best books I read in 2008

*I've affixed asterisks to the best titles.*

Mysteries: These were good but not great. I'm still looking for a great new mystery author, and have high hopes for Donald Westlake.
Elizabeth Ironside: Death in the Garden and The Accomplice
Barbara Vine: Anna's Book
Ian Rankin: Knots and Crosses

Sea books: Patrick O'Brian is the best, followed by CS Forester. Ramage will suffice if you need a fix of salt air and a couple of broadsides.
Dudley Pope: Ramage series
Nordhoff and Hall: Mutiny on the Bounty

Classics:
CS Lewis: Till We Have Faces, The Screwtape Letters*
Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda and sequel

Best-kept secret:
Louis Hemon: Maria Chapdelaine*

Baseball:
Rind Lardner: You Know Me Al*

Politics:
Mark Steyn: America Alone*

Parenting:
Neufeld and Mata: Hold On To Your Kids: Why Parents Need to Matter More than Peers*
Robert Karen: Becoming Attached*

currently reading

I finished Maria Chapdelaine. More on that later, maybe. Highly recommended.

I'm reading Unconditional Parenting by Alfie Kohn (recommended, especially the chapter on time-outs) as well as the penultimate Ramage book. Will the author be tempted to kill off a significant character? A big difference between this series and the infinitely better PO'B series is the immunity from real harm possessed by the main characters. No one was safe in the Hornblower books, either. Ramage is just a way for a nautical fiction addict to keep from going into withdrawal.

maria chapdelaine

by Louis Hemon



I'm in the middle of this beautiful little book, set in sparsely populated Quebec, land of Catholic pioneers, loggers, trappers, farmers, and long, long winters. Hemon visited this remote country, living and working with its people, and wrote the book in 1913.

Here are a couple of passages:

"Young Telesphore's depravities supplied this household with its only domestic tragedy. To satisfy her own mind and give him a proper conviction of besetting sin his mother had fashioned for herself a most involved kind of polytheism, had peopled the world with evil spirits and good who influenced him alternately to err or repent. The boy had come to regard himself as a mere battleground where devils who were very sly, and angels of excellent purpose but little experience, waged endless unequal warfare." (p. 28)

"Edwige Legare had worked for the Chapdelaines these eleven summers. That is to say, for wages of twenty dollars a month he was in harness each day from four in the morning till nine at night at any and every job that called for doing, bringing to it a sort of frenzied and inexhaustible enthusiasm; for he was one of those men incapable by his nature of working save at a full pitch of strength and energy, in a series of berserk rages. Short and broad, his eyes were the brightest blue--a thing rare in Quebec--at once piercing and guileless, set in a visage the colour of clay that always showed cruel traces of the razor, topped by hair of nearly the same shade. " (p. 46-47)

The depictions of the brutally cold climate and the courage and back-breaking physical labor necessary to survive in it are compelling. But the simplicity of the Chapdelaines and their friends, their relationships, and their faith in God, are what gives this book its beauty. Their acceptance of their way of life ennobles them.

some catholic authors

Myles Connolly: Mr. Blue

Rumer Godden: In This House of Brede

Graham Greene: The Power and the Glory, Our Man in Havana, many others

Louis Hemon: Maria Chapdelaine

Bruce Marshall: The World, the Flesh, and Father Smith

Edwin O'Connor: The Edge of Sadness

Flannery O'Connor: various titles

Walker Percy: various titles

Sigrid Undset: Kristin Lavransdatter trilogy, Master of Hestviken series

Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited, The Sword of Honour Trilogy