Books

Modern Library Rankings My son, Jack, is trying to read the greatest works of modern fiction. I got him started with Catcher in the Rye, Fahrenheit 451, Brave New World, The Sound and the Fury, Wise Blood, etc. Those were obvious. In order to find more options, I googled "

Flannery on Ayn: > I hope you don't have friends who recommend Ayn Rand to you. The fiction of Ayn Rand is as low as you can get re fiction. I hope you picked it up off the floor of the subway and threw it in the nearest

Jacobs You don't hear much about Siger de Brabant these days. He's a Latin Averroist (fan of the Muslim philosopher, Averroes), who taught a lot of bizarre stuff, but in particular, he taught there were two types of truth: philosophic truths and religious truths. His framework

Ah, the small pleasures. Better yet, the free pleasures. Especially the free pleasures that help defeat a shortcoming. Here's the situation: I'm reading an article or a book that makes reference to a book that sounds really good. For the past ten years, I've

The Vat My firm subscribes to the New Yorker. A recent issue featured this piece about the Vatican library, "God's Librarians [http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/01/03/110103fa_fact_mendelsohn]." It's good, especially for a magazine that isn't terribly friendly

From the Notebooks Notes about Fiction As I studied the work of Flannery O'Connor–possibly the ultimate craftsman of the novel, who wrote so slowly and deliberately that every word has a purpose–it seemed her philosophy is explicit. Consider, for instance, Rayber, the cold rationalist who was