Bibliography, November 2019

BOTM: D. Lessing, The grass is singing (1950)

M. Brearley, On cricket (2018)
T. Holland, Dominion (2019)
U.K. Le Guin, The real and the unreal: selected stories, volume 2 (2012)
A. Munro, Something I've been meaning to tell you (1974)
S. Tighe, Rethinking strategy (2019)
B. Wilson, The Hive (2004)
J. Worth, Call the midwife (2001)

It has been a mediocre month, and surprisingly so. I'm a big fan of many of the authors on this list, but it is clear I was not reading their best work. Of the stronger ones, Brearley was very enjoyable, but I have read lots of this kind of thing before; ditto Le Guin. More interesting was Lessing, both on its own merits, and in the context of when it was written. Its racial politics are clearly progressive for 1950, and in themselves unobjectionable, but it would be inconceivable to write such a novel now, with the black voice almost completely silent save as a foil to the disintegration of the whites.

A lengthy and specific coda now follows on Dominion, which I expected to be my favourite, but wasn't.

Good things first. This is a well written, very enjoyable, canter through the history of Western Christianity. Tom Holland writes nicely and has a great eye for interesting detail and insightful extrapolation, as well as good asides. As a narrative history, it's very good. But that's not the limit of the ambition of this book - it wants to show that Christian heritage drives much of the modern west's values, and are unique. I found both of these problematic, especially the latter.

Part of this I think is an unwillingness to do the major work, which I'll come onto, but there are also more minor questions of accuracy, noticeable perhaps only to people who have been over this ground many times before. Ulfilas, bishop to the Goths, is described as only really ministering to Christian captives on page 186, but six pages later is translating the bible into Gothic. Wittenberg was not, in 1517, 'poor and remote' (p.295), but the residence of one of the seven Electors of the Holy Roman Empire. These don't really matter, but are suggestive of a desire to ramp up the rhetoric at the expense of detail. Personally, I also found irritating the fact that Gregory VII, who animates a lot of this book, is interchangeably referred to as Hildebrand (his given name), though I accept that's personal only.

The central role given to Gregory is however, excellent. Canossa here is given its rightful place in the Christian narrative. The hinge of that narrative is the early part of the second millenium, and Holland does it well, though I would have liked to see more on Innocent III. This experience is western European only - this is after all, a history of 'the making of the western mind' - and is the first of my major objections: the book skates over the clear implications of this focus. Whatever we are talking about cannot be intrinsic to Christianity if it doesn't describe the experience and thought of the Christians to the east of the Adriatic, and indeed those east of the Euphrates. Holland knows the eastern church perfectly well, but much of what he claims to be Christian would I think be hugely undermined by an assessment of the Byzantine church and state.

Even more serious, and I think fatal, is the lack of engagement with any comparative religious analysis. Frequently, things are referred to a unique or unprecedented, but I just don't think they are. I'm not an expert on eastern religion, but it's very clearly not unique to Christianity to love the poor, nor even for the nobility to do it. Ask anyone from the subcontinent. I'm less familiar with some of the comparisons around sexual mores, both monogamy and homosexuality, but again, the only comparisons are classical and occasionally Islamic.  That's Holland's specialism, but I don't think it's credible to make claims about the distinctiveness of Christianity in a book, whose excellent index (for which many commendations) has a sole reference to Hinduism and none to Buddhism.

As I write this, I wonder if I'm being overly critical. For I am sympathetic to the view that Christian history has shaped modern thinking, and that many modern assumptions owe much to particular strands of thought in our Christ-drenched, though also classically influenced, backstory. Books that tell that story are welcome. And this makes clear the distinctions between parts of the ancient west and parts of the Christian west. However, to expand that thesis requires a lot more than is present here. I understand anyone not wanting to spend more time on Buddhism than they have to, but then they shouldn't make the claims contained here.

Bibliography, October 2019

BOTM: B. Wilson, The way we eat now (2019)

M. Atwood, The Testaments (2019)
M. Atwood, The handmaid's tale (1985)
E.M. Brent-Dyer, The new house at the chalet school (1935)
B. Evaristo, Girl, Woman, Other (2019)
C. Obioma, An orchestra of minorities (2019)
J. Paxman, The political animal (2002)
S. Rushdie, Quichotte (2019)
E. Shafak, 10 minutes, 38 seconds in this strange world (2019)

I love Bee Wilson's work. I think she writes well and has exceptionally interesting things to say. I need to read the lot. This is fascinating on our food culture (and depressing, particularly as I write this just after Halloween). Like all books of this kind, it makes me want to make bread, but it also makes we want to think more about a much wider range of foods (and drinks). Read it; and read her Consider the fork as well, which is even better.

It probably would have been book of the month anyway, but it wasn't really challenged by this years' Booker shortlist, which was weak. I agreed with the judges (I am ignoring the sentimental award to Atwood, which was emphatically not deserved), and thought Evaristo was the best. It was engaging, nicely phrased and vocalised from its various viewpoints. And I thought it managed the contradictions and and problems of its narrators well. There's a cute, semi-twist in a final coda that I quite liked, but some didn't. I don't think it matters very much. Of the others, it was tight between Shafak and Obioma, and I applaud the ambition of Ellmann. Rushdie and Atwood felt tired and shadows of the former selves. I reread the Handmaid's tale after this, which I liked a lot more than I did first time round, and just served to show how pedestrian the sequel is.

My ranking.

1. Evaristo
2. Shafak
3. Obioma
4. Ellmann
5. Atwood
6. Rushdie

Bibliography, September 2019

BOTM: A. Maalouf, The rock of Tanios (1993)

A. Bennett, Anna of the five towns (1902)
L. Ellmann, Ducks, Newburyport (2019)
D. du Maurier, The scapegoat (1957)

Ducks, Newburyport was not my favourite, but it did take up most of the reading time. It has also been somewhat misleadingly reviewed. I think that may well be because many of the reviewers didn't finish it. It is accurately reported as being very very long, and definitely outlandish in technique. It is a stream of consciousness novel, but a very specific manner which is essentially a list. That makes it hard going, though the writing does make many of those fragments very quotable. Contrary to most of the reviews, it is actually full of plot. There's a whole biographical backstory packed into it, and central conventional narrative has a dramatic (one could say melodramatic) climax. It's far from perfect, and it could definitely be half the length or less, but it's an ambition to be applauded.

Everything else was high quality without being outstanding. Arnold Bennett remains consistently good, and given that consistency, ever more surprisingly unfashionable; Du Maurier was fun. However, Maalouf's evocation of the beginnings of modern religious conflict in Lebanon was particularly nicely done, and it's right on target for me. I'll be reading the rest of his.

Bibliography, August 2019

BOTM: A.A. Gill, Pour me (2015)

J. Arlott, Arlott on wine (1986)

F. Fernandez - Armesto, Millenium (1997)

P. Hensher, Kitchen Venom (1996)
C. Louvin, Satan is real (2012)*

L. Mangan, Bookworm (2016)

A. Marshall, Life's rich pageant (1984)

S. Runciman, The lost capital of Byzantium (1980)

D. Storey, Saville (1976)
J. Thayil, Narcopolis (2012)

A. Wilson, As if by magic (1973)

I read widely this month, but not well. I have though cleared the decks of some long overdue books, where I liked Millenium (a shamefully never completed 18th birthday present), but not Saville (one of three unread Booker winners, but with a dire, unconnected ending). Much of the rest was mediocre and some (Hensher, Wilson) were bad. I make Gill's memoir my favourite with some reluctance as other contenders fell away. Runciman was solid rather than sparkling; Mangan I did enjoy, but a) the distance between our childhood reading was too great (essentially because she's a girl) and b) I'm jealous of the number of books she must get to read even now. I did consider giving it to Arthur Marshall's rather lovely autobiography, but I think I would have needed to know who he was beforehand, though it had some very good lines. So it had to be the Gill, which I found both engaging and problematic. Lots is left out; and much of his fairly aggressive public persona is not engaged with or heavily glossed over. And that makes it a not very honest book, deliberately, despite claiming to be. It is affecting, but the compelling episodes add up to a disingenuous whole. The episodes are however often very well done. In fact, I enjoyed the digressions on art and on journalism more than the central plank of the book. That is problematic, but it does make a very worthwhile read. 

Bibliography, July 2019

BOTM: W. Goldman, Adventures in the screen trade (1983)

N. Faber, Faber and Faber: the untold story (2019)
R. George, Ninety percent of everything (2013)
E. Huxley, The flame trees of Thika (1959)
J. Lees-Milne, People and places (1992)
L. Lynn, Coal miner's daughter (1976)
T. Snyder, Bloodlands (2010)

H. Turtledove, Agent of Byzantium (1987)

There were some great books this month. Bloodlands was good, but not as strong as Snyder's earlier book on the region. It was however very good on the different historiographic elements of our understanding of the Holocaust. I was very struck by the difference in our knowledge of Auschwitz being in part a function of both its westerly location and its combined function as a labour camp. This brought out the picture to include those multitudes gassed in camps with very few survivors and those millions shot in regions further east.

However, the best three were all memoir. Huxley was excellent, but felt slightly shallow, an impression that comes mostly with its age I think. Its preoccupations and lack of curiosity of the indigenous communities have dated. Loretta Lynn's autobiography was great, and actually far from shallow, but the narrative punch of the first half I don't think was backed up by the second. That had a bit too much opinion and not enough story - Lynn is much better at the former. Goldman's book on Hollywood, on the other hand, was riddled with opinion, and he is very good at it. I picked it up on whim. I hadn't realised how big a scriptwriter Goldman was. That's incidental to the book, but it does give it credibility. It's also funny, well-written (you would hope so) and illuminating. Best of a good month.

Bibliography, June 2019

BOTM: Y.N. Hariri, Sapiens (2011)

P. Lively, Oleander, Jacaranda (1994)
A. Patchett, The Patron Saint of Liars (1992)
S.S. Tepper, The Margarets (2008)
H. Williamson, Tarka the otter (1927)
J. Wong, Red China Blues (1996)

It's been a very weak month for volume. I've been binge watching Brooklyn 99 instead of doing any reading. I could have spent those 30 hours really getting to grips with shipping containers (next reading) amongst others. I also had some reservations about the books too. I have loved Sherri Tepper's books over the last few years, but despite being one of the best reviewed of hers, I thought it was contrived and resorted to the fantastical for the central plot. It wasn't the only one that disappointed. Best of them was definitely Sapiens, which I liked a lot, though itself not without issues. In particular the change that came with the scientific revolution is presented as more binary than I think was. However, the general sweep and scope were excellent and with lots of insightful nuggets.

Bibliography, May 2019

BOTM: J. Jeffs, Sherry (6th ed., 2016)

J. Baldwin, If Beale Street could talk (1974)

C. Fielden, Manzanilla (2010)
T. Hamilton and A. Hazarika, Punch and Judy politics (2018)

M. Miller, Song of Achilles (2011)

S. Mucha et al., Alphonse Mucha (2000)

D. Reynolds, Empire of Liberty (2009)
J. Scalzi, Redshirts (2011)
R. Silverberg, Dying inside (1972)

J. Preston, A very English scandal (2016)

A definite feeling of fleshing out here. Reynolds and Preston were books from radio and television for me, though I know they didn't start like that. And I recall Julian Jeffs hosting an evening on sherry for the 5th edition several years ago. Of these, and of all of them, that was the best. It's partly the state of my knowledge. I had some knowledge, but material gaps in process and lots in the history. It does those admirably and is written fluidly and packed with splendid asides. It helps that its core is sixty years old and some of the original text clearly breaks through. I'd recommend it, though you probably do need to be up for sherry.

Bibliography, April 2019

BOTM: P.G. Wodehouse, Mike and Psmith (1908)

J. Betjeman, Sweet songs of Zion (2007) 

L. Booth (ed.), Wisden Cricketers' Almanack (2019)
T. Clark, Monopoli Blues (2018)

B.D. Ehrman, The Orthodox corruption of Scripture (1993)

C. Fowler, Book of forgotten authors (2017)

C. Freeman, AD 381: Heretics, pagans and the Christian state (2008)

J. Haldeman, The Forever War (1974)
--------, Forever Free (1997)

--------, Forever Peace (1998)

A. Hamilton, J. Madison, and J. Jay, The Federalist papers (1787)

P.G. Wodehouse, Psmith in the city (1909)

--------, Psmith, Journalist (1910)

It's pretty unclear to me what the best of these was. None were outstanding, though plenty were OK. Forever Free contains possibly the worst ending one can imagine, but I toyed with giving BOTM to Haldeman's 70s classic - in the end, the rest of the book doesn't live up to its brilliant concept. I had the same issues with Ehrman's book, which is the product of outstanding work, but exceptionally hard going (and tells me that Mark 1.1 is wrong). So, in the end, I went for the first of the Psmith novels. It's the best of the three here, and it has cricket as a central part of the plot. It's light relief that I very much needed.

Bibliography, March 2019

BOTM: D. Levy, The cost of living (2018)

J. Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why good people are divided by politics and religion (2012)

D. Levy, Things I don't want to know (2014)

C. Liu, The Three body problem (2006)

N. Mahfouz, Children of the alley (1957)
S. Reynolds, Shock and awe: Glam rock and its legacy (2016)

G. Robb, The debatable land (2018)

A few of these could really have done with being part of the books they were. Liu's multi-garlanded science fiction could have ended earlier, and Haidt's and Robb's initial chapters were laboured with too much tedious personal detail. Both finished well. No criticisms of either of Deborah Levy's succinct volumes of autobiography. I stumbled across Levy through the Booker, but she's a fine writer, though I've found her fiction intriguing rather than outstanding. These I think do it better, with a stronger rootedness to place, and tighter writing. I read them in the wrong order, which doesn't really matter - both were excellent - but I wouldn't recommend you do. I enjoyed the later one more, but by a fine margin.

Bibliography, February 2019

BOTM: A. Kurkov, Death and the penguin (1996)

K. Addison, The Goblin Emperor (2014)
M. Beard, Women and Power (2018)

D. Landes, The wealth and poverty of nations (1998)

U.K. Le Guin, The other wind  (2001)

J. McMorland-Hunter and S. Dunster, Quinces: Growing and Cooking (2014)
M Maeterlinck, The life of the bee (1901)

C. Mieville, The last days of new Paris (2016)
Tan Twan Eng, The Garden of Evening Mists (2012)

Non-fiction was poor this month. I am craving a general economic history that has a clear thesis without being overly reliant on it. Landes wasn't it. Fiction was much stronger, though I doubt any of them will be troubling me for book of the year. The Goblin Emperor was engrossing, and I'm glad I read it by mistake, but suffered from that regular annoying trope of innocents cleaning out government etc. No such idealism in Kurkov's bizarre and macabre novel about post Soviet Ukraine - with a penguin. It's inventive, and slightly mad, but was clever and great fun. It has a sequel, which based on this review, I won't read. You should read this.

Against the Gnostics

Preached Septuagesima (17th February) 2019. St Michael's, Stockwell.

Jeremiah 17:5-10

1 Corinthians 15:12-20

Luke 6:17-26

It’s a great pleasure to be speaking today. I don’t often hear the sermon in church at all because of the children. And they don’t want to listen to anyone for 10 minutes, certainly not me. I asked Jamie what I should talk about today and he asked if I was going to talk about poo. I fear he would be disappointed. 

To give you my credentials for preaching, I should add to Erica’s introduction that I’ve just finished my Doctorate on the early church ecclesiastical historian Socrates Scholasticus, who I am confident no-one has ever heard of. I’m not going to talk about him either. 

But he was in my mind when I saw the readings for today. Because they are also obscure. Jeremiah is always obscure. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians is famous, and includes one of the most read passages in the bible – the one about love that people have at weddings. I had it at my wedding. It’s not that one. The gospel looks more promising – it’s the beatitudes. But it’s not the famous ones. They’re in Matthew. From the Sermon on the Mount.

I want to start today by comparing Luke’s account of the beatitudes with Matthew’s. 

There are a lot of similarities. Both of these are blessings. In both we can hear the echoes of Jeremiah and the psalmist (and lots of other Old Testament prophets): blessed are those who trust in the Lord, not in man’s priorities, but God’s. These blessings are pointing us towards what God’s priorities. 

In both, they occur just after the disciples are called by Jesus and after a crowd gathers. And this crowd has come from a long way away. It a couple of hundred miles between Sidon and Jerusalem. Thereafter they diverge.

In Matthew, Jesus goes up a mountain with them alone and then he launches into a list of blessings that mostly concern spiritual virtue. The poor in spirit, they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the pure of heart, peacemakers and so on. Each of those has a more or less linked reward: the merciful obtain mercy; the pure in heart see God. 

Luke’s account is different. It’s different in lots of ways – I am always struck by how he blesses and condemns his audience not by talking about what they will do, but what they are. I suspect some of us are pretty uncomfortable with the condemnations of those who are rich and those who are full. I know I am. But I am not going to preach today on the role of the poor or the nature of salvation or the humanity of Christ. 

Instead, I want to talk about the world and Christ’s engagement with it. Because when we listen to Jeremiah and the Psalmist, I think there is a risk of withdrawing from the world and treating this is as a spiritual exercise. From the Psalm: their delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law they meditate day and night. 

But what Luke describes is rooted in the present and the physical reality of who he is speaking to. He doesn’t bless those who will hunger for righteousness, but those who are hungry. He is blessing them for what they are, right now. Literally, two of those blessings have the intensifier ‘now’ in them. The subjects of his blessings are the poor, the hungry, and the weeping. And the rewards are both spiritual and tangible. The hungry are promised food, not a vision of God. Luke’s account does promise the kingdom of God but is stripped of much wishy-washy spiritual allegory that lurks around promises of reward. These ambitions are rooted in the world as well as the kingdom of God 

It may not be obvious, but our section of Paul’s letter to the Corinthians is addressing the same thing. 

Paul argues here that our salvation happens through the resurrection, and this is a real tangible event. The dead are raised. This is so important that Paul writes it out twice and added it to a letter that mostly talks about something else. 

He does this because he is worried about the church in Corinth. They are clearly talking about the resurrection in a different way a milder, more palatable, spiritual experience. This is one of Paul’s earlier letters, written in the early 50s, but that tendency to downplay the concreteness of the resurrection never goes away. In the second century, a series of Christian thinkers we now call the Gnostics (from the Greek, meaning secret knowledge) sought to allegorise away great swathes of Christ’s death and resurrection. Replacing them with ever more elaborate schemes of spiritual hierarchies and supernatural powers. Valentinius, the most well-known of them, argued that Jesus had a supernatural body, and indeed was unable to experience corruption – to digest and excrete food. My son was perhaps right to ask about that. His opponents rejected this, led by Irenaeus of Lyons, one of the great orthodox theologians. And I am very glad they did. Because if we deny the tangibility of Jesus, we rob the mission of Christ of its roots in the world. 

Normally at this stage in my sermons I like to dredge up an ancient saint to make my point. And today is the feast day of Donatus, Romulus, Secundian, and their 86 companions, who died in the year 304 under Emperor Diocletian. But it is also the feast of Janani Luwum, archbishop of Uganda, who protested against Idi Amin and was murdered by him on this day in 1977. It is his statue – and not those of Donatus and his friends – that is outside Westminster Abbey as testament that bearing witness to Christ doesn’t just mean letting pagans execute you. It means fighting the problems of the world. And that is because of the exhortation the Christ made. 

In my favourite novel about American anti-slavery Calvinism, and indeed about Christianity at all, Gilead by Marilynne Robinson, the main character, a preacher, says this about the world: 

I know this is all mere apparition compared to what awaits us, but it is only lovelier for that. … I can't believe that, when we have all been changed and put on incorruptibility, we will forget our fantastic condition of mortality and impermanence, the great bright dream of procreating and perishing that meant the whole world to us. In eternity this world will be Troy, I believe, and all that has passed here will be the epic of the universe, the ballad they sing in the streets.

[M. Robinson, Gilead (2004), 65] 

I think Jesus thought that too. And today’s gospel calls us to root our faith in the hereafter in the condition of the world, right here, right now. 

There’s no social or political blueprint in the bible. No manual on how to do it, which is probably a good thing. But there’s a clear instruction to do it. 

And it is because Jesus did, that he brought humanity to salvation. The concrete reality of Christ’s presence and mission is what makes his resurrection our resurrection. 

I’d like to end by going back to Jeremiah. Let our trust in the Lord make us like a tree planted by water and because of this, let us never cease to bear fruit in the world, right here, right now. 

Amen.

Bibliography, January 2019

BOTM: B. Stanley, Yeah, yeah, yeah: the story of modern pop (2013)

S. Cooper, Over sea, under stone (1965)
---, Greenwitch (1974)
---, The Grey King (1975)
---, Silver on the Tree (1977)
C.M. Dominguez, House of Paper (2004)
N.K. Jemisin, The fifth season (2016
---, The obelisk Gate (2017)
---, The stone sky (2018)
D. Levy, Swimming home (2012)
S. Maconie, The people's songs (2013)
A. Patchett, Commonwealth (2016)
S. Turton, The seven deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle (2018)

It wasn't competitive. I liked a lot of the fiction I read this month, and I read a lot of fiction. Almost all of it was excellent, though I'd single out the first of the Jemisins, Patchett and Turton. However, they were blown away by Stanley's magisterial history of pop music, by which he really means mid 1950s - late 1990s. It isn't perfect: it doesn't quite manage the complexity of the fragmentation of popular music from the mid 1970s onwards and I don't think he entirely succeeds in telling the story of pop rather than the developments that he is interested in, so very popular aspects are neglected in favour of cooler scenes he likes. He also expressed views I do not always agree with. Nonetheless, it is meticulously researched and presented - and fascinating in the linkages it unearths, even in stories I know well. It's very good on the transitory nature of fashion in pop music and the rapid change in taste. The sections on the 1950s are outstanding, and the chapters on mid-sixties London and Glam are functionally perfect. Throughout it is also beautifully and wittily written. I have a sheaf of quotations that I'll be putting up. The first half is better than the second, but that's true of pop music itself. It is a masterpiece, even if he is wrong about Queen.

Bibliography, 2018

Back over 100 books in the year for the first time since the children; I am very proud of myself. My ratios aren't quite as healthy: I meant to read lots of 'hard' non-fiction, i.e., history, politics and theology, but that's down in percentage terms, if up in volume. Fiction is down too as I've read a awful lot of what I call cultural output*, mostly about cricket. This comes across in the BOTMs, with only four fiction, and five of the eight non-fiction were cultural (though only one was about cricket).

I had a plethora of riches in non-fiction, but politics and political history dominate. All out War was fantastic - a masterful pulling together of the Brexit campaign which continues to help make sense of what is happening now. However, Team of Rivals was absolutely exceptional. The contours of the story are well known, but the detail was riveting, and the context hugely enhanced my understanding of the American Civil War and of America in general. It has claims (from others) to wider relevance, but for me stands as a brilliant piece of political history.

In fiction, for the first time, none of the books of the month were book of the year. I do love The Leopard, which is the best thing on the list here, but I have read it before, and so Milkman was the novel I am most glad I read this year. By coincidence it was from the same month as Goodwin so it doesn't appear below. In general fiction has been a real vindication of the Booker prize. I read two shortlists this year, and the three of the four best novels I read came from them.

Books of the Month:
January: S. Middleton, The Daysman (1984)
February: T. Shipman, All out war (2016)
March: D. Sandbrook, Never had it so Good: 1956-63 (2005)
April: G. Tomasi di Lampedusa, The Leopard (1958)*
May: L. Booth (ed.), Wisden Cricketers' Almanack (2013)
June: P. Mathiessen, The tree where man was born (1972)
July: W. Thesiger, The Marsh Arabs (1964)*
August: A. Hartley, The Zanzibar chest (2003)
October: D.K. Goodwin, Team of Rivals (2005). 
September: R. Powers, The Overstory (2018)
November: J. Morris, Trieste and the meaning of nowhere (2001)
December: J. Lahiri, The Lowland (2013)

*This year, Sport (20), Travel (11), Memoir and contemporary history (9), Food (4), Literature (3)