Seven Winter Reads
(Photo: Sue Careless)
Julie Lane Gay is a writer and editor who lives in Vancouver with her husband, Craig, and their four children. She attends St John’s, Vancouver.
A Gentleman in Moscow
Amor Towles
Viking, 2016
One of the best – and most wonderfully written – novels I’ve read this past year is the story of a young Russian Count sentenced to life imprisonment in a hotel in Moscow. Neither the Russian Revolution nor aristocracy would usually draw me, but Alexander Rostrov wins not just my affection and interest, but that of everyone in the Metropol. Never was a novel of imprisonment such a pleasurable escape.
At first, Alexander copes with his confinement by focusing on the last pleasures he can attain, reminding himself of past longings.
How, as a youth, he had longed for trips to France by steamship and Moscow by the overnight train.
And why had he longed for those
particular journeys?
Because their berths had been
so small….
Well. At long last, here he was.
But these longings fall short. Despair ensues, and then, yes, resilience.
Alexander agrees to be a waiter in the hotel’s opulent restaurant, showing an uncanny brilliance for not just wine pairings but for seating arrangements. Using the best of aristocracy’s wisdom of the urbane and the humane, watching Russia’s turbulent history evolve outside his window, facing perils and dangers inside the hotel and out, the Count is not only remarkable, but surprising.
Becoming Gertrude
Janice Peterson
NavPress, 2018
My only frustration is with the cover.
With cheery glasses of lemonade and a swirly feminine font on the book jacket, few men would buy this for themselves. Yet this is a book I hope that every Christian would read.
Jan Peterson, wife of pastor and writer Eugene Peterson, unpacks the importance of spiritual friendship, not mentoring, not being bros or bffs, but “learning to see the worth that God has placed in each person and appreciating the gifts individuals have to offer.” She expands on five of the oft-needed ingredients of spiritual friendships – caring, acceptance, service, hospitality, and encouragement – and reminds us that, like her older neighbour, Gertrude, who befriended Jan long ago, we need to practice.
Caring might be for a friend’s teenage son who needs someone other than a parent. Acceptance could be choosing to find similarities with those who annoy us, or accepting wise boundaries for ourselves. Service might be soup for a friend. Hospitality might be to your own family or as with the Petersons who invited three kids to live with them while their parents got situated. Encouragement may be genuine interest in the grocery store checker. Jan writes, “Giving people space and a listening ear and heart are often rare in today’s world and people are hungry for it, whether they are aware of it or not.”
Becoming Gertrude is in many respects simple – you might know all this – but Jan graciously reminds us why spiritual friendship is so important, and why we need to be intentional about it.
On Reading Well
Karen Swallow Prior
Brazos Press, 2018
The first time I read Les Miserables, I remember thinking, “Oh. That’s what grace looks like.” Suddenly I saw that God’s gift was vibrant, enormous. Who can ever forget when the priest forgives Jean Valjean for stealing those candlesticks?
Karen Swallow Prior, an English professor, probes twelve virtues – prudence, temperance, justice, courage, faith, hope, love, chastity, diligence, patience, kindness and humility – through the lens of twelve novels. From Cormac McCarthy’s The Road to Jane Austen’s Persuasion, she offers a deeper look at virtues through fictional characters.
The virtue I keep pondering is humility, which Prior vivifies in the stories of Flannery O’Connor. Hog farmer Ruby Turpin, the central character of “Revelation,” struggles with humility. She looks down at others; she’s “always noticed people’s feet.” Through Ruby I’ve grasped that humility is not just an appropriate estimation of oneself, but an awareness of what we don’t know about others, a void that invariably gives a misplaced confidence – and pride.
Reader, Come Home
Maryanne Wolf
HarperCollins, 2018
While different in genre from On Reading Well, Maryanne Wolf, an esteemed brain scientist at UCLA, has written a series of friendly letters that, like Prior, implore us to read.
Research shows that we are increasingly wooed to read online – to peruse pithy bytes, to be assimilators of spurts of information. Yet Wolf’s findings show that we are increasingly attracted to fake news because we no longer have the stamina for complex and nuanced information. Our brains are losing what she calls “cognitive patience.” What is essential for Christians to see is that when our brains lose this particular patience, our brains also forego empathy, a crucial part of caring for others.
Who knew that one of the best ways to love our neighbour and ourselves is to read good books?
Bill Reimer is the manager, and has been for many years, of the Regent College Bookstore, one of North America’s largest surviving theological bookstores. He attends St John’s Vancouver.
Modern Technology and the Human Future: A Christian Appraisal
Craig M. Gay
InterVarsity Press, 2018
Arriving at our bookstore just this week, this was a title I have been anticipating. In our “just in time” electronic age we are trained to be impatient and Modern Technology and the Human Future spells out why. Craig Gay grew up in the Silicon Valley and saw first-hand the dizzying pace of change that defines our world. Embedded within it is a “creative destruction.” It is this destruction that is uppermost in Gay’s mind. Technology, certainly in many ways beneficial, entails “the systematic application of knowledge, methods, and tools to various practical tasks.” While we have been relieved of many of the traditional drudgeries that over the ages burdened us, we also have found ourselves “disengaged, distracted, and lonely” — out of touch with our humanity. Humans are capable of adapting but we are travelling a road that is entirely new when one takes into account the loss of religious belief and, I would add, seismic shifts in family structure. The “cash nexus” and logic of money combined with the digital age has sunk us collectively to new depths from which there is no easy escape. Gay goes beyond the social analysis of a Shirley Turkle and calls on the people of God to “practice resurrection.” The Christian revelation is one that boldly proclaims that because of the Incarnation and Resurrection we are to imaginatively live out our lives in ordinary but creative ways that reflect the goodness of our Creator. Gay accents the importance of face-to-face relations. The book ends with a reflection on the Eucharist that reminds us of our embodied selves and that God has chosen already to dwell with us – and so is able to rescue us from our gnostic dependence on technology. Why not read this superb book in a group setting?
Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo”
Zora Neale Hurston,
ed. by Deborah G. Plant
Amistad, 2018
Oluale Kossola (Cudjo Lewis), captured by Dahomian warriors in 1860, was sold into slavery and in that year was part of the last “contraband cargo” to be brought to the United States. He was held as a slave in Alabama for over five years before gaining his freedom at the end of the Civil War. In 1927 the anthropologist Hurston travelled to an African American settlement near Mobile and spent three months interviewing Kossola, the last surviving American slave born in Africa. A manuscript emerged from the interviews but despite being submitted to a number of publishers it remained unpublished until now, almost a century later. It is especially valuable in describing Kossola’s African upbringing and initial capture and is one of only a handful of slave narratives that describe the Middle Passage. The Dahomians massacred Kossola’s people and carried many of their severed heads with them on the journey to the coast to meet the European slavers. Slavery, a universal sin, leaves deep stains and scars on our humanity. But Kossola came to possess a Christian faith that shines through in the narrative despite his experience of deep poverty and suffering. He was a proud sexton of his local Baptist church and possessed a flair for recounting biblical stories.
Seeking the Fabled City: The Canadian Jewish Experience
Allan Levine
McClelland & Stewart, 2018
Spanning the period from 1759, when Spanish and Portuguese Jews arrived, to the multiculturalism of present-day Canada, Levine tells a story from which Christians can learn much. He also serves as an able guide to differences within the Jewish community today. Jews do share a common understanding, however, that they have a history of being hated and treated as the “outsider.” From the early 1880s, when Jews began migrating to Canada in large numbers, to the 1960s, the community faced a significant amount of prejudice and discrimination that resulted in exclusion from certain social venues and sports clubs. In the beginning Jews (and non-Catholics) were excluded from New France. While Jewish traders did enter British North America, their first elected member to the assembly in Lower Canada, Aaron Hart, was ejected and not allowed to take his seat. He did, however, live to see a victory for Jewish civil rights. Slowly throughout the nineteenth century the Jewish community grew with synagogues being established in the larger urban areas. In Vancouver David Oppenheimer served as mayor from 1888-1891 and surely this marks a milestone in Canadian religious history. The late nineteenth-century saw pogroms in Russia and numerous Jewish migrations to North America as the favoured destination. Settling primarily in the urban centres of Montreal, Toronto and Winnipeg, and often in slum conditions, Canadian Jewish society took root. By 1921 there were 125,000 Jews living in Canada. The development of Jewish Zionism in Canada in the early twentieth century is a fascinating chapter while the impact of the Russian Revolution brought with it an identification of Jews with Bolshevism and heightened the levels of antisemitism in Canadian cities. Beginning in 1926 Jewish enrollment was cut at McGill University. Jews in both rural and urban areas were to face an uphill battle for full acceptance as Canadians over most of the twentieth century. The Church needs to listen to the Canadian Jewish story, particularly in light of present migrations from the Middle East. (For another angle on the narrative of late nineteenth-century Jewish migration, which also brings to light evangelical philosemitism, see The Origins of Christian Zionism (Cambridge, 2014) by Regent College professor, Donald Lewis. TAP
