My Books of 2021
Seven favourite reads and a few surprises.
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An end-of-year book list needs little introduction and if you’ve clicked this far, you know why you’re here. Let’s get to it.
My reading patterns in 2021 fell along three major lines:
Cinephilia and the history of film theory
Philosophy and its history
Fiction drawn from the 20th century Catholic literary canon
From this mishmash, I’ve selected seven favourite reads and a handful of honourable mentions that cover the gamut of my year in reading fiction, spiritual works, philosophy, film studies, and history. And if that’s not enough, I’ve included a few standalone essay recommendations, too. Shall we?
1) Persuasion - Jane Austen
Most of my reading habits for the last decade have been geared towards exploring the canon of English and French Catholic novelists of the 20th century. It’s the usual suspects: Mauriac, Waugh, Greene, and Bernanos have been my most frequent companions during these years. You can imagine how dour things get.
Now, I like a good bit of dourness; it fits my temperament and I’ve learned that patience with the doldrums of the human heart is a useful prerequisite for attaining certain heights of insight which the somber masters - Mauriac and Bernanos in particular - are keen to share with us.
One cannot live on tears and vinegar alone, though, and this is inevitably why I’ve found myself reaching for Jane Austen every spring for the last few years. Her mountain is higher still; when one is standing on it, it is impossible to think any other writer exists. In an Austen climax, subtlety, felicity, virtuosity, and warmth dwell in perfect unity, weaving a vision of goodness, hope, and love which is truly cosmic in nature and yet remains clothed in the simple gestures, looks, manners, and words of everyday life. And that brings us to Persuasion.
Gestures and looks! Austen’s attention to paying attention is what mesmerized me about Persuasion, so much so that it is tempting to call it a proto-cinematic work. So much of the drama of Anne Elliott’s quiet recollision with Captain Wentworth, seven years after breaking their engagement, hinges on what is being seen: looks, mannerisms, flitting eyes, flared nostrils, the weight of one heel put in front of another, a certain exit at a certain time. Equally so is its evocation of what is being heard: it is not so much what someone is saying, but how they are saying it, which becomes the site of unlimited tension. Anne’s desire goes so far as to impel her to search out the meaning of certain intonations for certain syllables. It’s a feast of overanalysis, a veritable melancholic’s heaven. In other words, Persuasion is an immersion into the arts of observation and interpretation: a constant search for signals, coded and uncoded, intended and unintended.
Never have I read an author more skillfully lay out a sense of space as Austen does here. Every room in which Anne and Captain Wentworth find themselves immediately becomes charged with a profound energy, the world seeming to turn on the axis forming between these two poles. It reconfigures space into a field which can only be navigated by a judiciously attentive and roving eye, attuned ears, and the social graces necessary to hide such surveillance. All of these elements, signs and spaces, come together in an exquisite climax, hinging on the unknown contents of a letter being written across a room while two hearts dance in stillness and silence. I’m hard-pressed to think of a more potent scene in all of Austen, and perhaps in all of literature.
Some Honourable Mentions…
The rest of my year in fiction was excellent. Having read some of his short fiction, I came to J.F. Powers’s final novel Wheat That Springeth Green prepared for short and wry prose; what I was not prepared for was how well the longer format would complement Powers’s trademark unfussiness. His spare and often subtly scathing account of Fr. Joe Hackett, a very average parish priest in suburban America living through the turmoil of the 50s, 60s, and 70s, is hilarious and hopeful, building a long chain of strangely mundane episodes into a mini-epic of hidden grace, always working.
C.S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce pierced me with its honest appraisal of the messy tangle of human desire and concupiscence. I’ve never quite clicked with Lewis’s other attempts to entwine fiction and spiritual meditation, but this one, operating mostly as a series of dialogues between souls on the cusp of Heaven - many of them choosing to go back to Hell because paradise isn’t quite what they wanted - hits uncomfortably close to home.
This was also the year I finally got into Walker Percy, somewhat slouching my way into his oeuvre after a decade-plus of judiciously ignoring him while exploring the rest of the 20th c. Catholic literary canon. I don’t regret the wait. Finally coming to The Moviegoer and Love in the Ruins after gaining a few bruises in the rounds of life seems most appropriate, and it was that sense of bruised hope in both novels which pulled me in initially. Both are frequently funny, frustrating, and touching; I give the edge to The Moviegoer, whose closing exchange between Binx and Kate rather brilliantly and sweetly evokes the theological mystery of God’s thinking-of-us in the simplest of terms.
My other multi-volume author of the year, John le Carré, was a bit of a surprise to me. I fell into reading Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy after revisiting Tomas Alfredson’s 2011 film adaptation. While it helped that I already knew the story (even accounting for massive structural changes by screenwriters Bridget O’Connor and Peter Straughan), I was still taken aback by the intensity of the novel’s pleasures: le Carré’s mastery of English prose, the slow and satisfying accumulation of insignificant details into a case, and the byzantine cogitations of master spy George Smiley (never has deliberation during conversations been so exciting). I’m currently waist-deep in the sequel, The Honourable Schoolboy and plan to finish the “Karla Trilogy” with Smiley’s People by the summer. I expect we will be seeing le Carré again on this list come next year.
2) The Autobiography of St. Teresa - St. Teresa of Avila
This was absolutely revelatory. I’ve been slow to get to St. Teresa since becoming a Catholic, possibly because she has such a reputation for intensity. And while her story is intense, it is much, much more than that. St. Teresa leaves no stone unturned, but her fervour in the quest is leavened by gentleness and humility; her self-knowledge is exhaustive but not exhausting. As a cradle Catholic, her story lacks the overt drama of St. Augustine’s Confessions, but as a chronicle of the heart, this is every bit it's worthy successor.
I was totally captured by the final chapters, where St. Teresa records in aching detail the seemingly endless and complex campaign to establish a new convent under the patronage of St. Joseph. I have not read a more honest and detailed account of the material and spiritual dynamics simultaneously at work in the pursuit of a concrete project. The number of moving parts and opportunities for failure was immense, and St. Teresa narrates it as a chronology of prayers, decisions, petitions, setbacks, providential timing, and above all, faithfulness and patience. My inner philosopher marvels at the sheer overflow of causes and the delicate web they form in the making of an event; my inner theologian reposes in the God who stoops, through so many of these causes, to make things so and in such a way, because He loves.
If you find yourself undertaking a new task that seems overwhelming, is dependent on the good graces of those beyond you, or seems impossible to grasp, read St. Teresa. You will find exactly what is needed to keep going.
Honourable mention: Some years ago, I benefited greatly from Caryll Houselander’s sadly-forgotten masterpiece Guilt, and so I was excited to return to her this year, this time on the subject of the Mother of God. The Reed of God is succinct and deep; highly recommended for meditation.
3) Methodical Realism & The Unity of Philosophical Experience - Étienne Gilson
Since coming across his aesthetics trilogy several years ago, I’ve morphed into a full-on Gilson maniac. I was very pleased, then, to bookend my year with two of his most important works of the 1930s. The Unity of Philosophical Experience (1938) is a deep dive into the history of Western philosophy from the Middle Ages up to the 20th century. Gilson’s quest is to uncover and explain an erroneous tendency in philosophers which, he argues, stretches from Abelard to Comte to the modern day: the decision to substitute a particular science or discipline in the place of metaphysics. The recurring failure of philosophy to “do” metaphysics via any method other than metaphysics itself has gifted us a set of inadvertent experiments in philosophy that, taken together, form a “unity of philosophical experience.” This unity points to the inescapable fact that “as metaphysics aims at transcending all particular knowledge, no particular science is competent either to solve metaphysical problems, or to judge their metaphysical solutions.” The only solution is to do philosophy properly from first principles.
This was one of the more challenging works by Gilson I’ve encountered, largely because he covers a great deal of historical ground (dealing with at least a dozen philosophers, major and minor) without giving much background, and saves all of his barn-burning revelations for the final chapter. But what a chapter it is! There is nothing like a Gilsonian slow-burn.
I finished out the year with Methodical Realism, a 1935 collection of lectures addressing the age-old conflict between idealist systems of philosophy (beginning with Descartes) and the realist philosophy of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. Because of my interest in film studies, I’ve spent much of the last year wrestling with how to navigate the epistemological doubt that undergirds all of modern philosophy and by extension, all modern sciences, including film studies. I found Gilson’s critique of idealism and defense of realism to be deeply clarifying and refreshing. This was probably my single favourite philosophy read of the year.
Honourable mention: I’d be remiss not to mention another late favourite by another 20th c. Thomist. Belief and Faith by Josef Pieper is a rich philosophical exposition of what, exactly, is happening in the act of believing: namely, one trusts the word of another being. Pieper unpacks the implications of this core truth patiently and luminously.
4) The Aesthetics of Thomas Aquinas - Umberto Eco
An early read for me last year was Umberto Eco’s early work on St. Thomas’s aesthetics - which, as every Thomist undertaking the aesthetic question usually notes upfront, is a bit of a misnomer since the Universal Doctor expounded only briefly on the concept of beauty. Eco’s book is a fascinating and sometimes pointed counterpart to the aesthetic theories of fellow 20th c. philosophers Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain (among other sallies, Eco makes an explicit critique of Maritain’s treatment of the famous Thomistic aphorism id quod visum placet - “that which, being seen, pleases” in Art and Scholasticism).
Eco’s most important contribution is his exposition of St. Thomas’s use of the Latin term visio as the lynchpin of the act of perception. Far more than merely “seeing,” visio denotes a complex process of sensing, grasping with the intellect, and judging, and Eco undertakes the task of structuring this process with regards to how seeing a beautiful object results in aesthetic pleasure. I can’t say I agree with all of Eco’s claims here but it was a complete delight to accompany him as he opened up these avenues of thought.
5) The Permanent Crisis of Film Criticism: The Anxiety of Authority - Mattias Frey
A meticulously researched look at the history of film criticism, Frey begins with the puzzle of ‘decline and fall’ and ‘death of the critic’ narratives among film critics (pressured by the rise of the Internet and the decline in print publishing), locating in them a profound anxiety over the question of the critic’s authority: who, in the end, gets to speak authoritatively about cinema? Is it the critic, the audience, or the industry? If it is indeed the critic, what undergirds that authority?
Tracing this question back to the haphazard birth of film criticism as a professional discipline, which began as pragmatic and industry-driven feedback before it began to find its legs as a philosophical and scientifically-informed endeavour, Frey lays bare the halting, shuddering, deeply conflicted maturation of film criticism as a discipline in search of its metaphysical foundations. The picture that emerges is that film criticism has always been unsure of itself and is thus sentenced to a state of “permanent crisis.” Of particular value is the extensive chapter on the history of Sight and Sound, which Frey posits as the ultimate representation of modern liberal taste in cinema. Given that the latest edition of the decennial Sight and Sound Top Ten will be revealed later this year, now would be a perfect time to look into some of the history behind its lofty influence.
The implications of Frey’s thesis extend into all areas of knowledge about film. I look forward to unpacking some of it further in our ongoing Cinephilia series. Available for free on Open Library.
6) Jazz-Age Catholicism: Mystic Modernism in Postwar Paris, 1919-1933 - Stephen Schloesser, S.J.
An exhaustive and mesmerizing account of the spiritual and actual transformation of French arts and culture after WW1, a process profoundly shaped by the horrors of the war and the influence of Catholic artists and thinkers. This will be of value primarily for those looking for background on the major artistic and philosophical players of this period: Jacques and Raissa Maritain, Georges Bernanos, Jean Cocteau, and so on (it’s an endless list). The wealth of detail here, especially to do with Maritain and his efforts to revitalize French Catholic artistic endeavours, is truly stunning. My one complaint is that Schloesser’s characterization of 19th and early 20th century French Catholicism’s tensions sometimes reads more like a secular historian’s efforts to reduce complex dynamics into a simplistic traditional vs. progressive framework. I expected a bit more nuance from a Jesuit.
7) French Cinema of the Occupation and Resistance - André Bazin
Two wonderful facts which this slim volume drove home for me: First, Bazin was brilliant from the get-go, as we see in this collection of early writings spanning his student paper days to his first forays into art theory. Second, one cannot overestimate the tremendous value of reading Bazin chronologically. As far as I can tell, this is the only English collection of his work that permits a genuinely intimate experience of his developing thought over a suitably limited period of time (roughly 1943-1946). The reward for us is the thrill of accompanying a young talent taking his first steps into the intellectual vocation for which he was made.
Of particular note is the book’s climax: a 1945 essay on André Malraux’s L’Espoir published several months after Bazin’s much more famous breakout work “The Ontology of the Photographic Image.” It seems criminal to me that these two essays have been separated in English collections, for together they form a stunning diptych of Bazin’s emerging maturity as a thinker and writer traversing the disciplines of history, psychology, and philosophy.
Related: A guide to reading André Bazin chronologically.
Bonus: Some Favourite Essays
The System of the Arts - Helmut Kuhn (1941)
The Modern System of the Arts - Paul Oskar Kristeller (1951-52)
Part of my research this year took me into the question of the “system of the arts,” the modern grouping of fine arts (painting, sculpture, music, poetry, and architecture) which dominated aesthetic theory from the 18th to the mid-20th century. Kristeller’s essay is the modern classic exposition of the topic, and justly so, as he masterfully considers the systemization of the arts from ancient to contemporary times.
Helmut Kuhn’s essay is a provocative treatment of problems which arise in the traditional modern system of the arts, leading him to propose a new context for studying the arts - that of the “festival.” By doing so, Kuhn, who converted to Catholicism in 1948, in some ways anticipates Josef Pieper’s much more famous invocation of festivity in Leisure, The Basis of Culture.
L’Evidence - William Routt (1992)
A deeply stimulating analysis of the auteurist doctrine which made Cahiers du Cinema the most significant film publication on the planet in the 1950s. Routt’s description of the auteurists’ method, which prized the simplicity of details and gestures as a doorway to a profound encounter with cinema, is both wide and deep. Key among his insights is that at the heart of auteurism is love, plain and simple - a fact which is often cited, but rarely penetrated. Available here.
Cinema: An Undiscoverable History? - Pierre Sorlin (1992)
A rich meditation on what it really means to approach cinema as an historical object. Sorlin takes up a critique of positivist views of science as the guiding light of film history, arguing that historicizing cinema is complicated by the fact that the primary objects which film history is concerned with - films - still exist and are still making impressions on people today. How do you “do” history about something which is still alive and kicking; which isn’t “past?” This was by far one of the most thought-provoking essays I read in 2021, and I will be unpacking it for a long time to come.
For more reading suggestions, I encourage you to check out Catholic World Report’s massive end-of-year book roundup. I look forward to this list every year.
Happy reading to all in 2022!