Summer Reading

Literary Gems with an Eternal Perspective

My favorite course when I was studying at U-M was the one I completed on the beach.

While on vacation at Lake Michigan in Grand Haven, I read the works of Hemingway, Faulkner and Saul Bellow for an American literature “summer reading” course. For the three-hour exam I had to take when I got back to campus, my memory of Mr. Sammler’s Planet and For Whom the Bell Tolls remained as crisp as it was when I was dusting the sand off the pages of these books.
It was nice getting academic credit; but most other summers I read for enjoyment, only to discover in retrospect that I had learned lifetime lessons as well. This happened especially when I read books like the ones listed below, recommended by local Catholics who say these Catholic classics are among the best they have discovered during their summer reading adventures.
Unfortunately, some of these classics are out of print; but almost all can be accessed at local libraries or, in a pinch, from Amazon.com at their out-of-print book dealer link.

* G.K. Chesterton: Orthodoxy (Image Books) and The Complete Father Brown (out of print, but Favorite Father Brown Stories and Father Brown: Selected Stories are available, and The Astonishing Father Brown will be published this September).

Critics have ranked Orthodoxy among the greatest books of Catholic apologetics. It contributed to the conversion of famous figures like C. S. Lewis and T. S. Eliot. Gregory DeLassus, of St. Mary Student Parish in Ann Arbor, said the Father Brown collection was the best book he had read this summer. “The great thing about this book is that it is a whole series of truly engrossing mysteries, but each one is no more than 20 minutes long, so you can read them very comfortably in little snatches,” he said.

* C. S. Lewis: Perelandra (Scribner: 1996), The Chronicles of Narnia (Harper Mass Market Paperbacks), The Great Divorce (Broadman & Holman Publishers) and Till We Have Faces (Harcourt Brace).

Lewis, a Protestant, is perhaps the most famous Christian apologist after Chesterton. No child should grow up without reading The Chronicles of Narnia. “I was driving through the Appalachian Mountains to get to college and reading The Last Battle,” related Pam Wiitala of Dexter, who attends Holy Spirit Parish in Hamburg. “Part of the story is about going ‘further up and further in’, and the book just came alive. I felt I was living it as we drove through the mountains, an incredible experience!”

* Lloyd Douglas: The Robe and The Magnificent Obsession (Mariner Books).
Douglas, the late Ann Arbor Protestant minister, wrote about the transforming power of Christianity. Douglas Memorial Chapel was named after him. Both of his most famous books were also made into movies. The Magnificent Obsession concerns a selfish young man whose life is transformed after he learns to live according to the Beatitudes.

* J. R. R. Tolkien: The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion (Ballantine Books).
Tolkien, a Catholic philologist who also translated part of the Jerusalem Bible, was a close friend of C. S. Lewis. Some speculate he served as a model for Dr. Ransom, Lewis’s hero in the Perelandra trilogy. After Lewis bootlegged his own copy of The Hobbit into publication, Tolkien became famous in his own right. Carol Pucchio, director of religious education for the Spiritus Sanctus Academies, said she just finished reading her “favorite series”—The Lord of the Rings—for the third time. “This fantasy series brings you into a world of amazing creatures and fascinating characters so unlike our own world. Yet, we can all relate to this world because it reflects truth, truth about good and evil, about virtue and vice, about love and hate, about life. Only a Catholic mind could have created this world,” she said. Chris Ozias, a parishioner at Holy Trinity in Ypsilanti, agreed. “Despite the lack of any overt theology, I think the books really exemplify the order of grace better than anything I’ve read. I think the books show a distinctly Catholic understanding.”

* Michael O’Brien: Fr. Elijah and the “Children of the Last Days” series, the first of which is Strangers and Sojourners : A Novel (Ignatius Press).
O’Brien’s books of apocalyptic fiction, set in contemporary times or in the near future, create images as vivid and spiritually rich as icons, but are also exciting reads.

* Dorothy L. Sayers: Strong Poison, Gaudy Night and Busman’s Honeymoon (Harper Prism).
Like the books of Agatha Christie whom she influenced, Sayers’s delightful murder mysteries—solved by famous detectives Lord Peter Whimsey and Harriet Vane—were snapped up by women and men readers alike. Sayers was a friend of Lewis and Tolkien who belonged to their literary club, the Inklings. She was a serious scholar who translated Dante’s Paradiso from Italian to English verse.

* Thomas B. Costain: The Silver Chalice (Buccaneer Books).
Historical fiction writer Costain develops this fictional story about the Chalice of Antioch, an artifact some historians believe to be the cup Christ used at the Last Supper.

* Elizabeth Goudge: Pilgrim’s Inn, Green Dolphin Street, The Heart of the Family (all out of print) and The Dean’s Watch (Amereon Ltd.).
The daughter of an Episcopalian minister, Goudge has a genius for writing about how grace operates in family relationships.

* Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited (Little Brown & Co).
Waugh was a British wartime correspondent and satirist who reportedly wrote this novel to parallel his own conversion to Catholicism after World War II. Waugh said he intended to show “the operation of divine grace” in the affairs of the wealthy Roman Catholic Marchmain family, who, despite their indifference to the Church, are each brought back to grace in the end.

* Taylor Caldwell: Grandmother and the Priests (out of print) and Dear and Glorious Physician (Buccaneer Books).

In their reviews published on Amazon.com, readers say these books have transformed their lives. The first tells of a young girl who hears the stories of heroic priests at her Irish grandmother’s house. The other is a fictional account of Luke the Evangelist. Unfortunately, Caldwell’s later work deviates from her strong Catholic roots into quasi-prophetic visions and New Age musings.

* Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory (Penguin USA) with an introduction by John Updike.
“I had heard of it for years, I finally read it this summer,” said Jeff Wiitala of Greene’s masterpiece. “It treats of the massive persecution of Catholics in Mexico in the ‘20s and ‘30s; this was a big blank for me. It rivaled what was done during the time of Stalin.”

* Morris L. West: The Shoes of the Fisherman and The Clowns of God (both out of print).
These books also have an end-times flavor. Shoes of the Fisherman was an uncanny prediction of what the election of a saintly man as Pope might portend for the world.

* Henryk Sienkiewicz: Quo Vadis (Barbour & Co).
Critics consider this novel, set in the time of Christ, to be one of the greatest conversion stories ever written. Certainly it’s one of the greatest works of Catholic fiction.