novels, comets, movies
These reflections of mine will not be new, but they are new for me. I recently showed my kids one my favorite movies, "Contact", based on Carl Sagan's novel of the same name, about a potential first contact on Earth with extraterrestrial life. We had a great discussion about it, and since then I've been … Continue reading Consider Again that Dot
During my convalescence this past winter I watched a lot of movies. I've gotten busy making YouTube playlists of my favorite music and movies. I started one playlist privately just to collect some of my favorite concluding scenes from movies, and I threw in a few scenes from old movies that marked the Intermission break. … Continue reading Favorite movie endings
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 … Continue reading Favorite reads of 2022
Huck Finn's dilemma: send his friend Jim back to slavery as he has been taught he must do, or go against his church's teaching by helping Jim to escape, and then go to eternal hell as punishment I've started reading David Bentley Hart's "That All Shall Be Saved: Heaven, Hell and Universal Salvation." It is … Continue reading That All Shall Be Saved
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 … Continue reading The Odyssey, books 11-24
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 … Continue reading Sisters of The Wretched
Alban Krailsheimer once wrote that Christianity was oddly missing as a subject in Victor Hugo's Notre Dame de Paris (aka, The Hunchback of Notre Dame). And I agree: that novel can seem like a merely secular story about a Christian cathedral. Les Misérables, by contrast, opens immediately with Christianity as a subject: its entire first … Continue reading Les Misérables – atheism and faith
I've started reading Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, and it's such a long novel that I'm going to start sharing partial impressions and thoughts as I go along. Victor Hugo was a lifelong opponent of the death penalty, which you may guess from the following passage in Le Miz: There is something nightmarish about the scaffold … Continue reading Les Misérables – guillotine and cross
Earlier this year I read John Steinbeck's "East of Eden," so I was very motivated to read his earlier classic, "The Grapes of Wrath." I've finished it now, and I hardly know how to say what a great novel it is, or what to say that has not already been said. I did see the … Continue reading The Grapes of Wrath
I recently read John Steinbeck's "East of Eden", a novel so rich, and long, that one blog post couldn't begin to uncover even 2% of it. But below I've quoted passages from the novel that I'll talk about both in themselves and in relation to certain texts: the Bible, principally Genesis and Job; Miguel de … Continue reading East of Eden