Summer Reading
June 10, 2009
Derek has asked what should be read this summer. Here's what I'm aiming to dispatch (and, in case you were wondering, he banned me from citing the Beano Annual as he tells me that is not published until November -- but it will no doubt be a good read when it comes):
Two biographies of significant nineteenth century intellectuals:
Tristram Hunt, The Frock Coated Communist, the biography of Marx's sidekick and patron, Friedrich Engels (this book is not yet released in the US). No-one can understand the modern world without understanding how and why Marxism developed the way it did, and this book gives insights into both the birth of an ideology and the nature of life in nineteenth century Europe. In addition, Engels' work, The Condition of the Working Class in England was perhaps the single most important, graphic, and searing indictment of the poverty generated by the Industrial Revolution. Much of it was plagiarised from parish reports written by ministers. It gives insights into what parish ministry meant for many in the nineteenth century. If you want to understand what motivated and preocuupied the likes of Thomas Chalmers, Thomas Guthrie and company, you need to read this book. A clue: it did not involve trying to get the local council to create more parking spaces outside the church for all the Lexus and Jaguar cars that needed to be accommodated on a Sunday morning.
Stanley Jones, Hazlitt: A Life. William Hazlitt was a greater journalist than Hugh Miller and (I now believe) a greater prose stylist than Cardinal Newman. A brilliant radical polemicist and cultural critic, if you haven't read him yet, you should. A good selection is available from Oxford University Press. A precursor of the kind of writing found in George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, and Camille Paglia, and in many ways strangely contemporay. For example, his essay `On Public Opinion' nails the bottom feeders of the blog world -- and that nearly two hundred years before they put finger to keyboard. He was a plain speaker and shows in all its glory the prophetic potential of a pen wielded by master of polemical prose. Particularly good are his withering assessments of the ageing Wordsworth who had become the very sort of complacent reactionary pillar of the establishment that his younger self had fought so hard against.
For pure fun I'm also reading Public Enemies, the story of how J. Edgar Hoover used a crime wave in 1933-34 to transform a minor government department, the Bureau of Investigation, into the mighty power that is the FBI. It's also being made into a movie, with Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, but as I despise any movie that involves submachine guns yet which doesn't simultaneously feature either Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney, I shall not be going to see it. Look ma -- top of the world!
And, as I have one or two long plane trips, I shall reread The Count of Monte Cristo, the classic revenge novel. The Count's careful planning also appeals to my administrative side.
As to theology - well, given that that's my day job, I try not to let it clutter up my summer or my real life; but I shall probably start rereading Warfield in preparation for a course I am teaching at Covenant Seminary in the winter.
Two biographies of significant nineteenth century intellectuals:
Tristram Hunt, The Frock Coated Communist, the biography of Marx's sidekick and patron, Friedrich Engels (this book is not yet released in the US). No-one can understand the modern world without understanding how and why Marxism developed the way it did, and this book gives insights into both the birth of an ideology and the nature of life in nineteenth century Europe. In addition, Engels' work, The Condition of the Working Class in England was perhaps the single most important, graphic, and searing indictment of the poverty generated by the Industrial Revolution. Much of it was plagiarised from parish reports written by ministers. It gives insights into what parish ministry meant for many in the nineteenth century. If you want to understand what motivated and preocuupied the likes of Thomas Chalmers, Thomas Guthrie and company, you need to read this book. A clue: it did not involve trying to get the local council to create more parking spaces outside the church for all the Lexus and Jaguar cars that needed to be accommodated on a Sunday morning.
Stanley Jones, Hazlitt: A Life. William Hazlitt was a greater journalist than Hugh Miller and (I now believe) a greater prose stylist than Cardinal Newman. A brilliant radical polemicist and cultural critic, if you haven't read him yet, you should. A good selection is available from Oxford University Press. A precursor of the kind of writing found in George Orwell, Christopher Hitchens, and Camille Paglia, and in many ways strangely contemporay. For example, his essay `On Public Opinion' nails the bottom feeders of the blog world -- and that nearly two hundred years before they put finger to keyboard. He was a plain speaker and shows in all its glory the prophetic potential of a pen wielded by master of polemical prose. Particularly good are his withering assessments of the ageing Wordsworth who had become the very sort of complacent reactionary pillar of the establishment that his younger self had fought so hard against.
For pure fun I'm also reading Public Enemies, the story of how J. Edgar Hoover used a crime wave in 1933-34 to transform a minor government department, the Bureau of Investigation, into the mighty power that is the FBI. It's also being made into a movie, with Johnny Depp as John Dillinger, but as I despise any movie that involves submachine guns yet which doesn't simultaneously feature either Humphrey Bogart or James Cagney, I shall not be going to see it. Look ma -- top of the world!
And, as I have one or two long plane trips, I shall reread The Count of Monte Cristo, the classic revenge novel. The Count's careful planning also appeals to my administrative side.
As to theology - well, given that that's my day job, I try not to let it clutter up my summer or my real life; but I shall probably start rereading Warfield in preparation for a course I am teaching at Covenant Seminary in the winter.
