Reader’s Diary

Peter Carey

What sounds like a winning formula: father takes anime-fan son to Japan to explore Japanese culture, turns out to be little more than a superficial magazine article in book form. If an author’s main conclusion about another country is “we can’t understand them”, there’s little point in
reading his work.

Update, March 7, 2006:

It turns out that there’s a reason that Carey’s book is kind of thin: he made some of it up. According to an article in the Seattle Weekly:

…two-time Booker Prize-winning novelist confesses he has invented a character in his new travel memoir…

“To get to the argument and the conflict, I had to,” says Carey. “I wasn’t going to have conflict with anybody in real life. So I have this imaginary character do a whole load of things which didn’t happen.”

Well, like my mother used to say, “you’re either honest or you’re not”. I don’t like fictional characters showing up in my non-fiction.

Mike Murray

What if, in the darkest days of World War II, British commandos had killed Hitler and replaced him with… a not-overly-bright third rate Hitler impersonator? This is the preposterous question that Mike Murray answers in “Raven”. It’s to Murray’s credit as a story-teller that despite the unlikely premise and despite some poor editing, this is un-put-downable pulp at it’s best. The thriller genre has fallen on hard times, but the story of Archie Smythes, actor, doing business as Adolph Hitler, dictator is a sing that it’s not dead yet.

Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger

In this deep but accessible book, Cardinal Ratzinger - now Pope Benedict XVI - offers the insights of a lifetime of study. No Catholic who reads this book will put it down without a greater appreciation for the Mass, for what it is and what it represents. Such ideas as the Mass being part of a timeless celebration that links us with the celebration in heaven as described in Revelation are not the kind of things one usually thinks about in the pew on Sunday morning. But reading about such concepts in this book cannot fail to deepen one’s faith.

In addition to its spiritual benefits, “The Spirit of the Liturgy” offers insights into the mind of our new pope. The depth of thought visible in this book and the clarity of his writing are striking, and bode well for his papacy.

Mike Aquilina

How did Christians in the first centuries AD worship? Much like Catholics, according to Mike Aquilina. This short book uses primary sources to document that the “Mass of the early Christians” is the same service, in fundamentals if not in detail, as the Mass as celebrated in Catholic parishes today. This book is a comfort to Catholics who may have suspected that their liturgy was the product of Medieval practices and it stands as a challenge to Protestants who claim that their non-liturgical, non-Eucharistic services are in accord with the worship of the first
Christians.