Tag Archives: literature

On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life through Good Books, by Karen Swallow Prior

I have thought at times it would be appropriate to, à la Augustine, retitle this blog “Confessions.” I often feel constrained to commence a post with a disclosure of some sort: my failure to fully appreciate a work’s literary merits, failure to understand it, failure to–shameful truth–read to the end before drafting a review.

In the present case my confession is this: I was unprepared to learn so much from Prior’s engaging, accessible volume. That holes exist in my literary knowledge I am well aware. But to have encountered, despite my MA in literature, such a wealth of information and ideas both surprised and delighted me.

Granted, Prior is a professor of graduate studies at Southern Baptist Seminary. I studied at a public university where the Frankfurt School and deconstructionism, rather than the classical virtues, were central to our course of study. But while Prior’s work reflects a Judeo-Christian worldview, her discussion constitutes a rich survey of Western thought, extending from Aristotle to post-modernism.

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A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life, by George Saunders

I borrowed Saunders’s Lincoln in the Bardo from the library last spring (2022), after a neighbor introduced me to Saunders’s Story Club for writers. I was intrigued by Lincoln’s multiple narrators, speaking in first person, passing off the story from one to another at irregular intervals, sometimes even interrupting one another or finishing each another’s sentences. But at the time the death of a child—Lincoln’s, to be precise—was a subject matter too oppressive to shoulder, and I returned the book after a close skimming of its contents.

But I was sufficiently impressed by Saunders’s innovation and the spiritual vein I thought I detected to queue up for the library’s audio version of Saunders’s A Swim in a Pond in the Rain. I finally reached the front in July; thus my association between Saunders’s selected Russian short stories, along with his commentary, and staining our back deck in the mild warmth of a Pacific NW summer.

A Swim in a Pond reprints seven short stories by Chekhov, Golgol, Tolstoy, and Turgenev. The discussion that follows each highlights essential strengths—or weaknesses—of the nineteenth-century works in question.

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