My Dirty Little Secret

(Photo by timetrax23.)
My brain is broken. I can’t read.
It’s been this way since January. January–probably not coincidentally–is when we got our internet back after a month’s absence. In December I read ten or twelve books, substantial books, but since we got back online, my reading has gone steadily downhill. With fiction, I get a few [...]

Karen Armstrong on God

(Photo by kyz.)
“The human idea of God has a history, since it has always meant something slightly different to each group of people who have used it at  various points of time. The idea of God formed in one generation by one set of human beings could be meaningless in another, as such, but like [...]

The Fate of Africa

This is an awesome book.
I get on these learning jags where I have to learn everything possible about any single subject. Earlier this fall it was Yellowstone National Park. (Ask me about Jesse James bears, the Old Faithful Inn, or the fire of ‘88.). After that, it was evangelical Christian pop culture. (Seriously, ask me [...]

Literary Criticism

“I find coffee in the fridge, and find the coffee maker, and start the coffee. While I wait for it to brew, i peruse Henry’s bookshelves. . . . Here is the Henry I know. Donne’s Elegies and Songs and Sonnets. Doctor Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe. Naked Lunch. Anne Bradstreet, Immanuel Kant. Barthes, Foucault, Derrida. [...]

Getting Rid of Books

A few years ago, I dated a minimalist. His living room was all white carpet and white walls, the only furniture a television on an entertainment stand and a futon. His built-in bookshelves held almost no books and only a handful of DVDs. Whenever he bought a new item of clothing, he told me, he [...]