The Buzz

I call it “the buzz” for lack of a better term. It’s when I hear about an author I’m unfamiliar with, not once, but two or more times, sometimes in the same day. That happened today with an author named John Mark Comer, who writes on spiritual formation with a current book called Practicing the Way and a ministry organization by the same name.

Actually, I thought Comer was new to me until I read about him and discovered I had reviewed one of his earlier books, Garden City. What makes it more embarrassing is that i reviewed the book last year! In my defense, I review a lot of books!

But I digress. The buzz is a tip-off to pay attention to an author. That doesn’t mean rushing out to get his or her latest book. But when I hear about someone from very disparate sources, I start asking why this person’s writing is influential. I look at book descriptions and reviews. And if that piques my interest and I think they are offering a fresh perspective on something, I may bite.

I suppose the buzz may be chalked up to coincidence. Sometimes, though, I take it as a prompting to pick up a book by the author. This happened when I heard about Tom Holland’s Dominion from about a dozen people. But it’s thick, and I think I need a book buddy to join me in reading it. Anyone interested?

Five Articles Worth Reading

I think one of the attractions of reading children’s books as an adult is the lessons that speak to us perhaps even more powerfully than to children. In “10 Life Lessons for Grown-Ups From Children’s Classics,” Pamela Paul reminds us of some of these lessons.

Russell Harper is one of the revisors of The Chicago Manual of Style (CMOS), the bible of writers. in “What Can a Book from 1749 Teach Us About Chicago Style?” he considers Henry Field’s Tom Jones in its originally published form and how it conforms to and departs from The Chicago Manual of Style. It wasw fascinating to see the conventions that have endured.

Zabihollah Mansouri. Not a household name for us, but most Iranians have read something he translated. “In Search of Zabihollah Mansouri” is a fascinating profile of a translator who often “improved” on authors’ works when he thought them too dull for readers.

If you’ve never discovered the delight of reading a novel by Anthony Trollope, “The Way We Don’t Live Now” is a good introduction to why this reader, at least finds Trollope worth reading.

As you may have noticed, I’ve been reading more poetry. This one brought back memories of my grandmother, who passed in 1965: Fossil Record for My Grandmother: A poem for Sunday, by Dara Yen Elerath. One difference between me and the poet. My grandmother’s Bible is a treasured possession.

Quote of the Week

Hortense Calisher was an American novelist and second female president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was born December 20, 1911. She observed:

“It took most people a lifetime to join the human race.”

I’m still thinking about that!

Miscellaneous Musings

One of the things that hasn’t gotten old after over a decade of reviewing is when I write to a publisher for the first time and request a review copy of a book and they say “yes.”

I’ve been losing myself this week in Katherine Rundell’s Impossible Creatures. It’s written for children in the middle grade but I’ve been thoroughly engrossed. There is a hidden world within our world that a young boy enters, a girl with a destiny she has to decide whether to embrace, and a threat to life in the hidden world and our wider world. A wonderful story of love and heroism–things good, true, and beautiful.

For three years, I lived a block from Anthony Wayne Trail in Toledo, Ohio. I’m reading a biography about the Revolutionary War General often known as “Mad” Anthony Wayne. He was the general responsible for defeating an alliance of indigenous tribes in 1795, supported by the British, who lived in the Ohio country, who were unwilling to give up land previously allocated under treaty. The European settlement of every city I’ve lived in in Ohio was made possible by that defeat and the Treaty of Greenville of 1795 when the indigenous tribal confederacy ceded the Ohio lands. Ohio became a state in 1803. But reminders of that indigenous presence are still all around me in the names of rivers, towns, and counties: Mahoning, Maumee, Scioto, Cuyahoga, Olentangy, Sandusky, and Delaware just to name a few.

Next Week’s Reviews

Here’s the lineup for next week:

Monday: Jill Hicks-Keeton, Good Book

Tuesday: Georges Simenon, Maigret and the Wine Merchant

Wednesday: Richard Panek, Pillars of Creation

Thursday: Matthew Levering, Why I am Roman Catholic

Friday: Benjamin T. Quinn & Dennis T. Greeson, The Way of Christ in Culture

Well, that’s The Weekly Wrap for December 15-21, 2024!

Find past editions of The Weekly Wrap under The Weekly Wrap heading on this page.