Confessions of St. Augustine – A Review

Published: 397
Pages: 285

St. Augustine was in his forties and Bishop of Hippo when he wrote his Confessions. It was only recently that I realised that I was leaning towards the wrong definition of ‘confession’ when I read it. There is definitely an element of confessing his sins, but he is also confessing his faith. It’s also an autobiography, since St. Augustine starts the account of how he became a Christian with his boyhood in northern Africa.

Although St. Augustine was one of the great minds of the early church, or perhaps because of it, he wrote in a way that is very approachable. That might, of course, be due to the translator, but I read City of God in 2018 and that’s also very readable, despite its length (1,000 plus pages) and a different translator. St. Augustine was a teacher from a young age, which probably influenced how he wrote, because one of his aims is clearly to help his readers avoid the mistakes he made on his way to becoming a Christian. I’m not in a position to comment on how easy or otherwise his Latin is to read, but it’s believed that it was his first language, even though he grew up in a Roman province in northern Africa, so I suspect he had a facility with it.

He portrays himself as someone who was searching for something as a young man, trying Manichaeism and Neoplatonism before he came across Ambrose, the bishop of Milan. Although St. Augustine’s mother was a Christian, it wasn’t until he heard Ambrose preach that he began to take Christianity seriously and was converted.

Much of what’s in the Confessions is well-known, including his account of stealing pears. I didn’t know the story before I read the book, but it’s one I shall remember. As a teenager, St. Augustine and some friends stole from a neighbours pear tree. They didn’t do it because they wanted to eat the pears. In fact, they threw them away. They did it because it was forbidden. It was, as St. Augustine later reflected, the sin itself that they wanted. His thoughts on sin still influence modern theology.

Having read City of God, reading The Confessions was like meeting an old friend. I enjoyed it very much.

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

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Angel Pavement by J.B. Priestley – A Review

Published: 1930
Pages: 460

Priestley wrote Angel Pavement as a response to what became Great Depression. The novel is set in the sales office of a company that sells veneers. The company doesn’t seem to manufacture anything, but imports veneers and sells them. I think Priestley himself wasn’t entirely sure what the company does. Whatever it does, it doesn’t do it terribly well. The company is saved by the arrival of a man with access to cut-price veneers produced in Eastern Europe. The novel examines the effect this has on the staff and the owner of the business.

Each person working in the office represents a different level of society and Priestley shows their home lives with a bit more precision than their working lives. The owner of the company lives comfortably in a serviced flat in the west of London. He and his wife have friends round for dinner and have servant troubles. The finance manager lives with his wife and two teenage children (both at work), in a terraced house. The typist lives in a woman’s hostel whose occupants are constantly changing. The clerk lodges in the house of a couple who are only a little better off than he is. Each of them has a very precise address in different parts of London, underlining their social status.

There’s a fair amount of anti-semitism and misogyny in the book, which troubled me. Both were probably endemic at the time Priestley was writing, but from a man who made much of his social conscience, they’re hard to swallow. At a pinch, the anti-semitism could be passed off as reflecting the views of his characters, although I don’t think that’s the case. The misogyny is all his.

The novel is very long. Too long, I think. The third quarter is quite dull. In comparison, the final quarter is a whirlwind of action. I think I would have enjoyed it more if the actions leading to the climax made more sense. Unfortunately, I can’t explain why this was a problem without giving away the ending and I don’t like to spoil books for other people.

As a bit of social history, it’s an interesting book to read. If you want to know more about the importing of veneers into England in the late 1920s you’ll need to look elsewhere.

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

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2019 Week Fifty

At last, I’ve finished The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. There won’t be a review; I think I’ve made it quite clear over the weeks I’ve been reading it that I didn’t enjoy the book. Having said that, there were some among the later stories that were not such an effort to read, but I wouldn’t want to recommend them to anyone. This will say more about me as a reader than about Welty as a writer, but I found that few of her stories have a point and, although they’re beautifully-written, they are so full of allusion, that I rarely had any idea of what was going on. I did, however, enjoy her take on the story of Odysseus in Circe.

In other reading I’ve started Little by Edward Carey. It’s the fictionalised story of Mme. Tussaud, and I made a good start on it when I went to and from London by train one day this week. It’s bizarre and full of grotesques, but I’m enjoying it. That may change when I reach the scenes of graphic violence promised by one reviewer. Carey has illustrated the novel with pencil drawings, which are as strange as the story he’s telling. I’ve been looking forward to reading it for over a year, as it received very good reviews when it came out.

Books read in challenge: 12
Books read in year: 47

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

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2019 Week Forty-Nine

I have finished St. Augustine’s Confessions and what a delight they are. He winds himself up in knots trying to avoid giving in to God and he doesn’t hide from his reader the false paths he followed.  His agonies of indecision don’t end when he does give in. He reaches the point of his conversion and could have ended his confessions at a high point.  Instead, he carries on and sets out the difficulties of his early days as a Christian. This desire to be honest with himself and his future readers is one of his endearing qualities.  His Confessions aren’t just confessions to God; they’re also a guide for someone who might be traveling a similar path.

There is some progress with The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. I wish now that I had given up on them at the beginning and read one of my alternatives. It has been a hard and unrewarding slog. There are still six stories to read and a little over 100 pages. I will finish it by the end of the year, but it really hasn’t been worth the effort.

Books read in challenge: 11
Books read in year: 45

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

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2019 Week Forty-Eight

As I had hoped, I’ve saved the best for last. I started reading The Confessions of Saint Augustine this week and I’m really enjoying it. It’s a bit like meeting an old friend and getting to know him better. Augustine’s is an interesting story. Anyone who knew him as a young man could hardly have expected him to end up a bishop. Although studious, he was wayward and broke his Christian mother’s heart.

Augustine didn’t write his sins down in detail, for fear of inspiring others to sin, but he hinted at them. His purpose wasn’t to satisfy curiosity, but to encourage and warn. In my reading, Augustin has reached 35 and is still not a Christian. He has, however, come under the influence of Ambrose, the Bishop of Milan. The translation is good and the chapters are short, making it very easy to read. Augustine himself is very engaging.

Now that we’re in December, it’s time to think about next year’s Goodreads Reading the Classics Challenge. I’ve been putting some books aside as I come across them, but I haven’t yet got 12. I need 14 in all. I’m trying to choose shorter books for next year, but I have a suspicion that the very lengthy Canterbury Tales in Middle English will make the final cut.

Books read in challenge: 10
Books read in year: 44

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

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2019 Week Forty-Seven

Last week I complained about nothing happening in Angel Pavement by J.B. Priestley. It was a premature complaint and the final hundred or so pages were full of incident. I have finished the novel and it has left me, I think, disappointed. It’s full of period detail, which is interesting. Priestley admitted, though, that he got almost everything wrong about the business of Twigg and Dersingham, the company for whom the main characters work.  The office life he described, however, was still recognisable to someone who started work in an office 50 years after the period in which the novel was set.

Finishing Angel Pavement has given me more time to read Antonia Fraser’s Gunpowder Plot, which I left before I’d reached the halfway point. It’s the summer of 1605 and the plotters are putting their plans, such as they were, into action. I say ‘such as they were’ since Fraser insists that they didn’t really have any plans beyond blowing up parliament and making James I’s daughter the puppet ruler. They didn’t even seem to have any idea about whose puppet she would be.

I’ve finally read a story by Eudora Welty that I enjoyed. It’s Moon Lake, a story about two girls and the Boy Scout lifeguard at a girls’ summer camp. Strictly speaking, I suppose it’s a coming of age story, of which I’m not normally fond, but I was predisposed to enjoy it by the appearance of the lifeguard, who features as a sickly boy in an earlier story in the collection. It was reassuring to know that he grew out of his illness. This single story doesn’t redeem the whole collection in my eyes, but it does make the prospect of the remaining 300 pages a little less terrifying.

We’re almost into December, which means it’s time to start thinking about books for next year’s Reading the Classics Challenge. I have some ideas, but I’ve misplaced one of the books I was intending to include. That’s what comes of having too many books.

Books read in challenge: 10
Books read in year: 44

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

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2019 Week Forty-Six

I’m still struggling through The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty. There’s more to read than I ‘ve already read and the stories are getting longer. They’re also getting more obscure. The last one that I read climaxed when a man, reaching the front door of a house, turned and ran away without doing anything.  The story is told in a humorous way by one of the town gossips, but it’s a lot of fuss about nothing.

It’s not all plain sailing with Angel Pavement either. Like many novelists before and after, Priestley has become bogged down in the middle. In the first hundred or so pages, it didn’t matter that nothing happened. There were characters to get to know and their lives to understand, and that was enough. By two-thirds of the way through a novel, it’s not unreasonable to expect something to happen. To be fair two tiny things, of a negative nature, have happened and one character has ignored something that will doubtless turn out to be very important. I don’t pick it up as readily as I did before.

Tom Holland’s Millennium continues to delight. He draws together events happening across Europe that don’t appear at first glance to be connected. I’m finding the early days of the Holy Roman Empire far more interesting than I expected.

Books read in challenge: 9
Books read in year: 43

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

Available now:

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Classical Literary Criticism by Aristotle, Horace and Longinus – A Review

The latest book that I’ve read in the Goodreads Reading the Classics Challenge is Classical Literary Criticism. It does exactly what the title says. Aristotle, Horace and pseudo-Longinus examine what did and didn’t work in classical poems and plays.

I’ll begin with the treatise that I found least interesting – Longinus’ On The Sublime. The major difficulty with this work is that so much of it is missing. Halfway through a chapter there will be a note that two pages are missing and then the text picks up with the end of a sentence after those two pages. This doesn’t happen just once or twice. Not surprisingly, there is no flow to his arguments. The end of the treatise is also missing, which doesn’t help.

Horace’s work is titled On The Art of Poetry. Best known for his own poetry, Horace certainly knew what he was talking about. The treatise is structured as if he’s giving advice to a young man who wants to be a poet. He’s a witty writer and his advice is good. He advises the young man to “Choose a subject that is suited to your abilities … give long thought to what you are capable of undertaking, and what is beyond you.” Not advice, I suspect, that Horace ever felt he needed to follow. He recommends a certain amount of realism on the stage: “… you must note the behaviour of people of different ages, and give the right kind of manners to characters of varying dispositions and years”. I didn’t really warm to Horace, but I might take to him more if I read some of his poetry.

Aristotle’s treatise is also called On The Art of Poetry. It was my favourite of the three by a long way. He’s succinct, but he covers everything that somebody writing a drama or a poem needs to know.  He has short chapters and his points follow one another logically. What he says applies as much today as it did two and a half thousand years ago.

He’s not afraid to say that a play has to have a beginning, a middle and an end. He also says, “… if the presence or absence of something makes no apparent difference, it is no real part of the whole”, which is sound advice for many rambling playwrights or screenwriters today. One piece of advice that I wasn’t too thrilled about, though, is, “… but it is not appropriate that a female character should be given manliness or cleverness”.

His approach to linguistics is the foundation of what I was taught at university forty years ago, and its study hadn’t advanced much from his time until the second half of the twentieth century.

The end of his treatise went right over my head, however. He goes into detail about a few Greek words and how their various meanings affect how a line of poetry might be interpreted. This gave the translator a difficult time, as well, and the footnotes to these pages are longer than the text.

I’m glad that I’ve finally read this book after having it on my shelves forty years, but I understand why my younger self found it impossible to get through it.

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

Available now:

 

 

 

 

 

 

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2019 Week Forty-Five

Angel Pavement by J. B. Priestley is the penultimate book on my list for the Goodreads Reading the Classics Challenge. I’m more than a quarter of the way through it, but there’s still no real indication of what it’s about, although I suspect it’s going to be as depressing in its way as The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty.  It presents a group of office workers at the beginning of the Depression. Some of them worry about retaining their jobs, but others don’t. The company they work for is struggling, but appears to have been saved by a man with a shady background. I can’t help but think it’s not going to end well. Despite that, it’s a joy to read. The prose is humorous and entertaining, and the characters are well-drawn, if unattractive.

The best thing I can say about The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty is that I’m still working my way through them. In this case, the beautiful prose doesn’t help.

In other reading, I’ve begun Millennium by Tom Holland. It’s an account of the, more or less, two centuries either side of the first millennium. Holland’s proposition is that there was a change at that time that still affects all of us. I’m looking forward to learning more.

Books read in challenge: 9
Books read in year: 43

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

Available now:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amazon

2019 Week Forty-Four

I have finished Classical Literary Criticism and I enjoyed Aristotle’s treatise much more than those of Horace and pseudo-Longinus. There will be a review later. I still have two and three-quarter books to go in the Goodreads Reading the Classics Challenge. All three of them are over 400 hundred pages long. Fortunately, Angel Pavement, by J. B. Priestley, looks as if it will be fairly straightforward. The first chapter, introducing the office workers at Twigg and Dersingham, reminds me of parts of Murder Must Advertise by Dorothy L. Sayer, written around the same time (late 20s/early 30s). This was also set in an office in London. Drug smuggling is an important element of Murder Must Advertise, while 250 cigars are smuggled into London in the prologue of Angel Pavement. I’m hoping there won’t be any further similarities.

In other reading I’ve finished La Nuit des Temps. I realised quite early that I’d read it before, not because I recalled the story, but because I underline words I don’t know when I read French novels so that I can look them up later. I’ve underlined words to the end, but none of the story was familiar. I’m not surprised, as it’s not a great story. Too many people do too many things that defy logic, which weakens it. On the plus side, I’ll gain a vocabulary of French words that might come in useful the next time I read some French science fiction, unless I don’t get round to looking them up, which is what happened last time.

Books read in challenge: 9
Books read in year: 42

 

April Munday is the author of the Soldiers of Fortune and Regency Spies series of novels, as well as standalone novels set in the fourteenth century.

Available now:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Amazon