For this first revival of this blog’s Friday Links feature—inactive since last April—here is a sampling of links recommended by Dappled Things editors and Deep Down Things bloggers in the months since then.

In April 2019, Jonathan McDonald shared “Polish priest apologises for Harry Potter book burning.” McDonald mentioned, “Maybe it’s time to revisit my old blog series on censorship.” If you agree it is time, you can find McDonald’s censorship posts at these links: “What has Rome to do with Iowa City?” and Purifying the Source.”

In June, Karen Ullo shared a link to “Inspired innovator: The startling Christian art of Tintoretto.” As the article says, Tintoretto “parlayed his unique artistic talent for imaginative story-telling (Jean-Paul Sartre called him ‘the first film director’), to become one of the biggest painters of 16th-century Venice.” Biggest in size too: “Paradiso” (shown below) c. 1583 by Tintoretto measures 23 feet high and 72 feet wide, and is “the largest old master oil painting in the world.”

In July, Natalie Morrill posted a meeting of two Jorges. In 1965, Jorge Bergoglio, S.J., [left in the photo] aged 28, (now Pope Francis) was teaching literature to high school boys at Colegio de la Immaculada Concepciòn in Santa Fé, Argentina, when he sent stories written by his students to fellow-Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges, who, as Pope Francis told an interviewer many years later, “liked them very much.” Borges later wrote a preface to a book of the boys’ stories. The photo is from when Borges travelled six hours to speak to the class.

In August, Jonathan McDonald posted this link to information about early access to Bishop Robert Barron’s first film Flannery O’Connor, in his new film series Catholicism: The Pivotal Players. In a video at the linked page, Bishop Barron says of O’Connor, “By being a storyteller in the full rich integral way, following the rules of storytelling, she was giving glory to God.” In the video below, Bishop Barron speaks about the famous interchange about the Eucharist between well-known novelist Mary McCarthy and budding author, Flannery O’Connor.

In September, I posted “The Risque Artist Who Found God,” about James Tissot. Tissot was a fashionable painter who returned to the Catholic faith of his childhood. His good friend and mentee Degas was disgusted at Tissot’s reversion to Catholic faith and accused him of mercenary motives, but Tissot’s faith was sincere and lasting. During the final years of his career, Tissot made three trips to the Holy Land and produced hundreds of watercolor illustrations of Bible stories.  (By the way, if you’re in the Bay Area, and you might like to see some of Tissot’s works, you have about ten days to get to San Francisco Legion of Honor’s exhibit: James Tissot: Faith and Fashion before it closes February 9.)

In October, Katy Carl sent “Has Literature Regained Its Faith?“—which reports on the Third Catholic Literary Imagination Conference and includes a shout-out to Dappled Things—as one of the publications that “are mission-driven to give Catholic and Christian authors a place to publish their work.”

In November, Josh Nadeau shared “The Book Thief of Monastery Mountain,” with this recommendation: “Books. Monks. Drama. This one has it all.” Spoiler alert: A Strasbourg teacher with a devouring passion started stealing ancient books from the library of the abbey of Mont Sainte-Odile in Alsace, France.

In December,  Karen Ullo posted “Why Sexual Morality May be Far More Important than You Ever Thought.” In this essay about Sex and Culture (a 600+ page summary of a lifetime of research by Oxford social anthropologist J.D. Unwin), its author wrote,  “As I went through what he found, I was repeatedly reminded of the thought I had as a philosophy student: some moral laws may be designed to minimize human suffering and maximize human flourishing long term.” Unwin compared cultures that value pre-nuptial chastity and absolute monogamy with cultures that do not, and the evidence showed that a sexual revolution has long-term, devastating consequences for culture and civilization.

In January 2020, Katy Carl recommended “The Law of Art,” an essay by James Matthew Wilson at The Catholic Thing. Wilson quotes Solzhenitsyn’s definition of what Wilson calls the classical theory of the artist, “The artist is simply one who perceives the order embedded in and constituting reality and makes it visible in some striking, new, analogous way. The artist is a receptive medium for truth to speak again to us, in the world and of the world, in all its depth, form, and wisdom.” Wilson goes on to write that Solyzhenitsyn viewed classical theory as inadequate to account for the undefinable magic of art and that—although classical theory comes close— Solzhenitsyn’s qualification was correct; no theory can completely capture what art is for, because, “The end of the virtue of art is the new work, which resists our theories. Theories stand outside art and meddle with its internal deliberations, necessities, and laws that are already hidden within and waiting to be realized.”

I recently read Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice, a Hugo-and-Nebula-award-winning science fiction novel. I admit, while the other Dappled Things editors are busy writing compelling articles about aesthetics and successfully publish super-amazing novels, I’m over here chilling, deeply immersed in some pretty weird sci-fi and making no apologies for it. It’s just a phase. I can stop any time I want.

I don’t want to do a deep dive into Ancillary Justice itself but what interested me as I was reading it was how flexible and adaptable sci-fi can be when it comes to creatively discussing metaphysical concepts via scientific descriptions of the universe. Of course, this is what many philosophers would argue someone like Plato is doing with The Republic, which is a utopian fiction, not quite sci-fi…but maybe it is? I don’t know if I believe this but the more I thought about it, the more I really wanted to be able to irresponsibly claim that Plato is a science fiction writer. This guy, at least, agrees with me. In any case, it seems to me that Aristotle’s description of metaphysics is actually, technically, a common-sensical outgrowth of natural sciences, so the link is there between the sciences and descriptions of the human soul, but I’d need to leave that claim up to the philosophers to defend or attack, as the case may be.

Quickly moving on, here’s a brief synopsis of how it works in Ancillary Justice. The novel is about an artificial intelligence that is bonded with and runs a military spaceship called Justice of Toren. The ship is a person of sorts. She is several thousand years old and stocked full with thousands of “ancillaries.” Ancillaries are human bodies that have been taken over by the AI. They’re unified with her and think with her common mind. They are the ship.

In the novel, during a moment of stress and suffering from a glitch that causes a lack of connectivity between her parts, it turns out that the AI Justice of Toren isn’t as unified as she seems. Her ancillaries have subtle but unique personality differences, and these end up splitting under stress. Different pieces of her make different choices, even as they maintain identity with the whole.

The same phenomenon holds true for a character named Anaander Mianaai, the tyrant of the Radchai empire who has multiplied herself into thousands of bodies. Theoretically, she is a single intelligence, a unified self who happens to be present in multiple locations. It turns out, though, that she too will split under stress. After a horrible massacre based on an order from the tyrant, she begins to maneuver against herself. Part of herself is horrified by her actions and decides to reform the empire, another part of her desires to relentlessly double-down on the ruthlessness that has built the empire. Throughout the struggle, she is still herself, not two people, and yet she is divided.

It’s a physical description of a metaphysical concept – Sin. It affects all of us. Those things we do which we don’t want to do and those things we don’t do and wish we had. It’s a description of our unexamined motivations, regrets, intentions to change a behavior and then failing day after day. We are at war with ourselves. All our actions are fully ours and yet we are divided.

The ability to describe these metaphysical struggles with simple physical descriptions is a distinct advantage of the genre. Sci-fi is an odd corner of the literary world, but it really does have its merits.

The recent publication of a profile piece on Daniel Mitsui at the National Catholic Register reminded me of an essay he posted last year concerning the rebuilding of the fire-damaged Notre Dame Cathedral. Entitled “Beautiful, Traditional, Interesting, Real,” Mitsui opines on the broad gulf between restoration and the making of art within a tradition:

The commentary in the aftermath of the tragic fire at the Cathedral of Our Lady in Paris is telling of this. Certainly I understand the dread that its reconstruction will be entrusted to some architect with no religious sensibility. But the reactionary demand to rebuild Notre Dame exactly as it was before is equally troubling. If the faithful never saw in a church fire the opportunity to build something even better, the Gothic cathedrals would never have existed at all. (There are rumors even that the Archbishop of Reims started the blaze himself in 1210!)….

Many who consider themselves religious and æsthetic traditionalists will celebrate this approach. Even now, I know that the easy availability of printed reproductions of 15th century paintings affects the demand for my own artwork. I don’t oppose such reproductions themselves; I have them on display in my own home. What I oppose is the notion that traditional art can be fostered through attitudes that would have made its existence impossible in the first place.

It indeed seems likely that, if Notre Dame is ultimately salvageable, it will be reconstructed almost exactly as it had been before. The French preservationist societies have significant sway, and the wilder concepts for rebuilding will probably be left in the dustbin of history. As preferable as this result would be, Mitsui is correct in worrying that our modern inability to rebuild the cathedral according to a traditional mode without resorting to mere mimicry is a sign of failure.

Sometimes I peruse iconography of the Eastern traditional style. Most of what I find online is either a carbon copy of ancient icons or a bizarre pseudo-realistic depiction of contemporary figures for whom we have (too many?) photographic records. Only rarely do I find an icon of a more recent subject which works within the artistic tradition in such a way that feels like it is actually part of that organic whole.

T.S. Eliot expressed similar sentiments in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent”:

[T]he historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of the literature of Europe from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order. This historical sense, which is a sense of the timeless as well as of the temporal and of the timeless and of the temporal together, is what makes a writer traditional. And it is at the same time what makes a writer most acutely conscious of his place in time, of his own contemporaneity.

Ever since the West tired of the Renaissance’s glut of classical-revivalism it has attempted to remain in a cycle of constant reinvention. Deconstruction, reconstruction, and whatever supposedly Hegelian synthesis is meant to emerge—all these fail to produce anything substantial that the larger culture can assimilate and make its own across generations. Even the rebranding of prose fiction as the “novel” assures us that newness is the only lasting aesthetic. Few today could imagine the retelling of a recent event like the Vietnam War in Homeric epic verse, and even fewer could appreciate such an artifact, but this was once the trajectory of our cultural heritage. If Chesterton was right in saying that the purpose of an open mind was like that of an open mouth (to close it upon something solid), then a similar observation can be made regarding the purpose of a supposedly progressive school of art: that its ultimate purpose must not be to destroy but to incorporate new experiences into an existing organic whole. Progress must have a real destination, even if it is only dimly viewed at the outset. Change is not an end unto itself, and annihilating the past only ensures that contemporary trends will last less than a generation.

Imagine a Medieval Revivalist movement in literature, if you can. Imagine the use of chansons and moralist retellings of myths by modern poets who have lived through the War on Terror and multiple sex abuse scandals in the Church. Imagine supplementing the traditional three “Matters” (of France, England, and Rome) with the Matter of Japan or the Matter of America. Imagine the revival of allegory with the experience of Communist propaganda and the rise of nuclear power. Imagine reconsidering the mores of courtly courtesy in light of the recent history of online trolling and televised political debates. Imagine the cosmological-spiritual symbolism pregnant in discoveries like solar winds, black holes, and galactic superstructures.

The reclamation of our ancient cultural heritage requires neither a rejection of modern discoveries nor a hatred of technological inventions, and it can offer a framework for contextualizing alien elements. The world has been overwhelmed by an excess of data which our scientists try to convert into comprehensible information, and which our poets and philosophers usually fail to convert into wisdom. The restoration of metanarrative might be the only way to make the world comprehensible again without regressing into a dark age.

We could not only rebuild Notre Dame, but we could build another grand church based on similar modes of thought—and with the benefit of modern structural know-how—if only we bother to learn the principles. We lack some of the knowledge, but that can be attained. More importantly, we lack the will. We have been content to allow the world to dictate all artistic trends and storytelling. Are we surprised to find aesthetics in a state of disarray, becoming either the slave of avarice and sentimentality or a blasphemous cry of despair? What other spirit could even consider designing a parking lot to crown the Notre Dame?

On Sunday the death of Sir Roger Scruton weighed much on my mind. The English philosopher-knight was an Anglican but in some ways more Catholic than many Roman compatriots. His defense of beauty against the “cult of ugliness” he saw encroaching on all sides was more robust than the self-doubting, half-hearted aesthetes who flit about the usual religious milieu. One wishes he had had some influence on the last generation of Catholic architects when reading his complaints against the modernists:

Modern architecture is unavoidable. Nowhere do we feel the need for beauty more vividly than in these vast, supposedly functional, buildings. Without ornament, grandeur, style or dignity, a building is opaque to us. We cannot find our way around it. Nothing seems to face us, to beckon to us, to welcome us. When we enter such a building, we are immediately lost. (“The Modern Cult of Ugliness”)

Scruton’s death came a few weeks after a friend’s father had passed away, and a couple months after finding out that an old mentor of mine had passed late in 2018. Sometimes you seek out a memento mori, and sometimes one is imposed upon you. This mentor, a retired professor who found a spiritual home in Opus Dei many decades before, had shepherded me towards a love of great books, great philosophers, and great beauty in a time when my recent conversion seemed unlikely to grow roots. I probably owe my continued Catholicism to Dr. John Gueguen.

And yet, thriving in a hostile environment would require the appropriation of many good ideas from outside the Church, and Roger Scruton, lifelong Anglican though he remained, was a stay against confusion. He was not a perfect man nor a perfect philosopher, but he fought for the protection of a transcendental that he did not even believe was a transcendental. God forgive him his faults, and may those of us spiritually privileged with the Catholic Faith be half as courageous as he.

Within the grounds of the University of Geneva stands the “Reformation Wall,” a century-old monument commemorating the influence of John Calvin’s development of Fr. Luther’s movement. Calvin is not the central figure but stands as an equal, flanked by other early Protestant figures like the Scottish iconoclast John Knox. There is some irony in seeing these old icon-smashers depicted in statuary and bas-relief, but the intent is so clearly secular that few modern Calvinists are likely to complain.

For all the problems 2020 is likely to bring, I can at least breathe freer now that a major reading project from 2019 is over and done. Both of my sisters’ husbands are Protestant seminary graduates who have worked in ministry positions. During Christmas Vacation 2018, we agreed on a theological-exchange program: they would read St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica if I would first read the lengthy Reformed Dogmatics of Dutch theologian Herman Bavinck. Thousands of hardbound pages and ten long emails of my own glosses later, the ball was back in their court, and I was left to reflect on the theological tradition in which I was raised.

Like most heretical sects, Calvinism not only bears a smudged image of what Catholics would recognize as Christian, but veers so far into its own peculiar style that it enters a sort of Uncanny Valley of Christianity. While Dr. Bavinck is not the best known Calvinist theologian, he is making a minor resurgence in Reformed circles thanks to the recent translation of his major works into English. He is clearly well-read in Protestant theology, Patristic sources, and in the contemporary philosophy and theology of his day, all of which serve to impress his readers with his erudition. Intellect is no sure stay against contradiction, however. Scattered throughout his systematic volumes were the stirrings of an aesthetic which never managed to come to life:

For the beauty of God Scripture has a special word: glory…. All creatures, accordingly, contribute to the beauty of the whole. But all creaturely beauty is transitory and changeable; it is not beautiful by itself but by participation in a higher, absolute beauty…. The pinnacle of beauty toward which all creatures point, is God. (Vol. II, p. 254)

Bavinck gives us much to appreciate, and from a certain point of view he appears to care more about beauty than St. Thomas, who does even not include Beauty among the Transcendentals. Yet, for all of the Calvinist’s bluster about God’s glory and the Christian’s duty to glorify the Creator, the Calvinist tradition is one of destroying all objects intended to glorify God. The Reformed are so scrupulous about graven images that they ignore the divine command to make beautiful religious instruments patterned in part after heavenly beings and angels (Exodus 25; 1 Kings 6). Strong scruples have a tendency to spread, and thus one also finds no beautiful Calvinist churches, no memorable Calvinist hymns, no great paintings, poems, or novels. Their sole boast is John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, which succeeded only by stripping out all specifically Calvinist theology, and still it is a faint echo of the great spiritual allegories of the Catholic Middle Ages.

I am grateful now for many things I did not have as a Calvinist—the richer theology, the sacraments, and the missing books of the Bible all come to mind—but beauty is something I did not realize was missing until I had been in the Church for a while and completed a pilgrimage to Rome. (Brutalism has not yet eradicated the Catholic sensibility for beauty, and perhaps we still have time to reverse the backdoor invasion of Calvinist anti-aesthetics that came to us through modernist architectural experts.) I became obsessed with aesthetics and began my lifelong amateur study of poetry, iconography, storytelling, symbolism, architecture, liturgy, and allegory. I cannot deny that it saddens me to see Catholic artists ignoring their rich aesthetic heritage to chase after the ephemera of the world, although I can hope that we might successfully plunder the Egyptians of whatever riches we may put to our use. All truth is God’s truth, and all real beauty is God’s beauty, but we still need to get out of this toxic, co-dependent relationship we have with Ugliness. Dredging treasures out of sewage might not be a task worth doing unless we are the ones who threw them in there.

Indeed, it seems silly to criticize the aesthetic failures of a small sect when our own house is in such disarray. It is less interesting to trace the loss of beauty through history than to try to build it back up into something substantial. Early Christian poets built a new aesthetic on the last gasp of Roman Stoicism, and perhaps we will miraculously build something on the dying embers of postmodern cynicism. We need the will to make it happen, and we need to do so much more than lazily mimic the world around us. We need to think of our art in terms of centuries. Will we make art that future generations will want to imitate and develop into depths we had scarcely even considered? Are we making feuilletons or heirlooms? If there is such a thing as an examination of conscience for artists, we might kneel quietly and soon feel the need for a bit of shriving.

We’re rounding out our year-end collection of favorite books with the recommendations of four Dappled Things editors who all spent the year reading awesome sci-fi/ fantasy books with Catholic themes. We’ve thrown in some poetry, Walker Percy, and fictional homeschooling for good measure, but now’s the time to power up your warp engines and get reading with these suggestions from associate editor Fr. Michael Rennier, managing editor Karen Ullo, editor-in-chief Katy Carl, and associate editor Rosemary Callenberg.

(You can read Part One of our list, and Part Two.)

Fr. Michael Rennier

This was the Summer of Gene Wolfe. It has also been the Fall and Winter of Gene Wolfe. After his death, I re-read New Sun and got deeply into his stuff again. I forced all my friends to read the New Sun books too and participate in a discussion group with me. It got intense. After that, I started reading (and am still reading) the Long Sun books. If you like sci-fi, they are unbeatable.

I’ve also been working in lots of other reading. I finally read Walker Percy’s Thanatos Syndrome. It’s super weird in all the right ways. I’m hooked on the etymological deep dives that Mark Forsyth does, and his Etymologicon was a delight. If you enjoy trivia, pointless knowledge about word origins, and being able to intimidate your literary friends, give this one a read. I’ve been working back through Robert Alter’s Art of Biblical Narrative and he’s simply the best reader of the Scriptures around. I find his work far more insightful that run-of-the-mill commentaries.

Karen Ullo

It’s no secret that I love weird fiction. Sci-fi, fantasy, and horror are my go-to genres, and it’s been a banner year for me for discovering gems of Catholic speculative fiction.

J.B. Toner’s Whisper Music gets off to a rollicking start with a battle between vampire Daniella Morrigan and the Blessed Virgin Mary. If that’s not enough to tempt you, just ask the question the protagonists ask: How do we weaponize the pope? My full review is winging its way toward Dappled Things subscribers in our Mary, Queen of Angels issue, but there’s no reason to wait for it before treating yourself to some to some fun.

The Innocents by Gertrude von le Fort has been newly translated into English for the first time this year. This collection of four novellas by the famous twentieth century German Catholic writer is both haunting and haunted. The four stories span the history of Europe from the Scanian War to the mistresses of King Louis XV of France to the aftermath of World War II. On the whole, the collection is an excellent Gothic romp with deeply Catholic themes.

I hesitate to recommend Somewither by John C. Wright only because I haven’t finished it yet—but I am thoroughly enjoying it. The 2016 Dragon Award winner for Best Science Fiction Novel opens with a host of quotes from G.K. Chesterton and is shortly thereafter followed by a (punchy, short, and interesting) discussion of the moral and theological implications of the Many Worlds Theory. The Knights Templar still exist, the Church has been hiding the reality of other world for centuries… and they’re the good guys.

There I was, wearing my bathrobe and moccasins, big black bulletproof vest, cool nightvision goggles, honking huge flashlight tucked through the jacket belt at one hip, ridiculously cool, expensive, antique Japanese sword no one in his right mind would ever take into a for-real battle at the other hip, and my Dad’s blessing and prayer on my head.

And I could not decide if this was the best night of my life or the last.

What’s not to love?

I also read quite a bit of poetry this year, and would especially like to recommend James Matthew Wilson’s The Hanging God. You can read the review from our print edition here. It’s far more eloquent than I could be. Also, I’m not quite sure why I decided to spend my summer with Longfellow, but I’m very glad I did. I (re)read both The Song of Hiawatha and Evangeline. Beautiful, faith-filled stories told in gorgeous lyric poetry—the world needs more Longfellows.

Katy Carl

This winter I have a mighty destroyer of a toddler: 15 months, no brakes. Lots of mothers (and fathers) at this stage say they can’t find time to read. I can’t manage not to read. This is as much a liability as it is a virtue. Without the printed word I would be nowhere. Even if it’s on a glowing screen in the dark while the toddler falls asleep, reading is breathing.

Out of a truly excellent field, one of the best novels I read this year (possibly in years) is Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai. Friends, I did not expect a book with this title to be about homeschooling. It is about homeschooling. It is also about human identity and community and culture and language and so many good things. Despite her characters’ grim situation, DeWitt finds a splendid balance between loss and a rich vein of comedy. You will be laugh-crying over how well the experience of having (and of being) a bright, difficult child—or a parent trying to square the circle when being human and being family feel incompatible with each other–is seen and transliterated. Do beware of the twist at the very end, which drops a sudden intense emotional and moral weight into what had been a relatively lighthearted caper through the end of civilization, but don’t assume that the narrative is implicitly placing praise or blame on its characters. If there is a didactic message here, it’s Sondheim’s from Into the Woods: “careful the things you say; children will listen.”

I’m grateful to the pages of First Things for pointing me toward Laurus  and The Aviator by Eugene Vodolazkin. Both novels are stunning — at the line level, in their dramatic arcs, and in their unified artistic and moral vision of the human condition.

Following up on Dana Gioia’s recommendation in a casual conversation at the CIC, I read Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia. As promised, I found it finer in form and composition than most things filed under the “genre” label — even finer, imo, than Le Guin’s own Hugo- and Nebula-winning The Left Hand of Darkness — while it also checks all the boxes for exciting sci-fi. Recommended if you’re at all into that genre (hey Karen; hey Fr. Michael). An unexpected gift: the novel digs deep into the triumph and pain of struggling to create something that will outlive you while also working to live a compassionate, engaged human life here, now.

I finally also put Gioia’s 99 Poems, a strong fortress in the renewal of the Catholic literary neighborhood–and beyond that, of American formal poetry — on my shelf. I want to say more, but you should go get your copy first, and then let’s talk about it.

Still another marvelous discovery through the CIC, in particular through the influence of scholar Cynthia Haven, was Rene Girard’s Deceit, Desire, and the Novel — a book I wish I had found a decade ago. Any synopsis I could give here would risk seeming reductive, so instead please check out T.C. Merrill’s essay in the most recent Dappled Things for a taste of what’s going on. Girard takes a seemingly simple insight about human nature and develops it into a cathedral of perspective on why we want what we want (or what we think we want) as social creatures. You’ll never look at human community and human endeavor quite the same way again.

I also loved our own Natalie Morrill’s The Ghost Keeper  (check out Simcha Fisher’s review of the novel here), Abigail Rine Favale’s Into the Deep, Alice McDermott’s Charming Billy and The Ninth Hour, Randy Boyagoda’s Original Prin and Beggar’s Feast — all splendid. If 2020 brings in a reading year half so substantive, elegant, complex, and engaging, that will be marvelous good fortune.

Rosemary Callenberg

This year’s reading has been rich and varied. Goodreads tells me I’ve completed 57 books, and I’m sure a few fell through the cracks somewhere.

Most recently I finished Night’s Bright Darkness by Sally Read, and it was one of my favorites. The memoir of her conversion from staunch atheist to Catholic is not just an intellectual journey, but a story of encounter with God, of a burning love for Christ being awoken in her soul when she least expected it. It was a beautiful example of how knowing Christ changes everything—including, for Read, her relationship to family, to writing, to the world around her—and brings us more fully into being.

I also reread the entire Chronicles of Narnia this year with my boys. (I might add, at the risk of stirring up controversy, that we read them in the proper order, i.e., that in which they were published.) Sharing these stories with them for the first time was a joy, and I was surprised by how often I found myself thinking about these books rather than my “own” reading. For me they offered both the comfort of the familiar and the delight of newly discovered layers of meaning.

My Schole Sisters group read The Dream of Gerontius by Cardinal Newman in October, to celebrate his canonization. I thought I would read a bit of this book-length poem every evening; instead I found that once I started, I couldn’t put it down, so compelling was this saint’s vision of a soul’s journey after death to meet God.

Finally, no reading list of mine would be complete without a post-apocalyptic novel, so I will mention my favorite of the year: When the English Fall by David Williams. This novel can be described as “post-apocalyptic Amish fiction.” Who can resist such a description? Not me! As the author points out in an essay at the end of the novel, apocalypse means not destruction, but an unveiling or making clear: “Apocalypses, as a genre, are about stripping away all of the fluff and pretense and getting down to what matters.” This book certainly does that.