Saturday Good Reads - March 29, 2025

This past Tuesday was the 100^th birthday of writer Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964). I still remember when I discovered her writing. I was 24, working for Shell Oil in Houston, and a work colleague (who herself was a bit Flannery-esque) strongly me urged me to read her. Which I did. And I promptly devoured everything he’d written, including her letters, collected and published in 1979 as The Habit of Being. One of my favorite lines of hers was, “When I’m asked why Southern writers always seem to write about freaks, I say it’s because we’re still able to recognize one.”  

Her 100^th birthday meant she was just about everywhere you looked.

 

Poet and writer Sally Thomas has a reflection on O’Connor and her works, as does Chilton Williamson Jr. at Modern Age. Catherine Taylor at The Guardian wonders if we should still read her works. Shaun Usher at Letters of Note considers her letters (she was a marvelous letter writer), while Henry Eliot at Read the Classics recommends reading her short stories. Ralph Wood at Notre Dame’s Church Life Journal argues that her life and work embodied the three Lenten requirements of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Poet and writer Angela Alaimo O’Donnell has written three books about O’Connor, and she has three poems about the writer at Rabbit Room Poetry. If you want to read O’Connor, I’d recommend the edition of her collected works published by the Library of America. 

 

And if you’d like to hear O’Connor speak in her own voice, Open Culture has a recording of her reading “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” (The early part is difficult to follow, but it gets better, and you can click on “Show transcript.”)

 

More Good Reads 

 

Writing and Literature

 

The Vanishing White Male Writer – Jacob Savage at Compact Magazine.

 

Twenty-one facts and opinions about A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Henry Oliver at The Common Reader. 

 

Building: How You Can, While You Can – Joel Miller at Miller’s Book Review on Death Comes for the Archbishop by Willa Cather.

 

The American Revolution: The 250^th Anniversary

 

Discover Parick Henry’s Legacy – Cassandra Good at Smithsonian Magazine.

 

“Never heard anything more infamously insolent”: Loyalist and British response to Parick Henry’s famous speech – Rob Orrison at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

Virginia 250^th Events – Bert Dunkerly at Emerging Revolutionary War Era.

 

American Stuff

 

The Man Behind Reagan’s ‘Evil Empire’: Tony Dolan, RIP – Paul Kengor at The American Spectator.

 

Review: The Confederate Resurgence of 1864 by William Marvel – Civil War Books and Authors.

 

Israel

 

Israel’s Second War of Independence – Michael Oren at Clarity.

 

Poetry

 

“The Last Ship,” poem by J.R.R. Tolkien – Andrew Henry at The Saxon Cross.

 

“On Joy Harjo,” excerpt from Ambiguity and Belonging by Benjamin Myers – New Verse Review. 

 

At the Funeral Parlor – James Matthew Wilson at National Review.

 

“Spots of Time,” from the Prelude by William Wordsworth – Poems Ancient and Modern.

 

Faith

 

You Were Made for This – Brianna Lambert at From Glory to Ordinary.

 

Friends Come and Friends Go – Tanner Kay Swanson at Desiring God.

 

Life and Culture

 

In Praise of “Old” – Reid Makowsky at Front Porch Republic.

 

O Freedom – Anchor Hymns

 Painting: The Evening News, oil on canvas by Louis Charles Moeller (1855-1930).

Poets and Poems: Angela Alaimo O’Donnell and “Andalusian Hours”

If you read, you’ve been there. It may be a single book, or it may be an author. It may be a literary work, or a popular novel you pick up at the grocery store. But each page shouts that you’ve found a kindred spirit, someone who occupies your mind and knows you as well as you know yourself.

I can name the books when that’s happened to me: The Pier Falls by Mark Haddon; All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr; A Whispered Name by William Brodrick; The War of the End of the World by Mario Vargas Llosa; Farewell, I’m Bound to Leave You by Fred Chappell; Grief is a Thing with Feathers by Max Porter; David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. There are others, including a short story. I first read “A Good Man is Hard to Fund” by Flannery O’Connor in the 1970s, and as soon as I began reading, I knew with dead certainty what exactly was going to happen. As bizarre as that story was and remains, it is about the American South I grew up in and recognized.

For writer and teacher Angela Alaimo O’Donnell, the kindred spirit is that same Flannery O’Connor.

To continue reading, please see my post today at Tweetspeak Poetry.

Sitting at the dealership

Sitting in this nice waiting room

at the car dealership, waiting while

mechanics serviced the car, 

waiting areas didn’t used to be

so nice, this one had coffee, and

bottled water neatly lined up

in a small refrigerator, and popcorn,

with the showroom of new cars

shining and sparkling conveniently 

close by. The gray-haired man

shuffles in, glances at the coffee,

and ponders the pre-packaged muffins,

finally selecting the wild blueberry.

He sits, contented, and opens the book

that had been tucked under his arm.

I’m too far away to see the title, 

but the cover photograph gives it away:

he’s reading Mystery and Manners

by Flannery O’Connor, while he waits

for his car to be serviced, and I think

a good car is hard to find.

Photograph by Daniele Fantin via Unsplash. Used with permission.

A warm electric blanket

It’s not a warm electric

blanket, she said, wrapping

itself around us, a cocoon.

It’s not a blanket warmed

for our comfort and ease,

our protection and defense,

to keep the cold away. No,

she said, it is not that nor

any of those things

we think it is, we believe it is,

we so desperately demand it is.

Rather, she said,

it is the cross.

Photograph by Tilen Hrovatic via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.

Flannery O’Connor and the Disappearance of Celebrity

This article first appeared at The Christian Manifesto.

I can pinpoint the year I first read Flannery O’Connor. It was 1976, I was 24 going on 25, and a new person had joined the Public Affairs Department at Shell Oil where I worked. She came from a well known Houston family, had lots of eccentric relatives and was an extraordinarily fine writer. She and I talked about Shell, the oil industry, relatives, literature and writing; most of all, writing.

She was shocked that I hadn’t read Flannery O’Conner.

I started with Three by Flannery O’Connor, which included The Violent Bear It Away, Wise Blood and A Good Man is Hard to Find. From there I went to The Complete Stories, and then to Mystery and Manners, which included her essays and speeches. Finally, I read The Habit of Being, her letters collected and published in 1979, quite some time after her death (in 1964 from lupus).

There are all kinds of stories about Miss O’Connor, some true and many apocryphal. One that could be true or untrue is that John Kennedy O’Toole left New Orleans to drive to Georgia to see her, learned she had died some years before, and killed himself, leaving his manuscript for his mother to worry over. His mother did, made a huge pest of herself, and finally convinced author Walker Percy to read it. The manuscript became A Confederacy of Dunces and won the Pulitzer Prize (this is still the only novel I’ve read that’s set in what I recognize as authentic New Orleans).

O’Connor’s works were – are – extraordinary. She is often considered a Southern writer, and she is that in the sense she was born and lived in the South. But she is more than that, too.

Her writing bears the likeness of William Faulkner but in a wholly original way. She is a kind of heir to Faulkner, particularly in the sense of having challenged the norms of literature and writing.

But, as if not more importantly, she is also the heir to G.K. Chesterton. Like him, she was Catholic. As author Bret Lott points out in an essay on O’Connor in a 2012 issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, she is a Catholic writer even more than she is a Southern writer, and that’s something not normally taught in the English classes where her stories are studied.

Lott says something else in his essay (not available online, unfortunately) that strikes me as profoundly true: you will not find her in her stories. When you read one of her stories, you forget who’s written it; the point is the story, not the author. In an age of instant and often fleeting celebrity, her stories still resonate – and one of the reasons may very well be that she refused to be one. For her, the story, not the author, was the story, and she was not very patient with questions about what stories meant or what different aspects or elements or plot devices or characters were really about. She would tell such questioners to “read the story.”

She had a model for this, of course, and that was Jesus. He spent 33 years on this planet, and then physically removed himself from the Christian narrative – the narrative that he is still the point of. In many ways, the fact that he’s physically removed makes the mystery all the greater and all the more important, and he’s left us his story to study, to tell and to live. And one day he’ll return to complete it.

It was that mystery that defined O’Connor’s writing. She’s been dead for almost 50 years, but her influence has, if anything, grown in the intervening years. She left us with a number of remarkable stories, stories that “tell” just as well now as they did when she first published them.

Flannery O'Connor and the Avoidance of Celebrity

I can pinpoint the year I first read Flannery O’Connor. It was 1976, I was 24 going on 25, and a new person had joined the Public Affairs Department at Shell Oil where I worked. She came from a well known Houston family, had lots of eccentric relatives and was an extraordinarily fine writer. She and I talked about Shell, the oil industry, relatives, literature and writing; most of all, writing.

She was shocked that I hadn’t read Flannery O’Conner.

I started with Three by Flannery O’Connor, which included The Violent Bear It Away, Wise Blood and A Good Man is Hard to Find. From there I went to The Complete Stories, and then to Mystery and Manners, which included her essays and speeches. Finally, I read The Habit of Being, her letters collected and published in 1979, 15 years after her death from lupus.

There are all kinds of stories about Miss O’Connor, some true and many apocryphal. One that could be true or untrue is that John Kennedy O’Toole left New Orleans to drive to Georgia to see her, learned she had died some years before, and killed himself, leaving his manuscript for his mother to worry over. His mother did, made a huge pest of herself, and finally convinced Walker Percy to read it. The manuscript became A Confederacy of Dunces and won the Pulitzer Prize.

O’Connor’s works were – are – extraordinary. She is often considered a Southern writer, and she is that in the sense she was born and lived in the South. But she is more than that, too.

Her writing bears the likeness of William Faulkner but in a wholly original way. She is a kind of heir to Faulkner, particularly in the sense of having challenged the norms of literature and writing.

But, as if not more importantly, she is also the heir to G.K. Chesterton. Like him, she was Catholic. As author Bret Lott points out in an essay on O’Connor in the most recent issue of The Writer’s Chronicle, she is a Catholic writer even more than she is a Southern writer, and that’s something not normally taught in the English classes where her stories are studied.

Lott says something else in his essay (not available online, unfortunately) that strikes me as profoundly true: you will not find her in her stories. When you read one of her stories, you forget who’s written it; the point is the story, not the author. In an age of instant and often fleeting celebrity, her stories still resonate – and one of the reasons may very well be that she refused to be one. For her, the story, not the author, was the story, and she was not very patient with questions about what stories meant or what different aspects or elements or plot devices or characters were really about. She would tell such questioners to “read the story.”

She had a model for this, of course, and that was Jesus. He spent 33 years on this planet, and then physically removed himself from the Christian narrative – the narrative that he is still the point of. In many ways, the fact that he’s physically removed makes the mystery all the greater and all the more important, and he’s left us his story to study, to tell and to live. And one day he’ll return to complete it.

It was that mystery that defined O’Connor’s writing. She’s been dead for 48 years, but her influence has, if anything, grown in the intervening years. She left us with a number of remarkable stories, stories that “tell” just as well now as they did when she first published them.

This post was originally published by The Christian Manifesto, but they revamped the site and the archive disappeared. So I’m occasionally reposting a few of the articles.

Angela Alaimo O’Donnell’s “The Province of Joy”

I first started reading the works of Flannery O’Connor in 1975. A friend at the company I then worked for introduced me to A Good Man is Hard to Find, and I was hooked. I read all of her fiction; Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose; and The Habit of Being, her letters as collected and compiled by Sally Fitzgerald.

O’Connor was a Southern writer, yes, but she transcended the region. She was a literary writer, and her reputation grew, and grew mightily, after her death from lupus in 1964.

Her characters and plots can seem strange when you first start reading, and can be jarring and disconcerting. But as you read her fiction, you learn that behind the misfits and charlatans and con-men are the universal themes of grace and redemption.

Another odd thing about her writing, and this may very well be what originally pulled me into it, was that she was a devout Catholic writer writing within (and often about) a largely Protestant South. For a reader like me, a Protestant raised in largely Catholic New Orleans, her writing was almost instantly familiar, in both a specific and a general sense. I knew what it was to feel something of a misfit in my culture.

O’Connor prayed, too, and she prayed in accordance with her Catholic faith. In The Province of Joy: Praying with Flannery O’Connor, author and poet Angela Alaimo O’Donnell has a created a devotional guide, on that reflects both O’Connor’s Catholic faith and the themes of her writing.

O’Donnell structures the book for a full seven-day week, with devotions and prayer for both morning and evening. Each day has a theme, and the order of the devotional is far more structured than what might be familiar to most Protestants (and even some Catholics).

The main elements for each time of prayer are a gospel meditation; a psalm; a reading; a quotation from O’Conner’s writings; a canticle or song; the Lord’s Prayer and a prayer to St. Raphael in the mornings; and a concluding prayer. The canticles, the Lord’s prayer and the prayer to St. Raphael are repeated each day, and while it may seem repetitive at first, in practice it is not. It’s a kind of liturgy that becomes new and different with each day’s theme.

The evening canticle is the Magnificat of Mary, her song in response to learning from Gabriel that she would give birth to the Messiah. In this devotion, however, Mary’s song becomes our song, providing a depth of understanding that I hadn’t previously encountered, in spite of the number of times I’ve read it.

O’Donnell provides a solid introduction to O’Connor and her works, and includes a number of resources (and prayers) in the appendix. The daily readings also include information for additional consideration and reflection.

I wasn’t sure what to expect when I began reading it, but The Province of Joy, like the author who inspired it, takes us to a different, more insightful place in our faith.

Related:

My review of O’Donnell’s Saint Sinatra: Poems at TweetSpeak Poetry last year.


The Province of Joy is published by Paraclete Press, which provided a review copy of the book.

Counting the cost

When I first starting reading Flannery O’Connor, I was as taken by her essays and non-fiction writing as I was by her fiction. She had these wonderful quotes, where she could take a subject and turn it on its head, and make you see something you hadn’t seen before. In fact, she was much like G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis in that regard.

I read her letters, many of which were collected and edited by Sally Fitzgerald for The Habit of Being, and her essays in Mystery and Manners (edited by Fitzgerald with her husband Robert). In fact, I read both books twice, the second time with a pen in hand to mark the great quotes. One of my favorites was, “Everywhere I go I’m asked if I think universities stifle writers. My opinion is, they don’t stifle enough of them. There’s many a best-seller that could have been prevented by a good teacher.” Another one: “The truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.”

One statement she made surprised me at the time; I read it only two or three years after becoming a Christian and I didn’t quite understand it, at least from my own experience. This is what she said in one of her letters: “What people don't realize is how much religion costs. They think faith is a big electric blanket, when of course it is the cross.”

O’Connor was echoing Jesus when she wrote this. Jesus didn’t say, “Pick up your warm electric blanket and follow me.” No, he said, “Pick up your cross and follow me.”

We know what happens on a cross.

You die.

In Mere Christianity, C.S. Lewis doesn’t so much explain what the cost is and describe how it comes to be paid, or counted. If you go to the Lord to deal with some particular sin, you’ll be cured, but He’s going to want more, a lot more. “That is why,” Lewis writes, “he warned people to ‘count the cost’ before becoming Christians. ‘Make no mistake,’ He says, ‘if you let me, I will make you perfect. The moment you put yourself in My hands, that is what you are in for. Nothing less, or other, than that.’”

As difficult as this sounds, there’s an unexpected side to it: “…this Helper who will, in the long run, be satisfied with nothing less than absolute perfection, will also be delighted with the first feeble, stumbling effort you make tomorrow to do the simplest duty.” Lewis quotes the 19^th century George MacDonald to put this is its simplest terms: “God is easy to please, but hard to satisfy.”

I was puzzled by O’Connor’s words when I first read them. Thirty or so years later, they make perfect sense. Time, experience and learning has taught me the truth of her words. Faith is indeed the cross, and nothing less than the cross.

As odd as it sounds, that’s a good thing.

Jason Stayszsen and Sarah Salter have been leading us us in a discussion of Mere Christianity. To see other posts about this chapter, "Counting the Cost," please visit Sarah's site at Living Between the Lines.

Flannery O'Connor and the Avoidance

"Flannery O'Connor and the Avoidance," my article on how the writer took issue with the idea of "author as celebrity," is now posted at Christian Manifesto. Take a look and tell me what you think.