About the time Covid hit I made a commitment to read all of Willa Cather’s novels in chronological order. With one exception: I read her first one last. No idea now why but I did. Not one bad egg in the whole basket of Cather novels, and it’s hard now to pick my favorite. When I was done, Covid looked like it was not about to cave in to human pressures, so I read through the novels of Hemingway, again in chronological order. I read a biography of his life along with them and by the time I was done with both I was done with Hemingway.
Source: http://hughcullum.com/portfolio/st-peters-petersham-chancel/
Question: What novels did you read during Covid? (Not saying it’s entirely over but we seem to be on the cusp of moving on.)
Then I read Fitzgerald’s novels, one of which we read in high school and whose ending was more surprising to me now than it was then. The Great Gatsby. Another biography and I was done with the man. Then I turned to a biography of Steinbeck, read Of Mice and Men and then The Grapes of Wrath, and met my match with his East of Eden, which was so slow for me I put the thing on the shelf. For good reason.
I wanted to read Lil Copan’s new novel, Little Hours. What a treat (and relief from Steinbeck). I like the novels of Cather and Marilynne Robinson, though I found Jack two notches below Gilead, Lila, and Home. Those three I’ve read twice each.
I’m not making comparisons between these American great novelists and Lil’s novel, but for me there was as much pleasure and insight in reading in Little Hours as the others.
Question: How many characters can you follow in a novel? That is, without taking notes.
Little Hours is about six nuns in a monastery on the east coast, at Plover Point in Weymouth Mass. Lauren Winner’s little blurb on the front cover, which was designed by Lil and is Lil’s handwriting – and I know this because she edited some of my books and her handwriting is, well, Lil’s. Winner says “The novel is a wonder. Formally, literarily, spiritually, it’s just staggering.” She knows novels better than I know them, but I’d give a big amen to each of those adverbs and the predicate attribute.
Six nuns in the order of Saint Hildegard of Bingen, the Bings: Little Sister, who cooks; Sister Farm, who tends the barn and smells like it and the cigars she smokes; Sister Bird, who likes birds; Sister Anne, who becomes central to a light plot in the book, loves the Boston Red Sox and “hobbles after God”; Sister Patrick Gertrude; Mother Lourdes the Prioress, and the center of the story is Sister Athanasius, who finds her calling in what called her to do, which wasn’t all that glorious but it was the glory of her calling. Her memory of love in a previous life tells the story of more than one who inhabits a monastery.
Frankie, a Downs young man, tends to the beehives and loves ice cream. She dedicates the book in part to a Frankie.
The book is not driven by some hair-raising plot. It’s a slow steady plodding that matches the slow steady life of a monastery. It’s about characters. There’s lots of fun in that monastery, along with lots of routine.
So, for me and my house, we find the birds and baseball along with the themes of spirituality to be our daily living room conversations. Some of the books Sr Athanasius mentions were ones I sent to Lil years ago. Kris and I talked about this book daily for more than a month. I’ll read this novel again, and in so doing this novel will join fewer than 10 that I have read more than once. I don’t know about you, but some characters in novels don’t disappear into the past and I get to missing them and wondering what they’d say. I miss the sisters.
The novel is a series of letters from an outsider, Miriam, who has cancer, and Sr. Athanasius. Sister A. writes them all to Miriam, with some snippets from Miriam’s letters.
We found the sisters charming and lovable and very believable and quirky and irritating and therefore all the more realistic. The idealism of a monastery doesn’t really exist anywhere so this gets us into the inside with nuns struggling to love one another but committed to one another anyway.
Here’s some of my favorite lines:
“I am writing late at night, after prayer, which brought me such unrest in my earnest petitions that I thought a cup of tea and a short letter to you might be the other form of prayer that brings peace.”
On Sister Bird: “what a rich little trail of enthusiasms she is.”
On Miriam’s cancer: “A strange feeling, isn’t it, to see those around you who are so well? For the ill inhabit a different wisdom, a thinner, decidedly aware, place.”
On the apostle Paul: “who became the roaring voice of the early church.”
On the spiritual life: “Oh, this is my struggle of great proportion – to know the work that I am called to, and to know the spiritual life without a constant spiritual itch to test the nature of the spiritual life.”
“Knowing God in each moment simply raises that moment.”
On prayer: “And I know that prayer is also the way you bend toward God and others.”
“The shape of our lives matter most, not in the way we see them, but in how God sees them: their potential, their place.”
I leave off with this one: “When you get stuck and lose Jesus, you start cleaning. Work at the things you know. Jesus comes back. That’s what I do. You practice faith, until you have faith. We practice all our lives.”
I’ll do my best to wait a bit before I read it again, but not sure how long that wait will last. Not long, I suspect.
I committed to reading ten classic novels in 2021 I'd never read and polled twitter to decide which ones. I finished Things Fall Apart, Jane Eyre, North and South, Middlemarch, Beloved, Fahrenheit 451, and To the Lighthouse. (Middlemarch took FOREVER.) So 3 leftover for this year--and, oh dear, East of Eden is one of them.
Hi Scott, it’s always a delight to read the musings of a fellow avid reader. My COVID reading adventure featured six of Charles Dickens’ works, meandered through 1984 and Brave New World then focused on Alex Dumas’ five volume D’Artagnan romances. I started War and Peace last week. Boy, you talk about the challenge of following a number of subplots and a boatload of characters without taking notes Dickens, Tolstoy and (especially Dumas) will sure work the memory muscles!
I also just finished Phillip Jenkins’, The Jesus Wars. Wow. I’m going to read it again soon to nail down the characters and varieties of monophysite and Chalcedonian Christologies.
Thanks, too, for the list of Black theologians. I downloaded, African American Readings of Paul.
Life and Peace,
Jeff