Tag: books
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The State of the “Read Me” Project, 2022
T’shua li!! Victory is mine!! In 2021, I at last achieved the dynamic homeostasis I tossed out as a goal so cavalierly a few years ago with respect to my “Read Me” Shelf. More precisely, with respect to the amorphous multi-locational stack of unread books that is a more or less permanent part of the […]
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Christmas Books
It wouldn’t really be Christmas without books. Christmas was a much lower key event this year for our family than it has been in years past. This turned out to be delightful. Nevertheless, we did all exchange bookstore gift cards, because that’s the kind of family we are. And we did make the obligatory Christmas […]
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Reinventing the Radical Proposition that Women are People
I keep being astonished at how quickly the recent past becomes ancient history, and how that impels the reinvention of the same wheels, over and over, generation after generation. I’m a slower learner than I think, I guess. Because feminism is old. Anne Hutchinson old. Married Women’s Property Acts old. Votes for Women old. International […]
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Assumptions, Questioned and Un-
What counts as knowledge – that is, knowledge of reality? This is a question for the philosophers, in the end; but, as Gramsci said, everyone is a philosopher, so it’s a question for all of us. And while Gramsci’s point was that everyone has a philosophy, one they live by, some philosophers are better than […]
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Maybe Metaphysics After All
Almost no one operates without some metaphysical paradigm, if indeed anyone does. Being a modernist-postmodernist kind of thinker, I have gone along for decades assuming that whatever those metaphysical premises are, they are simply unprovable. At some point, a person just has to decide what she’s going to accept. That view traces back to Kant, […]
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Thoughts on *A Book of Uncommon Prayer* by Brian Doyle
I wish everyone could read this book. I understand that not everyone would think they would want to, for different reasons. But I wish it, anyway, because it is a beautiful book that has the effect of opening a reader’s (my) eyes to the delightful, marvelous, wondrous, good, true, vital things, ordinary things, that surround […]
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The State of the “Read Me” Project, 2021
I’m committed to this now. In it for the long haul. I still haven’t read all the books in the tsundoku. I still haven’t achieved “dynamic homeostasis.” But, I have made Measurable Progress! Depending, that is, on how one measures the progress. Here are the data: In 2019, I read 24 books (that counted), and […]
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More Books for Christmas!
Basically, I got a big bag of books for Christmas. *Grins broadly* These are the ones I’m adding to the Read Me Project list: Fretheim, Terence E. and Froehlich, Karlfried. The Bible as the Word of God in a Postmodern Age. Wipf and Stock Publishers, 1998. Garrett, Duane A. The Problem of the Old Testament: […]
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How Delightful?
Thoughts on The Delightful Life of a Suicide Pilot, Colin Cotterill (Soho Press, 2020). Since The Coroner’s Lunch, we (the readers in our household) have read several (not all) of Colin Cotterill’s tales of the exploits of Dr. Siri Paiboun, Laotian forensic pathologist, former freedom fighter, and wry commentator on post-revolutionary state bureaucracy. Also, on […]
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Some Things Still Need Explaining
Thoughts on Caste, by Isabel Wilkerson (Random House, 2020). I have thought a lot about this book, and what I think about it, and why, mainly because I felt ambivalent about it, and because friends who also read it described feeling differently. Maybe I have thought about it so much, then, because I felt defensive, […]
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What Makes a Book Political? Thoughts on *The Hate U Give*
Our church book group finished working its way through The Hate U Give last week. It’s a novel. This was a feature that some of the members really liked, and some others went along with, because of trying to maintain the unity of the spirit in the bond of peace and all that. The ones […]
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What People Mean By “God”
Professor Stevenson has written a remarkable book: clear enough to understand the first time through; short enough to read through again, just to be sure; engaging enough to want to do that; interesting and important enough to want to hang on to for future reference. Stevenson, Leslie. Eighteen Takes on God: A Short Guide for […]
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A History Book Like I Never Read in School
Our church book group settled on the book Stamped earlier this summer, as a follow-up to our study of Difficult Conversations. We figured reading about race together in our white rural congregation would probably spark a few difficult conversations all by itself, and we wouldn’t even have to do any role playing. Our pastor had […]
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“White Fragility” – Who’s/Whose Reading?
Should we absolutely totally read White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People to Talk About Racism, or should we avoid it as if our anti-racist lives depended on it? The answer sure seems to depend on who’s doing the reading. How much it has to do with the substance of the text is […]
Matters of Interpretation 