James E Hartley

Apathy in the Face of Evil

Blood Meridian is a hard book to recommend to people. It is brilliant and unforgettable. It is violent and gruesome.

Those things are not separable.

It’s a post-Civil War tale of The Kid (never named) as he joins a marauding band of scalp hunters in the borderlands between Mexico and what will eventually become part of the United States. Led by John Glanton, this gang commits atrocities everywhere it goes while it hunts down assorted bands of Apaches and Comanches committing comparable atrocities wherever they go.

One lesson: if you are in charge of a small town in this country and you decide to hire Glanton to rid you of the threat of a murderous tribe threatening to rampage through your town, just know that the cure is as bad as the disease. But, that lesson doesn’t have a lot of relevance to you, Dear Reader.

Instead, let us turn to Judge Holden, who summarizes the fundamental message of the book thus:

If God meant to interfere in the degeneracy of mankind would he not have done so by now? Wolves cull themselves, man. What other creature could? And is the race of man not more predacious yet? The way of the world is to bloom and to flower and die but in the affairs of men there is no waning and the noon of his expression signals the onset of night. His spirit is exhausted at the peak of its achievement. His meridian is it once his darkening and the evening of his day. He loves games? Let him play for stakes.

Judge Holden celebrates the degeneracy of man. He is, after all, the devil.

Holden is without a doubt one of the most terrifying villains in literature. Larger than life, he rides with Glanton’s gang as they move from atrocity to atrocity. All the while, he offers a commentary on the world, recording every thing he finds in his leather notebook right before destroying those things.

Why keep this record of things he will destroy? “Whatever in creation exists without my knowledge exists without my consent….In order for it to be mine nothing must be permitted to occur upon it save by my dispensation.”

Toadvine sat with his boots crossed before the fire. No man can acquaint himself with everything on his earth, he said.
The judge tilted his great head. The man who believes that the secrets of the world are forever hidden lives in mystery and fear. Superstition will drag him down. The rain will erode the deeds of his life. But that man who sets himself the task of singling out the thread of order from the tapestry will by the decision alone have taken charge of the world and it is only by such taking charge that he will effect a way to dictate the terms of his own fate.
I don’t see what that has to do with catchin birds.
The freedom of birds is an insult to me. I’d have them all in zoos.
That would be a hell of a zoo.
The judge smiled. Yes, he said. Even so.

From the beginning until the end, the Judge hovers over the book, finding that thread of order by destroying everything around it. The Judge is the ruler of this world. Do you doubt it? Recall: Satan offered the world to Christ, but Christ turned down the offer.

You read Blood Meridian and you know you would never want to meet the Judge face-to-face. You close the book in a bit of relief that he is just fictional. Except he isn’t fictional at all. Blood Meridian is a work of fiction, but it is, as they say in Hollywood, based on a true story.

The source is Samuel E Chamberlain’s autobiography, My Confession. Chamberlain tells of joining a marauding gang of scalp hunters led by John Glanton. A surprising number of the horrific events in the novel are right there in this autobiographical tale. You want to think that McCarthy is making this all up, but the violence was very real.

The biggest shock of My Confessions is the second in command in Glanton’s crew is none other than Judge Holden. Chamberlain deftly sketches the nature of Holden in two paragraphs. The only way you could tell that the following two paragraphs are from the true autobiography and not the world of fiction is the difference in style. The description of Holden fits either one.

The second in command, now left in charge of the camp, was a man of gigantic size called “Judge” Holden of Texas. Who or what he was no one knew but a cooler blooded villain never went unhung; he stood six feet six in his moccasins, had a large fleshy frame, a dull tallow colored face destitute of hair and all expression. His desires was blood and women, and terrible stories were circulated in camp of horrid crimes committed by him when bearing another name, in the Cherokee nation and Texas; and before we left Fronteras a little girl of ten years was found in the chapperal, foully violated and murdered. The mark of a huge hand on her little throat pointed him out as the ravisher as no other man had such a hand, but though all suspected, no one charged with the crime.
Holden was by far the best educated man in northern Mexico; he conversed with all in their own language, spoke in several Indian lingos, at a fandango would take the Harp or Guitar from the hands of the musicians and charm all with his wonderful performance, and out-waltz any poblana of the ball. He was “plum centre” with rifle or revolver, a daring horseman, acquainted with the nature of all the strange plants and their botanical names, great in Geology and Mineralogy, in short another Admirable Crichton, and with all an arrant coward. Not but that he possessed enough courage to fight Indians and Mexicans or anywhere he had the advantage and strength, skill and weapons, but where the combat would be equal, he would avoid it if possible. I hated him at first sight, and he knew it, yet nothing could be more gentle and kind than his department towards me; he would often seek conversation with me and speak of Massachusetts and to my astonishment I found he knew more about Boston than I did.

So much for your sigh of relief that Holden is purely a work of fiction.

Holden is evil; there is really no other word for him. He has all the beguiling charm of evil; a perfect example of Milton’s Satan Problem in which the evil character in Paradise Lost is the most fascinating person in the tale of the revolt in Heaven and on earth. When Holden is on the scene, you cannot look away.

What do you do when you face evil? McCarthy’s brilliance as a novelist comes in the fact, that when you read the novel, you know exactly what you do, because McCarthy put you in the novel. You are The Kid.

You don’t think you are The Kid because you haven’t joined a gang of people committing one atrocity after another. After all, you haven’t scalped anyone lately. You just go along with the flow of things, not really doing anything particularly bad. Exactly like The Kid.

A fortune teller with a pack of Tarot Cards entertains Glanton’s Gang one night in the desert. The Judge points the fortune teller in the direction of The Kid, who draws a card. Four of Cups. The novel does not explain the significance of this card, but fortunately we have Google. Four of Cups is the card indicating apathy or disillusionment. You don’t really notice it that much when just reading this story of horrors, but as soon as you step back and isolate the Kid, you realize that Apathy is indeed the right description. Here we have someone surrounded by sadistic evildoers and The Kid just floats along.

The Kid knows what is happening is evil and wrong. He is himself the violent type, but we see throughout the story he has the remnants of a moral code which keep him from going that far, as if he is thinking that as long as he hasn’t actually scalped anyone lately, he isn’t that bad. As the Judge himself says to The Kid, “There’s a flawed place in the fabric of your heart. Do you think I could not know? You alone were mutinous. You alone reserved in your soul some corner of clemency for the heathen.”

In the face of evil, The Kid was apathetic. The Judge again: “For even if you should have stood your ground, he said, yet what ground was it?”

If I had to name one novel from the last 50 years that is the best description of the age in which we live, Blood Meridian is it. Our problem, the problem of our generation, is that we are perfectly happy to isolate wrongdoing in an individual here and there and sometimes we are even willing to say this or that person is evil. But, we do not want to face up to the fact that the degeneracy of man is all around us. We do not like to acknowledge that human depravity is very real and omnipresent. We have no ground on which to stand. And so, we roll with the times, and every now and then we do something that seems a bit kind, like abandoning a wounded man in the desert rather than shooting him, as a way of convincing ourselves we aren’t that bad.

What if Blood Meridian is right. What if the world in which we live is every bit this bad. What if Judge Holden is real and walks among us. Those aren’t really even questions; you know those things are true. And you, like me and so very many others, draws the Four of Cups and just keep on going.

Is L’affaire GameStop a Morality Play?

Where were you when you heard the news about GameStop?

When it showed up in your Twitter feed, you were probably shocked. Senator Cruz agreed with Representative Ocasio-Cortez, with both saying that what Robinhood did was unacceptable. Clearly, it must be really bad.

Then Senator Hawley joined the fray in an article over at First Things titled “Calling Wall Street’s Bluff.” The narrative quickly became that of a good, old-fashioned morality play, in which the “Elites” are attacked by a ragtag bunch of “Ordinary People” and the ordinary people win, raiding the castle and carrying off some ill-gotten loot. The Elites are unhappy. Fortunately, our elected representatives are here to stick up for the regular folks. Congress is scheduling hearings. Janet Yellen is launching her own investigation.

Truth be told, as the whole story was unfolding, I laughed. It was so fun and crazy—a real-life video game revolution. The names themselves are priceless: Reddit and Robinhood and WallStreetBets vs. Melvin Capital and Wall Street. Coming soon to Netflix. (That is not a joke: Netflix really is planning a show. So is MGM.)

Alas, sober reality is not nearly as exciting as all of the foregoing makes it sound. Not everything in life is a morality play. Sometimes it is just a bunch of technical details that really don’t lend themselves to a story with good guys and bad guys. Sometimes there are good guys and bad guys on both sides. So, before rushing off to change policy and enshrine the ordinary people as heroes for beating the dastardly elites, let’s pause and look at the details.

Read the rest at Public Discourse

What Has Reason to do with Faith?

“From Faith to Reason” was the title of my first year collegiate Comparative Literature course. We started with Dante’s Inferno and ended with Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

The message was clear; Western civilization used to be based on Faith, but then came the Enlightenment and now Faith is Dead, Long Live Reason.

Fortunately, the teacher for the course was obviously bored and lousy, so I didn’t really absorb the lesson.

Over the years I have seen that story line repeated innumerable times. You can imagine my surprise when I started actually reading the Great Books and the history of the West to find out that it is an absolute canard that the West moved from Faith to Reason at any point in its past. Western Thought has always been a blend of faith and reason, a melding of Athens and Jerusalem.

Samuel Gregg’s Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization is the latest attempt to beat back the myth that faith is no longer important. This is an argument that oddly needs to be repeated time and again; Gregg provides some clues as to why the point needs repeating.

The starting place for Gregg’s argument is that contrary to the popular story, the Enlightenment was not devoid of religion. My favorite example is Newton’s Principia, which easily wins if you had to pick the single most paradigmatic Enlightenment work. Newton invents calculus to demonstrate that a clean mathematical model of a heliocentric solar system shows that the same force causes celestial motions and apples falling to the ground. Before Newton, there is some doubt about how best to describe planetary motion; post-Newton, the debate is over. Newton closes his book with a long explanation of how all this demonstrates the amazing nature of God.

But Newton is not the only incredibly devout member in the pantheon of the Enlightenment. Many, probably most, of your own list of Enlightenment greats were quite religious. (Not Hume and Voltaire, obviously.) Gregg documents the breadth of the interactions of faith and reason throughout Europe. The Enlightenment’s ties to religious thought runs deep; it was religion, after all, that provided the argument that the world was sensible and follows predictable patterns because it was created by God. Without the idea of a reasonable God behind the whole thing, there is no reason to think the world itself is reasonable.

While the Enlightenment itself was a manifestation of the interaction of reason and faith, Gregg argues there were two outgrowths of the Enlightenment that proved to be hostile to faith. Prometheanism and Scientism both have their roots in the Enlightenment, but did not fully develop until the 19^th century.

Prometheanism is Gregg’s term for the view that humans can be created anew simply by changing the external structures which surround them. There is no innate human nature, no stamp of original sin. Fix the society and people will thrive. All the pathologies we see about us are purely the result of societal structures corrupting people from the moment of birth. In a Promethean world, faith is the enemy; it is a legacy of all those old structures which cause modern societal ills. Reason is the hero; if we just reason out the good society and have the will and power to impose it, then people will conform.

The second misbegotten manifestation of the Enlightenment is Scientism, the belief that the scientific method can discover all that can be known. Physics and metaphysics are divorced and only the former contains actual knowledge. Metaphysics is mere fantasy. The ultimate expression of scientism is the oft-repeated phrase, meant to be a conversation stopper, “Scientists say X” or “My opponent is a science denier.” Science attains the status of Holy Writ and so there is no need for any other source of authority, no need for faith.

The particular creeds generated by the combinations of Prometheanism and Scientism are obvious. Marx’s materialism with its inevitable historical laws eventually resulting in the perfect society as the material conditions are altered. Nietzsche’s observation that there is no longer such a thing as Truth with a capital T; that if all is relative, then the Will to Power is all there is.

The current manifestations are also obvious. Authoritarian Relativism with its claim that since everything is relative, and there is no Truth, there is no reason for the Enlighted Few to refrain from imposing their views on society. Liberal religion with its endless appeals to mere sentiment. Jihadism, with it assertion of truth immune to reason entirely. As Gregg’s title says, the Struggle for Western Civilization is the fight between those who believe in Reason and Faith and those in all these other movements which seek to destroy that union.

Gregg’s book is thus a call to arms, which makes a couple of features of the book so jarring. The chapter pointing to the problems arising from Marx and Nietzsche is entitled “Faiths of Destruction.” But, there is a third malevolent figure discussed in this chapters: John Stuart Mill. Marx, Mill and Nietzsche; you would be forgiven for thinking one of these three is not like the others.

From the first chapter to the last, Gregg asserts that freedom and liberty are the most important innovations in the West. You would naturally enough think that Mill is one of the heroes of the story. Instead, Gregg notes that Mill had no love for faith, that in Mill’s ideal world there is an inherent relativism. Mill’s ideal society did not privilege any particular view. As Gregg explains:

The notion that people might have good reasons to believe that a religions revealed truths (dogmas) might be true or that religious institutions like Oxford and Cambridge had a responsibility to explain their religious beliefs to their students was plainly foreign to Mill. Nor did he seem conscious that his own insistence that such things have no place in any institution of learning sounds itself rather dogmatic.

This is, as I said, terribly jarring. Is Gregg arguing that Oxford and Cambridge have a responsibility to teach religious truth as fact? Does Gregg reject the idea of the university being the marketplace of ideas? After all, one of the things he decries is higher education imposing its authoritarian relativism on the community.

Then a chapter later when Gregg turns to Jihadism and the discussion of Islamic terrorists who murder in the name of their faith, he begins the discussion by noting that Muslim terrorists are not the first people who rejected reason in favor of a blind fideism. The earlier example of this type of evil threat to Western Civilization? The Protestant Reformation. Martin Luther, you know, made some snide remarks about the Roman Catholic Church’s reliance on Aristotle for working out theology. Is Gregg really suggesting a link between Martin Luther and Osama bin Laden?

Gregg really tips his hand in the penultimate chapter “A Way Back.” The way back from the cliff over which Western Civilization is heading is Vatican I, in particular the decree Dei Filius. Now Gregg is obviously free to argue that the “faith” in Reason, Faith, and the Struggle for Western Civilization is, at its heart, the Roman Catholic Church. But, it does seem odd that if the struggle is as fierce as Gregg believes it to be, that Gregg does not do a bit more to make Protestants feel welcome on his side.

After all, his best example of the prominence of faith in the Enlightenment itself was the role of the Scottish clergy in the Scottish Enlightenment. Clearly Protestants have played a huge role in the integration of reason and faith. Indeed, there is a pretty direct line from Martin Luther’s emphasis of the priesthood of all believers to Enlightenment ideas that the people should be able to elect their rulers. Since Gregg clearly applauds the latter, it is staggering that Luther is lumped in with modern terrorists.

Even still, Gregg’s book is an important addition to the literature defending the notion of Western Civilization against its very obvious enemies. Gregg’s constant return to the idea of God as logos, God as the source and embodiment of reason, makes it hard to evade his argument that reason and faith have been co-mingled for two thousand years in the West. The attempts to rip religious influences out of the West are nothing short of an attempt to destroy the West itself.

One final note on the book. I read the book with a student reading group. There was a remarkable split in the way the students reacted to the book. The history and classics majors thought the book was a quick read. The students with other majors thought the book was incredibly dense and hard to read. I didn’t notice it when I was reading it—I too thought it was a quick read—but hearing the students who found it dense talk about it, it was immediately obvious why. Gregg assumes the Reader has a high degree of familiarity with the important names and events in the history of the West. It would be nice if Gregg’s assumptions about what is common knowledge were correct. But sadly, Gregg’s thesis that the struggle for Western Civilization is being lost is made remarkably obvious by the fact that some very smart, very curious students who are happy to think and argue about important ideas, the exact type of people Gregg would love to reach and that anyone would want to hire, have been miserably failed by the modern education system.

Capturing Castles with Jane and Charlotte

Apparently, I just joined a cult.

“Once you read it, you fall in love with it, and from then on you’re part of a secret club, self-selecting and wildly enthusiastic.” That is what Constance Grady said in Vox.

At least my new cult has some distinguished members! J.K Rowling: “This book has one of the most charismatic narrators I’ve ever met.” Erica Jong: “A delicious, compulsively readable novel.”

The novel is I Capture the Castle, by Dodie Smith. It was recommended to me by one of my former students, who did not warn me she was luring me into a cult. (Tsk, tsk, Mallory.) You, Dear Reader, are hereby warned. Read at our own peril. (If you have already read the novel, then we can go off together and dye our clothes green while listening to Debussy or something like that.)

My glance round the internet reveals an unusual consensus. This is Smith’s best novel, but it is not even remotely her most well-known. She also wrote 101 Dalmatians, which thanks to a certain media conglomerate gets all the attention. Then again, I would guess that many people (like me) know the movie well, but never once wondered if there was a book back there somewhere behind the story of Pongo and Perdy.

There is a dog in I Capture the Castle, but that is totally irrelevant to the story. This is a story about people. At the outset of the story, we find the Mortmains living in a thoroughly decrepit English castle. They are supposed to be paying rent to live there, but fortunately their landlord never bothers to care that no rent is paid. The father is a famous novelist, whole sole novel is a sort of proto-Ulysses, an incomprehensible modernist tome beloved by people who like to pretend that they like that sort of thing. He wrote it a long time ago and never managed a second book. His second wife is a model. His two daughters and one son complete the family. And there is the nice, rather handsome lad who helps out with the chores. The book is the diary of the middle child, Cassandra.

Soon after the novel starts, the owner of the castle meets an untimely end and the new owners show up. They are…surprise, surprise…two young, wealthy, and quite eligible bachelors. Fill in the plot.

The key to the whole book shows up in the second diary entry. Cassandra is talking with her older sister, Rose, one evening.

“How I wish I lived in a Jane Austen novel.” [said Rose]
I said I’d rather be in a Charlotte Bronte.
“Which would be nicest—Jane with a touch of Charlotte, or Charlotte with a touch of Jane?”
This is the kind of discussion I like very much but I wanted to get on with my journal, so I just said: “Fifty percent each way would be perfect,” and started to write determinedly.

If you read that passage and you thought, “I simply must read this book,” you will soon join us in the cult. If you read that passage and thought, What utterly maudlin rubbish,” well…

(By the way, the correct answer to Rose’s thought experiment is “Jane with zero Charlotte,” and while I would love to have that discussion with you right now, I must get on with this blog post.)

The book has charm, no doubt. But, there is also a tremendously interesting reflection on the love of Jane and Charlotte. The castle in the title is the decaying remnant of yesteryear in which Cassandra lives in the mid-20^th century. Looking around her home, the only sign that it is the 20^th century is that it would take a long time for a castle to reach this state of disrepair.

Living like that, you might assume that Cassandra would like to join the 20^th century, with one of those fancy new houses with things like indoor plumbing and electricity. Instead, Jane and Charlotte are her lodestars. Cassandra’s diary reads like something an Austen heroine would write. Two wealthy eligible bachelors show up. Cassandra is right there with you in writing the rest of the story. The title gives away the end of the story, but honestly was any other end possible? The castle is life in a Jane Austen novel. Cassandra captures the castle.

There really should be a name for the category of books that create worlds in which the readers desperately want to live. Austen, Bronte, and, of course, Rowling. Any others? I have never heard anyone sigh wistfully at how nice it would be to live in the worlds of Homer or Dickens or Dostoevsky or Faulkner.

The biggest wonder of I Capture the Castle is that I only recently learned of its existence. I cannot imagine that anyone who loves Austen or Bronte would fail to enjoy this book.

C. S. Lewis and the Reading Life

“If only one had time to read a little more: we either get shallow & broad or narrow and deep.”

“A good shoe is a shoe you don’t notice. Good reading becomes possible when you need not consciously think about eyes, or light, or print, or spelling.”

C.S. Lewis

The hobby of reading has a curious feature. All hobbies have books written to explain how to more fully enjoy the hobby. But reading is the only hobby where the act of reading about the hobby is the same as the hobby itself. Hence books about reading are quite common. Indeed, as you read more and more, it is hard to avoid reading books by enthusiasts for your hobby.

C.S. Lewis has become an Institution. In many Christian circles, he is the theologian for people who don’t really want to read theology. He is a genial writer, making deeply substantive points in a winsome manner. You can read Lewis quickly for the joy of his prose and the flashes of insight littering the book. You can read Lewis slowly, taking apart his arguments in detail and trying to fill in the gaps. He has fiction and non-fiction, both dense and light, but always written in a prose which just carries the reader along. People find Lewis in all sorts of ways—through Narnia or science fiction or Screwtape or grief or The Abolition of Man. Once you find him, you notice you find him everywhere.

Couple the last two paragraphs together and you have an obvious book, indeed one it is a wonder is only being published now. As I mentioned in a recent newsletter, C. S. Lewis’ The Reading Life is a collection of excerpts about reading which are scattered among Lewis’ voluminous output. If you like Lewis and if you enjoy reading, you have already clicked the link above to buy the book. It is an irresistible title.

But, is the book any good? (Is it heretical to even ask if a book of Lewis’ writings is good? In some circles, yes.) It is, as you might expect if you are not in the Church of Lewis, a mixed bag. There are some really great essays in here and some fun short excerpts. But there is not enough to fill a whole book. It isn’t hard to see why. Lewis actually has a whole book on reading which explains his ideas at length. An Experiment in Criticism is rather good; I’ve used it in reading groups as a way to kick off the discussions. But, given that Lewis published his fully developed thoughts on reading in a book of their own, is there enough left over in the rest of Lewis’ corpus for a full anthology?

The present anthology kicks off with a couple of excerpts from An Experiment in Criticism, which would be hard to avoid. Then we move to a bunch of hits and pieces from elsewhere, some gems, some obvious filler. Lots of blank space and pages with the super large fancy italicized font of an excerpt from the excerpt you are reading. The real market for this book is when you need a gift for a friend who likes reading. The format and contents of this book scream “Present for the Reader in Your Life.” Not a bad gift, by the way.

What about the content? Lewis makes a distinction between True Readers and people who happen to read. “How to Know if You are a True Reader” is the title of the second selection. It is a four part test:

1. Loves to re-read books
2. Highly values reading as an activity (versus as a last resort)
3. Lists the reading of particular books as a life-changing experience
4. Continuously reflects and recalls what one has read

If you hit on all four, congratulations, you are a True Reader (but you already knew that). If not, well, it’s not too late to join our cult.

And yes, the Cult of Readers is a real thing. As Lewis notes:

Those of us who have been true readers all our life seldom fully realize the enormous extension of our being which we owe to authors. We realize it best when we talk with an unliterary friend. He may be full of goodness and good sense but he inhabits a tiny world. In it, we should be suffocated.

It is often difficult to explain the pleasure of reading to those not as enamored with it. For many, maybe even most, people, reading is a chore. It is something you do to learn something. This is even true of reading fiction; many people read fiction as if they are accomplishing the chore of learning the plot. I suspect this is why many book clubs fail; if reading is a chore and you are reading a book purely for the task of going to your book club, there is something lacking in the experience. Sure, getting together with your friends is fun, but if reading the book was a chore for everyone involved, it is no wonder the conversation feels stilted.

For Lewis’ True Reader, the act of reading is not a chore you do in order to accomplish another end. One reads because in doing so, one is catapulted into a pleasure that is literally unattainable in any other way. Perhaps it is best explained by noting that the way to attain the pleasure of reading is to realize that reading is not a serious hobby. It is a light-hearted and fun hobby.

For a great deal (not all) of our literature was made to be read lightly, for entertainment. If we do not read it, in a sense, ‘for fun’ and with our feet on the fender, we are not using it as it was meant to be used, and all our criticism of it will be pure illusion. For you cannot judge any artifact except by using it as it was intended. It is no good judging a butter-knife by seeing whether it will saw logs. Much bad criticism, indeed, results from the efforts of critics to get a work-time result out of something that never aimed at producing more than pleasure.

This is not just true of schlocky genre fiction, by the way. Dickens also should be read with your feet on the fender. So should Plato. For those for whom reading is a hobby, the whole point of reading Thucydides or Chekhov is simply that it is fun to go along for the ride. Imagine starting Ivanhoe or Middlemarch in exactly the same relaxed mode you had when you picked up Good Omens or Harry Potter. If you can do that, you are a True Reader.

Books are not death marches. “It is a very silly idea that in reading a book you must never ‘skip.’ All sensible people skip freely then they come to a chapter which they find is going to be no use to them.” I acutely suffer from this failing, by the way. I have pushed my way through far too many books I knew I should have abandoned. I blame Moby Dick. I forced myself through an endless amount of whaling trivia, wondering why I was reading all this, only to find that it all came to a magnificent end in which all that lore was suddenly necessary to appreciate the epic clash at the end of the book. Ever since then, I have pushed through many a book, thinking, “Maybe this is like Moby Dick.” Decades later, I have no other examples of when not skipping was worth it.

If you want to cultivate the hobby of reading, how do you do it? It’s remarkably simple. Find a book you really want to read, put up your feet, and start reading. The trick is not to wonder if you have picked the right book. If you enjoy it, it is the right book.

After a certain kind of sherry party, where there have been cataracts of culture but never one word or one glance that suggested a real enjoyment of any art, any person, or any natural object, my heart warms to the schoolboy on the bus who is reading Fantasy and Science Fiction, rapt and oblivious of all the world beside. For here also I should feel that I had met something real and live and unfabricated; genuine literary experience, spontaneous and compulsive, disinterested. I should have hopes of that boy. Those who have greatly cared for any book whatever may possibly come to care, some day, for good books. The organs of appreciation exist in them. They are not impotent. And even if this particular boy is never going to like anything severer than science-fiction, even so,
The child whose love is here, at least death reap
One precious gain, that he forgets himself.

When you forget yourself in a book, you know the feeling. Then start another book and forget yourself again. When you do this, you’ll notice something else wonderful; there are other bookish people around you. “When one has read a book, I think there is nothing so nice as discussing it with some one else—even though it sometimes produces rather fierce arguments.”

Why do I have a blog? Why do I send out a newsletter? There is nothing so nice as discussing books with someone else.

Fortunately, the Milk

There are these days, and to be honest it has always been thus, people who are firmly convinced that the world is becoming a worse place. There are people who believe that the children born in the years to come are being born into an impoverished world, that it would have been better to have been born in the past.

Those people have not read Fortunately, the Milk by Neil Gaiman. The book, published in 2013, came into this world long past the date at which I could have read it to my children. This is sad. Very sad. I would have liked to have read this book to my children. They would have liked to have had me read to them. But, they were born too soon. Children in the future have it better.

It is a simple tale. Mom leaves town, and when the kids wake up, there is no milk in the house, so Dad goes to get the milk, and he doesn’t come back for a rather long time (long time in kid terms—in adult terms, maybe an hour). When he returns, the bored children ask what took him so long. So, Dad explains…and that is the story.

You see, Dad went right to the store to get the milk, and on his way back he was abducted by aliens, from whom he escaped only to be captured by pirates, from whom he also escaped when he was rescued by a stegosaurus named Steg in a hot-air balloon and they end up…well, the story has a volcano god, piranhas, wumpires and more. It is a rollicking tale, full of dastardly villains and heroic heroes and danger and escape and lots and lots and lots of oddities. Do not be anxious. Fortunately, the Milk is not lost. (Should I have included a spoiler alert for the fact that Fortunately, the Milk was not lost?)

This is a story you want to read aloud and make up fantastic voices for all the characters and raise and lower the volume of your voice as danger looms and subsides. This is the story in which you want gasp aloud when horror strikes and then look utterly relieved when horror is avoided. If you read it with enough gusto, you would have a marvelous time. It is a book, in other words, made for Dads who like to read books aloud and engage in over-the-top dramatic amateur theatrics.

It is a fun book. Sadly, my children were too old…

As if that wasn’t enough to make you want to read this book to your kids, Dear Reader, there is more. After you read this book, you get to have some really fascinating philosophical discussion with the Listeners.

First, you can wrestle with the Time Travel parts. (Of course there is Time Travel! How could a book like this Not have Time Travel?) As the Steg explains to the wumpires, “We are on an important mission I am trying to get back to the present. My assistant [aka Dad] is trying to get home to the future for breakfast.” Does the sentence “I am trying to get back to the present” makes logical sense? If you have never had a discussion about the nature of time with an 8 year old, then this book gives you the wonderful opportunity for a marvelous conversation.

There is in addition a time loop. (Of course there is a Time Loop. How could there Not be a Time Loop?) Future Dad helps Present Dad (who is currently in the past) out of a really bad situation. You see, Present Dad lost the Milk (insert sounds of horror), but Future Dad was able to go back in time to grab the milk that Present Dad lost and return it to him, which means there can now be two milks, both Present milk and Future milk. As if that is not enough looping goodness, after discovering that milk from one time can be brought into another time, Even-Farther-in-the-Future Dad reaches back in time to get the milk from what is then Past Dad and voila, there are now two of the same milks existing at the same time! (Don’t worry, Future Dad sends the past milk back into the past before the universe is destroyed.) Now ask that 8 year old Listener to explain how all this works.

Once you are done with all this marvelous discussion of Time, you can move on to discussing necessary and sufficient conditions. (Insert sounds of Great Joy!) After Dad has finished his tale explaining why it took him so long to get home, the kids express skepticism. For some strange reason they do not believe that all of these things happened to Dad as he was trying to come home with the Milk. Dad is not disturbed at all by their doubts, because he can prove his story is true. “How?” ask the kids. Dad reaches into his pocket and produces the Milk.

Does this prove Dad’s story is true? After all, if the story was true then Dad would have the milk in his pocket when he came through the door. If he didn’t have the milk, the story would be false. But, he has the milk. So, that is proof, right? Now spend a good long time insisting that the existence of the milk proves the story is true while the young listeners work out the difference between a necessary condition (if the story is true, then there necessarily must be must be milk in Dad’s pocket) and a sufficient condition (if there is milk in Dad’s pocket, then that is sufficient to establish that the story must be true).

Want more philosophical discussions? There is a fascinating rumination on nomenclature. Steg refers to objects in what seems like an unconventional manner. Steg’s “hard-hairy-wet-white-crunchers” are what Dad calls “coconuts.” Steg rides in his “Floaty-Ball-Person-Carrier” powered by “special shiny-bluey-stones.” The fact that Dad has different names raises an interesting question: who gets to name things? Steg was around long before Dad, after all. Doesn’t Steg have the right to name things? (Who, by the way, got to name the Listener to whom you are reading the story?)

There are also fascinating culinary matters: why exactly can you not put orange juice on your breakfast cereal?

This is a story which can be read again and again, and after each reading, yet more marvelous discussions will ensue. To help you in your rereading pleasure, the book also has a curious publication decision. The book was published in Britain and America by different publishers. The book is filled with illustrations, which help the story roll along in its marvelously inventive way. But, the illustrations are not the same in the British and American versions. Indeed, not even the illustrator is the same. Skottie Young did the American version; Chris Riddell did the British version. The illustrations are not even remotely the same; completely different style. So, after reading one version multiple times, you can get the other version and start a whole new debate on which set of illustrations is better and how the story is affected by the new set of illustrations. (Plus, with new illustrations, you can invent new voices!).

Sometimes, books are pure fun. This is one of those books.