The Market Monitor Minding the Nation's Business
By Alvin I. Dacanay
For many workaholics, Holy Week is a terrific time to reacquaint themselves with their religion or reconnect with their spiritual side, bond with their loved ones, go on a well-earned vacation, pursue long-delayed personal projects, or catch up on their reading.
Recently, several Filipino writers—a few of them prize-winning—were asked which books they would recommend people to read during Holy Week, and the titles they gave ranged from bestselling ones to relatively obscure works.
One of them, playwright Liza C. Magtoto (Agnoia, Care Divas, Rak of Aegis), recommended Betty J. Eadie’s 1992 New York Times bestseller Embraced by the Light, which recounts the vivid near-death experience she had after undergoing surgery in November 1973.
In its brief review, Amazon.com called Embraced by the Light “an inspirational map of the afterlife framed in the moment of Eadie’s death, and presents a possible answer to the big question, ‘Why are we here?’” It noted that, although the non-fiction book is “heavily filtered through Eadie’s Christian worldview, her vision of the afterlife does not include a wrathful deity, but a figure of love and compassion.”
For her part, screenwriter-film producer Moira Lang (Tanging Yaman; Ang Pagdadalaga ni Maximo Oliveros; Norte, Hangganan ng Kasaysayan) endorsed Fyodor Dostoevsky’s classic 1880 novel The Brothers Karamazov, which the Goodreads website describes as a “passionate philosophical novel set in 19th-century Russia that enters deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will and morality” and “a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt and reason, set against a modernizing Russia.”
The Brothers Karamazov is said to have influenced many writers and philosophers, and its admirers include Albert Einstein, Martin Heidegger, Kurt Vonnegut and Cormac McCarthy. Another admirer, Sigmund Freud—widely considered the father of psychoanalysis—called the novel the most magnificent ever written, while influential novelist James Joyce admitted in Conversations with James Joyce that the book “made a deep impression” on him.
Writer Resty S. Odon’s book of choice is Evelyn Waugh’s 1946 novel Brideshead Revisited, which was added to Time magazine’s “All-TIME 100 novels” list. In that January 2010 article, Time book critic Lev Grossman began explaining its inclusion by writing: “Once and only once in his career the bitter, urbane, howlingly funny satirist Evelyn Waugh screwed up all his nerve and his talent and produced a genuine literary masterpiece.”
“Though it’s saddled with a faded doily of a title, Brideshead Revisited is actually a wildly entertaining, swooningly funny-sad story about an impressionable young man, Charles Ryder, who goes to Oxford in the 1930s and falls in love with a family: the wealthy, eccentric, aristocratic Flytes, owners of a grand old country house called Brideshead,” Grossman wrote.
“In the first half of the book, the exquisite, hilariously fey Sebastian Flyte, who is Charles’ classmate, teaches the young man about beauty, booze and witty conversation. In the second half, every one grows up and everything goes spectacularly to smash. Told in flashbacks from the dark days of World War II, Brideshead is aglimmer with the guttering-candle glow of an elegant age that was already passing away,” he concluded.
For writer-editor Eleanor Sarah Reposar, it’s acclaimed children’s-book author Madeleine L’Engle’s 2001 non-fiction book Walking on Water: Reflections on Faith and Art, which, according to her, says a lot about the creative/writing process. She quotes a small portion as one of her favorites: “When I’m praying, when I’m truly praying, I’m not thinking, I’m not speaking, I’m shutting up, so, perhaps, if God has something to say I can hear it. So writing, too, is an act of listening, listening to what has to be said.”
“In this classic book, Madeleine L’Engle addresses the questions, What makes art Christian? What does it mean to be a Christian artist? What is the relationship between faith and art? Through L’Engle’s beautiful and insightful essay, readers will find themselves called to what the author views as the prime tasks of an artist: to listen, to remain aware and to respond to creation through one’s own art,” the Barnes&Noble website says in its overview of the book.
Finally, California-based essayist Wilfredo Pascual (“Devotion,” “Lost in Childrensville”) recommends not just one, but a dozen books: Thomas Moore’s Care of the Soul; C.S. Lewis’ Surprised by Joy; Patricia Hampl’s Virgin Time; Mary Gordon’s Final Payments and Reading Jesus; Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood; Karen Armstrong’s Fields of Blood; Anne Lammot’s Traveling Mercies; Jim Crace’s Quarantine; W.G. Sebald’s Campo Santo; Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary; and Richard Rodriguez’s Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography.
Noteworthy among these titles is Surprised by Joy,which a review in the Sunday Times newspaper says: “You can take it at two levels, as straight autobiography, or as a kind of spiritual thriller, a detective’s probing of clue and motive that led up to his return to the Christianity he had lost in childhood.”
Another review, from the Saturday Review magazine, says: ‘’Anyone approaching this book as a study in the psychology of conversion will find the greatest interest in the dual paths—intellectual and intuitive—which converged at last. But the casual reader looking merely for an enjoyable book will equally value many other parts.”