Reading List

In his blog, Stephen Altrogge asks his readers what books are on their reading list. Aside from a mountain of Supreme Court cases and a slew of boring codals which I’m required to read for my classes (try reading the National Internal Revenue Code, and I’m sure you’d be lost in the maze of long articles with long enumerations, and with little regard for rules on antecedents), here are the books which I am reading or planning to read:

1. Fatelessness by Imre Kertesz. I’m halfway through it already. Very good thus far.
2. Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky. I have picked up and put down this one for a very long time. I got the book more than 5 years ago. I really hope to finish it this time.
3. A Severe Mercy by Sheldon Vanauken
4. Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis. This is to satisfy the C.S. Lewis fan in me.
5. 12 Ordinary Men by John Macarthur. I saw this book on Booksale for 60 pesos. I bought it without second thoughts.

Any recommendations?

I could never have known

Elie Wiesel, to my mind, has caricatured best the horrible massacre of people, of humanity, and of faith during the holocaust in his memoir, Night. (Although he might have the “best” retelling of the story, the story itself is worse than “worst.”) In a hundred pages or so, Wiesel is able to recount in vivid detail and in the simplest of language how families are separated from each other forever; how a single soldier, by merely pointing his finger to a man, woman or child can so easily decide his death; how prisoners had to do hard labor with nothing but crumbs of bread in their stomachs and in between lashings of a whip; how prisoners morph into helpless animals, and their captors into brutal beasts in a single day; how men who used to believe that God is as real as the next breathing person across the room soon find themselves echoing Nietzche: God is dead.

It is in the simplicity of the retelling that it is most haunting. But no matter how depressing the atrocities are, I know that’s all anyone who has never been in that concentration camp can ever do: be depressed, be disgusted, be enraged, take pity, vomit. Reading through the story I could feel in my bones the crushing defeat of Elie as he looked on a young boy (as young as he) suspended between heaven and earth in a rope, his tongue lolling as he desperately pants for breath, wanting to die but never quite dying yet. I could feel, but I could never have known.

And I hope I never would. I hope no one ever would.

And then I remembered the story of Job, and how he has suffered, too. How his wealth and kin disappear in a snap of a finger; how he is told the news that his properties are all gone; and how, no sooner than he learned of this, without even a chance to recover from a terrible blow, he is told again that all of his children are dead. So I am amazed when Job is able to declare: The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away. May the name of the Lord be praised.

From where did this faith come? This faith that would set aside the sharp and piercing claws of suffering to focus more on praising God? This, indeed, is grace. Purely grace.

(Photo credit: Lance)

Sneaking Around

It’s the first week of classes, and the cases that I have to master are piling up in my desk, threatening to drown me in a sea of white sheets if I don’t start reading. I, however, couldn’t resist the urge to sneak around during my free time to read a non-law related book. I’m talking about Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. This is a very good book that I immensely enjoyed, and which made me wonder why my cases in corporation law couldn’t be this interesting.

By the way, I take back what I said earlier. I didn’t sneak around to read some book unrelated to my course. When you take into consideration the fact that Atticus Finch is a lawyer, and the story involves the trial of Tim Robinson, then I guess that qualifies the book as “law related.” So, I was really studying all along.

Okay, I’m being a lawyer. I’m making excuses. I have to study now.

Book review soon.

They Began as Children

The Lord of the Flies tells the story of people–young and seemingly innocent boys who could not probably even spell their own names correctly–who fell prey to the curse of human depravity. The book opens with the main character, Ralph, making sense of his surroundings that is vastly different from the England that he is used to. He discovers that he is in an uninhabited island, along with an unaccounted number of children. There are no adults with them, so they decide to form their own little society–with Ralph as chief, with a set of rules, with attendant duties and obligations. They are a bunch of happy kids until Jack Merridew decides that he couldn’t stomach taking orders from Ralph anymore. Jack and his companions begin with hunting wild animals. They ended up killing other children–first, Simon, who was “batty” and different than the rest of them; and then Piggy, the fat, awkward, bespectacled, asthmatic kid who stood up against them, and who had more sense than any of these boys.

Author Williman Golding said of his book:

The theme is an attempt to trace the defects of society back to the defects of human nature. The moral is that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or respectable.

The Lord of the Flies is symbolic of human society. Yet, I believe it is also symbolic of the total depravity of man. In this book, even children are portrayed as capable of much evil.

Indeed, they began as children. They ended up as savages.