A List: City of God (Augustine)..............................................................................541/867
B List: Between books
C List: Sir Walter Scott--Rob Roy................................................................................7/501
Bonus: Zena Hitz--Lost in Thought.........................................................................126/210
I finally finished Buddenbrooks on 8/4, so I will eventually get up a report on that, though probably not before the last part of August, as there is probably no way I can get it done this week, and next week I am going to be on vacation. The next book on that list is another long one, which will probably take me through all of the rest of August and September, if it ever arrives, which it hasn't yet. So activity on this blog will continue to be light for a while. As to my other one, which I haven't updated since May, I am hoping that when school starts up again, in addition to being able to read a little more, I can get back into something of a more regular writing routine, even if it is just the blogs to start. I want to get in some exercising too, not because I am getting fat, but because I would like to maintain a somewhat healthy look, and as I am getting bored with my social life I would like to keep my options open for having a better one as much as possible--at this point of my life I have to concede that my brains are not enough to get me there on their own. We'll see what happens.
This was not a productive month of reading. My mother came to visit for two weeks in July, and she is even harder to escape from than my regular family. Augustine is coming along slowly. His theme of the two cities (That of Man and that of God) is starting to come into clearer focus. This book is kind of an encyclopedic inventory of such religion and history as was known, or at least regarded as important, up to that point, and I like reading books of that sort from time to time. But I can't read that much of it in any given day.
For the C-List I spent most of the month finishing up Madeline L'Engle's short story collection The Moment of Tenderness. It got mixed reviews but other than one story about the devil which I didn't quite understand I thought it was really good. I guess I don't read that many stories. Maybe they all seem good when a real professional writes them, though I think I have some discernment in these matters. I just started Rob Roy today. It is pretty long for a C-list book, but my discovery of what a good novelist Scott is after not having read him my entire life is one of the modest joys I have had in the past two or three years. The first few pages of Rob Roy possess the same inimitable authorly charm that infused The Heart of Midlothian and especially The Bride of Lammermoor, the two books by this author that I have read in the last year or two.
I am working my way leisurely through my old classmate Zena Hitz's book. She draws on a wide array of liberal learning, much of which, even if I cannot claim to have been already possessed of, is accessible enough to me that I can usually make sense of it. The book has an underlying current (though don't all philosophical books to some extent?) of dismay at the current state of universities and intellectual culture, with the obscene lust for social status and material luxury that has permeated and influenced even the way these realms operate beyond what appeared to be the case in much of the known past, even that known to our generation personally ca. 1990. I feel much of the same general dissatisfaction with the state of public discourse and thinking in comparison with the form I thought, or hoped, these things would take in my mature years back then, so I am receptive to the message of the book.
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