Announcing the Tradition & Sanity Bookshop—with a Back to School List
Pages for a fall full of folios
This Friday’s post is a special post, in lieu of the usual Weekly Roundup, which will resume next week.—PAK
As any reader of Tradition & Sanity knows, we like recommending books — our own and many others.
For years now, people have been asking me, “Can you share your favorite books about X, Y, and Z?” What they meant was, in a public forum. While all of the books I’ve written carry bibliographies, they are not online for easy access by everyone. At lectures I’ve sometimes distributed handouts of favorite picks, but that’s limited only to a particular audience. The problem was, I didn’t have the right tool to fulfill this request.
Until Julian found it.
We are excited to announce a new resource that will make it far easier for us to recommend books and to keep our recommendations au courant: the Tradition & Sanity Bookshop.
This bookshop contains hundreds of titles in dozens of categories, carefully selected by yours truly (with Julian’s input as well). Using the Bookshop.org platform, we have been able to collect nearly all our favorite books in one handy place, where you can both see and purchase them.1
Nota bene. This list is a grand work in progress and will be continually updated and tweaked. We love to read (if you haven’t figured that out already), and there’s no way we could necessarily remember all our favorite books all at once, or fill out, from the get-go, every category that we decided to create. For instance, the category on apologetics is a bit thin at the moment because we’ve put our attention elsewhere for now — not because we think there are only a couple of books by C.S. Lewis worth reading! On the other hand, categories like Catholic Tradition & the Traditionalist Movement and Latin Mass & Liturgy are extremely well fleshed-out. As time goes on, we will give special attention to books for children and younger readers, as such lists are always very helpful to families.
Also… I’ll freely admit that my memory isn’t quite what it used to be. It’s likely I’ll have forgotten a few of my favorite titles. But time, and additional updates, will cure that problem.
What I can personally guarantee is that I’ve listed only books that I’ve found to be exceptionally good at doing what they set out to do, whether that be to educate, edify, or entertain. There is quite simply no dross anywhere in this list of gold and silver nuggets. It’s my “desert island” library.
Bookshop.org works as a sales channel for dozens of publishers, directing orders wherever they need to go while allowing folks like us to create custom pages with our own branding where we can conveniently bring various books together. When you purchase through the Tradition & Sanity Bookshop, we do get a small commission.
(In the interests of solidarity, let me add that if you wish to look at our lists but purchase the books directly from the publisher — especially if it’s a known Catholic one like Angelico Press, Arouca Press, Sophia Institute Press, TAN Books, Cluny Media, or the granddaddy of ’em all, Ignatius Press — please, by all means do so! It’s good to have options. Just remember that getting any of these titles off of Amazon, on the other hand, means both the publisher and the author get a much smaller share, and T&S no commission.)
To kick off this new project, Julian and I have selected a few books we’ve been enjoying recently to highlight as great fall reading. When the title of today’s post says “Back to School,” I don’t just have in mind grammar school, high school, or university. I consider every rational animal to be a lifelong student who should never stop learning, never stop reading, never stop growing intellectually. It’s “back to school” for every one of us, as we seek the joyful immersion and elevation in the truth that only reading can bring us. Enjoy!
JULIAN’S TRIO
Berry Picking
Wendell Berry is a well-known author in the circles I tend to move in, but I had never read anything by him until this summer, when I picked up The Unsettling of America: Culture & Agriculture. In this incisive and insightful work from 1977, Berry destroys the myths of modern “agribusiness” and shows how the cultural crisis of the West is intimately related to a disregard for the land.
He notes how modern science has a knack for “taking a solution and neatly dividing it into two problems,” an excellent example being that of waste and fertilizer. Where the traditional small farm uses almost all its waste (manure, food scraps, lawn clippings) as compostable fertilizer, the industrial farm has to “solve” the problem of disposing of huge quantities of waste (from 1000 cows in a tight pen, for example), while simultaneously importing vast quantities of chemical fertilizer to spray on the crops. Both require expense, and both result in inefficiencies. In the old system, however, nothing had to be trucked anywhere, or put in a landfill.
Deeply poetic and philosophical, Berry takes a close look at the relationship between the soul and body and how this affects our care of the earth. I highly recommend it for anyone interested in being a good human, and curious about how technology and the push for “mastery of nature” has manifested itself in contemporary big farming. What he wrote here in 1977 has not only remained true but seen even worse excesses — although it is fair to note that there’s also been something of a pushback and a growth in alternative models, largely thanks to Berry’s tireless writing over the decades (he just turned 90 a month ago).
A Flight of Unfancy
Wind, Sand and Stars is the most poetic true account of adventure I have ever read. The book is Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s autobiographical account of his flying exploits in the 1930s, as a pioneering air-mail pilot over Africa and South America. In tiny prop planes with few instruments, Saint-Exupéry and his fellow pilots charted their course by the stars, hoped to lock onto landmarks or faint radio signals and wind up unhurt at what were then the far corners of the world.
Often things did not go as planned. Wind, Sand and Stars recounts Saint-Exupéry famous crash in the Libyan desert when, disoriented at night and flying in cloud cover, he and a mechanic crashed at 180mph into the top of a sand dune. Without food, water, or a radio, the two managed to survive for three days in the desert, walking 150 miles before being found by a camel-riding Bedouin.
Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s most famous work, The Little Prince, is based in part on this Libyan crash. A man who combines poetry and philosophy to a high degree, Saint-Exupéry’s prose is lyrical and meditative as he recounts his exploits and musings thousands of feet over the earth. A glimpse into an age of highly educated explorers and pioneers, Wind, Sand and Stars ends with a fascinating account of the Spanish Civil War.
Drive Time
If flying airplanes over Africa is far-removed from our everyday experience, automobiles are not. The brilliant Matthew Crawford (whom I had the pleasure of meeting at a New Polity Conference this past spring) has given us, among his other fine books, Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road. This tome explores the human-machine relationship in the context of the road, offers the best apologia for manual transmission I’ve ever read, and debunks the idea that auto-drive and similar features are really “saftey enhancers” in any meaningful way.
Crawford also presents the best argument I’ve ever seen against self-driving cars, and draws on personal experience doing emissions testing to undermine the slogans surrounding electric vehicles. Funny, thoughtful, filled with both anecdotes and studies, Why We Drive is probably the book I’ve talked most about with the most people. I’d love for you to experience Crawford’s delightful style, too. By the way, the audiobook version is quite good, too.
DR. K’S TRIO
It’s folly to avoid Foley
While officialdom in the Church frowns severely upon all manifestations of tradition, be it in the wearing of cassocks and lace or the use of a bimillennial liturgy or the defense of the decalogue, “on the ground” there is a never-ending stream of indications that tradition is seeping in everywhere and saturating the rising generations who still believe in Christ.
Nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of publishing, where nine out of ten books appearing on liturgy, sacraments, spirituality, and the like are either markedly conservative or defiantly traditional in approach. My favorite in this genre lately is Michael P. Foley’s Lost in Translation: Meditating on the Orations of the Traditional Roman Rite.
Our hand missals give us pretty decent translations of the Latin texts of the ancient Roman Rite, but at the end of the day, the Latin says more and says it better. Foley is an expert guide who not only knows the nuances of the Latin, but equally importantly, knows how to explain them with examples and entertaining metaphors. For this reason, a book that could have been dry as dust becomes as sweet and tasty as fresh-squeezed orange juice. It’s simply astonishing to see how, week after week and feast after feast, the official authentic prayer of the Catholic Church manages to say so much in so few words, and manages to cover all the needs of man — including his need for the help of divine grace in the midst of mortal weakness, and his need for asceticism, and many other unpopular themes that were downplayed or eliminated in the Novus Ordo.
Foley serenely focuses on the TLM and doesn’t take pot shots at the 1960s “redactions,” so don’t worry, this book hasn’t got the polemical edge of my own books. What it does do, however, with subtlety and aplomb, is to demonstrate how good, solid, and correct, how profoundly Catholic, was the traditional lex orandi of the Church, and how it endlessly nourishes the soul that attends to it in faith. That can’t help but make one wonder why it was ever thought necessary to change it so radically.
A harrowing tale of fidelity and defiance
Over the years, I’ve often regretted that there wasn’t a convenient way to find out the history of the traditionalist movement. How exactly did it start? What were its roots? Who were all the major figures and how were they indebted to one another, communicating across languages and countries? Just how central was Archbishop Lefebvre, and would the movement have existed or flourished without him? How did the slow recognition and regularization by the Vatican of some aspects of traditionalism come about, and where did the fringe groups (e.g., sedevacantists) come from? There are so many questions when you think about it, and frankly, the literature has been inadequate.
Until now. Eminent French historian Yves Chiron has done us all an immense service by packing into one whopper of a book — Between Rome and Rebellion: A History of Catholic Traditionalism, with Special Attention to France — the fascinating story of Catholics who, for a wide variety of reasons, knew that something fishy was going on during and after the Second Vatican Council and who responded, as best they could, to the massive crisis of faith, catechism, Scripture, liturgy, family life, etc., that only seemed to burgeon and diversify as the years passed.
I literally could not put this book down once I got into it. For me it was like finding, at long last, the giant map that placed every country, province, and town in its proper place, and showed the roads connecting them. Admittedly, it does focus very much on France, but then again, France is pivotal in this movement. Even as all moderns are heirs of the French Revolution, so all traditional Catholics are heirs of the French Counterrevolution.
Rising above the particular stories and personalities involved in the narrative, I’d say a major benefit of this book is to show us, simultaneously, the justified rationale of the traditionalist movement — in other words, why it should and must exist — and the inherent dangers within it, such as its fissiparousness (its tendency to split apart into smaller groups). Knowing the historical strengths and weaknesses of the movement is vitally important as we go into the future, for, short of an unexpected miraculous divine intervention (or multiple such interventions), we will be fighting this rearguard battle for decades to come.
Remember, the iconoclast heresy in the Byzantine empire lasted for a full century. A full century of tearing down icons, defacing and burning them, torturing and killing their makers and defenders. We are not being tortured and killed, but we are fighting for icons that are even greater than those for which the Byzantine Catholics fought; and our enemies are just as willing to use the power of their positions to attempt to thwart us. Our resistance must be not only principled but virtuous and full of ardent charity for souls.
(To round out one’s knowledge of the history, I also recommend Sire’s Phoenix, Chessman’s Faith of Our Fathers, and Shaw’s The Latin Mass and the Intellectuals — all on my Catholic Tradition & the Traditionalist Movement booklist.)
A difficult topic to talk about well
Dom Pius Mary Noonan, OSB, prior of Notre Dame Priory in Tasmania (and a friend of mine — I enjoyed the blessing of a visit to his monastery in remote Tasmania a few years ago and gave some conferences to the monks), has written what is, hands down, the best, most detailed, most sympathetic, and most insightful treatment of the question of modestry in dress that I’ve ever seen: Fig Leaves Are Not Enough: Open Letters On Modesty in Dress.
We’re talking light-years ahead of any other book out there. The reason is quite simply that Dom Pius pushes the question deep into the realm of theology and spirituality, which most popular authors are not capable of doing, and writes with a pleasant, clear, non-confrontational style, without ever mincing words or backpedaling on the conclusions that follow from his unarguable premises.
I believe this book would be a game-changer, or rather, a life-changer, for any woman (especially young woman) who reads it. Men will also benefit from it, because Dom Pius’s explanation of the differences between masculine and feminine psychology illuminates a host of problems that otherwise seem inexplicable or downright bizarre. Having been wearied by interminable online debates in which Catholic traditionalists and Catholic feminists make superficial arguments back and forth, irritating each other and getting nowhere, I can say this book is a breath of fresh air. It would undoubtedly offend feminists, but the key point is this: Dom Pius provides a full argument, starting from Scripture and philosophy, and takes you each step of the way to the conclusions. So, if you disagree, you will see what you are disagreeing with, and why it matters.
For most readers, however, the reaction will not be irritation, but relief at finding a luminous explanation of modesty (with detailed advice, not vague generalities!), and an accompanying delight in knowing the truth and being set free by it.
Fall Music
If you need something to listen to, we’ve also got a few playlists to share that we’ve been building over the summer:
Some baroque to get you riled up:
And some funky traditional folk music to enjoy:
To support Julian’s work of writing and music,
please consider putting $5, $15, or $25 into his tip jar:
I say “nearly all” because there are a few that aren’t distributed through the channels used by this site, and so we had to leave them off. Time allowing, I will prepare an “appendix” for such — but let’s take this one step at a time!
As a nineteen-year-old here, please do consider us youths! As someone who loves to read, I would very much enjoy seeing your recommendations for us on both Catholic and fiction books (if you have any of the latter).
How wonderful that Julian found the platform, and that by your joint efforts we now can consider titles you recommend most highly (as opposed to titles you have ever recommended.) I am ordering Chiron, Shaw, Chessman and the one about modest dress to support Tradition and Sanity. And the post was a sheer delight to read, start to finish. (Having nearly memorized The Happy Prince when raising our son in the eighties, and reading Julian’s review, I will eagerly check the local library for that one.)
Thanks, you two, and God bless!
Thelma