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IP Novels Digest: First Day of Fall!
by Ignatius Press Novels
September 22, 2014 9:32 am Leave a Comment
Today is the first official day of Fall and what better way to celebrate than to curl up with one of our novels! Mark Nowakowski of Communities Digital News suggests Lucy Beckett’s The Leaves are Falling: Lucy Beckett may be a retired English literature professor, but she definitely doesn’t write like… Read more »
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This review originally appeared in Ignatius Novels author Roger B. Thomas’s personal blog, A Prince of the West (post here). Reprinted in full with permission. I’ve heard it said that if the world made sense, men would ride sidesaddle. I’m going to up that by claiming that if the world… Read more »
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Summer is almost over and these bloggers have some great end of summer reading suggestions! Sarah Reinhard at the Snoring Scholar suggests Do No Harm by Fiorella de Maria: “Enter Do No Harm, by Fiorella de Maria (Ignatius Press, 2013). It covers topics I am praying about and pretty sick-to-my-stomach about, topics… Read more »
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More great reviews on Tobit’s Dog! “Have you ever reached the end of a book to find yourself feeling a little sad that it was finished; as if you were saying goodbye to good friends? That is how I felt as I closed Tobit’s Dog, by Michael Nicholas Richard….Tobit’s Dog is a novel… Read more »
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Lately I’ve been reading nothing except Polish in Four Weeks by Marzena Kowalska, A Pocket Full of Rye by Dame Agatha Christie and, above all, Home Comforts: the Art & Science of Keeping House by Cheryl Mendelson. And I’ve been doing little except housework because when I consulted the Great Cheryl… Read more »
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Arthur Powers, author of The Book of Jotham, reviews Tobit’s Dog: “You should read this book,” Marguerite – the owner of In His Name, our local Catholic book store – told me. She has started a section of North Carolina writers, and Richard’s book was right next to mine. She knows books, and… Read more »
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I recently read Ray Bradbury
’s beautiful book Dandelion Wine. It is incredibly evocative of what being a child is like. I found myself pausing repeatedly in my reading as Bradbury’s prose jostled memories of my own childhood: the first realization that, yes, I was a real person and really truly alive; walking in the moonlight during a warm night and suddenly going from comfort to fear; the first real awareness of mortality; the joy of being allowed to stay up late and share in the world of adults; the foods, activities, music that come with summer.Ray Bradbury uses the metaphor of dandelion wine to represent capturing summer in a bottle, one that can be opened and shared even in the dead of winter to awaken those remembrances of joy and warmth. Bradbury’s writing is itself a bottle of that wine—I’m not sure how he did it, but he captured magic with his words. He himself humbly described how he felt when reading his own work: “Every so often, late at night, I come downstairs, open one of my books, read a paragraph and say, My God. I sit there and cry because I feel that I’m not responsible for any of this. It’s from God. And I’m so grateful, so, so grateful.” Read more »
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IP Novels Digest: 4th of July Edition
by Ignatius Press Novels
July 3, 2014 12:00 pm Leave a Comment
Check out these reviews and pick up some good novels to read for your long weekend! Happy Independence Day!
John Jollife from The Tablet reviewed The Leaves Are Falling:
This is the story of Josef, a Jewish boy who miraculously escapes from the devastation of wartime Lithuania, having lost all his family through the twin genocides carried out by the Nazis and the Russians…. In an important sense, England was not a part of Europe during the war, but adjacent to it. However much we suffered in the bombing and the fighting, we never knew invasion or occupation, or had to face the terrible choice between resistance and collaboration. And, of course, thanks to the Americans and the Russians, we were on the winning side. The worst of the horrors took place in Eastern Europe, and since they were hardly reported here when other dangers and disasters were so much nearer at hand, we were able to turn a blind eye. So as well as being a sensitive and evocative story, Beckett’s novel is a salutary eye-opener on what the eastern half of Europe suffered, and on what moulded its future for the next fifty years. And although it is an acutely personal story, like her sensitive and gripping previous novel, A Postcard from the Volcano, set in pre-war Germany, it reveals more of the truth about the twentieth century than many a textbook collection of facts can hope to do. Read more »
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More bloggers are raving about our novels!
Nancy Ward and Kelly Hansen reviewed Tobit’s Dog:
Tobit’s Dog is a love story amid the battle between heaven and hell for the souls of the good guys as well as the racists, murderers, rapists, thieves and connivers not portrayed in the biblical version of the Book of Tobit. In this imaginary take on the Book of Tobit, exciting enough a tale, Richard skillfully uses the characters, symbols, and scriptural principles. All the vital elements are there: Tobit’s sudden blindness and miraculous healing. Prejudice and bravery — this time, involving a lynching and Tobiah’s arrest for his compassion toward the boy hanging from a tree…. Reading the Book of Tobit a little along with Tobit’s Dog brought me great pleasure and insight into the plots of both books. The Book of Tobit, however, has no holy water from Lourdes, Negro nuns or KKK. Read more »
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Novels often fall into the trap of offering easy redemption. The wayward soul sees the error of his ways, has a quasi-mystical experience, and sets off on the road to the straight and narrow. It’s what we want to happen—even if it sacrifices some of the reality of human behavior… Read more »
