The Book Shopper

Jean Browne (1928-2013)

My mother Jean Browne, 85, died in her sleep last week here in Atlanta. She was the parent who read to us as kids and read to her grandchildren as well. I have a tape (somewhere) of her reading the “Little Ginger Bread Boy” from the My Book House Collection to my daughter Cynthia.

There are probably studies that confirm this, but I never could see how a person could learn to enjoy reading without having being introduced to those pleasures as a child. And to this, I attribute part of my interest in books to her, though I believe it was my paternal grandmother who showed me later that a person who did a lot of reading was naturally interesting.

There are sad experiences surrounding my mother's late decline (though she lived independently until this year) but in my memory she will remain the person who read to me as a child and for this, and many other things, I am indebted.

(In this 1959 photo I am the little guy on the left, my sister Kay is on my mother's lap, and my brother Neil is on the right.)

Francis Spufford is an Unapologetic Christian: A Review

The best metaphor for describing how I relate to Christianity comes from Jack Miles who wrote God: A Biography (1995). It goes something like this: A young man raised in wealth, who for some reason ends up in poverty. Nevertheless, the basic character of the man “will remain that of man raised in wealth for he can't give his history away.”

As a youth, I was immersed “in the watery grave” so to speak (our poetic reference to baptism) and spent a lot of time going to church every Sunday. I can still recite the lyrics to “In the Garden” or “How Great Thou Art” even though I haven't heard the songs in decades. These days, it's not like I am opposed to going to church (though it would probably be Unitarian), it's just when you work full time the free time on the weekends is so short.So when I happened upon a brief review of British writer Francis Spufford's Unapologetic: Why, Despite Everything Christianity Can Still Make Surprising Emotional Sense, I thought to myself, “ The pull of Christianity is still there. Why not investigate the religion of my youth while riding to work on MARTA (good time management). The Bible is one of the hands-down favorites of the book club for people who ride public transportation in Atlanta (See the line to MARTA Book Club postings on the right). Moreover if people see what I am reading, maybe they will give me their seat during rush hour.

What sold me on giving this book a try was not that I was going to get a regurgitation of that old time religion, but a thoughtful discourse about what Christianity can and should mean as opposed to something experienced in a mega church with big screens. The reviewer Nick Hornby sums it up this way, “...the best reason to read the book is that it enables thought, specifically thought about who we are and what we're doing here and how we intend to negotiate the difficulties and tragedies that are unavoidably a part of being human.” Handling difficulties and tragedies? I'm in.

But Spufford is no dry, pontificating theologian. He begins the book with this:

 

My daughter has just turned six. Some time over the next year or so, she will discover that her parents are weird. We're weird because we go to church.

 

This means- well, as she gets older there'll be voices telling what it means, getting louder and louder until by the time she's a teenager they'll be shouting in her ear. It means that we believe in a load of bronze-aged absurdities. It means we don't believe in dinosaurs. It means that we are dogmatic. That we're self-righteous. That we fetishise pain and suffering. That we promise the oppressed pie in the sky when they die. That we're bleeding hearts who don't understand the wealth-creating powers of the market... That we build absurdly complex intellectual structures, full of meaningless distinctions, on the marshmallow foundations of a fantasy...

 

In Chapter 2, Spufford writes about sin, but he calls it HptFtU instead – the human propensity to f--- things up. Our normal state of being is messing things up and to think that it all began with this wonderful blissful state of grace creates many problems. A major one is guilt because we are not perfect. Once we recognize that and we realize that God (who is not the white-beard old man, according to Chapter 3 Big Daddy) and Jesus (topic of Chapter 5 Yeshua) are here to show forgiveness. Maybe we can think about forgiving others more. Forgiveness can help us heal and as Spufford writes at the end of the book, “Far more can be mended than you know.”

I am not even going to try to cover some of Spufford's arguments, some of which you probably won't agree with. But if you're a little beaten up, pick up your tattered cloak of Christianity, and check out this short well-written, uplifting book.

Postscripts. Don't assume I ever finished the Jack Miles book, which I did not. The only thing I remember is the wealthy man and religion metaphor, but if you remember ONE thing out of every book you read isn't that good enough? Currently, I have also been reading Clive James' Cultural Cohesion: The Essential Essays (1968 -2002) (2013) a kind of prequel to Cultural Amnesia (2003). Coincidentally , James opens his book with this quote from French essayist Alain Finkielkraut which sounds a lot like HptFtU: “Barbarism is not the prehistory of humanity, but the faithful shadow that accompanies its every step.” Nick Hornby's review of Unapologetic appears in the March/April 2013 of The Believer magazine, another periodical you can read on MARTA unapologetically.

In Book Towns, the Books Come to You

I was up in Boston over the Fourth of July weekend visiting my daughter. Traditionally, Boston is a great book shopping town for me, but I didn't make it out like I normally do.

I did squeeze in a couple of my normal stops. Raven Used Books and the Harvard Bookstore, but ran out of time before I could make it down to the M.I.T Press Bookstore. I took some solace in my poor time management since I haven't read the book I bought at M.I.T. last December on my last visit. (This photo comes from the storefront of a used bookstore near M.I.T. )

At Raven, I found a copy of a Charles Portis' 1966 novel, Norwood, but another book Lie Down in Darkness (1951) by William Styron found me. I was staying at the Irving House, a bed & breakfast near the Harvard campus. According to the in-room brochure the general manager is a book shopper and she has stocked her rooms with plenty of books and not just bestsellers. In my room among other literary offerings, was Richard Ford's Canada (which I read last year) and the Styron book. Just a few weeks ago I had finished Styron's Tidewater Mornings, a book of three long short stories. I found the prose exquisite and his portrayal of the South fascinating – no surprise that he was such an intense and troubled writer. A work colleague told me that Darkness was worth the read as well and she knows something about books since she recommended Zadie Smith's White Teeth to me earlier this year, which I thought was fine book.

The management at Irving House makes it very clear that guests are allowed to take books with them. Good thing, since this is a book shopping blog, not a book stealing blog.

Young Men and Fire: From Montana to Arizona

The raging Arizona wildfire that claimed the lives of 19 men of an elite firefighting team earlier this week may remind some of a book that was published over twenty years ago. Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire (1992) was a detailed account at the tragedy of another special group of 16 firefighters, 13 who perished during a Montana wildfire. Having grown up in Montana and having worked for the U.S. Forest Service as a teenager, Maclean re-creates the tragedy -- the perfect storm of nature's fury and miscalculation. I can't remember why I unloaded my copy (it happens), but I do remember the meditative quality of Maclean investigation of the fire and the questioning his own mortality. (Maclean died two years before the book was published.)  Later the book was reviewed on the front page of New York Times Book Review.

Maclean is probably better known for his 1976 book of short stories, A River Runs Through It and Other Stories, which was made into a 1992 movie directed by Robert Redford and starring Brad Pitt.

I hope that in the future some writer honors those who died in Arizona, the way Maclean remembered those who burned to death in Montana in 1949.