One Woman, One Year, 200 Books
This book has many elements that tend to set my teeth on edge: cries against a vast conspiracy, a shiny new cover, lots of praise for the author printed in it and an insistence that the vast majority have it wrong and only our author is standing for truth and reality.
And yet…it was a very [...]
The lack of capitilization is not my fault. Regine Pernoud titled her book without capital letters.
I usually am delighted by Ignatius Press’ books. They publish high-quality and hard-to-find titles and, while they do print mostly (only?) paperbacks, all their bindings are sewn. However this book – those terrible middle ages: debunking the myths – was [...]
I finished up Boethius’ The Consolation of Philosphy last night just before bed. Alex was up way past his bedtime reading one of daddy’s “mageenz” (magazines) and interupting me every five seconds to ask me to name the letters for him. He was adorably imitating Jared’s lay-on-stomach technique for late-night reading – Jared finds it [...]
…because then I’d get to read all the time.
Our house came down with a nasty stomach flu early last week and while most of the nastier effects of that kind of thing were over by Tuesday, the weakness, weariness, and achyness continues yet today. I spent most of the week flat on my back and [...]
Everyone needs to go out and get a copy of this unbelievably wonderful book by Gilbert Highet. My (borrowed) copy is a slim paperback and though it came with high recommendations I wasn’t quite sure how amazing it could be. Even the first few chapters didn’t blow me away but the book built up it’s [...]
This pseudo-biographical work by Daniel Defoe about the 1665 outbreak of the plague that nearly wiped out London is a compelling read. We had a pandemic spook this spring with the H1N1 virus and it is possible that it could return this fall so the book is quite topical despite the hundreds of years that [...]
Dorothy Sayers’ The Mind of the Maker is brilliant and, as far as I know, unprecedented. To look at and try to concieve of the character of God by examining the nature of the artist provides not only startling insight but great motivation to work harder and better. Sayers deftly handles such essentially complex ideas [...]
This “Last Self Help Book” by Walker Percy is quite brilliant. Very thought-provoking, very funny and very open-ended.
I want to review it. I am, however, brain-dead. I cannot seem to think of anything to write. I planned my day very carefully trying to maximize my creativity and time during the boys’s nap and I got [...]
This is the last of Geises books that I plan to read this year. I’ve really enjoyed their trilogy about medieval life and am looking forward to doing more reading from and about the Middle Ages.
I’m so glad to live in our day and age though I think that there were definitely some good aspects [...]
I’m really enjoying these “Life in a…” books. The writing is engaging and the information seems well rounded. The Geises seem to be well aware of the difficulty of making generalizations about a time that is so far removed from our own and yet they do draw reasonable conclusions and paint a clear picture.
I also [...]