Flannery

Eric Scheske recently picked up Flannery O'Connor's The Habit of Being again. A collection of her letters from 1948 until her death in 1964, it's a thick book, about 600 pages. Eric started reading it about three years ago and loves it, but something else always draws away his attention, so he hasn't finished it and, in a way, doesn't want to. He likes taking it off the shelf every couple of months and reading something new. Of course, his reading of the book kind of reminds him of Charlie Brown's Snoopy, who undertook to read War and Peace in manageable bites: one word a day. We are, however, optimistic that he'll finish it before he dies, at least with the help of the longevity devices discussed in The Atlantic article (see entry below).

While browsing through the parts of the book he has read, he ran across this great quote: "I write with a solid belief in all the Christian dogmas. I find that this increases rather than decreases my vision."