A cute title for a book on punctuation. Of interest to writers, but probably not many others.
I’m not sure where I picked up this little volume, Eats, Shoots and Leaves, by Lynne Truss. I think I won it at a writers conference. It’s a small hardback, 209 pages. What’s it about?
Punctuation.
The title comes from a punctuation error, though the author didn’t tell exactly where it happened. The writer, writing about panda bears, meant to write, “The panda eats shoots and leaves.” Alas, a pesky comma crept in, and it was printed “Eats, shoots and leaves.” The difference in meaning is startling, all from a misplaced comma.
Truss tells of several books on punctuation, going back to the 1700s. She shows how acceptable punctuation came into use through what worked and what didn’t. Punctuation was for the purpose of giving readers clues as to when to take a breath, when to fully stop. It’s a British book, so deals mostly with the British way of punctuating. Truss does talk about the differences on the two side of the pond.
It’s a good book. Truss manages to make a boring subject quite entertaining. If you are a writer and need to get a better handle on punctuation, this should be helpful. It wasn’t so much for me. I can’t say that I learned much in it, other than something about how punctuation has changed through the years.
I give this 4-stars. It’s not a keeper, however. I’m either going to give it to someone at one of my writers groups, or put it in the donation pile.
It’s difficult to remember where I picked up different books. Before embarking on this road trip, I searched my bookshelves for a book to take to read, something that looked interesting but was probably not a keeper. In the basement, in the area where we set up a bed for when needed when we have lots of company, I found a book titled The Hogarth Letters. I had no idea what it was about, when I got it, how new or old it was, but it sounded perfect. Upstairs and into my book bag it went.
It turned out to be something much different than I expected. I love reading letters (as regular readers of this blog will know), but it turned out this book wasn’t really letters. This was a publisher’s (Hogarth Publishing) stunt from the early 1930s. Twelve different people—writers, politicians, etc.—wrote fictitious letters to people. Not necessarily real people. What the “letters” were were essays disguised as letters. The subjects were of the authors’ own choosing, and the person behind the stunt—er, project, Hermione Lee, did an introduction.
Essays from Great Britain from the early 1930s. The Great Depression was on world-wide, or coming on. It was the time between the two world wars. Communism was on the rise. Some of the essays, such as the one by Viscount Cecil, dealt with disarmament. I read that one through and learned from it, though many of the references and circumstances were obscure in 2023. Still, it wasn’t bad. A couple of other letters/essays were to real people, such as Madan Blanchard, Virginia Wolfe, and W.B. Yeats, the poet. Others were to a fictitious person representing a class, such as an archbishop, a modern novelist, a young poet, a grandfather.
I began this book at the beginning, even though a book such as this could be read at any of the essays that seemed, from the title, most interesting. I read the first couple all the way through, but then I found them increasingly uninteresting. I started reading them, found myself skipping or just reading the first sentence in each paragraph. The last three or four essays I quit after getting halfway into them and finding myself not benefitting from the reading.
I plan on abandoning this book, but not quite yet. As I write this, I’m halfway into the letter to W.B. Yeats. I may finish it. I have six more essays to go, and I will at least start each of them and perhaps finish a couple.
Originally published in 1931 (my copy re-published in 1986), I can’t recommend this book. Perhaps I’ll feel differently if the last six letters/essays are better than the ones I’ve read. If I leave a rating somewhere, it will be 2-stars. Maybe they seemed interesting at that time, but almost 90 years later, not so much.
Nor is it a keeper. When we get home, it will go straight to the donation pile. And it goes into the category of, “Where did I get this book (for $3.00, apparently), and why did I think I needed it?”
I learned much from reading this bio or Livingstone. Quite a man.
Another book that I recently read, just like the last one I reviewed, was one I have wanted to read and not keep. Like the last one, it’s a biography and I don’t remember where I got this. Unlike the last one, I knew a little about the subject: David Livingstone.
I knew something about him from various sources over the years, as well as from a short biography I’d read about him and reviewed on this blog.
This book is titled David Livingstone: His Life and Letters. Written by George Seaver and published in 1957, at 633 pages, it is much different than the last one I read on him. That one was popular; this one scholarly. That one did little more than give the basics; this one get deeper into Livingstone’s life.
Yes, David Livingstone was a headstrong, complex person, and the life he lived has much controversy in it. He found Christ as his savior in England while a young man, and felt a call to preach, but as a missionary. He went to South Africa under the auspices of the London Missionary Society. Livingstone married Mary Moffet, the daughter of the head of that mission, Rev. Robert Moffet.
Immediately on Livingstone’s arrival in South America, the problems began. He wanted to push farther into the interior of Africa than the mission was prepared for or had the money to do. He tended to fight for what he wanted, writing letters to people back in England, going above Moffat’s head to enlist help. Eventually, they moved his family further inland. Only a year or two passed when Livingstone wanted to push even further. He had determined that the best way to promote missions in Africa was to promote trade that would bring more Europeans there.
He fought for this, eventually won, and made a transit of south-central Africa, first to the west, then back to his starting point, then to the east. This trip, immortalized in his journal and other writings, brought him instant fame in Great Britain, and he was mobbed when he returned to England on furlough.
I could go on and on about how Livingstone became so fixated on the commerce thing that he eventually became an explorer, not a missionary. But this is a book review, not a mini-biography. One thing this book did that the other didn’t was point out Livingstone’s faults and controversial traits. Here are a few of them.
The already mentioned headstrongness and tendency to think his way was the only way.
The dragging his wife along on some of his explorations, to the detriment of her fragile health.
His neglect of his children, who eventually were shipped back to England or Scotland and raised by others.
The fact that his opening the continent to more trade also opened it to more slave trading. Livingstone was strongly against the slave trade, already outlawed by England but not by Portugal and several Moslem nations. Unwittingly, Livingstone helped facilitate the vile practice he wanted to eradicate.
His essentially abandoning missions in favor of exploration.
As for the book, while being scholarly, it was actually easy reading. A handful of maps included were copies of maps Livingstone drew while on his journeys. While the authenticity was nice, I would have preferred having modern maps that showed the places better.
The text was a mixture of narrative and Livingstone’s letters and other writings. But the letters weren’t quoted in their entirety, but rather in limited extracts. As one who likes to read letters, this was a negative. Because of the length and limited daily reading time, it took me about two months to read it.
I give the book 4-stars, one star lost for how the letters were handled, the lack of readable maps, and…I don’t know, a sense that despite its comprehensive nature, at the end of the reading I felt like something was missing, something I couldn’t quite put my finger on. It’s well worth reading, however, if you can find it. I suspect other semi-scholarly biographies or David Livingstone are out there and would be better worth your time and money.
This is not a keeper. I wouldn’t mind reading more about the famous explorer one of these days, and even some of his own writings. But I won’t ever re-read this one. Into the donate/sale pile it goes.
Once again, in the spirit of dis-accumulation, I picked a book to read that I wanted to read, but didn’t think I would keep. So I picked “Francis Bacon: The Temper of a Man”, by Katherine Drinker Bowen. Published in 1963, the
The book is 50 years old and in good condition. It’s also a good, informative read. Alas, it’s not a keeper.
book I have may be a first edition. I’m not sure where I got this book. It may be one my dad picked up at a flea market, though there’s no sales sticker on it.
I must first say that, before reading this book, I knew almost nothing about Francis Bacon. I would have called him Sir Francis Bacon, noting either knighthood or respect, for that’s how I’ve heard him described over the years. But why was he famous? What did he do in England to acquire such fame?
I remember he was discussed in a book I read, a book about escape from POW camps during WW2. The POWs argued about something Bacon allegedly said or wrote. From this, I got the impression that Bacon was a writer and philosopher of sorts. But I knew nothing that he wrote, nothing that he said, nothing about his life and work.
This book, described by the author as an introduction to the man, was an easy, relatively short read at 236 pages. It showed Bacon as a loyal monarchist during the days of Queen Elizabeth 1st and King James 1st. He slowly rose in government service, through the law and fawning over the monarchs, but not as quickly as he wanted. He was constantly thwarted by one particular rival, Sir Edward Coke. The two vied for the same positions, the favor of the same monarchs and nobles, and Coke almost always won the day. Bacon, in consequence, would retreat to his abodes and write: sometimes on the law, sometimes on science, sometimes on politics or national policy.
His family was well placed, his father having been Lord Chancellor for Queen Elizabeth. I don’t really understand what that position is, but it was pretty high up in the government. Bacon got the short end of his father’s bequests upon the elder’s death, as most of the estate went to children by the elder Bacon’s first wife, Sir Francis having been born to the second wife. As a result, and due to his inability to adjust his lifestyle to his financial circumstances, was constantly in debt.
Due to losing so often to Coke, Bacon had lots of time to write. I won’t list his publications here. They include essays and legal treatises. None of them have I read, but after reading this book want to.
And that’s the measure of a biography, isn’t it? Does it spur you on to want to know more about the subject, to read his works? This biography has done that. I don’t think I have any of Bacon’s works in the house, but given that they are all out of copyright, I should be able to find them available on the internet. I bet I can also find a more complete biography from before 1925.
Now, the question is, how do I rate this book, and do I keep it? I rate it 5-stars, which is a rarity for me. I base that ranking on its brevity and ease to read, along with how it has caused me to want to know more. But it is not a keeper. I simply have too many books, and need to reduce my possessions. So onto the donate/sales shelf it goes. But I am very glad that I had it and
Some books sound good when you make a decision about buying them, but upon reading, turn out to be difficult to get through. Such was the case of Great Voices of the Reformation. Edited by Harry Emerson Fosdick, t
A good book that I found a little difficult to read. Not sure if the lack was in me or the book.
his is a 546 page hardcover from 1952 that I picked up used somewhere.
The premise is good. Look at the people who were the main clergymen of the Reformation; give a brief bio of each and description of their publications; and provide lengthy excerpts of their writings. The documents included were mainly doctrinal writings.
Fosdick began with John Wycliffe, then John Huss, then Martin Luthor. From there he moved on to mostly familiar names, such as Zwingli, Calvin, and Knox. But he included some names I had either never heard of or hadn’t associated as being significant parts or the Reformation. One example was the Anabaptists, represented by a number of names I had never heard of. Another couple were Cotton Mather of New England fame and Jeremy Taylor of the church of England. I’d heard of both, but just hadn’t thought of them as main forces in the Protestant think tank.
One surprise was Roger Wiliams. He founded my native Rhode Island when he was banished from Massachusetts Bay Colony. I
learned about him in school, but hadn’t thought about him in years. I found his writings refreshing and his colonial methods better than many others. He believed in buying land from the Indians rather than just taking it. He was also in favor of religious freedom. This contrasted with the Puritans, who wanted freedom for their own worship but not for others—at least not in their own colony.
Part of the problem with this book was the archaic English in some of the writings. Most of the oldest texts have had the English modernized or been translated into modern English. However, I suspect they kept the English purposely a little archaic, for I found it difficult to read. Some was sentence structure, not necessarily the words.
Another difficulty was how the writers had approached their subject matter. It’s hard to explain, but the older documents tended to put me to sleep. I would settle in my reading chair in the sunroom at noon and open the book to John Huss. Knowing his story was so inspiring, I had high hopes, but I fell asleep more than once after reading a page or two. I should probably chalk that up to my failure, not the failure of the document.
The later writers—George Fox, John Woolman, and John Wesley, were definitely easier to understand. I’ve read a lot of Wesley’s works independent of this book, and, being last in this volume, it was enjoyable to wind up and end up with a familiar voice.
I had thought this was to be a reference book, permanently in my library. After reading it, however, I think it i unlikely I’ll ever come back to it. I made some marginalia in a number of places. Before putting it on the discard pile, I’ll flip through the pages and see if I should copy out anything for reference.
I give the book 3-stars. Maybe had I read it at peak powers of comprehension, it would have been 4-stars. Certainly, if you are interested in the history of the Reformation, especially the doctrinal views of the major participants, pick up a copy. Of course, everything in this book is in the public domain (except the biographical introductions written by Fosdick) and available on the internet without too much search.
Two volumes of these letters are well worth reading. They are available without charge, being out of copyright, from Google Books and perhaps other places.
I had planned to write a post today about the pastoral change our church is going through, but I think I’m going to wait until Friday for that. So here’s a book review, of the book The Correspondence of Thomas Carlyle and Ralph Waldo Emerson.
I first read this during the early 2000s, having found it on Project Gutenberg, downloaded both volumes, formatted them for a good mix of easy reading and concise printing, and printed them. I read them rather quickly, my second foray into the world of letter collections after the letters of Charles Lamb. Recently I learned that you can upload a Word file to Kindle. I did so with these two volumes and read them again on my phone.
At that time, Carlyle I was just beginning to know, and Emerson was a total mystery to me. Neither man had been part of the curriculum in my school years, and my adult reading up to that point had been in different directions. Why I happened upon these volumes, why I downloaded and formatted them, and why I shoved other reading aside for them are all mysteries to me.
But read them I did, and loved them. These two literary giants, from opposite sides of the Atlantic, both influential in their milieu, both men who enjoyed friendship. Carlyle was probably the more brusque of the two, Emerson the more gentle. They divided over politics, including the question of slavery. Hard to believe in this day, but Carlyle was pro-slavery, and this became a wedge between them.
Yet the friendship endured. Emerson, who had both inherited ad married into money in America, took note of Carlyle’s poverty and became his promoter in the New World, where he thought Carlyle would find an audience. He found publishers and negotiated deals favorable to Carlyle. Soon, dollars were sent eastward to be converted into pounds, and Carlye could soon say he was not poor any more. Implied was he was now free to write what he wanted rather than to write for money.
The friends met during Emerson’s three trips to Europe. The first time, in 1833, Emerson (who was totally unknown to Carlyle) sought out Carlyle, whose magazine articles Emerson had taken special note of. They had a 24-hour visit before Emerson left for the return voyage. But the conversation was stimulating. Eight months later, Emeron wrote to Carlyle, and the forty years of letters commenced.
The letters are rich in the words of friendship. They discussed their writings, their homes, their families, their lives. At one point, Emerson pulled back from immediately returning Carlyle’s letters, at least in part due to the rift over politics. The correspondence never ended, but it tapered off. The first twenty years include at least twice the number of letters than the last twenty.
The Emerson quote I include on my website comes from one of his letters to Carlyle. In this, my second reading of the letters, I found great enjoyment. I suspect someday I will read them again.
Not a recent book, but definitely a good one if you can find it.
This will be somewhat of a short review, due to time—both things to do and time lapse from when I read this book.
It was at least six months ago that Lynda pulled Beyond Prison Walls by G. Frank Allee off our bookshelves. We were looking for books to read and get rid of (donate or sell), and this looked like a good candidate.
It is the story of Frank Novak. Published in 1960, it tells how Novak, an immigrant from Bohemia who fell in with the wrong crowd and found himself in prison. It was there that God got ahold of his heart. He was transformed and became a prison chaplain with a national reputation.
I sure hadn’t heard of him, but his story is amazing. The book is short, only 96 pages. Mr. Allee has done a good job telling Novak’s story. The writing is clear and precise. One leaves the book quite impressed with Novak and what he was able to accomplish with the power of God behind him.
I rate the book 5-stars. After reading it, we hate to give it up. We would like for our grandchildren to read it. We’ll see. Today I will put it in the donation pile, but maybe the grandkids will be here before it gets taken someplace.
Sorry, all you Thoreau lovers out there. I gave up o this one.
Every now and then you pick up a book, not because you necessarily are interested in it, but because you know others are and therefore you ought to be. That was the case with The Heart of Thoreau’s Journals. I bought it used some years ago and put it on the bookshelves in a guest room. That way someone might see it and say, “Oh, my, he reads Thoreau!”
Except I didn’t read it. It sat on that shelf for close to ten years until, in the spirit of dis-accumulation, I picked it up and decided to read it. Again, I thought others did, why shouldn’t I? I’ve read other journals and liked them.
Alas, this one I didn’t. Emerson described Thoreau as a brilliant, gifted writer. Famous, of course, for his time of isolation on Walden Pond. I found his journal entries to be unintelligible. Oh, they were made in proper English, but what did they say? By reading them, how was I enlightened?
Here’s an example from June 26, 1840, when Thoreau was 22 years old:
Say, Not so, and you will outcircle the philosophers.
And another from around the same time:
My friend will be as much better than myself as my aspiration is above my performance.
Nice sounding prose, and to read such a line in the midst of a narrative about the day will cause the reader to stop and ponder the meaning, thinking surely this is profound and I must think on it until I gain knowledge or enlightenment.
But I couldn’t take it. I read 25 pages of this 219 page book. I usually try to get at least 25% into a book, but I couldn’t this one. Actually, I rarely give up on a book all together, so this speaks of my inability to appreciate the obvious brilliance of the journaler.
I did take a little time to look ahead before I totally gave up. I read some of the entries from 1859, about the slavery debate then raging. I found Thoreau to be lucid and spot-on in his denunciation of slavery and support for the abolitionists. If only the rest of this excerpt from his journals was just as good, I might have finished it. I have a copy of Walden, and hope to read it someday. For now, however, I will give Henry David Thoreau a good long rest.
Two stars only, and I’m not quite sure why it’s not 1-star, except that the literati will think I’m an ignoramus if I rank it that low. Tomorrow it goes on the sale/donation pile. There are plenty of other books on the guest room shelves, and anyone who stays there will find hours of pleasurable reading.
What happens when a headhunter is introduced to God?
Amazing man, amazing story, amazing book.
This was the subject of the book Tariri, My Story: From Jungle Killer to Christian Missionary, which Lynda and I read aloud a couple of months ago. The events of the book took place in the 1950s, when missionaries reached a section of the upper Amazon River at the border of Peru and Ecuador.
From the book’s dust jacket: The great chief Tariri was a legendary figure among the tribes along the eastern slopes of the Andes in southern Peru. The tales of his brutal killings were told with wonder even among his own people, the Shapras of the Candoshi group. A vital, colorful leader, he ruled his tribe through brute force and feared no one because of his fierce conviction that he was impregnable, inviolate.
Until two single women, workers with the Wycliffe Bible Translators group, arrived. Doris Cox and Lorrie Anderson, armed only with Bibles, pioneered the work among the Shapras and encountered the feared Tariri. He realized they were no threat to his rule, and so they were not accosted in any way, by him or others of his tribe. They went to work, joined by Rachel Saint at times. Slowly they helped Tariri understand that a way to live was possible without killing. That you could be at peace with rival tribes.
The Peruvian government had agents and officials within 50 miles of Tariri’s tribe, but had not had any influence on them. The killing continued. They—the Shapras—understood they should not harm the government men who lived and mostly remained at the edges of their territory, but beyond that Tariri was the law and the government in his territory.
Slowly, the two white women began to influence the jungle chief. Over time, he turned away from killing and embraced a life dedicated to Jesus Christ. The change wasn’t easy for him, but it happened. Killing as a way of life, a way of settling disputes, ended.
The book, published in 1965, was fascinating. It was a little hard to read because of all the names and terms in Tariri’s language. His words were recorded on tape, and translated to English. The book is mostly his words, his story, with a little context provided by the missionaries who worked in the area.
I have no idea where we got this book. It likely sat on our shelves for years, waiting for us to notice it. I’m glad Lynda finally did. My intention was to not keep this, mainly because we have so many other books we’d like to get through. But I think we will keep it. I’d love for the grandchildren to read it some day. It is definitely 5-stars. Still available at Amazon, perhaps other places.
‘Twas in this book that I found the essay “Christianity and Culture”. I will need to read it another time or two to fully understand it. Meanwhile, I have completed the second of three books in this volume.
The book Timeless Writings of C.S. Lewis is actually three books in one volume. The first is The Pilgrim’s Regress, the first book he wrote after his conversion to Christianity, which I read earlier this year and reviewed.
The second is Christian Reflections. This is a compilation of Lewis’s papers, talks, and essays published in 1967, four years after his death. They were collected, edited, and published by Walter Hooper, who was Lewis’s secretary near the end of his life and became his literary executor after his death. He took on the job of organizing the mass of Lewis’s writings into collections.
This book has items composed from 1939 to 1962. The fourteen items are arranged more or less chronologically. The first is “Christianity and Literature”, a paper Lewis read to an Oxford society in the 1930s, and which was included in his first collection of essays, Rehabilitations, published in 1939. I read this in one sitting back in 2019, and found it to be a great help. I found several things to inspire my writing.
The next was “Christianity and Culture”. Published in a magazine in 1940, this essay generated a debate with several critics—a debate that played out in the pages of the magazine. This book includes Lewis’s three contributions to the discussion, the original essay and two responses to his critics. I’ve been looking for the other site of the discussion. I found one item. When I find the other, I’ll come back to this for a fuller reading. I reviewed this essay previously on the blog. I read this in both August 2019 and September 2021, though I’m not sure I finished it the first time.
After this, the essays are a mixed bag. I’m not going to give all the titles here. I read them slowly, in many sittings, in 2021 and 2022. Many of them I found hard to digest. Several I don’t remember at all. I read them, at least according to the notation in the book I did, but I couldn’t tell you what they are about. Were they too difficult for me, or did I read distractedly, without the wherewithal to comprehend what Lewis was saying? The only way to know is to read them again.
And that I shall do, though I know not when. The third book in this volume is God in the Dock, another of Hooper’s posthumous collections of Lewis essays. I’ve read a couple in this, but have yet to tackle this formidable looking document. I’m going to read something lighter before I do.
What about Christian Reflections? Is it worth reading? Is it a keeper? Yes, it is worth reading, but probably only for the dedicated Lewis reader. It is available as a separate volume, if you want to pick up a copy. As to it being a keeper, yes, for sure. Not only because I have more to read in this 3-in-one book, not only because I don’t want to break up my C.S. Lewis collection just yet (if ever), but also because I need to re-read some of these, sometime years hence. Perhaps I’ll still be posting at this blog, and will have something more to say about it.
