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For the past few (ahem, six) months I have been slowly reading through Rumer Godden’s 1969 novel In This House of Brede. From the first page, (nay, first paragraph) I sensed that this book deserved ample time and attention. Some novels are for devouring, and some, like Brede, are for meandering. So meander I did, and though I did not intend to spend half a year reading a 500 page novel, I must admit that slowing down and leaving myself some breathing room between chapters only increased the delight and depth that I found in its pages.

I finished the book last month with a full heart (and commonplace book). Rumer Godden is truly a gifted author - she blends exquisite prose with unforgettable images and characters of both relatability and depth. I already look forward to revisiting Brede one day, but in the meantime I thought I would share — by reflecting on a few of the many unforgettable quotes and moments in this story — some of the ways that this book swept me off my feet.

I’m not sure I’ve ever read an opening to a book that has stopped me in my tracks the way that this paragraph did. Seriously, can someone put this on a T-shirt? Or better yet, a coffee mug? The world, or at least my home, would certainly be a better place if I began my day with these words each morning.

In this opening paragraph, as she will go on to do in the book, Godden masterfully brings to our minds the paradox of peace. That’s what the book is about because that’s what the Christian life is about.

In This House of Brede is, literally, a book about the Benedictine Nuns of the English Congregation. It looks at the complexity of religious life with the ups and downs that likely go unnoticed or unimagined by the laity. Any exploration of religious life, though, invites a broader consideration of the Christian life in general. The religious sister is recognizably a bride of Christ, but the truth is that all Christians, insomuch as we are participants in the mystical body (ahem, bride) of Christ, are “wed” to Him. Just as the priest acts in persona Christi and images Christ to us, the religious sister images the Church, and thus ourselves.

This is not, then, a novel which allows us to sit back and consider a set of characters wholly apart ourselves. Rumer Godden does not allow us that kind of contemplative distance. From the first lines we are keenly aware that receiving and living in Christ’s paradoxical peace is the work of us all.

The novel opens with the efficient Philippa Talbot leaving her successful, high stakes career to enter the novitiate at Brede Abbey. Within the first few pages of the book, we meet Philippa already well on her way to Brede. Aside from a few goodbyes and a brief, panicked foray into the local inn for a double whiskey and final cigarette, we see very little of Philippa outside the Abbey walls.

I was a bit surprised to find that Philippa enters the community within the first chapter. I’d heard that this book was about “a woman entering a Benedictine monastery”, so I’d incorrectly assumed that the drama of the story would center on her journey of discernment. Many of the great novels, after all, center on the “courtship” which culminates in the marriage, (or at least the romance). In this case, though, Godden gives us only the briefest glimpses of what Philippa’s conversion and eventual discernment to religious life was like and chooses to focus the drama of the story on something else entirely: a lived vocation rather than the path to one.

The above quote from Dame Ursula gets at something really important about what it is to accept and then live into one’s vocation. She’s talking, in particular, about the vocational demands on the life of a contemplative religious, but the challenges she observes translate quite easily to the universal task of all Christians seeking to honor their vocations. We know that the Christian life is one of giving and serving, but we (e.g. I) find it far easier to give and serve something distant and different than the work set before us. (Am I the only mom who has snapped at a toddler seeking my attention while I am earnestly trying to “devote myself entirely to prayer”?!)

Dame Agnes, the brilliant and scholarly, if a little grumpy, mistress of ceremonies says to the council in chapter four: “A religious must reserve nothing” (p. 121). This quote came to mind this week when I saw some chatter on Substack notes about the idea of women making a martyrdom of their motherhood. I won’t weigh in on that specifically, but I’ll just say that in my humble opinion, a vocation as a spouse/parent (or as a Benedictine sister apparently) will most definitely require you to give more than you’d like. And more specifically, to give parts of yourself that you’d prefer to keep on reserve. Throughout In This House of Brede, Rumer Godden kindly and completely dispels the idea that “arriving at your vocation” is the easy part.

When Philippa first enters Brede, she is not afraid of the difficulties that living under the Rule will present. “I need it hard, I need to be purged and cleansed” (p. 102). Philippa is fully prepared to suffer; to go without her cigarettes and luxurious baths and her quality tea, but she is unprepared for the ‘two-o’clock-devil’ she finds waiting for her night after night as she lays awake unable to find sleep in her less-than-comfortable bed amidst the snores of her sisters.

It is in these torturous waking hours that the thoughts of her son’s (suffering) death plague her incessantly.

“Philippa would find herself bathed in sweat. She tried to think of Christ’s last hours in the Praetorium. What did our Lady do in those hours? She must have been waiting, watching…but though she had tried to fortify herself such thoughts, doubts would come up again. What am I doing here? I was mad” (p. 106).

These sleepless nights drag on, and her sisters cannot help but observe the melancholy that has come upon her. Despite this, Philippa does not give up on life at Brede. She, with a “dogged obstinacy”, white-knuckles her way through the days and nights and weeks. She keeps her pain - that most understandable and forgivable pain of a bereaved mother - close to her chest, insisting that “They don’t understand because they can’t. No one can, not even Mother” (p. 108). On a particularly bad night, Philippa desperately wanders out into the park to “feel the cold and wind on her face”. She is met there by Dame Catherine who kindly observes that Philippa is "cold and distressed”. Philippa’s grip begins to loosen:

“The compassion in her voice had seemed to plumb Philippa and, as if it had made a crack in the wall of her reserve, that surface composure under which she had hidden all these weeks, Philippa had felt tears beginning to well; they had seemed to have come not from her eyes but deep in her…in a moment she, dry-eyed stoical Philippa who had not wept even with Keith died…was weeping in a storm of tears, perhaps the tears of a lifetime” (p. 111).

This storm of tears, (which Dame Catherine appropriately calls “having monsoon1”), is a moment of surrender for Philippa. But it seems that the Christian is never done surrendering. Over the years Philippa has found a way to live with the pain of her unspeakable tragedy; to remain stoically dry-eyed in the midst of a consuming loss. She has, in a sense, achieved a sort of “mastery” over her sorrow. And yet she must surrender even that. This tearful moment which makes a chink in her wall is just the beginning.

In Philippa’s desire to hold tightly to her grief, I’m reminded of Pam, the mother in Lewis’ The Great Divorce who arrives at the foothills of heaven eagerly awaiting a reunion with her son who died as a young child. When told she’ll have to wait until she’s better “prepared” to see her boy, a heart-wrenching scene follows that comes to a crescendo with the following lines:

“‘Give me my boy. Do you hear? I don’t care about all your rules and regulations. I don’t believe in a God who keeps mother and son apart. I believe in a God of love. No one had a right to come between me and my son. not even God. Tell Him that to His face. I want my boy, and I mean to have him. He is mine, do you understand? Mine, mine, mine, for ever and ever.’

‘He will be, Pam. Everything will be yours. God Himself will be yours. But not that way’” (The Great Divorce, p. 103)

Philippa, too, finds that God’s gifts may not be grasped. She’ll see that there is no amount of penance or self-denial that “achieves” holiness. Rather, the Christian life costs everything - we must take up our Cross to follow Him. Even that most precious love between a mother and child must be surrendered to Him; and yet we are not without hope that our offerings will be multiplied and that whatever we surrender will somehow be made even more truly and fully ours. It is not until chapter twelve that Philippa finally surrenders. She takes what she has kept in darkness and solitude and brings it into the light and allows herself to be known more fully by her Mother and sisters. And in a beautifully poetic turn of events, it is after this surrender that God restores to Philippa her motherhood, a new kind of motherhood, as she goes on to serve as novice mistress to the newly-entered sisters of the Abbey.

These words are spoken by Mr. Konishi, the wealthy Japanese businessman who comes Brede Abbey for help in realizing his dream, namely: “to bring the contemplative ideal to Japan” (338). His endeavor to establish a Benedictine monastery in his native land brings an interesting, if unexpected layer to the latter half of the story. It initially seemed a little out of left field given the very British-ness of the story up to that point. But the more I reflected on it the more it became clear that this plot-line, down to the minute details, serves as the perfect arena in which to consider the value of contemplative religious life.

Mr. Konishi is first met with some incredulity - Japan is after all, not recognizably a “Catholic country”. “would not a Japanese monastery properly be Buddhist?” (338) asks dear Dame Anselma. The gentleman, in his impassioned response, begins to recount names of the martyrs who died to bring the Christian faith to his homeland:

“We were burnt, beheaded, crucified, Madame Nun!” (338)

Though I surely owe 99% of whatever knowledge of Japanese Catholic history I possess to Shūsako Endō, (I suppose I can even give a little credit to Martin Scorcese), I do know that it was Francis Xavier and Jesuits who brought Christianity to the country. When I considered that point, it became clearer what Godden was doing. Japan’s Christianity was historically a scrappy one - it fought long and hard for survival. Religious life there had largely, naturally, taken the active form and the goods of that kind of life are clearly evident. And yet now Mr. Konishi seeks to bring contemplative life to this land. His desire to do so begs the question which I think Rumer Godden is exploring throughout the novel: what is the good of the contemplative religious life?

Over and over again this question arises - sometimes directly, sometimes indirectly. Godden shows throughout the novel the way that Brede and the life it encloses is longed for not only by the Sisters, but also by those on the outside, even (and especially, perhaps) the Mr. Konishis of the world. Back in the in preface, we find Philippa awaiting the train that will take her to the Abbey. She reflects on some words from Abbess Hester:

“People think we renounce the world. We don’t. We renounce its ways but we are still very much in it and it is very much in us” (17)

As we witness the novices grapple with their vocations, keep all-night vigil for the gravely ill, and even as they simply observe their daily rites and mortifications, it becomes abundantly clear that however distant they may seem from it, this ora et labora is for2 the world. It is tempting to see life in the cloister in negative terms - a refuge from, the option to choose so you don’t have to keep up the fight with temptation and sin and evil. Yet Godden shows beautifully the way that contemplative life does not abandon the battle, but takes it up with some even bigger weapons. She says in her afterword:

“It is not only praise and supplication; underlying all, is the fight against evil that has always been in the world” (504)

And so we end where we began, with Pax. We’ve borne witness throughout these five-hundred odd pages to a hidden life wherein the battle for peace - that peace “made of unremitting toil and effort” - is quietly and faithfully fought.

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Kristen Lavransdatter by Sigrid Undset

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Choice.

That’s what I’m wrestling with here.

The freewill of those we love to choose, and to choose badly.

And like Jacob, when I catch my breath enough to look up and see who I’m wrestling, it’s God. Mercy upon me.

~For those who have not read Kristin Lavransdatter, there are tiny plot spoilers in this essay. These “spoilers” are so small I don’t think it will “ruin” the book for you, but I did think it kind to give you this heads up.~

For the next three months, we are reading Kristin Lavransdatter.

I’ve read this book before. I know where it ends. And I know the way Kristin gets there.

The ending is good.

The way there is fraught.

But before we get into all the fraught-ness, before we arrive at any moment of deliberate sin from Kristin, I’m caught, stilled by the grunting pain of an arm bar, at the end of Chapter 3 of Part II.

Because at this point in the novel, Kristin, our heroine, has just made her first wrong choice,1 and I want to know why.

She’s 15 years old, has been brought up with love and piety, is betrothed to a good man, and she’s living in a convent to pray for the death of a childhood friend.

All the cards, fellow parents, were in her favor. She has received the best homeschooling which love and prayer could foster.

And yet.

At the end of Chapter 3, she has fallen asleep in the lap of a man she’s met once and has promised herself to him.

Kristin chooses Erlend.

Why does she make this choice?

Notice, I’m not hung up (yet) on Kristin’s fall—there’s no mortal sin at play here (yet).

I’m hung up on choice. The will. Reason. Those things which we parents try to develop and strengthen in our child so that the child can go into the world with rightly ordered desires and be able to freely choose.

Since I’m emotionally seeking to take emotion out of this discussion, I’ve bullet pointed the facts she knows about her two choices (Simon and Erlend). I’m going to be rational about this. I’m going to be reasonable. I want to lay out the proof that Kristin chose wrong, and then figure out why.

To anyone who loves anyone, I feel like you should be with me in this endeavor. Let’s get out of this arm bar, and pin our confusing freewill into submission.

Let’s begin with the facts about Simon.

Simon

(+) denotes a positive trait; (-) a negative; (~) a neutral

• (+) Handpicked for her by the father she loves2

• (-) Not initially attractive to Kristin3

• (~) 20 years old

• (+) Has good sense and wisdom4

• (+) Liked by her mother and sister5

• (+) Entirely satisfied with him6

Tidy, isn’t it? Simple, isn’t it? Her father, a great man, found for his beloved daughter a good boy who has the potential to be a great man.

Kristin experienced no love at first sight, but she did begin to “think about him a great deal, and she looked forward to seeing him again” (62).

Tidy.

Duty and desire had the potential to be bound together in a good marriage.

But at this point of Chapter 3, Part II, we know that Kristin’s desire for her betrothed is cold - like the tepid chill of an unused wrestling mat - she’d visited Simon’s family on the way to the convent and her “dislike of the family at Dryfin was all the greater because she knew of no reasonable explanation for it” (100), whereas her desire for Erlend is unreasonably, ardently burning.

Confronted by the opposition of Kristin’s desires to her duties, I realize that the opponent I’m wrestling, the force pinning me, is God.

I’m not wrestling Kristin. I’m wrestling the One who created her as she is.

I’m questioning Him. Because shouldn’t Kristin be able to love what is good in Simon?

I thought —I guess— that God would help a girl out. I guess I thought that if a girl was innocent, and had very few personal sins, and had good parents, and received the sacraments regularly, and all those truly good things, I guess I thought God would respond by making her feel good about her father’s choice for her husband. I thought He’d respond by raising up in her an attraction for the “right choice.”

I’m asking God, why didn’t you make her feel love towards the right choice (Simon)? And then in the same breath, knowing that all things are God’s will, I wonder if the wrong choice (Erlend) is what Kristin actually needs for salvation? Is it a marriage to Erlend which will provide the crucible necessary to burn off the dross in Kristin?

But this offers me no escape, I remain locked in the same wrestling hold, now asking, “But God, couldn’t you have brought Kristin to holiness through the happy, good, easy choice of Simon? It didn’t have to be the saga of passionate frustration and mess that is Erlend’s choice, did it?”7 (But then also, there’s no guarantee that a marriage to Simon would have been easy and happy.)

Why, Lord, do our desires confound us? Why must Kristin fight an unreasonable dislike for Simon and an unreasonable passion for Erlend? (You can sense me wiggling meaninglessly here, wasting energy, still as stuck as when the struggle began.)

Which brings me into Eden. Banging my head up against the doctrine of the Fall, searching for a way out. I know the Fall muddied many things, including our desires and emotions. I know that we, down here, are not clear sighted, as Aslan explains to me:

Here on the mountain I have spoken to you clearly: I will not often do so down in Narnia. Here on the mountain, the air is clear and your mind is clear; as you drop down into Narnia, the air will thicken. Take great care that it does not confuse your mind.

-“Aslan” in The Silver Chair by C.S. Lewis, 27

Though Kristin hasn’t fallen (yet), Kristin is a fallen Daughter of Eve walking in the thick air of earth. So is this the reason why she chooses wrong?

But—then I ask—hasn’t Kristin been baptized out of Adam’s original sin?

And I find myself in need of the Catechism, because now I’m fully in an arena where terms really matter.

By Baptism all sins are forgiven, original sin and all personal sins, as well as punishment for sin. In those who have been reborn nothing remains that would impede their entry into the Kingdom of God, neither Adam’s sin, nor personal sin, nor the consequences of sin, the gravest of which is separation from God (CCC 1263).

Okay, tracking. Sounds great. Thank God for Baptism.

But onto the next paragraph, because I don’t have answers yet. I want to know the extent of Kristin’s ability to choose correctly in a fallen world. Because that’s what I’m concerned with, readers, I’m caught up, remember, on asking: how easily can those I love choose rightly? (Notice my assumptions? Notice my priorities? Hint, they might not be quite right.)

Yet certain temporal consequences of sin remain in the baptized, such as suffering, illness, death, and such frailties inherent in life as weakness of character, and so on, as well as an inclination to sin that Tradition calls concupiscence, or metaphorically, “the tinder for sin” (fomes peccati); since concupiscence “is left for us to wrestle with, it cannot harm those who do not consent but manfully resist it by the grace of Jesus Christ.” Indeed, “an athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules” (CCC 1264).

Here’s some explanation. Kristin had the “tinder for sin” within her. And, if I look within myself, I guess each of us has different types of tinder within, different fodder that will blaze up into a fire under different circumstances according to the weakness of our own character.

The restricting pain eases up a bit.

But goodness, I find myself with Aashild praying:

Perhaps I’ll have the courage to ask the one who created me, such as I am, whether He will have mercy on me when the time comes (231).

But I’ve an undergirding assumption here, a premise, which may topple this whole tower. Or, to keep with my extended metaphor, I’ve assumed that the struggle I’m locked in is a wrestling match, but if I’m actually in a different sport, than all the moves I’ve been studying to get out won’t help me. Have you, too, noticed the biggest assumption I’m making?

I’m assuming that Erlend is the wrong choice.

The arm bar painfully keeping me from moving on, is that God not only lets Kristin choose wrongly, but that He does not help her in the way I want Him to so that she can choosing rightly.

We need to look at Erlend now.

Erlend

Here’s what Kristin knew about Erlend when she chose him at the end of chapter 3, Part II.

(~) randomly meets him when she’s buying shoes
(+) saves her from men who intended to rape her
(-) stares at her intently while she’s wearing the garb of a young nun
(-) arranges to meet her after he’s found out she’s betrothed
(-) looks at her throughout the Mass
(-) in their first arranged meeting, all their talk is of scandal
(-) he’s been excommunicated
(-) he’s has had an affair with a married woman for almost 10 years
(-) he has two children with this married woman
(-) he’s had to pay heavy fines which have diminished his property
(-) he’s unaware of the poor state of his finances
(~/-) he’s 28 years old
(+) he’s hot

There’s not a single mentioned attribute of Erlend that is good.

But, he’s very attractive.8

I do not say that ironically.

He is.

Erlend is one of the most enticing characters I’ve met in a book. You read how he looks at Kristin, how he kisses her wrist, how he speaks to her, and your skin tingles. You feel the desire.

Why?

WHY people!? Why is there this desire for a man who has no desirable qualities as a bridegroom? Why is there this betraying desire in Kristin (and readers) for a man who would make a TERRIBLE husband?

What makes Kristin, a sheltered girl from the country, who has never seen or heard of mortally sinful things, fall deeply into love with this man? And to such an extent that she will promise (after just her second time speaking to him):

“I will have affection for you, Herr Erlend,” said Kristin. “I will have affection for you as long as you wish—and after that I will love no one else” (133).

You feel for Lavrans.

You can hear his disillusionment asking: How could this happen? How could this perfect little innocent girl, who I worked so hard to raise with both discipline and love, choose this? I hand-picked her curriculum. I chose everything she learned with care. I strengthened her love for what was good, true, and beautiful. I took her to every Sunday Mass, and each holy day of obligation. Our family was friends with the priest; he came regularly to dinner. I was moderate, too. When my spouse wanted to have people over who weren’t morally sound, I allowed it. Trusting my daughter would see flaws with charity, but also rejection. I prayed, and I fasted, and I sent my daughter directly to Your house. And while she was there, Lord, while she was there living in a convent, in the heart of Your sanctuary, she fell in love with a this man. How? If I didn’t parent rightly, who can? How can any parent be sure of keeping their child close to You?

It breaks my heart. I feel my shoulder ripping away from my chest.

I have children.

I have brothers, I have sisters, I have friends, parents—I love so many people. And I can’t save them.

I can’t save myself.

And, if you follow my reasoning up to this point, you’re also blaming the “tinder” within Kristin, the tinder within each of us, the fodder for sin. And a little bit of you, if its like the little bit in me, is blaming God.

And here’s where it gets personal (was it ever impersonal?)

My questions, you can see, stop being about a 15-year old girl in Medieval Norway. Now I’m asking Him questions very close to home.

“God help you, Ragnfrid Ivarsdatter,” said Sira Eirik, shaking his head. “You want nothing more from all your prayers and fasting than to force your will on God. Does it surprise you, then, that it has accomplished so little good?” (44).

A beautifully holy friend of mine once asked years ago, “Why waste time on fiction?”9

There’s so little time, why choose to read anything but the Psalms? Why pick up any book that’s not spiritual reading?

This—wrestling with what it means to have free-will and to love—is why we read fiction. Because good literature is the grandchild of Scripture.10

Does reading Kristin Lavransdatter teach me what pitfalls to avoid in parenting? Do I now know how to be perfectly ensure that all of those I love will never “choose wrong”?

No.

Who chooseth [love] must give and hazard all he hath.
(The Merchant of Venice)

Scratch that, Reverse It

And here’s where I turn over it all.

I was going to end this essay saying something like, “Kristin did not choose right. But knowing the end of the story, and that she ends with God, everything, therefore, is good. So let’s entrust all whom we love to Him, and give over to Him all our fears about their choices.”

And I think this is right.

But I also think it’s a bit too limited, a bit narrow-visioned, a bit tidy, and a bit incorrect.

I think it’s only one part of the answer.

I think it is treating God as if He were stagnant, as if He (like me) saw Kristin at the crossroads of two choices and after she chose “wrong,” He then continually finds Himself looking back, wishing she had chosen otherwise.

I think that’s how I think.

Now that I write it out, I’m completely sure that is not how God thinks.

Let the scoundrel forsake his way,
and the wicked man his thoughts;
Let him turn to the Lord for mercy;
to our God who is generous in forgiving.
For my thoughts are not your thoughts,
nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord.
As high as the heavens are above the earth,
so high are my ways above your ways
and my thoughts above your thoughts.

For just as from the heavens
the rain and snow come down
And do not return there
til they have watered the earth,
making it fertile and fruitful,
Giving seed to him who sows
and bread to him who eats,
So shall my word be
that goes forth from my mouth;
It shall not return to me void,
but shall do my will,
achieving the end for which I sent it.

Isaiah 55:7-11
(New American Bible St. Joseph Edition)

I think if I just kept reading those verses, I’d never be locked in a wrestling hold again.

God is not Time bound. Temporal creature that I am, I forget that. The past and future tenses live too real in me. The present tense is a fleeting thought.

But God—

He acts in the play of our lives (ref. the Incarnation). He’s not just the author, and the director, and the stage hands. He’s not a mere person looking at the play He wrote in the past tense, and frantically seeking to rework some scenes after His actors miss a few cues.

No, He’s also an actor, moving with our moves, responding to our lines, especially when we go off script. And He’s a good actor, a great actor, the greatest actor of all time. And so, He responds, He changes the play with us, always moving towards the final, hopeful end. Because the end is good, it always has been. It’s a Comedy. It’s always been a comedy, Dante knew this.

So, back to choice.

A few years ago, my younger, still-in-the-dating-world sister challenged me when I encouraged her to date someone who was “right.” I’d listed out the bullet points, showing her a good Simon choice.

She said, “But shouldn’t I be attracted to him?”

And she was right.11

Attraction, foolish love, the force that moves all the stories—in that force is God.

I know that.

All this time I’ve been pinned, it’s because I thought I was in a wrestling match with my maker.

Turns out, Isaiah prompts me, I’d mistaken the way in which He held me for an arm bar, but in reality He was seeking to flow with me through a “bow tie move,” that fun over the back arm lock which dancers do.

God wants to dance with me.

So, I guess, I have to look at Kristin and Erlend and trust that this way, and no other, is the way they are being attracted (notice the verb tense) into Christ. Because this is the way it is. Because the present is the only real reality. No other choices exist. There’s only right now, and God’s call now.

There are right and wrong choices. That statement is not wrong.

But also, as soon as the choice is made, there’s Christ - still.

I’m not trying to tie all these thoughts up in a bow. I think I’m actually trying to untie them. Or, to say it better, I’m attempting to force myself out of a pinned wrestling mentality and into the continual motion of the bow tie move, following His lead, staying in the present, not letting myself get pinned by past decisions or un-occurred future events.

This is not because I don’t think there are answers, but because I think I so often ask the wrong questions, obsessing over the past and future (forcing decisions into constrained verb tenses) when the answer resides in the Presence.

Back to Kristin, I think my obsessive traps are also hers. Instead of being where her feet are, once she’s married, Kristin obsesses over Erlend’s faults. Once the choice is made, she looks back — a lot. And ironically, it will begin to be her passionate ardor for her husband —that “tinder” that I was tempted to fully and completely blame for her “wrong” choice—which will bring out the best in her, the redeeming moments, the literally life-giving moments. The maiden will become the matron. The curse is the cure. And since that is so, it’s as foolish to waste time hating the cure’s past as it would be to attempt to escape a wrestling pin while dancing.

If I were to plan out (notice the necessarily past verb tense constraining that action) the “right” way to do life, it wouldn’t be all that great of a story.12 And also, if I were to write the story, I wouldn’t exist.

Remember the beginning of Matthew, when Christ claims every part of His lineage, even Tamar, the woman who seduced her father-in-law, and Rehab, the harlot? Well here’s my moment to claim my lineage. My great grandmother was another Kristin. She fell for my great grandfather, an Erlend if there ever was one. Her family objected. She stubbornly married him. He was never faithful. And her life was as hard as her hard-headedness. But God’s word “did not return to Him void”—she kept the faith. And her son was my grandfather, and he kept the faith, and his daughter was my mother. If I were to write the story, I would never exist because I would never have allowed my great grandmother to make the “wrong choice” and create me.

Therefore with my own life and the lives of those I love, I must trust that the story is deeply part of God’s will for me right now, in time. And it is this story, and no other, that is creating souls for Him.

So, my final thought is: raise a glass to reading good stories, for it is through His story that we become His.

In other words, do read literature, it’s the dance of soul craft.

What We’re Reading Now:

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.

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!

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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It’s Autumn; it’s time to memento mori.

The whole earth reminds us that death is coming, approaching, encroaching, steadily sucking the life blood from plants, pulling the visible earth’s vitality into the ground. Which sounds awful—why is this season beautiful?

Enter the gothic novel—the extreme, the stories which write in bold strokes, like the deep reds and pulsing oranges we see all around us. It’s the time of the year to visit the stories which draw back the veil, which remind us that Death is continuously and dramatically seeking its pound of flesh. But also… that the curse is the cure; Death is not the ultimate enemy, evil is.

Enter Eleanor, and enter her beloved, demon-fighting Dominican protagonist Father Thomas Edmund Gilroy.

The emphasis of A Bloody Habit is on formal preternatural evil, the emphasis of Brother Wolf is on intrinsically wounded living beings who are under the influence of such evil, and the emphasis of Wake of Malice is on living beings who want to awaken and be under the influence of such evil (because of deluded notions of being able to control what you awaken). The hierarchy is important because it determines the redeemability of a character. An outright vampire cannot be saved, but a werewolf or a witch could be.

-Eleanor Bourg Nicholson, author of A Bloody Habit, Brother Wolf, and Wake of Malice

Here at Reading Revisited some of us love gothic literature (), some of us are ridiculously squeamish and terrified by the mere thought of preternatural horrors (), and some of us deeply love any book which helps us better see and live this life ().

Therefore, whether you love this bold time of year, or are still trying to understand the worth of the macabre, this review of Eleanor Bourg Nicholson’s three gothic novels—and their theme of redemption—is for you.

A Bloody Habit

Formal preternatural evil - cannot be saved
(’s reflections)

With the above quote, John Kemp, narrator of A Bloody Habit, begins his narration of Nicholson’s first gothic novel, a wild story full of exciting plot and terrifying vampires.

Because many of us have read Gothic literature before, we know this trope, and it works. We all love an unbelievable story, which we just maybe believe by the end. A good story captures us and we love having our imagination awakened in this way.

But, I am going to argue that Nicholson understands that not only do we have trouble believing that a story about vampires is true (or werewolves or evil leprechauns for that matter…see below), but we also have trouble believing that deep, unabashed, unredeemably villainous evil is real. It’s not necessarily that we have trouble believing that evil exists. We can all look around us and see its effects starkly. But, I think we have trouble believing that anyone can choose evil, especially in a way that they can become irredeemable.

Why would anyone choose to turn completely toward evil? And is it really possible to be unredeemable? This is part of the mystery of the Christian faith. What responsibility do we have for our own choices and where does grace come in? We have been asking this question for a long time.

My husband is reading and teaching his way through the book of Exodus with our kids right now and they are all so bothered by God’s hardening of Pharaoh’s heart. The only (slight) consolation is that he does harden his own heart multiple times first. At what point do we say “no” to God too much to be able to come back from it? It does happen, we see it in Pharaoh and plenty of other characters throughout the Scriptures.

But “this is a hard saying, who can hear it?”1

Maybe the only counter balance is that the same mystery also exists on the other side. It is equally unbelievable that in a world after The Fall we can (through Christ) choose good and therefore God. The presence of holiness is more unbelievable than even evil vampires as our narrator, John Kemp, expresses:

“As we hurried along, I remembered an earlier visit to that house, where I had wondered about the existence of the chapel. So it does exist, I thought to myself. Somehow this architectural detail seemed to be extraordinary—more extraordinary than the probable presence of vicious, undead creatures within those haunted walls. What a strange world it is after all, I mused” (396).

What a better way to explore this mystery than through story.

How deft Nicholson is to lead us through these questions in the mode of a fantastic story that we need convincing to believe. Maybe our imaginations will be awakened enough to pray for grace and act with virtue as we daily say “yes” to God instead of slowly turning our backs until one day it is too late.

In this story our vampire doesn’t even have a name. He is the “every man” of evil and the unredeemable. Our narrator, John Kemp, is maybe the “every man” of the converted believer, the one in each of us who sees what man looks like without redemption, and turns away in horror. Maybe by the end of reading the story we too will have the beginnings of what Fr. Thomas calls faith, too!

“Perhaps that is the beginning of what you call faith, Father Thomas Edmund Gilroy. And perhaps it is quite enough for me. For now, at least, it seems so. There you have it, my friend. You may do with it what you will” (435).

Brother Wolf

Intrinsically wounded living beings under the influence of evil - can be saved
(’s reflections)

St. Augustine wrote the above lines when discussing St. Paul’s words in Romans 7:

“For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members.”

-Romans 7: 22-23, RSVCE

The language of St. Augustine (and St. Paul) may seem extreme, but he is describing nothing less than the highest-possible-stakes battle in the Christian life between good and evil, life and death.

It is this battle which Eleanor Bourg Nicholson explores in Brother Wolf, her second novel featuring beloved, demon-fighting, Dominican hero Father Thomas Edmund Gilroy.

We hear the story through the lens of our lovably flawed heroine, Athene Howard. Athene is kind, intelligent, and curious. Given her priest-turned-atheist father’s scholarly pursuits, she has received an eclectic, if uneven, education, and possesses an interesting blend of skepticism and superstition:

“I was not accustomed to prayer but had a superstitious investment in the power of will cribbed from cursory readings of some books and papers Father cherished” (21).

Athene is ripe for adventure, and is delighted when she and her father find themselves thrown into a werewolf-hunting quest—a quest being carried out by a group of nuns, knights, and friars.

If you, like me, love all things gothic, this story has it all—gypsy curses, bloodthirsty beasts, satanic priests, even some Greek “deities.” But the real horror of this story lies in the striking image of the werewolf as the creature that is intrinsically wounded and living under the influence of preternatural evil.

Sir Simon, one of Athene’s fellow adventurers, describes the werewolf:

“There are some poor souls beset by darkness — part men, part beast…We would call it an evil oppression. A crippling wound that, though they strive to overcome it, can only be relieved by God’s mercy” (66).

Later, Athene questions:

“How can he be restored? Isn’t it a business of drugs or enchantment? Is that something that can be healed, like a sickness?”

“It is not so simple. Through prayer, discipline, and penance, often they can be relieved from the worst of their malady and spared those dark episodes where the man is transformed to the beast” (66).

We later meet one of these werewolves, Brother Luke, who is under the care of the Franciscan brothers whose charism it is to help these wounded men. He says, when describing another one of his kind:

“He is a good man. He has a weakness. What man does not? Who is to judge these weak, broken men? Can you see into the hearts of men? Can you see into your own hearts? You do not know what it is to be shackled to madness! You do not know how you can battle ceaselessly against the draw of the moon only to find yourself in the toils of that evil spirit once more. One misstep! Only one! And all the years of upright, forthright behavior come to naught!” (77)

He is answered by Isabel, one of the adventurers who began this quest seeking her werewolf brother, the man described by Brother Luke:

“He has had a capacity for goodness, but his actions will have their due consequence, as well you know. As he embraces the viciousness, he will descend, destroying all goodness and giving evil full reign” (78).

The werewolf is not, like the vampire, intrinsically doomed. The werewolf can be redeemed. There is hope for him, but it is a hope, like that of St. Paul in Romans 7, in God’s mercy. Though not born as werewolves, these men are born predisposed to “the lycanthropic vices” (i.e “bloodlust, blood frenzy, ungoverned appetites,” 188). And it is engaging in these vices that causes the man to descend more and more fully and uncontrollably into the wolf form.

There is the clear, yet powerful, image here of the Christian fighting the “madness” of concupiscence. Like every person battling evil and striving for goodness, the wolves find themselves stronger in community - hence the Franciscan brothers welcome these werewolves into their Order and aid them as they seek to mortify their flesh and find relief from their affliction. It is when Jean-Claude, brother of Isabel and the main werewolf in the story, leaves his community that things grow especially dire.

In the end it is through the strength of community, unlikely heroism, and God’s grace found in unexpected places, that the characters overcome the evil Satanic force that is behind the mayhem. The climax of the story finds our characters locked in an intense battle that is both physical and spiritual - it will keep you raptly turning pages to the end!

Wake of Malice

Living beings who want to awaken and be under the influence of such evil (because of deluded notions of being able to control what you awaken) - can be saved
(’s reflections)

Because we obey him, or…because we ignore him? Often in the face of overwhelming evidence. Wasn’t it Screwtape that said:

In other times we terrified men. Now, we prefer to lull them into a false sense of security (C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters).

If that’s the current tactic of the devil, Nicholson is doing the Lord’s work because her story un-lulls me. I could not read this book past the hour of 5pm, and never alone.

In this, her third novel of the exorcist hero Father Thomas Edmund battling real evil in real places, I felt closely aligned with Hugh Buckley, the narrator. Hughe is good-tempered man, terrified of ghost stories, while simultaneously denying the existence of anything preternatural —specifically, zombie leprechauns.

He’s run-from-dark-places terrified, but also enormously afraid of being perceived as silly, non-modern, or superstitious. Therefore, when he, a full-grown, enormous man, sprints like a little child across a field at night away from his “imaginings,” he dismisses everything that happened in that field, including the literal, physical bite mark upon his leg.

He has told himself he is scared of something that does not exist. Therefore, his only option when staring at a painfully real, preternatural wound bleeding on his leg is to: cover it up.

Father Thomas Edmund’s question brought me up short. I almost mentioned my wound, but speaking of something so laced with superstition struck me as foolish, perhaps because of the censorious tone of Dr. Pouncefoot…I passed into an animated account of Miss Martin and her cats (139).

The wound is oozing green pus. And he doesn’t mention it because he’s got the voice of a professor in his head.

Sound like an examination of conscience to you? It is to me. How many times in the confessional am I most reluctant to confess little, petty, embarrassing sins. Sometimes the fear of being perceived as absurd leads us to absurd, and potentially deadly, decisions.

But back to preternatural. Not all people are so close-minded as Hugh and I, there are some humble souls who stand as bulwarks:

It seemed strange to hear her lovely little voice speaking so matter-of-factly of the lore (142).

Edith, a humble soul, is one of the most capable characters in this book. She speaks plainly of real things that cannot be seen.

Now turn to see how honestly and seriously she and Father Thomas Edmund take Hugh’s wound:

“It’s something Freddie and I refuse to discuss, but I’ll be sworn we were set upon by evil sprites in a field the first night we were here, and their mischief is in the wound.”

My two companions froze, the smiles wiped from their faces.

“Hugh Buckley,” said Father Thomas Edmund in a voice both commanding and stern. “Raise your trouser leg.”

I stared at him. “What?”

“Raise your trouser leg and be quick about it.”

I hurried to obey. The priest bent down and examined my injury, now grotesquely green and edged with translucent white pus.

I blushed to realize that Miss Edith O’Hara was gazing at the wound too, her eyes wide and not a hint of red in her cheeks.

“Yes,” said Father Thomas Edmund, drawing breath. “Yes, that is a foul wound indeed.”

“There’s evil there,” murmured Edith.

“Hugh Buckley,” demanded Father Thomas Edmund, “where did you get this wound?”

“Well, it’s a long story, Father…really a bit of silliness, you know…”

“I want the truth now. Quickly.”

I wanted to sink into the earth—and deservedly too, my mother would say—but once again, I obeyed. In a few choice sentences, I put him in possession of the facts (143).

There is a person in this Irish town who is calling from the earth zombie leprechauns—tiny, undead monsters—to bite, mock, and kill living souls. The person believes their actions are justified, and that they have harnessed the evil.

Father Thomas Edmund says to Hugh (and to me) in the face of this terror:

“Hugh, don’t be frightened. The devil is a mad dog, but he is a dog on a leash” (272).

Which was comforting, until Fr. Thomas Edmund reiterates and deepens this understanding by reminding us of the person who is obeying the powerless devil by attempting to control evil:

The devil is a rabid dog, but a dog on a chain. Someone has to let him in” (274).

Father Thomas Edmund helps people remove preternatural evil. But, unlike the evil person setting zombie leprechauns onto their neighbors, Father Thomas Edmund does not justify the means he uses for the good end he intends. He is careful, careful even of the soul of the one who is doing the evil. He does not make the mistake of fearing Death as the worst thing that could happen. This would be truly silly. This would be Hugh-like. For fear of a thing we must all pass through, while reasonable, certainly cannot justify every action to delay it.

Instead, Father Thomas Edmund acts carefully, in ways to protect further victims, but not at the price of damnation, not at the price of decisively losing the soul of the one who calls forth the evil. That may happen, but he never forgets that it also may not. There’s hope for this person to be redeemed.

It is easy for those of us scared of spooky things to become impatient with such patience. I wanted to yell, “Father! You know so much, just reveal the bad person! Make the scary things go away!”

But he did not cast the first stone. He never forgot that Christ would have gone through His entire Passion just to forgive the Good Thief. One soul is worth the sacrifice of all.

Final Fall Thoughts

Therefore, if you are anyone, you’ll probably benefit from reading a bit of unsettling, plot-driven, thought-provoking, (and fun!) Nicholson this season.

Have your trite, lullified, mundane picture of the world ripped open, and see the decay beneath the earth, but also, the beauty of death’s path to resurrection in the next season.

What We’re Reading Now/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

The 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 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.

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The other week, I was at Gerber Collision & Glass waiting to get an estimate on the damage my Honda Odyssey’s bumper had recently withstood in a Walmart parking lot.

I was outside. The parking lot was gravel. The sun glinted off of many vehicles in various states of banged-up-ness.

I pulled out Dr. ’s Why Literature Still Matters, and continued to read:

Yeats, and the long tradition within which he stands, does not primarily see the natural world as a set of resources which need to be mined, analyzed, pulled to pieces, and rebuilt into more useful things like plastic and microwaves. Rather, the natural world’s chief value is found when it is “looked upon,” loved, internalized, and then re-spoken, or painted or played or prayed (5).

Leaning against the after-hours key drop-off box, I turned the page, and was greeted by a poem my mother had me memorize in elementary school: “The Lake Isle of Innisfree” by W. B. Yeats.

Those who know this poem, will know why this poem was precisely the poem to read in that exhaust-haunted parking lot.

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.

“The Lake Isle of Innisfree,” W. B. Yeats

“Oh,” my soul said, for suddenly, within me, was a moment like the one in the photograph below.

I sat down on the concrete curb stop, and began penciling in my own re-spoken lines. Just a week previous, I’d been reading Yeats in his Ireland. Just less than a week previous to this grey graveled afternoon, I was surrounded by water, and grass, and ocean wind.

And now, with that small cream book in my hands, those moments came into this moment, and I knew that I too now, had an Innisfree.

Let me show you:

That last picture is of the road which ran in front of our home in West Cork. It’s lined by blackberries which my kids would eat on the way down to the tide pools at the cove. It’s the road that showed me Tolkien’s road:

The Road goes ever on and on
Down from the door where it began.
Now far ahead the Road has gone,
And I must follow, if I can,
Pursuing it with eager feet,
Until it joins some larger way,
Where many paths and errands meet.

(“Roads Go Ever On,” J. R. R. Tolkien)

It’s the road that showed me Montgomery’s road:

Anne sat long at her window that night companioned by a glad content. The wind purred softly in the cherry boughs, and the mint breaths came up to her. The stars twinkled over the pointed firs in the hollow and Diana’s light gleamed through the old gap.
Anne’s horizons had closed in since the night she had sat there after coming home from Queen’s; but if the path set before her feet was to be narrow she knew that flowers of quiet happiness would bloom along it…And there was always the bend in the road!
(Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery, 307-8).

For you see, before this narrow-road experience of Ireland, I’d read Tolkien’s or Anne Shirley’s references to “a bend in the road” metaphorically, as a symbol of the twists and turns of life, picturing what a road might look like if it was narrow and you couldn’t see to the end of it.

But I didn’t have a moment when I’d ever truly held onto the sight of this narrow road. Outside of some camping trips to the Appalachians or Rockies, I’d never lived off a road that wasn’t broad, that didn’t force your vision to be wide and far. The roads I travel everyday are broad, cleared-out affairs.

Even the prettier roads—the ones with Crape Myrtles down the center and Loblolly and Longleaf Pines and Scrub Oak closer at hand—are still broad, straight things.

You can never quite take away the beauty of a road, but here in American suburbia, we don’t often try to hold onto it either.

So before West Cork, a narrow road had only ever been an idea for me, not a living fact.

Now, here it was before me. A simple thing, right in front of my yellow door.

And I walked it each day to get to where I was going.

In Why Literature Still Matters, Dr. Baxter begins by asking:

What does an experience of beauty feel like? What is it good for? How does literature, and her sister arts, attempt to hold onto that beauty? And is it possible that, as our ability to see our landscape disappears, we are also losing access to our words? (iv).

Literature held onto beauty for me (the beauty of a road down which you cannot see) until I had traveled far enough to arrive at the moment when I could see it.

Literature held onto beauty for me when I was in elementary school, before I even knew to hold onto beauty, giving me a poem I did not yet need, so I could hold it in my deep heart’s core until the day when I could be given a landscape upon which I could say, “Oh, this is that poem!”

Literature held onto beauty for me so it could give it back in a graveled parking lot.

And literature trained me to hold onto this beauty by creating more Art, by re-speaking my own poem, scribbling descriptors of my own Innisfree while waiting to be given a big bill for a small, superficial, fender bend.

Literature keeps us human, before we even know that we could lose our humanity.

In closing, here’s my “Innisfree” poem. I cherish it because it connects me to Yeats, and Baxter, and Ireland, and a beautiful trip with my family, and a kind, wonderful aunt who brought us to her home, and the experience of stunning, simple, earth-shattering beauty.

I will arise and go now, and go to Ballyluck,
And a glass home built there, of breeze and sunshine made;
Many children will I have there, a kite for the sky to play,
And live together on the rust streaked cliffs.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes winding through,
Winding o’er the kerrygolden grass from where the water tides;
There roads are all good narrow, and red-lined with flowers fairy,
And aunts and jam are always close at hand.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear silence stirring with blue and brightsome looks;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I am there, in my deep soul’s calm.

(“The Cork Coast of Ballyluck,” Jessica Risma)

Literature baptizes time, bringing memory, and beauty, into this present moment.

My husband and I frequently turn to each other now (often while driving in our continuously-kid-questioning Odyssey) and say, “What if we were in Ireland right now?” And into the previously hum-drumly, chaotic moment comes a calm joy, a memory of deep stillness in a moving wind, and we smile, we really do smile, this isn’t cliche, and we look upon our current moment with more love because of the memory.

And this is good.

Because the truth is, the reality is, life was not better in Ireland. We were. We saw better.

I’ve watched a family on the white sands of Waikiki stress each other out by trying to make plans for a pizza dinner. No place is a panacea for peace.

Peace is difficult to come by, though. We know that. And if it does come, it only comes “dropping slow,” in part because finding peace means becoming more peaceful (Baxter, 7),

Memory, landscape, and the literature which holds onto beauty, help me practice peacefulness today.

I will now forever fondly remember that grey gravel Gerber parking lot.

Thank you Montgomery; thank you Yeats; and thank you Dr. .1

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.

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

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Several years ago, my sister (who was at that time a high school sophomore) sent a frantic email requesting urgent help on her due-next-day paper, the prompt of which was, “Is Shakespeare still relevant?”

Then, as now, it’s difficult for me not to daydream about concluding our 8-hour Christmas drive up to Cincinnati with a visit to that school in order to grab that English teacher by his lapels (which he probably does wear), and shake him into less ridiculously banal prompts.

However, I will concede him some ground.

In graduate school, I got the impression that most of the scholars I interacted with were seemingly so disconnected from the idea that one might need to defend the humanities, that they had almost lost the ability to do so. And in losing this need to constantly re-check the metaphorical compass, it appears to me that many humanities programs are losing their way, ceasing to have any true objective, and therefore becoming more and more consumed with less and less meaningful minutia.

Therefore, to return to Shakespeare, it is perhaps not entirely useless or banal (to reuse my own word against myself) to remember why we read him, or at least to remember some things which are helpful or enjoyable to keep in mind while reading him.

A note on history:

To begin, I like placing the author in his time, so please stay with me as I summarize a bunch of things we already know.1 William Shakespeare lived from April 1564 to April 23, 1616. Straddling the 16th and 17th century, his life and work also straddled two separate monarchs of England.

Elizabeth I, daughter of notorious Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn (who Harry married in 1533 – after divorcing Catherine of Aragon, his wife of 24 years, and leaving the Catholic Church to establish himself as head of the Church of England – and who he executed 3 years later when Elizabeth was 3 years old), was queen from 17 Nov 1558 until her death in 1603. Therefore, Elizabeth I was the reigning monarch from the time our dear Will was born until he was almost 40 years old.

Since Elizabeth died without an heir, the thrown passed to James I, great grandson of Henry VII and son of Mary, Queen of Scotts. He reined from 1603-1625, the last 13 years of Shakespeare’s life and work.

After Shakespeare died, James I was succeeded by his son, Charles I, who was deposed of his thrown, and his head (big event!), by the English Civil War in 1649. 

I can’t adequately express what strong shifts were occurring philosophically, spiritually, religiously, politically, etc. during this time.

A note on religion:

Joseph Pearce, in his 2008 book The Quest for Shakespeare: the Bard of Avon and the Church of Rome, has successfully laid out compelling evidence that Shakespeare was Catholic. (Phyllis Rackin briefly references scholarly arguments for Shakespeare having been brought up Catholic in her 2005 book Shakespeare & Women, just in case you wanted to hear it from a non-Catholic.)

A brief summary of Pearce’s argument: In Elizabethan England, there were Catholics who had given up fighting to be Catholic, and there were Catholics still fighting to be Catholic. It is well documented that William was born and baptized into the latter type of Catholic family, to John and Mary Shakespeare. Additionally, during his life, Shakespeare is not registered in any of the parishes of the Church of England, he donated a portion of his property to Catholic priests in his will, he was friends with well-known Catholics (notably the martyred St. Robert Southwell, a poet priest), and in his will he left all his property to only one of his daughters (the one who had remained Catholic). Here’s an article by Joseph Pearce on the topic.

And if you care for my personal opinion, before knowing any of these arguments, when deeply immersed in reading Milton and Shakespeare at the aforementioned grad school, I penciled marginal notes all along Shakespeare, saying “This man is Catholic!” Chesterton anticipated this feeling when he wrote,

“Whenever Milton speaks of religion, it is Milton’s religion: the religion that Milton has made. Whenever Shakespeare speaks of religion (which is only seldom), it is of a religion that has made him,” (G.K. Chesterton, The Soul of Wit).

Why do I think this is relevant to mention?

For two reasons.

First, because we need not leave our Judeo-Christian orthodoxy at the door when reading Shakespeare. We don’t have to jettison natural law and begin again with a blank slate of morality, asking convoluted questions like, “Does Shakespeare actually think Iago is the hero? Or, is it possible Desdemona is a symbol of repressed womanhood, and is a proto-feminist construct of the deadly consequences of marriage?”

Even in the past when I allowed these types of amoral “anything is possible” proddings into the space in my mental quarries, they weren’t helpful questions. The text did not open before me. These questions might lead to a long thesis, with a lot of evidence. But if we compare the play to a blossom, these questions left that blossom, closed, untouched, and cold, while external to the flower I remained, a mere questioner, scientifically studying the floral text to bolster my own ability to follow any premise to a logical conclusion.

No, I did not enjoy Shakespeare plays when I thought the text was bereft of any moral compass.

But now, if I settle into the thought that Shakespeare wrote plays with standard (and true) perspectives on what is right and wrong, suddenly the plays bloom. This is why I say it is helpful to recognize Shakespeare’s Catholicism. Chesterton gets at this idea better,

“The old writers knew exactly what they thought about things, and then wrote about the things. They did not write with a moral purpose, but with a moral assumption. The author of Macbeth can sympathize with a murderer; but the whole play would be meaningless if there were a moral doubt about murder,” (G.K. Chesterton, The Soul of Wit).

This is what I mean by not “checking your orthodoxy at the door.” Read, keeping in mind what is known to be right and wrong, and all is a lot clearer (and more beautiful and nuanced and layered) in Will’s plays.

The second reason I find Shakespeare’s Catholicism helpful is for more Catholic-denomination-specific reasons. Example: the ghost of Hamlet’s father works better within the play when you assume that it came from Purgatory not Hell. Instead of asking questions like, “Why would Hamlet even consider taking the advice of a person damned to Hell?” Or a question like, “Is the whole play put into motion by demonic intervention?” You instead are able to say, “Oh, because Hamlet’s father died without confessing his sins, he therefore did not die sinless, and therefore required a period of purgation. Since Purgatory is a state of cleansing en route to Heaven, the ghost of Hamlet’s father is saved, and he will eventually be in Heaven. Therefore his counsel does not need to be dismissed. Indeed, Hamlet is right to heed it, as evidently this apparition is sanctioned, and has a necessary purpose in the temporal world, both personally and politically.”

Last, somewhat connected, thought: Here I’ll also note, along with Chesterton, that perhaps no one is misquoted as much as Shakespeare. Example: Perhaps you’ve seen engraved on a building, or made into a touching social media banner, “To Thine Own Self Be True.” –William Shakespeare; perhaps implying that Shakespeare was a rather trendy, moral relativist who would today say, “You do you.” While the quoted line does come from Hamlet, we do authors a disservice when we forget that they choose into whose mouths they put things. Meaning, when Shakespeare put the above quote into the mouth of the play’s fool (and not the wise fool), he was perhaps not intending people to take this as his own personal mantra – though I’m not sure he would’ve cared as much about this as I seem to, a word more on this below. :D

A note on seriousness (or not!):

G.K. Chesterton has been the most influential on my view of Shakespeare, and in the most pleasant of ways.

Chesterton contends that Shakespeare is one of the greatest authors of all time, AND that he is full of mirth, of ridiculousness, of laughter. That he is a “common man’s man,” much more instep with his Medieval predecessors than some of his Renaissance contemporaries. Therefore, while we should rightly stand in awe of Shakespeare as the greatest English author, we should also approach him as someone who wants to be approached. He was not trying to be a great man who spoke only to other great men, for the mark of a truly great man is his simplicity. As defense of this argument, note the simplicity of Christ’s fiction writing, of His parables.

So, do not forget to look to laugh in Shakespeare.

“There is in Shakespeare something more godlike even than humor: something which the English call fun,” (G.K. Chesterton, The Soul of Wit).

This may help us make sense of some of the more irreverent, or bawdy scenes. Shakespeare’s faith was strong enough to withstand humor.

“The moderns who disbelieve in Christianity treat it much more reverently than these Christians [referring to Medieval monks] who did believe in Christianity…I have seen a picture in which the seven-headed beast of the Apocalypse was included among the animals of Noah’s ark, and duly provided with a seven-headed wife to assist him in propagating that important race to be in time for the Apocalypse,” (G.K. Chesterton, The Soul of Wit).

A note on poetry:

“There is a sort of speech that is stronger than speech. Not merely smoother or sweeter or more melodious, or even more beautiful; but stronger. Words are jointed together like bones; they are mortared together like bricks; they are close and compact and resistant; whereas, in all common conversational speech, each sentence is falling to pieces,” (G.K. Chesterton, The Soul of Wit).

This quote, for me, summarizes why we read poetry, why we read Shakespeare, why we love to read good writing. Instead of remaining a critic on the outside saying, “That was ridiculous, no one talks like that,” after a long soliloquy by Othello, or Iago, or any other long-winded person in book. Instead, to love literature is to open oneself up to the reality of how words should be, a glimpse at what words might have been if there hadn’t been a Fall, and how words are in Scripture, and how the Word is in Heaven.

So, when we read Shakespeare (especially if we’ve already read a plot summary – more on this later), let us revel in the words, in how Shakespeare has someone say something, in the turn of phrase, or accurate description, or in the comedic or tragic timing.

“If Shakespeare were under the limitations of realism, he would be forced to make Macbeth express his depressions or despair by saying, ‘Blast it all!’ or ‘What a bore!’ And these ejaculations do not express it; that is part of the bore. But as Shakespeare had the liberty of a literary convention, he can make Macbeth say something that nobody in real life would say, but something that does express what somebody in real life would feel,” (G.K. Chesterton, The Soul of Wit).

A note on spoilers:

Be spoiled! Reading a summary before you read Shakespeare is highly helpful, and enriches, not detracts, from the pleasure of reading. Shakespeare often re-worked well-known plays, Othello, is no exception. Therefore, most of his audience would have entered the theatre knowing what was going to happen, and therefore looking forward to how Shakespeare was going to make that happen. Would he alter some small or large part of the plot? Would he remove some details or add others, and thus change the entire message of the play? Would he speed up and condense the timeline of events to “up the ante?” Would he go wild with his word-skill and phrase the whole story with such “sticky” language that one laughed, cried, and applauded at the same time?

Side note: I think a good example in current culture of how subsequent storytellers can play off of pervious storyteller’s works, is in the 2005 Pride and Prejudice movie. This most recent version could afford to move really fast, and not fully introduce characters, because it could safely assume most of its audience already knew the plot well enough to keep up. I noticed this aspect because my husband, not a big Austenite, was fairly lost throughout the whole thing. So, do yourself a favor, read a summary of the play before you read the play, then just sit back and enjoy the words.

A note (my last) on dialogue:

It’s because of Shakespeare’s mastery of dialogue, that I began to notice that some of my favorite authors were those who had mastered this craft, the craft of actually writing the quirky, disconnected, and eloquent ways of speech. L.M. Montgomery in her Anne of Green Gables series (March 2021), Harper Lee in To Kill A Mockingbird (May 2023), Leo Tolstoy in Anna Karenina (February 2022), and Wendell Berry in Jayber Crow (November 2024) are a few examples I find of excellent dialogue contained in excellent storytelling.

On the flipside, there are some books that I’ve found very interesting for the story, but which continued to lose me every time a character opened their mouth, because I kept finding myself thinking that: 1) that character wouldn’t actually say that, or 2) that’s just the author spewing their philosophy through the mouth of a character, or 3) the character didn’t need to say that, the author is just using the character as a lazy way of moving the plot forward.2

Needless to say, looking closely at dialogue has made me realize just what a tricky art it is. And Shakespeare, arguably, does it best. Currently we say, “it all comes down to communication.”

Well, that’s another way of saying, even in our daily interactions, dialoguing well is crucial.

So why not read a man who mastered it in the written word?

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In Case You Missed It:

• Reading Revisited ep.30: Introduction to Shakespeare with Fr. Tom

• Othello Introduction and Schedule

• A Christmas Carol Stave 5 Revisited & Discussion Questions

• Reading Revisited ep.29: Bookish Bio of Colleen Adams (aka Jess’ Mom!)

What We’re Reading Now:

January

Othello by William Shakespeare

February

Out of the Silent Planet AND Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

March

That Hideous Strength by C.S. Lewis

A Few Reminders:

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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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Leisure Essay

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Happy St. Nicholas day! Welcome to the best time of the year.

Yes, I know— if you, like Elise and I, are trying to live a liturgical calendar inside your home, this is not the Christmas season. This is Advent. A season of preparation. I agree.

Now. How do we do this? How do we prepare our hearts and minds—not to mention our homes and our travels and our gifts— well? How do we embrace the heart of Mary, when Martha has so much to do?1

And what is the “this” we are trying to do? We will suggest, that the “this” we are yearning for is: leisure.

But first, a note: these thoughts build off of a previous essay, Revisiting Lazy Murder (summary in footnote2), in which we became convinced that we must adhere to a Rule of Live…so what does that mean now?

Routines are gone. The Rule of Life is disturbed. We’re supposed to be praying and working (according to our penciled RoL taped onto our bathroom mirror) but instead we’re on Amazon buying gifts for a last-minute White Elephant party for our 2nd-grader on Dec 9th… And we’re re-arranging Sunday plans to accommodate in-coming relatives for a pre-Christmas Christmas. What to do?

How to preserve the heart of Mary when the activity of Martha is needed? How to be post-ghost Scrooge, when every fiber wants to shout: “Humbug! Go away! I’m PREPARING for CHRISTMAS!” (Not a good look…)

Acedia-busyness in some literary Marthas

Before Elise and I attempt any answers, we’d like to keep before us a few images of who we do not want to be. The first comes from Jane Eyre, and describes Jane’s cousin, Eliza Reed:

Eliza spoke little: she had evidently no time to talk. I never saw a busier person than she seemed to be; yet it was difficult to say what she did: or rather, to discover any result of her diligence. She had an alarm to call her up early. I know not how she occupied herself before breakfast, but after that meal she divided her time into regular portions, and each hour had its allotted task….[detailed account of prayer and task routine]…this routine sufficed for her; and nothing annoyed her so much as the occurence of any incident which forced her to vary its clockwork regularity (Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, 298).

This description may as well be describing one of us, during certain days of Christmas past, when we were iron-fistedly clutching at our pre-Christmas Rule of Life, snarling inwardly (& sometimes outwardly), “Don’t touch it! Don’t disturb my plans! They’re my precious...” (Not a good look…) We were not heeding Lewis’ advice to a female correspondent:

Each must do his duty “in the state of life to which God has called him.” Remember that a belief in the virtues of doing for doing’s sake is characteristically feminine, characteristically American, and characteristically modern: so that three veils may divide you from the correct view! There can be an intemperance in work just as in drink. What feels like zeal may be only fidgets or even the flattering of one’s self-importance. As MacDonald says, "In holy things may be unholy greed.” And by doing what “one’s station and its duties” does not demand, one can make oneself less fit for the duties it does demand and so commit some injustice. Just you give Mary a little chance as well as Martha!

(C.S. Lewis, Letters to an American Lady)

And while C.S. Lewis notes that women are particularly prone to "intemperance in work," another of Jane Eyre's cousins, St. John Rivers, is a masculine example of this same fault.

“I trust that when the first flush of vivacity is over, you will look a little higher than domestic endearments and household joys.”

“The best things the world has!” I interrupted.

“No, Jane, no: this world is not the scene of fruition; do not attempt to make it so: nor of rest; do not turn slothful.”

“I mean, on the contrary, to be busy.”

“Jane, I excuse you for the present: two months’ grace I allow you for the full enjoyment of your new position, and for pleasing yourself with this late-found charm of relationship; but then, I hope you will begin to look beyond Moor House and Morton, and sisterly society, and the selfish calm and sensual comfort of civilized affluence. I hope your energies will then once more trouble you with their strength.”

I looked at him with surprise. “St. John,” I said, “I think you are almost wicked to talk so. I am disposed to be as content as a queen, and you try to stir me up to restlessness! To what end?”

“...try to restrain the disproportionate fervour with which you throw yourself into commonplace home pleasures” (Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, 290).

Apologies to St. John, but we fully intend to suggest that we should throw ourselves into “commonplace home pleasures,” even for two months time, and be occupied in the best, and most non-slothful of ways. We will not forget that “domestic endearments and household joys” are an excellent place to spend our “energies” and “strength.”

But before we leave these literary examples of acedia-plagued souls, it is perhaps well to return to the opposite side of acedia (just so we don’t forget that we are, in fact, trying to walk a narrow path here.) In “Revisiting Lazy Murder,” we discussed Dian de Momerie, the wealthy and aristocratic drug addict who “has it all” in Dorothy Sayers’ Murder Must Advertise. On the surface, characters like Dian and Eliza/St. John couldn’t be more different (indeed all parties concerned would want to be considered unalike). However, they suffer from the same peskily-joy-stealing vice. Recall Sayers’ definition of acedia:

The sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, [and] finds purpose in nothing.

(“The other Six Deadly Sins” in Creed or Chaos?)

And as Sayers further notes, acedia can “dissemble itself under cover of a whiffling activity of body.” Such activity is aided and abetted by the other deadly sins who “hasten to provide a cloak for Sloth.” Gluttony “offers [Dian] a whirl of dancing, dining, sports, and dashing very fast from place to place” while Lust provides her with a “round of dreary promiscuity that passes for bodily vigour.”

Yet, “these are all disguises” for the “empty heart and the empty brain and the empty soul” of Dian. 

The holidays are an opportunity for genuine richness, but liable to be made into an excuse for all the Scrooge-like strictures of Jane Eyre’s cousins, or all the hedonistic follies of Sayer’s Dian.

Thus, we must keep ourselves from both over-work and misguided-play. For an example of this balance, let us look to Dian’s foil, Lord Peter Wimsey.

Leisure in a literary Mary

Like Dian and Eliza, Wimsey is a wealthy aristocrat. He is the second son of the Duke of Denver, which means that Lord Peter has absolutely no right to (or responsibility for) the title and estate that his elder brother alone inherits. Yet, his family’s wealth and social influence grant him the ability to do more or less whatever he wants. The only thing he really can’t do is pick a profession; it simply isn’t done. 

In such circumstances, Lord Peter could easily fall into the trap of acedia, as either a lazy, self-indulgent hedonist, or as a busy, thrill-seeking hedonist, like Dian. However, Lord Peter pursues the golden mean of virtue (that narrow path with the two chasms on either hand) balancing fruitful labor with refreshing leisure, thus effectively avoiding acedia.

Rather than Dian’s “whiffling” activity of body, or Eliza’s intemperate and self-important “work,” Lord Peter pursues a useful and other-oriented vocation: detective work. Like the most famous of all detectives, Sherlock Holmes, Lord Peter Wimsey enjoys the “puzzle” element of detective work. Like Holmes, he takes the moral and social questions, which such work entails, seriously. However, unlike Sherlock Holmes, who struggles to find much stimulation or enjoyment in activities outside of his work, Lord Peter does not see leisure as a sort of purgatorial punishment. Quite the opposite. Rather, the discovery of fruitful and meaningful work strengthens Lord Peter to enjoy activities and interests outside of said work in right proportion. He does not need recourse to the drugs of bored acedics like Dian de Momerie, and (arguably) Sherlock Holmes, in between “jobs.” 

Educated at Eton and Balliol College Oxford, Lord Peter is a lover of literature, as evidenced by the way his dialogue is littered with literary references. He is an avid collector of rare manuscripts, including works of Dante. He is a skilled piano player, a lover of classical music (particularly Bach) and certainly knows how to enjoy both good food and good drink, though neither to excess (as evidenced by his athletic feats in Murder Must Advertise). 

At Oxford, he played cricket, and so enjoys it that he nearly blows his cover in Murder Must Advertise, when he reveals his incredible talent in the aforementioned-sport during an investigation. Clearly, he is not gripping his Rule of Life too tightly.

During the course of investigations, he is able to find moments of leisure and accept leisurely interruptions, whether it’s relishing a ride in his iconic Daimler, or spending time with his niece and nephew while consulting his police officer brother-in-law about an investigation. Indeed, there are times when his love of leisurely activities is what leads him to close the case, as in The Nine Tailors.

Lord Peter is an example of the landed gentry at its best, an example of what the removal of well-educated people from the hamster-wheel of the work-a-day world was meant to create space for. Effectively, Lord Peter is able to make all work leisure.

And this is a good thing.

Let us explain, for it is high time we defined leisure.

Leisure: the antidote to acedia

Leisure is not laziness. (That would be acedia.)

In his book, Leisure the Basis of Culture, Josef Pieper defines a man riddled with acedia as a man who “does not want to be as God wants him to be” (44).

Instead, leisure is:

Man’s happy and cheerful affirmation of his own being, his acquiescence in the world and in God—which is to say love. Love that certainly brings a particular freshness and readiness to work along with it, but that no one with the least experience could conceivably confuse with the tense activity of the fanatical “worker” (Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, 45).

“The tense activity of the fanatical worker…” That surely describes the mood in which we have too often conducted our daily duties. (Not a good look…)

Perhaps leisure has always been hard to cultivate, perhaps its part of concupescence, but let’s examine what makes it tricky to practice in today’s world.3

Leisure, from [the point of view of a utilitarian society, which believes all actions should be useful], appears as something wholly fortuitous and strange, without rhyme or reason, and, morally speaking, unseemly: another word for laziness, idleness, sloth.

At the zenith of the Middle Ages, on the contrary, it was held that sloth and restlessness, “liesurelessness”, the incapacity to enjoy leisure, were all closely connected; sloth was held to be the source of restlessness, and the ultimate cause of “work for work’s sake” (Josef Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, 43).

Leisure got a bad name recently.4 Leisure was rebranded. Sitting was christened a sin.

Sloth [acedia] is not the opposite of industry, as late-stage capitalism would have it. Indeed sloth and industry may get along quite well together, as a glance at an assembly line of a harried bureaucrat’s desk may reveal. As Dante presents it, sloth is a lukewarmness of love, and its spiritual haze is opposed not so much to labor as to play and the joy of play.
(Anthony Esolen, footnote to Purgatorio 18).

Leisure is play, and the joy of play. Leisure is love, not lukewarm, but burning.

Who would guess, unless he were expressly told so, that Aquinas regarded acedia as a sin against the third commandment? He was in fact so far from considering idleness as the opposite of the ethos of work that he simply interprets it as an offense against the commandment in which we are called upon to have “the peace of the mind in God” (Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, 45).

Did you catch that? There was a rather good connection made by Pieper just then. Leisure upholds the third commandment. Leisure is an engagement in the “peace of the mind in God,” it is related to the seventh day of creation, to the sabbath, to rest, to recreation, to re-creation, to keeping holy the Lord’s Day.

Not an idle commandment— sabbath rest. It’s one that Moses staked his whole reputation and life upon.

And what is the main purpose of the Lord’s day? Is it to sit? Yes? To remember? Yes, deeply yes. But primarily, what is the purpose for the sabbath? Worship.

For what purpose did Moses demand that the Israelites be set free from endless work in Egypt? Was it to be able to do what they wished? To be their own masters?

No, nothing so trivial as that.

It was to worship.

And you shall say to him, “Let my people go, that they may serve me.”

Exodus 7:16

Compare the movement in the above image of Moses receiving the written tablets of the law, with the movement in the following two paintings.5

Worship. A state of active stillness. A placing of oneself in God’s presence. A shout of praise and thanksgiving. A striking of one’s breast with, “Mea Culpa.” A standing, kneeling, walking, moving action in which one acknowledges that I am not all that is, that I AM is all that is. Worship. Where we set aside our to-do list, and do something that can never quite be belittled into a line on a to-do list. Worship. An action that takes us out of Time, while firmly grounding us in this very moment. Worship. Something that we did not create, but which we were made for. Something which re-creates us.

Culture depends for its very existence on leisure, and leisure, in its turn, is not possible unless it has a durable and consequently living link with the cultus6, with divine worship (Pieper, Leisure the Basis of Culture, 15).

Leisure is admitting that there is more here than what is here. That this world is not everything. And therefore, it is not right and just for man to use all his time on tasks which are merely material. There is a part of Man that is other. That is immaterial.

In the former essay, we included a passage describing those souls in Inferno who frittered life away through acedia, and are now wind-whipped around for eternity. Compare that former scene to this passage from Purgatorio, where the souls who mourned their lack of leisure in life, are now being purged of acedia by racing to the high altar. Notice that Dante compares their race to a festive celebration of Bacchus, the god of wine. This living of leisure, my friends, can and should be quite joyous indeed:

And as the Theban rivers used to see
a rage of dust along their banks at night
when revelers called on Bacchus in their need,
So did they swing their paces like a scythe,
those souls hard-spurred, as far as I could tell,
galloping for good will and righteous love.
Straightaway past us on the ring they swept,
for that great throng of spirits ever raced,
and the front-runners shouted as they wept,
"Mary ran to the hill country in haste!”
…
"Come on, come on, don’t let time slip away
for lukewarm love!” cried those who ran nearby.
"Zeal in well-doing makes grace green again!”
…
"So full of ardent will to move are we,
we cannot rest—pardon us, then, and don’t
mistake our duty for discourtesy.”
(Dante, Purgatorio 18. 91-100, 103-105, 115-117)

How to Live Leisure

So my friends, have fun! Throw yourself into this season of preparation with prayer and awe for the God-made-Man. And also, remember that that God who became Man became a baby, a giggling, hungry, wiggly-toed bundle of joy.

Go worship, and bring the heart of worship into your home by remembering that “all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.”

Go be merry.

Three thoughts:

• Make space for free time, then allow activities to enter into this space, always seeking to maintain an interior state of peace and joy.

  • Possible affirmation: “The goal isn’t to make cookies [insert any other activity here], the goal is peace and joy.”

• Think of those activities which genuinely give you and yours a sense of rest/peace/relaxation, and make/plan time for those activities

  • These can be “active” things (like hosting, hiking, Christmas parades, crafts, listening to quality music, reading, etc.)

  • This may mean crossing-off merely “okay” opportunities which would create busyness and harried hurriedness. Ask yourself: “Is this activity deliberately chosen or is it merely a product of restless, dissatisfaction, or ‘trying to do all the things?’” (Lord Peter Wimsey as crime solver and book collector is as “active” as Dian but he is not busy or unhappy the way Dian is. Be like Peter.) 

• Cultivate times for true pleasures which are oriented towards giving us rest (mental and emotional and not merely physical) and drawing us closer to God and neighbor. 7

Two thoughts from others:

Read this:

The Commonplace

Recreation & Re-Creation 🛶

A cool little burner of mine was re-sparked last weekend on our anniversary getaway — and it wasn’t anything to do with recognizing the relational milestone that it was. It was simply because of that otherwise unimportant couple of hours we spent at a coffee shop watercoloring…

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a year ago · 53 likes · 13 comments · Tsh Oxenreider

And read this:

Go in Peace & Joy to spread Peace & Joy

Acedia has two opposing sides: lackluster dreary-weariness like the pout pout fish, and harried, frenzied, strict-fisted busyness like pre-ghost Scrooge.

But Leisure, my friends, has a deeply unified dual nature, like our Lord Himself. It is a state of deeply abiding rest, and a shout of exuberant joy. It is the willingness to submit oneself (body and soul) to the liturgical forms of the rite of worship, and the spontaneous acceptance of a game of tag with one’s nieces and nephews. (An excellent look…)

It is allowing oneself to be silly, and then making oneself be solemn.

The customers were all so hurried and so eager in the hopeful promise of the day, that they tumbled up against each other at the door, crashing their wicker baskets wildly, and left their purchases upon the counter, and came running back to fetch them, and committed hundreds of the like mistakes, in the best humor possible…But soon the steeples called good people all to church and chapel, and away they came, flocking through the streets in their best clothes, and with their gayest faces. (Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol, 65).

May we go forth to go to church. And then, understanding that most of our lives are spent outside of worship proper, that is, outside of the church sanctuary and in our homes, may we bring the adoration of the Christ Child into our hearts, enthrone Him there, and always find times to recur to Him, even in the midst of “much serving.”

Let us hear Christ’s words. Let us not be “anxious and troubled,” but instead as we bring worship with us, may we also bring its heart: sacrifice.

There are times when we do not want to bake anymore, or talk anymore, or join in a toast anymore. But these are but little sacrifices which we can make on the altar of love. These are but little, mighty gifts, which we can bring to the stable.

May we, then, go in peace to give thanks and to sacrifice always with a spirit of freely-given happiness.

This Christmas, let us love the inexplainable. Let us be a child again. Let us revel in the wonder of things unknown. Let us do what is unnecessary and has no purpose. Let us bring calm in the midst of busyness and make it joy. These things, surely, are mini-metanoia moments, and therefore, surely, are true Adventian preparations.

Let us not remove the veil this Christmas. But instead, let us leave untouched and unreasoned-out what is great and glorious and good and beautiful to behold. Let us be filled with joy over the greatness of little things.

Go my friends, to sit and to be busy. To rest and to be merry.

For the joy of the Lord is a gift within, and an awe for all things without.

And…

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In Case You Missed It:

• A Christmas Carol Stave 4 Revisited

• A Christmas Carol Stave 3 Revisited

• A Reading Revisited Bookish Gift Guide

• Reading Revisited ep. 27: Favorite Advent Reads

What We’re Reading Now:

December

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

January

Othello by William Shakespeare

February

Out of the Silent Planet AND Perelandra by C.S. Lewis

A Few Reminders:

If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us! If you have started a group and we don’t know about it, please let us know so we can get you some resources to help you out!

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, voice recordings of the Read Along Guides and Essays, and we are working on (printable) bookmarks for each book.

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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Happy All Saints Day, readers! , and I are taking a slight detour from regularly scheduled literary programming to share with you some of our best-loved books by and about our favorite saints on this high holy day!

• St. Francis by G.K. Chesterton

• Joan of Arc by Mark Twain

• Catherine of Siena by Sigrid Undset

• St. Thomas Aquinas by G. K. Chesterton

• Murder in the Cathedral by T.S. Eliot

• Edmund Campion: A Life by Evelyn Waugh

• Summa of the Summa by Peter Kreeft

• John Henry Newman by Ian Ker

• Witness to Hope: The Biography of John Paul II by George Weigel

Books By Saints:

• The Rule of St. Benedict

• The Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena

• The Way of the Cross by St. Alphonsus de Ligouri

• True Devotion to the Blessed Virgin by St. Louis de Monfort

• Introduction to the Devout Life by St. Francis de Sales

• Meditations on Mary, Our Mother by St. John Henry Newman

• A Letter Addressed to Rev. E.B. Pusey by St. John Henry Newman

• Loss and Gain by St. John Henry Newman

• The Story of a Soul by St. Therese of Lisieux

• The World’s First Love: Mary, Mother of God by Venerable Fulton Sheen

• Crossing the Threshold of Hope by St. John Paul II

• The Way by St. Josemaria Escriva

• He Leadeth Me by Servant of God Walter J. Ciszek

Saint Books for Children

• Saint George and the Dragon by Margaret Hodges

• Patrick: Patron Saint of Ireland by Tomie de Paola

• Brother Francis of Assisi by Tomie de Paola

• A Boy Who Became Pope: The Story of Saint John Paul II by Fabiola Garza

• Stories of the Saints: Bold and Inspiring Tales of Adventure, Grace, and Courage by Carey Wallace

• Saintly Creatures: 14 Tales of Animals and Their Holy Companions by Alexi Sargeant

• Princesses of Heaven: The Flowers by Fabiola Garza

• Saintly Rhymes for Modern Times by Meghan Bausch

• Saints for Boys: A First Book for Little Catholic Boys

• Saints for Girls: A First Book for Little Catholic Girls

In Case You Missed It:

• Jayber Crow Part 1

• Reading Revisited ep. 23: Cayce Bernhardt’s Bookish Bio

• Theology of the Body & Jane Eyre

• Jayber Crow Introduction and Schedule

What We’re Reading Now:

November

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

December

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

January

Othello by William Shakespeare

A Few Reminders:

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

Reading Revisited 24-25 List

Previous Lists

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

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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!

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Who we are is body and soul.

We’re not souls trapped in bodies. Nor are we soulless bodies. What we do to our bodies, affects our souls. What we do to our souls, affects our bodies. This, in my words, is the theology of the body.1

And this Jane Eyre knows in her very bones.

St. John’s proposal - divorce of soul & body

“I want a wife: the sole helpmeet I can influence efficiently in life, and retain absolutely till death.”

I shuddered as he spoke: I felt his influence in my marrow—his hold on my limbs.

“Seek elsewhere than in me, St. John: seek one fitted to you.”

“One fitted to my purpose, you mean—fitted to my vocation. Again I tell you it is not the insignificant private individual—the mere man, with the man’s selfish senses—I wish to mate: it is the missionary.”

“And I will give the missionary my energies—it is all he wants—but not myself: that would be only adding the husk and shell to the kernel. For them he has no use: I retain them” (Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre, 508).

Jane, though poor, obscure, plain, and little, nevertheless (and this is perhaps what causes readers to love her) retains a powerful respect for her worth, which fully includes her body.

And even as she uses denigrating (and rather gnostic) terms like “husk” and “shell” in reference to her corporality, underlying these words is a fervor which belies the insignificance which her terms seem to suggest. Jane retains the firm conviction that the gift of her body is not meaningless. A soundly catechized person of Lowood School2 she may be, and she cannot shake the terms through which she has learned to view the flesh and the sprit, but there’s this depth within Jane that knows she is all of herself, not just her spirit.3

I like to imagine Charlotte sitting down with JPII, hearing his theology of the body, and sighing with satisfaction, “Ah, here it is, this reconciles my mind and my heart. I was right to not toss my heroine’s body to one who deemed it valueless.”

Therefore, though Jane calls her body a mere “husk” and “shell,” I believe she would actually whole-heartedly agree with Chapman:

One of the most essential truths that the theology of the body helped me understand was that my body was not a husk, a shell, or a carrying case for my soul…Rather, it was the real me.(Chapman, The Catholic Table, 51-2).

Jane cannot give the “husk” of herself to someone who does not and will not love her, because she just knows that she knows that she knows that her body is her.

Oh! it would never do! As his curate, his comrade, all would be right…accommodate quietly to his masterhood; smile undisturbed at his ineradicable ambition; discriminate the Christian from the man: profoundly esteem the one, and freely forgive the other. I should suffer often, no doubt, attached to him only in this capacity: my body would be under rather a stringent yoke, but my heart and mind would be free (510).

And here she is merging terms, uniting, perhaps without trying or even really wanting to, these ideas of body and soul. If Jane’s body is given in missionary work but not given to St. John in the marital embrace, her heart and mind remain ungiven as well. Even if, she holds, she pours her physical energies out for him completely, if she does not physically unite with him, she will retain herself, her mind, her heart, her soul. But, if she gives him her body, she gives him herself.

But as his wife—at his side always, and always restrained, and always checked—forced to keep the fire of my nature continually low, to compel it to burn inwardly and never utter a cry, though the imprisoned flame consumed vital after vital—this would be unendurable.

“St. John!” I exclaimed, when I had got so far in my meditation.

“Well?” he answered icily.

“I repeat I freely consent to go with you as your fellow-missionary, but not as your wife; I cannot marry you and become part of you” (510).

Rochester’s (2nd) proposal - marriage of soul & body

Rochester, unlike St. John, deeply desires all of Jane - body and soul.4

When she comes to him, in his blindness, he hears her voice but must have her physical touch to confirm she is there.

“And where is the speaker? Is it only the voice? Oh! I cannot see, but I must feel, or my heart will stop and my brain burst. Whatever—whoever you are—be perceptible to the touch or I cannot live!” (542)

Would St. John have responded similarly in similar circumstances? I don’t believe so. I have this hunch that if St. John were blind and Jane spoke to him, he would respond, coldly and unmoved, requiring no physical touch, no proof that she was with him. The body, for St. John, is no external sign of an internal reality. Or, if it is, if he retains the sacramental world view to some extent, it is only in a utilitarian way, only as a means to the end of owning the spirit.

Rochester, on the other hand, knows that Jane is her body, and he wants both her body and soul, for their own sakes. He longs for Jane’s body as he longs for her soul.

“Is it Jane? What is it? This is her shape—this her size—”

“And this is her voice,” I added. “She is all here: her heart, too. God bless you sir! I am glad to be near you again.” (542)

She is all here. Body and soul. All of me is me. Including my little hands and my diminutive stature. This is Jane.

Our bodies make us known in the world.

Before we leave these thoughts too-tied-up-in-a-bow, I’m going to pull the rug out from under my own feet, and question the entire premise of this essay: is it true? do our bodies make us known to the world?

Or, do they hide us?

To what am I referring?

I’m referring to those moments when a person looks in the mirror, and does not recognize who they see.

Perhaps because of age: “Is that really my face?” Perhaps because of puberty: “Am I really so blemished?” Perhaps because of injury: “Am I so broken?” Perhaps because of pregnancy: “Am I really so bloated? So depressed? So not-fun?”

What do we do when because our exterior is poor, obscure, plain, or little, we are treated (or we treat ourselves) as if we do not possess a priceless, worthy-of-recognition, beautiful, and immense soul?

There is a way in which my body expresses exactly who I am.

But there’s also this way in which sometimes my body does not at all seem to fit my interior state.

Thinking about fairy tales…what do we do with the fact that there are so many beautiful people who are nevertheless bad or empty or cruel? (E.g. Jane Eyre’s cousin Georgiana; Rochester’s “fiancé” Blanche Ingram; the beautiful but wicked queens in fairy tales.)

Why doesn’t beauty follow virtue?

And can it? Like in Beauty and the Beast, if someone is first loved, can they be made lovable?5

One of the pleasures of a Fairy Tale, is that the conclusion often corrects what this fallen world has mixed up. By the end the beautiful witch, who has always been ugly on the inside, is revealed for the warped person she is.

Fairy Tales seek to set right what often still feels muddled in this world.

It gives one hope that, in the end, the exterior will be made to reveal the interior.6

The body expresses the person to himself

But, there are also times when —instead of the exterior needing to change to match the interior—the exterior is meant to teach us about our interior. When the body is being given the task of revealing to ourself what we did not yet know about ourselves. When who we are on the outside is meant to reveal to us who we are being asked to be.7

Example: I come from a tall family. There are people within my family who would have preferred to be quiet and unobtrusive, but could not be. I’ve watched them learn from their own bodies, and wrestle with the fact that they were being called to grow bigger than they wished to be. I watched them be called out of themselves, to be leaders where they would have rather followed. I watched those I love be tempted to forgo the call and instead slump within their posture —seeking to shed this mortal coil which they see as a bigger request than they wished to be called to. But, in their strong moments, I have watched them prayerfully ask God to reveal to themselves why He made them in this body, why He made them unable to be unnoticeable, why He made them literally have to look down on most people when they would have preferred looking up from an obviously humble stature. I’ve watched them pray for their spirit to be raised to the level of their bone structure.

In this world, it is both a beautiful and challenging truth that our bodies reveal who we are.

I retain them.

In time, through time, with time, because of time, I trust that as my body and soul work together, they will, like a fairy tale, perfectly mold themselves into one, unified person, with the exterior fulling revealing the interior, and the interior fully matching the exterior.

Beauty and wisdom, loveliness and age, should, as in a George MacDonald grandmother, mature together. Stimpson confirms this fairy tale hope:

Youth can hide darkness for a while, but by a certain age, almost everyone has the face they deserve (Stimpson, 54).

I trust that one day I will be truly known and that I will truly know those around me.

Our bodies don’t just communicate what we think and feel in the moment, though. They also communicate what we’ve thought and felt in the past. They communicate what we’ve experienced. They tell the story of us.

Laugh lines testify to late nights swapping stories with friends. Stretch marks recall babies brought into the world. Soft curves speak of a love for cheese and wine (Stimpson, 54).

And, what is more, I trust that my vision of what is true, good, and beautiful will be redeemed. I trust that I will see beauty not through the lens of the latest fad, but that my vision will be aligned to the true internal and external realities, seeing beauty where there is virtue.8

The bodies of those who’ve loved hard, who’ve given themselves away for Christ and for others, grow more beautiful, not less, with the passing of time.

St. Teresa of Calcutta bears witness to that. Everyone who met that tiny, wrinkled old woman walked away from their encounter with her saying she was the most beautiful woman they’d ever met. Her love for God and man was written on her face. In her eyes, they saw mercy. In her hands, they saw compassion. In her shoulders, stooped and bent, they saw humility. Her virtue manifested itself in her every look and action. That didn’t just make her soul beautiful. It made her body beautiful. It caused people to see her as lovely. They liked to look upon her.

Again, the body expresses the person. It can’t do otherwise (Stimpson, 54).

Therefore, with Jane, I say: I retain them. I retain my body and its scars. I will not treat this “husk” as a mere husk. I will give it, like Jane, deeply and thoroughly and completely in marriage and love, to my family, trusting in that old Christian paradox that only in giving it away rightly will I regain and retain it fully.

Therefore, let us be like Jane. Let us love deeply, body and soul, and not be tempted by either the too-bodily first proposal of Rochester, nor the too-spiritual proposal of St. John, but instead marry body and soul into one humble and ordinary vocation, so that, of us too, it will be said, “They liked to look upon her.”

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In Case You Missed It:

• Jayber Crow Introduction and Schedule

• Reading Revisited ep. 22: Introducing Jayber Crow

• Reading in Community

• Reading Revisited ep. 21: Book Swap #2 Announcement

What We’re Reading Now

November

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

December

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

January

Othello by William Shakespeare

A Few Reminders:

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

Reading Revisited 24-25 List

Previous Lists

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!

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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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About six years ago I reached out to the leader of my parish’s Moms Group and said, “we should start a literature book club.”

To which she answered, “yes, you really should!”

I did not feel qualified to be in charge of this and a lot of moms said they had no extra time to read or meet (we already had twice monthly meetings to discuss spiritual books). Over the years this seed of an idea and its implementation has led to what you now know as Reading Revisited.

But why? Why is a book club so important? That is what I have been thinking about over the last few weeks (and months and years).

(I could write a whole essay (or book) on why reading is important or why community is important. For the sake of this essay I will be talking about the combination and assume that we can all agree with the premise that reading and community are both essential.)

Peer Pressure

Most of us want to read more and so many of us are suffering from the defects in our education (or wanting to continue a great one, for the blessed few), but we are all so busy. I have so many books on my TBR (to be read) pile/shelves, but motherhood is exhausting, I need to plan for the children’s education, there are a lot of good TV shows to watch, my phone has endless people to talk to and things to scroll through. Some of those are better reasons than others, but either way, how do I resolve to read?

I always enjoy reading when I do it, but it can be difficult to put aside all the other needs/wants in my life (and my children’s) to spend time with a book each day. The to do list is never done so maybe I shouldn’t read. Enter book club!

Do I like hanging out with my friends? Check!
Do I like getting out of the house (especially at kid bedtime)? Check!
Do I like to talk? Obviously…
Do I want to be able to fully contribute to the conversation? Yup!

Okay, well then I better read the book. Decision made…I am a reader even when I am busy, sick, or stressed by the endless to do list because I am in a book club.

(Caveat: there are seasons where even all of this peer pressure isn’t enough and the books won’t be read that month or months…that is okay, please still go to book club and enjoy the community!)

Eliminating Decision Fatigue

Speaking of decisions…Do you ever finish a book and not know what to read next? Or have too many options? Or have been burned by your last few books?

Enter book club.

A good book club can pick your next book for you. This could be in the form of a formal book club, a read along group on Substack, or a Podcast book club. All of these avenues help me to know what to read next and to persevere when I don’t feel like finishing a certain book (even if it is truly worth my attention).

These groups also help me to not get too stuck in choosing the perfect book for the season, my mood, or my current thoughts. Sometimes the exact book you need at a certain time isn’t the book you would have chosen for yourself. As Shakespeare said (and She’s the Man), “some need great books thrust upon them.”1

People to Chat About Books With

When I first started reading in earnest I very quickly wanted to talk about everything I was reading. There is something about awakening the life of the mind that begs to be talked about. How can you read a great (or even a good) book and not want to bring it into everyday conversation.

First, I tried my husband. He went to a Classical Christian school and had a great education and had read a lot of the books. So we had some great conversations, but then sometimes he wanted to actually read his own book and not just hear quotes from mine. Sometimes he hadn’t read the book I was reading and we couldn’t have as deep of a conversation as I would have liked.

Then I tried friends, I had a few that actually read. Those could be fun conversations, but they were contingent on those friends having read the book I wanted to talk about. And then even if they had read the book we usually weren’t reading the same books at the same time. So that definitely hindered the conversations from going as deep as I would have hoped.

Then, finally, I found out about Book Club Podcasts.2 This was my dream come true. There are podcasts that exist simply to read books “together” and then to talk about it. What could be better? Here was the rub though: I couldn’t talk back to my podcast. Sometimes I had ideas to add that it seemed like the hosts had missed. Other times I disagreed with their interpretation of my favorite book (ahem, Brideshead Revisited) and needed to tell them what I thought.

That was when I finally started a book club. Now my friends and I could be reading the same books at the same time and then have a few hours each month set aside to chat about the book we’d all just read. It is truly my favorite day of the month!

“Buy In”

I have been a part of multiple moms/ladies groups in the course of my adult life and one of the events we have always tried to have are ladies nights out. Where we can get out for a social gathering in the evening without kids and chat and have fun. These are always very fun, but planning them comes with a significant draw back: it is hard to get people to show up. Everyone wants to. A lot of people even plan to. But when push comes to shove family needs trump social engagements.

However, I have not found this to be the case (as much) with Book Club. I call this the “buy in” theory. When there is an assignment (such as reading a whole book) and people complete it, they feel more pressure to come to the meeting. It seems a little bit like the sunk cost fallacy. If you’ve already read the book it would feel much sadder to miss the meeting. Not that books are really sunk costs, they are worth reading even if you can’t make the meeting. But, I find it to be a helpful paradigm.

I don’t say this to encourage manipulating people to show up to events, but we all know that community and friendships are important. So getting people to show up encourages community to be formed and sustained.

As I learned in an old movie, “If you assign a book, they will come.”3

Deeper Conversations

Alright, so far we have mostly focused on how to read and get people to the meetings. Now let’s dig a little deeper.

When we read books together each month we are set up to have much deeper conversations than the normal small talk that is bound to happen in everyday encounters. By default we tend to talk about the weather and life’s various complaints long before we delve into the deeper issues that can start a real friendship.

When we read a book together we automatically have a topic of conversation that can draw us out of our ordinary lives. This serves us in two ways. First we actually have an assigned topic of conversation that month: the book. And secondly, we have all of the ideas in the book to then bring our conversation to a higher plane. This doesn’t mean that we don’t talk about our lives. We actually usually do talk about our personal lives a decent amount. It simply gives us a higher starting point to then come back down and reexamine our own choices and relationships.

Something for the Introverts and the Extroverts

Reading by definition is something one must do alone. Even if you have a family of readers that can all sit around the fire reading their own book, each person is still in their own mind and can only engage with the others by interrupting their reading. Therefore I would consider reading an intrinsically introverted activity. Which isn’t to say extroverts won’t do it, but it will not give them the external stimulation they crave and receive energy from.4

(I suppose there is an exception here for reading aloud as a group, but even then everyone is still engrossed in the story together and there must be a separate time for discussion of the book.)

I have heard from a lot of extroverts that it is hard to decide to sit down with a book when they have any other option of human interaction available. I also know as an introvert5 that it can be tempting to always stay inside of a book and my own head far too often.

I think there is something beautiful about a book club that takes what is an introverted activity and then brings it into an extroverted situation. It seems like the books are begging to be read and then subsequently begging to be talked about. I like to think that the book club gives encouragement to whatever part of the introversion/extroversion scale you find yourself on. The extroverts must sit down with the book and the introverts must get out of the book to interact with other people and the ideas they encountered there.

New Insights

I always think that the way I read is the way that everyone reads; that what I get out of a book is what everyone else will get too. Oh how wrong I have been! I am surprised again and again at how different people have different thoughts in response to what we have all collectively read. Sometimes it is simply who liked or disliked a certain book, but it goes much deeper than that. The insights that other people bring to my attention are constantly expanding my understanding of the work itself and the world at large.

But it doesn’t stop there. The new insights aren’t just adding new thoughts to my thoughts, they actually end up sparking new thoughts in me (and in others in the group as well). The growth of ideas is not linear, but exponential.

So whatever I came to book club prepared to talk about may get said, but I leave having said things I had never connected on my own. Because I have my in person book club, virtual book club, and we have a podcast discussion on each book, I leave each one of those conversations with my mind having been opened to new ideas and having new thoughts about a book I thought I had already completed thinking about.

This sharing and sparking of new ideas also changes with each person added to the group. A new book club member is not simply another body in the room, but a whole person who has their own perspective, ideas, and way of reading that can change the whole tenor of the conversation. The same is also true of anyone being subtracted from the group. When a faithful book club member can’t make it to the meeting that month or hasn’t been able to read the book I am sad, not simply to not see that friend (which, truly I am), but also because we are losing that particular person’s thoughts, and the conversation is bound to change because of that.

(All the caveats to say that it is okay to get busy and not read one month, but never feel like your presence and voice don’t matter in your book club!)

Shared Connections

Over time these ideas become shared connections between the whole group. The more of us that read each book the more of us that can reference a character, scene, or quote and share mutual understanding. I am always tempted to reference books I have read to a group of people who have never read said book.6 Even if my explanation of the reference is adequate, the comparison usually falls flat or is lost in the time took for the set up.

I don’t say this to discourage anyone from referencing ideas in books. Sometimes it has the beautiful effect of encouraging someone to read the book, which is the ultimate goal of book chat. But, it can be discouraging to have ideas and want to express them and feel like you are always stuck explaining the backstory instead of exploring the new thoughts you have.

This is where a long term book club comes in. Each book read by the group is another point of connection between the group. And not only one point, but countless points. It is not only the book as a whole, but every character, scene, setting, idea, and quote that we keep with us as a group. This sharing of ideas creates a bond and an ease of communication.

I have had countless times where I was at the park with a friend watching our kids play and trying to have a deep conversation amidst kid interruptions, when we have both been able to reference something from a shared book and both come away with a deeper understanding of the book referenced, but also of the world, our life, the faith, or other people. This becomes infinitely easier when the books are shared over years. The connections simply grow and grow and the conversations can get deeper and deeper. Instead of prefacing every reference with the question, “Have you read such and such?” We can simply make the reference and keep the conversation going.

This also benefits the actual book club meetings because we have more and more books to compare our current book club book to. This adds to the conversation and deepens our knowledge of the literary tradition (and we don’t have to be the only one making the connections because there are so many other people whose ideas can be inspired by each others).

New Friends

Out of these shared connections over time comes genuine friendship. A friendship that goes so much deeper than the general airing of grievances or numbering poopy diapers (is that too specific? Is it only me?).

“Friendship arises out of mere Companionship when two or more of the companions discover that they have in common some insight or interest or even taste which the others do not share and which, till that moment, each believed to be his own unique treasure (or burden). The typical expression of opening Friendship would be something like, "What? You too? I thought I was the only one."

-C.S. Lewis (The Four Loves)

It is so much easier and likely to find these friendships when as a community we have all of the shared connections the books provide. It can be hard to dive deep into conversations in the busy lives we all lead, but the books help us get there faster. We can have those “what? you too?” moments so much more often when we are (at least) monthly having deep literary conversations.

From those friendship sparking moments we can then form genuine friendships that grow outside of the book club and even aside from the books (but I promise the books will keep coming up). Most of my closest friends are in my in person book club(s) and it is such a lovely added benefit to our friendship that we are reading together each month.

A Plug for In Person Community

We, at Reading Revisited, have a few ways you can engage in the bookish goodness. I picture this as a pyramid. All of these levels are good, but they get better and more rewarding the further in you go.

On the first level are the people who Substack followers and listen to the podcast for some extra book chat in their lives. In that level you get the bookish peer pressure.

The next level are what I am calling the read alongers, people who follow along with the book club reads. They may even comment and interact on the Substack or even our Slack page. On this level you get the bookish peer pressure, eliminating decision fatigue, and even a bit of people to talk to about the books (to a limited extent).

The next level are the people in virtual book club. On this level you get *almost* everything on the list. You get the peer pressure, no decision fatigue, chatting about books, buy in, new ideas, and deeper conversations. But still you are missing out on the shared connections and new friendships.

(The internet can resolve this a bit, but it can never be the same as in person relationships with chances to interact weekly outside of official meetings).

The last level is belonging to one of our in person book clubs. Here you get everything else and also the shared connections and hopefully some new friends. Of course these relationships can develop in a virtual group to some extent, but there is nothing like seeing these people in real life, sharing food and drinks, and even meeting up outside of book club. There is also space at in person book club for one on one conversations and getting there early and staying late. Connections can be made with the books and each other, but this can also branch out into more personal conversations as well. You might even get to know each others’ families outside of book club. The friendships that have been grown out of these book clubs are such an invaluable resource in my life.

Book Club is my favorite. Everyone should have one. If you don’t already, I can only encourage you to join or start one for yourself. It is one of my most rewarding time investments I’ve made and I am so thankful that all those years ago my mom’s group leader encouraged me to get this started.

Reading Revisited Options

If you are not already a part of a book club and would like to be, we would love to have you here! We are a completely free book club that has in person and virtual options. Message us if you would like to join or start a group. Everything you need is in the footer below including our yearly book list. We hope you join us!

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In Case You Missed It:

• Reading Revisited ep. 21: Book Swap #2 Announcement

• Jane Eyre Discussion Questions (and printable PDF)

• Reading Revisited ep. 20: Our Favorite Autumn Reads

• Reading Revisited ep. 19: Walking on Water

What We’re Reading Now

October

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

November

Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

December

A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens

A Few Reminders:

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

Reading Revisited 24-25 List

Previous Lists

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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The best explanation I have read on the Introversion-Extroversion scale is from Reading People by Anne Bogel (which is not a book about people who like to read, to my deep surprise upon opening it for the first time, but about understanding different personality paradigms)

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 Again Readers,

We have made it to the final round! I am so excited that my two favorite books made it this far and can’t wait to see which one wins it all. As a quick reminder, we are rereading ONE of these books for the 25-26 Reading Revisited Year. Choose the one you want/need to read in community! Both of these books are worth your time and will generate great discussion. You have until Thursday to vote!

For logistic purposes:

• If Brideshead Revisited (300 some pages) wins it will be read in one month.

• If Kristin Lavransdatter wins, we will read it over the course of 3 months (one month per book in the series, each a bit less than 400 pages).

• We will plan the rest of the list around the book that wins.

Your vote matters! Go vote and tell your friends!

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I will announce the results next week!

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In Case You Missed It:

• Reading Revisited ep. 20: Our Favorite Autumn Reads

• Reading Revisited ep. 19: Walking on Water w/ Sarah Van Hecke

• Jane Eyre Volume 3 Revisited

• Reading Revisited ep. 18: Short Stories w/ Sarah Van Hecke

• October Commonplace

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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 Again Readers,

We have made it to Round 3! This week was a sad one for me as I had to say goodbye to two Graham Greene books that I would have LOVED to discuss with you all. We also lost A Tale of Two Cities, which is a really lovely book (but I wasn’t sad to see it go because I will always want an excuse to reread Kristin). Brideshead Revisited and Till We Have Faces ended in a tie so I let our regular book club attenders break the tie. Even the tie breaker was a nail biter! But, after much Brideshead propaganda campaigning on my part, it pulled out a win! I will call it a buzzer beater to stay in theme with the sportsball analogy we are working with.

The three of the books left are in my Top 5 and the one that is not, I still would love to reread. As you are choosing, remember: these are all great books, but you are not just choosing a book to read (or reread), but you are choosing a book to read as a group and discuss together. All of these books deserve to be reread, but some of them are better discussion books (or need more pressure to be reread and are enjoyed more with discussion).

For logistic purposes: If Hannah Coulter (200 pages or so) or Brideshead Revisited (300 some pages) wins they will be read in one month. If Anna Karenina (800 pages) wins we will give it two months. And if Kristin Lavransdatter wins, we will read it over the course of 3 months (one month per book in the series, each a bit less than 400 pages). We will plan the rest of the list around the book that wins.

Just as a reminder, we are rereading ONE of these books for the 25-26 Reading Revisited year. So, get out there and vote!

Come back next week for the FINAL TWO! We can only reread ONE of these books as a group, so choose carefully!

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• Reading Revisited ep. 18: Short Stories w/

• October Commonplace

• Jane Eyre Volume 2 Revisited

• Reading Revisited ep. 17: Commonplacing w/

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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 Again Readers,

We are back for round two of the Rereading Bracket. Last week we had to say goodbye to Villette, To Kill a Mockingbird, The Great Gatsby, Crossing to Safety, Manalive, East of Eden, Middlemarch, and Frankenstein. Some of those were harder to say goodbye to (RIP To Kill a Mockingbird and Crossing to Safety) than others (Good riddance Villette and Frankenstein) for me, but we have a lot of my favorite books left in the bracket still!

Just as a reminder, we are rereading ONE of these books for the 25-26 Reading Revisited year. So, go make your voice heard!

Come back next week for round three!

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In Case You Missed It:

• Reading Revisited ep. 17: Commonplacing w/ Elise Boratenski

• Revisiting Lazy Murder

• Jane Eyre Volume 1 Revisited

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

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Two years ago, one of those stars-aligning moments, which all of us readers long for, happened; two books which I was reading at the same time began talking to each other.

Those two books were: Murder Must Advertise (RR 2022) by Dorothy Sayers, and The Noonday Devil by Jean-Charles Nault, O.S.B.

Then, as I began to write, two more books joined the conversation: The Letters of Magdalen Montague by Eleanor Bourg Nicholson, and The Inferno by Dante (translated by Anthony Esolen).

Murder was published in 1933. Noonday in 2015 (with lots of quotes from 4th-century Evagrius). Magdalen was published in serial form in 2007-2008. And the Comedy in 1321.

Sayers was English. Nault is French. Evagrius was born in modern-day Turkey. Nicholson is American. Dante was Italian.

Y’all, the written word’s ability to speak into various times and places at once, is celestial.

So what were these books talking to each other about?

Acedia.

A vice we don’t much mention; a word rather absent from our daily lexicons.

You understand, therefore, my surprise when this archaic word put a clarifying, unifying label upon—what were before—various unconnected grumblings of my daily life.

The Noonday Devil

To begin, let’s let Nault (let Evagrius) describe acedia.

And, as you read, I invite you to insert your own vocation or job title in place of the word “monk”, and see if you don’t believe that this term isn’t identifying a scratch we’re all itching from:

The demon of acedia, also called the noonday demon (cf. Ps. 90:6 Douay-Rheims), is the most oppressive of all the demons. He attacks the monk about the fourth hour [viz. 10 A.M.] and besieges his soul until the eighth hour [2 P.M.]. First of all, he makes it appear that the sun moves slowly or not at all, and that the day seems to be fifty hours long. Then he compels the monk to look constantly towards the windows, to jump out of the cell, to watch the sun to see how far it is from the ninth hour [3 P.M.], to look this way and that lest one of the brothers…[might have the good idea of coming to distract him from the monotony of his cell!]. And further, he instils in him a dislike for the place and for his state of life itself, for manual labour, and also the idea that love has disappeared from among the brothers and there is no one to console him. And should there be someone during those days who has offended the monk, this too the demon uses to add further to his dislike (of the place). He leads him on to a desire for other places where he can easily find the wherewithal to meet his needs and pursue a trade that is easier and more productive; he adds that pleasing the Lord is not a question of being in a particular place: for scripture says that the divinity can be worshipped anywhere (cf. John 4:21-4). He joins to these suggestions the memory of his close relations and of his former life; he depicts for him the long course of his lifetime, while bringing the burdens of asceticism before his eyes; and, as the saying has it, he deploys every device in order to have the monk leave his cell and flee the stadium (The Noonday Devil, Acedia, The Unnamed Evil of Our Times, 28).

Just to be sure you’re feeling what I’m feeling, I have taken the liberty of “translating” this description into contemporary circumstances; replacing the title “monk” with “mom” (again, for full effect, please translate the passage to your own state of life).
Rendering the description of acedia thus:

The noonday demon attacks stay-at-home-moms between 10 am and 2pm. He makes it look like time isn’t moving, and the day is interminably long. He compels the mother to constantly check her phone, to see if anyone wants to talk to her and distract her with anything but what’s in front of her. Then, the noonday tempter, instils in her a dislike for where she is, her home, and for her state of life. He gives her the feeling that no good or lasting result will come of doing any of her work (toilets will just need to be cleaned again, answered emails will just bounce back in a minute, butts will always need wiping, after one kid learns to read there’s always another, ad infinitum…), causing her to believe all tasks are equally pointless to put effort towards. The noonday tempter tells her: no one really cares or sees what you do. This is also the time when, should her husband or the neighbor or the lady at church or the grocery checkout clerk have been unfortunate enough to offend her, this too the demon uses to add further to the mom’s dislike of her home and state of life. He leads her on to a desire for other places where she can easily get more recognition and find an easier and more productive life. For Scripture says God can employ His servants anywhere, does it not? Surely it doesn’t have to be here? The temptation of acedia joins to these suggestions the memory (or the social media images) of her high school or college friends, and her former life; he depicts for her the long course of her lifetime, causing her to borrow trouble from tomorrow, while bringing the burdens of the ascetic, hidden, mom life before her eyes; and, as the saying has it, he deploys every device in order to have the mother leave her home and flee the stadium.

Everyone with me now? Everybody also saying “ouch” alongside me? Anyone else ever had moments like Julian from In this House of Brede (RR 2023) when, despite having given years of one’s life to a thoughtfully discerned vocation, one is tempted to fly after flashier, more obviously-charitable work?1

Acedia in Our Daily Lives

Now that we have that vignette of acedia before us, here’s Nault to delineate the Five Principle Manifestations of Acedia:

1. Interior instability
   “The demon of acedia suggests to you ideas of leaving, the need to change your place and your way of life” (31).

2. An exaggerated concern for one’s health

3. Aversion to manual work2

4. Neglect in observing the rule
   (i.e. the “Rule of Life” or routine or schedule or daily habits or agenda which keeps one doing what one needs to be doing today)

5. General discouragement

In short, acedia is malaise. It’s lacklusterness. It’s boredom.

It’s despair at Life ever being less tedious than it currently is, unless…Unless you get up! You change everything! You go somewhere else. You break the schedule! You throw all plans to the wind!

Notice the quick and radical pendulum swing acedia takes us on? From lazy slumpiness to hurried, harried busyness.

Vice can hit us from both sides, from the two opposing extremes.

Acedia causes torpor (e.g. Netflix binging) one moment, and then flurried, unplanned, restless busyness the next (e.g. suddenly throwing the remote onto the other couch and announcing: let’s GO somewhere, let’s do something, let’s go buy something). But even in that sudden rush of momentum, acedia, the friction on the soul, remains; inevitably dragging against the energy within our impulsive busyness, until we (again) slow to a halt, (again) epically cataloguing all we don’t like: this place is too-crowded; there’s nothing here I want to buy; I’m hungry; there’s nothing here I want to eat; let’s go somewhere else…let’s do something else…let’s buy something else…

Murder Must Advertise

Now, let’s turn our star-gazing sights onto Dorothy Sayers, to see acedia manifested in fiction.

In Murder Must Advertise, one of the supporting characters is Dian, a sickeningly rich, beautiful, and bored woman. The following excerpts come from her interior thoughts while drinking, doping, dancing, and doing-bedroom-things, at a 1930’s party.

Dian de Momerie was dancing:

“My God! I’m bored…Get off my feet, you clumsy cow…Money, tons of money…but I’m bored…Can’t we do something else?…I’m sick of that tune…I’m sick of everything…he’s working up to get all mushy…suppose I’d better go through with it… (84, ellipses from the original)

And skipping half-a-dozen-or-so similar lines, the center of her monologuing thoughts is:

“…my God! how bored I am…” (83)

Then skipping another half-a-dozen similar lines, she finishes with:

“I can’t stand this any longer…black and silver…thank God! that’s over!”

Dian de Momerie, wealthy, attractive, and at a pull-out-the-stops party (probably between the hours of 10pm-2am), goes through the above monologue while doing one of the most profound and intimate actions of which a person is capable. And she’s bored.

Then Sayers steps away, zooming out from this excruciatingly hollowed-out woman to take in the wide, empty landscape of a whole society.

All over London the lights flickered in and out, calling the public to save its body and purse: SOPO SAVES SCRUBBING - NUTRAX FOR NERVES…The presses, thundering and growling, ground out the same appeals by the million: ASK YOUR GROCER - ASK YOUR DOCTOR - ASK THE MAN WHO’S TRIED IT - MOTHERS! GIVE IT TO YOUR CHILDREN - HOUSEWIVES! SAVE MONEY - HUSBANDS! INSURE YOUR LIVES - WOMEN! DO YOU REALISE? - DONT SAY SOAP, SAY SOPO! Whatever you’re doing, stop it and do something else! Whatever you’re buying, pause and buy something different. Be hectored into health and prosperity! Never let up! Never go to sleep! Never be satisfied. If once you are satisfied, all our wheels will run down. Keep going - and if you can’t Try Nutrax for Nerves! (84-5)

Advertising acedia.

In a note on the flatters of the 8th circle of Hell, Sayers says:

These, too, exploit others by playing upon their desires and fears; their especial weapon is that abuse and corruption of language which destroys communication between mind and mind. Here they are plunged in the slop and filth which they excreted upon the world. Dante did not live to see the full development of political propaganda, commercial advertisement, and sensational journalism, but he has prepared a place for them.

(The Divine Comedy 1:Hell, footnote to Canto XVIII, pgs. 185-6)

It sure makes you want to disconnect.

But also—to go back to Dian, to the person—it makes me want to run back in time to girlfriends, to roommates, to co-workers, to girls-I-only-saw-once-at-a-bar-who-were-desperately-hoping-for-someone-to-think-they-were-pretty-enough-to-be-laid, and also to my own little, wanting-to-be-loved-self, and give each of these souls a hug; or in some other such way shake the acedia from the soul.

How to take a person hollowed-out by the mantras of society—by the sales pitches of acedia— and show them/ourselves/our children that we are inherently hallowed?

How do we expose the falsehood of trying to buy something different or move somewhere different or do something different in order to scratch an itch that isn’t on the outside?

For me, Sayers is like one of those long, skinny, wooden sticks with the little hand on the end. She’s like a spiritual backscratcher, like a little hand pointing one tell-tale finger at the exact place that was bothering me.

Letters of Magdalen Montague

And then, I read Magdalen.

Dian speaks from the 1930’s, post WWI and ramping up to WWII. Nicholson’s “J” writes to a friend from a similarly acedia-ridden-soul, but from 1902, prior to either world war. (Meaning, we can’t blame the disillusionment of world war for acedia’s existence):

Yes, my friend, I have fled sodden London and become, for the sake of my health, a temporary expatriate. I find the rest of the world as tedious as London can ever be, in season or out. I am not surprised. The world has been dull for as long as I have known it, and I am not so arrogant as to suppose that it was not dull before I graced it with my presence.

“How goes your time abroad?” That is the established question, and therefore you must ask it. I answer, “It is dull.” “How do you like Budapest?” That is your next question. We shall obey the laws of polite society, not out of respect or devotion to their arbitrary rule but because there are no original remarks left to us. I reply, “I do not like it.” “How long shall you be away?” Perhaps you may proffer this question next, as it is quite respectable and used in the best houses. “Forever,” is my response, “or, at least, until such time as I waste away from boredom” (31-32).

Notice that those five tell-tale, scratchy “manifestations of acedia” are all here:

Interior instability? Check. He has literally traveled over 1,000 miles to escape his discontent and malaise.

An exaggerated concern for one’s health? Check. Health is mentioned in the first line as his purported reason for leaving.

Aversion to manual work? Check. Not obvious here, but very obvious in the pages prior, that “J” is a bonafide dandy who would distain any “ungentlemanly” efforts which required physical use of one’s body.

Neglect in observing the rule? Check. “J’s” letters are vignettes of meandering from one social situation to another, displaying a complete absence of any rule, routine, or semblance of a plan for his daily life. He wanders about, waiting for someone or something else to entertain him.

General discouragement? Check. It’s dripping from every line of his prose.

Dian and “J,” two people equally stuffed full of the best money, society, and education the world had to offer, and they are bored. Buying cheap thrills. Acedia rampant.

The Inferno

And then, to prove that the 20th century couldn’t contain this vice, Dante shook me with what must be the most metanoia-inducing image of lacklusterness I have ever read. The scene is on the outskirts of Hell; the focal point is upon those “small-souled” individuals who committed themselves to nothing in Life, and so were condemned to be nothing for the rest of eternity.

There sighs and moans and utter wailing swept
resounding through the dark and starless air.
I heard them for the first time, and I wept.
Shuddering din of strange and various tongues,
sorrowful words and accents pitched with rage,
shrill and harsh voices, blows of hands with these
Raised up a tumult ever swirling round
in that dark air untinted by a dawn,
as sand-grains whipping when the whirlwind blows.
Said I —a blind of horror held my brain —
“My Teacher, what are all these cries I hear?
Who are these people conquered by their pain?”
And he to me: “This state of misery
is clutched by those sad souls whose works in life
merited neither praise nor infamy.
Here they’re thrown in among that petty choir
of angels who were for themselves alone,
not rebels, and not faithful to the Lord.

…

And I: “Teacher, what weighs upon their hearts?
What grief is it that makes them wail so loud?”
And he responded, “A few words will do.
These souls, immortal, have no hope for death,
and their blind lives crept groveling so low
they leer with envy at every other lot.
The world allows no rumor of them now.
Mercy and justice hold them in contempt.
Let’s say no more about them. Look, and pass.”

…

I had not thought death had unmade so many.

Inferno 3.22-39, 43-51, 573

I sat back in my reading chair. Here was the rebuttal to mantra, “As long as I’m a decent human, and not hurting anybody, it’s all good.”

No, I thought. No. The stakes are so much higher. Infinitely higher. If I don’t use the gifts that have been given me, if I bury my talents in the field, afraid to use them lest I fail, I don’t just end up “kinda-good,” or “coulda-been-a-bit-better.” No, I fall to chasing nothing for the rest of eternity.

Because they followed nothing on earth, now, in hell, they chase a swiftly moving banner, which races about without ever stopping. It is an empty sign, a meaningless cause, a flag with nothing printed on it
(Jason Baxter, A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy, 23).

Acedia, according to Kierkegaard, is the “despairing refusal to be oneself.”4

So, for example, if you were given the gift of writing, you must write. You cannot “prefer not to,” out of fear of not being the next Shakespeare. You can’t abstain because you might not be great. We must be humble enough to fail, or to merely be a lesser talent. But the options aren’t: Be Shakespeare, or don’t be a writer. If you’re a writer. You must write. Even if it means being only a “small stream,” as L’Engle phrased it in Walking on Water (RR 2024). Better be a small stream than a dried up creek bed.

To paraphrase C.S. Lewis: Use your gifts, and worry not about what posterity will decide as regards your particular niche in the hall of human fame.

But to opt out of doing the daily duties and to instead fall into acedia, means being like those empty souls who never used their talents, who never entered the stadium, and who now (at least in Dante’s imagination) eternally run a meaningless race.

Those cold and timid souls…anything but being nothing!

To fully connect acedia, and Dante, and Sayers, Baxter says that both C.S. Lewis and Dorothy Sayers were greatly influenced by the quoted passage from Canto III. Quoting Sayers thus:

The sixth Deadly Sin is named by the Church Acedia or Sloth. In the world it calls itself Tolerance; but in hell it is called Despair. It is the accomplice of the other sins and their worst punishment. It is a sin which believes in nothing, cares for nothing, seeks to know nothing, interferes with nothing, enjoys nothing, loves nothing, hates nothing, finds purpose in nothing, lives for nothing, and only remains alive because there is nothing it would die for.

-“The other Six Deadly Sins” in Creed or Chaos?

Now, if you’re like me, you’re crying out: I’ll do anything but be nothing! I hear you Sayers, I hear you Nicholson, I hear you Dante, I’ve understood you Nault, I will clean every toilet, patiently respond to each too-quickly-boomeranged email, wipe every butt, and calmly sound out “r-a-t” as many times as the Good Lord (and my 4-year old) asks me to.

So, since we’re all equally motivated, let me provide, as a closing, Nault’s five ways to defeat acedia.5 (Because great enthusiasm needs order and planning or it will burn out, like any other busy-acedia fit.)

Five Remedies for Acedia

My friends, if you find yourself, between the hours of 10 am and 2 pm, monologuing like Dian or bemoaning like “J,” do one (or all) of these five things:

1. Cry

   [Tears] are an acknowledgement that one needs to be saved, that one cannot go it alone. The little child weeps when he is discouraged, when he needs help, when he needs to be loved. The same goes for adults who, somewhere deep down, remain children. To weep is to acknowledge that one needs to be saved (Nault, 37).

2. Pray and work

   Once when Antony was [sitting] in the desert [he fell into] boredom and irritation [acedia]. He said to God, “Lord, I want to be made whole and my thoughts do not let me. What am I to do about this trouble, how shall I be cured?” After a while he got up and went outside. He saw someone like himself sitting down and working, then standing up to pray; then sitting down again to make a plait of palm leaves, and standing up again to pray. It was an angel of the Lord sent to correct Antony and make him vigilant. He heard the voice of the angel saying, “Do this and you will be cured.” When he heard it he was very glad and recovered his confidence. He did what the angel had done, and found the salvation that he was seeking. (Nault quoting The Desert Fathers: Sayings of Early Christian Monks, 39).

3. Contradiction (the antirrhetic method)

   This is about confronting the temptation of acedia using the method that Christ utilized in the desert against Satan, in other words, the use of a verse from Scripture to confound the devil (Nault, 40).

   Or, here’s how Father Philippe describes this remedy:

   One of the dominant aspects of the spiritual combat is the struggle on the plane of thoughts. To struggle often means opposition between those thoughts that originate in our own spirit, or the mentality of our surroundings or even sometimes from the enemy himself (the origin of the thoughts is of little importance) and which cause us disquietude, fear, discouragement and, on the other hand, those thoughts that could comfort us and reestablish our peace. In view of this combat, happy is the man who has filled his quiver (Psalm 127) with arrows of good thoughts, that is to say with solid convictions, based on faith, that nourish one’s intelligence and fortify one’s heart in times of trial…all the reasons that cause us to lose our sense of peace are bad reasons (Father Jacques Philippe, Searching for and Maintaining Peace, 13, emphasis original).

4. Meditate about death

   I told you earlier that there was a temporal dimension to acedia. Now the thought of death, precisely, gives meaning to passing time, restores a linear orientation, gives it a sense, in both senses of the word: direction and signification (Nault, 42).

   The Inferno is filling this role for me right now. “I had not thought death had unmade so many” (Inferno 3.57).

5. Persevere

   "The handrail is fidelity to one’s everyday routine, fidelity to one’s rule of life.” (43)

   The Rule of Life— what a gift I have found it to be.

   

   The concept of a daily plan gave me the framework I needed to step back and ask who am I? What is my purpose? Where am I going? And then, having answered my ultimate vocation, I was able to plan out the reasonable, right, and just amounts of time to prescribe to prayer, daily chores, children’s education, developing and using my individual gifts, reading, leisure, etc. This Rule is the “handrail” that ensures one does not fall into the pit of wind-whipped nothingness, nor rocket away from one’s daily duties in a blind, Sister Julian-like flight towards some “other good” that is not one’s calling.

   
   The best resources I have found for building this Rule are: A Mother’s Rule of Life by Holly Peirlot and Autumn Kern’s Common House and The Commonplace podcasts. Additionally, for habit training within a Rule of Life, I have found these two books helpful and invigorating: the classic, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey; and, the more recent, Atomic Habits by James Clear. Both are good audiobooks, and both work well within the larger God-oriented framework of a Rule of Life.

   
   I would love to hear any resources you have found helpful in ordering your daily life.

   Leave a comment

Going Forth

So my friends, lest we, through pure and simple selfish laziness, murder our own souls, let us instead go forth to cry, pray & work, draw from a filled quiver, remember that we will die, and persevere in our Rule of Life.

Do the hard work to make virtue habitual.

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Until next time, keep revisiting the good books that enrich your life and nourish your soul.

In Case You Missed It:

• Jane Eyre Volume 1 Revisited

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

• A (very brief) Prelude to Jane Eyre

• Jane Eyre Introduction

• Reading Revisited ep. 15: Revisiting Our Summer Book Stacks

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Hello Readers,

We have an exciting announcement! We are going to do our first reread as a Book Club. We now have 5 years of book lists and lots of new members, so we think it is time to circle back and revisit a book together. We are giving our readers the full power of picking this book. The method, you ask? A proper bracket! Below is a picture of the bracket I am working with. Scroll down to vote in all 8 competitions. We will be rereading ONE of these books and ONLY one. So, make your voice count! I will honestly be excited to read any of these books and I am excited to see what you all choose!

Come back next week for the next round!

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Until next time, keep revisiting the good books that enrich your life and nourish your soul.

In Case You Missed It:

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

• A (very brief) Prelude to Jane Eyre

• Jane Eyre Introduction

• Reading Revisited ep. 15: Revisiting Our Summer Book Stacks

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I owe an immense debt of gratitude to my favorite college English professor. Besides opening the door to many books and authors that would go on to become favorites, Dr. Rosalie de Rosset was also known, after her nearly 40 years of teaching experience, for her oft-repeated quotes and one-liners. Many of these have remained with me long after leaving her class, but one in particular comes to my mind quite frequently:

“These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”

The quote comes from the final stanza of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land. I am by no means a poetry aficionado. In fact, I find myself rather intimidated by Eliot’s poetry - especially The Waste Land. My understanding is that in this final stanza, Eliot reflects on the way in which elements of culture (the artistic, literary, historical) that have shaped his life and thought are ultimately what keep him from falling into destruction, despair, even chaos. Our professor would quietly repeat the words — a refrain, after reading aloud or discussing some particularly powerful statement.

What a beautifully somber image: the honest admission that we stand always at the precipice of our own “ruins”, but that out of the truth, goodness, and beauty we have inherited we can brace our souls to weather the storm. I have many fragments, mostly literary, that shore me up, as it were. Some are merely quotes that aid my own self-examination, others are scenes or characters that come unbidden to my mind. I would like to share with you just a few of my “fragments” and offer you the invitation to consider your own.

The unforgettable closing line of Middlemarch by George Eliot.

”But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." 

What a mic drop to close this long and lovely story. Dorothea, our heroine to whom this closing line refers, begins the story with dreams of greatness. She hopes to attain this greatness by her marriage to a man (with a veneer) of brilliance. She says in considering her expectation of Mr. Casaubon’s proposal, “It would be my duty to study that I might help him the better in his great works. There would be nothing trivial about our lives. Everyday-things with us would mean the greatest things.”

Throughout the story we see Dorothea grapple with her idea of greatness while going about her duties to her husband, family, and community.  The contrast between her own attitude early on and this final line is a striking one, and it helps me to make better sense of and dig further into my own vocation as a wife and mother. In my worst moments I fall prey to the lie that greatness lies somewhere outside the often tedious, seemingly trivial day-to-day tasks that are mine to do, but Dorothea rises often to my mind and walks me back to the “faithfully hidden life” to which I have been called.

The surrender of Madame la Comtesse from The Diary of a Country Priest

This one hurts, but it’s a Good hurt. In The Diary of a Country Priest, we are following the episodic reflections of a young, self-conscious priest as he goes about his parish duties. The entire novel is superb, but the fragment that especially remains with me is from chapter 5. The priest goes to visit the Madame la Comtesse, (matriarch of the most prominent family in the community) after her troubled teenage daughter has confided in the priest that her parents, anxious to avoid a scandal, are sending her away to relatives in England after she discovered that her father has been unfaithful to her mother.

The priest hopes to appeal to Mme la Comtesse’s motherly feeling and encourage her to allow the girl to remain at home, but finds the lady bitter and hard-hearted. She confides that many years prior, she had lost her one-year-old son to illness and ever since has harbored resentment, even hatred, towards God (as well as her husband and daughter). The priest strives with the great lady to let go of her bitterness, to soften her heart to God and to her family. The struggle reaches something of a crescendo when the lady says, with a surprising calm:

“Suppose that in this world or the next, somewhere was a place where God doesn’t exist: though I had to die a thousand deaths there, to die stoically, every second — well, if it existed, I’d take my boy do that place…and I’d say to God: “Now, stamp us out! Now do your worst!” (p 170)

And a few lines down, the priest appeals to her:

“Madame, if our God were a pagan god or the god of intellectuals…He might fly to His remotest heaven and our grief would force Him down to earth again. But you know that our God came to be among us. Shake your first at Him, spit in His face, scourge Him, and finally crucify Him: what does it matter? My daughter, it’s already been done to Him.” (p 171)

After this, the lady softens a bit. She takes from her neck a small medallion which holds the precious lock of hair from the head of her beloved, deceased child. She clutches the medallion tightly against her breast as the priest leads her slowly through, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done.” She tries to pray, but jumps up and exclaims:

“I can’t. I seem to be losing him twice over.” (p 172)

The priest again appeals to her, and she relents:

“An hour ago my life seemed so perfectly arranged, everything in its proper place. And you’ve left nothing standing - nothing at all.”

“Give it to God, just as it is!”

“I’ll either give Him all or nothing. My people are made that way.”

“Give everything.” (p 173)

At that, the great lady throws her medallion, containing that precious relic, into the roaring fire. The priest rushes to the fire and reaches in to retrieve it. The lock of hair has been burned, and the priest’s hand is blistered and bloodied.

This scene is a fragment that comes quite often to my mind. Oftener than I’d like, if I’m honest. To put it simply, it is nothing less than an image of the gospel. Christ asks everything of us. We must take up our cross, let the dead bury their dead, hate father and mother, leave everything. No clenched fists. And yet we know, we trust, we hope, that Christ, plunges his hand into the very fire for us. He retrieves whatever we (believe that we) have lost, whatever we clutched and pined for and finally surrendered, and offers it back to us with His blistered and bloodied hands, and it is Good.

( has excellent episodes on this book from last spring.)

The unsteadiness of Emma Woodhouse in Emma

I’ll offer one more fragment from my collection - we’ll end on a gentler note. This one, though “lighter” shores me up no less. It is a quick, easily overlooked line, describing our flawed heroine of Emma by Jane Austen.

“She played and sang, and drew in almost every style; but steadiness had always been wanting; and in nothing had she approached the degree of excellence which she would have been glad to command, and ought not to have failed of. She was not much deceived as to her own skill, either as an artist or a musician; but she was not unwilling to have others deceived, or sorry to know her reputation for accomplishment often higher than it deserved.” (ch 6)

My closet-graveyard-where-hobbies-go-to-die (and perhaps a lingering touch of bitterness from my parents at the years of varying instrument lessons) rush to accuse me here.

I stubbornly refused to commonplace this passage when I first came to it, as it hit a bit too close to home. It stayed with me, nonetheless, throughout the whole story, and made me see Emma (and myself) more clearly. My problem is that, like Emma, I long to be proficient and admired in many things that I do not want to apply the time and effort to.

Emma is juxtaposed in this instance with Jane Fairfax. Jane’s skill at the piano is justly praised because Jane is a true amateur - she plays and practices and goes deeper into the art for the love of the thing itself.

This fragment comes to me most often when through some combination of my ADHD and vanity I am inclined to jump from one thing to another and feel satisfied with surface-level talent and unearned praise. I am inspired by Emma to examine my intentions, to stay the course, to love the work, to hone an art.

So here, then, is why I read — as an act of dependence, as it were. I read, and invite you to do so, in admission to the reality that

“that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the [truth, goodness, and beauty, the fragments, which we have received].”

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Until next time, keep revisiting the good books that enrich your life and nourish your soul.

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In Case You Missed It:

• WoW and The Father Revisited

• Reading Revisited ep. 13: Intro to Madeleine L'Engle with Katie Marquette

• Revisiting Our Summer Bookshelf

• WoW and The Hint of An Explanation Reading Guide

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This will not be about the Opening Ceremonies of the Olympics.

However, I am going to begin with what this post is not about because: first, it’s timely; second, it’s a way into discussing Karen Ullo’s brand-new book, To Crown with Liberty; and third, it’s a means of discussing the nuanced conversations, which Art, and specifically literature, can (and should) achieve.

Therefore, let us begin with the Olympic Opening Ceremonies.

Pictured above is the mascot for the 2024 Summer Olympics. NBC explains it thus:

“When French revolutionaries stormed the Bastille prison in July 1789, kicking off the French Revolution, they wore the caps, which have since been known as a symbol of liberty and the revolution.”

This bonnet rouge mascot, and especially its rather white-washed explanation, were a surprise to me. If I’d been in Paris seeing these little red hats parading around, I think I would’ve felt a bit like Viktor Krum at the Wesley wedding when he saw Luna Lovegood wearing the deathly hallows as a necklace bauble. And also, to quote Ullo’s narrator:

“Tricolor cockades abounded along with floppy liberty caps, which could never be called stylish whatever their symbolism” (197).

But I begin too critically, let me begin with joy.

In the last week of July, as athletes from around the world flowed through the heart of Paris, my smile filled with love for the Frenchness of the French.

As I watched the Opening Ceremonies dance along the shores of the Seine, over the Louvre, upon the scaffolding of Notre Dame, and across countless icons of Paris, I gave my mental voice a French accent, and said, “Here we are. We have no need to build anything new and vulgar. This is Paris.” I loved the pride imbibed by this nonchalance. I loved the old-worldly hauteur of a city which did not bow to creating something grand and large just to impress. Paris seemed to be saying to the world: We are Paris. That is enough to impress anyone. And if you are not, c’est la vie.

But my love for the French stumbled when this lady sang onto the screen.

I recoiled. Pride in a nation is good. Making a cartoonish operatic display of a deceased person? Not my idea of classy. And thus continued the clash of classy and odd; regal hauteur and dare-you-to-not-be-shocked hauteur.1

This unabashed glorification of the French Revolution unnerved me. Perhaps I’d forgotten some of my history and philosophy classes, in which the ideals of the French Revolution were the main source of discussion but not their actual results.

However, in more recent memory, I’d been reading A Tale of Two Cities (RR 2021), The Scarlet Pimpernel, and The Song at the Scaffold. And through each of these works ran a river of blood as surely as the Seine. Within the nuance of true Art, the philosophies of Parisian salons are shown to be able to become scythes, or, more accurately, the guillotine.2

Ideas are powerful. Ideas are great. Let’s talk ideas. But, let us not forget that they are a tool, which must be wielded well. For this reason, the French Revolution is of momentous importance to remember, but to completely glorify?

Additionally, the timing of my TBR pile and the recommendation of a friend were impeccable; during these Olympic Games I was simultaneously reading Karen Ullo’s third novel, To Crown with Liberty.

Published an excitingly recent 3-months ago, To Crown with Liberty thus wins the silver medal in the hottest-off-the-press competition in my reading life.3 This means that by writing this post, I have taken upon myself the strenuous—nay Olympic—challenge of reviewing a book without spoiling it.

Reviewing old books? That’s my forte. No spoilers possible. If you didn’t know Hamlet dies…well, he’s been dead over 400 years and it’s titled a tragedy...But reviewing a new work... Let’s just say, if my event is the 1600m, this paragraph is me warming up for the 100m.

I don’t want to spoil anything. I must not spoil anything. Especially since the entirety of this novel is driven by a burning desire to discover: what happened?!

So be patient with me fans, this long-distance runner is about to attempt to sprint through 300 pages, barely nodding at a few ideas as I pass them by.

The Plot

To contextualize this review, here is a plot summary that you can gain within the first 3 pages of the novel:

Narrated in the first-person by a young woman named Alix, this historic fiction novel begins in New Orleans in 1795. Alix is married to a gardener named Joseph, but her attire and the way other French immigrants react to her…

Then other voices raised a more familiar song.

Let us march, let us march until an impure blood waters our furrows…

Inside the tavern, three men dressed as sans-culottes, their heads adorned with bonnets rouges — those farcical crowns of liberty — raised their voices in the war cry of the Marseillaise.

“Hurry Alix.” Joseph sheltered me with his body, herding me away. For it was my blood they wanted. I had cast away my title, but my blood would always be my own.

“Hélas, is that ci-devant? Citoyens, look at that silk!”

…

Joseph’s fist collided with his jaw. “Get away from my wife, you swine!”

“Your wife!” the man laughed as he pulled a dagger from his boot. “You’re a laborer. This is…a marquise? A baronne?” The blade glinted in the twilight. “Don’t you wish to follow your queen, madame?” (12)

…reveal that in a former life, she was someone else, or at least, bore a different title.

If misfortune had stolen its glamour, at least its substance still remained (9).

From this initial chapter, Ullo sets the narrative’s pendulum swing in motion, moving backwards and forwards, alternating between Alix’s past life in France in the 1780’s and ‘90’s, and forward into the New World and a river journey further into it.

The narrative sustains its mysterious, unveiling nature almost until the very end, only providing the reader the last bit of past information in the second to last chapter.

Therefore, in order to not blemish your future, first-blush read, I have practiced extreme constraint (and extreme speed for a miler) and will only speak on three points: the French Revolution; Marie Antoinette; and slavery. I will finish with thoughts on: first impressions4 and how does one trust a new book?

Revolution

Like Charles Dickens, Baroness Orczy, Gertrud Von le Fort, and others, Ullo allows her novel to duly admire the philosophic seeds of the French (and American) Revolution.

“But this is a question of more than practicability. It is a question of who we are as the French people — whether we, who supported the Americans, who helped them gain freedom from tyranny, will nevertheless be tyrants ourselves. I claim no intimacy with Jefferson and Franklin,” he nodded to Lafayette, “but I have read their writings. ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: That all men are created equal.’ That is the truth, the defending of which has caused our nation’s debts. And now are we to say to our people, ‘All men are created equal, but not subject to the same law’” (61).

The above scene takes place in Madame Necker’s famous, idea-refining salon. Thomas Jefferson, Bishop Talleyrand, Lafayette, Jacques Necker, Camille Desmoulins, Fréton, and other leading idealists of the day are given space within this work’s pages.

Personally, I enjoyed these intellectual interjects. In a necessarily emotional narrative, they were like solid objects floating on an ocean and onto which I could scramble for a rest (like Rose and Jack—RIP). Or (if you wish me to extend my running metaphor), providing the theories which led to the drama, was like providing quick, on-the-rocks sips of cognac amidst the heat and passion of the race, which temporarily quenched the drinker’s thirst, but ultimately derailed the whole event (…of the Revolution, not the novel).

But they always returned to greater questions, to the doctrines that governed mathematics. Words like rights and liberty flew like flags, decorated with quotes from Diderot and Franklin—entire worlds of thought into which I had never before entered.

…

As I drifted off, the evening’s conversation still flowed through me, a muddy river where I could not distill opinion from fact or truth from my own prejudices about the ones who spoke (62).

Alix’s last line, about the muddy river of opinions, facts, truth, and prejudice, understood in the context of her love for country and the men leading it, gives a glimpse into the nuance Ullo embraces and reveals through her fictional retelling of the French Revolution.

But the vaunted Peuple of the Revolution did not want careful nuance. They wanted submission (200).

Look at this subtle question we can ask ourselves because of Ullo: Yes, looking back we are able to see error in 1790’s France, but could this statement just as accurately apply to us and today?

Lest we be pastist (a new word I’m coining, it means: “to be biased against the past merely because those people or ideas are in the past.” Similar to how the word “sexist” means “to be biased against a person of the opposite sex merely because he/she is the opposite sex.” Surely a word with this definition already exists? Comment below and educate me.), every generation in every nation must acknowledge that we have the same potential for success or violence as previous generations. These events were not unique to France in 1792. We’re not off the hook. We’re not out of the race. We haven’t achieved some on-the-podium state where losing can no longer occur. We’re in the Games, we’re running the race, and, as Ole Ben Frank said, we gotta keep it. Or as good Paul said, we’re in it to win it.5

So dear people-of-the-world, the Opening Ceremonies… Can we, knowing our responsibility to promote and uphold ideas and events which lead Man towards greater goodness, can we, in all honesty to the carnage inflicted in the name of ideas and future peace, in the name of future equality and future stability, can we justify an un-nuanced celebration of the French Revolution? Do the ends justify the means? And, even if we subscribed to such a Machiavellian philosophy (or even, which is more likely, a utilitarian one), are the ends really so good that the means can be justified?

Back to Alix, let us let her remind us of the bloody turn, which the French Revolution took:

I heard them murmuring, late in the evening when they thought I was asleep, about mass graves and the sale of prisoners’ clothing, about cleaning up after Death. And then, I found I wanted to know. I begged them to bring me every paper, every pamphlet, every blasphemous, violent word, hoping that I might find some kernel of meaning. Yet there was no meaning - only logic.

…

The prisoners had been slaughtered for daring to exercise “the free communication of ideas and opinions,” without being “held innocent until they have been declared guilty.” The rights for which the delegates of the Third Estate had taken their oath in a tennis court three years before, the freedoms for which they resolved to stand against tyranny at the cost of their lives, had fallen to the swords of September like so many stalks before the scythe.

Reason and Rights, the twin gods of Enlightenment, had proven incompatible (276).

Place in front of your mind scenes from A Tale of Two Cities (not, unfortunately, from To Crown with Liberty, because to do so would reveal too much). Remember scenes of head-collecting women who knitted as lines of men, women, and children were guillotined into their laps. Remember how during the Reign of Terror, the streets of Paris literally ran with blood.

If we are to pay tribute to the French Revolution, surely some homage should be paid to the idea that Man must be encouraged to be good by social and legal means, else he can devolve into savagery.

Reason, untempered by love could justify even mass murder (287).

Ideas should be handled with great trepidation, with fear and trembling, awe and respect. I’ll press on, before I’m justly accused of forgoing the race in order to stand on a savon box.

One glorious Easter Sunday, I heard Bishop Jacques Fabre-Juene of Charleston, give an excellent homily on this Gospel reading:

On the first day of the week,
Mary of Magdala came to the tomb early in the morning,
while it was still dark,
and saw the stone removed from the tomb.
So she ran and went to Simon Peter
and to the other disciple whom Jesus loved, and told them,
“They have taken the Lord from the tomb,
and we don’t know where they put him.”
So Peter and the other disciple went out and came to the tomb.
They both ran, but the other disciple ran faster than Peter
and arrived at the tomb first;
he bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in.
When Simon Peter arrived after him,
he went into the tomb and saw the burial cloths there,
and the cloth that had covered his head,
not with the burial cloths but rolled up in a separate place.
Then the other disciple also went in,
the one who had arrived at the tomb first,
and he saw and believed.
For they did not yet understand the Scripture
that he had to rise from the dead.

John 20:1-9 (emphasis mine)6

In his homily, Bishop Fabre focused our attention upon the old disciple (Peter) and the young disciple (John). He said (I paraphrase), that these two disciples are the model of the Church when she functions best. The youth of the Church run ahead with excitement and energy, flying towards new ideas and ways of implementing the Gospel in social initiatives and changes. And, Bishop Fabre said, this is good. But look, he said to us, look at how the young disciple waited for the old disciple. Look at how youth was respectfully patient, and allowed older heads the time they needed to catch up before they moved forward together, with the old leading the young. Bishop Fabre said that our Church (and therefore our world) needs both types of men: the young and the old; the excited and the cautious; the inventive and the traditional. It is only when we combine the power and speed of new ideas, with the steadiness and strength of old ideas, that we have a true force for good in the world.

The race of this world, then, might be seen as more of a relay than any individual event, with each athlete needing to wait on the previous to pass the baton. The French Revolution could have, perhaps, benefited from waiting on older minds.7 For as we know from the U.S. Men’s 4x100m, you can’t win if you failed to pass the stick. Too soon?

I’ll end this section with Ullo’s narrator, Alix, reflecting on how obsession with Revolution can become idolatrous:

Some of the rabble were singing Ça ira:

I shuddered. To buy freedom with blood was a cause that could be justified; blood was a price that could bring martyrdom and redemption. But no constitution should ever have been bought at the price of idolatry (197-8).

Marie Antoinette

One small pleasure within this work, was how Ullo un-caricatured the “let them eat cake” version of Marie Antoinette, bringing her forward as a woman with flashing eyes, which “marked her as the daughter of an emperor” (174).

In a similar spirit, I set before you an un-cartooned image of Marie, with her head restored, her children by her side, and seated next to an empty basinet in memory of the premature daughter who died the year prior to this portrait.

Marie Antoinette de Lorraine-Habsburg, queen of France, and her children
by Élisabeth Vigée le Brun, 1787

Still pictured is her oldest son who would die the next year (and less than a month prior to the tennis court oath).

Below is a humanizingly poignant portrayal of that moment from Alix, as she watches Marie Antoinette watch her 7-year-old son painfully pass towards death:

I played Grétry, Mozart, Gossec, the greatest pieces in my repertoire, but I believe I could have played the simplest folk songs and had the same effect. While I played, the Dauphin lay silent, his breathing soft and sure. If I stopped, he groaned aloud, or raved as one gone mad.

The king came sometime in the afternoon, nodded to me, then took a seat beside his wife. He was so near-sighted, I doubt he ever realized who I was. He held Her Majesty’s hand while she held their son’s, and both of them—the greatest monarchs in the world—wept over their child (134).

To Ullo’s continued credit, she did not white-wash the King and Queen into innocent victims. As the ultimate leaders of France, she duly noted how their actions, too, played a part in the onslaught of anger and violence:

A monarch who would flee his own country could hardly be trusted to uphold its new constitution…Every prospect, every thought, swirled more dizzily than the last, the fragile strands of stability severed by a sentence: The king was gone (205).

Slavery

I should acknowledge, that if there was a literary tradition which the Ceremonies were directly referencing, it was not A Tale of Two Cities, or The Scarlet Pimpernel, or The Song at the Scaffold, it was Les Miserables.

Pictured above is the red-streamer bedecked Conciergerie, which was a major place of detention during the French Revolution, and also the prison where Marie Antoinette was held.

And I can’t argue with some epic singing of:

Speaking of all of us people who should all continually strive not to be slaves again, I found one of the most intellectually stimulating affects of interweaving the past and present of Alix’s life, and therefore the life of 18th century France and the life of 18th century America, was the conversation Ullo created, by this juxtaposition, on slavery.

Two-thirds of the way into the novel, one of the characters tells Alix that she is free to do what she wants because she “is not a slave.” Alix responds thus:

“Madame, I am less of a teacher—and more of a slave—than you know.”

She scoffed. “You’re no slave to anything but fear.”

I closed my eyes to shut away the sight of her scorn. It was too much like my own. “You’re right, madame. And fear is a brutal, unforgiving master” (213).

Slavery of the body is terrible. Slavery of the mind, of a person’s will, of a man’s ability to be a Man, much more so. This is why all attempts to free a person’s physical restraints, rightfully speaking, should merely be a step along the path to freeing the man’s ability to fully exercise his own will. Hence, the inclusion of the topic of education.

Alix’s extreme, deep discomfort (to say the least) with the institution of slavery as an idea, but even more so with the witness of actual enslaved persons, reaches a breaking point 50 pages from the end:

He let out a hiss. “Madame, have you ever owned a slave?”
“There are no slaves in France, monsieur.”
“Then I beg you not to interfere in what you do not know.” He stood.
…
“Monsieur…have you ever been held captive?”
He started. “What?”
…
Joseph knelt beside me. “If you want to tell him, I will stand by you. You should not hide, Alix. You should tell him who you are —and what you know that he never can.”
…
I stood and gestured to him to retake his seat on the log. “Please, monsieur. If you rest here with me, I will tell you about the true price of compassion” (256).

Without revealing the story, I cannot express to you the new perspective on what it means to be enslaved, which Ullo creates through the tool of her narrative structure. By the pendulum swing from past to present, France to Louisiana, Ullo presents a comparison of the hypocrisy of the French Revolution with the hypocrisy of the American Revolution, and—this is what adds to the power of her comparison—even while doing so, and specifically in doing so, is able to still uphold the good that was accomplished by both. The revolutionary ideas did spread freedom to many, if not to all. Ullo remains nuanced, through the end.

In addition to structure, the contemporary and modern feel of Ullo’s narrator’s voice, allows Alix a clarity of vision on slavery, which most of her actual contemporaries could not have had. To say this another way, due to the way this narrator speaks, I would have as easily believed she was born in the 20th century as in 1771. And I think this was incredibly helpful in Alix’s ability to speak against slavery. Her level of repugnance could only be written now, with a voice from today. Time is required to give Man a far-enough-removed vantage point from which we may see the cruelty of a past age. Cruelties of our own time are often too close to see. (God save us from the sins we inflict upon ourselves and others today, and, dear descendants, please forgive us.) Therefore, I found the modern voice of Alix to be a necessary device in order to allow her to see and expose evil for evil.8

Suddenly I knew why she [a slave] was bleeding. The dam of panic burst: inchoate rage, unbridled chaos rattling like sabers through my brain. I turned and stumbled back into the woods.

Joseph cried, “Alix! Alix, wait!”

…

I gasped when I could find the air. “It’s those poor people.”

Joseph looked back through the trees. His jaw grew rigid. “The slaves.” He put his arm around my shoulders. “I know you do not like it, but it will be like this everywhere we go. The only government that has outlawed slavery in the colonies is…”

“France.” I swallowed hard. “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité.”

“For them, but not for you.” His eyes roamed over mine. “Do you want to go back to England? The United States? Spain, Portugal, Austria? I will take you anywhere. But I will not take you back to France to die.”

…

“Joseph, why do I see evil in this when no one else does?”

He kissed my hair. “Because you have seen so much more evil than they have. You recognize it now, no matter what disguise it wears.” He held me a moment longer. “Do you want to go back to Europe? You will not have to see slavery there.”

Alix…do not watch…

“No. Refusing to see it will not change what happens” (227).

Things I wish I could talk about:

There are so many aspects of this book, which I cannot reveal.

Therefore, here they will sit as a list of teasers: Abner, who he is, his Biblical namesake, and his passion; the snake bite in the garden; Joseph’s last name; what makes for justice and a good government; desire; the hunchback of Notre Dame; a comparison of fear in Von le Forte’s character Blanche and Ullo’s character Alix; “fathering a nation” (184) in Abner and Hamilton; the crowns of liberty; the role music plays throughout the narrative; the insane amount of research Ullo must have conducted; Fulton Sheen’s World’s First Love and how Woman sees “at a glance;” Alix’s mother, and how hierarchy creates the space for humility.

First Impressions & Narrative Voice

Now, I wish to (almost nearly) finish with my initial impressions of this book.

Dear Reader Dear Enthusiastic-spectator-in-the-stands-cheering-me-on-for-the-last-5-meters-of-a-very-slow-100-meter-dash, I admit that I may not have finished this book if it had not been recommended to me by a friend.

Why? Why might I have set this book aside? Why do I mention this? And how do we know that reading a new book will be worth our time? I will address this threefold question in order.

Why might I have set this book aside? 90 pages into this 313 page-work, I found myself thinking along these lines: Without knowing Ullo as an author (as I “know” Dickens, or Austen, or any other vetted-by-centuries author), I can’t know where she is taking the narrative. Without knowing the end of Alix’s story, I can’t know if the depth of her remorseful tone is appropriate. I’m worried this will merely be a sensationalized story without depth of insight. I’m worried this will be a lot of warmup exercises (high knees, butt kicks, and up-and-down the in-field karaokes—facing the same direction of course), but no actual race, no gun going off, no finish line, no head-thrown-back-arms-outstretched-exaltation.

Why do I mention this first impression? First, because if I acknowledge it, maybe you will not find it a stumbling block when you read this excellent novel; and second, because perhaps by acknowledging what I thought might have been a flaw, I will help you trust my opinion. (Why must we moderns appreciate criticalness as a mark of thought? I wish I could regain that innocence, which sees beauty first, and flaws almost never.)

How do we know reading a new book will be worth our time? The test of time is my favorite test. But, the race continues. And new heats continue to step up to the line. We can’t always use our favorite test.

Therefore, since the test of time is the conglomeration of many good men’s opinions, perhaps a good enough test for a new book is the good opinion of one man.

Therefore, I continued into Ullo’s narrative with good faith in my good friend. And I was rewarded.

I greatly enjoyed this book, especially in the latter half when Alix’s life began to take greater shape, and therefore I began to see larger themes. (I began to know that Ullo did have a finish line prepared for me.)

This appreciation then caused me to understand the fittingness of Alix’s narrative voice. I began to ask: If Alix had, instead, been remote, or overly-factual, would I not have thought her callous, or even heartless? And would that not have been an entirely different book? No, she had to be who she was to make this work what it is.

This book is good, and it needed Alix to be Alix.

Alongside Lewis’ The Great Divorce, I firmly hold that the ending of a work works its way retroactively back through the whole, re-coloring everything that came before it. This is why one can’t be sure if a book is good or not, until one has finished it.

Therefore, since I know the ending, and since new books require a trusted source to recommend them, this is me heartily recommending this book to you.

What a refreshing thing it is to read such a good story.

When you meet Alix, please squeeze her hand from me.

Summer Reading

To (nearly) end our very slow 100m dash with the jauntiest, most light-hearted stride possible…

…this was the perfect beach read.

Now please see Reading Revisited ep.6: Our Favorite Summer Reads to understand that I do emphatically reject the idea that being by water and sand means one should “indulge” in a “guilty pleasure” of idiotic trashiness.

But, if you’re looking to take a break from being seemingly pretentious due to toting an Ignatius Press Critical Edition in your Bogg…

…than, Ullo’s plot-riveting novel is a gem to pull out, nod to the beach-towel-prone, sunburnt stranger next to you, and lift the book as if to say, “See, I can be one with the people.” Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, right my friend?

La Fin

Now to truly end.

(We’re crossing the finish line y’all, and my arms are thrown open wide in jubilation, as if I did not just clock in a 26-minute 100m…)

As we wrapped up the Olympics, I could not be more Team USA. Watching Simone Biles and Suni Lee; Gabby Thomas and the entirety of the women’s 4x400m team; and the men’s basketball star-studded lineup, I got that deep-seated yet light elation which only the Olympics brings. To see so many people who have worked, and striven, and sweat, and bled, and sacrificed so much with such focus and purpose…it makes one proud to be Man.

But as we crown these incredible athletes with laurels, and as we watch the little red caps dance around, it is perhaps well to remember, that true freedom, which is liberty par excellence, comes only from a crown of thorns.

No—most surprising was the wooden crucifix where an Indian Christ hung beneath a crown of black and white eagle feathers with the quill points tapered to look like thorns (290).

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Until then keep revisiting the good books that enrich your life and nourish your soul.

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In Case You Missed It:

• Walking on Water and Short Story Introduction

• Reading Revisited ep. 11: The Harry Potter Series with

  Rachel Woodham

• Walking on Water and Short Stories Reading Schedule

• Pride and Prejudice Discussion Questions and Reading Guide PDF

A Few Reminders:

• If you are wanting to get in on the in person or virtual community please contact us! We have meetings in different parts of the country and over zoom each month. We would love to have you join us or start your own group!

2024-2025 Reading Revisited Book List

Previous Reading Lists

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Since we read Persuasion by Jane Austen last year (August 2023) I have been meaning to watch the new Netflix adaptation of it. I had heard too many negative reviews to expect to love it, but I thought it might be a funny movie to watch when I had an evening to myself. did a live watch of this when it first came out so I heads up for some of the worst parts. Therefore I was not surprised to find Anne Eliot drinking wine straight from the bottle (a lot) or that the screen writers completely butchered some of Jane Austen’s best lines. But I still found myself surprised and disappointed by what this adaptation did to this beautiful story about an introverted, older heroine with a few regrets.

After that fairly negative introduction I do want to point out some aspects of the movie that I think were done very well. It can be very easy to criticize, when in reality nuance in all things is usually the best policy. So with that in mind, here we go with some aspects of the movie that I did enjoy!

Pros

I think this film is worth watching because it is a very creative adaptation. It is so creative that at first I was wondering if it was meant to be a parody of the novel. If that had been the case, then I think I could have fully enjoyed the experience. However as the movie went on it became clear that it was meant to be taken seriously.

The characters are very well cast and acted. I think sometimes people assume Austen wrote serious books because all old books are serious (though if you read old books you know that is nowhere near the truth). In reality Austen, while having serious plots and moments, writes hilarious characters, scenes, and relational dynamics. She knows the human soul and is able to convey it with a wit (maybe like no other). It is always in a dry British style, but if you are not laughing you might be missing the joke (as a side note, I think the audiobooks can be very helpful in this situation). The main characters in Persuasion are not very comedic, but a lot of the side characters are meant to be very funny and the movie did pick this up very well. Anne’s younger sister, Mary, is a great example. In the book she is ridiculous and annoying, but in the movie the actress played this up so well that I was laughing aloud at points. Anne’s father is another good example of the ridiculousness of the character being drawn out for comedic purposes. There are a lot of side characters that this is done well with.

While I do not think the writers got Anne’s character right (more on that later), I do think her monologues are very funny. If this was just a movie and not a Jane Austen adaptation I would find her very likable. Unfortunately, it just doesn’t seem like Anne at all.

I am not exactly sure how I feel about breaking the fourth wall, but it is an interesting and creative way to get into the head of this introverted heroine. In the novel we find ourselves privy to Anne’s thoughts through the narrator, especially because Austen frequently uses indirect discourse (a mode of letting the narrator speak with a characters opinions….this is one should not simply pull Austen quotes out of context and assume they are her views. For example: Austen doesn’t actually think “it is a fact universally acknowledged that every man in possession of a fortune must be in want of a wife”…however, Mrs. Bennett does think that!). I digress. So while breaking the fourth wall feels a little odd, I do think it was a creative way for a film to get us inside Anne Eliot’s head without having a constant voice over. Also, Anne’s Jim-like (from The Office) glances at the camera are very funny.

I’m so glad they kept the letter at the end fairly close to the book.

The last aspect of the film that I think is well done is the cinematography and the sets/scenes. It is honestly a beautiful movie. If they had kept the script closer to the book (with a few creative changes for the medium) it would have been a lovely movie. Unfortunately, this is not what happened. So with that we can move on to my criticisms…

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Cons

Let’s start with the biggest problem. That problem is Anne. She seems to be a completely different character from the book. Is she another Lizzie Bennet now? In the book she is a more introverted heroine that is harder to get to know, but Jane Austen makes her likable all the same. What a feat! The movie is just lazy. Instead of figuring out how to make a introverted, more closed off character likable, they simply make her a different person entirely. Drinking wine from a bottle now? Anne Eliot? No. Also the scene when Anne calls Charles out for wanting to marry her first? My (and Jane Austen’s) Anne Eliot would never. Nor would she ever dream of tauntingly calling to Captain Wentworth out of a window. She has class. This was too much for me.

The dialogue slowly killed me the whole movie. The writers took some of Jane Austen’s best lines and changed them to sound silly and mean nothing. What why are exes more upsetting to Anne than friends? Back in the early 1800s people were labelling people as tens? There are so many cliches! A few could have been funny, but it honestly feels cheesy.

It seems like the writers couldn’t decide if this was a funny satire or a serious movie. The dialogue and narrations go back and forth between ridiculously funny to serious advice and it doesn’t work. It feels like a better produced Lizzie Bennett Diaries, but the setting wasn’t updated. I think if the setting was updated it could have worked, but then it would have taken more creativity. It seems like the writers stole Jane Austen’s story and setting, but coopted it to give their own opinions. This feels like cheating.

On to my next issue. The writers did not trust the audience. There was far too much explaining of the meanings behind characters’ actions and events. It is okay for the audience not to be able to express exactly why everything happened in words, if the story is good enough it will wash over them and they will still be able to fully enjoy the story. (This is a note for modern authors everywhere…trust your audience I tell you!)

Okay I promise the negativity will come to an end soon. Here’s my biggest problem with the movie. This very quickly turns into a modern story. At the very beginning it feels perfect and then the music changes, but the costumes/time period don’t. All of the sudden we are in modern times but the characters are still dressed up (minus the hair styles…oh the modern hair styles!) like early 1800s people. This could have been done well, but again the tone is not consistent. Then we come to lots of modern ideas being thrown at us. Anne would make a good Admiral? Mrs. Russell is openly talking about her extramarital sex life with Anne? Mary is developing a habit of gratitude? The universe has perfect timing? Fanny’s spirit was in the wind? And then everyone is making out at the end.

Finally we come to the very end and Anne’s speech is not at all like the thoughts that she has in the book. Instead of being her humble self accepting advice she tells everyone not to ever let anyone tell them who to love no matter how unconventional it is. Oh goodness. Jane Austen would not approve.

So there you have it. I honestly tried very hard to enjoy this movie for what it was, but in the end I couldn’t do it. This movie had so much potential but fell so short.

And on that note, I am going to go read Pride and Prejudice and then watch the miniseries and the Lizzie Bennett diaries, because those are two examples of how to do adaptations right (and they are SO different)

I would love to hear what you thought of the new Persuasion movie in the comments!

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In Case You Missed It:

• Pride and Prejudice Part 2

• Reading Revisited ep. 7 - Next Year’s Book List

• Our Favorite Austen Things

• Pride and Prejudice Part 1

A Few Reminders:

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

• Here is the whole list of this years book selections

• Book lists from previous years can be found here.

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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!

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Today we have writing a little reflection on My Name is Asher Lev for this Friday’s essay. I hope you enjoy her ability to make you think more deeply and beautifully about a book we read. If you didn’t read this book with us, then see below the essay for the posts on this book (back from October). Without further ado…

Stories are an invitation into a community of relationships, from those we have with the characters, the authors, and even the art of storytelling itself, to the connections we make with other readers, and especially the relationship we have with ourself. A good book’s ability to reveal truths about ourself in much the same way a trusted friend might, is an invaluable guide on each of our personal journeys of discovering our own identity.

Chaim Potok, in his novel My Name is Asher Lev, wields the themes of relationship and identity as brushes that paint a personal portrait of each reader with the unfolding of the story. So delicately does he detail the “tenuous balance between light and darkness,” the bridge between suffering and beauty, and the battle between intellect and emotion within the human heart that the utter necessity of art is made undeniable.

Asher’s story is a testament to the idea that it is through an act of creation that we were made and is, therefore, by creating that we not only come to better understand our broken world, but also, enter into relationship with the Master Artist in whom our true identity is found.

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Until next time, keep revisiting the good books that enrich your life and nourish your soul.

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Asher Lev Posts (w/ podcast links)

• My Name is Asher Lev

• Some Musings on Asher Lev

• More Musings on Asher Lev

• Podcasts for My Name is Asher Lev

• Asher Lev Wrap Up

In Case You Missed It

• East of Eden- Part Two by

• Reading Revisited ep. 3: Crossing to Safety with , , and special guest

• June Commonplace

• East of Eden- Part One by Jessica Risma

A Few Reminders

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

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• Here is the whole list of this years book selections

• Book lists from previous years can be found here.

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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, I 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 I appreciate it!

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Recently, I came upon one of the most delightful videos: Tuesdays with the Troubadours: Classics You Should Avoid. It is a joy. I felt like I got a window into today’s Inklings Club.

From these fine gent’s hilarious discussion, I learned Joseph Pearce’s four categories for books: the Good Good, the Good Bad, the Bad Good, and the Bad Bad. Let me share with you.

Pearce judges books on two criteria: (1) literary value, and (2) moral or philosophical value.

• Thus, the great books are the Good Good books, which are good literature and good morality/philosophy (a truly triumphant achievement).

All other books fall into one of three remaining categories:

• Good Bad books, which are good literature but bad morality/philosophy (just shy of perfect);

• Bad Good books, which are bad literature but good morality/philosophy (these can be rather ridiculous);

• and Bad Bad books, which are bad literature and bad morality/philosophy (no reason to even look at ‘em).

For the fun of it, let’s talk examples, revisiting books we’ve read together.

Good Good Books

Where to start? How to choose? The goal for any self-respecting book club surely would be to have only Good Good books on it’s list. In order to be brief, I’ve chosen one book from each of the previous book club years, and provided an excerpt to display its literary quality and sound morality and philosophy.

Good Good Book of 2020-2021: Kristin Lavransdatter

She opened her eyes and looked at the ring lying in the dark palm of the smith. And her tears burst forth in torrents, for she felt as if she had never before fully understood what it signified. The life to which this ring had married her, over which she had complained and grumbled, raged and rebelled. And yet she had loved it so, rejoicing over it, with both the bad and the good, so that there was not a single day she would have given back to God without lament or a single sorrow she would have relinquished without regret (1121).

Good Good Book of 2021-2022: Til We Have Faces

The complaint was the answer. To have heard myself making it was to be answered. Lightly men talk of saying what they mean. Often when he was teaching me to write in Greek the Fox would say, ‘Child, to say the very thing you really mean, the whole of it, nothing more or less or other than what you really mean; that’s the whole art and joy of words.’ A glib saying. When the time comes to you at which you will be forced at last to utter the speech which has lain at the centre of your soul for years, which you have, all that time, idiot-like, been saying over and over, you’ll not talk about the joy of words. I saw well why the gods do not speak to us openly, nor let us answer. Till that word can be dug out of us, why should they hear the babble that we think we mean? How can they meet us face to face till we have faces? (335)

Good Good Book of 2022-2023: God Made Sunday

It was inevitable that the priest should have come after me. I knew this. I was his care, like everyone else. It was his duty. I wouldn’t have respected him if he hadn’t. I was going long-lining, when he stood on the pier…He said many things later. He said, You are nursing your sorrow, Colmain, like a mother nursing a child beyond the time when it should be taken from the breast and given solid food. I couldn’t see this. I said, You are wrong. I no longer feel sorrow. How can I nurse what I do not feel? He said, Do you not feel God is to blame then for the things that have happened to you? I said, No, I do not, because I am now aware that God does not exist…The idea of God is a necessity for the mind, but the idea is as unreal as the colour of the sky or the lake or the sea. O, Colmain, he said. (Friday)

Good Good Book of 2023-2024: The Innocence of Father Brown

“You call it unusual, and so do I,” said [Father Brown], “and yet we mean quite opposite things. The modern mind always mixes up two different ideas: mystery in the sense of what is marvelous, and mystery in the sense of what is complicated. That is half its difficulty about miracles. A miracle is startling, but it is simple. It is simple because it is a miracle. It is power coming directly from God (or the devil) instead of indirectly through nature or human wills. (“The Wrong Shape,” 93)

And the honorable mentions are: pretty much all the rest of the books… Now on to less rah-rah categories.

Good Bad Books

First I will echo the Troubadours and place an incredibly respected classic into this category, this way when I place one of our own books here, it will feel like it’s in excellent company.
So, as much as it pains me to say it, Paradise Lost is a prime example of a Good Bad book. Frankly, it was a bit of a relief to hear the Troubadours assert this, because I love this epic, but it doesn’t love me back, it can’t, it’s too coldly wrapped up in itself.

(Paradise Lost: The Fall of the Rebel Angels - Gustave Dore - 1866)

First, the good. The writing is (dare I say it, how can I not?) epic. Let’s read a justifiably famous passage of lines. It’s a quarter of the way into Book I, and Satan has just arisen from the pool of fire where he was cast down after his rebellion against God, and he says:

hail horrors, hail

       Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell

       Receive thy new possessor: one who brings

       A mind not to be changed by place or time.

       The mind is its own place, and in itself

       Can make a Heav’n of Hell, a Hell of Heav’n.

(Book I, 250-255)

And, please follow this thought into Book IV, with a description of Satan:

And like a devilish engine back recoils

       Upon himself; horror and doubt distract

       His troubled thoughts, and from the bottom stir

       The Hell within him, for within him Hell

       He brings, and round about him, nor from Hell

       One step no more than from himself can fly

       By change of place

(Book IV, 17-23)

                        …

       Which way I fly is Hell; myself am Hell

(Book IV, 75)

I’ve penciled that one line “The Hell within him, for within him Hell’ into the margins of nearly every single book I’ve read in the last decade, without even trying. If I pressed myself, I’d been willing to wager that I could find this idea, that a mind can make a Hell within oneself, that a mind can torture itself into nothingness, that a Man (or Angel) can fabricate his own inner world to such a concrete extent that it becomes the only reality he knows, in every great work of literature. It’s a terrifying power.

       Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav’n.

(Book I, 263)

You can’t get more diabolical. Lewis captured the devilish wit of tempters1, Milton displayed the infernal passion of Hell.

But thus far and no further… Paradise Lost fails epically with the person of Christ. Milton’s characterization of Jesus is just lame. It’s flat, and despite being very bright, is still very flat, and when I was in a place of beginning to live my faith less (because I was beginning to justify wrong actions) it made me doubt that God was worth knowing. That’s pretty bad. Like epically bad. Let’s let Pearce say it better. “Milton became so heterodox, denying the Trinity and the true divinity of Christ, that it is arguable that he cannot justifiably be called a Protestant or even a Christian in any true sense of the word…Milton’s God is not the Trinitarian God of the Christians but a Unitarian God whose Son is a mere creature” (Literature What Every Catholic Should Know, 79,81).

Paradise Lost is a very Good Bad book.

Now, to revisit a book of our own. I’m going to place Gilead into this Good Bad Book category.

Gilead is here because of an insightful comment from a fellow book club member. Before she made her comment, I loved the calm, deep wisdom imbued by the beautifully drawn narrator.

I really can’t tell what’s beautiful anymore. I passed two young fellows on the street the other day. I know who they are, they work at the garage. They’re not churchgoing, either one of them, just decent rascally young fellows who have to be joking all the time, and there they were, propped against the garage wall in the sunshine, lighting up their cigarettes. They’re always so black with grease and so strong with gasoline I don’t know why they don’t catch fire themselves. They were passing remarks back and forth the way they do and laughing that wicked way they have. And it seemed beautiful to me. It is an amazing thing to watch people laugh, the way it sort of takes them over. Sometimes they really do struggle with it. I see that in church often enough. So I wonder what it is and where it comes from, and I wonder what it expends out of your system, so that you have to do it till you’re done, like crying in a way, I suppose, except that laughter is much more easily spent. (5)

This gentle, kind pastor’s voice captured me, and I wandered along all his meandering thoughts, happy that he’d gotten to this place of all-encompassing charity. But, that friend at bookclub said something that’s made me relegate this book here, as a Good Bad book. She said (I paraphrase), “The problem with this book is that there’s not a person who wouldn’t like it. It appeals to everyone. It takes no stance. It’s theology is flowy and open and able to be interpreted. It’s relative.” And I think she’s probably right. This book comes so close to providing just the tiniest bit more substance, which would then firm up its moral trajectory.2 But, I couldn’t find it during that first reading. So, sadly, humbly, here it sits, as a good work of literature, but a bad work of morality and philosophy. Feel free to help it up.

Bad Good Books

I’ll be quick about this category and say it probably includes many "Christian Fiction” works. And unfortunately, a lot of these could probably slip down to the Bad Bad Books category since not only is their literary value pretty rough, but I’m sure the philosophy is pretty shaky. But honestly, I’m going off of hearsay here; I don’t read these books. But, perhaps they weren’t set up for success. To paraphrase Peter Kreeft in an interview with Matt Fradd on Pints with Aquinas, “One of the signs that Jesus is who He says He is, is that there’s no good fiction about Him. It just can’t be done.”

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Bad Bad Books

Now, here’s where we could have a lot of fun playing expert. But, it is too easy to find flaws. Therefore, I will restrict myself to only critiquing a book I have called out before in How (I think) I Read: Where the Crawdads Sing.

Let me first give Crawdads credit, and say that this book has been greatly enjoyed by a lot of people, including people I love and respect, deeply. I didn’t pick especially low-hanging fruit for this category, as this is a book people could fight my on, at least three of whom are in my own family. Therefore, what is captivating in it? For me: the beginning. The descriptions of the marsh are lovely, and the main character, Kya, is endearing. The details about plant and animal life are stunning. Additionally, the story is good, in the sense that you care about what happens and want to get to the end. There was potential.

Why it’s bad literature: It completely fails in writing multidimensional characters or good dialogue.

• Flat characters: Tate and Chase, are the two interests in the love triangle. The former is the cliché good guy, the latter is the cliché bad guy. No nuance. Of the two, Tate is drawn better, though still flat. (The random part about Tate dating other girls in college, but always loving Kya, felt forced and out of character.) Chase Andrews is hopelessly flat. He’s a football star who Kya first sees shirtless while playing catch on the beach with the popular kids…In the movie, there were hints at a nuanced character because of the left-open-question of: why did he always wear Kya’s necklace? But this was not developed in the book.

• Stilted dialogue: In a scene between Tate and his dad, it’s Disney-channel-eye-rolling bad. “I’m your dad, I’m supposed to say things like this,” said no dad ever. Dialogue in this book is often used to move the plot along, but fails (from my reading) at character development.

Why it’s bad morality: the protagonist (spoiler!) commits premeditated murder and gets away with it…completely (i.e. she is not condemned by the law, her own conscience, or the author). In the movie, it was slightly more forgivable because the condensed events meant the murder occurred within days of the triggering event. In the book, months went by…months of planning…before the murder. When reading, I held out to the end, waiting to see if Owens would understand Kya as Shakespeare understood Macbeth; she didn’t. The moral of the story seems to be: good guys are justified in getting rid of bad guys, especially if the good guy is a girl living in a marsh.

To end on a positive note: the story keeps you reading. Which just goes to confirm: good plot can carry you a long way, but not, in this case, out of the Bad Bad Book category.

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Well, that’s a wrap! Hope it was fun! Hopefully you don’t find any but the Good Good books here, at Reading Revisited. However, if every so often a Good Bad book does make the list, enjoy the very stimulating conversation bound to follow! All is not lost if the perfect Good Good Book list is not achieved.


Next up we have East of Eden by John Steinbeck. Below is the reading schedule. (It’s a 600 page book, so plan ahead because you don’t want to miss this American masterpiece!)

June 19 - Part One ( ~125pgs)

June 26 - Part Two (~140 pgs)

July 3 - Part Three (~130 pgs)

July 10 - Part Four (~190pgs)

Happy Reading!

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Until next time, keep revisiting the good books that enrich your life and nourish your soul.

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In Case You Missed It

• The Remains of the Day-Final Thoughts (and discussion questions) by

• Our first ever Reading Revisited Podcast with Hannah Suire interviewing Kelsie Hartley about her “Bookish Bio”

• Sin and the Gothic Novel by

  Kelsie Hartley

• May Bookshelf

A Few Reminders

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

Start Survey

• Here is the whole list of this years book selections

• Book lists from previous years can be found here.

• Instagram

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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, I 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 I appreciate it!