Finished reading: Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel 📚
Posts in: Reading
Great day at the used book store 📚
Finished reading: *The New Leviathans* by John Gray
Finished reading: The New Leviathans by John Gray. A book with no single overarching thesis beyond an examination of how liberal democracy is in crisis in the West, and how the alternatives at the moment, primarily Russia and China, are… unsavory. Gray’s book, just 3 brisk chapters, helpfully resuscitates Hobbes as interested in the wide range of forms Leviathan can take to provide order, peace, and freedom to its citizens. Unfortunately, all of these are more or less totalitarian—which is why Gray finds in Hobbes a helpful thinker for our age, in which the world is converging on forms of surveillance capitalism:
Currently reading: Your Face Belongs to Us by Kashmir Hill 📚
Currently reading: Toward the Winter Solstice by Timothy Steele 📚
Finished reading: The Bible and Poetry by Michael Edwards.
A fascinating and very idiosyncratic look at Scripture, from an unexpected quarter: Edwards is a member of the Académie Française and one of the world’s leading Racine scholars. If you’ve ever wondered why so much of the Bible is poetry, and how that fact should influence your reading of Scripture, this is a very good starting point.
Plus, anything published by New York Review is worth reading at least once. 📚
Finished reading: Meet Me at the Lighthouse by Dana Gioia.
A delightful collection of poems, songs, & a few translations. I especially loved the closing sequence, “The Underworld.” I read “The Ballad of Jesús Ortiz” aloud to me daughter, & she loved that. 📚
Tyler Cowen draws attention to the remarkable life and work of the Catholic religious scholar R.C. Zaehner, whose Wikipedia page is, indeed, fascinating and wild. 📚
Currently reading: The Bible and Poetry by Michael Edwards 📚
Finished reading: Zen in the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury.
I love Bradbury’s simple, relentless enthusiasm for writing. 📚