E.'s Friend Comments

My reflections on V. S. Naipaul on the news of his death. http://escottjones.typepad.com/myques...

Anyone else dislike this new format. Yes, I'm sure I'll get used to it, but it's rather obnoxious.

I've also begun re-reading Leaves of Grass. Sublime, of course.

Next up, I'm going to re-read Things Fall Apart in honor of Chinua Achebe who recently died.

Re-reading The Last Battle was a great way to spend this Saturday before Easter. I cried like a silly thing all through my favourite parts.

For my next "fun" reading, I'm going to re-read The Last Battle by C. S. Lewis. It is difficult on Goodreads to indicate that one is re-reading a book. This is the longest span in my life in which I've gone without re-reading the Chronicles of Narnia, my favourite stories. I haven't re-read them since I lived in Dallas in the mid-Aughts. I'm reading The Last Battle because of the depression I've experience in February and March, and I believe that this novel will be healing. The chapter "Further Up and Further In" has always been one of my favourite in fiction, and it has inspired me since I first read it in sixth grade.

This week I was in Portland, Oregon, where I visited Powell's Books. I was only there for one and one half hours. I bought ten books, mostly philosophy and religion. Fortunately, they all fit in my luggage to bring home.

I next intend to read some Cicero. I've had three Penguin volumes of his for almost twenty years, but never read them. I'll likely only read one this passage through the Western canon. Any advice? I'm particularly interested in either "The Nature of the Gods" or "On the Good Life."

Back in 1996 I began writing down all the books I read. I'm about to complete the second such little notepad booklet. I've never sat down with Goodreads to enter all those old books. Decided to kill some time this morning waiting for Michael.

At the church book sale I found the next three volumes of the Forsyte Chronicles!

Yesterday I bought my end-of-the year books for myself: The Sense of an Ending, 1Q84, The Night Circus, and The Marriage Plot.

I'm very excited that some theology books I've had on my to-read list for years have arrived in the mail today!

I'm two books away from completing the goal I set for the 2011 Reading Challenge!

A snow day sure is good for getting my reading caught up! I've finished three books in the last 24 hours.

Okay, I know I'm currently reading WAY too many books. But a handful of them are what I'm currently using for my sermon series.

Ove the weekend I did some antique shopping in Grove, OK and purchased a copy of a book by Bess Streeter Aldrich, a Nebraska writer I have not read, and an illustrated copy of Tristram Shandy.

So, I had an hour to kill yesterday and stopped in our new Half Price Books here in OKC. And left having spent $50+. I did find some things I've been looking for good used copies of for a while, including the science fiction trilogy of C. S. Lewis', which I have never read. These were the original paperback editions, really funky, modernist cover images.

I have written about my top books of the decade: http://escottjones.typepad.com/myques...

In his review of Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life by Gerald Martin, Paul Berman writes this stunning description of Garcia Marquez' writing:

Every last sentence in “The Autumn of the Patriarch” offers a heroic demonstration of man’s triumph over language — unless it is language’s triumph over man. The sentences begin in one person’s voice and conclude in someone else’s, or change their subject halfway through, or wander across the centuries, and, even so, conform sufficiently to the rules of rhetoric to carry you along. To read is to gasp. You want to break into applause at the shape and grandeur of those sentences, not to mention their length. And yet to do so you would need to set down the book, which cannot be done, owing to the fact that, just when the impulse to clap your hands has become irresistible, the sentence you are reading has begun to round a corner, and you have no alternative but to clutch onto the book as if steering a car that has veered out of control.