All posts tagged Books

  • The Idiot

    Peri and I are in Paris.

    Today we made our regular pilgrimage to Shakespeare & Company–
    the famous English bookstore across the Seine from Notre Dame.

    I bought The Doctrine of Reconciliation by Karl Barth.

    But that’s not the interesting part.
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  • The Problem With Perfection

    Yesterday afternoon I sat on my deck and finished John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. A marvelous, sprawling epic. For me it ranks right up there with my all time favorite novel, Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Great novels like East of Eden, The Brothers Karamazov, War and Peace, A Tale of two Cities, Moby Dick, etc., are valuable for this simple reason: What masterpieces of literature have in common is their insight into human beings. An author can reveal the inner sanctum of a person; the author can tell us what a person is thinking and let us in on their deepest secrets — something which is nearly impossible to do in real life. If the author chooses to do so they can give us a “God’s eye view” of the world they have created with their writing. And the literary giants aren’t just great writers, they are also great perceivers. Steinbeck, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Dickens, Melville and the rest have helped me to understand the human soul far more than you might imagine.

    And sometimes they stumble upon the utterly profound.
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  • Subhuman

    I’m reading John Steinbeck’s East of Eden. I’ve been wading through a lot of heavy theology and philosophy over the past year, so I decided to take a break and read a novel just for the pleasure of it. On Peri’s recommendation I chose East of Eden. But as it turns out East of Eden is a modern reworking of Genesis with plenty of theological and philosophical thinking. The antagonist in the story has to be one of the most evil characters in literary history — the monstrous and whorish Cathy Ames (Kate Trask).

    Steinbeck introduces Cathy (Kate) with these words:

    I believe there are monsters born in the world to human parents.
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  • Blog On Blog

    This is a blog on blogs.

    Brief and to the point.

    This is my 184th blog in a year and a half. Most of them averaging around a thousand words. That’s a lot of writing.
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