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When I Was a Child I Read Books: Essays, by Marilynne Robinson
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Marilynne Robinson has built a sterling reputation as a writer of sharp, subtly moving prose, not only as a major American novelist, but also as a rigorous thinker and incisive essayist. In When I Was a Child I Read Books she returns to and expands upon the themes which have preoccupied her work with renewed vigor.
In "Austerity as Ideology," she tackles the global debt crisis, and the charged political and social political climate in this country that makes finding a solution to our financial troubles so challenging. In "Open Thy Hand Wide" she searches out the deeply embedded role of generosity in Christian faith. And in "When I Was a Child," one of her most personal essays to date, an account of her childhood in Idaho becomes an exploration of individualism and the myth of the American West. Clear-eyed and forceful as ever, Robinson demonstrates once again why she is regarded as one of our essential writers.
- Sales Rank: #560481 in Books
- Published on: 2012-03-13
- Released on: 2012-03-13
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.56" h x .88" w x 5.93" l, .75 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 224 pages
From Booklist
*Starred Review* There is more food for thought in one of Robinson’s well-turned paragraphs than in entire books. Esteemed for her award-winning novels Gilead (2004) and Home (2008), Robinson is a consummate and clarion essayist. In her third and most resounding collection, she addresses our toxic culture of diminishment, arguing that as our view of society shrinks, public discourse coarsens, corruption spreads, education is undermined, science denigrated, spirituality and loving kindness are siphoned from religion, and democracy itself is imperiled. What has made America great, she reminds us, is our “heroic” focus on and investment in the public good. In the brilliantly corrective “Austerity as Ideology,” Robinson looks back to her Cold War childhood, during which America’s response to crisis was to ramp up our commitment to art and science. Now she fears that our obsession with “market economics” is putting us in danger of “losing the ethos that has sustained what is most to be valued in our civilization” as public schools, universities, libraries, and the free press come under siege. In “Imagination and Community,” Robinson lucidly and movingly explains how the imagination is the wellspring of healthy communities, and how profoundly reading enhances our capacity for sympathy. Intellectually sophisticated, beautifully reasoned with gravitas and grace, Robinson’s call to reclaim humaneness beams like the sun breaking through smothering clouds. HIGH-DEMAND BACKSTORY: The great success of Robinson’s novels will ensure interest in her brilliant reflections on the most urgent questions of our lives. --Donna Seaman
From Bookforum
When I Was A Child I Read Books, is by far Robinson's most political work to date, and is a defense of what she considers the grand traditions of American democracy—generosity, hope, and radical openness to new experience—waged against a society that seems to believe itself in irreversible decline. Robinson's great virtue as an essayist is her ability to combine a deep knowledge of this country's literary, intellectual, and religious canon with a demotic, impassioned tone that is American in the highest sense. —Charles Petersen
Review
“Brilliant . . . As the credo of a liberal Christian, Robinson's new book of essays stands on its own. But it is also an illuminating commentary on her novels . . . This collection is a rewarding reminder that the author's faith infuses every word she writes . . . Like every good preacher, Marilynne Robinson judges others while including herself--in theory at least--in the judgment.” ―Andrew Delbanco, New York Times Book Review
“With her newest book of essays, When I Was A Child I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson affirms that my deep admiration and respect for her are well-placed. ‘Every great question is very old,' she writes, and here, as has been the case throughout her career as a writer, the great questions concern her most. Robinson displays an exceptional gift for deciphering the zeitgeist and offering generous counsel . . . Not only is her book wise; it is full to the brim with clear, resonant, melodic prose. These essays do two things very well. First, they provide a clear, largely unflattering diagnosis of America . . . Second, her essays affirm the extraordinary meaningfulness of words . . . She wants to dig deeply into our minds, examine the history and biases that underlie our assumptions, and re-animate our consciousness . . . Every measured sentence in this book serves as a bracing antidote to the thoughtless bobble-headed chorus of consumerism, the bellicosity of atheistic scientism, and the monotonous, disorienting mantras of the economists. Robinson uses her extraordinary gifts as a thinker and writer to offer a close-up look at what our world is and how we got here, and she very deliberately complicates our assumptions . . . Robinson seeks to waken rather than enchant, and her deliberate complications shatter the simplistic, polarizing rhetoric that plays fast and loose with truth as it fumbles for sound-bite clarity . . . When I Was A Child doesn't offer much for the earnest optimist, eager to change the world. But it thunders with love, compassion, difficult hope and extraordinary wisdom.” ―Kurt Armstrong, Paste Magazine
“The Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist returns with a collection of essays that are variously literary, political and religious . . . Robinson is a splendid writer, no question--erudite, often wise and slyly humorous (there is a clever allusion to the birther nonsense in a passage about Noah Webster). Articulate and learned descriptions and defenses of the author's Christian faith.” ―Kirkus
“Author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel Gilead, Robinson weighs in with a series of tightly developed essays, some personal but mostly more general, on the Big Themes: social fragmentation in modern America, human frailty, faith. Her project is a hard-edged liberalism, sustained by a Calvinist ethic of generosity . . . In these times of the ever-ascending religious right, in the aftermath of what she sees as the ideologically secularist-driven cold war, Robinson bravely explores the corrosive potion of ‘Christian anti-Judaism' and what it really ought to mean to be ‘a Christian nation.'” ―Publisher's Weekly (starred review)
“There is more food for thought in one of Robinson's well-turned paragraphs than in entire books. Esteemed for her award-winning novels Gilead (2004) and Home (2008), Robinson is a consummate and clarion essayist. In her third and most resounding collection, she addresses our toxic culture of diminishment, arguing that as our view of society shrinks, public discourse coarsens, corruption spreads, education is undermined, science denigrated, spirituality and loving kindness are siphoned from religion, and democracy itself is imperiled . . . Intellectually sophisticated, beautifully reasoned with gravitas and grace, Robinson's call to reclaim humaneness beams like the sun breaking through smothering clouds . . . The great success of Robinson's novels will ensure interest in her brilliant reflections on the most urgent questions of our lives.” ―Booklist (starred review)
“The indomitable Marilynne Robinson radiates genius in her collection of essays.” ―Vanity Fair
“[When I Was a Child I Read Books] is the equivalent of an uncommon library ticket, an admission to the subjects that most obsess her: the frail human enterprise, faith and its absence, mysteries that elude language. . . This book is scholarly closework, as painstaking as a Victorian sampler but more subtle. She is determined never to undervalue or oversimplify. There is a sense that to be meditative is a necessary part of being alive. She is especially clear on the absurdity of seeing religion and science as adversarial . . . Robinson is adept at studying the small print and reading between the lines but she never forgets to look up at the stars.” ―Kate Kellaway, The Guardian
“When I Was a Child, by far Robinson's most political work to date, turns her old questions to the problems now directly confronting us. The book is a defense of what she considers the grand traditions of American democracy--generosity, hope, and a radical openness to new experience--waged against a society that seems to believe itself in irreversible decline . . . Robinson's great virtue as an essayist is her ability to combine a deep knowledge of this country's literary, intellectual, and religious canon with a demotic, impassioned tone that is American in the highest sense . . . Robinson is a representative of the grand tradition of liberal Protestantism, still carrying the flame for the likes of Jonathan Edwards and Paul Tillich . . . For those who prefer their liberal American dream in the language of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, Robinson has, for the past three decades, been the standard-bearer.” ―Charles Petersen, Bookforum
“The greatest pleasures of this book are its provocations, which are inseparable from its prose. Ms. Robinson channels the cadences of Emerson and Whitman and says that she owes the stately shape of her sentences to her school-days reading of Cicero. ‘I seem to know by intuition a great deal that I cannot find words for,' she writes, ‘and to enlarge the field of my intuition every time I fail to find these words.' On the evidence of language itself, she marvels at the capacity of human perception. She describes the wonder expressed by a group of French students about the number of English words that describe light--glimmer, glitter, glisten, glean, glow, glare, shimmer, sparkle, shine--which testify to a human need for distinctions beyond the bare essentials. Words like ‘grace,' ‘soul' and ‘miracle,' she suggests, speak to registers of experience that even the most secular among us are reluctant to relinquish. When I Was a Child I Read Books may seem like a book addressed to Christians--some of the essays have the whiff of the pulpit--but Ms. Robinson's church is exceptionally broad. Her essays are psalms to an indivisible America.” ―Thomas Meaney, The Wall Street Journal
“At her best she's a wise, droll and incisive essayist. These pieces concern faith, education, family, writing and reading, and . . . they're enlightening and a pleasure to read . . . Some of the most effective and immediate essays in the collection deal with Robinson's decision to become a writer and how she approaches her craft . . . These pages will be of great interest to her many devoted readers and would-be novelists alike.” ―Kevin Canfield, The Kansas City Star
“It's never been easy to categorize Marilynne Robinson, whose new collection of essays . . . is no exception. Each of the pieces gathered here practices what Robinson preaches, combating the lazy habit of using ‘a straight-edge ruler in a fractal universe' . . . she works to free her readers from the ‘tendency to fit a tight and awkward carapace of definition over humankind,' in which we ‘try to trim the living creature to fit the dead shell' . . . When we are alone, Robinson suggests, we're best positioned for a ‘meditative, free appreciation of whatever comes under one's eye'--including other people, who we're otherwise apt to misread. As this collection makes clear, Robinson's own eyes read widely--and well.” ―Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Robinson's penchant for complex sentences and lofty subjects mirrors the thoughtfulness of what she wants to say. And while she may be an old-fashioned stylist, she is also a progressive thinker who yokes rigorous scholarship with profound attention to her subjects . . . Her new essay collection, ‘When I Was a Child I Read Books,' may best be served with a straight-back chair and a mug of piping-hot black coffee. But I say, strap yourself in. Robinson's words, girded by a scholar's seat and a stimulant, will sharpen you up . . . Having read these essays, I have a better understanding of the sort of mind that could create ‘Gilead,' a novel of quiet grace, and ‘Housekeeping,' a book so beautiful and other-worldy that at times it threatens to float away altogether.” ―Maggie Galehouse, The Houston Chronicle
“The latest turn in Robinson's thinking is toward politics, specifically her strong intuition of political crisis in America. She's talked politics before, but it's never been quite this intense or urgent . . . Besides the essays' tone, which is consistently heartfelt, moving from grave (‘We do not deal with one another as soul to soul.') to joyful (‘I love the writers of my thousand books.'), her political concerns give the book a kind of informal unity . . . She includes almost zero references to TV, movies, Facebook, celebs, or anything to do with pop culture. Her lonesome distance from the mainstream is eccentric, but it's also what gives her essays their strange power to diagnose America's discontents. It's a perspective that's simultaneously alienated and engaged, public and personal . . . if any of her thought somehow seeped out into America I think we'd be much better off for it.” ―Alex Engebretson, The Millions
“It is difficult not to quote Ms. Robinson at length, so finely calibrated are her sentences. Here, it's a tonic to see a rhetoric of such righteous anger turned, for once, against those who believe it is virtuous to attempt to deprive their fellow citizens of aid and succor . . . these essays represent what Robinson calls ‘an archaeology of my own thinking, mainly to attempt an escape from assumptions that would embarrass me if I understood their origins.' This is what education is for, and this book is a tool for those who would be archaeologists of their own thinking. Even when one disagrees with her, Ms. Robinson is always worth reading because she is as gifted a stylist as the English language has at present. Sentence after sentence demands to be reread for the pleasure the mind takes in well-made things . . . Anyone who has read Housekeeping (1980) or Gilead (2006) knows that she is a great novelist. It's time to recognize that Ms. Robinson is also a thinker of the first order, one of the finest we have ever had.” ―Michael Robbins, The New York Observer
“In an age when such American politicians as Michele Bachman display an astounding ignorance of the history of her own country . . . Robinson's essay collection [is] a valuable contribution to public discourse in the United States.” ―Philip Marchand, The National Post
“Robinson's country is at a political and moral crossroads, so she wants to remind her readers of its history, what it stood for and how far away it has moved from its founding principles . . . Her rhetoric is of the gentle, thoughtful kind that nevertheless hides a rapier, which she unleashes just when she needs it. Mary Wollstonecraft was once insultingly called a ‘hyena in petticoats' by a man who felt threatened by her intellect. Like Wollstonecraft, Robinson's intellect, too, is threatening. And if it can threaten us into action, is all the greater for that.” ―Lesley McDowell, The Independent
“When I Was a Child is a broadside defense of literature and classical liberalism that demands we include the unfashionable Old Testament as a foundation of both. Through rigorous citation and deep personal reflection, Robinson builds an excellent case . . . Over the book's 10 essays, Robinson systematically marshals text-based evidence that upends popular beliefs about faith, America and their uneasy commingling--all themes explored in her novels Housekeeping, Gilead and Home as well . . . When I Was a Child feels progressive in its belief that humanity has written stories that hold their virtue over millenniums. And her commitment to those texts is ultimately humble before all that we don't know.” ―August Brown, Los Angeles Times
“Robinson offers her essays in the face of this confusion, as ‘night thoughts of a baffled humanist' . . . She aims to defend both religion and humanism from their not-quite-so cultured despisers, many of whom may be found self-identifying as ‘religious' or as ‘humanists.' . . . Robinson takes aim . . . at those who would diminish the human person . . . Whatever else these new essays are--and they are many wonderful and interesting things--they are Robinson's determination not to diminish mystery, not to make foolishness of the world or the human person by forcing theories to limit our wonder at God, the human brain and mind, the cosmos. The essays are tonic for our adoration-starved religious and scientific cultures, bracing in their critique and hope-giving in the alternative way of seeing that they open up for us.” ―Wesley Hill, Books & Culture
“This is a rare writer about America and one it seems to me we need. Desperately. Whether writing about Jefferson or Johann Friederich Oberlin or ‘the dark gorgeousness' of the mind of Edgar Allan Poe, Robinson is a self-described ‘humanist' who says ‘the presence of human consciousness is a radical qualitative change in the natural order' . . . Her imagination of other lives, in these essays, defines an imperiled democracy to which, she says, we need to remain loyal . . . One of the year's stealthy great books.” ―Jeff Simon, The Buffalo News
“[Robinson] questions accepted opinion and helps us think through its implications and its reasonableness . . . Be ready to have certain assumptions challenged and to think through important issues while enjoying a master of prose.” ―Gordon Houser, The Wichita Eagle
“Most striking of all is Robinson's mental work ethic. She seems to be incapable of a lazy conclusion . . . Robinson's great strengths [are] independence and eccentricity . . . Robinson, though some of her views are well known, is never predictable, for her discipline is to look at every question as though she were considering it for the first time. It is impossible not to be fortified and enlarged by a few hundred pages in her company.” ―Stefan Beck, The Barnes and Noble Review
“A provocative--and deceptive--plainness is a constant feature of Robinson's work, which asks us to accept the hidden richness of the mundane . . . [When I Was a Child I Read Books is] the fascinating expression of a rooted and contrary mind.” ―John Broening, The Denver Post
“In a climate increasingly averse to compassion and unappreciative of curiosity, Robinson has published When I Was a Child I Read Books, a glimmering, provocative collection of essays, each a rhetorically brilliant, deeply felt exploration of education, culture, and politics . . . When I Was a Child is a brutally, beautifully intelligent jeremiad on the cynical state of American culture and politics, but Robinson is rare today in that she uses the language of faith to advance the most cultivated humanistic values all in an attempt to defend what she sees as an imperiled American greatness . . . When I Was a Child strives to burn off the blather and tame the wolfishness that currently bedevils our society.” ―Michael Washburn, Boston Globe
“These rich, uncompromising essays are not for everyone but--to make a Robinson-like distinction of my own--their rewards should be for anyone, of any faith, who cares to dive deeply into a distant world.” ―Emily Stokes, Financial Times
“What this collection does contain in abundance, though, are intelligent discourses on contemporary intellectual culture . . . Robinson . . . illuminates the cobwebbed corners of her mind. The effort required to relish the collected works presented here will be worth it.” ―Noori Passela, The National
“If there is any fear that the fast-moving world of the Internet and the iPhone has destroyed our powers of concentration, or our ability to think lucidly and beautifully, or to create surprising and powerful designs from philosophical concerns, that fear will be put to rest by Marilynne Robinson's new book of elegant essays . . . Robinson's voice is thoughtful and intimate, but she does some thundering, too, on ancient, complex and important subjects . . . Her ideas are unconventional, and she sees the world in surprising ways . . . Taut, eloquent and often acerbically funny, these essays present a formidable response to slack scholarship, an indignant refutation of the policies of punitive frugality toward the poor and a challenge to anyone who denies the power, mystery and significance of the human soul. Robinson's language is elegant and her reasoning precise, and reading these essays is like taking a draught of water from a cold spring. They offer us something rewarding, deeply essential and long-sought, even if we only realize it now.” ―Roxana Robinson, The Washington Post
“For Robinson, human beings--and especially, readers--must collectively imagine humanity, because imagination creates moral communities. It is through language--silent, personal, and solitary experiences of language -- that we engage in an ‘amazing human conversation,' one that delivers us to ‘place[s] across millennia, through weal and woe.' . . . [An] illuminating collection . . . What . . . ring[s] true in When I Was a Child are the intimate notes . . . In the title essay, Robinson writes lovingly about her childhood encounter with solitude that attuned her to mystery. It is this repeated emphasis on mystery that most differentiates this set of essays. ‘When I see a man or a woman alone,' writes Robinson, ‘he or she looks mysterious to me, which is only to say that for a moment I see another human being clearly.' Robinson's religious faith is learned and self-reflective, rooted in a lonesomeness that ‘allows one to experience . . . radical singularity, one's greatest dignity and privilege.' Robinson's form of religious faith requires relentless introspection and loneliness. It's a faith that rejects easy platitudes and easy answers.” ―Michelle Kuo and Albert Wu, The Los Angeles Review of Books
“Whether writing fiction or nonfiction . . . Robinson displays a compelling blend of intensity and austerity . . . In some of the . . . best moments [in When I Was a Child I Read Books], Robinson describes her life as a reader, with ‘my library all around me, my cloud of witnesses to the strangeness and brilliance of human experience.' She expresses gratitude for the books which have ‘taught me most of what I know....and trained my attention and my imagination.' And in the title essay, she recalls herself as a ‘bookish child in the far West.'” ―Carmela Ciuraru, Biographile
“Readers . . . have come to expect a blend of acute observation, deep learning, courageous assertion and compelling prose. Happily, Robinson's new book of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, provides readers with all of this and more: a rare combination of wisdom and beauty that transforms our vision of our current cultural moment . . . Robinson's book urges Americans to stop our herding and our name-calling, to refuse to engage in wolfishness and blather and to nurture the radical power of the individual self through the agency of the word--in short, to drop everything and read.” ―Angela Alaimo O'Donnell, America
Most helpful customer reviews
141 of 145 people found the following review helpful.
Thoughtful analysis of the responsibilities and blessings of a Christian life
By las cosas
This book consists of ten essays, mostly revolving around aspects of the Bible and Christianity. I would not have purchased the book had I known this, but found the essays deeply thought provoking. This is a book I will reread. The author is a thoughtful and believing Christian, and her understanding of what this means is the core belief from which she widely and deeply explores both the New and Old Testaments, and the nuance of language as understood by herself and others. There are entire sections of rigorous analysis when she sternly criticizes several recent Christian commentators of the Old Testament. And her sternest criticism is the lack of charity on the part of these critics, their willful blindness to the beauty of the language and unwillingness to read it on its own terms. Christians can reject, but not denounce, the Old Testament, which is not theirs to denounce. Show some respect, she insists.
And she shows enormous respect for both the New and Old Testament. There are close readings of various translations of the Bible, showing for example instances when charity is translated as love and reminding us of the incredible historic importance of making the Bible available in the local vernacular, a task which caused more than one translator to be killed by a jealous church.
Today in the western Christian world, and particularly in the United States to which the author largely addresses this book, words are a much devalued currency. Millions of words blabbing along daily, immediately replaced by another million. The result is an unavoidable cheapening of words, wherever we find them. The author uses a minimum of words in her essays. She is sparse, which in some cases results in an obliqueness. But each word is carefully weighed, and she insists that we pay attention, that we follow her with the same care and gravitas that she expands on these essays. As readers we are very much the students of this long-time teacher.
The author asks, demands, that we closely examine the text of the book that forms the core of her and presumably the reader's, religion: Christianity. She lost me in that assumption, but the persuasiveness of her textual argument kept me fairly riveted to her analysis, particularly on the importance of laws in the Old Testament and the importance of Moses within that context as the precursor of Jesus' teachings. As a Christian she examines the teachings of the Bible and their relationship to her world, noting with sorrow and anger the failings of the present world, particularly in the United States. But she also describes the Bible as a novelist and teacher of creative writing, reminding us of the beauty of the images, the unsparing vividness of the stories. She laments that Old Testament translations by Christians are often "laundered to remove complexity and loveliness." In another essay she states that Christians have accepted, generation upon generation, the stewardship of the remarkable narrative that is the Bible. I found this a wondrous concept, that a book, even a book as well known as the Bible, needs the constant stewardship of the people studying that book to have a continued relevance, and that this stewardship must include a reverence. "This is too great a narrative to be reduced to serving any parochial interest or to be overwritten by any lesser human tale. Reverence should forbid in particular its being subordinated to tribalism, resentment, or fear."
I point out the essays on the Bible because I found them the most thought provoking. But there are also essays that for example discuss 19th century social activists and evangelicals (as that term was defined at the time) such as Oberlin; and, growing up in a world of big, difficult books, Latin teachers and a respect for learning in small town Idaho. She deplores what she sees as the current minimization of human nature and the essence of human beings which she argues can not fully be understood without understanding human beings as created in the image of God. "Lacking the terms of religion, essential things cannot be said." I find these provocative and very old-fashioned statements, but surely it is a gift she has given us in this book that we can be provoked, that we can strive to understand what she so strongly implores us to consider.
The essays are a combination of discursive and rigorous, though unfortunately they veer from one to the other without signposts or logic and the persuasiveness of the arguments decreases. When this occurs, when an exploration of the apophatic and its relationship to a writer's search for the unsaid suddenly veers into a digression about 'people' thinking the United States is too heterogeneous, I feel whip-lashed. The carefully argued statement, the beautifully constructed sentences are replaced by facile statements that are disquieting. The author sets a high standard for herself, and for the reader, in her carefully articulated thoughts, so the lapses or shifts are the more unsettling. She has two pet peeves in this book: fundamentalist Christians (though that is my shorthand, not hers) and the free market (which she also refers to as the inscrutable financial economy). She makes a fair effort to explain the concerns of the former, but is often dismissive in describing the later.
But these are relative nits. I would recommend this book to any person interested in a meditation and analysis of a text that is the cornerstone of a religion at the center of historical and current United States. Practicing Christians living in the United States should particularly find this book a wondrous and thought-provoking journey.
41 of 43 people found the following review helpful.
Very, very smart
By Debnance at Readerbuzz
I'll go ahead and say it: Marilynne Robinson is too smart for me. I can be a lazy reader, seeking the quick answer, the easy answer.
This is not a book for lazy readers. It is not a book for simple readers.
Robinson is thoughtful and compassionate and deep. She sees past the first obvious answer and the second obvious answer and offers explanations that are unexpected and which embrace all we bring to a book. She is spiritual without being dogmatic and she is kind without leaving truth behind.
A book I need to read again. More slowly next time.
46 of 50 people found the following review helpful.
Cogent
By Stephen T. Hopkins
I read each of the ten essays in Marilynne Robinson's collection, When I Was a Child I Read Books, in a single sitting on separate days. I needed to engage my wits to follow her thorough and thoughtful arguments, and then needed a rest afterwards to absorb what I read. She must be the kind of teacher for whom alert students should schedule free time after her class for recovery. In many respects, she comes across as a writer's writer, with her careful choice of words and deliberative style. There may not be a better contemporary description of liberal Christianity and its sources and demands. Readers of her novels will gain insight from these essays and may consider re-reading the novels in light of the revelations from these essays. Any reader who appreciates fine writing and cogent reflection should consider reading the book.
Rating: Three-star (Recommended)
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