Finished reading: The Life We’re Looking For: Reclaiming Relationship in a Technological World by Andy Crouch.
A wise essay on the importance of instruments, households, and history in resisting the technological idols of our age.📚
Posts in: Reading
Finished reading: Purgatory Mount by Adam Roberts 📚
Finished reading: Bells In Winter by Czeslaw Milosz 📚
In life and work alike, his contradictions are pressed together like layers in metamorphic rock. It is in the nature of monoliths not to grow old.
~Alex Ross on Thomas Mann, in the New Yorker. My favorite Mann is *The Magic Mountain*—it speaks with clarity to our world. 🔗📚
Finished reading: McGilchrist, *The Master & His Emissary* 📚
I finally finished Iain McGilchrist’s The Master & His Emissary this morning. It’s taken me about 6 months, but the time was well spent—the book is as rich in neuroscience and psychology as in historical and cultural analysis, & a profound guide to our current cultural dislocations. It’s earned a place in my personal pantheon—one of the best books I’ve read, and one I will return to often in years to come.
Max Richter, giving Auden pride of place in his Recomposed Four Seasons headshot. (The album is very good.) 🎶📚
I relished Roy Foster’s Conversation with Tyler on Irish history, economics, and culture. I read Foster’s Modern Ireland years ago, and I’m eager now to read his books on Yeats and Heaney. 📚 🔗 🎧
“We’re moving towards disaster, guided by a false image of the world; and no one realizes.”
~ Michel Houellebecq, from an excellent profile by Justin E.H. Smith 🔗📚
The world needs more Cavafy 📚
Finished reading: Tradition and Apocalypse by David Bentley Hart 📚
Unsurprisingly if you’ve read much DBH, this is a very strange book. I’d highly recommend chapters 1, 6, & 7 for a compelling vision of Christian belief & practice oriented not just to the past but to the future. The middle chapters on Newman & Blondel? Quite dry by comparison.