When I Was a Child I Read Books

by Marilynne Robinson

Since the 1981 publication of Marilynne Robinson’s novel, Housekeeping—a stunning debut that was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize—she has built a sterling reputation not only as a writer of sharp, subtly moving prose, but also as a rigorous thinker and incisive essayist. Her compelling and demanding collection The Death of Adam—in which she reflected on her Presbyterian upbringing, investigated the roots of Midwestern abolitionism, and mounted a memorable defense of Calvinism—is respected as a classic of the genre, praised by Doris Lessing as “a useful antidote to the increasingly crude and slogan-loving culture we inhabit.”

In this new collection she returns to the themes which have preoccupied her work: the role of faith in modern life, the inadequacy of fact, the contradictions inherent in human nature. Clear-eyed and forceful as ever, Robinson demonstrates once again why she is regarded as a modern rhetorical master.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Religion, Books About Books, Memoir, Biography

224 pages, Hardcover

First published March 13, 2012

About the author

American novelist and essayist. Across her writing career, Robinson has received numerous awards, including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2005, National Humanities Medal in 2012, and the 2016 Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction. In 2016, Robinson was named in Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people. Robinson began teaching at the Iowa Writers' Workshop in 1991 and retired in the spring of 2016.

Robinson is best known for her novels Housekeeping (1980) and Gilead (2004). Her novels are noted for their thematic depiction of both rural life and faith. The subjects of her essays have spanned numerous topics, including the relationship between religion and science, US history, nuclear pollution, John Calvin, and contemporary American politics.

Reviews

[Joel · Rating 5 out of 5]

I don't mean to be overdramatic, but each book I read by Marilynne Robinson gives me slightly more hope that we are not doomed. This book, like much of her work, is ultimately about taking human experience -- that is, the history of ourselves and our institutions of culture, religion, politics, education, and so on --seriously when we consider what and who we are.

[Deb (Readerbuzz) Nance · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

[tee]

I want to read this because apparently it's going to contain lines like these:

"Say that we are a puff of warm breath in a very cold universe. By this kind of reckoning we are either immeasurably insignificant, or we are incalculably precious and interesting. I tend toward the second view. Scarcity is said to create value, after all."

Sold!

[Thing Two · Rating 5 out of 5]

As you can probably tell from the number of times I posted interesting thoughts from these essays, I loved this collection! I read Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything and was disappointed, not because of what he was arguing, but by the lack of research he presented with his argument. He seemed to want to say, "I'm Christopher Hitchens and here's what I think ..." and that was that. Marilynne Robinson is polar opposite from Hitchens, not only in beliefs, but in her presentation style. She argues for an Old and New Testament God and uses her many years of research to present logical arguments to support her belief. I suppose I should disclose that I tend to agree with Robinson more than Hitchens, but it's the background information she provides which makes me love this book.

I must say, I was totally unprepared for this book. I've read all three of Robinson's fiction works, and assumed this would be a series of short story fiction pieces. I approached this book of 200+ pages looking for a quick piece to breeze through. What I found was challenging writing, a deep intellectual discussion, something a graduate student in Religious Studies would easily grasp, but which kept me sitting with my google search open to get a better understanding of the various subjects.

Robinson writes at an intellectually challenging level which I found, at times, difficult, brilliant, but on occasion sanctimonious. She discusses slavery, ideology, Calvin, Nietzsche, Freud, More, Hume, Old Testament, Judaism, Christianity, politics all the things we’re not supposed to discuss at dinner parties.

I will re-read this, but for now it's moving to my husband's night stand.

Loved this!

[Dave Schaafsma · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've read all of Robinson's fiction and am a huge fan, so when I saw this essay on audio--twenty minutes--I listened to it, and again, and again, as she is such a good writer, such a careful crafter of sentences, so thoughtful. I'll probably read the rest of it, as it is not writing that one can just breeze through.

I was attracted to this essay by the title, the same title as the book itself, because this was true for me, too, but the essay is less about herself as young reader as it is about how the subject of her work emerged out of her early reading in history and the place of the (American) West in the literary and political imagination. She was a "bookish" girl from an early age in rural Idaho, as were most of her friends, reading big dusty tomes. She says Cicero is more of an inspiration than Hemingway in her work. She invites us to find epic similes inspired by Cicero in and through her work.

[LindaJ^ · Rating 4 out of 5]

First a caveat -- my rating is based on the 8 of the 10 essays that I understood. The first -- Freedom of Thought -- I found the most challenging and will have to read it again in order to figure out what the point is. The last -- Cosmology -- did not hang together for me. I think I got the point -- that science has not replaced God in understanding human nature -- but would have to read it again to follow the argument.

The other 8 essays I found very interesting and thought they provided much food for thought. I found the two with Moses in the title -- Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism and The Fate of Ideas: Moses -- to be of particular interest. Both have extensive discussion of the Old Testament, which I have always struggled with because of all the "smiting," i.e., how bloody it is. But Robinson has me thinking - what a good essayist should do. She points out how the laws of Moses and various passages in the Old Testament are, on the whole, more people oriented, especially to the poor and those down on their luck, than many current laws. She tells how the Old Testament has often been ignored in Christian churches. This reminded me of the book I recently finished on Dietrich Bonhoeffer -- Bonhoeffer: Pastor, Martyr, Prophet, Spy -- in which I learned that Bonhoeffer put emphasis on the Old Testament and opined that most American clergy ignored it (but not African-American pastors) and failed to involve themselves in trying to preach about or understand it. I enjoyed the other 6 essays. They made me think.

I should read all of these essays again and do so with a dictionary, a bible (King James version), and a computer close at hand!

[David · Rating 1 out of 5]

Sometimes I dislike a book and can't imagine anyone else liking it. This is not such a book. You might like it, but I didn't. I like essays, and her topics (mostly religion, intellectual history, American society/culture) are important and interesting. She teaches at U. Iowa writers' workshop, and I'm open to the possibility that I'm missing something about her writing, but whatever; i didn't care for it. Trying to analyze a little more deeply why not.....

here's a typical excerpt, re John Shelby Spong's "why Christianity must change or die":

"In fairness, Christianity also suffers terribly at the hands of Bishop Spong, though he may not be wholly conscious of this fact. He gives an account, with Episcopal self-assurance, of what Christians believe, which I, who have long answered to that description, read with true astonishment." (p. 98)

It's not the wordiness itself that gets to me, though this is a long way of saying "I disagree with his account of what Christians believe.". I think what's annoying about it to me is (a) hyperbole (read with true astonishment), (b) seemingly pointless circumlocution ("have long answered to that description" -- really? people describe you as Christian and you agree? or you're just saying you're Christian.), and (c) condescension (with Episcopal self-assurance, not..wholly conscious....).

Another excerpt, from an essay about growing up in Idaho:

"A man in Alabama asked me how I felt the West was different from the East and the South, and I replied that in the West "lonesome" is a word with strongly positive connotations. I must have phrased my answer better at the time, because both he and I were struck by the aptness of the remark, and people in Alabama are far too sensitive to language to be pleased with a phrase such as "strongly positive connotations". For the moment, it will have to serve however." (p. 88).

OK, so to start we have the kernel of a semi-interesting observation - being a loner is viewed more favorably in the West. Not the first time I've heard that, but no problem. At this point, though, you could give an anecdote about being accepted as a bookish introverted young person in Idaho, or cite a character from a movie, or contrast the ease with which you fit in the West vs. in midwest later in life, or a hundred different possibilities. Maybe the worst choice (IMO) is to locate this observation as being something you said to someone (boring, no more vivid or informative than just saying it now), report that you can't remember how you put it (then why include this fragment of conversation?), brag that you undoubtedly put it well because both of you were struck by how well (ugh) and wrap it up with disingenuous "for the moment" (you're publishing this -- it's forever, not for the moment).

Probably shouldn't go on at such length. I'm just trying to figure out why I hated this book so much. Oh well. Next!

[CC · Rating 2 out of 5]

There's no doubt that Robinson is bright, and thoughtful. And well-read. But sometimes I think when readers feel intimidated by an author's intellect, they say "Great! Amazing! Insightful!" with the hope that others will not notice how deeply confused they are. After all, if the reader is confused by something, and there are big words present in the text, that reader often feels deeply ashamed at not having "got it" and lays on the praise extra thick in hopes of not being asked to comment further. I think it's great practice to, when you're confused, say "I'm confused," rather than assume that a writer's verbosity and seeming intelligence renders them smarter than you and above criticism.

This collection of essays is challenging, but that doesn't make it valuable. Robinson's essays are insightful, but tedious. I appreciate watching a brilliant woman play in the depths of her own mind, which is what I feel Robinson did in these essays, and I can appreciate it for what it is. But, the fact remains that I am tired of reading thoughts on Freud, on Walt Whitman, on Edgar Allen Poe, on Biblical history. I could never read another word by or about Freud ever again and still live a full, meaningful life. In fact, it would be a great relief.

I am deeply invested and curious about historical margins, not so much the centers. This book was entirely about, and in discourse with, some of the most central centers to exist: the history of white people (when generally referring to everything from antiquity to modern U.S. culture, Robinson is always talking about white people. She seemingly never finds it necessary to distinguish the truth that "antiquity" doesn't HAVE to mean European antiquity, though it does when she refers to it. And nary a mention of the ubiquitous presence of slavery throughout all of these histories she explores. The unrecognized invisibility of non-white, non-European experiences, discourses and histories in this text left me feeling bored as hell, and irritated); and Biblical history. I want to take winding paths and hear voices unheard, while Robinson is interested in adding her nuance to mainstream ideas that have been unspooled and re-spooled time and time again, for centuries. This is just a fundamental difference in interest and style, so to each their own, I suppose.

I don't feel like I am Robinson's audience. I visualize the type of person who would boast about this book's brilliance: he usually only reads books written by dead white men, you see, and a woman writing about the dead white men he idolizes is a progressive feather in his collection. This is probably cruel to say. I have nothing but kind things to say about Robinson's fiction. I find Robinson's fiction tender, insightful and oddly like coming home. Her fiction both challenges me, and coaxes me into her world of big ideas and histories. I cannot say the same about these essays.

Let me say, I love being challenged by a book. I love it when I feel knocked down a few pegs, or opened to new perspectives, or told exactly how and why I'm wrong. But the biggest challenge I faced upon reading this collection of essays was maintaining my interest.

Standouts: "Austerity as Ideology"; "When I was a Child"

[Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

Marilynne Robinson’s first novel, "Housekeeping", was published in 1980, and she has written two further novels: "Gilead", which won the 2005 Pulitzer Prize, and Home, which won the Orange Prize in 2009. "Gilead" and "Home" contain many positive values, so "When I was a child I read books", a collection of essays, was met with anticipation and will likely arouse the interest of her readership.

Robinson has the convinced written style of an essayist. She comments on present-day North American society and its values, analysing characteristics of its thought and religious life. Robinson’s skills as an essay writer do not quite match up to the great essayists: stylistically, it is not always easy to understand which idea or person she is referring to, which is especially challenging if one is already straining to follow her train of thought.

Some general impressions about the way the writer comes across: One weakness is Robinson’s tendency to group people into two opposing camps, to indicate how narrow the debate has been thus far. Yet the problem is that there is often little evidence that those camps really existed before she came to characterise them! For example, is America really divided into “those who cannot embrace fundamentalist religion [and] scorn the past[, and] those who embrace it [and] despise the present”? Nevertheless, Robinson’s essays are interesting historically, falling within the context of contemporary American questions in the first decades of the millennium.

There are some difficulties with the philosophical framework of this collection of essays, which emerge early on. They are perhaps not as evident in Robinson’s fiction, but worth being aware of in terms of this book. In early chapters, Robinson refers to Walt Whitman, a 19th century poet and essayist, and draws out especially his framework of opposition to religious traditions, signs and creeds. Robinson seems to argue that “individual experience”, somehow conceived as only synonymous with a society without dogma, is the basis of American democracy. She leaves little space for the idea that people come from existing contexts which transcend their individual experience, and unfortunately this excludes the idea that they could be a part of a tolerant dialogue.

A particular strain of subjectivism comes through in this book. From my perspective, at least, this perspective enjoyed its ascendancy in the 1960s but now it seems at odds with present-day experience. For example, Robinson asserts that “the situation of the undergraduate rarely encourages systemic doubt”. Perhaps that was the case for an older generation, but now undergraduates are usually exposed to things like postmodernism, which definitely encourages systemic doubt!

Robinson’s subjectivist approach to societal issues is mirrored in her theological assertions. Robinson weaves Calvinist ideas of reality into many of her essays. She also draws from other influences, such as cognitive science, but in a confusing turn, blends cognitive insights with metaphysics, leaving us with confusing definitions of things such as the soul and the relationship between nature and grace.

I would recommend staying with Robinson's fiction, and giving these essays a miss.

[Claire · Rating 2 out of 5]

It is my fault that I didn’t like this book. A lesson in reading the blurb not just the title and a quick look at the author. I was expecting a series of essays about childhood reading and instead got a collection of essays about human nature with a heavy spiritual bent. I was propelled by a couple of interesting historical analyses early on in the collection and my respect for Robinson as an author of fiction. At the end of the day there was just too much God here for me. That’s a me thing, so the 2 stars are for Robinson’s considerable intellectual might, and the fact that she probably did what she set out to here extremely well.

[Ty · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I would say, for the moment, that community, at least community larger than the immediate family, consists very largely of imaginative love for people we do not know or whom we know very slightly. This thesis may be influenced by the fact that I have spent literal years of my life lovingly absorbed in the thoughts and perceptions of - who knows it better than I? - people who do not exist. And, just as writers are engrossed in the making of them, readers are profoundly moved and also influenced by the nonexistent, that great clan whose numbers increase prodigiously every publishing season. I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification."

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps her ideas won't be as refreshing and original to everyone as they were to me, but I've never read anything that so intelligently synthesized thoughtful Christianity with the love of literary fiction and a liberal education. She refined my understanding of politics, economics, and faith, and renewed my courage as a teacher of a subject that--while eminently practical in some respects (grammar)--can be considered frivolous and rather impractical. She made me feel that what I do as a teacher of literature MATTERS and is SIGNIFICANT and WORTHWHILE. This is a very important book for me and I will be mulling it over for weeks. (In fact, I've already put my name on the holds list at the library so I can check it out again soon!)

This is probably the most intelligent and challenging book I've read since college--so intelligent, in fact, that entire essays flew directly over my head. (I blame disjointed reading, post-pregnancy brain loss, and tiredness for some of this, but the truth is, Marilynne Robinson is a formidable intellect!)

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

A GR friend of mine, Kristen, wrote a review of this book that led me to read it. I'm about halfway through now and my attitude toward it (in terms of stars) has ranged from 2 to 5, settling for the moment at 4.

As I mentioned in a comment under Kristen's review, I find Robinson's writing a bit dense. I consider this my fault, pretty much a consequence of my vocabulary and literary background being less robust than Robinson's. The obvious solution to this problem is for me to read the book with dictionary in hand and to read up on Freud, B. F. Skinner, Jonathan Edwards, William Tyndale, Calvin, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, and others whom I have at least heard of, and to also read up on the Manichees, Mircea Eliade, Phoebus, Tiamat, Aeschylus, and others I have never heard of. Should I do this, perhaps I would more appreciate such sentences as (from page 14), "Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides would surely have agreed with Virgil's Aeneas that the epics and the stories that surround them and flow from them are indeed about lacrimae rerum, about a great sadness that pervades human life."

Alas, it appears I am not up to this enormous task (although I did look up "lacrimae rerum", expecting it to be a misprint, and found it is a Latin phrase meaning "tears of things"), so I will just have to take her word for it that such an agreement is sure and that said agreement is relevant to whatever point she is trying to make. Despite being out in the cold at this point, I did from time to time wrest a glimmer of understanding (I think) as I read her first essay. Nevertheless this was a low point (2 stars) in my reading of this book and I wondered whether it would be useful for me to carry on. Since I hate to quit reading a book I have started and since it isn't a very long book (only 202 pages), I decided to persevere.

In the next essay, Imagination and Community, I learned that she believes it is a most-often-forgotten truth that "it is in the nature of people to do good to one another". This is a sentiment I can understand and one that is hopeful and happy and with which I happen to agree, although I would have put "most" in front of "people".

I am somewhat uncomfortable with Austerity as Ideology (the third essay), since (if I understand her correctly, a possibly unwarranted assumption) it appears she feels Austerity (she capitalizes it) in the United States, presumably in government spending, is somehow evil. Why? Well, because it falls mainly on the poor. And why does it fall mainly on the poor? Because so much government spending benefits the poor. She seems to take the attitude that government debt (although she hardly mentions it by name) should expand indefinitely if that's what it takes to keep from cutting back on benefits for the poor. I find that a bit scary, but then, I'm not one of the poor, so what do you expect.

Now we come to Open Thy Hand Wide: Moses and the Origins of American Liberalism. In this essay she defends Calvin, pointing out that Calvinism (portrayed by many "to mean a certain kind of unlikable excess wherever in the world it might be discovered or imagined") doesn't relate very closely to the teachings or philosophy of Calvin. I don't know much about Calvin, but from somewhere I have gotten an impression of him as a severe hell-fire-and-brimstone kind of person who condemns to hell all those not otherwise predestined by God to be saved from such a fate. So it was somewhat of a surprise to me to read on page 77 the following quote from Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion (sorry about the length, but it is necessary to get the full impact):

"The Lord commands us to do 'good unto all men,' universally, a great part of whom, estimated according to their own merits, are very undeserving; but here the Scripture assists us with an excellent rule, when it inculcates, that we must not regard the intrinsic merit of men, but must consider the image of God in them, to which we owe all possible honour and love; but that this image is most carefully to be observed in them 'who are of the household of faith,' inasmuch as it is renewed and restored by the spirit of Christ. Whoever, therefore, is presented to you that needs your kind offices, you have no reason to refuse him your assistance. Say he is a stranger; yet the Lord has impressed on him a character which ought to be familiar to you; for which reason he forbids you to despise your own flesh. Say that he is contemptible and worthless; but the Lord shows him to be one whom he has deigned to grace with his own image. Say that you are obliged to him for no services; but God has made him, as it were, his substitute, to whom you acknowledge yourself to be under obligations for numerous and important benefits. Say that he is unworthy of your making the smallest exertion on his account; but the image of God, by which he is recommended to you, deserves your surrender of yourself and all that you possess. If he not only deserved no favour, but, on the contrary, has provoked you with injuries and insults,--even this is no just reason why you should cease to embrace him with your affection, and to perform to him the offices of love. He has deserved, you will say, very different treatment from me. But what has the Lord deserved? who, when he commands you to forgive all men their offences against you, certainly intends that they should be charged to himself."

This quote struck me powerfully as expressing profound truths. It reminded me very much of part of King Benjamin's address in the Book of Mormon, Mosiah 4:16-26, but it made connections that King Benjamin did not and that had never occurred to me. The first is the role that forgiveness plays in making sense out of helping others even when they have "provoked [us] with injuries and insults". Doctrine and Covenants 64:9-10 comes to mind. And the second is that when we help someone in need, no matter if it is someone who seems not to deserve our help, we are helping Jesus who more than deserves our meager help. Matthew 25:34-40 comes to mind.

Now comes her essay When I Was a Child. Have you ever read something that touched you unexpectedly to tears? If you have, you will understand what I'm about to describe. I have no idea how to explain it, but the paragraph I'm about to quote from page 88 had just such an effect on me.

"I remember when I was a child at Coolin or Sagle or Talache, walking into the woods by myself and feeling the solitude around me build like electricity and pass through my body with a jolt that made my hair prickle. I remember kneeling by a creek that spilled and pooled among rocks and fallen trees with the unspeakably tender growth of small trees already sprouting from their backs, and thinking, there is only one thing wrong here, which is my own presence, and that is the slightest imaginable intrusion--feeling that my solitude, my loneliness, made me almost acceptable in so sacred a place."

I wish Robinson would forget about Freud and Mircea Eliade and Virgil and all those others and just write such simple, humble, beautiful paragraphs all the time. I'm going to keep reading When I Was a Child I Read Books hoping, perhaps unreasonably, that I will encounter another paragraph like that one. But if I don't, it's OK; having discovered that one paragraph more than makes up for all the "denser" ones.

I've finished the book now and am glad I did, but most of what she wrote went over my head. If you have read this far in my review and consider the quotes I gave valuable, then you might venture a reading of this book. I believe you will find it a worthwhile experience, especially if you are more fully versed in literature than I am. For the casual reader, perhaps better to find a different book to occupy your time.

[Kristen · Rating 5 out of 5]

My favorite of this collection of essays was "Freedom of Thought." It gave me a real interest in seeking out some ancient literature--a genre which has never before interested me. Virgil's Aeneid and the Epic of Gilgamesh, in particular, and maybe City of God...I'd like to read now. Creating a new curiosity is always a good thing.

I respect Robinson's careful style---she has a very direct and absorbing feeling about her as a narrator.

Just one of the many sections I enjoyed:

"Religious experience is said to be associated with activity in a particular part of the brain. For some reason this is supposed to imply that it is delusional. But all thought and experience can be located in some part of the brain, that brain more replete than the starry heaven God showed to Abraham, and we are not in the habit of assuming that it is all delusional on these grounds. Nothing could justify this reasoning, which many religious people take as seriously as any atheist could do, except the idea that the physical and the spiritual cannot abide together, that they cannot be one dispensation. We live in a time when many religious people feel fiercely threatened by science. O ye of little faith. Let them subscribe to Scientific American for a year and then tell me if their sense of the grandeur of god is not greatly enlarged by what they have learned from it....If the old, untenable dualism is put aside, we are instructed in the endless brilliance of creation. Surely to do this is a privilege of modern life for which we should all be grateful."

Further along in this essay she explores ancient narratives and the criticism that religion was formed around the desire to explain what prescientific humankind could not answer for. Very interesting, and it renewed my belief in the existence of a God.

[Roy Kesey · Rating 2 out of 5]

Marilynne Robinson has written three of the great novels of the last forty years. Her first novel, Housekeeping, is on my Indispensables shelf with Jesus' Son, Invisible Cities, Rayuela, At Swim-Two-Birds, et al. So it gives me little pleasure to write about When I Was a Child I Read Books--even less than it gave me to read it.

Starting with what is surely one of the worst titles in titular history.

What else. The tone ranges from arrogant to airless (with rare glints of a grim sort of academicky sarcasm.) The occasional worthwhile insights are stranded in the desert of the rest of the text. It regularly asserts without bothering to attempt to support let alone prove, while constantly accusing its (multitudinous) (straw) opponents of same.

What takes the text from one star to two is the essay on Oberlin. I was glad to learn/be reminded of the historical connections between the 2nd Great Awakening, abolitionism, women's rights, and early higher education in what is now the Midwest.

All the same: overall, pretty awful. But I still can't wait for her next novel.

[Rosemarie · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a real disappointment. The title is very misleading-the book wasn't about reading, her childhood or fiction.
It was a collection of long-winded essays and made for a tedious read.
Even the cover was misleading.

[Jarrett DeLozier · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I had a million dollars I would be greatly tempted to spend it all on copies of this book to give to everyone I see.

READ IT.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robinson now has three novels and four books of non-fiction to her name; she might end up as the E. M. Forster of the early twenty-first century (I consider that a great compliment). Thankfully this book of essays is a step up from Absence of Mind, although not quite up to the quality of Death of Adam. WIWACIRB, hereafter WIW, is a much easier read than DoA, but that's not necessarily a good thing- much of the pleasure of her first book of essays came from the prose, which did a nice job reminding its readers that syntax can be enjoyable. WIW continues the main tasks of that book, though: an attempt to refute reductionism, particularly with reference to human abilities (a noble task), and an attempt to convince everyone that Calvinism is really great (which, honestly, seems to be to contradict the former). [Addendum: just flicked through DoA again, and it turns out that WIW is better on the ideas side. I still think DoA is more attractively written, though.]

Here Robinson argues against the reductionisms of contemporary 'rational choice' economics, scientism and the new atheism, and does it very well. As presented in popular forms, these three theories are, as she says, ideologies, and they do, as she argues, reduce our sense of wonder at ourselves in possibly harmful ways.

Her approach is often restricted to American concerns, which is fair enough, and she makes excellent points: the extreme 'patriotism' of contemporary American defenders of capitalism is probably due to the fact that America has only very rarely been a capitalist country; it's nice to know that a nineteenth century edition of Webster's defines socialism as 'agrarianism,' something that many Americans thought and think is a good thing. Also:

"Lately we have been told and told again that our educators are not preparing American youth to be efficient workers. Workers. That language is so common among us now that an extraterrestrial might think we had actually lost the Cold War."

Zing. Robinson offers some counter-weights to these reductionisms: education, particularly in the humanities; a sense of wonder; a greater immersion in history. This would be much more palatable if she wasn't so fond of saying things like "Calvinism is uniquely the fons et origo of liberal Christianity," which would come as news to the Anglicans/Episcopalians, Vatican II Catholics and liberation theologians she treats with so much scorn. Her 'me against the world' shtick can get tiresome, too- on what planet are abolitionists stigmatised?? Does she seriously think early Americans were fleeing religious persecution in the abstract, and if so, why did almost all of them try/succeed in setting up state churches? Does she honestly believe that the Old Testament was 'neglected and suppressed' throughout the middle ages?

Most of this can be forgiven, since the people she's arguing with are even more tendentious ('Monotheism causes war!' Um... tell that to the Greeks. And Romans. And Hindus.) What cannot be forgive is her failure to distinguish between rationalism and idealism. For whatever reason, everyone likes to cap their criticisms of other people's thinking by making a large scale procedural claim. Here, Robinson would have us believe that, say, rational choice economics is bad because it is "driven by righteousness and indignation to conform reality to theory." And yet she *praises* the Mosaic law because "the vision of the society preexisted the society itself." In both cases, reality is meant to conform to theory; but this is bad in one case and good in the other? Could it be that the problem with rational choice theory is not its procedures and methods, but its content? Alternatively, and I suspect this is what she means, economics looks only at how things are, and not how they should be; the Law looks at how they should be, not just how they are. This is not a problem of theory and reality, but of reality and ideals.

Anyway, the book is well worth reading, if only for zingers like this: "The notion that the laws ought to be ahistorical is no more sophisticated than the insistence that they are in fact ahistorical."

[Blair Hodges · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 1/2, really, but it ranks this low because it was one of the weaker of Robinson's outstanding books in my very subjective view. Out of ten essays I loved 2 and liked 4 more, the other 4 were either so-so or uninteresting/weave-y. It's a collection of pieces exploring contemporary politics, religion, and thought about human nature and our place in the cosmos, with some asides about her background, writing, and teaching. She's definitely not satisfied with the status quo in today's politics, education, or religion, and she has a masterful way of expressing herself, even though it sometimes becomes distracting, or makes me pause to wonder where she's going.

A few things it made me ponder more:

-The problematic nature of biblical criticism is problematic, though I think she goes too far in lumping it all together. Good thoughts on anti-Semitism in the way the Old Testament is interpreted by both believers and non.
-The OT ethic of care for stranger, for social justice, is overlooked by contemporary conservative Christians much to her dismay.
-Various uses and misuses of history by liberals and conservatives; misinterpretation of Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney on the one hand, for instance, and uncritical views of a Christian past much different from what it really was on the other.
-What is human nature? (A theme she returns to even more in The Givenness of Things. The gist is this: Beware easy answers of neo-Darwinists and new atheists re: our genes and selfishness. Isn't the cosmos and our place in it miraculous and unbelievable?
-The dangerous nature of ideologues as those who require purity and avoid complexity. (49)
-Individualism and community, she favors the former as a way of being in the world more than she thinks contemporary society does. Her Calvinism receives discussion as usual, though it sounds different than much of the Calvinism I hear about today.
-The nature of language and building community was an especially interesting part, especially noting something as simple as the fact that humans have conjured an incredible number of words to describe the appearance and behavior of light.

[brinley · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have heard many a recommendation for Robinson's book "Housekeeping", yet for one reason or another I never had an interest, & have placed it low on my list of other books to read. Lately all my interest is in poetry and non-fiction; fiction has held a place in my heart in times past, but it seemed as though I had "moved past" the unreal, didn't have time for it. (Although you know, reality and shit, what is it really? Everything's a fiction in one sense, I get it.) Anyway when I found out about her collection of essays, I thought it might be a good primer to get a feel for who Marilynne Robinson is, what concerns her, etc. I did not expect her to convert me back to fiction as absolutely as she did.

She says: "I think fiction may be, whatever else, an exercise in the capacity for imaginative love, or sympathy, or identification." &: "...the scale at which imagination is exerted, the healthier and more humane the community will be." She constantly returns to this theme of imagination & suggests that by building up our capacities in experiencing these fictions, that is also a way to fully experience love & empathy. Without fiction, how would our imagination roam?

I also love what she said, in that same essay (Imagination & Community)about what books have done for her:
"First, books have taught me most of what I know, and they have trained my attention and my imagination. Second, they gave me a sense of the possible, which is the great service--and too often, when it is ungenerous, the great disservice--a community performs for its members. Third, they embodied richness and refinement of language, and the artful use of language in the service of the imagination. Fourth, they gave me and still give me courage."

I enjoy the way Robinson shows confidence of her upbringing, her religion & the things she believes in. She is a profoundly courageous author, and I will definitely bump "Housekeeping" up as a priority read.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is that rare breed, a thoughtful book by a Christian writer; too often books by Christian writers turn into "Christian books," and lose the "thoughtful" part. As a woman of faith myself, I share most of her assumptions without necessarily sharing her conclusions; this makes her writing particularly challenging and thought-provoking. Also, Robinson regularly calls cultural assumptions, from several different "corners" of culture, into question. (One such assumption is that human beings are motivated by self-interest, an assumption which is as widespread in the church as it is in secular society.) It is said that learning takes place only when our mental models of the world are overturned; if so, Robinson's book is certainly crucial in helping readers learn what it means to value the individual and value beauty in this world. Robinson is a surprisingly funny and sarcastic writer. Her prose style is fairly informal. C.S. Lewis wrote essays laid out as an argument against a specific secular proposition; Robinson's are more like a conversation, looping from one point to another until the big picture is clear. She is a delight to read.

My one complaint (and it is very minor indeed) is that the essays all seem to cycle around the same two themes: the marginalization of the sacred, and the saddening lack of value given to the human individual in our capitalist society. She tackles these themes from every angle, explores them meditatively and through research, and in any case, I understand (as a minor essayist myself) how certain themes draw our attention again and again and again. Nevertheless, it did feel sometimes as though I were reading the same essay.

[Jaime · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I write this review, I am purposely not allowing myself to go back and look at all that I underlined. There is no shortage of brilliant sentences to share, but it strikes me as more important to consider what I have retained without the assistance of the text.

So.

Listen, the lovely thing about this book of essays is that it nails so many things in our culture so concisely and so intelligently that it will make like-minded readers feel less alone in this world.

Although at times I felt that the phrasing was more condescending that necessary, it felt like the condescension of a truly great mind. (Scene: Barack Obama, painfully trying to explain Anything to people around him.)

She writes so much about God. This I love. As years have gone by I am more and more skeptical of a world without an accessible spirituality. I grieve for our state of not knowing about Oberlin. I shake thinking about how reductionist things appear in our conversations.

And how much I wish, ARDENTLY, for the types of nuanced understandings these essays bring to the table.

This nuanced thing doesn't mean everyone is entitled to their own facts, as we often confuse these days. You can think what you want but don't use flimsy historical anecdotes for your nihilism or atheism. Robinson will raise her eyebrows at your funded-by-a-large-advance-245-double-spaced-paged-volume full of unfounded assertions and take you to school.

Has she been on The Daily Show yet? Can someone make that happen?

[Corinne Wasilewski · Rating 5 out of 5]

At a time when people’s thoughts are reduced to 140 characters, instant gratification is the norm, everybody’s talking but nobody’s listening, and culture is reduced to the lowest common denominator, enter Marilynne Robinson. (Robinson rides into town with guns blazing). Now, here is a woman who stands out from the crowd. Wise. Articulate. Bold. A woman of discernment. A straight shooter. And probably most important of all -- a woman who reads. And just what is Marilynne reading, you ask? The list is eclectic -- ancient literature and religion, philosophy, history, science… . Nothing seems to escape her scrutiny. And yes -- this is her genius. She doesn’t think in a vacuum. No, her thinking is a synthesis of all she has learned and read and her writing sparkles with wit and intelligence.

In this collection of essays, some of the topics Robinson covers include: the sacred mystery of man as a conscious being; democracy as the key motive force in American history; the pitfalls of capitalism; the importance of education (including arts and humanities), imagination and community in a democracy; and the inability of science to assign value to man or give meaning to the human experience.

In the end, the reader is struck by the love and hope Robinson holds for mankind. She lifts us out of our small and often petty lives, opens our eyes to the wider world around us and restores our dignity. The world is a better place for her being in it.

[Celeste · Rating 4 out of 5]

These essays are among the deepest and most beautifully written that I’ve come across. They are also some of the most complicated I’ve ever read. The density and complexity reminded me of philosophy texts I read in college. This collection is definitely intended to be read slowly and thoughtfully instead of being rushed through. Marilynne Robinson is perhaps the most astoundingly intelligent person whose thoughts I’ve ever been privileged to read. What she has to say about patriotism and government; the true differences between capitalism and socialism; the misunderstanding of certain religious terms and how that misunderstanding impacts the practice of faith; the dangers of unnecessary competition on a global scale, are so deep that they’re difficult to wrap the mind around. However, I do have to admit that I felt just a bit hoodwinked by the title. I love books about what books mean to others, and that's what I was expecting. I think I would have enjoyed this collection far more had I not felt that I was floundering in its depths, but I have so much respect for Robinson as an author and an intellectual. I look forward trying her fiction, though I have to confess that I’m now very intimated by the thought.

[Adam · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's weird, reading Robinson as a Calvinist. Some of her defense of our tradition includes ideas I'd reject, but I'm glad to admit her broader arguments. For instance, despite my stronger emphasis on the distinction between law and Gospel, it's a pleasure to feel so at home in her argument for Calvin's and Moses' liberality. I feel similarly about her humanism -- she's more optimistic than I am (I probably have that "...“liberal” or “progressive” tendency—both words in quotes—to give the past away, to make meagerness and pathology seem to be our only heritage."), but we share in wonder at what human beings long to do.

One of her targets is the contemporary intersection of egoism and scientism. There are better essays on each, but I've not read any as good on their relationship. I'd recommend this collection solely for her complaints there.

[Kristi · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is exceptional.

Here are a few reasons why I recommended this book to a friend:


Reason 1: She writes beautifully, imaginatively, in an engaging way and most lucidly.
Reason 2: This book is a compilation of essays on formative subjects such as community, imagination, politics, religion and tribalism, to name but a few. She explores these concepts through the lens of English literature, morality and being. For this reason, her writing is suffused with careful analysis of culture and it's a joy to read her peeling back the layers of assumption to reveal the heart of human nature entrenched in each of the aforementioned topics.
Reason 3: She sharpens one's mind as one reads the stunning clarity with which she conveys hers.
Reason 4: Due to Reason 3, she will energise and inspire you to write!

A marvel and a delight to read!

[Joye · Rating 5 out of 5]

What an amazing, thoughtful, intelligent, direct writer!! I was so impressed with the thought put into her various essays/arguments. She has some strong opinions and backs them up with powerful well thought out verbal stands. She is obviously well read and informed and is a compassionate person concerned about the current state of affairs of the human race. I recommended this book to everyone, but take it slowly!

[Anita Yoder · Rating 3 out of 5]

Robinson is incisive but not harsh, thoughtful but not egotistical.
This is a dense read, and discussing it in book club helped connect themes that eluded me on my own. As I read, I listened for the voice I knew from her fiction. That voice is not here, which speaks of her enormous capacity to span multiple spheres. As a writer and a Christian, an academic and a woman, her disciplined introspection has given her a credible, winsome voice that shines like a city on a hill.
However, be warned: the title is misleading. This book is not about her childhood or the books that shaped her, which I found disappointing. The book title is the title of one of the essays, in which she tells some of the setting and back story of her Housekeeping novel. I'd have loved more of that.

[Mark Jr. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stimulating, so stimulating, even when I did not agree. And such prose.

Marilynne Robinson calls herself (I took careful note) a "Christian," a "Calvinist," a "biblicist," a "Mainline Protestant," a "liberal," and, of course, an "American." You put all those together if you can. I can't. But I enjoyed watching her try, especially when the "Christian," "Calvinist," and "biblicist" identities seemed to be winning. You may now guess about my own identities.

Here are the two quotations I valued enough to take down verbatim from the audio; I wish I had not listened to this book, however, but read it on Kindle (or Logos!) so I could have more quotations. I went to the trouble of getting a few more from Google Books but was too cheap to buy the book. =)

While the specifics of evolutionary psychology remain controversial—it is never easy proving theories about the distant past—its underlying assumptions are largely accepted by mainstream scientists. There is no longer much debate over whether evolution sculpted the fleshly machine inside our head; instead, researchers have moved on to new questions like when and how this sculpturing happened, and which of our mental traits are adaptations and which are accidents. This line of reasoning clearly assumes much, and implies much more, when it sorts human mental life into only two categories: adaptations that suit us to life on the primordial savannah and accidents. All sorts of creatures are suited to surviving in their environment; this should be obvious on its face. The world would be a very empty place if it were not, in fact, axiomatic. Our humanity consists in the fact that we do more than survive, that a great part of what we do confers no survival benefit in terms presumably salient from the Pleistocene point of view. This kind of thinking places everything remarkable about us in the category "accidental," at least until some primitive utility can be imagined for it.

That's pretty incisive.

And so is this:

When he said, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with certain unalienable rights," "Jefferson has used Scripture to assert a particular form of human exceptionalism, one that anchors our nature, that is to say, our dignity, in a reality outside the world of circumstance. It is no doubt true that he was using language that would have been familiar and authoritative in that time and place, and maybe political calculation led him to an assertion that was greater and richer than he could have made in the absence of calculation. But it seems fair to assume that if he could have articulated the idea as or more effectively in other terms, he would have done it. What would a secular paraphrase of this sentence look like? In what non-religious terms is human equality self-evident? As animals, some of us are smarter or stronger than others, as Jefferson was certainly in a position to know. What would be the non-religious equivalent for the assertion that individual rights are sacrosanct in every case? Every civilization, including this one, has always been able to reason its way to ignoring or denying the most minimal claims to justice in any form that deserves the name. The temptation is always present and powerful because the rationalizations are always ready to hand. One group is congenitally inferior, another is alien or shiftless, or they are enemies of the people or of the state. Yet others are carriers of intellectual or spiritual contagion. Jefferson makes the human person sacred, once by creation and again by endowment, and thereby sets individual rights outside the reach of rationalization. My point is that, lacking the terms of religion, essential things cannot be said.

I think this is one of the most important, and saddest, points to be made about modern Western society. Truths can only be "self-evident" to a society given a certain worldview, certain lenses, certain assumptions. The rights of the unborn are *not* self-evident anymore. Who's next? Secular progressive liberalism doesn't know yet. Never knowing where it's going, it can never go astray.

[Dean Anderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s tempting to say that as an essayist, Marilynne Robinson is a great novelist. Of course, no matter what the first clause of the sentence is…Robinson would still be a great novelist. Her 2004 novel, “Gilead” won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award and sold a whole lot of copies. And I liked it, a lot. 1980’s “Housekeeping” and 2008’s “Home” are also great works of fiction.
Some of the essays in this collection are bring history, theology and insight together and allow the reader (at least me) to look at things in a whole new way. And some of the essays have the air of an academic journal that is only read when it’s assigned.
My favorite essay in the book is the last, “Cosmology” which begins puzzling on how Edgar Allen Poe in his work, ’Eureka’, seemed to anticipate 20th century physicists ideas about the Big Bang. She uses this as a starting point to assert that the human mind has tools beyond science to consider the big questions of life. She bemoans that students rely only on the theories of Darwin and Freud to understand the human condition. She argues that not only does that limited perspective lead to a poorer life, it leads to poorer fiction.
I appreciated her defense of great Christian leaders of American history, such as Jonathan Edwards and Charles Finney, whose intellectual, social and moral achievements are belittled by modern historians who have different theological perspectives (or believe mistakenly believe they have no theology.) As the father of a Knox College student, I was happy to read Robinson give honor to many of the small Midwestern colleges that stood up for the rights of women and enslaved African Americans. (This in the essay, “Who Was Oberlin?”)
But there were essays that made intellectual leaps and bounds that I couldn’t follow. Maybe it’s because I’m not bright enough (certainly well within the realm of possibility) but I think Robinson at times leaves dots disconnected.
And there are times where I think she just gets things wrong. In the essay, “Austerity as Ideology”, she ponders Winston Churchill’s famous Iron Curtain Speech. She seems to argue that the speech hurt the tender feelings of Joe Stalin, still hurting for WW II, and was the reason for the Cold War. No where in the chapter does she talk about the military aggression of the Soviet Union, or their oppression of the people of Eastern Europe (let alone the slaughter of their own people.) She seems to subscribe to a moral equivalence between the East and West of that period that strikes me as morally bankrupt.
In the same chapter, she frets about those that call for austerity in government budgets, that might cut education budgets. (She seems to feel academics are holy creatures that never waste money.) She seems to think the two wars of the Bush and Obama years were the only budgetary challenges of the 21st decade and yet she never mentions vast majority of government spending goes to entitlements.
Marilynne Robinson does have a great mind, but at times I think she buys into the group think of the academic world. But in the area of the church and theology, she fights the received Ivy League wisdom and come up with true and powerful thoughts.
Reading everything Robinson writes is a worthy endeavor. But it would probably be best to start with the fiction.
(And frankly, I was a little disappointed that there wasn’t at least one chapter about what she read as a child. Was she more of a May Alcott or Ingalls Wilder fan?)