Books
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My wife and I spent the last two Sunday evenings watching the BBC dramatization of P.D. James's Death Comes to Pemberly, which, as you probably know, is both a murder mystery and a sequel to Pride and Prejudice. I haven't read the book, and it's been a long time since I read P&P, so I can't comment on…
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From the Church [of England] Times: an intriguing list of the The 100 Best Christian Books. I don't think I've read more than half of them, though there are many others that I know by reputation. As far as I can see, there are only a few real clunkers in there, and they make up for…
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I'm not sure I would ever have read this book if my wife had not liked it so much. I had heard of it and knew that it was very highly regarded by critics, but that alone doesn't mean a great deal to me. But while my wife was reading it she read me a…
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When I finished this book a few weeks ago I wanted to turn back to the front and begin reading it again right away. I'm not going to, because there are too many other things I want to read. But I do want to return to it in time. This is not because I enjoyed…
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If some characters from Atlas Shrugged wandered into Twin Peaks. Please pass this idea along to David Lynch if you know him.
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I wondered the other day whether some novelist had written an alternate-history exploration of what the world would have been like if the French Revolution had not happened. Paul obligingly posted a link to this 1948 story by H. Beam Piper, which you can read or download in various electronic formats at Project Gutenberg. It's…
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The Panther and the Hind, by Aidan Nichols, O.P. This book has been on my "do a blog post about this" list for several months now, so many that its details have begun to fade. One aspect of it that will not fade, though, unless I am overtaken by senility, is the clarity with which…
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You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs, they tell us, but while the eggs are surely broken, the omelet is never made. –Gary Saul Morson Morson, a professor of Slavic Languages and Literature at Northwestern University, makes that remark in a New Criterion piece about Alexander Herzen, a strange German-Russian writer of whom I knew no…
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Speaking of Orwell, I ran across this a few days ago: his review of Mein Kampf. Quite interesting. It was written after the beginning of the war, though; what would have been really interesting would have been a review written before Hitler's true nature and intentions had become indisputably clear. The opening paragraph is nevertheless striking: It…
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It's called The Beauty of God's House, and is edited by Francesca Murphy, and sounds really good. When Mr. Caldecott was nearing death, I posted a prayer request for him here. But when he actually died, I was silent. That was because so many notices and eulogies appeared on the web that I couldn't sort…
Light On Dark Water 