What I'm Reading/In the Book Review
The book pile has undergone meiosis: there are two piles. This happens. It happens often. Eventually, some of the books in each of the current piles get swept back into other, attendant piles. That will not happen this time!
I’m trying hard to finish The Stillborn God (Mark Lilla on religion and politics) by the end of the week, because I want to be done with it before we head off to St Croix. It’s not an easy read by any means, especially because there’s a great deal about Kant, and I have a preliminary problem with Kant that makes reading about his thought very difficult: how can anybody not have figured out that Kant is (a) unwholesome and (b) ridiculous? Much more appealing are two recent books by Ramsay MacMullen that I ordered from a catalogue of Yale books, Voting About God in Early Church Councils and Christians and Pagans in the Fourth to Eighth Centuries. These plainspoken titles fail to suggest the vibrancy of Prof MacMullen’s scholarship. But I’m saving both books – they’re quite slim - for St Croix.
Other books that I’ll be taking with me include three Miss Marple mysteries, all of which I know inside and out from the Joan Hickson adaptations (I haven’t yet moved on to the somewhat shorter Geraldine McEwans). I shall leave whatever I read behind at the hotel. I’m also taking Tony Attwood’s The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome.
I thought I’d have read The Abstinence Teacher by now, but it looks like something that I’ll get to after the Thanksgiving break.
As for this week’s Book Review (which has so many bad reviews that I set up a new section just for them.)
¶ The Colossus.