Books

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

From Subversives to Belloc Dusted off the shelf: Subversive Orthodoxy by Robert Inchausti. Sub-title: Outlaws, Revolutionaries, and Other Christians in Disguise. It's a collection of 3,000-4,000 word essays about orthodox Christians who took unconventional positions. William Blake, Kierkegaard, Chesterton, Kerouac, Wendell Berry, McLuhan, Ivan Illich, others.

Some new, some old. Some in progress, some finished. Some repeats, some originals. Freaks in History The poor and freaks. They'll both always be with us. Barabbas was apparently a freak, as was Caligula. What Origen did to himself was kinda freaky, too, but out of respect, I

Some new, some old. Some in progress, some finished. Some repeats, some originals. Age of Aquarius Squirming Absolute classic. I read this book about twelve years ago, and I loved every second of it. I learned the meaning of "pneumatic antinomianism," and I've been casually dropping

Some new, some old. Some in progress, some finished. Some repeats, some originals. It's a Random World I bought this book after hearing Taleb interviewed on EconTalk [http://www.econtalk.org/]. The host (Russ Roberts) asked Taleb about the economic meltdown (rough quote), "So, you were right

Dalrymple Sighting Aye, at times my ignorance surprises even me. Dalrymple has written a great little book review/essay [http://www.city-journal.org/2009/bc0427td.html] about an author whose name doesn't even ring a bell: Paul Hollander, a man who "is not one of those sociologists

20 Books to Make You a Smart Catholic Joseph Epstein is the best essayist alive. He's urbane, funny, self-deprecating. He's a fine stylist, and he's remarkably well-read. I remember William F. Buckley marveling at Epstein's erudition and wondering how Epstein could have