Larry Brown

Larry Brown’s South is the type of place country singers don’t mention because it’s too depressing. The setting: grime. The tone: grim. Saying a Larry Brown character has a drinking problem is redundant—beer is almost a character—as is saying that his characters are poverty-stricken or unexpressive.

This probably doesn’t sound like a positive review, but it is. You just need to know what you’re getting into.

I didn’t know it when I picked up Father and Son, a gothic story of generational sins, justice, and redemption. It left me wiped out for several days.

And any author who affects me that strongly is worth another try.

Dirty Work, an anti-war tale based mostly on the conversation between two dying vets, didn’t affect me as strongly as Father and Son, but his masterful collection of short stories, Facing the Music hit me again and again.

“Hitting” is a decent metaphor for how it feels to read him. I don’t always agree with his theology, and I wouldn’t care to meet many of his characters, and I absolutely think there are better ways to live—but you don’t read Larry Brown to find someone who can wrap you in cozy phrases you think are true. You read him because he can beat you to the verge of despair.

I think it makes you stronger.

William Faulkner

In the same way that you can’t describe John Piper’s writing without mentioning God, or Larry Brown’s writing without mentioning beer, you can’t describe Faulkner without the word “southern.”

I’m not southern, which creates a problem.

I’m glad I read As I Lay Dying and The Sound and the Fury. And I take some pride in having read them on my own instead of for a lit class, and in spite of lit teachers who consistently disliked him. I even read the one-sentence novella The Bear after it had been referred to disparagingly in another class.

And I’m glad I did. I enjoyed them.

But I really don’t get them.

Has something to do with the word “southern.”

Dan Brown

There are over-rated blockbusters, and then there is The DaVinci Code, which pushes the term “over-rated” to such an extreme that the language needs to invent a new word.

I wasn’t overly put off by the concept of Jesus being married (laughable historically, but an interesting premise for fiction), or the Catholic church being corrupt (correct historically, but a clichéd premise for fiction). What turned me off from the beginning were absolutely astoundingly implausible events, such as:

1. a septuagenarian is able to run through the halls of the Louvre

2. he is able to do so faster than his gargantuan, physically fit assassin

3. when gut shot, he is still able to compose numerous riddles, including some in different wings of the Louvre that are hundreds of meters apart

4. and the riddles involve writing in his own blood

5. and the writing involves elaborate word puzzles dependent on spelling ability in a foreign language

6. and riddles end with the old man positioning his body so that his death posture (which is remarkably free from spasms or wrenchings, especially for a gut shot) will be a clue to the riddle

7. and that the riddles are, in the end, so simple that I solved several of them faster than I could read the explanation, and I’m not that good with riddles, but they were unsolvable by master sleuths

8. and the master sleuths just happened to be experts on symbology and code breaking

9. and ….

Forget the blasphemy against the origins of Scripture.

Forget the absolute lies presented as facts and defended as “fictionalizations” about such well-documented events as the Council of Nicea.

Forget the most blatant attack on monotheism in a novel since Skinny Legs and All.

It’s a terrible mystery.

Which, I suppose, is why no one forgets the issues I just listed; they were what made it a best-seller. If the same story had been told, using the same characters and clues, about something like whether Bill Clinton really knows what the meaning of “is” is, no one would have read it.

Gillian Brown and George Yule

Teaching the Spoken Language was one of the strongest influences on my practice of teaching foreign languages. I can’t recommend it highly enough. In addition to being helpful, it has two wonderful attributes that are scarce in the world of pedagogy: it’s readable, and it’s short.

Douglas H. Brown

Principles of Language Learning is a pretty good book on the subject. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many principles, and I read this late in my career as a language teacher, and I can’t really remember anything else about it.

Mortimer J. Alder and Charles Van Doren

I don’t include much trivia on the lives of authors reviewed on this site for one reason: I don’t remember much of it.

For those of you who are interested, though, I remember that Charles Van Doren was the guy involved in the TV game-show scandal portrayed in the film Quiz Show.

And then he went on to co-author a very good book with Mortimer Alder: How to Read a Book.

If there’s a prize for least-sexy titles, this has got to be a top contender. But read the title as though the authors were aware of its lack of sales appeal, and wanted to get a chuckle at the expense of the marketing department, and you’ll have a sense for the type of dry humor and dead-on insight you’ll find in the book.

I wish I followed its advice more thoroughly—especially with authors like Denis Johnson and Larry Brown, whom I know I read too quickly—but my failure only proves Alder and Van Doren’s success: they know how to describe the work it takes to appreciate the great ones.

There is no book I would recommend more highly for language teachers.