Mario Vargas Llosa, recent Nobel Prize for Literature winner, gave an acceptance speech entitled “In Praise of Reading and Fiction. The entire speech is worth reading. Although Vargas Llosa still seems to think that religion, all religion, is a divisive and violent force in the world, he has come to see the horror of Marxism. Politically, he calls himself a “liberal,” in the classical sense of the word, supporting free markets and non-authoritarian government.

Good literature erects bridges between different peoples, and by having us enjoy, suffer, or feel surprise, unites us beneath the languages, beliefs, habits, customs, and prejudices that separate us. When the great white whale buries Captain Ahab in the sea, the hearts of readers take fright in exactly the same way in Tokyo, Lima, or Timbuctu.

In my youth, like many writers of my generation, I was a Marxist and believed socialism would be the remedy for the exploitation and social injustices that were becoming more severe in my country, in Latin America, and in the rest of the Third World. My disillusion with statism and collectivism and my transition to the democrat and liberal that I am – that I try to be – was long and difficult and carried out slowly as a consequence of episodes like the conversion of the Cuban Revolution, about which I initially had been enthusiastic, to the authoritarian, vertical model of the Soviet Union; the testimony of dissidents who managed to slip past the barbed wire fences of the Gulag; the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the nations of the Warsaw Pact; and because of thinkers like Raymond Aron, Jean Francois Rével, Isaiah Berlin, and Karl Popper, to whom I owe my reevaluation of democratic culture and open societies. Those masters were an example of lucidity and gallant courage when the intelligentsia of the West, as a result of frivolity or opportunism, appeared to have succumbed to the spell of Soviet socialism or, even worse, to the bloody witches’ Sabbath of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.

Have any of you read any of Vargas Llosa’s novels?

Is this vignette of the situation in France an indication of where the institution of marriage is headed in the U.S.? Christians need to making the biblical case for marriage now to young Christians because I don’t think it’s at all obvious to them anymore.

The Scandal of Gendercide—War on Baby Girls And this tragedy in the making is yet another result of our abortion-hardened culture.

Where do you find the time (to read)? by Jessica Frances Kane I love this brief meditation on time. HT: Girl Detective. “Don’t get a dog. Decorate minimally, including holidays. Maintain no position on Halloween costumes or children’s birthday parties. Use gift bags. Shop rarely.”

Marilynne Robinson: “I’m kind of a solitary. This would not satisfy everyone’s hopes, but for me it’s a lovely thing. I recognize the satisfactions of a more socially enmeshed existence than I cultivate, but I go days without hearing another human voice and never notice it. I never fear it. The only thing I fear is the intensity of my attachment to it. It’s a predisposition in my family. My brother is a solitary. My mother is a solitary. I grew up with the confidence that the greatest privilege was to be alone and have all the time you wanted. That was the cream of existence. I owe everything that I have done to the fact that I am very much at ease being alone. It’s a good predisposition in a writer. And books are good company. Nothing is more human than a book.” HT: Anecdotal Evidence