Peter Kavanagh. - book review

Peter Kavanagh is senior producer with the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation's radio current-affairs programs "This
Morning" and "The Sunday Edition."

The temper of our times often makes our reading choices for us. A wall of new books, and the eye and mind are drawn in directions both obvious and mysterious. It's the mysterious choices that speak loudly of who we are and what we need. In North America this fall, reading has become a refuge, a solace, a form of mental and spiritual defense, as well as a pleasure.

Rudy Wiebe is a Canadian Mennonite whose first novel nearly forty years ago dealt with the question of pacifism in the face of an implacable enemy. Set in World War II, Peace Shall Destroy Many has just been republished (Knopf Vintage Canada, $18.95 Can.). Weibe's latest and fifteenth novel, Sweeter Than All the World (Knopf Canada, $34.95 Can., 436 pp.), returns to the same themes: how to respond to evil, why evil happens, what choices good people have. The novel tells the story of Adam Wiebe, a modern man faced with a life rich in material goods and desperately short on moral ones. He embarks on a journey to find the means to be good. He travels the world seeking out the stories of his ancestors as they moved throughout Europe looking for a safe place to be "defenseless Christians." The novel, a coming-of-age story of a man wrestling with a long midlife crisis, is steeped in Mennonite lore and history.

During a dark and gloomy autumn, J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and precursor novel, The Hobbit (Houghton Mifflin, boxed set, $45, 1,800 pp.) could be renamed Hobbit for Our Time. These perennial favorites are dominating the bookstores in advance of the release of the big-screen adaptation. This classic meditation on the forces of darkness and the struggle to contain them makes the heart glad and the nerves tingle. Because it is so rich in learned lore, the series has always been susceptible to layered reading. It has been interpreted as a commentary on Nazism and World War II, a treatise on environmental degradation, and an extended reflection on modernity. Today it can be read as a classic assessment of a fateful struggle between good and evil. Or it can be simply enjoyed as a rollicking good read.

Must difficult times make us harder, more resentful, and afraid? Or might it be possible to learn to be softer, more open, more compassionate? Those are the questions posed by Buddhist nun Pema Chodron in The Places That Scare You: A Guide to Fearlessness in Difficult Times (Shambhala, $21.95, 144 pp.). Born in the United States, Chodron resides at Gampo Abbey in Cape Breton, Canada. Hers is a quiet guide to steeling the spirit while seeking the calm. Her meditative prose quietly argues that, demanding as the emotions can be, they do not shape us inevitably. We can decide how to live.

It's the hundredth anniversary of the serialized publication of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles (Signet, $4.95, 256 pp.). Sherlock Holmes's dedication to reason, above all else, entrances the mind and strengthens the spirit. A menacing atmosphere, one of Doyle's most excellently drawn, is oddly enough an antidote to today's climate of vague and precise terrors. The moor evolves from geological hazard into a metaphor for dark thoughts and evil deeds. Doyle, the reluctant master of the detective story, demonstrates here the power of the genre. The comfort quotient is entirely derived from familiar tropes and the inevitable rebalancing of the social order.

Billy Collins's Sailing Alone Around the Room: New and Selected Poetry (Random House, $21.95, 172 pp.) is the newest collection by the new American Poet Laureate. The range of interest, the play of language, and the laughter, quiet the mind. Collins, often criticized for his "accessibility," demonstrates in poem after poem the role poetry has long played as balm. Poetry, as Collins says, teaches us about ourselves. In this collection he teaches me that the great pleasures come from quiet, ordinary moments: from music, our dogs, simple days.

Reading anything these days is complicated. It requires time. And, as with everything else, the question lurks: Is this the best use of time when time seems too short and too precious? But reading is a vital part of what makes many of us who we are. Paradoxically, because reading changes us, and change has proven to be one of the few constants, hanging on to who we are can often be centered in the turning of pages.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Commonweal Foundation
COPYRIGHT 2002 Gale Group