reading

The Summer Reading List

In honor of classic Catholic education, some summer reading possibilities. Continue Reading »

Lectio Divina and the Facebook Newsfeed

The ancient monks’ most glorious libraries contained less information than the average smartphone. But their habits of receptivity and assimilation can empower us to lift our gaze from our screens ennobled rather than enslaved. Continue Reading »

Where Her Whimsy Took Me

I thought it would be little more than a pleasure read, a short break before I got into the serious stuff, but soon I found that my expectations, and my reading habits, were being re-written. Continue Reading »

Brush Up Your Shakespeare

Last year I posted in this space a reading plan of my own devising for working through all of Shakespeare's works. I made some work for myself when I created this plan, because I settled on reading plays Monday through Friday, and sonnets and other poems on weekends. Thus it needs annual . . . . Continue Reading »

What We've Been Reading—7.31.15

I am in the first 50 page of Midcentury, a 1961 novel by John Dos Passos. Dos Passos (born 1896, died 1970) is largely forgotten today. He doesn't even appear much on syllabi in undergraduate American literature courses. There are two reasons for that. One is Dos Passos' politics. Like so many others, he started out as a writer on the left, in the 30s flirting with the Communist Party and joining Hemingway in Spain to help in the fight against the Fascists. The murderous conduct of Stalinists in Spain turned him off of communism, and further world events pushed him farther right during and after the war. The more he came to despise collectivism, even to the point of briefly supporting Joe McCarthy, the less the literary world favored him. The other reason Dos Passos has disappeared is literary. (Randy Boyogoda's essay in the current issue of First Things directly relates to this point.) His fiction comes out of an era in which the novel was a great carrier of history and ideas. Continue Reading »

What We've Been Reading—7.17.15

Why Virgil is Still Worth Reading (alongside Robert P. George)

Peter Jones, distinguished classicist and “Ancient and Modern” columnist for The Spectator has published (just in time for Christmas in the UK, at least) an entertaining new book on ancient Rome: Veni, Vidi, Vici: Everything you ever wanted to know about the Romans but were afraid to ask.  . . . . Continue Reading »

Literature Makes You Empathetic, But For How Long?

Reading good literature will make you better in dealing with people, according to a new study published in Science. The study found that after reading literary fiction, as opposed to popular fiction or serious nonfiction, people performed better on tests measuring empathy, social . . . . Continue Reading »

Winning the Distraction War, Losing the Distraction Peace

I haven’t followed the distraction wars very closely. That’s not a joke, I really haven’t paid close attention. I gather that a bunch of people of varying degrees of seriousness have expressed concerns about the effect the Internet has had on the way people think. A listicle of their worries . . . . Continue Reading »

In Praise of Good Bad Books

I had a fairly bookish childhood. I don’t mean that I was a sedentary youth; I spent a greater portion of my days out of doors than is normal for most children in our culture today, given our dread of strangers, our ignorance of our neighbors, and our bizarre belief that sports are things one . . . . Continue Reading »