? If I didn’t know that Mark Twain was a master, at this point in the journey I would be thinking: we’ve traveled a long way, we’ve missed our original destination, we’re now traveling further from our original goal both physically and morally, where will this end? Is there any hope? Is there any reason for the journey? What’s the purpose?

When I set these questions within the greater framework of the epic journey tradition, I like them better.

To be clear. I am not a nihilist. I do not enjoy feeling like I am being taken on a journey that may conclude that there is no point to the journey.

However, just shy of the world-view that “there is no point to life” is the reality of living life real-time, with often no very practical, applicable idea of what the point is.

“We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forget.”

-G.K. Chesteron

This journey, like epically long journeys before it, is filled with mishaps. This book is called, the adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

“An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered. An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.”

-G.K. Chesterton

Can all these mishaps and inconveniences (to use understatement) be rightly considered adventures? Will there be a final arrival which will work retroactively through the whole and cause it all to make sense, making every moment matter? Or, any way you shake it, is life just crappy?

As of the end of chapter 31, there’s no hope on the horizon that any of this will lead to Jim’s freedom. Indeed, he’s less free now than he was when the book started. And also, that Chestertonian-author-love-for-men we talked about in the previous Read Along Guide is beginning to wear a bit thin. I’m starting to wonder if Twain really does love the mysterious and messy composite that is Man. Or is the South just too broken to love?

On Nature, Nurture, and being Man

In Chapter 22, we get the end of the Sherburn escapade, which begins with demands for a lynching, and ends with the murderer lecturing the town about what it means to be a man, and a Southerner. Then in the next chapter, we get a false theatre starring a king with no clothes, and a discussion between Jim and Huck about the nature of kings. And how “all kings” are “ornery,” it’s just the way “they’re raised” (174-6). This is not the first time Twain has had Huck reflect on moral culpability, and the extent to which how one was raised bears the blame, and in all of this, what it means to be a good man.

So far, we haven’t seen a single good example of a good man. What to do with that?

What does it mean to be an American?

And what does it say, structurally, that this is the center of the novel?

Evil Farse

Up to chapter 23, the Duke and the King have done nothing worse than swindle a few dollars out of poor people. It wasn’t pleasant. It was sometimes done using other’s best virtues against them, but it was comparatively harmless when compared to the stunt they try to pull in chapters 24-29.

Six chapters are dedicated to the near fraud of three innocent, virtuous, orphaned girls. This is an enormous percentage of the book. Up to this point, the narrative has not lingered this long in any other place. The memorable Shepherdson feud, in comparison, was only two chapters. Why spend this much time here?

“I felt dreadful glad I’d worked it all off onto the [slaves] and yet hadn’t done the [slaves] no harm by it” (209).

And are lines like these, from Huck, the highest heights our hero is going to be capable of?

Eventually, after a lot of silence, he does speak some truth:

I see I had spoken too sudden, and said too much, and was in a close place. I asked her to let me think a minute; and she set there, very impatient and excited, and handsome, but looking kind of happy and eased-up, like a person that’s had a tooth pulled out. So I went to studying it out. I says to myself, I reckon a body that ups and tells the truth when he is in a tight place, is taking a considerable many resks, though I ain’t had no experience, and can’t say for certain; but it looks so to me, anyway; and yet here’s a case where I’m blest if it don’t look to me like the truth is better, and actuly safer, than a lie. I must lay it by in my mind, and think it over some time or other, it’s so kind of strange and unregular. I never see nothing like it. Well, I says to myself at last, I’m agoing to chance it; I’ll up and tell the truth this time, though it does seem most like setting down on a kag of powder and touching it off just to see where you’ll go to (211).

Thank goodness our protagonist is growing—some.

Is this book designed to be a powder keg of truth which Twain is touching off to see where it’ll take America?

And at the end of this saga, we don’t know the truth. We don’t know if the two men who came as uncles to the girls after the King and the Duke are the true uncles, or if they too are frauds. At this point in the book, I’m asking: does Twain believe truth will come out? Does he think appearance and reality ever do match up, one revealing the other? In his worldview, does he only see fake dukes and kings blustering on a stage full of sound and fury, with all of this life, in the end, meaning nothing?

You can tell I’m getting pretty demoralized in my reading.

Can Twain’s authoring of Joan of Arc give me hope that he will recognize that there are some purely good people in the world? Yet, do I undermine my own point here? If the best our world can produce are women like Mary Jane and Joan of Arc, who are, in the end, either defrauded or burned at the stake, respectively, is this world a place which allows for any true goodness to live?

For Forty Dirty Dollars

Jim has been sold back into slavery. This leads Huck to his greatest growth into virtuous manhood yet, though ironically, it is against the prevailing culture, and therefore he believes he is choosing evil.

So I kneeled down. But the words wouldn’t come. Why wouldn’t they? It warn’t no use to try and hide it from Him. Nor from me, neither. I knowed very well why they wouldn’t come. It was because my heart warn’t right; it was because I warn’t square; it was because I was playing double. I was letting on to give up sin, but away inside of me I was holding on to the biggest one of all. I was trying to make my mouth say I would do the right thing and the clean thing, and go and write that [slave’s] owner and tell where he was; but deep down in me I knowed it was a lie—and he knowed it. You can’t pray a lie—I found that out (238).

And this next section:

It was a close place. I took it up, and held it in my hand. I was a trembling, because I’d got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself:
’All right, then, I’ll go to hell’ —and tore it up (237).
It was awful thoughts, and awful words, but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head; and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter, I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog (239).

The South

On a second-to-last note, I must speak beautifully of the South, otherwise, we’ll all come away from this post, and perhaps this whole book, blindly blaming a region in a past time for the ugliness we see in this narrative. And while that’s a tidy moral, it’s neither helpful to our own growth in virtue, nor accurate.

Below is an excerpt from an article written by Richard Barnett1 on Darius Lecesne, the “man among men,” scholar, poet, and father of one of my childhood friends whom I mentioned in our Jokien with Tolkien episode. Lecesne, Jamaican by birth, chose the South as his home, the article explains. Here’s a small snapshot of why a great man loved the South:

One of the things that attracts Lecesne to the American South is the Southerner’s natural suspicion of “experts,” a wariness of what John Crowe Ransom called our technological society’s “gospel of progress,” and a perspective that is frequently ridiculed by outsiders. Lecesne says this is because a section of the South still clings to its Judeo-Christian cosmology, however “backwards” or fragmentary, whether as Dennis Covington’s snake-handling believers, or, less dramatically, as “other-Georgia” misanthropes. Flannery O’Connor’s small-town and rural Southern skepticism toward many of the things the mass culture deems “broad and up to date” has always been and continues to be a scandal to Allen Tate’s “Yankees of the spirit,” who would replace faith with what Lecesne and his Southern “kin” call “intellectual idolatry.” Here in the South, Lecesne says, “people still see their mark of Cain clearly” and the region’s “manners, tragic history, and whispered sins” are “the stark truth” of God “striving for possession of suffering and violent souls alike.”
(“Darius Lecesne’s Seers of All Time,” Richard Barnett)

Perhaps that last sentence is the most helpful lens through which we can read Twain’s Southern Epic.

And just in case you don’t read the whole of Barnett’s article, here’s the beautiful, perfect, excellent concluding encapsulation of the South:

It is easy to say that Lecesne is merely “whistling Dixie” with such views in a place like Atlanta. But perhaps there are spiritual kin even in places that seem most hostile, as evidenced by a bit of graffiti seen by this writer recently on the back of a seat on an Atlanta commuter train. It was in three different handwritings:

“Repent, for the Kingdom of God is coming!”

“Why fear God?”

Then, with an arrow pointing to the previous: “Must be some white man wrote this.”

(“Darius Lecesne’s Seers of All Time,” Richard Barnett)

Where are we going?

So, what will happen next? Will Huck be able to free Jim? And if he does, where will they go then? Does a land of freedom, does a home, exist for our heroes? Is the land of freedom, is America, real? Can we get there from here? Is there even a “there” that can be our destination?

What We’re Reading Now/Next:

October

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

November

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

December

Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton

AND

A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

We have turned on paid subscriptions which will allow you to support the work we are doing here as well as receive Read Along Guide PDFs each month and voice recordings of the Read Along Guides.

If you would like to make a small contribution to the work we’re doing here at Reading Revisited, we invite you to do so with the Buy (Us) a Coffee button below. We so appreciate your support!

Buy (Us) a Coffee

Reading Revisited 24-25 List

Previous Lists

*As always, some of the links are affiliate links. If you don’t have the books yet and are planning to buy them, we appreciate you using the links. The few cents earned with each purchase you make after clicking links (at no extra cost to you) goes toward the time and effort it takes to keep Reading Revisited running, and we appreciate it!

Hello y’all!

Remember the question we ended last week with:

How do we get there from here?

Well the question remains; no answer forth coming.

Structure

Since I’m not sure where we’re going, let alone how to get there, I’ve started plotting the structure to see if we can’t begin to have some answers emerge.

Things I’m primarily looking for:

• Time - seasons of year, will this be a “full circle,” one-full year story so they end at the same season they began? If not, what season/s will this epic cover?

• Money - in East of Eden, we discovered a three-fold inheritance, what’s the role of money in this story?

• Location - is there a structure underlying where Huck is? Will he begin in his home, get further from it, and return to his home? Is there a significance to when he’s on land or on water? Is there a significance to which side of the river he is on?

• Chiastic Structure & the Central Chapter - will Twain utilize these tools?

To save space, I’ve put the structure in this footnote.1 And I’m keeping in mind that next week’s reading will have chapter 22, the central chapter.

Piebald with Vicious Virtue

When I remember Huckleberry Finn, I remember these two chapters: chapters 17-18, Grangerfords vs. Sheperdsons.

The Grangerford home is the perfect place…an Eden…rich and bountiful in every way, pristine in its glistening outward purity, with Death at its heart.

Amidst the carpets and books and cool, Southern tranquility, lies the deceased Emmaline with her lead penciled pictures of youth meditating against tombs, and her preserved deathbed. At the head of a large family table sits the patriarch:

Col. Grangerford was very tall and very slim, and had a darkish-paly complexion, not a sign of red in it anywheres; he had the thinnest kind of lips, and the thinnest kind of nostrils, and a high nose, and heavy eyebrows, and the blackest kind of eyes, sunk so deep back that they seemed like they was looking out of caverns at you, as you may say. His forehead was high, and his hair was black and straight, and hung to his shoulders. His hands was long and thin, and every day of his life he put on a clean shirt and a full suit from head to tow made out of linen so white it hurt your eyes to look at it…he carried a mahogany cane with a silver head to it (122).

I could read the above passage about Col. Grangerford in two manners, and they are as distinct as black from white.

He is either a familiar nineteenth-century type for the model man of virtue: strong and aloof, reserved and noble, an aristocratic Southern gentleman to the core.

Or he is a skeleton, whose face looks more dead than alive, and whose body and ability to move are literally propped up by a wood harvested by enslaved men, women, and children.

I think he may be both.

Col. Grangerford was a gentleman, you see. He was a gentleman all over (122).

He’s the pinnacle of Southern culture.2 He’s rotting from the inside. He’s a skeleton, clothed in a white suit. He’s death beneath a exterior whiter than snow. He’s bloodless, no life within him.

And he’s immensely wealthy. We haven’t met any character in this novel who can remotely touch the Grangerfords for material goods. And he’s even wealthy in the most meaningful way: children.

The Grangerfords had 9 children. But in addition to Emmaline, 3 sons have already been killed in the feud. Still living when Huck enters the home are four sons and two daughters (Bob, Tom, Charlotte, Sophia, and Buck).

But by the close of their story all three living sons have been shot, the colonel is also dead, and Sophia has gone across the river (possible symbolic death, since she’s effectively dead to her family). Of the nine children, only Charlotte, presumably still lives this side of the river.

And for what reason? Honor.

‘Well,’ says Buck, ‘a feud is this way. A man has a quarrel with another man, and kills him; then that other man’s brother kills him; then the other brothers, on both sides, goes for one another; then the cousins chip in—and by-and-by everybody’s killed off, and there ain’t no more feud. But it’s kind of slow, and takes a long time’ (125).

Out of the mouths of babes…truth is said in all its simplicity. Here’s that truth-finding childlike innocence we noticed in the first section. Out of the roughest language comes the best poetry. Out of Ransom’s translation of Weston’s hot air, comes a ridiculously revealing definition of civilization.3

Slavery props up the Southern gentleman, and the Southern gentleman uses his wealth of land, property, and children, to uphold his honor, and he upholds his honor by killing and being killed by other paragons of Southern aristocracy.

Thus Southern gentlemen care only for honor, and their honor is murderous.

Yet, there’s still the sense in this part of the novel that the South is a place that Twain deeply loves, even in the midst of deeply understanding it’s foundational cracks. And it’s hard that the very things that make you love these people the most (their willingness to sacrifice, their loyalty to family above all, their honor) are intimately a part of, or made out of (which it is, I don’t know) their deepest vices.

I say this, because while only thinking of this section of reading, I’m not certain Twain would wish me to completely label Col. Grangerford as the vicious cancer at the heart of the South. Col. Grangerford may be that. But, he is also a man. And so we cry mercy upon him. For there is much good intermingled with the bad. Therefore in humility, my second-to-last thought on Col. Grangerford is, “But for the grace of God go I. May God have mercy upon his soul, and forgive us and our ancestors of the sins we do not know we commit.”

The boys jumped for the river—both of them hurt—and as they swum down the current the men run along the bank shooting at them and singing out, ‘Kill them, kill them!’ It made me so sick I most fell out of the tree. I ain’t agoing to tell all that happened—it would make me sick again if I was to do that. I wished I hadn’t ever come ashore that night, to see such things. I ain’t ever going to get shut of them—lots of times I dream about them (132-133).

To end sourly, if I take the ending of this story into account here and not merely the half of the book which we have read thus far, I’m less inclined to think we are being asked to be lenient with Col. Grangerford. His Romantic way of living is perhaps both the origin and the prop of all evils in this society. His Romantic way of living leads grown men to gun down children.

Shakespeare

The bard is here. In all his complexity and humor. Thank you Twain.

Immediately after escaping the feuding Capulets and Montagues who are killing each other over the love of their daughter and son on the shores of the Mississippi River,4 Huck is intercepted by the arrival of two Shakespearean fools, the “Duke” and the “King,” who, despite their slapstick comedy, carry down the river and deeper into this narrative a contemplation on death.

To best compare, let’s begin with the original Hamlet soliloquy:

To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles
And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,
No more; and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come,
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause—there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life.
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
Th'oppressor's wrong, the proud man's contumely,
The pangs of dispriz'd love, the law's delay,
The insolence of office, and the spurns
That patient merit of th'unworthy takes,
When he himself might his quietus make
With a bare bodkin? Who would fardels bear,
To grunt and sweat under a weary life,
But that the dread of something after death,
The undiscovere'd country, from whose bourn
No traveller returns, puzzles the will,
And makes us rather bear those ills we have
Than fly to others that we know not of?
Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all,
And thus the native hue of resolution
Is sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought,
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry
And lose the name of action.

(William Shakespeare, Hamlet, III.i.57-89)

Hamlet, in his actual soliloquy is wrestling with a deep disillusionment with life. He looks at life, sees a sea of misery, and wishes to end that misery. But, he’s conscience makes a coward of him, in that his fear of what happens in death after suicide is greater than his fear of the current misery of life. Also, fear of any death, not just suicide, freezes his will, throws him into a mire of doubt, and he does not act. He does not take an unsheathed dagger to his own breast. He also does not take an unsheathed dagger (at this point in the play) to the breast of the usurping uncle who has stolen the throne and his mother, the queen. His fear of death is greater than his fear of life, and both fears cripple him into inaction.

Now, let’s look at Hamlet as he soliloquizes on a raft.5

To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin
That makes calamity of so long a life;
For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,
But that the fear of something after death
Murders the innocent sleep,
Great nature’s second course,
And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune
Than fly to others that we know not of.
There’s the respect must give us pause:
Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst;
For who would bear the whips and scorns of time,
The oppressor’s wrong, the proud man’s contumely,
The laws delay, and the quietus which his pangs might take,
In the dead waste and middle of the night, when churchyards yawn
In customary suits of solemn black,
But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,
Breathes forth contagion on the world,
And thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i’ the adage,
Is sickled o’er with care,
And all the clouds that lowered o’er our housetops,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.
’Tis a consummation devoutly to be wished. But soft you, the fair Ophelia:
Ope not thy ponderous and marble jaws,
But get thee to a nunnery—go! (156-157).

My goodness. What a hilarious jumble of Hamlet, Macbeth, and Romeo and Juliet. Yet, unless I read this wrong, I do believe the main force of Hamlet’s speech is preserved. I don’t think, unless I read this incorrectly, that the Duke’s unintentional contortions change the main idea: death is terrifying, and life is miserable.

Let us just look at the hilarious ending: “But soft you…” is a line from Romeo, which originally was finished with, “what light through yonder window breaks? It is the east and Juliet is the sun.” A line which, in deifying Juliet, will end in death by suicide.

Instead, the Duke muddles this first glance of Romeo upon his newly found love, and puts it into Hamlet’s mouth as the final conclusion of his musings on death, where Ophelia, Hamlet’s love, becomes a personification of Death itself with its “ponderous and marble jaws,” which devour all men.6 And the whole grand speech ends anticlimatically with a line from Hamlet (from elsewhere in the play, when he is faking madness) which, through a nun’s vow of chastity, would effectively close her ponderous jaws, and end the threat of death, though in the rejection (to some extent) of life.

There is so much here. And what I’ve said needs so much more nuance. It deserves its own essay. We must drift on.

Miscellany & Questions

• The River - what role does it play? How does it fit into the greater tradition as regards rivers? As in, when Sophia Grangerford and Harney Shepherdson cross the river, are they as good as dead, like those who’ve crossed the river Styx? Or, is the river, as water, also a source and symbol of life, and home, and beauty? Is it, perhaps, like the Grangerfords, and the South, and America, a mixture of both?

  I never felt easy till the raft was two mile below there and out in the middle of the Mississippi. Then we hung up our signal lattern, and judged we was free and safe once more…I was powerful glad to get away from the feuds, and so was Jim to get away from the swamp. We said there warn’t no home like a raft, after all. Other places do seem so cramped up and smothery, but a raft don’t. You feel mighty free and easy and comfortable on a raft (134).

• Reminds me of…East of Eden. In the Grangerford home is: “Dr Gunn’s Family Medicine, which told you all about what to do if a body was sick or dead” (116). This reminds me of the passage about the Hamiltons’ family medicine book, and the narrator saying that you can tell a lot about a family by the places that are doggearred. Additionally, there’s mention of “finding water and gold with a ‘divining rod’” (148), which is similar to Samuel Hamilton’s use of a divining rod on Adam Trask’s land.

• You Can’t Get There From Here - And I thought this was only going to be a side comment last time. But then look where we find Huck and Jim: headed further South, further from Freedom, further from their destination/purpose, but with no way to turn around.

Last (two) Note(s)

First, I like that in these sections it seems to me that Twain likes people.

Second note, it’s hard for me to write about his people.

Let me say this another way, and together.

As I read this first half of the book, if I attempt to pick apart (explicate, if you will) the plot or the characters, the story resists me. It’s completely opposite from my reading experience of, say, C.S. Lewis’ Space Trilogy. Those books wanted to be discussed.

But this Mississippi epic…not that one can’t find lessons in it, but, it’s as if the author wrote a notice at the beginning saying, “don’t do that.”7 His characters, though drawn in bold strokes, don’t allow me to say: “this man represents this,” or even, “this man is like many of the other men of his socioeconomic status.” No, each individual is himself.

In a post last Spring on Willa Cather, said, “Cather clearly loves her characters and draws them with affection.”

I’ve said about L.M. Montgomery, one of my favorite authors. Her “annoying old ladies,” were drawn with humor and deep charity. She laughed over them, and ached with them. And because of seeing this love from Montgomery for each of the quirky and goodly flawed characters in the Anne of Green Gables series, I discovered this same love for people in Shakespeare. And then found it from Tolstoy towards the men and women of his Anna Karenina. And then from Sigrid Undset in her Kristin Lavransdatter. And this caused me to think, to be a great author, does one need to love those one writes about?

“Some stupid people started the idea that because women obviously back up their own people through everything, therefore women are blind and do not see anything. They can hardly have known any women. The same women who are ready to defend their men through thick and thin are (in their personal intercourse with the man) almost morbidly lucid about the thinness of his excuses or the thickness of his head. A man’s friend likes him but leaves him as he is: his wife loves him and is always trying to turn him into somebody else…The devotee is entirely free to criticise; the fanatic can safely be a sceptic. Love is not blind; that is the last thing that it is. Love is bound; and the more it is bound the less it is blind” (Orthodoxy, “The Flag of the World,” G.K. Chesterton, 63).

Do some of the best stories come from people who want to write about the miracle and messy composite that is each Man? I think so.8

Well, at this point, it seems to me that this, too, is what Twain does well. He shows each man, doing what each man does in each moment, and he seems to show them with the love of a good wife, knowing all their flaws, but loving them, in a real, rather sorrowful, but not sentimental way.

But, the story resists use. I can’t turn these men into a moral, or even a lesson to help me out in my own daily life. You could say I trust that Huck Finn is worth reading, but I’m still not fully capable of articulating why.

What We’re Reading Now/Next:

October

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

November

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

December

Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton

AND

A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

We have turned on paid subscriptions which will allow you to support the work we are doing here as well as receive Read Along Guide PDFs each month and voice recordings of the Read Along Guides.

If you would like to make a small contribution to the work we’re doing here at Reading Revisited, we invite you to do so with the Buy (Us) a Coffee button below. We so appreciate your support!

Buy (Us) a Coffee

Reading Revisited 24-25 List

Previous Lists

*As always, some of the links are affiliate links. If you don’t have the books yet and are planning to buy them, we appreciate you using the links. The few cents earned with each purchase you make after clicking links (at no extra cost to you) goes toward the time and effort it takes to keep Reading Revisited running, and we appreciate it!

Subscribe now

I first remember reading Huckleberry Finn when I was 15-years old. My teacher was intelligent and young, and I loved the class discussions. But I did not love the book.

Why?

I think I resented it for being considered, as Mary Reichardt said, the greatest American novel.

“You mean to tell me,” I said to myself, “that England can boast the likes of Shakespeare, Austen, and Chaucer, and we get stuck with the colloquial slang of Huck and Jim?!”

If this book had not been lauded as America’s greatest novel, I might’ve been less resistant to it’s charm. But I did resist. And this is where I sat, loving British Literature, and putting up with American Literature, until very recently when I realized: Gosh darn it all, I am American, meaning, I fall into the American tradition whether I want to or not.

This was a bit of a blow. (And placing my hopes in the T.S. Eliot option wasn’t in the cards.)

This means, that as your guide for this book, I find myself in the role of Eleanor from Peanut Butter Falcon.

See her face? She’s wondering: what good could possibly be achieved by a beat-up-by-the-world, less-than-average-country boy and his newly-made, just-escaped-from-captivity, lower-than-average-IQ friend floating down the water on a raft?

Y’all, that’s me.

So, this time around, Eleanor is my model. And instead of allowing myself to be put off by less-than-polished exterior appearances, I’m going to sit down on the raft, paddle my feet in the water, listen to the slapstick rhythm of the talk as it mirrors the slap of the water, and be taken along for a ride.

Where We’re At (in Time) & Anti-Romanticism

But first things first, I can only kick my feet in the water for so long before my brain begins to need something to mull over.

So, I’ll pull from one of the essays at the back of the Ignatius Critical Edition which provides helpful context.1

Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) was born in 1835. He published Huckleberry Finn in 1885, about the pre-Civil War South of the 1840s. Of this time period, William F. Byrne2 says:

Much of this novel’s moral, political, and literary significance is wrapped up in its relationship with Romanticism…Romanticism emerged in the eighteenth century and peaked in the nineteenth century, but it is still very much with us today…It tends to emphasize strong emotion…Rejecting the humdrum and ordinary, Romantic literature and art often featured heroic figures as well as strong and exotic people and places. A fascination with the Middle Ages is sometimes evident.3 This makes sense, since Romanticism is generally seen as a reaction against modernity in general and the Enlightenment in particular.

The Enlightenment, an eighteenth century philosophical, political, and social movement, helped to define the modern world. It emphasized “reason”, which it understood (incorrectly, some would argue) to operate in opposition to tradition, to emotion, and, for many, to religious belief. Since the Enlightenment, some people have found the resulting world cold, mundane, and disenchanted. Although Romanticism is usually not religious, it represents an attempt to fill a void.

(William F. Byrne, “Huckleberry Finn as a Response to Romanticism,” 340)

Mark Twain, Byrne continues, is reacting against Romanticism to emphasize a realistic depiction of life.

Understanding this context, I began filling in some of the authors I knew best, noticing who and what Twain’s Huck Finn was responding to.

Precursors:
Johnathan Edwards (1703-1758) - a leader of the American Enlightenment. I remember his writing as dry, esoteric, exalted, and fiercely directed towards the divine and against the physical world. I did not dislike him, but he was like an eagle, aloof and piercing.
Charlotte Lennox (1720-1804) - Her novel The Female Quixote figures a heroine who has so completely given herself over to her Romantic reading, that she does not understand the world she actually lives in. Reminds me of Tom Sawyer and Catherine Morland from Northanger Abbey.
Sir Walter Scott (1771-1832) - a lovely writer of Romances. His beloved novel Ivanhoe has everything in it which Tom Sawyer would revel in: the Middle Ages, knights, damsels in distress, Robin Hood, Crusades, and chivalry to the extreme. (Note that Twain names a sinking boat after him…)
Jane Austen (1775-1817) - I can’t help but think of Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne Dashwood, and her Romantic sensibilities, which require some tempering from realistic and practical (and virtuous!) Eleanor. As well as, Catherine Morland from Northanger Abbey, who is so blinded by the gothic and the romantic that she does not see the real threat to her in the form of General Tilney.

Contemporaries & Descendents:
So much could be said about how Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855), John Henry Newman (1801 - 1890), Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1883), Oscar Wilde (1853-1900), and, not to be forgotten, the Civil War (1861-1865) were a part of the world Twain wrote in. And that on the heals of Twain come two of my all-time favorite authors: L.M. Montgomery4 (1874-1942) and G.K. Chesterton (1874-1936).

But for the moment, I merely want to stand back and say: It boggles my mind to think of the characters in the towns of Huckleberry Finn alongside my favorite British country estate characters. To make this more specific: Huck and Jim *almost* breathe the same air (albeit across an ocean) as Jane Eyre.5 If St. John Rivers had taken his missionary zeal to America, instead of India, he could have been one of the traveling preachers giving revivals along the Mississippi, and raising money for reformed pirates... That breaks my brain. One of the gifts, therefore, in Twain choosing to write about who he did is to give us a fuller perspective on the English-speaking world.

Language

In the Introduction, Mary Reichardt notes:

The crowning achievement of Huckleberry Finn is Huck’s language. Unlike the conventional third-person narrator of Tom Sawyer, Huck’s vernacular, full of homey idiom and appalling grammar, strikes the reader as fresh, vivid and charming (xiv).

Here’s a passage from chapter 9, which bolsters Reichardt’s observation:

Directly it begun to rain, and it rained like all fury, too, and I never see the wind blow so. It was one of these regular summer storms. It would get so dark that it looked all blue-black outside, and lovely; and the rain would thrash along by so thick that the trees off a little ways looked dim and spider-webby; and here would come a blast of wind that would bend the trees down and turn up the pale underside of the leaves; and then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; and next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest —fst! it was as bright as glory and you’d have a little glimpse of tree-tops a-plunging about, away off yonder in the storm, hundreds of yards further than you could see before; dark as sin again in a second, and now you’d hear the thunder let go with an awful crash and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling down the sky towards the under side of the world, like rolling empty barrels down stairs, where it’s long stairs and they bounce a good deal, you know (59).

Beautiful poetry. Excellent imagery. Atrociously fitting grammar. And a superbly timed comedic ending, you know, to undercut the poetry. Twain is true to his character.

For a last thought on the beauty in rough language, here’s a passage from the Irish author Walter Macken’s short story God Made Sunday (RR 23):

I [Colmain] am aware that people like myself are not supposed to know beauty. I don’t mean beauty of nature, but the beauty of living. They are both bound together. People don’t think of this when they come to see a countryman living in his own surroundings…They say, Well he lives in the middle of it, how then can he see it? They know that he has not had a chance to educate himself fully, being so far from all schools and universities except the prime school that teaches him to read and write and add up his simple sums. I have heard educated people when I was present pointing out to one another the beauty of a sunset, or a tracery of a cloud, or a rainbow made by the moon in showery evening weather, or a boat on a summer sea. I have been there and they speak as if I was not present. This is a mistake.

Life is a real book, you see. Once I took a man fishing. He was a professor from one of the big places. He talked philosophy to me. He had spent many years learning what he knew. He knew a lot. Yet, I could understand him. Does this seem strange? Many of the people around me could understand him. Does this surprise you? It didn’t surprise him. He said, You must not wonder at your own understanding, because you live the books which people like me write. These books just put into printed words the life of men, their reason and their understanding. All men are basically the same no matter what colour they are and yet they are all different. I’m just trying honestly to tell you about myself.

I knew beauty. I saw the purple on the hills in the evening time, and stopped to stare at it. I recognized a coloured sky when the clouds are low on the horizon and the heavens are really a vault pitted with uncountable stars. I knew the feeling of eternity the day I really realized that I was fishing on water that was attached to a round planet, twirling and spinning, that my body was tied to the earth by a certain law, and that if I could fall from the earth, I would be falling and falling in unending space for ever and for ever. So I knew eternity and I could recognize it.

I knew creation because I lived by it. The beauty of a newborn thing. A blade of green grass after the winter frosts. The first little leaf of a wild woodbine, the blossoms on the blackthorn, the oatfield with its layer of green, the first push of the potato leaf, all these I recognized with satisfaction, but because they meant food and shelter and a harvest in the end doesn’t mean that I didn’t see the beauty of them because they would prove useful.

(43-44).

Colmain is not American. But Mark Twain (and, later, Wendell Berry) both show me an America peopled with similar men.

Childlike Innocence

Huck Finn strikes me as good, though flawed, and young (about thirteen or fourteen according to chapter 17).

The mirror reflects things which humble and exalt.

From chapter 2, I come away with a few black-and-white assessments of children’s views, will they hold throughout the narrative?

• Children love justice

  • “They talked it over, and they was going to rule me out, because they said every boy must have a family or somebody to kill, or else it wouldn’t be fair and square for the others. Well, nobody could think of anything to do—everybody was stumped, and set still. I was most ready to cry; but all at once I thought of a way, and so I offered them Miss Watson—they could kill her. Everybody said: ‘Oh, she’ll do, she’ll do’” (12-13).

• Children are very precise with words

  • Robbers vs. Burglars:
    'Now,’ says Ben Rogers, ‘what’s the line of business of this Gang?’
    'Nothing only robbery and murder,’ Tom said.

    ‘But who are we going to rob? houses—or cattle—or—’

    ‘Stuff! stealing cattle and such things ain’t robbery, it’s burglary,’ says Tom Sawyer. ‘We ain’t burglars. That ain’t no sort of style. We are highwayman. We stop stages and carriages on the road, with masks on, and kill the people and take their watches and money’ (13).

• Children are traditionalists:

  • ‘Ransomed? What’s that?’

    ‘I don’t know. But that’s what they do. I’ve seen it in books; and so of course that’s what we’ve got to do.’

    ‘But how can we do it if we don’t know what it is?’

    ‘Why blame it all, we’ve got to do it. Don’t I tell you it’s in the books? Do you want to go to doing it different from what’s in the books, and get things all muddled up?’ (13).

Morals & Ethics

The last thing I’ll draw out from this week’s reading, is how Twain lays the groundwork for deeply conflicted moral and ethical problems, Huck Finn is literally and figuratively trying to navigate the world correctly. Trying to find and follow Natural Law, even when societal law is cloaking it.

In his heavy-handed satire of the pre-Civil War South, Twain’s overall point seems clear: a slaveholding society is, by its very nature, deeply corrupt, resulting in manifold layers of greed, deception, and hypocrisy. It is a system of lies built on lies and the elaborate contortions used to cover them up (Reichardt, xv).

Here’s an excellent passage in which Huck’s environment and situation (both physically and morally) present a confusing landscape to navigate:

Well, I can tell you it made me all over trembly and feverish, too, to hear [Jim], because I begun to get it through my head that he was most free—and who was to blame for it? Why, me. I couldn’t get that out of my conscience, no how nor no way. It got to troubling me so I couldn’t rest; I couldn’t stay still in one place. It hadn’t ever come home to me before, what this thing was that I was doing. But now it did; and it staid with me, and scorched me more and more. I tried to make out to myself that I warn’t to blame, because I didn’t run Jim off from his rightful owner; but it warn’t no use, conscience up and says, every time, ‘But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody.’ That was so—I couldn’t get around that, noway. That was where it pinched. Conscience says to me, ‘What had poor Miss Watson done to you, that you could see her [slave] go off right under your eyes and never say one single word? What did that poor old woman do to you, that you could treat her so mean? Why, she tried to learn you your book, she tried to learn you your manners, she tried to be good to you every way she knowed how. That’s what she done.’” (102)

Huck has a generous heart. He didn’t like Miss Watson, and we get the impression that her “kindness” to him was of that stiff, self-righteously charitable kind which has very little kindness in it. But he is kind to her in his memories, and, like the best of childlike hearts, believes the best in her actions.

But let’s return to Huck’s tricky navigation:

He would steal his children—children that belonged to a man I didn’t even know; a man that hadn’t ever done me no harm.

I was sorry to hear Jim say that, it was so much a lowering of him. (103)

What a tangled web we weave.

Then, after Huck lies to save Jim, he says:

I knowed very well I had done wrong, and I see it warn’t no use for me to try to learn to do right; a body that don’t get started right when he’s little, ain’t got no show—when pinch comes there ain’t nothing to back him up and keep him to his work, and so he gets beat. Then I thought a minute, and says to myself, hold on,—s’pose you’d a done right and give Jim up; would you felt better than what you do now? No, says I, I’d feel bad—I’d feel just the same way I do now. Well, then, says I, what’s the use you learning to do right, when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same? I was stuck. I couldn’t answer that. So I reckoned I wouldn’t bother no more about it, but after this always do whichever come handiest at the time (106).

In Lewis’ Space Trilogy, when comparing the experience of the N.I.C.E. vs. St. Anne’s on-the-Hill, we said that: sin is sweet-ish at first, bitter at the end; and virtue is bitter-ish at first, and sweet at the end.

I’m trying to decide if that quip is accurate in this ethically twisted situation as well.

You Can’t Get There From Here

To close, I’d like to quote a story I heard about an American traveling in Ireland:

“Sir,” says an American, “How do we get to County ———?”

Irishman thinks for a moment, then says, “Sorry, lad, you can’t get there from here.”

As we close this 16th chapter, Twain, too, was evidently at a loss as to where to go from here:

With his newfound interest in Huck, Twain composed the first sixteen chapters of what would become Huckleberry Finn in 1876. But he put the manuscript down at the point where, as Huck and Jim float down the Mississippi, they miss the crucial confluence of rivers at Cairo, Illinois, in a dense fog and the raft is smashed by a steamboat. The story is now confusing—while attempting to free Jim from slavery, the two are actually headed deeper into slaveholding territory—and Twain may not have known how to proceed. He set the manuscript aside and turned to new projects that intrigued him more and were more immediately lucrative. When he returned to the work in the winter of 1879-1880, he penned several hundred more pages, most likely through what is now chapter 21. (Reichardt, xvi)

Therefore, fellow friends floating deeper into America, when we meet next week, we will discuss the next section which Twain wrote, chapters 17-21, and we shall be asking, alongside Twain: How do we get there (to the end, and what is the end goal?) from here?6

What We’re Reading Now/Next:

October

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

November

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

December

Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton

AND

A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

We have turned on paid subscriptions which will allow you to support the work we are doing here as well as receive Read Along Guide PDFs each month and voice recordings of the Read Along Guides.

If you would like to make a small contribution to the work we’re doing here at Reading Revisited, we invite you to do so with the Buy (Us) a Coffee button below. We so appreciate your support!

Buy (Us) a Coffee

Reading Revisited 24-25 List

Previous Lists

*As always, some of the links are affiliate links. If you don’t have the books yet and are planning to buy them, we appreciate you using the links. The few cents earned with each purchase you make after clicking links (at no extra cost to you) goes toward the time and effort it takes to keep Reading Revisited running, and we appreciate it!

Welcome to Reading Revisited, a place for friends to enjoy some good old-fashioned book chat while revisiting the truth, beauty, and goodness we’ve found in our favorite books.

Subscribe now

Welcome friends, to our first novel of the year!

We wanted to begin our 2025-2026 reading year with an all-time favorite, and nothing seemed more fitting than the one and only, Mark Twain.

Despite being mostly Anglophiles around here, we can’t help that we are, in fact, American. Therefore, our American book pick for this year is: The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.

Some of our previous American books include:

• Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather (RR 2025)

• East of Eden by John Steinbeck (RR 2024)

• To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee (RR 2023)

• True Grit by Charles Portis (RR 2022)

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald (RR 2021)

To access the full book lists from previous years go here!

Tentative Schedule

We’ve divided the reading to align with the chunks Twain wrote it in. (He wrote the first 16 chapters in 1876, then returned in the winter of 1879-1880 to write through ~chapter 21, and did not return to complete the manuscript until 1883 (see Introduction, pg. xvi).) Therefore, our reading breaks follow his writing breaks:

Friday, September 12th: Introduction and Schedule
Monday, September 15th: ep. ##: Intro to Huck Finn
Wednesday, September 17th: Read Along Guide 1 (chapters 1-16)
Wednesday, September 24th: Read Along Guide 2 (chapters 17-21)
Wednesday, October 1st: Read Along Guide 3 (chapters 22-31)
Wednesday, October 8th: Read Along Guide 4 (chapters 32-43)
Thursday, October 23rd: Huck Finn Virtual Book Club
Monday, November 3rd: ep. ##: Revisiting The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Why you should read Huck Finn:

Lastly, to get us excited here are a few friends from Book Drop Day:

Nadya Williams from Cultural Christians in the Early Church:

Cultural Christians in the Early Church

Helping Christians think about the Roman Empire daily--all for the glory of God

By Nadya Williams

Recently, I re-read The Odyssey yet again. In fact, now that I'm thinking about it, I'm not sure a year has gone by in my adult life when I haven't re-read it. Call it an occupational hazard. But also, it's a really good epic, although I have always found the Iliad superior--as Daniel Mendelsohn notes in his new translation of The Odyssey, people are either Iliad people or Odyssey people (this is a nice personality profiling option to consider, by the way, if you need an alternative to stuff like the Enneagram). Anyway, I suspect Mark Twain was an Odyssey person. At any rate, his Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is basically the Odyssey, except this epic is set in the American South and has an adventurous boy from a troubled family background as Odysseus. And just like the original Odyssey, the plot involves sailing along not-quite-clearly-charted waters and encountering danger after danger and hoping for rescue to come each time at the last possible moment. There is a reason the original Odyssey endured, and we see it clearly in action in Mark Twain's epic, so glorious in its own right! Secretly, we're all Odysseus or Huck Finn, both longing for great adventures, and realizing (especially mid-dangerous adventure) that what we most want is to come home.

Karen Swallow Prior from The Priory:

The Priory

Prayers of Attention

By Karen Swallow Prior

I revisited The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a few years ago when I was writing about the virtues in literature for my book, On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life in Great Books.

Huckleberry Finn was a perfect case study for an examination of the virtue of courage. Huck displays moral courage in deciding to take tremendous personal risk to help an enslaved person find freedom. But that enslaved person, Jim, shows even more courage when he risks his freedom and even his life to help Huck’s foolish friend Tom.

But good books are so much more than whatever moral lessons they might impart. Huckleberry Finn earns its place as a classic work of American literature on several fronts.

It is a true American adventure, taking place in great part in and along the Mississippi River, offering a vibrant picture of American life during a time marked by both hope and trouble. The story challenges one of America’s most besetting sins—not only slavery itself but also a distorted social conscience (to which we are all susceptible) used to rationalize and even Christianize some of the many ways we de-humanize others. Yet, in true form, Twain tackles such heavy topics with characteristic humor, telling the truth but telling slant, as Emily Dickinson would say. Sometimes humor is the best way to confront hard truths about human nature.

Elise Boratenski from The Commonplace Catholic(and our Virtual Book Club):

The Commonplace Catholic

A newsletter exploring the way literature relates to faith, marriage, motherhood, and...well...life one commonplace quote at a time

By Elise Boratenski

In a novel narrated by a teenage boy, it is singularly appropriate that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn opens with Twain’s infamous notice that: “Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.” As the teenagers to whom I taught this novel recognized, such a notice amounts to a dare, on Twain’s part, to do the opposite. Indeed, any reader of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn must do so, for Twain’s rollicking satire of antebellum Southern society is also a deeply moral novel. At its heart is the conflict raging within the soul of young Huck Finn; a conflict between the perverted morality of an unjust society and the universal moral law that speaks (however imperfectly) through Huck’s developing conscience. As a Christian, it can be all too easy to relate to the struggle between how my conscience (formed by faith) defines right and wrong, and how the culture in which I live defines right and wrong. Yet, lest I become too self-satisfied and self-righteous because of the moral direction my faith provides, Huck Finn’s astonishing declaration towards the end of the novel stops me cold: “Aright then, I’ll go to hell.” Huck decides to “go to hell” because he feels compelled by conscience to help his friend Jim, a runaway slave, escape. His assertion is a sobering reminder that faith too, can be misused and abused in such a way that it no longer conforms to the moral law God has written on every human heart.

As anyone with a passing knowledge of American literary history knows, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has, since its publication, attracted controversy and cries for censorship. In addition to concerns surrounding its portrayal of race (which has, over the course of time, been criticized by individuals on both ends of the political spectrum), the novel horrified many initial readers for being “vulgar” and “coarse.” And indeed, the novel is replete with earthy humor and characters who are not quite “respectable,” to say the least. How such humor can coexist with the seriousness of Twain’s moral concerns is perfectly explained by another author we will be reading this year, G.K. Chesterton: “When once you have got hold of a vulgar joke, you may be certain that you have got hold of a subtle and spiritual idea. The men who made the joke saw something deep which they could not express except by something silly and emphatic. They saw something delicate which they could only express by something indelicate.”

What We’re Reading Now/Next:

October

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (Book Drop Day Post)

November

Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte (Book Drop Day Post)

December

A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver (Book Drop Day Post)

and…

Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton (Book Drop Day Post)

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

We have turned on paid subscriptions which will allow you to support the work we are doing here as well as receive Read Along Guide PDFs each month and voice recordings of the Read Along Guides.

Subscribe now

If you would like to make a small contribution to the work we’re doing here at Reading Revisited, we invite you to do so with the Buy (Us) a Coffee button below. We so appreciate your support!

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Reading Revisited 24-25 List

Previous Lists

*As always, some of the links are affiliate links. If you don’t have the books yet and are planning to buy them, we appreciate you using the links. The few cents earned with each purchase you make after clicking links (at no extra cost to you) goes toward the time and effort it takes to keep Reading Revisited running, and we appreciate it!

I am so excited to introduce you to our September Book About Books for this year. This is the start to our Book List for the 2025-2026 year1 and what a great way to kick off a year full of reading literature together.

Each year we start the new reading year off with a book that inspires us to read more and better. I find this helpful not only as inspiration, but also to provide us with shared language and ways of thinking and talking about the rest of the books we read as well.

This year our September Book is Why Literature Still Matters by ! This little gem of a book fits so well with our vision of the reading life and this book club specifically.

Here is a little bit of what I wrote about this book in our Book Drop Day Post2…

Do you ever know reading matters yet still have trouble when someone asks you why you do it? Do you ever feel guilty for the amount of time you spend reading? Do you ever want to express how books have changed you, but can’t quite put words to it?

Enter Why Literature Still Matters! Clocking in at only 77 pages this little book packs a punch. Baxter does exactly what the title says he will do. By the end of the book you will know and believe why literature still matters. This slim volume is full of references to books that feel way above my pay grade as a reader, and yet, the book is so accessible. He describes feelings and thoughts that I have had while reading or experiencing beauty that I recognize, but struggle to put words to. I think you are all going to enjoy this one immensely.

Below you will find resources from Reading Revisited (including an introductory podcast episode with Dr. Baxter himself!), Jason Baxter’s Substack, and some other podcasts to listen to if you want to hear more! I also linked to a few of his other books in case this one leaves you wanting more. I hope these links help to aid you in your enjoyment of this month’s book!

A Few Things to Note

• Make sure you buy the 2nd edition. They had an issue with the publication for the 1st edition and it is very hard to read. So unless your eye-sight is better than mine, grab that second printing.

• The audible version is now available and is read by Jason Baxter himself, which is always a treat. Hearing the author’s specific inflection while reading the book can be such a helpful interpretive key and a delightful experience. This is also a book that I can see you wanting to listen to on repeat over the years of your reading life!

Resources from Reading Revisited

Resources from Jason Baxter

’s Substack is a lovely place to get more of his writing! He also wrote these “Augmented Footnotes” for a few of the chapters which include beautiful pictures and other hyperlinked resources! Enjoy!

Augmented Footnotes:

• Apocalypse of the Imagination: How to Become a Human Emoji (Chapter 1)

• How to Die in Sardinia (Chapter 2a)

• How to Die is Sardinia (Chapter 2b)

• Down the Rabbit Hole (Chapter 3)

Other Podcasts

Literary Life Podcast: Why Literature Still Matters

New Mason Jar: Why Literature Still Matters

Literary Life Podcast: Catching Up With Jason Baxter

Other Books by Jason Baxter

That is all I have for now. If you find other resources around the internet please pop into the comments section and share with us! Or you can head over to our Slack Group and chat with other book club members there.

Enjoy your reading!

What We’re Reading Next:

October

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

November

Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë

December

Ballad of the White Horse by G.K. Chesterton

AND

A Poetry Handbook by Mary Oliver

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

We have turned on paid subscriptions which will allow you to support the work we are doing here as well as receive Read Along Guide PDFs each month and voice recordings of the Read Along Guides.

Subscribe now

If you would like to make a small contribution to the work we’re doing here at Reading Revisited, we invite you to do so with the Buy (Us) a Coffee button below. We so appreciate your support!

Buy (Us) a Coffee

Reading Revisited 24-25 List

Previous Lists

*As always, some of the links are affiliate links. If you don’t have the books yet and are planning to buy them, we appreciate you using the links. The few cents earned with each purchase you make after clicking links (at no extra cost to you) goes toward the time and effort it takes to keep Reading Revisited running, and we appreciate it!

I hope you are all enjoying Austen Month as much as I am. We have such a privilege to have leading us through this book. She is a true Austen lover AND a Literature teacher. What a gift!

I come to you today to remind you that if you are a paid subscriber (or you’d like to be) you have access to the Full Read Along Guide PDF (so you can print it or read it off the internet) and all of the Audio Recordings (read by Elise herself). We hope this is a helpful way to keep up with everything we are doing at Reading Revisited.

I am especially excited to print this PDF out and put it next to my copy of Northanger Abbey as we start this last month of summer. We include pages to take notes so that it can be a helpful resource to take to your book club meetings as well. I hope you all come read with us!

If you are already a Paid Subscriber, then thank you so much! You are helping us to keep all of the Book Clubs running! We love doing this, but it does take time and we appreciate the monetary support to make it happen. If you are not a Paid Subscriber then we still thank you for being here and supporting us in other ways. We are so thankful for all of our subscribers! If you are thinking about becoming a Paid Subscriber then maybe now is a great time!

Thanks again for your support and have a happy rest of your summer!

(Here are some pictures so you can see what you’re getting…the full download is right below the Pay Wall)

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I had been thinking about 1,001 Nights and wondering what would happen if Scheherazade was sick or dizzy one night and fell asleep right in front of the villain king. Or what would happen if she ran out of stories, her mind went blank, and she knew if she didn’t keep talking, he would kill her. Would she start recounting her memories?

….

Would the memories curve into themselves into a perfect round river? A red river? A heart pumping blood in and out in perfect circulation? What if it goes on forever, the telling and retelling? When did all these words begin? Are they all just distant memories we are passing to each other?

And what if, like a rug, they are flawed? Memories are just stories we tell ourselves, after all. What if we are telling ourselves lies? (349)

Hello Readers,

I hope you enjoyed the end of the story this week. Last week we ended with the tornado and this week we jumped right back into the story with the rest of Daniel’s family escape from Iran, their time in Dubai, and Italy. Back in Oklahoma we also get to meet his dad in the present day (not just in the memories). And we finally see someone stand up to Ray!

Again, I am not going to try to give a full summary or cover everything we have read. That would be borderline impossible and a much longer post than you have time to read. I am going to choose a few “Things I Couldn’t Help But Notice” and elaborate from there. This story is woven together so expertly that I couldn’t possibly explain it all, nor do I want to. I hope that you have noticed things I haven’t and that those insights can enliven our Book Club discussions.

Now onto the end of the book….

Story Structure

As we come to the end of the book I am wondering if the book has a chiastic structure. I noticed that the direct middle of the book is the part where Daniel says poop is the truest thing about a person. But the event at the middle is his mother’s conversion. Because the story starts where it begins (with the bull), it made me think that you could chart out a chiastic structure. He also doesn’t start telling poop stories until midway through the first half and then he stops telling poop stories midway through the second part. If anyone else wants to chart out more specifics, I would be very interested to see what other connections can be made!

Or maybe this is just pointing to the more cyclical storytelling of the Eastern tradition.

“O wise and merciful Mrs. Miller, every story is nestled somehwere within another story.” (258)

The Hole in the Rug

I don’t even remember the moment my dad left us…It’s the not-remembering that makes it one giant hole in the middle of a rug. Like somebody didn’t even care to address it…When you ask, they never quite tell you. (242)

In this section we are introduced to the theme of the Persian rug. It has been alluded to before, but Daniel finally starts parsing it out here. I think this is significant for a number of reasons. We have the way his memories are weaved together in the stories he tells. We also have the fact that there are so many myths and legends weaved into his story and the magic carpet is one of the very well known parts of Persian mythology even to us westerners. And finally we have “The Persian Flaw.” Daniel explains that this is something all rug makers put into their rug to remind them that only God is perfect.

The truth is, in the real world there’s no such thing as a Persian Flaw, because that assumes you could have a thing that has only one thing wrong with it….The truth is that everything has a hundred thousand flaws. But it’s pretty to think that we can make perfect things and scratch them a little to keep from being gods. It’s comforting, the way in myths the heroes are all one personality flaw from perfection. (257)

The way that Daniel connects the Persian Flaw not only to rugs and people, but also to memory is so interesting to me. The hole in himself is the fact that he is missing memories. Or that his memories don’t match other people’s. While him and his sister are literally weaving mini Persian rugs (“mug rugs”) they are having conversations about their memories and specifically how hurtful it can be when their memories differ.

Myth Becomes Fact

Throughout this whole book we have been hearing/reading Daniel’s actual memories weaved together with his memories of myths and legends that were told to him. It’s a beautiful way to tell a story. But in this section it seems like we get much less of the memories and more of the real life.

Once they flee Iran and get to Dubai they run into an actual prince. It feels like the myths and legends are all of the sudden walking into their real life. At first this seemed simply to be a fun twist on the story telling, but as I read more I was convinced that there was something more going on. The Prince, instead of being purely evil (and trying to kill them) or purely good (and saving them with no ulterior motives) is actually a flawed human. He is on drugs and is willing to help them if they give him what he wants (which is unfortunately to marry the young girl). It seems like a random story in the story, but I think not.

I think this might be foreshadowing for Daniel’s dad coming to Oklahoma. Up until the moment we meet his dad in “real time” (though that is complicated because what we experience as real time is Daniel’s twelve year old self, when in reality the author is very far removed from that time), we think of his dad in almost a mythic way. I think Daniel does too. When he walks off the plane we immediately experience with Daniel how much smaller he is than he remembers. He is suddenly a flawed human being, not some mythic prince. He is real. He has the one hundred thousand flaws that human beings have.

Naming and Renaming

Something new that I noticed in this section was that a lot of our main characters are not specifically named until later in the story. The fact that these characters don’t have names doesn’t seem significant because Daniel refers to them as his sister, his mom, and his dad. But as soon as each character gets a name, I all of the sudden realized I hadn’t know their name that whole time. The name then almost works its way backwards through the story.

The first time I noticed this was when his mom gets named. It is right after she converts to Christianity. After that her name, Sima, is used regularly in the book. Then Dina, his sister, is first named after she stands up to Ray. These are both brave actions that change the course of the family’s life. I don’t remember when Daniel’s dad first gets a name, so I am not sure if it is significant.

Renaming is also always significant and Daniel is the only one who gets renamed (I think). This happens when they are in the process of fleeing and he is traumatized. If his mom and sister get named only after their brave actions, what does it mean that Daniel gets renamed in a weak moment? In the Bible people usually get renamed for what they are called to do. Daniel is named after Daniel in the Bible. Is he being called to bravery and courage like Daniel in the Lion’s Den?

Mr. Sheep Sheep Redeemed

We cannot leave this book without talking about Mr. Sheep Sheep one more time! He comes back to Daniel. Almost like he is resurrected from the dead. All of the imagery of the good shepherd and the lost sheep are so referential to the gospels. I love that Mr. Sheep Sheep comes back but he is injured. He has the scars.

Then we have the terribly awkward sermon that the pastor preaches directly to Daniel’s dad. Watching the evangelical spirit come into contact with Persian hospitality is packed with meaning I’m not ready to draw out yet. What I am thinking about is that he is preaching on the parable of the lost sheep, which seems to bring Mr. Sheep Sheep out of the land of myth and into the land of Christianity. All of which seems appropriate to the story. Expertly done!

The Blood of the Bull and the Blood of the Cross

The fact that the book begins and ends with the story of his grandpa and the bull not only alerted me to the possibility of a chiasm, but noting that the conversion scene is in the middle helped me connect the story to Christianity not only in theme but in structure. As Christians we cannot help but think of Christ whenever there is an animal being sacrificed. God used the whole Old Testament story to lead us to understand the New Testament sacrifice of Christ on the cross.

It seems like Daniel is mirroring this in his story. We get the initial memory of the sacrifice of the bull, plenty of myths, legends, and histories, the conversion of Sima to Christianity, how it affects Daniel’s present life, and then the real meaning of the sacrifice of the bull. It is like Daniel is teaching us through his memories what he has come to understand about Christ.

I also noticed that we don’t get Daniel’s conversion moment, only his mom and his sister’s. But he obviously understands it much more than his dad and the other adults in the story. It makes me think that the structure of the story is pointing to the way his conversion worked out, whether fully in reality or at least in memory. I think ending the story this way is so much more satisfying than a simple scene of Daniel having a lightbulb conversion moment.

Thank you Daniel for letting us borrow your memories. I for one hope that I have been changed by them. I love stories so much and this seems like exactly what story should be!

Discussion Questions

• Is the ending to the story satisfying?

• Muse on the themes we’ve noticed

  • Fatherlessness

  • Memory

  • Story

  • The relationship between myth, legends, and history

  • Conversion

• Do you have a favorite story within the story? Or a section that sticks with you?

• Has the story changed you like Daniel hoped it would?

• Have you read 1,001 Nights? If so, how does it affect your reading of this story?

• This is a middle grade novel…What age would you let your kids (if you have them) read this book?

• How does this change the way you view your past and memories?

Everything Sad is Untrue Reading Schedule

• Monday, June 16th- ep. 60: Intro to Everything Sad is Untrue w/ Heidi White

• Wednesday, June 18th: Introduction and Schedule (you are here)

• Wednesday, June 25th: pgs. 1-119

• Wednesday, July 2nd: pgs. 119-238

• Wednesday, July 9th: pgs 238-351 (but don’t forget to read the Author’s Note at the very end)

• Monday, August 4th: ep. 67: Revisiting Everything Sad is Untrue

What We’re Reading Now/Next:

July

Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri

August

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

September

Why Literature Still Matters by Jason Baxter

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

We have turned on paid subscriptions which will allow you to support the work we are doing here as well as receive Read Along Guide PDFs each month and voice recordings of the Read Along Guides.

Subscribe now

If you would like to make a small contribution to the work we’re doing here at Reading Revisited, we invite you to do so with the Buy (Us) a Coffee button below. We so appreciate your support!

Buy (Us) a Coffee

Reading Revisited 24-25 List

Previous Lists

*As always, some of the links are affiliate links. If you don’t have the books yet and are planning to buy them, we appreciate you using the links. The few cents earned with each purchase you make after clicking links (at no extra cost to you) goes toward the time and effort it takes to keep Reading Revisited running, and we appreciate it!

You know every memory I have of all my grandparents and aunts and uncles and cousins. You’ve got them all.

You can probably count them yourself. And they’re as fuzzy to you as they are to me. You won’t clench them like I do, that’s for sure. To you, they might even be junk.

In the movies, kids get fishing trips with the grandpas, and grandmothers give them hugs.

Maybe my memories are only worth a couple peach pits to you.

But you’ve got them now. All the pieces are in place for you to understand what happened and how we ended up in Oklahoma….

….It’s not so hard to believe if you’ve got the memories I’ve got. (137)

Hello Readers,

I hope that you have had another lovely week reveling in stories and myths from the other side of the world. Last week I left the Read Along Guide asking where this story was going to go. This week it seems like this chunk of reading has at least started to answer that question.

This week we learned about Daniel’s life in Oklahoma, his grandma Ellie, his trip to England, a lot about poop, and his sister and mother’s conversion to Christianity. Now we know why they came to Oklahoma. This book is expertly crafted to lead us to this moment at the perfect time.

A Quick Note on Structure

I split this book up into 3 sections for the Read Along Guides pretty arbitrarily. However, I have been happy with how it has turned out. Last week’s reading ended with Daniel killing the owl by accident (which seemed appropriate when the whole book starts with him feeling responsible for killing the bull). This week the section ended with the tornado and the explanation for the title of the story, which I’ll get to in a moment.

However as I was preparing this reading guide I discovered the direct middle of the book. At first I thought it was right after Daniel’s sister almost loses her finger and then sees an angel. But that is actually 4 pages or so before the exact middle. I liked that as the middle because it does feel like it is where the whole story shifts, however I decided to turn a few pages and see what the actual middle was. Here is what I found….

If you wanna know how rich somebody is, just look at what they eat and how they poop. Everybody does both… (174)

If you think that is too random, then hear me out.

Potty Humor

So what is with all of the poop (and pee) stories? Are these totally random because Daniel is young and young boys like to talk about poop? Maybe. Partly. But I don’t think that is a completely true or satisfying answer.

The poop (and pee) stories all start being told around the same time as the conversion story is taking place. This at first seems to be a random tangent or even a needed distraction before getting to some of the harder parts of the story to tell, which I think is interesting in its own way.

But, more than that I think there is a deep connection that Daniel even alludes to. Poop and faith are so personal. If you want to know about someone, look at what they eat and how they poop, Daniel tells us. Faith and poop start inside. They both come from what we take in. But they will both eventually come out. You can’t hide either one.

They are both “unclean” in different ways in the different places. Daniel thinks the way American’s poop is gross and weird. The Americans think that not sitting on a toilet is gross and weird. Similarly in Iran being a Christian is “unclean” and in America being from the Middle East is “unclean.”

Both of these similarities are so relevant to the questions that everyone wants to ask…Why did Sima become a Christian? Why didn’t she just keep it a secret?

Important Questions to Ask

Which brings me to the next thing I’d like to point out from this section. All of the adults ask the questions above. And Daniel answers those questions with very firm answers. She became a Christian because it is true. She met Jesus. What else was she supposed to do? How can you keep something like that a secret? She wanted everyone to have what she had! Jesus is more important than any amount of money, job, or importance. She couldn’t stay in Iran because she had to protect her children. These answers are all obvious to Daniel.

However, Daniel asks another question. Why didn’t his dad come with them? That is the question that haunts him and that is the question he doesn’t seem to have the answer to. I think contrasting these questions is an important aspect to the story that we shouldn’t pass over.

Trinitarian Story Structures

Another Thing I Couldn’t Help But Notice (a la , A Swim in the Pond in the Rain) was all of the times the stories were told in groups of threes. I noticed it in this section a lot, but then when I started to think about it I realized it has been happening through the whole book. There are also other groups of three as well. I’m going to list some that I noticed, but I would love you to add any you find in the comments…

• Pee in the suitcase store, sister’s finger, conversion

• poop like chicken, poop like sloppy joe, actual poop emergency

• Daniel’s bloody nose, threats, caught (his mom’s story of returning to Iran)

• three men who threatened to beat Sima

• three miracles to escape Iran (papers, police, plane)

• three animals Daniel feels responsible for killing (Bull, owl, sheep sheep)

• three steps to nailing down a shingle (plus holding on for dear life)

(A True Story)

I loved the meditation on telling true stories versus telling made up stories that Daniel has in this section. He alludes to this problem in the first section as well by adding details to stories to make them a better or fuller story. So this isn’t the first time he talks about it. But, I first started thinking about it when he mentions that he doesn’t know what happened to his mom when she was “arrested.” He says, “Scheherazade never had this problem.”

First, Scheherazade was making the stories up. She could tell whatever story she wanted. We don’t get that luxury in our real life stories. We have to use the facts that we know. And when we get to the end of that information it is hard to know what to do. We see Daniel struggle with that through the whole story. He wants to tell the true story. Sometimes some made up facts help him get there. Sometimes he isn’t sure.

The other reason telling real life stories is complicated is because the maker of the stories actually knows the people involved. The truth can be painful. And in this book we have a young narrator who might not be ready to process it yet. Daniel hits this point when his mom is captured. “You don’t know what you don’t know,” he says. I think this instance illustrates both points.

This thought process makes me think that Daniel (the kid in the book) is using this whole book to help himself process and make sense of his life. Everything sad really will come untrue if he can tell his way out of the story. Or something like that.

Mr. Sheep Sheep

The episode with Mr. Sheep Sheep is structurally amazing! Daniel (the author) had me thinking all the right thoughts in all the right places. So this section is just going to be an ode to a well told story.

By the end of the story we know that Mr. Sheep Sheep is actually Daniel and the Shepherd is actually his dad. A good shepherd never leaves his sheep. His sheep can’t survive without him. “How could a shepherd leave a sheep to die in the airport parking lot?” turns into “Why didn’t my dad come with us?”.

Also we have the fact that they can’t bring Mr. Sheep Sheep because the airport will think they are smuggling drugs also connects the whole story to his dad. His dad had already smuggled drugs to England in a fancy suitcase. And then at the end of the story he says that Mr. Sheep Sheep is the third animal he has killed.

This last fact has me thinking that the memories might not be as clear as he thinks. None of the three animals died directly because of him. Which maybe makes it even harder to process. I love what Nayeri (the author) is doing with these stories.

The Title Explained

We would be remiss to leave this section of the book without at least touching on the title of the story. Right before the tornado comes Ray finds Daniel reading Lord of the Rings, more specifically The Return of the King, which is where the title gets its name. Daniel is actually reading that very scene…

One night really late- so late it was early- I was reading the part where Sam the hobbit sees Gandalf come back and it’s like seeing his grandpa return from the land of death and memories. And his grandpa laughed, and it says it sounded like “water in a parched land.” I could imagine exactly what the feeling must have been like, but not what it was. Does that make sense?

And Sam thinks maybe all the sad parts of the adventure will come untrue, now that this one has. And the beautiful part is that they do. (232)

First, I just love this scene in Lord of the Rings and then I love Daniel’s connection to it, especially the fact that he brings up his grandpa who he dearly misses. Then by the end of the chapter he is praying to a God who listens and speaks to see his grandpa again. And he says God heard him. How beautiful to think about the resurrection of the dead from the eyes of young Daniel with Gandalf in the background.

Right after reading this scene Ray comes to get Daniel to go fix the shingles on the house during the tornado. He doesn’t try to explain the book to Ray because there is too much backstory, which makes me think that scene is an objective correlative for this whole book. But Daniel does tell us the backstory. He tells us the story and shares the memories because we are his friends.

While they are fixing the roof Daniel remembers a phrase in Farsi that he is afraid he might forget…

That was when I realized I had to write down the memories and myths and the legends- and even the phrases and jokes. Or I’d lose everything. Maybe even the recipes.

But first I had to climb back down the ladder. (236)

I love that the title of the book and the reason for writing the book all happen during this tornado. And a tornado must be what it is like for a young boy to have gone through the life Daniel has gone through and how it feels to process all of those emotions. And I like that he is gifting that sympathy to us as readers by sharing his stories. We are now all busy with him “eating the tornado.”

Quotes Before We Go

Every side of an explosion looks different. If you’re looking at a bull collapsing on the ground and I’m beside you looking at it, we’re seeing two bulls die, two rivers of blood, two everything. That’s why there is an infinite labyrinth of stories, even in just one family. (120)

Does writing poetry make you brave? It is a good question to ask. I think making anything is a brave thing to do. Not like fighting brave, obviously. But a kind that looks at a horrible situation and doesn’t crumble. (122)

It’s beautiful.

How badly we all want love.

It’s tragic.

How bad we are at searching for it. (168)

Miracles are absurd by definition.

If they weren’t, they’d just be odd things that happened. Improbable things.

But while miracles are impossible, they aren’t coincidences. They’re knives that cut into our reality. And they’re messy and weird… (172)

I supposed if you don’t want to believe it, all you have to do is say my sister wanted to be like Ellie, or she wanted to harass my mom. Both of which are true.

Or she was dreaming.

Or the pain medication for her finger made her brain wibbly.

Miracles are easy to explain away. (172)

A Few Questions

• Now we know why they moved to Oklahoma, I think in the next section we might find out how….How will this information affect the rest of the story?

• What are your emotional reactions to the story?

• How has this story changed you so far?

• Are there aspects of the story telling that you think have a deep effect on you?

• What age would you let your kids (if you have them) read this book?

Everything Sad is Untrue Reading Schedule

• Monday, June 16th- ep. 60: Intro to Everything Sad is Untrue w/ Heidi White

• Wednesday, June 18th: Introduction and Schedule (you are here)

• Wednesday, June 25th: pgs. 1-119

• Wednesday, July 2nd: pgs. 119-238

• Wednesday, July 9th: pgs 238-351 (but don’t forget to read the Author’s Note at the very end)

• Monday, August 4th: ep. 67: Revisiting Everything Sad is Untrue

What We’re Reading Now/Next:

July

Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri

August

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

September

Why Literature Still Matters by Jason Baxter

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

We have turned on paid subscriptions which will allow you to support the work we are doing here as well as receive Read Along Guide PDFs each month and voice recordings of the Read Along Guides.

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All Persians are liars and lying is a sin.

Thats what the kids is Mrs. Miller’s class think, but I’m the only Persian they’ve ever met, so I don’t know where they got that idea.

My mom says it’s true, but only because everyone has sinned and needs God to save them. My dad says it isn’t. Persians aren’t liars. They’re poets, which is worse.

Poets don’t even know when they’re lying. They’re just trying to remember their dreams. They’re trying to remember six thousand years of history and all the versions of all the stories ever told. (1)

Welcome to our July book, Everything Sad is Untrue. I hope you have spent the past week enjoying this unique memoir of a novel. This is my second time reading it and I am enjoying it just as much, if not more, than I did the first time.

(yes, he is on Substack…how fun is that? An added joy to reading a contemporary author!) has such an enjoyable narrative voice and is expertly crafting this story for us. From the very first page (quoted above) we are hearing about so many of the themes yet to come.

Because this is such a patchwork of a narrative I am not going to attempt any summaries in these Read Along Guides. I am choosing not to summarize partly because it would be hard AND partly because I think a linear summary would take away from the story.

With that being said, the way I am planning to structure these Read Along Guides is that I will pick a few points to muse upon that I believe are important, stuck with me, or that Nayeri seems to be hammering in. Then I will list all the other themes I think we should be paying attention to and I will let you do the work in parsing those out so that we can have good discussions at our book clubs. Each week I will leave you with a few questions to ponder as we move on to the next section of the book.

A few things before we jump in…

• If you aren’t listening to the audiobook, maybe start. Nayeri reads it himself and therefore you get all of the right inflections and pronunciations, which really adds to the experience of the story.

• I think it is okay if you don’t remember who everyone is. These are memories and part of the point is reflecting on the haziness of memory.

• Remember, this is written en persona Daniel as a 12 year old boy. So keep in mind that we are following the memories of childhood from a child.

Alright, now let’s start…

Things to Note:

A Patchwork Story

It is hard for me to know where to start. Which is either because I am tired OR the story is really seeping into me. Daniel seems to have the same problem. Over and over again he starts to tell a story and then stops to tell us something else. This makes the story hard to follow in some ways (or at least hard to summarize), but in another way it makes it feel like a real memory or a real story…which it is, remember? It says so right on the cover of the book! Everything Sad is Untrue (a true story).

So let’s start with that. This book is written/told in the way that memory actually works. This makes us feel like we are actually in Mrs. Miller’s classroom listening to this presentation by little Daniel. We are Kelly J (shudder). How will we respond to this fantastical story? Will we not believe it because it is has twists and turns and is sometimes dramatic? Or will we realize that this is how our memories and family history works too and let that make us more compassionate listeners?

Culture Through Stories

I am fairly certain that I could read a whole non-fiction, informational book on Iranian culture and learn so much less than I am learning from this story. Why is that? I think it is simply because I am a human. Humans learn from stories. The point isn’t to get as much information on a topic as possible, but to live the experiences another has. This happens through a story.

This book in particular is like a love letter to stories (I’m pretty sure I am loosely quoting , so definitely thank her for that). It isn’t only one man’s stories that are teaching me and changing me, but the stories of a whole family and a whole people. We have Daniel’s stories, but also his parents’, grandparents’, and great grandparents’. Then, on top of all of that, we also have the myths and legends of his people. And, as if it couldn’t get better, we have a fictional character, Scheherazade, who is the backbone of the whole story.

I am also getting an interesting mix of Nayeri showing us some Persian hospitality through the stories along with the fact that he has said we are the evil king and he is telling us stories to save his life. I’m going to keep pondering this juxtaposition as I read the next two sections.

How Fact Relates to Fiction

I cannot help harkening back to our last book, Trust, as I read the way Nayeri is telling his stories. In that book we thought about who we could trust and how history is written and by whom. In this book it is not so much that we don’t trust Daniel, but that he is openly telling us he doesn’t have all the facts. Yet, to tell a good story he will add in the made up facts he needs. Or he will say that he has heard multiple versions of the same story.

This leads me to the question I’ve been pondering: What makes a story true? Is it that all of the facts are in line with history? Or is there something deeper we should be seeking? Can a fictional story (or an edited one) convey truth as well? Can these fictional/edited stories sometimes do a better job of conveying truth?

The theme of memory also comes back to me here. Does the way that memory can almost distort reality make it an effective vehicle for truth? Is there something in human psychology assisting us with processing reality in a more story-formed way?

Lessons/Morals to the Story

One of my favorite parts of this book is Daniel’s musings on the different lessons and morals he could take from the stories he has been told and is telling.

“Honestly not everything has a lesson…” (81)

I think this is so interesting and true to life in two ways. First, the stories we read don’t always have a clear moral of the story and that is what makes them good stories. Like Flannery O’Connor says, if you want to write an essay, write as essay (paraphrase mine). When we try to make stories have a clear moral we take away from them their truly human elements.

Which brings me to my next point: the stories we tell ourselves and the memories we have are sometimes confusing. We might think we understand the moral, but then it could change. Or we are supposed to learn different things from each memory at different times in our lives. It seems like Daniel is letting us borrow his memories so we can understand his story, but also our own.

I also noticed that a lot of the morals that Daniel extracts from each story are VERY different than what I would have thought. This could be because I am very Western in my thought, but also it could be because I am an adult and he is writing from the perspective of a child. I am going to keep meditating on this as I keep reading.

Weaving of the stories together

Sometimes the way these stories are woven together can feel disorienting. But, like I said above, sometimes our memories are disorienting. I also think that Nayeri (the author) has more intention behind which stories he puts near each other than it can seem like on the surface.

One example of this is the story about Tanner’s blood then flowing into his mom getting beat up by Ray which leads to his sister saying that she only married Ray so Daniel would have a dad. Which leads Daniel to react to his classmate saying that people only marry for love by telling the story of Aziz getting married for other reasons. It helps us get to know Daniel and the mind of a child so much better while simultaneously making connections and understanding our own memories better along the way.

How the Section Ends

I realize that I broke up this book purely by page numbers, however I have been thrilled with where the sections end. It is almost like the book was meant to be broken up into three parts. Which leads me to some thoughts I will have next week on groups of threes in this book. This section ends with Daniel accidentally killing a baby owl. The book started with him being the reason for the bull’s death, a third of the way through we have the dead baby owl…will any animal die for Daniel next week? Is this theme foreshadowing any themes or the book? I think it might be…

Themes

• Storytelling/Poetry/Lies

• Sin/Guilt

• Dreams

• Memory

• Being Foreign/What is Normal

• Languages

• Tapestry/Rugs

• Myth/Legend, Hero or History

• Fatherlessness

Questions

• Where is this story going to go?

• Why is Daniel’s family in America?

• Why isn’t his dad with them?

• Are we supposed to feel slightly disoriented with all of the stories moving around in our minds? Is that how Daniel feels too?

Everything Sad is Untrue Reading Schedule

• Monday, June 16th- ep. 60: Intro to Everything Sad is Untrue w/ Heidi White

• Wednesday, June 18th: Introduction and Schedule

• Wednesday, June 25th: pgs. 1-119 (you are here)

• Wednesday, July 2nd: pgs. 119-238

• Wednesday, July 9th: pgs 238-351 (but don’t forget to read the Author’s Note at the very end)

• Monday, August 4th: ep. 67: Revisiting Everything Sad is Untrue

What We’re Reading Now/Next:

June

Trust by Hernan Diaz

July

Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri

August

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

We have turned on paid subscriptions which will allow you to support the work we are doing here as well as receive Read Along Guide PDFs each month and voice recordings of the Read Along Guides.

If you would like to make a small contribution to the work we’re doing here at Reading Revisited, we invite you to do so with the Buy (Us) a Coffee button below. We so appreciate your support!

Buy (Us) a Coffee

Reading Revisited 24-25 List

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*As always, some of the links are affiliate links. If you don’t have the books yet and are planning to buy them, we appreciate you using the links. The few cents earned with each purchase you make after clicking links (at no extra cost to you) goes toward the time and effort it takes to keep Reading Revisited running, and we appreciate it!

We have just started another book, Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri. Earlier this week the Introduction and Reading Schedule went out, but I am popping into your inbox again to make sure that our paid subscribers get access to the printable PDF and the audio recordings for each section of the Read Along Guide. If you are a paid subscriber already, thank you so much!

If you are not a paid subscriber yet, then I invite you to join us. I love being able to print the Read Along Guide each month and keep it with my book so that I can take notes as I read. And then if I haven’t read the whole Read Along Guide before Book Club I listen to the audio recordings that day (and sometimes even on my drive to my meeting).

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Our goal with these Read Along Guides, podcasts, and paid subscriber benefits is to help you dive more deeply into each book so that all of our in person (and virtual) book clubs have a lively discussion.

(here is a preview of what you get in the PDF)

Read more

Welcome to Reading Revisited, a place for friends to enjoy some good old-fashioned book chat while revisiting the truth, beauty, and goodness we’ve found in our favorite books.

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Hello Readers!

Thanks for participating and helping to make Book Drop Day a HUGE success this past weekend! We had SO much fun announcing our next year of books and interacting with so many of our lovely readers. If you missed Book Drop Day, here is the full list of books with links to each Book Drop Day Post.

We are hoping as a result of an amazing book list (if I do say so myself), so many writers’ participation, and our readers’ enthusiasm that we will grow Reading Revisited! It is looking like we will have more Reading Revisited in-person groups around the country and an even bigger virtual book club. If you would like to start or join an in person book club please message me and I will get you set up! If you’d like to join Virtual Book Club, please do the same.

Don’t forget that we still have two more books from this year’s list and there is no reason you need to wait until September to jump on board.

Speaking of our next book, let’s jump in…

To continue our American summer we are going to kick off July by reading my favorite book from 2023, Everything Sad is Untrue (a true story) by Khosrou Daniel Nayeri. I am not sure that I can describe how excited I am to force you to read this book with me enjoy this book with you all! I think this is the book I am most excited to read together this year (though there is a lot of good competition).

Nayeri’s fictionalized memoir is beautifully written, has a compelling story, and employs such an interesting narrative device. It is a true story (like the title says), but he is writing it from the perspective of his 12 year old self telling his story to his teacher. So it is such an interesting cross of fiction and non-fiction. I am very interested in creative narrative structures right now (which also explains why we are reading Trust in June). So this is really part memoir, part fiction, part memory novel. Also, I hope we can all enjoy the Lord of the Rings reference in the title too!

Close Reads HQ did a series on this last year and it was lovely and at the end they had Daniel Nayeri on for an interview, which will make you love him and the book even more!

Heidi White (from ’ Close Reads) has generously offered us her thoughts on Everything Sad is Untrue. I have been listening to Heidi talk about Literature for years on the podcast and I am constantly amazed at how knowledgable she is about books and human nature. I really could listen to her chat about reading all day. I am so grateful that she can help us get excited for Nayeri’s novel. Here is what she has to say about this book…

Everything Sad is Untrue was in my top five favorite books of 2020–a year we all needed to be reminded of the truth of its title. A fictionalized memoir of a refugee child whose courageous mother escaped Iran with her children after a fatwa was placed on her head, this lyrical novel is a love song to storytelling, food, homeland, childhood, and the memories that make us who we are. From the saffron fields of Persia to the windswept rooftops of Tulsa, Daniel Nayeri’s self-revelatory novel illuminates how the stories we tell ourselves can become the redeeming conduit for the grace that saves us.

Everything Sad is Untrue Reading Schedule

• Monday, June 16th- ep. 60: Intro to Everything Sad is Untrue w/ Heidi White

• Wednesday, June 18th: Introduction and Schedule (you are here)

• Wednesday, June 25th: pgs. 1-119

• Wednesday, July 2nd: pgs. 119-238

• Wednesday, July 9th: pgs 238-351 (but don’t forget to read the Author’s Note at the very end)

• Monday, August 4th: ep. 67: Revisiting Everything Sad is Untrue

What We’re Reading Now/Next:

June

Trust by Hernan Diaz

July

Everything Sad is Untrue by Daniel Nayeri

August

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

We have turned on paid subscriptions which will allow you to support the work we are doing here as well as receive Read Along Guide PDFs each month and voice recordings of the Read Along Guides.

Subscribe now

If you would like to make a small contribution to the work we’re doing here at Reading Revisited, we invite you to do so with the Buy (Us) a Coffee button below. We so appreciate your support!

Buy (Us) a Coffee

Reading Revisited 24-25 List

Previous Lists

*As always, some of the links are affiliate links. If you don’t have the books yet and are planning to buy them, we appreciate you using the links. The few cents earned with each purchase you make after clicking links (at no extra cost to you) goes toward the time and effort it takes to keep Reading Revisited running, and we appreciate it!

Welcome to Reading Revisited, a place for friends to enjoy some good old-fashioned book chat while revisiting the truth, beauty, and goodness we’ve found in our favorite books.

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Futures
by Mildred Bevel

After that final short and sweet section we are done with Trust. We have been given all the pieces to the puzzle we are going to get and now are left to put them together. For this week’s final section of the book I will simply leave you with some quotes and musings on a few themes to help us all process what we have read. The amount that Diaz packs into such a short section is impressive.

If you have time before your book club I would encourage you to reread this section again. Rereading always bears fruit, but was there ever such low hanging rereading fruit as this?

This week’s section is so hard to summarize so instead of providing a linear summary I will simply state some of the things we learn about Mildred and Bevel.

• Mildred is a musical and mathematical genius.

• Vanner’s and Bevel’s portrayals of her were both incomplete.

• Mildred was the mastermind behind Bevel’s fortune and the 1929 Stock Market Crash (that caused the Great Depression…thinking about this in its historical context makes it pack a bigger punch).

• Mildred has hidden some of her mastermindness(?) by leading Bevel to think that he is actually the one making decisions. Like the call and response of music. It is inevitable.

  • This makes me wonder how much Bevel was trying to deceive the world or how much was simply self deception.

• Mildred and Harold Vanner are corresponding while she is sick.

• The house party circus acts from Vanner’s novel are a reality from Mildred’s past.

Notes and Quotes

The nature of this section of the book leads me to introduce some new themes into our discussion.

Future(s)

First, let’s talk about the title of this section: Futures. I want to bring us back to a quote in Harold Vanner’s novel about Helen’s fictional diaries.

Because she felt lost in the new tyrannical architecture of her brain, and because she no longer trusted her thoughts or her memory, she started relying on her journals, which she kept with daily rigor. She hoped her future self, the one reading the diaries, would be able to use those writings as a measure of how far into her delirium she had gone. Would she see herself on the page? She addressed herself constantly in her entries, asking herself to believe that it was, in fact, she who had written those words in the past-even if her future self refused to believe it; even if, as she read, she were unable to recognize her own handwriting. (83)

I can only respond to this with a lot of questions…Are we Helen/Mildred? Or is this a reference to Ida reading the diaries? Is money destroying us all? Is the reason that Vanner made her mind break is because the mind and body are so interconnected and both can be broken by money? Or is it just guilt?

The ticker fell behind me, and for a few minutes I owned the future. (387)

I can’t help but think that Mildred, in these moments, was living in time that didn’t belong to her and that now she is “paying it back.”

The other aspect of the title of this book to note is that futures are also a type of investment (as are Bonds for that matter). And then all through this section Mildred is musing on the future of music and one’s ability to predict it.

Music

Speaking of music…

This music creates an unavoidable future for itself. It has no free will. There’s only fulfilment. It’s fatal music. (366)

In her diary Mildred is constantly musing on the church bells. When later in the section she mentions that she never heard the stock exchange bell it became a powerful image.

This description of the weaving of the themes of money and music is intriguing…

My 1929 plan was much like the bell motif.

Short selling is folding back time. The past making itself present in the future.

Like a retrograde or a palindrome.

D F# E A / A E F# D

A song played in reverse.

…

Every loss becomes a gain, every increase a drop. (398)

Mutation/Disease

Mildred talks a lot about the frailty of her body in her last sickness. She even goes so far as to say that the cancer is a punishment for what she did in the 1929 Stock Market Crash.

All of life’s peculiarities result from a long series of mutations. I wonder what the cells mutating within my body would turn me into, if they didn’t kill me first. (367)

Another aspect of this that gets brought up is when Mildred is remembering her “acts” from childhood. She implies that people felt the need to bring her down because she was a child.

For some reason, they felt they had to destroy me. Their faces disfigured as they squinted + grinned with the impossible effort of thinking up problems larger than their minds. They kept going until I was defeated by their absurdities. (374)

Death

This exchange between Mildred and Bevel makes me ask a lot of questions.

“I’ve been doing this for too long. Done.”

…

“But you live for this,” he said at last. “You…”

He regretted his words.

“Exactly. And now it’s over.” (380)

Is the money killing her or was it what she was living for and setting it aside is killing her? Did it have to kill her or is it because a woman “can’t survive” in that world? I like that Diaz brings up the questions, but doesn’t answer them. Instead he leaves us pondering and even asking more questions back.

Masks/Hiding

I am so glad that I started tracking this theme at the beginning because it really panned out in this last section. To everyone’s surprise it was actually a woman behind it all.

Where there’s a ventriloquist, there’s a dummy. The latter word only sounds worse than the former. He disliked being told what to do. I disliked being pushed further into the shadows + speaking only through him. (382)

I like the way that Diaz has flipped this theme on its head. We think of the the ventriloquist as the one being in power, but Mildred doesn’t enjoy that role.

Women/Men

I have been waiting to bring up Taylor Swift’s song, The Man, for weeks while we’ve been reading. I think it is finally time. Go take a listen!

But on a more serious note I thought it was so interesting that being “in control” actual makes Bevel feel like less of a man.

He felt unmanned, he once said. (386)

When Mildred wants her hair cut, it is not just a little trim she is looking for. Her nurse won’t do it so she starts to do it for herself. The nurse ends up cutting it as short as she wants it and Andrew looks angry when he sees it. At first I wasn’t sure what to do with this scene, but then I realized: She looks like a man.

Memory

Here I will leave you with a few beautiful quotes about memory…

The Doppler effect of memory. The pitch of past events shifting as they rush away from us. (389)

And I will leave you with this hauntingly beautiful quote…

The terrifying freedom of knowing that nothing, from now on, will become a memory (402)

Other Resources

Now that you have finished the book it is time to check out some other resources that might open up the book to you and lead to deeper conversation at our book clubs! Here are a few interviews with the author (I have listened to each and recommend them!) and Close Reads Podcast series! Enjoy!

Interviews with Hernan Diaz

New York Times Book Review Podcast

Late Night with Seth Myers (this one is hilarious at parts)

Do you want to know more about the pen and his handwritten manuscript?(this one is a little cheesy, but still interesting)

Close Reads Podcast Episodes

Part One: Bonds

Part Two: My Life

Part Three: A Memoir, Remembered

Part Four: Futures

Q&A

Discussion Questions

Which author do you trust the most?

Which was your favorite “book” to read?

Discuss some of the themes we have looked at…

• Aesthete of money

• Monkish qualities

• American myth making instinct

• Money’s ability to distort reality

• The relationship between history and fiction/fact and fabrication

• Women

• Masks/Hiding

• Dopplegangers/Mirrors

• Future and Time

• Music

• Death

• Memory

Are you satisfied at the end of this novel or do you wish you had more information?

Did you figure out all of the “secrets” when Diaz told you or were you putting the clues together earlier?

Does anyone have any musical or financial knowledge that they want to enlighten us on to give us a deeper understanding of this book?

Reading Schedule

Friday, May 16th- Introduction and Reading Schedule

Monday, May 19th- ep. 55: Introduction to Trust w/ Sean Johnson (from Close Reads)

Wednesday, May 21st- Bonds by Harold Vanner (pgs 3-126)

Wednesday, May 28th- My Life by Andrew Bevel (pgs 127-192)

Wednesday, June 4th- A Memoir, Remembered by Ida Partenza (pgs 193-360)

Wednesday, June 11th- Futures by Mildred Bevel (pgs 361-402)

Thursday, June 26th- Trust Virtual Book Club (contact us for a link to the zoom meeting)

Monday, July 7th- ep. 63: Revisiting Trust

In Case You Missed It:

On the Podcast:

• ep. 51: Intro to Death Comes for the Archbishop and Willa Cather

• ep. 52: Bookish Bio of Joel J. Miller

• ep. 53: Beauty and Imitation w/

  DANIEL McINERNY

• ep. 54: Revisiting the Moonstone

What We’re Reading Now/Next:

June

Trust by Hernan Diaz

July

Everything Sad is Untrue by

Khosrou Daniel Nayeri

August

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us!

We have turned on paid subscriptions which will allow you to support the work we are doing here as well as receive Read Along Guide PDFs each month and voice recordings of the Read Along Guides.

Subscribe now

If you would like to make a small contribution to the work we’re doing here at Reading Revisited, we invite you to do so with the Buy (Us) a Coffee button below. We so appreciate your support!

Buy (Us) a Coffee

Reading Revisited 24-25 List

Previous Lists

*As always, some of the links are affiliate links. If you don’t have the books yet and are planning to buy them, we appreciate you using the links. The few cents earned with each purchase you make after clicking links (at no extra cost to you) goes toward the time and effort it takes to keep Reading Revisited running, and we appreciate it!