Category: Books
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The 100 Best Catholic Novels I Know
Deal W. Hudson June 14, 2016 In offering this list, I’m not making an attempt to define the “Catholic novel,” which would be a very foolish enterprise. There are many reasons why a novel can, and sometimes should be called “Catholic,” but to attach that impulse to a grand metaphysic or aesthetic theory would require…
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My Top 25 Recommended Audiobooks, The Best of the Best
Deal W. Hudson June 16, 2016 Good books become even better when read aloud by a skilled performer. A recent example is the recording by famed British actor, Edward Fox, of Anthony Trollope’s The Warden, the first of the Barchester novels. Fox’s deep-voiced, droll delivery has opened Trollope’s world to me as never before. Homer, the…
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A Cultural Outcast Asks: Who Can I Turn To, When Nobody Loves Me?
Deal W. Hudson. November 15, 2016 I’m a regular reader of various cultural blogs and magazines, especially those devoted to books, film, and classical music. Some of them have fed my mind and soul since college days. But over the past six months, I have watched as many of them bash Donald Trump and his “deplorable”…
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10 Recommended Audiobooks From the Past Year
Deal W. Hudson December 3, 2016 This kind of lists are normally entitled “The Best,” but since I can only vouch for the ones I’ve heard I will stay with “Recommended.” One thing I have learned from my years of listening is that narrators ‘make or break’ a book. Many of books that I would like…
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Why Is Tomorrow, or the Next Moment, More Important Than Today, or the Present Moment?
Deal W. Hudson January 11, 2018 My title may seem a bit pretentious, but it poses the central question of Francis O’Gorman’s 2017 book, Forgetfulness: Making the Modern Culture of Amnesia. I interviewed Francis yesterday on ‘Church and Culture,” to be aired this coming weekend, about his rich and unsettling book. Its richness lies in O’Gorman’s…
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A Novel About Giving the Gift of Music
Deal W. Hudson January 14, 2018 There’s a new and delightful novel, The Music Shop by Rachel Joyce, which I’m kicking myself for not having written first. The setting is a music shop whose owner, Frank, refuses to sell anything but vinyl LPs in the face of the Compact Disc whose introduction in the mid-80s quickly shrank…
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Why the 1916 Somme Slaughter?
Deal W. Hudson January 20, 2018 I’m reading Hugh Sebag-Montefiore’s magisterial Somme: Into the Breach (Viking, 2016) where he attempts to explain why Great Britain suffered 57,470 casualties, including 19,240 fatalities, on the first day of the battle, July 1, 1916. It’s a story of monumental pride, chaotic disorganization, delusional self-confidence, disingenuous calls to duty, and broken promises…
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Meeting Cervantes — the Man Who Invented the Novel
Deal W. Hudson February 1, 2018 Some books engross you immediately, that’s certainly true of William Egginton’s The Man Who Invented Fiction: How Cervantes Ushered in the Modern World (Bloomsbury, 2016). I was, like many, familiar with Cervantes’s place at the beginning of a literary tradition called the “novel,” but I started the book somewhat suspicious of…
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Audiobooks, The Word Spoken
By Deal W. Hudson Homer, the first great poet of the West, wasn’t a writer but a performer, with the dining halls of ancient Greece as his stage. Before the advent of written literature, the medium of poetry was dramatic utterance and song. Eyes were no more necessary to the enjoyment of words than they…
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The Exorcist Author Learns Death Is a Lie
Published April 29, 2015 at The Christian Review A Book Review: William Peter Blatty, Finding Peter: A True Story of the Hand of Providence and Evidence of Life after Death Regnery Publishing, March 30, 2015 256 pages, $27.99 Honesty is rare, and when it’s found in a book such as this the effect is quite…
Deal W. Hudson 