Monthly Reading Review: November 2024

Recommended books and articles from the past month.

Dec 03, 2024

“Study of a Girl Reading” by Valentine Cameron Prinsep

Dear friends,

I am delighted to share my next Monthly Reading Review, covering the best books and articles I’ve read over the past month. Scroll down to read my reviews of Gilead by Marilynne Robinson and How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen by David Brooks — plus some must-read articles from writers I love!

Gilead by Marilynne Robinson

Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead follows a love letter written by the Reverend John Ames in 1956 to his seven-year-old son. Physically failing and aware that he does not have much time left, Ames resolves to tell his son the “things I would have told you if you had grown up with me, things I believe it becomes me as a father to teach you.” He begins by telling him about his grandfather, a humble Iowa preacher and pacifist – himself the son of an abolitionist and a former chaplain in the Union Army. In telling his family’s story, Ames recounts a narrative of sorrow and struggle — a history of “droughts and the influenza and the Depression and three terrible wars” — while drawing out the tensions between injustice and inaction, violence and peace, and faith and proof — tensions that so often become manifest in the relationships that sons have with their fathers and fathers have with their sons.

Constrained by his waning time on earth, Ames dares to be vulnerable with his son. There is profound courage, he tells him, in smallness — in the quiet, “unadorned” places like his hometown of Gilead, which the world so often overlooks. Yet above all, it is love that both demands and enables us to be brave, arming us with a sort of “prevenient courage” that surpasses all understanding. To love and be loved is our simple earthly mission, and yet we remain distracted by our pride and fear, convinced that the love we give will somehow harm or weaken us. A stranger to his own father, Ames charts a new path for his son, using words that are sure to make you cry as you feel the depth of Ames’s love for his son, down to the marrow of his bones. Redefining what it means to be brave, he tells his son that “you have been God’s grace to me, a miracle, something more than a miracle” — a reenactment of something holy and “godlike,” which happens only if we have the courage to see it.

This summer, The New York Times ranked Gilead number 10 in its list of The 100 Best Books of the 21^st Century, and with good reason. Like the town for which it is named, it appears quiet and assuming though it harbors a masterpiece, where the entire world seems able to come into fuller view.

Book club questions:

Gilead explores the tensions between an ardent abolitionist, John Ames's grandfather, and his father, an ardent pacifist. “And that's just what kills my heart, Reverend. That the Lord never came to you. That the seraphim never touched a coal to your lips,” his grandfather says to his father at one point. How do you resolve this tension between activism and pacificism? How do you think the book resolves it, if at all?
At one point, John Ames says, “I cannot believe we will forget our sorrows altogether. That would mean forgetting that we had lived, humanly speaking. Sorrow seems to me to be a great part of the substance of human life.” Do you think this is true?
John Ames references the following: “Here is a sentence Boughton and I got a laugh out of: ‘One might ask how many Christians can define Christianity.’ In twenty-five volumes or less, I said.” How do you think John Ames comes to define Christianity? How do you define it? Did your reading of this book shape your view?

How to Know a Person: The Art of Seeing Others Deeply and Being Deeply Seen by David Brooks

From the very first pages of his bestselling book, How to Know a Person, David Brooks addresses what he calls Americans’ emotional and spiritual “crisis.” According to one survey, the share of Americans who put themselves in the lowest happiness category increased by more than 50 percent between 1990 and 2018, all while rates of anxiety, depression, and addiction have continued to skyrocket. American political culture provides what Brooks calls a “comprehensible moral landscape,” by which we are able to predictably distinguish right from wrong, dividing people into groups without knowing much about them. Yet just as it is “a great fallacy to think culture is nothing,” Brooks writes, so too is it a great fallacy “to think culture is everything.”

The solutions to this state of brokenness are as numbered and layered as the problems themselves, though Brooks offers us a promising place to start. “There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society” — that is, “the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen,” he writes. He starts with helping us deconstruct the stories we tell, both about others and ourselves. Many of us feel as though we are suspended in a never-ending high school, where we will be judged or excluded if we show the world who we really are. Yet human connection hinges on being the truest versions of ourselves.

Of course, true connection goes far beyond being authentic to ourselves. As Brooks tells us, it requires a “posture of respect and reverence” — an “awareness of the infinite dignity of each person you meet” — as well as an “other-centeredness,” which relocates the focus from our egos to something greater and more transcendent. Perhaps the most important ingredient is the art of paying attention — what Brooks quotes as “the purest form of love.”

Must-Read Articles

What I Wish Somebody Had Told Me About Motherhood by Daniela Lamas (The New York Times)
Abandon the Empty Nest. Instead Try the Open Door by
Gretchen Rubin
(The Atlantic)
The Brothers Grimm Were Dark for a Reason by Jennifer Wilson (The New Yorker)
Why I Send My Kids on ‘Sibling Dates’ by
Maggie Smith
(Self)
Why Wicked’s Politics Feel So Bizarrely Timely by Constance Grady (Vox)
Mary Bennett is the Bennett Sister We Need by Paula Byrne (The New York Times)