Reader’s Diary

Immaculee Ilibagiza

Immaculee Ilibagiza was 22 at Easter, 1994, an ethnic Tutsi in Rwanda. Over the next three months, Rwandan Hutus murdered over a million Tutsis - including most of her family - in a genocide that the world ignored. This book is the story of how she survived, hidden in a Hutu pastor’s bathroom with seven other women for 91 days. The most amazing thing about it, however, is not the fact of her survival, but the depth of her faith, a faith that grew during the three months and continued to grow afterwards as she came to forgive her family’s murderers.

G. K. Chesterton said, “The Christian ideal has not been tried and found wanting. It has been found difficult and left untried.” This does not apply to Immaculee Ilibagiza.

(My parish book club read this a while ago, but I neglected to log it. Thanks to Homer’s Travels for the post that reminded me of Ms Ilibagiza’s story.)

Bernard Cornwell

The “Saxon Tales” continue. Again, vintage Cornwell this time featuring a truly surprising betrayal. Uhtred heads north. The body count mounts.

Danny Wallace

A bearded stranger on a London bus told Danny Wallace to say yes more often. He did. For an entire year he said yes to everything. Yes to scam emails. Yes to blind dates set up by his ex-girlfriend. Yes to accompanying his ex-girlfriend on a date with her new boyfriend. In writing about his experiences, Wallace may have invented a new literary genre: the comic self-help love story.

This is an incredibly funny book. It’s inspiring. And it has a hypnotic dog.

Harry Young

Harry Young, age 14, left his home town in New York with $2.50. It was 1863, he’d been reading dime novels about the Wild West and decided to see it for himself. In 1877 he arrived in San Francisco with 20 cents to his name. The years in between are the subject of his 1915 memoir, the aptly-named “Hard Knocks”. He spent most of his time in the neighborhood of Fort Laramie and Cheyenne and, later, in Deadwood. He knew Calamity Jane, Wild Bill Hickock, and a number of other famous characters. He was one of life’s extras, working odd jobs but spending much of his time as a teamster and bartender. In the later capacity he served Wild Bill his last drink.

Young’s book is a fascinating and only slightly exaggerated (according to the modern introduction by James D. McLaird) account from the kind of person who doesn’t usually show up in the history books and who rarely writes memoirs.

The story of Young’s hard-living years is similar in some respects - especially with regards to his relationship with Wild Bill - to the fictional life of Jack Crabb in Thomas Berger’s “Little Big Man”. Berger must have read Young’s book an incorporated some of his life into Crabb’s.

Robert Conroy

The alternate Civil War is a popular sub-genre of alternate history. In this example, England joins the fray on the side of the Confederacy after the Trent Affair. The British come to North America and Grant ends up fighting a decisive campaign in Canada. The portrayal of Winfield Scott - who seldom appears in works of fiction - is a highlight of the book, as are the descriptions of the small but technically advanced U.S. Navy’s battles against the Royal Navy.

Every since reading Conroy’s “1901” years ago, I’ve been hoping that he would write another novel. While “1862″ isn’t as innovative as “1901″, and despite some anachronistic speech and behavior, it’s an enjoyable read. Thankfully, unlike some authors‘ interminable alternate histories, Conroy understands plot and pace, and his story has a beginning, middle, and end that all happen in the same book.

Joseph Pearce

This is an anthology of essays on (mostly English) Catholic authors. Becasue it’s a collection of short articles, it lacks the unity and depth of Pearce’s “Literary Converts“, but it is of equal quality. He writes about Chesterton, Tolkien, Waugh, Elliot, Oscar Wilde (deathbed conversion - how many people know that?), and many others. I found the pieces on Tolkien and Robert Hugh Benson to be the most interesting, but wasn’t bored by any of them. This would be a particularly valuable book for Catholic school literature teachers and their students.