Reading for Lent

I'm not one to post a link for the sake of posting a link, but I couldn't pass up this excellent and lengthy "listicle" at The Millions by Catholic English teacher and writer Nick Ripatrazone. I have not read much of Ripatrazone's fiction (it's on my own to-read list) but I've become familiar with his work from The Millions and from his trove of interviews with Catholic writers. Like me, he teaches all day and comes home to a young family, but somehow finds time to be a staff writer for a prominent website and publish a few books. Yikes! His list is impressive, to say the least. I hope to keep coming back to it over the next 40 days.

No better way to celebrate Ash Wednesday than by turning to old Thomas Stearns!

How to Think Like Huck Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn often gets lumped with The Adventures of Tom Sawyer as a middle-school book, a 19^th-century young-adult novel. After all, the two books share a central cast of characters and concern themselves with the often miscreant adventures of pre-teen boys. Yet Huckleberry Finn is a much more serious book, and it has come to occupy a central position in the American canon in a way that Tom Sawyer never could. Twain’s aspirations are different in his later book, essentially a coming-of-age story, a bildungsroman.