The Book Thread

[Charbel]

Oh yes, Jack London ! "Call of the Wild" was one of my favorite when I was young. I don't know To Build a fire, but it looks interesting ! 
I love Mark Twain, because when I was a kid, we had on TV "The adventures of Tom Sawyer" a japanese/american anime, and I was so fond of it. I remember the opening said : "Tom Sawyer is America, symbol of freedom, born on the bank of Mississipi, Tom Sawyer is a friend for all. Tom Sawyer is America, for those who love Truth. He knows the wonders of forest, the country lanes and rivers" I sang it 24 hours a day. My parents became crazy. Mark Twain makes me happy since this. 
 And my favorite Poe... I think it's "The Pit and the Pendulum" It's SO frightening. "The Black Cat", too. brrr. Do you have, too ? 

Ezra, I understand so much about how school can kill a book. A lot of American love the Misérable, when here everyone hate it because it's the boring book they make you read in high school. I'll try to see if I can find Moby Dick in english at the library. 

The Pit and the Pendulum yeeeeeah. That one was hard to read! The suspense really grabs you, I was surprised how much I was affected while reading it. Heart beating faster, clammy palms, quick breaths. amesome. I know most people's favorite is "The Tell-Tale Heart" which I really like as well and of course The Raven. I don't know why but I always sort of liked Annabel Lee. It actually reminded me of an episode of Pokémon when I first read it HA!

Did you ever hear about that movie made a few years ago "The Raven" where John Cusack plays Edgar Allen Poe? It was actually pretty decent, Cusack did a nice job portraying him. The premise was something like a crazy man was murdering people mirroring the things Poe wrote about in real life to see if he could get caught. He murders people in the manner like The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Masque of the Red Death is what I remember right now. Pretty gory from what I remember too. Sorry for the movie hijack!

Now I'm curious how you feel about Charles Dickens?

Jack London is fun to read, I also read "Call of the Wild" when I was a kid, and "White Fang". Never heard of "To Build a Fire", though. I shall have to look it up. 

 

It's one of his short stories, I guess it's not as known as I thought it was. It was really interesting, especially since I read it in a cold room. If I remember correctly, it was either inspired by or set in the Yukon, although I'm pretty sure it had something to do with both. I agree, London IS fun to read!

[Peace]

Jack London is fun to read, I also read "Call of the Wild" when I was a kid, and "White Fang". Never heard of "To Build a Fire", though. I shall have to look it up. 

 

White Fang? Aren't all fangs white?

[HisChildForever]

See Me by Nicholas Sparks

The Joy of the Gospel by Papa Francis

Evangelical Catholicism by George Weigel (this one I've been picking at)

Edited November 7, 2015 by HisChildForever
bad autocorrect

[NadaTeTurbe]

The Pit and the Pendulum yeeeeeah. That one was hard to read! The suspense really grabs you, I was surprised how much I was affected while reading it. Heart beating faster, clammy palms, quick breaths. amesome. I know most people's favorite is "The Tell-Tale Heart" which I really like as well and of course The Raven. I don't know why but I always sort of liked Annabel Lee. It actually reminded me of an episode of Pokémon when I first read it HA!

Did you ever hear about that movie made a few years ago "The Raven" where John Cusack plays Edgar Allen Poe? It was actually pretty decent, Cusack did a nice job portraying him. The premise was something like a crazy man was murdering people mirroring the things Poe wrote about in real life to see if he could get caught. He murders people in the manner like The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Masque of the Red Death is what I remember right now. Pretty gory from what I remember too. Sorry for the movie hijack!

Now I'm curious how you feel about Charles Dickens?

It's one of his short stories, I guess it's not as known as I thought it was. It was really interesting, especially since I read it in a cold room. If I remember correctly, it was either inspired by or set in the Yukon, although I'm pretty sure it had something to do with both. I agree, London IS fun to read!

"Heart beating faster, clammy palms, quick breaths" are also the symptoms of someone reading Lovecraft. "Cthulu's Call" and " The Shadow over Innsmouth" are the worst. 

I never heart of it, but I'll try too see it, it looks good. 

Dickens ? I love some of his books (A Christmas Carol, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop), don't like others (A Tale of Two Cities is really strange when you compare with his other books), but I felt sometimes that it's too easy. If it was written today, I would say "commercial". For exemple, Miss Havisham. While reading some of his books, I really felt I was reading something written by a writer who thought about his future movie. It's also sometimes too sentimentals. In fact, I have a "Victor Hugo" vibe with him, but a Victor Hugo less verbose. I read his books when I was between 8 and 11 and they were real page-turner for me. 

[xSilverPhinx]

White Fang? Aren't all fangs white?

I didn't choose the title.  

[HopefulHeart]

I read King Lear for a class. It was quite a gloomy tale. I didn't realize how emotionally invested I was in the characters until the last act, when people starting dying left and right.

[Era Might]

"Heart beating faster, clammy palms, quick breaths" are also the symptoms of someone reading Lovecraft. "Cthulu's Call" and " The Shadow over Innsmouth" are the worst. 
I never heart of it, but I'll try too see it, it looks good. 

Dickens ? I love some of his books (A Christmas Carol, Nicholas Nickleby, The Old Curiosity Shop), don't like others (A Tale of Two Cities is really strange when you compare with his other books), but I felt sometimes that it's too easy. If it was written today, I would say "commercial". For exemple, Miss Havisham. While reading some of his books, I really felt I was reading something written by a writer who thought about his future movie. It's also sometimes too sentimentals. In fact, I have a "Victor Hugo" vibe with him, but a Victor Hugo less verbose. I read his books when I was between 8 and 11 and they were real page-turner for me. 

Have you read George Eliot ("George" was her pen name, she was a woman). "Middlemarch" is a great novel...her prose is very dense but she's a great writer, realist rather than Romantic, but she's very good at seeing inside people and bringing out human emotions, relationships, thoughts, etc. I didn't like or get her when I first read "Middlemarch" in college...she's definitely different than Dickens or other Victorians, but I think she may be the greatest of them all. Here's her prelude for "Middlemarch":

Who that cares much to know the history of man, and how the mysterious mixture behaves under the varying experiments of Time, has not dwelt, at least briefly, on the life of Saint Theresa, has not smiled with some gentleness at the thought of the little girl walking forth one morning hand-in-hand with her still smaller brother, to go and seek martyrdom in the country of the Moors? Out they toddled from rugged Avila, wide-eyed and helpless-looking as two fawns, but with human hearts, already beating to a national idea; until domestic reality met them in the shape of uncles, and turned them back from their great resolve. That child-pilgrimage was a fit beginning. Theresa's passionate, ideal nature demanded an epic life: what were many-volumed romances of chivalry and the social conquests of a brilliant girl to her? Her flame quickly burned up that light fuel; and, fed from within, soared after some illimitable satisfaction, some object which would never justify weariness, which would reconcile self-despair with the rapturous consciousness of life beyond self. She found her epos in the reform of a religious order.

That Spanish woman who lived three hundred years ago, was certainly not the last of her kind. Many Theresas have been born who found for themselves no epic life wherein there was a constant unfolding of far-resonant action; perhaps only a life of mistakes, the offspring of a certain spiritual grandeur ill-matched with the meanness of opportunity; perhaps a tragic failure which found no sacred poet and sank unwept into oblivion. With dim lights and tangled circumstance they tried to shape their thought and deed in noble agreement; but after all, to common eyes their struggles seemed mere inconsistency and formlessness; for these later-born Theresas were helped by no coherent social faith and order which could perform the function of knowledge for the ardently willing soul. Their ardor alternated between a vague ideal and the common yearning of womanhood; so that the one was disapproved as extravagance, and the other condemned as a lapse.

Some have felt that these blundering lives are due to the inconvenient indefiniteness with which the Supreme Power has fashioned the natures of women: if there were one level of feminine incompetence as strict as the ability to count three and no more, the social lot of women might be treated with scientific certitude. Meanwhile the indefiniteness remains, and the limits of variation are really much wider than any one would imagine from the sameness of women's coiffure and the favorite love-stories in prose and verse. Here and there a cygnet is reared uneasily among the ducklings in the brown pond, and never finds the living stream in fellowship with its own oary-footed kind. Here and there is born a Saint Theresa, foundress of nothing, whose loving heart-beats and sobs after an unattained goodness tremble off and are dispersed among hindrances, instead of centring in some long-recognizable deed.

[Amppax]

Reading St. Bonaventure's Breviloquium now. My reading list this semester has been insanely amesome. Augustine, Lombard, Bonaventure, Aquinas... then on to de Lubac and Garrigou-Lagrange. 

[corban711]

+

I'm so happy you started this thread Peace, I love book discussions! This past week I read The Many Faces of Mary by Bob and Penny Lord (recommend to anyone, its just beautiful), Your Presence Is My Joy by Conrad De Meester, Light Love Life by Conrad De Meester (I am really enjoying Bl. Elizabeth right now!), Mary Was Her Life by Sr. Mary Pierre R.S.M. and I'm currently reading St. Faustina's Diary Divine Mercy In My Soul. It is very beautiful and I'm sorry I haven't read it sooner!

 

Loved "Light Love Life" and basically anything Bl. Elizabeth.  I read that one and "He is my Heaven" earlier this year, as well as the volumes of her collected works.      All of them were given to me by some amesome Carmelite friars who thought I would love her.  They were right!   

Also, I was so blessed to visit and pray with her relics at her home parish in Dijon back in May!  She is incredible!   And that was such a gift!  

 

okay.  /hijack.  back to books      

Edited November 16, 2015 by corban711

[Charbel]

 

Loved "Light Love Life" and basically anything Bl. Elizabeth.  I read that one and "He is my Heaven" earlier this year, as well as the volumes of her collected works.      All of them were given to me by some amesome Carmelite friars who thought I would love her.  They were right!   

Also, I was so blessed to visit and pray with her relics at her home parish in Dijon back in May!  She is incredible!   And that was such a gift!  

 

okay.  /hijack.  back to books      

I'm waiting to get her collected works for Christmas this year (I've got a tight budget, so I'm only asking for all the books I've been wanting this year. Shhh!) If you can, try getting your hands on "Your Presence Is My Joy" there are some passages in that book that are tear-worthily beautiful. It's only about 90 pages long, so it's actually more of a booklet. Nice pocket book to carry around! It's actually the booklet they printed for her beatification ceremony, but people liked it so much they started printing them for general use.

She has so many relatable qualities, I talk about her every chance I get! God bless those Carmelite friars! What a blessing, I've only seen pictures and they are beautiful! The real place of course must be just amazing. So glad you got to experience that and pray with her relics. The Dijon Carmel is so blessed to have her with them!

There's a nice documentary about her called Sabeth: Blessed Elizabeth of the Trinity that EWTN shows at least once a year (I think  They have for the last 2 I know for sure). It actually aired again on the 7th. The Carmelite Book Service carries it: http://www.carmelite.org.uk/acatalog/Online_Catalogue_DVD_84.html but it's a bit on the spendy side. Still, in case you or anyone else is interested!

Okay, done with my hijack as well

[Pia Jesu]

Feeling a bit frazzled?  Check out A Sunlit Absence:  Silence, Awareness, and Contemplation by Martin Laird, O.S.A. (Oxford Press, 2011).  I'm on the chapter titled "Clinging to Distraction Like a Dog to a Bone"  It's incredibly well-written...drawing from the wisdom of the saints, ancient Greeks and even modern poets.  Those of you who read Nancy Klein Maguire's An Infinity of Little Hours:  Five Young Men and their Trial of Faith in the Western World's Most Austere Monastic Order (Public Affairs, 2006) might be interested to know that Laird mentions Carthusian Dom Cyril Pierce (aka "Dom Leo" in Maquire's book) in the Acknowledgements.  Who can't relate to Laird's observation that "...as we struggle to sit still in prayer today or any day, we become part of a living tradition that stretches back centuries, witnessing to the fact that the God we seek has already sought and found us from all eternity: 'Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you' (Jer 1:5)."  This is a great read.
 

[HopefulHeart]

I visited the Rare Books department of my university today. I got to look at and handle different books from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, including Bibles, copies of Chaucer, Samuel Johnson's dictionary, and Noah Webster's dictionary. It was such a fascinating experience just to be able to turn the pages of these old books!