Favorite reads of 2022
My ten most memorable reads of 2022, fiction and nonfiction, out of my 42 first-time reads: 1. The Book of Job — Robert Alter’s translation “Oh, let that night be barren, let it have no song of joy.Let the day-cursers hex it, those ready to rouse Leviathan.Let its twilight stars go dark.Let it hope for…
That All Shall Be Saved
I’ve started reading David Bentley Hart’s “That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Universal Salvation.” It is a powerful and convincing call to abandon the doctrine of an eternal hell and to return to the belief, widespread in the earliest centuries of Christian history, that God’s punishments were not eternal and that God would…
The Odyssey, books 11-24
Emily Wilson’s translation of The Odyssey is unsentimental. Her language is poetic but straightforward, and never prettified. It’s unsparing about the violence and moral ambiguities in Homer’s poem, and not surprisingly, reading it is an emotional experience. This happens often in the space of one line, or just in single word of double meaning, as…
The Old Beggar and the Sea
I cannot say anything about Homer’s “Odyssey” that hasn’t been said before, so I’m going to take a personal angle on this one. I’m going to try to describe why I loved “The Iliad” even in high school but have never gotten around to its sequel until now. To sum up, I think I loved…
The Old Man and the Sea
When I was 8 or 9, I remember finding an old movie playing on television one afternoon, about an old man and what looked to me like a swordfish. I came in only near the end and my goodness it left an impression, though I retained no clear memory of how the story ended. I…
Pinocchio and Moby Dickens
My 10-year-old daughter and I recently read Carlo Collodi’s 1883 story, “The Adventures of Pinocchio.” Now, it turns out that the story is fairly dark, much more than the famous Disney movie of 1940. Parents may wish to be careful with this one, and a full plot description of Collodi’s story can be found on…
Don Quixote – Les Misérables edition
Lionel Trilling famously stated, ”All prose fiction is a variation of the theme of ‘Don Quixote’.” Therefore I try, in the most literal way possible, to find our famous knight and squire in the pages of every novel I read. Well, I recently finished all 1,304 pages of “Les Misérables,” and I couldn’t find them.…
Eponine and Sonya Alone
A few days ago I was making a list of the best sequences in the novel of “Les Misérables.” My list, which I’ll put below, was heavy on actions taken by Jean Valjean and Inspector Javert, and one item stood out: Eponine barring her father and his thugs from entering the house where Cosette and…
Sisters of The Wretched
Roman Catholic nuns play a critical role in the novel of Les Misérables. Victor Hugo takes up several chapters in an interlude about their order. It is one of the famous “digressions” of his novel. Like the other digressions, it requires patience, but the effort is rewarded, and I find myself thinking about it long…
Other Les Misérables films
I’ve been watching a lot of “Les Misérables” adaptations since finishing the novel. I’ve watched the usual suspects, and I’ll list them below (slight spoilers), but I have to start with one of the very best, only 10 minutes long, that I found entirely by chance. Click on the photo for Inspector’s Javert’s vlog, or…
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