Mark Brumley, the well-read president of Ignatius Press, joins us for a brief conversation about books in which he gives his suggestions for Catholics looking for some good summer fiction.
You need a good summer book to read. Mark Brumley, next.
Cy Kellett:
Hello, and welcome to Focus, the Catholic answers podcast for living, understanding, and defending your Catholic faith. To be a Christian is to be engaged with the word, the written word and the word of God in the person of Jesus. Words, words, words, Conversation. That’s a great deal of what Catholic and Christian life is about. Speaking to one another, sharing good news. It’s all part of the Christian faith. So reading is an important part and also the delight of reading, the joy of reading. It’s a way of sharing communion with a writer and with a community of other people who also are reading. It’s all important stuff in the Christian vision of the world. And we tend to kind of put it off to the side, and frankly, we’re losing the habit of reading, and by losing that habit, we’re losing some of the habits that make it easier to fully live the Christian faith. A faith that is about the word, is about sharing words, is about delivering news, and is about entering into conversation, even the divine conversation so to speak.
Cy Kellett:
Mark Brumley is the president of Ignatius Press. He knows an awful lot about books. So we asked him, give us some suggestions for summer reading. And here’s what he had to say.
Cy Kellett:
Mark Brumley, President of Ignatius Press. Thanks for being with us.
Mark Brumley:
Oh, it’s a delight to be with you.
Cy Kellett:
So what do you got for this summer for people?
Mark Brumley:
I’m just going to say on my Facebook page, I recommended sort of, kind of off-beat Ignatius Press books. I’m going to mention A Bloody Habit.
Cy Kellett:
Oh yes. I know you like this book. Yeah, right. I have not read it still. Okay.
Mark Brumley:
This is Eleanor Berg Nicholson.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Mark Brumley:
Bloody Habit, which is the story about a Dominican priest who has a business card and on his business card, it indicates that his vocation or avocation or profession is as a vampire hunter.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. That’s the job to get, yeah.
Mark Brumley:
The story is, I mean, it’s about him, but it’s also about an attorney and it’s set around 1900 when the original Dracula book is released. The story is told and the character is reading the Dracula book and as he’s reading the Dracula book, events in his life have a certain correspondence to it. This is actually a vampire story that involves a Dominican priest and a struggle of good versus evil, where in this universe vampires are real and it is not a super-pious type of book. It’s written as if it were a turn of the century novel.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, that’s great.
Mark Brumley:
One of the brilliant elements of the stories is told in a style akin to what the reader of Bram Stoker’s Dracula would experience. Just very cleverly done on so many levels. People who want something that’s a little offbeat in the world of Catholic fiction, you should get A Bloody Habit.
Mark Brumley:
I also mentioned on Facebook, this book called The Eighth Arrow, which is by Father Wetta, Augustus Wetta. He wrote, it’s one of my favorite books, and I can’t think of the name of it.
Cy Kellett:
Is it the Humility of Rules?
Mark Brumley:
Humility Rules, that’s it. It’s built on the rule of Saint Benedict, but it uses comedy, all right? Well, that’s a separate book. The Eighth Arrow is the story of Odysseus in Dante’s hell. Dante wrote The Inferno.
Cy Kellett:
Oh yeah, poor Odysseus.
Mark Brumley:
The Eighth Arrow is about Odysseus trying to break out of hell.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, that’s great.
Mark Brumley:
How he got there, how he gets out, and of course, Odysseus is a pagan, right? He’s Ulysses in the Roman version, Odysseus in the Greek version, he’s a pagan. Of course, because he does not know Christ and he was a pretty miserable sinner, he is ostensibly damned, but there’s a way out. The story is the adventure of his way out and his encounter, and this is going to sound more pious than I intend it, his encounter with saving grace.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, wonderful. Is Penelope in it?
Mark Brumley:
She is.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Mark Brumley:
Penelope is his wife and she makes an appearance.
Cy Kellett:
Because that’s one of the great marriages in all of literature.
Mark Brumley:
As does Helen of Troy.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, nice. Oh, very good.
Mark Brumley:
Yeah. It’s a great adventure story and it reminds me of CS Lewis’s The Great Divorce, which is also a book people should read. It’s a novel about a journey to hell to ostensibly hell. The Great Divorce is a fun book to read because it’s not so much about the ins and outs of what hell is like but it’s really what I think was to use the expression of Christopher Derrick, who was an author and a former student of Lewis’s and a colleague of Lewis’s, The Great Divorce is an example of Lewis’s best subject, which Derek says was the psychology of moral choice.
Cy Kellett:
Oh.
Mark Brumley:
And what goes into making the choices, the choices that we make and why do we make those choices, whatever our motives and The Great Divorce delves into how these people came to be in hell. You can’t get out of hell if you’re really in hell.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah.
Mark Brumley:
But some people, what they’re experiencing as hell, it turns out to be purgatory.
Cy Kellett:
Oh.
Mark Brumley:
You see what goes into the moral judgements of the people that wind up staying there and it being hell and what goes into the choices and the moral judgments of the people who don’t stay there and it winds up being for them purgatory. The Eighth Arrow does a similar thing with Odysseus.
Cy Kellett:
Wonderful.
Mark Brumley:
We can read ourselves into this man’s mind and heart. I encourage people to get those two books, CS Lewis’s The Great Divorce and Father Augusta Wetta book The Eighth Arrow.
Cy Kellett:
All right. Can I recommend a hell book while we’re on it?
Mark Brumley:
Sure.
Cy Kellett:
A friend of Louis Charles Murray wrote a book called Descent Into Hell. Oh, it’s awful. It’s a brutal book.
Mark Brumley:
Charles Williams.
Cy Kellett:
Charles Williams. I’m sorry, what did I say Charles Murray?
Mark Brumley:
Charles Murray.
Cy Kellett:
Who’s Murray?
Mark Brumley:
The social theorist?
Cy Kellett:
Oh, yeah. Okay. I got my Charles wrong. Yes. Yeah, Descent Into Hell. It’s a very intense book though, very intense.
Mark Brumley:
Yeah. What is it about The Descent Into Hell that you found so intense?
Cy Kellett:
Well, I think he’s just a very thick writer. I don’t know, it’s like an old fashioned kind of writing where it’s just thick and I don’t know but a wonderful, wonderful novel.
Mark Brumley:
But you see, I forget who the central character what his name is, but …
Cy Kellett:
I can’t remember.
Mark Brumley:
Yeah. You see how a series of choices that he makes, he becomes further and further cutoff from real people, we’ll just say that, without spoiling it and becomes more and more insulated and it is a descent into hell.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Yeah.
Mark Brumley:
They say, hell is other people. Well, no, actually hell is not other people.
Cy Kellett:
Hell is the lack of other people. That’s exactly backwards.
Mark Brumley:
Rightly to relate to other people is damnation. You see that also in The Great Divorce as well. The attitude that the people that are in hell, they just keep moving further and further away from each other because they can’t stand other people. People who say, “Well, I want to go to hell for the company,” have a misunderstanding of the nature of that.
Cy Kellett:
No. Right. That’s right. A mistaken premise. Although I think that the devil is perfectly happy for us to have mistaken premises about-
Mark Brumley:
That’s right.
Cy Kellett:
About hell. Want to give us a couple more before we have to go, a couple more summer reads or have we tapped you out?
Mark Brumley:
Well, no, I’ve got an endless supply.
Cy Kellett:
Do you?
Mark Brumley:
We just read for our Napa book club, a book called The High Crusade by Poul Anderson. Poul Anderson was a science fiction fantasy writer and this is not, from a literary perspective, a profound book, but as my wife described it, it’s a romp. It’s a fun read. The premise of this book is aliens invade England in the 14th century and they’re going to take over-
Cy Kellett:
Yes.
Mark Brumley:
And they make a mistake because this is advanced race and they think that they’re so much superior they’ll just use their advanced weapons and take over. But before they can do that, this group of Englishman led by this lower level bit of nobility, English nobility, they just attack this ship and they take over the ship. They kill everybody except the one alien and they use him to fly them. First, they’re going to go to France, then they’re going to go to the crusade.
Cy Kellett:
They’re going to take of France first.
Mark Brumley:
To free the holy land.
Cy Kellett:
It’s perfect English, yeah.
Mark Brumley:
Then the alien ends up taking them to an outpost in his alien race’s galactic empire, and the fun part of this is how these English button just take over the ship and wind up taking over this alien empire.
Cy Kellett:
That’s great.
Mark Brumley:
It’s just a lot of fun.
Cy Kellett:
Okay. The High Crusade, it’s called?
Mark Brumley:
High Crusade and there are a few inaccuracies from a Catholic theological point of view. It perpetuates the myth that educated people in the Middle Ages thought the earth was flat.
Cy Kellett:
Oh my gosh.
Mark Brumley:
They thought it was round, but this is a passing reference to that.
Cy Kellett:
I think Washington Irving was the father of that myth. I think he sold that. Come on. Thomas Aquinas knew the world was round.
Mark Brumley:
That’s right. Saint Augustine knew the world was round. The ancient Greeks. My daughter got me for father’s day a round earth society t-shirt. We’ve been around since 500 BC. Come on, guys. Anyway. Anyway. High Crusade. Lots of fun. Encourage people to get that book, read that book. What would you leave them with?
Cy Kellett:
I’m stuck on apocalyptic literature now. I don’t know if people will like this book or not, but you said something about, oh, that book from 1900 and about that old-timey writing. There’s a book from the 1900’s called The Lord of the World.
Mark Brumley:
Lord of the World, Hugh Benson.
Cy Kellett:
Lord of the World by Hugh Benson. Yeah. Yeah. I think it’s a great, wonderful book. I was shocked by one part of it, shocked.
Mark Brumley:
Really?
Cy Kellett:
That a priest-
Mark Brumley:
Give people a general idea of what the book’s about. Apocalyptic, okay.
Cy Kellett:
It’s about Christ taking over the world and flying around in dirigible jet hybrids or whatever Father Benson imagined the future would be like. He’s got the weird quality of death places where you just go to die if you don’t feel like living anymore. It’s total culture of death. He really saw that well. But I’ll just tell you the part that I found shocking. I had this idea that I don’t want to have, but it’s in my head that somehow the church’s attitude on everything changed around the 1960s and a woman commits suicide in this book, but she’s an innocent and she’s saved, and he describes her salvation. I thought 1907, a Catholic priest wrote a book where the woman who committed suicide was saved and it’s actually quite beautiful, and I’m not advertising for suicide. I’m just saying that he understood that she was innocent in this act, fundamentally innocent, because she was utterly confused by the kind of social teaching of her time. But I don’t know, I found that shocking and also just very hopeful.
Mark Brumley:
That’s a apocalyptic novel and it’s hopeful in the end because in the end, the Lord returns, but the description of the world is it’s getting bad, bad, bad, bad and there’s the antichrist and everything’s terrible.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah, right.
Mark Brumley:
Did you read sort of the alternative version novel that Robert Hugh Benson wrote called The Dawn of All?
Cy Kellett:
No, never read it.
Mark Brumley:
That’s just the opposite. That’s where the church of evangelizes the whole world and everybody converts.
Cy Kellett:
One of them is kind of the Pope Benedict version and one of them is kind of the John Paul version.
Mark Brumley:
Well kind of in a way.
Cy Kellett:
That’s funny.
Mark Brumley:
Yeah, you should get The Dawn of All. That’s a fun book too.
Cy Kellett:
Does it have killer dirigibles though? I mean, come on.
Mark Brumley:
Well, it does actually.
Cy Kellett:
Okay, all right, I’ll read it then.
Mark Brumley:
Yeah, it does.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Mark Brumley:
I think it’s fun to read those two together. We could have a conversation about those two books from an apologetics point of view because I think that they are as a lot of things that Hugh Benson wrote, they have a kind of an apologetical edge to them, but it’s a very different approach in the one than the other. The apocalyptic end of the world, everything’s going bad, evil is going to get worse and worse and then the Lord is going to return that’s Lord of the World. Then Dawn of All is the church evangelizes and there’s a conversion and-
Cy Kellett:
Oh, I got to read that. Yeah.
Mark Brumley:
You could just see this as the triumph of the immaculate heart of Mary or however you want to describe that, but there are all kinds of interesting little apologetical elements in it that I think people would have fun with.
Mark Brumley:
I got to mention this is sort of a high school pick. You read this in high school, but I think it’s a really great novel. Especially as we’re dealing with issues of race and so on in our society To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, what a great, great novel. Yeah.
Mark Brumley:
In a way it’s like so many things that you read in high school it’s wasted on high schoolers.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, yeah. Right. Right.
Mark Brumley:
Because they don’t get it but I think it’s a great book for older people to read. If you read it in a high school, go back and reread it. If you didn’t read it in high school, or if you said you read it in high school, but what you really-
Cy Kellett:
But you just watched the movie.
Mark Brumley:
Or watched the movie, people read To Kill a Mockingbird and then they should read the other Harper Lee book-
Cy Kellett:
I thought Truman Capote wrote To Kill a Mockingbird. No. That’s a joke, Mark. Sorry. Because that’s what people always say, that Truman Capote really wrote it but, sorry.
Mark Brumley:
Oh no, he couldn’t write a book that good.
Cy Kellett:
Maybe not, I don’t know.
Mark Brumley:
Harper Lee and Truman Cody were friends.
Cy Kellett:
Very good friends, yeah.
Mark Brumley:
Yeah and one of the characters in To Kill a Mockingbird is based upon Truman Capote.
Cy Kellett:
Now, see. I didn’t know that.
Mark Brumley:
Yeah. But Go Set a Watchman is the same universe, same characters, but it’s told from a different perspective. It was actually apparently the first version of what became To Kill a Mockingbird. Harper Lee submitted it and for reasons that apparently are somewhat still mysterious, it was turned down as a book. Then one of the little elements in the story of Go Set a Watchman talks about Atticus Finch and his defending a Black man accused of rape, sexual assault, and the editor told Harper Lee to go and tell a story about that, which she did and that became To Kill a Mockingbird.
Cy Kellett:
Wow.
Mark Brumley:
But Go Set a Watchman is told … It’s just a different story and it deals with racial issues in a way that is a little more complex because Atticus and his daughters is, first of all, the daughter is in her twenties. She’s grown up, she’s gone to New York and mingled with the literary elite and she’s come back home and she sees her father differently. It’s set some 20 years after, set in the ’50’s, so it’s set some 20 years after the story of Yo Kill a Mockingbird. Atticus is dealing with issues of segregation and desegregation in the south and the post Brown vs Board of Education world and he’s reacting, of course we know Atticus is not racist, but he’s reacting to the federal government’s incursion into to state’s rights and all of this.
Mark Brumley:
Obviously he’s his daughter’s hero and yet there’s a tension between the father and the daughter over how they view the federal government’s involvement in promoting Civil Rights.
Cy Kellett:
Wow.
Mark Brumley:
In some ways it’s a much more complex story. I love To Kill a Mockingbird. It’s told obviously from, although it’s narrated by the character, the daughter is an older woman, but she’s telling the story from her childhood. I agree with Flannery O’Connor that To Kill a Mockingbird kind of reflects a children’s perspective on that. I don’t, for that reason, think it’s a bad story. I think it’s still a very powerful story, but we see an adult perspective, a young adult perspective in Go Set a Watchman. I think reading these two novels, you’d read To Kill a Mockingbird first, and then you read Go Set a Watchman. Reading these two novels together this summer is a powerful experience.
Mark Brumley:
By the way, although they’re not heavy handed in their religiosity, it’s clear that these stories are coming out of a Christian worldview and they’re grappling with the issue of race and how Christian people, Black and white, see race in the 1950s and in an early ’60’s. I can’t recommend these two books read together highly enough.
Cy Kellett:
Mark, thanks. I got a lot of reading to do. I hate to say, I hope I don’t disappoint you with this, but I think the first one I’m going to read is The High Crusade. I don’t know some of them about that just grabbed me.
Mark Brumley:
Well, and then I know I’m running on, you guys need to wrap the show up, but probably my favorite novel of all time, Brideshead Revisited’s in the top five, but my, probably my favorite novel of all time is Till We Have Faces by CS Lewis.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Mark Brumley:
It is a retelling of the Psyche myth, Psyche Cupid myth. It is told from a pagan perspective but there are deep Christian themes and knowing yourself and the power of conversion and seeing yourself in the light of love, in the light of Christ. Now, these things are implicit in the story, because as I say, it’s a retelling of the Cupid Psyche story, but I think it’s just one of the best novels ever. Lewis is a man, but his central character is a woman and many women I know read it just say, “How is it that he’s so insightful when it comes to how a woman sees things?” So Till We Have Faces.
Cy Kellett:
Now you make me want to go watch the podcast Pints with Jack. Have you ever been on that?
Mark Brumley:
I have not been on that.
Cy Kellett:
Oh, I’m going to tell him that he’s got to beg you to come on there because they [inaudible 00:21:46].
Mark Brumley:
Yeah, well, you should think about it. In the title Till We Have Faces, the idea is why won’t the gods speak to us, answer us. We have these questions. Why won’t they speak to us, answer us face to face? Well, they can’t answer us till we have faces.
Cy Kellett:
Yeah. Beautiful, Mark.
Mark Brumley:
There you go.
Cy Kellett:
Mark Brumley, president of Ignatius press. It’s always fun to talk with you.
Mark Brumley:
Oh, great talking with you and let’s have a reading summer. I said, read, reflect, and discuss. Read, reflect, and discuss.
Cy Kellett:
Okay.
Mark Brumley:
I believe about reading what Mortimer Adler said. Reading is good, but solitude reading is like solitary drinking. It’s better to read with others, to discuss just as it’s better to drink with others and to celebrate.
Cy Kellett:
We’d love to hear from you. If you read one of the books that mark suggested, send us an email radio@catholic.com. Also send an email if you’ve got an idea for a future episode, or maybe you’ve got a bone to pick about this one, radio@catholic.com. If you’re of a mood to support us, we can use your financial support to keep doing what we’re doing. You can do that by going to givecatholic.com, givecatholic.com. Don’t forget to subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts because if you subscribe, you’ll be notified when new episodes are available and we’re making them. We’d love it if you’d hear them. If you’re watching on YouTube, just like and subscribe at the bottom, that helps us to grow the podcast. And I think that about wraps it up. I got to go do some reading. We’ll see you next time, God willing, right here at Catholic Answers Focus.