Dancing Priest

Author and Novelist Glynn Young

books

About Those 10 Books

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There was a thing last week, I think somewhere on Substack, about “10 books that changed my life.” I tried to find the specific article again, but Google produced an abundance of listings about 10 books, 37 books, 100 books, 20 books, 23 books, 77 books, 25 books, 40 books, well, you get the picture.

I asked myself the question. Could I identify 10 books that had changed my life?

My answer was no, I couldn’t, at least, not in the sense of some transformational change from what I was before reading the book and what I was after reading the book. But I could identify 10 that had influenced me, in some cases profoundly.

I first read four of the books in high school: Great Expectations and David Copperfield by Charles Dickens, Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot, and Don Quixote by Cervantes. The two by Dickens were both class assignments (9th and 12thgrades, respectively). I’d read Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock in 11th grade American literature, and I bought Four Quartets to read on my own (I even remember where I bought it — the long-gone Dolphin Book Shop at Lakeside Shopping Center in suburban New Orleans). 

Don Quixote was also a class assignment, but we had the option of reading the abridged or unabridged version. Two of 30 in our all-boy English class decided to bite the bullet and read the unabridged version – me and Jesse Stephenson. Our teacher said it was the kind of book you should read three times in your life – when you were young, middle-aged, and old. I read it was I was 17; I read it again when I was 35, and I discovered it was not the book I remembered it to be. I’ll have to wait a few years to read it when I get old. 

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I’ve read The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings four times, and each time I’ve been blown away by the story. My first reading was in high school – the pirated Ballantine editions. After college, I read the official family-approved versions. Some 25 years later, I read the whole saga again, in anticipation of the Peter Jackson movies. And then, a few years ago, I reread the entire series.

The 1970s were the period that shaped my reading the rest of my life. I read the crime novels Dashiell Hammett, like The Maltese Falcon and Red Harvest, and loved his writing style. A friend at work introduced me to Flannery O’Connor, and I read everything she wrote. In high school in the 1960s, I read the Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, The First Circle, and Cancer Ward, and I was more than ready for the first volume of The Gulag Archipelago in 1974 (ordered from Cokesbury Bookstore, downtown Houston, Texas).  Reading John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces was like going back to my roots; no one before or since captured the New Orleans accent as precisely as he did. October Light, a novel by John Gardner, remains one of my favorite works of fiction.

I’d previously read The Screwtape Letters and Surprised by Joy, but what really opened my mind to C.S. Lewis was They Stand Together: The Letters of C.S. Lewis to Arthur Greeves, published in 1980 and edited by Water Hooper. The letters formed their own kind of biography, from the time the two were boyhood friends to near Lewis’s death in 1963.

In 1986, in the middle of my master’s program at Washington University, I took a seminar in the Latin American novel. The assigned readings for me were one wow moment after another. I was so blown away by Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World that I did my seminar project on his Conversation in the Cathedral, not the easiest work to read, and discovered the intricate underlying structure. A later course in the history of the early Christian church found me reading Augustine of Hippo by Peter Brown, which is still one of the best, if not the best, biographies I’ve ever read.

Two recent influential books I’ve read fundamentally changed my understanding of the Civil War. I read them as research for a historical novel project (more on that later), but together they stripped away any notion of romance about the conflict. Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil Wars Final Campaign in North Carolina (2022) by Ernest Dollar describes the barbarism of the last spasm of the war, one in which neither side covered itself in glory. Of Age: Boy Soldiers and Military Power in the Civil War Era (2023) by Frances Clarke and Rebecca Jo Plant estimates that about 10 percent of the soldiers on both sides were under the age of 15.

That’s my list of influential books. As important as they’ve been to me, there’s nothing like writing a book that will change your life. That’s a story for another day.

The Pleasures of Reading a Physical Book

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I read a lot of e-books. Reviewing poetry for Tweetspeak Poetry means I’m read a lot of collections in pdf or e-book formats. Reviewing books on my Faith, Fiction, Friends blog means the same thing, although almost all of those books are e-books and specifically books found on Amazon Kindle.

I like my Amazon Kindle Fire (I also have the Kindle app on my laptop and phone). It saves considerable bookshelf space, for one thing. Many of the books I have there will be read once and not likely read again at some time in the future. While the prices of some Kindle books, particularly more academic ones, are eyebrow-raising, most Kindle book prices are reasonable and usually cheaper than the hardback or paperback.

Two recent books I read, however, reminded me of the pleasures of holding and reading a physical book. 

The Lost Tales of Sir Galahad, with stories by various authors, was recently published by The Rabbit Room. It’s a beautiful book, with a bright red embossed cover, creative stories, and wonderful illustrations by Ned Bustard. I’m trying to imagine it as an e-book, and I don’t think it would work as well.

The Bodleian Library recently published a new edition of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” the famous poem by Thomas Gray. It includes wonderful wood engravings by Agnes Miller Parker, first published in 1938. Her black-and-white illustrations remind me of the paintings by Thomas Hart Benton, full of motion and activities. It’s another book that wouldn’t work as well in an electronic format. (You can read my review of the book at Tweetspeak Poetry.)

There’s something about holding a physical book that brings additional pleasure to reading, probably not unlike holding a printed newspaper adds something to reading the news that an online version doesn’t have. It may be that, for non-fiction books, you can find something more quickly in the index, or that a physical text allows you to see a page as something more than only one screen. Or perhaps I’m just more comfortable with a physical text; it’s the one I’ve known since my mother was reading Grimm Fairy Tales aloud when I was two and three years old.

And that could be it – a physical text creates associations – with its place on a shelf, with people, with what was happening at the time – that an e-book or pdf doesn’t. And a physical text suggests a greater degree of permanence – it’s there even if your internet connection goes down or the battery on your Kindle goes out.

My five novels in the Dancing Priest series were first published on Amazon Kindle in e-book format, followed shortly thereafter by the paperback editions. A couple of months ago, my publisher told me that he’d been contacted by a firm that produced hardback versions, and those editions were also now available. I checked Amazon, and sure enough, there they were. 

I bought the first in the series, Dancing Priest, to see what the binding was like. There’s no dust cover or book jacket, but the cover is a sturdy laminated cardboard. It’s not a durable, say, as a hand-stitched leather, but it’s certainly more durable than a paperback. And, yes, I ended up buying all five hardbacks. At $34.99, they’re not inexpensive. But what can an author say?

I picked the last one in the series, Dancing Prince, and read the hardcover version. I can’t say there was anything remarkably different from the paperback, but I did find a slight, perhaps significant, difference. The book, and the story, felt more substantial.

I’ll continue to buy e-books; they’re provide a means to read good writing without breaking the budget. I’ll continue to buy hardbacks and paperbacks, particularly for books I want to keep, reread, and have ready access to because I know exactly where they are or the shelf.

Top photo by Jaredd Craig. Amazon Kindle photo by Freestocks. Both via Unsplash and used with permission.

A Year of Reading the Civil War

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For a few years before 2022, I’d been occasionally reading about the American Civil War. It’s something I grew up with; my grandparents were all born after it was over, but their parents lived through it. Tw sets of great grandparents lived through the Union occupation of New Orleans; one set lived in an unoccupied part of Louisiana; and one set survived the war as parts of Mississippi were ravaged by war (and often repeatedly). 

This last group was the Youngs. Three sons and a son-in-law all enlisted in the Confederate army. One, the youngest, was too young to enlist when the war began but somehow signed up as a messenger boy. He was the only one to survive, and he was my great-grandfather Samuel. Not long after the war, his father died, and Samuel became the family patriarch at the ripe old age of 23 or 24. Samuel lived until 1920; my father was four years old when his grandfather died. 

This year, I began reading about the war in earnest. Except for the Battle of Vicksburg, I had not known what Mississippi experienced during the war. The Young family, with my aging great-great grandfather with several daughters and daughters-in-law, lasted out the war in Brookhaven, Mississippi. I had to search hard to find out what, if anything, had happened in Brookhaven. The town was visited twice by Union troops, both times in 1863. First was Grierson’s Raid in April, which became the basis for the 1959 movie The Horse Soldiers with John Wayne. The second time was in July, during the siege of Jackson by Generals Grant and Sherman. A small contingent of Union troops made its way some 70 miles south of Jackson to Brookhaven, burning some mills, tearing up railroad track, and talking 200 prisoners at the conscript camp for the Confederate army there. 

Few family stories have survived over the succeeding 160 years, and only a few about my great-grandfather the messenger boy. I’ve turned to books, articles, and research papers to find out at least some small idea of what my ancestors experienced. I’ve been left amazed.

Here are some of the best books I’ve read this year. 

The Real Horse Soldiers; Benjamin Grierson’s Epic 1863 Civil War Raid Through Mississippi by Timothy Smith. Smith corrects the misinformation contained in Grierson’s Raid by Dee Brown, published in 1953 and which provided the basis for the John Wayne movie. 

The Ends of War: The Unfinished Fight of Lee’s Army After Appomattox by Caroline Janney is an excellent history, making the case for the unfinished business becoming the mythology of the post-war South.

Hearts Torn Asunder: Trauma in the Civil War’s Final Campaign in North Carolina by Ernest Dollar Jr. I blogged twice on this book; once for the review and once explaining how it was a book that wouldn’t let go. What we now call post-traumatic stress disorder was alive and well in the Civil War and particularly at its end. 

The Battle of the Wilderness, May 5-6, 1864 by Gordon Rhea. Published in 1994, this is the classic history of one of the most horrific battles of the Civil War (1994).

Diary of a Confederate Tarheel Soldier by Louis Leon. Published in 1913, this war memoir was written not only by a Confederate veteran but also one who was Jewish – and his parents in New York City sent him care packages when he was taken as a prisoner of war.

The Confederate Surrender at Greensboro by Robert Dunkerly. This is one of many concise Civil War histories published by Emerging Civil War. Dunkerly explains the surrender of General William Johnston to Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, and how Sherman’s terms were considered far too lenient by official Washington.

The Civil War in Mississippi: Major Campaigns and Battles by Michael Ballard. I never realized how much of the state was was fought over by the opposing armies. It was far more than only Vicksburg.

Mississippi in the Civil War: The Home Front by Timothy Smith. Smith (who wrote the account of Grierson’s Raid noted above) also produced a book on what life was like for civilians in Mississippi – and it was anything but easy.

The Limits of Loyalty: Ordinary People in Civil War Mississippi by Jarret Ruminski. Ruminski covers some of the same ground as Timothy Smith above, but with a different focus. He looks at what happened to civilian loyalities over the course  of the war.

The Battle of Jackson, Mississippi by Chris Mackowski and The Civil War Siege of Jackson, Mississippi by Jim Woodrick. Mackowski gives considerable details on the battle, while Woodrick takes a broader look (and includes what happened in outlying areas like Brookhaven). 

Presidential Reconstruction in Mississippi by William Harris (1967) and Reconstruction Mississippi by James Wilford Garner (1901). Harris looks at the program for Reconstruction approved by President Andrew Johnson (and eventually set aside by Congress; the Radical Republicans wanted vengeance and punishment, and they got it. The Garner book started life as a Ph.D. thesis at Columbia University; it is filled with data, charts, and graphs and a highly readable interpretation of them.

Portraits of Conflict: A Photographic History of Mississippi in the Civil War by Bobby Roberts and Carl Moneyhon (1993). In the 1990s and early 200s, a series of these photography books were published, covering most of the states in the former Confederacy. Pictures can tell just as good a story as text.

The Army of the Potomac Trilogy by Bruce Catton (originally published 1951-1954; Library of America edition 2022). This is a classic, one that remains a remarkably up-to-date history of the army eventually commanded by Ulysses S. Grant. Two other classic histories I hope to read in 2023 are Shelby Foote’s The Civil War: A Narrative and Battle Cry of Freedom by James McPherson.

North Against South: The American Iliad 1848-1877 by Ludwell Johnson (1978). This is decidedly not a classic history. It is, however, a well-research and documented history of the Civil War from the Confederacy’s perspective. 

Top photograph: Camp scene, Union soldiers guarding Confederate prisoners; National Archives.