I recently finished the newest book by Tony Horwitz entitled A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World. Horwitz has unexpectedly become one of my favorite authors having developed a style of writing that is part history, part travelogue. Typically, he’ll explore a historical topic by going to the place where some historical event happened, telling you about his encounters with some of the locals and telling you about the historical event. He’s done that to one extent or another with Captain Cook, the Australian outback, and the Confederates.

In this book, he takes a closer look at the events in North America before the Pilgrims set up shop. He describes his inspiration for the book as being at Plymouth Rock when he overheard that tourists would ask questions like, “Did Columbus drop off the Pilgrims in the Mayflower?” he laughed, but then realized that his own knowledge of pre-Pilgrim America wasn’t all that extensive. Columbus – Pilgrims – Squanto – Thanksgiving – something was going on in Jamestown. The book takes a look at Leif Erickson and the Vikings, Columbus, Coronado, DeSoto, some French colonists, Jamestown, and wraps up with the Pilgrims, including some lesser known facts — such as that Squanto was originally captured as a slave and dragged to England. He made his way back. Meanwhile, the area where he used to live was decimated by disease. When the Pilgrims got to Plymouth Rock, they had a settlement already cleared by natives who had died off and the assistance of a native who already knew English.

All in all, a good book. Horwitz plus early American history is a decent combination. However, the book doesn’t display as much of Horwitz’s humor and wit as many of his other books. That might have something to do with the subject matter. A lot of that early history is fairly grim — the Spaniards were particularly brutal when they hit the shores.

Normally I only post about a book that I’m reading when it has some substance to it. I’d hate to create the impression that I’m some kind of book snob, so I thought I’d mention that The Brothers Karamazov got a little heavy for me at about page 300. I put it down in favor of The Destroyer #111 Prophet of Doom. I’ll pick up Dostoyevsky again sooner or later, but sometimes a guy just needs a little mindless fun. The Destroyer books certainly fit the bill: super assassins save the day, repeatedly.

I took a break from the Brothers Karamazov to read Jon Krakauer’s book Into the Wild. The two books have some similar themes related to the passions of youth and the need of the young to find meaning in the world. Krakauer’s book is about Christopher McCandless, a suburban youth raised in Annandale, Virginia, near D.C. I’m only half way through the book, but so far, McCandless strikes me as almost a caricature of youth. He is strong-willed, refusing to take direction from authority. He is idealistic, railing against the hollowness and materialism of American existence.

After graduating with a high grade point average at Emory University, he donated about $24,000 he had in his name to a charity and began tramping around the country. He cut off contact with his family and adopted an assumed name. After a couple of years, he hiked into the Alaskan wilderness near Denali with minimal gear. He didn’t bother with a map of the area. He ended up dying, most likely of starvation, in the summer of 1992 about 20 miles from the Denali National Park’s highway.

Of more interest to me in Krakauer’s book is the way Krakauer dealt with some similar impulses and the lessons he learned after living to tell the tale. Krakauer made his way up to the Stikine Icecap in the Alaskan panhandle region to climb the Devil’s Thumb.

In any case, it seems that for most people, the passions of youth cool down over time. Krakauer talks about it. Dostoyevsky talks about it. In particular, I remember in college getting unusually angry over a passage in Catcher in the Rye to the effect that an immature person can die for a cause, it takes a mature person to live for a cause. For some reason, I had an emotional response to the minimization of the value of going out in a blaze of glory for some cause or another. Older, possibly wiser, and certainly more mellow, I have come to agree with the proposition about the value of living for a cause rather than dying for it.

This has been Stream-of-Consciousness Theater.

My current literary effort is to re-read The Brother’s Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Of the literary classics I had to read in high school, this one was probably my favorite. However, it’s not light reading, so I have picked it up a number of times since then without much success. This time, I’m about 300 pages in, so maybe I’ll finish it. I’m happy it was assigned in high school, but like so many other books of this caliber, a lot of it was wasted on a 17 year old.

I am, however, at a point in the book that decidedly was not wasted on me when I was a kid. One of the characters, Ivan, spoke about how the young have to wrestle with the great, momentous issues — the existence of God, the meaning of life, etc. Once you’ve aged, it’s apparently easier to focus on the more mundane problems of making things work here on earth. In the book, I am in the middle of Ivan’s lunch conversation with his brother Alyosha: The Grand Inquisitor and the conversation leading up to that conversation. The Grand Inquisitor is a story that Ivan shares with Alyosha about Jesus coming back to earth, briefly, much to the consternation of The Grand Inquisitor at the height of the Spanish Inquisition.

During the conversation leading up to The Grand Inquisitor, Ivan shares some items in a catalog of horror stories he has collected wherein adults torture innocent children. He describes a lord who sets a pack of hunting dogs on an eight year old because the boy accidentally hurt the lord’s favorite hunting dog. He describes rampaging Turks who like to torture children in front of their parents. And, he describes “disciplinarian” parents who beat their daughter half to death, then throw her in the outhouse to cry it out, crying in particular to “sweet, gentle Jesus.” Ivan then goes on to posit that, maybe in the end God’s plan will become evident to all. Everybody will be in harmony and will finally understand why all the pain was necessary. Consequently, all will be forgiven. The mother of the boy killed by the Lord’s hounds will forgive the Lord, etc.

But, Ivan asks Alyosha (his spiritual brother), if Alyosha was creating a world where all could be perfect, but first Alyosha would have to torture the girl and allow her to cry out in the stinking, freezing outhouse to sweet, gentle Jesus, could he possibly use the girl’s tears as the foundation to his master plan? Alyosha allows as how he could not do it.

The subject of original sin comes up somewhere during this discussion. And, I recall reading the book in high school, becoming even more pissed off at the theologians who conjured up original sin as justification for the existence of the suffering of innocents and an excuse for them to go to hell absent proper clerical intervention.

Next up, as I mentioned, is The Grand Inquisitor. Perhaps I will have more to say on that later. But, generally, it tells a story of the Grand Inquisitor lecturing Christ for his refusal of the Devil and his three temptations in the desert – the temptation to turn stones into bread, the temptation to cast Himself from the Temple and be saved by the angels, and the temptation to rule over all the kingdoms of the world. By giving people freedom instead of the various types of security offered by these things, Christ has chosen poorly. Fortunately, in the opinion of the Inquisitor, the Church has come along and provided the appropriate types of security. For the moment, it occurs to me that we have recently seen the temptation of people to reject freedom in favor of the illusion of security under “strong” leadership. This is not a new thing. Freedom is hard.

A last concept I’ll mention from the book is Fyodor Karamazov’s statement that he never hated anybody for what they had done to him. He always hated them for something outrageous he himself had done to them. Once he had done something to them of which he was ashamed, he’d make up reasons to hate them and continue to treat them horribly.

Oddly, it appears I have a real love for books about American men pushing middle age heading out into the Australian outback. I wouldn’t have even thought this was a genre. But, I’m currently reading and enjoying a second book on the subject. The first was Tony Horwitz’s One for the Road wherein Horwitz hitchhikes all over Australia. The current one is Roff Smith’s “Cold Beer & Crocodiles: A bicycle journey into Australia” wherein Smith, as you might guess, rides his bicycle around Australia counterclockwise.

Heat and flies seem as constant as the friendly strangers with coolers of beer in their trucks. I think I’m getting to a point in my life where I can start saying for certain there are things that I’m never going to do, even things that seem pretty cool. Wandering into a lonely Australian bush pub by myself is probably one of them. So, I guess I’m living vicariously through guys like Horwitz and Smith. Maybe one of these days, I’ll at least make it to a place like Perth or Darwin or Broome. For the time being, I think I have a hangover just reading how much beer is routinely consumed in that part of the world.

Swiped from Lemming’s Progress.

Bold = books you’ve read
italics = books you wouldn’t touch with a ten foot pole or wish you hadn’t.

1. The Davinci Code (Dan Brown)
2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)
3.To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
(I have a daughter named Harper Lee Masson, if that tells you anything.)

4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
(I was a huge Tolkien fan. When the movies came out, I couldn’t believe how much detail I remembered from the books, seared into my memory from multiple readings, mostly as a teen.)

8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13.Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)
15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees(Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
(I read this one in something like 2 days one college summer. I know I read one day from about 10 a.m. until 4 a.m.)

19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
(I know this one is supposed to be a classic, but to me it was basically “Holden Caulfield is a whiny little brat. The end.”)

23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)
[Read more…]

I recently finished reading Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Circumnavigation of the Globe by Laurence Bergreen.

Nothing earthshaking, but for me it was a nice, accessible account of Magellan’s voyage. I was particularly glad to read a fuller account of Magellan’s death than I had known of before. In high school history classes, I’d sort of vaguely been told that he’d been killed by savages in the Phillipines. Turns out, he’d taken one tribe’s side over that of another and, furthermore was on the attack and trying his hand at converting the natives to Christianity. Not really advisable activities when you’re half way across the earth from your home base with 3 ships and 150 men or so. I had also been unaware of the bad blood between Magellan who was sailing for the Spanish and the Portuguese who, by virtue of the Pope’s Line of Demarcation, had dibs on the half of the world east of Brazil and west of the Phillipines. This made it difficult for the remainder of the expedition to get home once they left the Spice Islands.

I finished it. It took me ten months, but I finished it. Last night I completed The Reformation: A History by
Diarmaid MacCulloch. Part of the reason it took me so long is because after reading so much of the history of the 16th century, I was inspired to go and re-read Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, a work of fiction heavily dependent on the history of the 17th century in the aftermath of the Reformation.

Coincidentally last night I was provided with a reminder that some of these battles of Christianity are recurrent or never settled — for example the discomfort of more established Christianity with more mystic strains of Christianity. I was tuned into “Family Talk,” the Christian talk station on my XM radio, and the host was Al Mohler. He was criticizing the work of an individual whose name escapes me, but the person had apparently posted a modern 95 theses. (Martin Luther is credited with kicking off the Reformation when he posted his 95 Theses on the door of Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517.) 

On the Family Talk program Mohler had specific criticisms for the modern writer but his critique seemed to apply generally to more individualized forms of worship, unbound by more organized teaching. In particular, he was critical of forms of worship that focused on a “feel good” positive view of humanity and its relationship with God and didn’t start with original sin and end with salvation through Jesus. Mystics crop up again and again through Christian history and, again and again, they are attacked and put down by more established, organized forms of Christianity. (This is a bit of an aside, neither Reformation Protestants or Counter Reformation Catholics had much use for mystics.)

The idea of making original sin the linchpin of Christianity (and resistance to that idea) crops up again and again. St. Paul and St. Augustine focus on the irredeemable sinfulness of humans more so than did Jesus or the medieval Catholic Church. Luther and John Calvin also made human sinfulness the starting point for Christianity. As I read these folks, humans are such depraved worms in the eyes of God that no actions we take in life could possibly make us worthwhile and so, only by God’s infinite grace can humans be worthy of salvation. (I’m a bit troubled as to why an omniscient, omnipotent, infinitely good God would craft us to be such worms, but that’s beyond the scope of this entry.) Still today we have ideological struggles between people who think that humans are powerless to make themselves worthy through actions and those who think that good works are the measure of one’s worth.

The clashes between Reformation Protestants and Counter Reformation Catholics was one of the things that led indirectly to the Enlightenment and our more secular Western culture. In part this is because it is difficult not to be a bit skeptical when you have decades of people torturing and killing each other because each side believes it is an adherent of the one true religion and is compelled to force the other side into the fold. And, if your skepticism reveals to you that these people are torturing and killing each other over the question of whether, during mass, bread and wine turn into the blood and flesh of Jesus or are merely symbolic of the blood and flesh of Jesus, you might start looking for answers elsewhere.

In any case, if you are interested in this period in history, this is the book to read.