Tolkien, Chesterton, Books, Beer...

First Things has a great little review of a book by Alison Milbank entitled Chesterton and Tolkien as Theologians: The Fantasy of the Real. I’ll include a short little excerpt from the review:

This final acclamation lies at the heart of Alison Milbank’s fine book. With clarity and wit and verve, she shows that the gift-quality of Tolkien’s and Chesterton’s art is premised on the gift-character of the universe itself. Their work, as she splendidly verifies, has profound moral implications. For in a gift-giving and gift-receiving world, we are not meant to seek our own advantage at the expense of others. Rather we are meant to create gifts—like those presents into which Galadriel has woven her own character before she gives them to the Company—that serve to free their recipients rather than putting them into our debt. Milbank has gifted us with what may well become our finest study of these Catholic artists in their unique relation not only to each other but also to our imagination-starved churches and culture.

As a huge fan and devourer of all things Tolkien and Chesterton, I’ll have to be adding this one to the wish list. My night table might collapse with all of the tomes sitting on deck.

Speaking of my night table, my current read is The Brewmaster’s Table: Discovering the Pleasures of Real Beer with Real Food. It has been a fantastic read, highlighting the history and qualities of just about every style of beer and how they work to enhance the foods you pair them with. Mr. Oliver is wonderful in his descriptions and I find myself constantly salivating as I read page after page of wonderful culinary combinations. Just the other night the wife and I cooked up a wonderful homemade soup and paired it with both freshly baked bread right out of the oven and an awesome Saison Dupont. This was my first experience with a Saison and I absolutely loved it. Each sip and bite was heaven. At only $7.00 for a large bottle (enough for 2), the Saison was a heck of a lot cheaper than a decent wine and the synergy between beer and food beats wine hands down in my book. By the way, the Saison goes with just about anything so pick up a bottle if you can find it in your neck of the woods and enjoy a great meal!

World Made by Hand

There is a new novel coming out early next year that should be extremely thought provoking - World Made by Hand. Here is a blurb from the publisher:

In the best-seller The Long Emergency, James Howard Kunstler explored how the terminal decline of oil production had the potential to put industrial civilization out of business. With World Made By Hand Kunstler makes an imaginative leap into the future, a few decades hence, and shows us what life may be like after these coming catastrophes—the end of oil, climate change, global pandemics, and resource wars—converge. For the townspeople of Union Grove, New York, the future is not what they thought it would be. Transportation is slow and dangerous, so food is grown locally at great expense of time and energy. And the outside world is largely unknown. There may be a president and he may be in Minneapolis now, but people aren’t sure. As the heat of summer intensifies, the residents struggle with the new way of life in a world of abandoned highways and empty houses, horses working the fields and rivers replenished with fish. A captivating, utterly realistic novel, World Made by Hand takes speculative fiction beyond the apocalypse and shows what happens when life gets extremely local.

Sounds pretty interesting to me. While I'm not a fanatic on the climate change front, my recent foray into the world of Distributism has me very interested in this novel. I love Distributist thought, but I think I'm with Kunstler that it will take a series of global catastrophes to bring that thought to the forefront of public life. It could be a total flop of a book but I think I'll give it a shot.

H/T: Veritas et Venustas