Reading Diary

This year, mainly because of family commitments, I have not been able to read as much as I would like. Most of my friends are avid readers; I have always been a little jealous of people who manage to read more than I do. There is so much out there that I would like to read--on my wish list now is Philip Roth's The Plot Against America and Visions of Gerard by Jack Kerouac. (I have since picked up Visions of Gerard--which I will try to read on my Thanksgiving vacation in sunny Florida.)

I have never read any Roth, but there was something about the review in The Times that caught my eye. I generally don't buy hardbacks, but I might break that rule in this case. I just finished a collection of Kerouac's journals, edited by Douglas Brinkley, and I want to read as much Kerouac as I can. I read On the Road three years ago (the wrong time for it, but even though I was in my mid-thirties, I just wanted to GO), and I read Tristessa. There's something about Visions of Gerard that really attracted me--I read the first page in the bookstore and it reminded me a little bit about my brother, who died way too young at 34. And I know that despite it all, people don't change much from the time they are nine, or seven, in my case. There is much wisdom there.

I am currently finishing up The Cost of Discipleship, by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. All I really know about him is that a lot of christian activists (Martin Luther King Jr., for example), have read him as a source of their thought, and that he was executed by Hitler for his role in the plot to assassinate him. (I am not exactly sure of Bonhoeffer's role.) The meat of the book is a meditation on the Beatitudes (origin, per Kerouac, of term "beat"), and the tension there always is between not hiding your light under a bushel and the "hiddenness" of the devout life. Simply put (at the risk of being a reductionist), the christian must not be "reflective" in living her life, but must DO or not. What is meant by "reflective" is that you should not let the good that you do become an object of your reflection; what that really is is a form of pride and idolatry. (I am not sure what I think about the translation from the German--the translator uses the phrase "kith and kin" twice!)

Bonhoeffer's theology is perhaps a little more traditional than mine, though I like and appreciate traditionalists such as C.S, Lewis. Having grown up Roman Catholic, it's been very interesting to read a Protestant theologian. As for myself, I am a quaker and my theology is christian universalist.

Back to Jack--I just loved his journals and they really were a revelation to me. He had a bit more money (at least after he published his first book, The Town and the City) than I thought he did, and it was great to see his relationship with his mother. He also worked a lot harder than he lets on--a big part of the journals are writing logs, where he keeps daily track of his output, and his creative victories and defeats. And it puts to rest the urban legend that On the Road was written in one sitting!

I hope to write more about what I'm reading soon.