The Herald’s guide to which books to pack when heading off for the summer.
Whether they’re packing their passports or just looking forward to some down time at home, here some of the Herald’s regular and not-so-regular contributors share what they’re planning to read this summer – old favourites, new titles and almost everything in between.
I am off to Portugal and will be packing Robert Harris’s Conclave, which remains the best novel about the papacy I have ever read. Harris somehow managed to get inside access to the Curia, and it shows in the compelling journalistic details. With Pope Francis due to create 21 new cardinals at a consistory in September, the thriller is heavenly and escapism. I also like the look of Kevin Starr’s Continental Achievement: Roman Catholics in the United States, which is the first volume of what promises to be a magnificent overview of how British recusants – alongside Spanish and French Catholics, Jews and Protestants – helped forge early Catholic identity from the American War of Independence to the early days of the Republic.
Alan Garner is a wonderful storyteller and the new edition of his Collected Folk Tales is an excellent book to have on journeys, when you can’t always focus on an extended narrative. It is itself a lively journey in stories across cultures and countries, mostly from the British Isles. They’re written in the style he remembers from the stories told around his grandfather’s forge. As he says, folk tales once belonged to everyone and it’s only recently that they’ve become the preserve of children, although children do like to be pleasurably scared, as they will be with some of these tales. “By nature, the folk tale addresses itself to the ear rather than to the eye. Its first appeal is to a listener,” he writes. “Plot evolves through physical action… I have tried to get back, through the written word, to the spoken.” The first story begins: “There was a hill that ate people…” And off he goes.
Glancing at a Kenyan friend’s bookshelf over a chilled Vin de Constance, I realised I’d never tried any H Rider Haggard. King Solomon’s Mines now sits at the top of my list, but I’m currently breezing through the eerily prescient and frighteningly plausible The Children of Men by the late PD James. Sicily’s Leonardo Sciascia has never let me down, so I’ve also got The Day of the Owl to read on my beach chair (firmly planted on the Thames at low tide). Meanwhile, if an early-20th-century Lebanese explorer traversing the wilds of Africa and chancing upon a fellow countryman who has dismantled a palace and is transporting it across a continent is your cup of tea, you might enjoy Charif Majdalani’s Moving the Palace. Literary meanders must be grounded by some good non-fiction, so I’ve picked up Diane Galusha’s Liquid Assets: A History of New York City’s Water System. No, really!
Done well, I love crime – novels, that is. I can’t resist the latest offering from Paul Finch, a fellow Lancastrian, ex-copper, and former journalist colleague at The Universe, whose crime stories are often Sunday Times bestsellers. His latest foray is into historical fiction, however. Nonetheless, I expect Usurper to be well-written, fast-paced and with great action scenes: perfect for those quiet moments by the pool. In more cerebral moments, I also plan to read The Science of Ezekiel’s Chariot of YHWH Vision by Fr Patrick Pullicino, a consultant neurologist who was ordained for the Archdiocese of Southwark after he retired. He analyses this most enigmatic book of the Old Testament and finds the existence of a science-based reasoning in the revelation it contains, namely of “fuzzy logic” or “fuzzy epistemology”, a concept expounded only since the 1960s and which now underpins the operation of such modern devices as Alexa, Siri and so on. Fascinating stuff.
My summer will be spent near St Tropez, in the south of France, where I will be reading The Two Cities: A History of Christian Politics by Andrew Willard Jones, Super-Cannes by JG Ballard and the AA Essential French Phrasebook which (lifted from my father’s house) falls suspiciously open on “chat-up lines”. Might “tu as de jolis yeux” get me a discount at the cheese counter? Only time will tell. The National Conservatism Conference in London, back in May, engendered in me an interest in the argument Willard Jones makes in his book: that the modern conception we have of a social, political and economic world operating outside of Christianity is mistaken. Meanwhile, as I lie on the beach soaking up the sun’s rays and listening to the gentle waves of the Mediterranean, Super-Cannes – a potent mix of noir, science fiction and social commentary – will inject just enough dystopia to keep me from being too comfortable. Saves me packing the cilice, I suppose.
As part of my re-learning English history, I am going to throw myself into Evelyn Waugh’s company and make the better acquaintance of St Edmund Campion. Henry Walpole wrote a poem commemorating his death: Why do I use my paper, ink and pen?… I speak of Saints whose names cannot decay. An Angel’s trump were fitter for to sound / Their glorious death if such on earth were found. William Byrd, equally courageously, set it to music, but Waugh sets the music of Campion’s life and faith to words. Risking cancellation by association, I’m also going to read Traditionalism: The Radical Project for Restoring Sacred Order, by Mark Sedgwick. For example, is the war in Ukraine a proxy war between corrupt modernity and its antidote, “traditionalism”, or not? Meanwhile others – Gueron, Peterson, Dugin – dare to wonder where Identitarianism might lead the world if left unchecked. It hardly bears thinking about.
This summer I hope to find time to read Nicholas Orme’s substantial Going to Church in Medieval England. It tackles the Church buildings, personnel and congregation, and the impact of the Reformation. Peeking a look at the section on children in the congregation, I see that both complaints about children making a noise during Mass and the dangers awaiting small children left home alone were being discussed by our Catholic forbears eight centuries ago. Orme’s well-received book is part of a positive trend to extend our understanding of the liturgy: from liturgical texts and the writings of clerical commentators to the experience of the faithful who attended services, whether they were devout daily Mass-goers or those who preferred to attend a quick early service on Sundays – so they could break their fast and, according to their critics, spend the rest of the day in drunkenness.
We are spending at least some of the summer with old friends from diplomatic days at their lovely house on Madeira, in the hills above Ponto do Sol. I am determined to learn how to cook more adventurously on this trip, and their wonderful cook has promised to help me to master the famous Pudim Abade de Priscos, which is like a very heavy crème-caramel but made with bacon and far more eggs than doctors recommend. Meanwhile I’m taking with me Skye McAlpine’s A Table Full of Love, with its alluring subtitle “Recipes to comfort, seduce, celebrate and everything else in between”. It looks very promising, and I’ll report back in due course. At some point, I’m also going to make time to re-read the much-missed Jennifer Paterson’s Feast Days, if only for the sake of a happy trip down memory lane in the company of one of the finest.
A highlight of my summer will be a holiday to Bavaria, just before I take up my new job as assistant chaplain in Cambridge. Part-holiday, part-pilgrimage to sites associated with the late Pope Benedict, I will be taking along the second volume of Peter Seewald’s biography of Joseph Ratzinger. I usually try and tackle a longer book or series, and so this summer may well prove to be the summer of second volumes. The second part of Sigrid Undset’s novel The Winding Road tells the story of Paul Selmer, the trials and tribulations of his work and marriage, and ultimately, his slow conversion. I also usually try to re-read a book over the summer, and this year I’ve started Eugene Vodolazkin’s Laurus, which I last read as a summer novel while on my novitiate pilgrimage to Dubrovnik in 2016. A favourite of Rowan Williams, it packs in questions about faith, identity and the world in the tradition of the great Russian novelists, but in far fewer pages!
This year, my summer holiday will be all buckets and spades on the Isle of Wight with my daughters and three grandchildren. No chance to read in the day, but once I get into bed I’ll be bingeing on books as usual. First up is James Pope-Hennessy’s official biography of Queen Mary: I’m riveted by her early life as a poor relation, followed by her stunning elevation as Prince Eddy’s bride-to-be, only for him to die and her to find herself eventually engaged to his brother, the Duke of York, who became King George V. I’ll also be reading journalist and broadcaster Selina Mill’s Life Unseen: A Story of Blindness, a powerful and erudite social history of blindness in the Western world, interwoven with an extraordinarily moving but unsentimental account of her own gradual life-long descent into blindness. Top dressing will be the book of the moment, Cecilia Rabess’s completely unputdownable novel Everything’s Fine. I can’t wait.
Living a stone’s throw from the world’s first purpose-built theatre in Shoreditch in east London, Shakespeare is ever-present in my daily life. Not only that, but there’s an app that lets you travel on the London Underground in the company of his characters. I like to think that Shakespeare would have relished the concept that his life’s work might perpetually live in the pockets of Londoners in this way. The windows of my house in Shoreditch look over Shakespeare’s streets, and also the former homes of three other writers I’ll be reading this summer. Keggie Carew, whose new book Beastly describes humanity’s profound and troubling relationship with animals; Emily Perkins, whose novel Lioness promises a cathartic fantasy driven by the phenomenon of the fragile male ego; and the late Iliassa Sequin, a poet associated with the New York Shool, whose collected works of pastoral parody have just been published by Grey Suit Editions. Talk about a literary neighbourhood.
I suppose I am having a bit of a Franciscan summer. By this I mean that I was so moved by the National Gallery’s St Francis of Assisi exhibition, which I reviewed for the Herald back in June, that I seem to have caught the Francis bug all over again. And so in addition to the catalogue that I bought on the day, I’ve been doing a bit of casting round for the latest on the Poor Man of Assisi. At long last, I’ve settled on Fr Michael F Cusato’s Francis of Assisi: His Life, Vision and Companions. Fr Cusato is himself a Franciscan friar, so I couldn’t have found a better guide; it’s scholarly but not too long, with plenty of illustrations for relief alongside the text. I’m looking forward to learning more about the enigmatic stigmatic who seems to inhabit the world’s imagination in a million different ways.
Alexander McCall Smith’s books in the Ladies No.1 Detective Agency series are a cosy read, but not a lazy one. I’m looking forward to getting into Tea Time for the Traditionally Built, to be relished over tea in the shade in a quiet garden, with cake. At the same time, I’m re-reading the late Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth: From the Baptism in the Jordan to the Transfiguration. I’m loving Joseph Ratzinger’s theology all over again. This year’s coronation reminded me of a need to fill some gaps in my historical knowledge; Julian Rathbone’s The Last English King is a fictionalised account of the life and death of Harold Godwinson. History closer to our own day comes with Travellers in the Third Reich by Julian Boyd. Visitors to Germany in the 1930s were beguiled by clean streets, fabulous scenery and loud rallies. It’s a scary and salutary read.
This summer, I really do need to finish St Thérèse’s of Lisieux’s autobiography, excellently translated by former Herald writer Mgr Ronald Knox. I’ve been curiously reading about the Little Flower’s difficulties in obtaining a dispensation to enter her vocation at Carmel – going as far as chasing an audience with Pope Leo XIII – while pondering its potential relevance to my own life. It’s been reassuring to see that even Doctors of the Church sometimes see spiritual dryness or fall into mechanical habits in prayer. Last year, I finished Catholic convert and lay Dominican Sigrid Undset’s Nobel-Prize-winning four-part epic The Master of Hestviken, which is the finest piece of literature I’ve ever read. So, after George MacDonald’s Phantastes, I’ll get my hands on a copy of Undset’s Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy and read it as I travel through the Portuguese countryside on my way to World Youth Day in Lisbon.
I always say I’m going to try and return to books I enjoyed years ago, and then new books come along and once more supplant the old faithfuls gathering dust on my study shelves. I may yet find time for Mary Renault’s great trilogy about Alexander the Great – Fire From Heaven, The Persian Boy and Funeral Games – which I first read when I was 16, but at the moment I’m being diverted by Wheel of Fortune by CF Dunn. It’s the first volume of another trilogy – this one set in the Wars of the Roses – called The Tarnished Crown. As the reign of Edward IV begins to totter, Isobel Fenton struggles to hold onto her lands while others seek to part her from them. The opening pages are arrestingly vivid, and I’m looking forward to reading about everything that comes next. Medieval England makes a nice change from Ancient Greece.
I shall probably spend my annual week in Scotland fighting off the midges and dreaming of sipping Aperol on the Campo de’ Fiori. I was thrilled to pick up recently, and cheaply, a copy of Fr Stephen Luff’s The Christian’s Guide to Rome, first published by Burns & Oates (who else?) in 1967. It is full of small but delightful details that bring the city alive, even at a distance of five decades. My favourite observation so far is about the sights to be seen on the Corso Vittorio Emanuele, and Fr Luff’s offhand reminder that: “The first Act of Puccini’s opera Tosca is set in the church of Sant’Andrea [della Valle].” More poignantly, he writes about some churches that were bustling when the book was written, but which I’ve always found to be firmly closed. Time to regroup and give them another go on my next visit to the Eternal City – it’s been far too long since I was there. Happy reading!
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