Hedda Gabler, by Henrik Ibsen

This has some similarities to Madame Bovary in that the title character is a beautiful woman who marries a good natured man that she finds boring and who looks for excitement elsewhere. 

However, Hedda Gabler has a cold calculating nature that I don't remember Emma Bovary as having.   She is quite capable of deliberately ruining other people's lives purely for her own entertainment.  She has a foil in her friend Mrs. Elvsted and also Aunt Julie--women who freely give of themselves to care for others. The two men who are interested in Hedda are Judge Brack, whose coldness and calculation are quite similar to her own, and Eilert Lovborg, an old beau with a generous, romantic nature and a self-destructive streak.  The play is about how these differing personalities affect each other's lives.

L'Étrangère, by Sándor Márai

This is a story about a man who is searching for the ultimate meaning of life in all the wrong places, to the point where his life spirals out of control, and he falls into despair, if not insanity.  I did find it too slowly paced at times (too much description about the protagonist's random musings and surroundings). Poor guy would have benefited greatly by reading St. Augustine's <i>Confessions</i>, I think, but then Marai wouldn't have had anything to write about if he had.

But then again, maybe Márai might have made a more interesting, complex and better story out of this man's turning his life around and with more material he could have cut out some of the random musings and surroundings that bogged me down.

Portrait of a Marriage, by Sandor Marai

This novel is an account of the formation and demise of a marriage told from three points of view: the wife's, the husband's, and the husband's mistress's. The writing and situations were realistic and convincing enough, but there was too much focus on class differences in the book: the husband could be described as upper middle class, the wife lower middle, the mistress (who was the housekeeper in the husband's mother's home), is working class. Since they all knew each other's background before choosing to get involved with each other, I did find it tiresome that they kept on feeling so self-conscious about it, even after getting married. If class differences are that important, why not marry someone else? And I didn't find any of the three main characters likable, so I didn't enjoy the book as much as I could have.

How the West Really Lost God, by Mary Eberstadt

Mary Eberstadt presents a convincing theory that family formation and family life help to pass on and enforce religious belief from one generation to the next rather than just being an effect of religious belief. She points out how marriage, family formation, and birth rates tend to rise and fall in tandem with religious practice among populations, and how this correlation tends to hold more consistently through history than other explanations of why belief in God rises and falls, such as political or economic changes, wars, industrialization, etc. The book can be a dry read at times, because it does deal with statistics, but very worthwhile for those who are interested in the subject. 

Fatima for Today, by Father Andrew Apostoli

We've just passed the centenary of the Fatima apparitions, so I wanted to learn more about them.  This book makes an excellent one stop shop about the apparitions.  Everything you could possibly want to know about them is in here.  Fr. Apostoli relates the content of what the three children saw, the historical context in which they happened, biographical information about the children and their families, and about the history of their town and of Portugal, how the Fatima apparitions were determined to be reliable, how they meshed with other preceding and contemporaneous apparitions given to other visionaries, the Church's interpretation of the visions, how successfully the Church has followed the instructions of our Lady, and how the predictions came to pass.  There is also practical information in the book about how to do the devotions properly, as well as the prayers taught to the three children.

Tortured for Christ, by Richard Wurmbrand

In his  1978 Harvard commencement speech, Solzhenitsyn said:

Through intense suffering, our country has now achieved a spiritual development of such intensity that the Western system in its present state of spiritual exhaustion does not look attractive...A fact that cannot be disputed is the weakening of human beings in the West while in the East they are becoming firmer and stronger.  68 years for our people, and 30 years for the people of Eastern Europe: during that time we have been through a spiritual training far in advance of Western experience.

If you were to become curious about the nature of the spiritual training Solzhenitsyn means, Richard Wurmbrand's life provides a good example.  Wurmbrand was a Romanian who grew up in a secular Jewish family, converted to Christianity as a young man, and became a Lutheran pastor.  When the Soviets took control of Romania after driving out the Nazis, they established a Communist totalitarian government that drove the genuine churches underground.  For standing up to them, Wurmbrand and his wife were both sentenced to lengthy terms in what can only be described as a torture camp.  Despite the horrific conditions, this is an inspiring story of hope, endurance, and the great consolation of faith in God.

The Origin of Russian Communism, by Nicolas Berdyaev

Excellent book on the various influences in Russian history, culture, and religion that helped shape how Communism was implemented in the Soviet Union. 

Berdyaev cites the Muscovite period and the reign of Peter the Great as particularly influential, because that was when the governments were most absolutist and repressive, using methods to control the population and the church that prefigured those used by the Bolsheviks. 

He cites the messianic cast of mind of the Russian Orthodox Church, which thought of Moscow as the Third Rome (after the fall of the Roman and Byzantine Empires) and believed that it had a great mission to fulfill in the world. Similarly, Soviet Russia took upon itself a special mission: it was the means by which communism was to be spread throughout the world. 

Berdyaev also discusses how the Russian Orthodox peasantry, unlike their Western Christian counterparts, never developed a strong concept of private property. They saw the land and its resources as belonging to God, and anyone who works them ought to be able to make a living off them. They had a feeling that the gentry were wrong to have such large estates, so that when the Bolsheviks began confiscating the estates and turning them into collective farms, the peasants were easily sold on the idea. 

Berdyaev himself was a disenchanted Marxist who converted back to the Russian Orthodox Church. He was among the exiles in the “philosophers’ ships” of the 1920’s, when Lenin threw out much of Russia’s dissident intelligentsia. Unfortunately, despite his disappointment with Marxism, Berdyaev did retain (at least at the time he wrote this book—I don’t know about later in life) the same mistake to which some Christians are prone: the view that socialism is a more moral economic system than the free market, and that there must be some way to make it work without resorting to evil means or evil results. 

Mr. Reginald Peacock's Day, by Katherine Mansfield

Amusing story about a typical day in the life of a man (a singing teacher) who has a quite high opinion of himself. He condescends to tolerate the foibles and shortcomings of those around him, of course not recognizing that he has any of his own.

A Shropshire Lad, by A. E. Housman

Evocative collection of poems on various themes such as youth, love, early death, the beauty of nature, looking back on one's life, and the passage of time. Some are joyful and even comic, but most have a melancholy atmosphere. The rhythm and rhyme of the words are so natural, nothing forced. 

I found it a very enjoyable read. The haunting quote from poem #35, On the idle hill of summer at the beginning of Winston Churchill's account of World War I, introduced me to this book. 

A Match for Mary Bennet, by Eucharista Ward

The premise is interesting but I found the book much too slowly paced and without the nuanced, sometimes wry observations of Austen on her characters and their society. It seemed like the author spent too much time trying to develop detailed plot lines and not enough on making the characters seem real or bringing out insightful commentary about their thoughts and situations. I lost interest and bailed out about halfway through. Not surprised, though. Jane Austen is a hard act to follow.