It's been a month since I read these; I'm not sure I even remember them

William Trevor: Death in Summer

Part of my frustration with the modern novel is that so many of them feel like first drafts. I don't mean to say that they are packed with any sort of glaring errors or annoying inconsistencies. When I draft a paper, I often don't realize what I want to say until I've written it. I then cheerfully delete the entire thing and start over, main point now clearly in mind. For all you know, I've rewritten this four times by the time you get a hold of it. I haven't, but if I expected you to pay for it, I would have.

Which is the only thing I have against Death in Summer. It's delightfully well-written, and lays out a Newton's cradle of desire that nicely outlays a world where everybody wants something "with a passion that will not be stilled (133). Mrs. Biddle wants Albert wants Pettie wants Thaddeus--who is also wanted by Mrs. Ferry. Thaddeus wants none of the other characters, not even his charming wife. He has none of the book's urgent passion, except for passion itself; he wants nothing more than to be able to want something.

But in the last chapter, the book takes a philosophical turn that I am unable to relate believably to the rest of the book. At the very end, Thaddeus begins to look at time like Boethius--simultaneous, instead of linear. If only this were somewhere earlier in the book, if only it related somehow, I would find the book irresistible. Unless Trevor is trying to make a statement about freedom from desire being the way to nirvana. But that would require going back and rewriting this analysis, a task up to which I am not.

Joseph Campbell: The Power of Myth

This book feel like Chinese water torture: a steady drip of wisdom, when I know there's a torrent, an aquifer waiting to burst. The book isn't a book; it's a transcript of a wonderful conversation, and therefore never really goes anywhere. It's just Campbell dropping cold, clear drops of water on your forehead without ever opening the floodgates. Campbell refers at one point to being ravenously consumed with an author in a way that Lin Yutang calls a love affair. I wonder if, were I to read his actual books, whether Campbell and I would fall in love as well.

Basic Teachings of the Buddha: edited by Glenn Wallis

What is there to say about the Buddha, other than I should have read this thirty years ago. Next to it, The Bible seems whiny, and A Course in Miracles seems obfuscatory. And serious props to the editor, whose simultaneously scholarly and epigrammatic commentary are responsible for a percentage of my delight.