First in an occasional series about books, authors and reading.
In this Internet Age, like many, I don’t read as many books as I used to. Yet I miss long extended, yet quiet, conversations with authors.
Some of those discussions have been about faith, particularly those spiritual journeys where faith is not for the perfect.
My first experience of deep spiritual reading was with Thomas Merton. The autobiographical “Seven Storey Mountain” was a start, followed by his writings on contemplation. But what really got me absorbed was a series of biographies about the man himself, his struggles only hinted at by his own books (Merton was far more tell-all than his religious community was ever comfortable with, and much of his work was sanitized by his superiors).
Merton the monk was, according to “The Seven Mountains of Thomas Merton,” a biography by Michael Mott, irascible and cantankerous. He was always fighting authority, sometimes demanding solitude, and, when it was granted, expressing anger when his community left him alone. The more I read, the more I began to sympathize with Merton’s superiors. What a swirl of contradictions. How difficult he must have been!
The imperfect seeking faith is also a theme of Graham Greene’s novels, particularly “The End of the Affair” and “The Power and the Glory.” Faith is for sinners. “The Power and the Glory” is about a whiskey priest, the father of a child, whose faith endures persecution in 1920s Mexico. Faith is also embraced by Sarah Miles, a character set in World War II England in “The End of the Affair” who is painfully cognizant of her own moral weakness.
Greene’s novels, the more I reflect, have kept me Catholic in an era when we have been confronted by sinfulness in the church. He tells us that faith can survive in the most unlikely people and places.
Books — yes, in the carry around, old fashioned binders with covers — continue to have an impact on me. This summer, I read “Quiet: the Power of Introverts” by Susan Cain, a cogent argument that even the quiet, too often ignored, have something to offer. She notes that many of our economic disasters of the past decade could have been averted if Wall Street listened to the quiet cautionary types rather than the bombastic, I-have-a-solution-for everything Power Point experts. I also took in Robert Caro’s “The Passage of Power,” the story of Lyndon Johnson’s ascendancy to the presidency, about a man often seen as coarse, crude and bigoted and who is now judged as perhaps the most influential figure in promoting social justice in our country over the past 60 years.
When times get rough, I read sports books. In particular, the “Book of Basketball” by Bill Simmons, more than 500 pages of totally useless yet often hilarious opinionated chatter on the game. Long debates about why Michael Jordan was the greatest basketball player of all time (spoiler alert: he was), in the hands of a clever writer who doesn’t take the subject too seriously, gave me hours of diversion at a particularly difficult time in my life.
Another basketball book, “Loose Balls” by Terry Pluto about the old American Basketball Association, tells stories about the guys I used to idolize who played with a red-white-and blue ball and brought us stars such as Julius Erving. As one confused by time changes, I relate to the story about a player who, told his 5:05 flight from Memphis would land in St. Louis at 4:30, stormed out of the airport yelling he wouldn’t be caught dead in any time machine.
The novels I like best are written by those who view life from the underside. In particular, the Easy Rawlins crime stories by Walter Mosley tell the tales of a World War II vet in Los Angeles encountering racism and various sordid crimes, ironically made me long for palm trees and sunny California on cold February days. The stories of Jamaica Kincaid, whether about the tense relations between mothers/daughters in the islands or of immigrant nannies among the wealthy families who employ them in Manhattan, ring true to anyone familiar with Caribbean culture.
The atmosphere in Frank McCourt’s “Angela’s Ashes” is often bleak about life among the poor in Limerick, Ireland, and Brooklyn, N.Y. McCourt was said to possess a jaundiced view of Catholic life. Yet what I remember most about the memoir is a compassionate priest who hears the confession of a boy who stole a loaf of bread because he was hungry. I could hear my own Irish-American mother’s prayers and expressions in Angela, making me realize that I am more Irish than I ever realized.
I still love to wander bookstores — there are too few remaining — and bask in the lure of conversations that continue to engender self-discovery. This look backwards with friends makes me promise to visit again with more bound dead trees.
Peter Feuerherd is associate publisher of the Catholic Star Herald.
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