Ask Auntie Leila: What can men read?
After my brief medical intervention, in which the diagnosis was “?”, I have come to think that somehow I strained my diaphragm in a significant way. Apparently this is something that happens to people who work out strenuously, so it seems rather unfair that I should fall victim to such an injury!
Anyway, I’m resting, figuring out how to make mittens two at a time (yes, I have a lot of that brown yarn!), taking ibuprofen, and trying not to laugh.
It kills to laugh.
Maybe it’s the right moment for a little Ask Auntie Leila. Here’s a question I get on a regular basis:
“Is there something like Like Mother, Like Daughter for men?”
Other than the answer “who could imitate the inimitable,” I’m not sure that your basic male is interested in a “daddy blog.” Most men don’t seem to want to spend endless hours discussing every detail, do they? They like to just get out there and do things. Yet, it’s valid to ask about the collective memory for them, and where is the affirming conversation, since there has been a rupture for everyone, not just for women. Where are there role models and the fellowship? Who can they relate to?
(I know that many men do actually come here on a regular basis. That makes us happy!)
I’ve taken a little survey of a few guys to see what books and sites have proven formative for them, so I do have a short list of good resources. My criteria would be the same as for women: that the resource be intelligent and leave room for what Wodehouse calls “the psychology of the individual” — the vagaries of temperament — not shoehorning everyone into a particular mode. For instance, though he happens to sport a beard and has brewed his own beer since before it was stylish to do so, cigar smoke triggers the Chief’s asthma — you can be a real man without doing those things anyway (and it’s tiresome constantly to be subjected to a certain beard-cigar-and-brew style of “manliness” as the be-all and end-all).
So here are some ideas:
Just reading good, informative sites like Catholic Culture, the Wall Street Journal, Stratfor (geopolitical analysis), Politico (a huge aggregator of news).
Reading good books (the links herein are Amazon affiliate links; a little money comes our way when you shop at Amazon, so thank you): The good men I know read actual books. There are always the classics, such as the ones we cover in the Library Project — especially our book lists, one of which will introduce the reader to the work of John Senior. From thence one will go from the 1000 Good Books to the Great Books that undergird our civilization.
Some important books that randomly come to mind would be biographies of Winston Churchill, Witness by Whittaker Chambers, The Gulag Archipelago by Solzhenitsyn, the biography of John Paul II by George Weigel, Democracy in America by Alexis de Tocqueville, anything by G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis. Many men have enjoyed reading John Taylor Gatto on education. Anthony Esolen’s Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child can be an eye-opener.
Good spiritual reading would include the ones we’ve written about in the Library Project, a biography of St. Philip Neri, and one of my husband’s recent favorites, The Wellspring of Worship by Jean Corbon, also mentioned in The Little Oratory, a book that many men have found decisive in figuring out how to lead prayer at home. St. Joseph is the greatest patron for men: I highly recommend this book, Joseph: Shadow of the Father, by Andrew Doze. It seems to be out of print, but perhaps you will come across it somewhere second-hand.
The books and site of James Stenson have proven helpful to fathers, although as an unmarried man (numerary in Opus Dei) he perhaps gives less attention than optimal to the foundational importance of the marital bond; nevertheless, we recommend his work.
As to blogs, we can recommend Bacon from Acorns. Since John Cuddeback is interested in “a philosophy of households,” his blog fits well with ours, I think. He is also involved with The Catholic Gentleman. You might like The Art of Manliness — but now we’re getting into tricky territory, because some of our men point out that the art of manliness lies in not speaking of manliness… but hard times call for desperate measures, one might counter. This blog does seem to specialize in really practical advice, like how exactly to change a tire, and that you need to know how to do it. There’s no question that some people need such particularity! As we’ve found!
Doing and making and fixing are excellent pursuits for any man — any book or site that helps him figure things out gets our thumbs’ up!
What to avoid? Just as with women’s sites, I’d say that it’s important to avoid two things: 1. anything that feeds narcissism, the fatal fault of our time; and 2. anything that causes anxiety by exploiting invidious comparison. It’s one thing to encourage and demonstrate; it’s another to present such an enhanced view of things that it only results in falling to an even lower level, like the ads in foodie magazines that feature opening cans of processed food (ever notice that?).
The post Ask Auntie Leila: What can men read? appeared first on Like Mother Like Daughter.
