The Catholic Herald

Here is the second part of the Catholic Herald's recommended reads for this summer that have been put together by some of the Herald’s friends and contributors. Once again, as with the <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/summer-reading-recommendations-from-the-catholic-herald-part-1/?swcfpc=1">first instalment</a>, the range of suggestions covers old and new, and all kind of genres. Pope Francis recently noted his fondness for tragedies in a letter he wrote extolling the virtues of reading literature and poems for priestly formation, while also emphasising the relevant import for all Christians. “I, for my part, love the tragedians because we can all embrace their works as our own, as expressions of our own personal drama,” <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/pope-pens-heart-felt-letter-on-vital-role-of-novels-and-poems-for-all-christians/?swcfpc=1">the Pope writes</a>. “In weeping for the fate of their characters we are essentially weeping for ourselves, for our own emptiness, shortcomings and loneliness. “Literature helps readers to topple the idols of a self-referential, falsely self-sufficient and statically conventional language that at times also risks polluting our ecclesial discourse, imprisoning the freedom of the Word.” The Pope also noted the point that C.S. Lewis made, in regard to the mind-expanding powers of reading, when writing in An Experiment in Criticism: “In reading great literature I become a thousand men and yet remain myself. Like the night sky in the Greek poem, I see with myriad eyes, but it is still I who see. Here, as in worship, in love, in moral action and in knowing, I transcend myself; and am never more myself than when I do.” So here are ten more recommendations for seeing with "myriad eyes" and to help you achieve some transcendence: Katharine Bennett I will be spending most of the summer writing, in the hope that one day my own book of short stories will be picked by one of my fellow Herald contributors as their summer choice. In moments away from the laptop, I’m going to revisit Donna Tartt’s The Secret History; her writing can be described with a line, borrowed from Flannery O’Connor, as “not so much Christ-centred, but Christ-haunted”. It is the dark tale of an elite group of students at a liberal arts college told from the perspective of Richard Papen, an ordinary boy who is desperate to fit in. CS Lewis writes that “of all the passions, the passion for the inner ring is most skilful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do ver y bad things”, and Richard’s intense desire to be accepted pushes him from weakness into sin. “In a world without God,” Tartt says, “the only way we can see actions and their complex consequences played out in the fullness of time is through the novel”. The Secret History is a blisteringly effective example. Michael Hodges There are two books that I plan to read over the summer months. The first is Queen Victoria and her Prime Ministers by Anne Somerset, which <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/refreshingly-honest-account-of-queen-victoria-from-foibles-and-failings-to-her-sense-of-duty-and-religious-leanings/?swcfpc=1">Fr Mark Vickers reviewed</a> for the Catholic Herald in June. Victoria had ten prime ministers during her long reign from 1837 to 1901, starting with the avuncular Lord Melbourne and ended with Lord Salisbury – “He is so wise.” She gave her advice in a way that would be regarded as verging on the unconstitutional nowadays. Her favourite prime minister was undoubtedly the unlikely but flattering Benjamin Disraeli; her least favourite was the devout William Gladstone: “a half-mad firebrand”. The second is The Quality of Love by Ariane Bankes, which describes the lives, in the first half of the 20th century, of the two beautiful twin Paget sisters – her mother, Celia, and her aunt, Mamaine – born in 1916. The pages are papered with characters such as Dick Wyndham, Arthur Koestler (whom Mamaine eventually married), Albert Camus, George Orwell, Freddie Ayer, Jeremy Hutchinson and Sacheverell Sitwell. Mamaine died aged 37 in 1954; Celia went on to marry a retired diplomat turned Lincolnshire farmer, and lived happily ever after. Flora Watkins Having just read Graham Greene’s fascinating memoir of his youth, A Sort of Life – which takes in his adolescent breakdown, psychoanalysis, conversion to Catholicism, marriage and publication of Stamboul Train – I feel compelled to go back and pick up his major novels. The one I return to again and again is The End of the Affair, but I am long overdue rereading the “big” books widely considered to be his master pieces: The Heart of the Matter and The Power and the Glory. After that I may need some light relief from moral conundrums and questions of redemption and human frailty. Summer calls for a blockbuster and by my sun lounger I plan to have Lace, by the recently departed Shirley Conran. For my children, I have – on the advice of a friend and mother of young adults – ordered In the Beginning, a book of Old Testament stories by the brilliant illust ator Jan Pienkowski. It has big, wonderful, funny pictures and shortish stories for small attention spans. Children like repetition, so I imagine I will be reading it a lot. Niall Gooch This summer I will be tramping across Dartmoor, from Ivybridge to Okehampton, across some of the wildest landscape in the whole of England, and one of my favourite novels – The Hound of the Baskervilles – will definitely be in my rucksack. Agatha Christie’s The Sittaford Mystery, another classic Dartmoor whodunit, could also make the cut, but the setting of a snowbound hamlet in the depths of winter might feel somewhat unseasonal. Ten Years at War, a trilogy of memoirs by the fascinating writer-soldier Peter Kemp, will accompany me to the Dordogne later on. Kemp had an extraordinary decade between 1936 and 1946; he volunteered for the Nationalist side in the Spanish Civil War, before being badly injured in 1938, and then served with some distinction in the Special Operations Executive throughout, and immediately after, the Second World War. I also hope to brush up a little on my understanding of the New Testament, with the help of Lydia McGrew’s Testimonies to the Truth, by all accounts an accessible but scholarly defence of why we can and should regard the Gospels as authoritative accounts. Dame Philippa Edwards For our annual convent staycation I have chosen to re-read Colum McCann’s Apeirogon, first published in 2020 but rendered topical by the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The title translates as a geometric figure with an infinite number of sides, which ranges through space and time and weaves myriad threads into ever-shifting wondrous patterns. At the book’s heart are two fathers, Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin, each of whom lost a beloved daughter through the age-old conflict but who have become as close as brothers and who now travel the world spreading the hope that peace is possible. In Holy Week this year they met Pope Francis. The accounts of the conversions of the two men – Bassam’s in prison when he was very young, through seeing a documentary about the Holocaust and realising that he had no wish to add to the suffering of the Jewish people, and Rami’s at 47 when for the first time he met Palestinians as human beings “who carry the same burden as I carry” – are among the most moving things I have ever read. This is truly a book with the power to change the world. Andrew Cusack As a New Yorker, I nurture a certain devotion to James II, who as Duke of York gave his name to our land and forcibly persuaded it into the Anglosphere. Justine Brown’s The Private Life of James II sheds light on this intriguing character. Meanwhile, from the familiar to the exotic, I’ve picked up an old Penguin edition of Freya Stark’s The Southern Gates of Arabia, in which she travels through the unknown realm of the Hadhramaut in today’s Yemen. Yasmina Reza’s subversively conservative play Art hasn’t lost any of its edge despite premiering 30 years ago; I’ve picked up Christopher Hampton’s translation of four of her plays to revisit. On the more academic front, Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294-1324 was a groundbreaking study that solidified the scholar’s status as a rock-star of medievalists – and I can see why. But summer requires something a little lighter, too. Cyril Hare’s vintage Tragedy at Law follows a High Court judge who begins to receive mysterious threatening letters on the circuit. That should do the trick. Oleńka Hamilton My husband bought me a Kindle when our son was born in December. I have always been against these modern devices, preferring actual paper – but it has been life-changing. I can now read in the dark at all hours of the night while settling the baby back to sleep. At the moment I’m reading Every Body Should Know This by Dr Federica Amati, which I highly recommend. Federica was the year above me at Edinburgh University, and while we were there we both promoted a nightclub called Opal Lounge. We’ve both changed a lot since then, and Federica’s book is a brilliant insight into how the body deals with food during each decade of life – including a section on a baby’s first 1,000 days. Away from the nursery, a rather different kind of book I’m looking forward to over the summer is Godmersham Park by Gill Hornby. It’s a fictionalised account of the real life friendship between Jane Austen and governess Anne Sharp; having dipped into it already, it’s a great comfort read for those who have read all of Austen but just want a little bit more. Gavin Ashenden When I stumbled across Carlos Eire’s magisterial tome Reformations, I found myself reading history in a fresh and exuberantly interesting light. As a Catholic intellectual, he approaches the near impossible task of offering a reading of events more free from polemical presupposition than is usually achieved. When I found he had written They Flew: A History of the Impossible, I put it on the top of my summer pile. Eire makes the point that one of the virtues of Catholicism is its capacity to negotiate fact and faith, physics and metaphysics; he shows how and why this happens and how and why it matters. Next, John Daniel Davidson’s Pagan America and the Decline of Christianity and the Dark Age to Come sounds as eccentric as it is sombre. Davidson is no apocalyptic neurotic, but he warns that Christian presuppositions have been so eroded that they are about to be totally overwhelmed – and it is better to know the enemy at the gates than to adopt the ostrich position. This course of reading may require some summer refreshment to make it more palatable. Gertrude Clark This summer, I’m going to be catching up with a fascinating man of letters: Charles Scott Moncrieff. He was a brilliant translator of Proust, a brave soldier, a Catholic convert, a homosexual and British spy in fascist Italy. Moncrieff ’s conversion during the war was extraordinarily moving, and his great-great niece, Jean Findlay, has written about him in Chasing Lost Time. I’ll also read Ant, Findlay ’s anthology of Moncrieff ’s own work, including some moving war poems and a serial about a soldier’s life during the Great War. Another brilliant man was Claud Cockburn, the legendary journalist, communist and editor of the transformative radical 1930s journal The Week. His son Patrick (himself a brilliant journalist – there is no one better writing about the Middle East) has written an account of his father’s work called Believe Nothing Until it is Officially Denied, after his most famous quip. I’m not sure that Claud was a nice man, but he saw the way the world was going in the 1930s from several extraordinary vantage points. His acid test of integrity was whether a person would have supported Dreyfus, even if he himself had opposing interests and sympathies. It’s a good rule of thumb, even now. Serenhedd James So many books; so little time. As I am also writing another one of my own, about religious philanthropy in colonial South Africa, I have taken delivery of Tom Sharpe’s Riotous Assembly and Indecent Exposure, both of which I first read as a teenager. They are differently hilarious now that I understand more about the political situation which Sharpe sent up so brilliantly; he was later expelled for sedition. I wish I knew where my original copies went – pinched by a student, probably. I’ve also got the new edition of The History of England’s Cathedrals by Nicholas Orme, with chapters on the 19th and 20th centuries taking in the modern Catholic establishments as well – if only Lutyens had won out at Liverpool. Finally, there’s Florence Has Won My Heart by Mark Roberts, which takes in the longstanding Anglophone obsession with the city through the eyes of over a hundred writers. Apart from the Museo dell’Opera del Duomo, which I adore, I find it difficult to love Florence as a whole – don’t get me started on the Uffizi, where I once had a blazing row with an over-combative (but mercifully unarmed) security guard. Perhaps Roberts will bring me round at last. Photo: A nursemaid, who is also a Cambridge undergraduates, looking after and reading to children whose parents are busy picking fruit in the nearby orchards at Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, England, 14 July 1937. (Photo by Arthur Tanner/Fox Photos/Getty Images.) This article appears in the Summer Special July/August 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world click <a href="https://catholicherald.co.uk/subscribe/?swcfpc=1">HERE</a>.

Summer reads recommended by the Catholic Herald (Part 2)

The Catholic Herald

related articles

subscribe to the catholic herald today