11 Days into A Mass

I am reading A Mass for the Dead at a snail's pace, but I am enjoying the book immensely. According to my notes, I started the book on September 9th, which was eleven days ago. I am now on page 300, with 93 more to go.

In fairness, I did leave the book at The Job this past weekend so I lost three of my most productive reading nights.

Still, even if you give me eight days that only amounts to about 37 pages a day. This is not a pace to rack up an impressive list of complete books for the year.

But this book is not designed to be a page turner. It is a positing a religion of the family told through anecdotes. It is about a New York intellectual who broke completely from his Depression era working class family to discover he had never left:

"Hope out of hope, they do come again like leaves, and after so many deaths the tree is still prodigal; of the ten children brought forth by my aunts and uncles five lived and brought forth ten more, the three oldest of these have been fruitful with another seven, and my sister and I with four. It is half a century since a child in the clan died, and with every birth the tale, not yet finished, begins anew. Let my tongue not be prudent, it wishes to remember the vexations and ennui of that daily prose which is family life, but I am talking of salvation."

This is not a book to knock in three days. To do so would be sacrilege.