CAC Summer Reading List!
I’m reading The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov for an online book club. Currently, a mysterious man (probably Satan) and his black tomcat are wreaking havoc on the streets of 1940s Moscow, Loki-style. A theater has been taken hostage by black magic, and a poet named Homeless is struggling to figure out what happened to him before he landed in a mental hospital. It’s vivid, colorful, wildly imaginative, and I can’t wait to finish it.
— Laura Pittenger, CAC Treasurer
Currently reading Lonesome Dove by Larry McMurtry, commonly considered the greatest Western of all time. It’s a pleasure to read. The level of detail McMurtry observes and communicates brings you completely into the dusty world of a late frontier Texas desert border town, and his evident compassion for a wide variety of characters helps you immediately love the people, despite their weaknesses and differences of background. Also, it’s consistently funny, in that inimitable, dry Texas cattleman sort of way!
— Cole Matson, CAC Vice-President
I was just in a Brideshead Revisited book club on Facebook that was a great way to (re)read Evelyn Waugh’s novel. Reading it with a mix of Catholics and non-Catholics was fascinating. It highlights how Waugh’s novel operates in a Catholic moral universe seen through the eyes of a narrator who (mostly, for most of the novel) doesn’t understand that world. And we had spirited discussions about what was going on in the novel’s treatment of wealth, class, sexuality, and love. Waugh’s pen is ever sharp, but it strikes me that the best thing about the book is his ability to depict glimpses of a holiness that is a little more uncouth and less genteel than the comfortable world it interrupts.
— Alexi Sargeant, CAC Board Member
I just finished Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, winner of the 2003 Pulitzer Prize. Middlesex is the story of Calliope, who is a third-generation Greek immigrant in Detroit, coming of age as the Motor City is slowly falling from glory. Eugenides’ novel and Cal’s quest for identity dig back into Cal’s family history and Greek heritage, which is populated with winning and winsome progenitors. The novel’s epic scope feels like a satisfying bedtime story as it unwinds the strands of DNA coiled up inside each of us, that connect us to our past and make us who we are—whether we asked for it or not!
—Renée Roden, CAC Newsletter Editor
Real Presences by George Steiner - it’s mind-blowing!
FROM A REVIEW:
Can there be major dimensions of a poem, a painting, a musical composition created in the absence of God? Or, is God always a real presence in the arts? Steiner passionately argues that a transcendent reality grounds all genuine art and human communication.
— Deniz Demirer, CAC Board Member
Let us know what you’re reading this summer! Also, if you want to add some Catholic fiction and non-fiction to your list, I recommend checking out Haley Stewart’s #cathLIT challenge to help you craft it!
