Books

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

Rapt For months, I've been meaning to blog about this excellent book: Rapt, Attention and the Focused Life, by Winifred Gallagher. It's full of common-sensical insight, which means, "Observations that most of us probably knew about, but needed someone to point out." Best of

Need the Book Roadmap? You know what's kinda hard? Starting a non-fiction book when you don't know what it's about. I recently tried it for the first time, inadvertently. I read an off-hand positive remark on a site I enjoy about The God of

Kinds of Reading I'm increasingly struck by the different types of reading. With the advent of the ubiquitous Web, lots of people are thinking about it, but Web reading v. book reading seems pretty obvious to me. The former is naturally inclined to browsing, the other inclined to