Where'd You Go, Bernadette

Where'd You Go, Bernadette by Maria Semple    330 pages

A whip-smart, hysterical dramedy about a family in crisis after the disappearance of its brilliant, misanthropic matriarch. 

To find her mother, Bee compiles email messages, official documents, secret correspondence--creating a compulsively readable and touching novel about misplaced genius and a mother and daughter's role in an absurd world.

Hilarious and wild, this book takes you on a journey and I enjoyed every bit of it. There's something about books that are built on the "letters and emails and articles" of its characters. It's a frame tale, told by Balakrishna or "Bee" as she's called, who's trying to find her mother, who has disappeared. She's written a "book," in this case the book you're holding in your hands, which is a compilation of her narrative and the narrative told by others through letters, faxes, emails, and articles. 

I'd recommend it as a vacation read or if someone's looking for humorous literary fiction (I can get so bored by literary fiction because it seems inundated with "serious" stories and it's almost as if life can't be fun while being "literary" - thankfully this book is a clear example that that's not true). It reminds me a bit of Jane Austen - not in its subject matter, but more in its satire of life in Seattle and socialites and rich people. It has the good humor of Jane Austen and the larger than life adventure of Mark Twain novels. Honestly, I'd highly recommend it. 

Eastern Schism

The Eastern Schism: A Study of the Papacy and the Eastern Churches during the XIth and XIIth Centuries by Steven Runciman, 170 pages

In the simplified standard account, the great schism between the sees of Rome and Constantinople - and therefore between the Catholic and Orthodox churches - began with the excommunication of the Ecumenical Patriarch by papal legates in 1054.  As Steven Runciman elaborates, however, this was only one dramatic moment in a long process of ecclesiastical, theological, cultural, linguistic, and political estrangement - the roots of the schism predate Christianity and the sometimes heroic efforts to reverse it continue to this day.

Runciman struggles for objectivity and largely succeeds, but admits his own sympathies lie with the Byzantines - a slant which, as he argues, is more than compensated for by the fact that most Western studies of the schism tilt in the other direction.  The result is a balanced and nuanced presentation of the history of the most momentous split in the history of Christianity, necessary to understand the persistent divisions between what St John Paul II famously described as the "two lungs" of the Church.