Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh (1937)

van Gogh, Vincent. Dear Theo: The Autobiography of Vincent van Gogh. Edited by Irving Stone, Plume, 1995.

There are few artists who have exceptional skills in multiple artistic media. Were it not for van Gogh's intimate and poignant letters to his brother Theo, we would not be able to group the sublime painter with such personalities as Blake (who illuminated his own poetry) and Michelangelo (whose poetry is lesser known but no less profound and emotionally striking). I first heard of Irving Stone's compendium of van Gogh's letters in Henry Miller's The Books in My Life (Miller also happened to be an obsessive water colorist in addition to original and raw novelist). We owe a lot to Irving Stone, who in this palatable volume distills the exorbitant contents of some 1,670 pages of letters to present an autobiography that is at once human-all-too-human and deeply moving. We see that can Gogh was not only well versed in art history, but also well read: in the first two letters alone he talks of Michelet, Heine, George Eliot, Dickens, Thomas à Kempis, and to a manic degree the Bible. In one letter he claims, "I have nature and art and poetry, and if that is not enough, what is enough?" In the next letter, however, he admits that "Man is not easily content: now he finds things too easy and then again he is not contented enough." We find that van Gogh heeded Socrates' advice to know thyself, as his letters exhibit a keen introspective psychoanalyst's eye. And yet the pages also shimmer with aphorisms beyond the self: "If one really loves nature, one can find beauty everywhere"; "...a woman is not old as long as she loves and is loved." It remains to be seen whether the book can sustain an invigorating experience for the casual reader. As with James Ramsey Ullman's The Day on Fire (a novel based on the life of Arthur Rimbaud), the reader may need to bring a special reverence for the artist in question to reap the full benefits of the book's breadth.

The Magic of Math: Solving for X and Figuring Out Why (2015)

Benjamin, Arthur. The Magic of Math: Solving for X and Figuring Out Why. Basic Books, 2015.

For a publisher (Basic Books) who brought out Douglas R. Hofstadter's Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid in 1979, I will read just about anything. And if the book purports to make math simple and fun I am all the more for it. Despite achieving a bachelor's degree in computer science, which forced me to endure three levels of calculus, linear algebra, statistics, and so on, I must confess that I've always had a love-hate relationship with math. It doesn't come as easily to me as reading and writing, so I shy away from it (some would call this playing to my strengths). Yet whenever someone, like the aforementioned Hofstadter, shows me some mathematical splendor I cannot help but be enlivened and interested in learning more. Luckily, Arthur Benjamin could rightly be called America's math teacher in the way Stanley Fish is America's English teacher. His passion for math and his profession as a teacher shine on every page. As the playful subtitle implies, the text reads like something written by that uncle who has an endless store of magic tricks and puns so awful you cannot help but laugh. In the first chapter, Benjamin employs amusing anecdotes and easy-to-follow examples to show how we can discover patterns in the particular to derive algorithms for the general. And he concludes the volume with a chapter on the endlessly-fascinating (see what I did there?) topic of infinity.

Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy (2017)

Lamott, Anne. Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy. Riverhead Books, 2017.

Like yesterday's book, this one takes its title from a song: Candi Staton's eponymous gospel song. And, as the title entails, Lamott's position boils down to radical mercy, looking circumstances and people directly in the face and saying, "Hallelujah anyway." Lamott reminds me of Marilynne Robinson, another exquisite novelist turned religious essayist. Both authors are of sound mind and high learning, easily shaking off accusations of narrow-mindedness and absence of erudition. Where they differ, however, is in Lamott's more colorful and pop-art tone against Robinson's controlled, mighty sentences. In the opening paragraph, Lamott captures something that Walker Percy hit on in his 1961 book The Moviegoer: we are often struck by revelation while doing or looking at the most meaningless, mundane things. There is something refreshing about a novelist writing of theological matters, and Lamott easily compels me to continue beyond my self-imposed twenty-five pages. The production of the little hardcover from Riverhead Books is also a joy to the eye, in the same manner of the recent Spiegel & Grau publication of Harold Bloom's The Daemon Knows: the incorporation of color, especially blue, in place of the standard black-and-white offers a riposte to the age of digital print and makes me long for a revival of illuminated manuscripts. 

My Back Pages (2017)

Moore, Steven. My Back Pages: reviews and essays. Zerogram Press, 2017.

Steven Moore—an irreverent but supremely knowledgeable literary critic, editor, and writer—is new to my radar, following in the footsteps of my recent fascination with Michael Dirda and Alberto Manguel. Reading book reviews wasn't something I ever thought I'd enjoy, but, after reading through a handful of glorified reading lists (like that of Clifton Fadiman), I started to enjoy the craft of capturing just enough of the spirit of a book to make the reader (of your review) feel that the book must be purchased and read at once. The first twenty-five pages of My Back Pages are taken up by Moore's own introduction, which is pleasant and inviting, so I will exclude that from my format and focus on the book proper. Since Moore chooses to arrange the reviews alphabetically by author surname (so as to eliminate bias), the first twenty-five pages are spread across Héctor Abad to Anne Beattie, with names like Nicholson Baker, Djuna Barnes, and John Barth in between. Already within the handful of reviews, it is clear that we are in the hands of an enigmatic literary scholar. Moore exhibits an engaging conjunction between casual, crisp writing (as if you're discussing books over coffee) and a database-like mind buzzing with search and retrieval algorithms from a petabyte of data about books. Given Moore's previous two publications (two volumes that construct an alternative history of the novel from beginnings to 1800), one will never be at a loss as to what to read next if one has access to Moore's reviews.