Mai > Recent Status Updates

This going to be a slow read because I’m stopping every other page to say “go off Leah” and send quotations to friends

Finding this more engaging than expected. There really is a part of the human brain that just loves the idea of building tree houses I guess.

So far this is ... uh ... not what I expected. I guess not every book can be In This House of Brede??

I'm a simple woman: I feel bad, I buy a conversion story on Kindle.

I'm really not sure why, but I wasn't expecting this book to get so deeply theological so quickly. In hindsight it makes perfect sense. Our uncertainty in relation to suffering stems from confusion about the nature of God and His creation, so of course, any discussion of the problem of pain is going to have to be a discussion about the nature of God.

Re-reading 'cause my man JPII knows what's up. And because there was too much good stuff here to process it all fully the first time around.

Back to the meat of the thing, and confronted with one of the pitfalls of ‘descriptive’ history. Our intrepid historian has just described the cannibalistic ritual practices of the ancient Minoan religion, and then gone on to observe that this religion helped to hold a “peaceable society” together for centuries. ‘Scuse me, since when is cannibalism “peaceable”?

Well, I’m glad that I did read the intro, because otherwise I’d have missed some good lines: “It is the same with European history as with a camel. The practical approach is not to try and define it, but to describe it.”

I’m glad that I

Davies really loves the phrase “virulent brew” for describing ideologies. Tbf, it’s an apt phrase for Stalinism and Nazism

My habit of skipping introductions works well for novels, less so for history books... have had to go back to read the introductory chapter (which is actually quite an interesting reflection on how any history ought to be written).

Fifth time’s the charm I guess...

Every time I'm like "huh this book is slowing down a bit, I'm getting bored" Undset absolutely floors me with some intense spiritual/emotional melodrama and it is GREAT.

So far this is ... uh ... not what I expected. I guess not every book can be In This House of Brede??

So far I've discovered that if I rest this behemoth on my stomach to read while lying down, it takes about 5 minutes for me to start experiencing back pain. Unclear whether my core muscles are just that weak or this book is just that heavy.

Some sparkling moments of insight, but many of the observations (particularly on Friendship) are too tightly bound to Lewis' social/historical milieu to achieve that timeless applicability of some of his other work, like The Screwtape Letters, for example.

The passage on nature-lovers was great, but the next one, on patriotism, was So, so cringe. There are some areas where my Irish Catholic ass is just never going to see eye-to-eye with an Ulster Protestant of the early 20th century

This book finally came in the post (thanks Sen!) so I’m abandoning everything else on my ‘currently reading’ shelf ‘cause I’ve been waiting for The Four Loves f o r e v e r

Still really enjoying this but good grief Erlend is (at best) a hot-headed idiot. Still bemused by the fact that the blurb of the book goes on about the "power and passion" of Kristin's love as though it were a good thing when that relationship is already so destructive. And yet, I'm still excited to see where the story goes.

Pet peeve: the way literally every book written more than 50 years ago has GOT to have some dumb-ass blurb claiming that the book is "modern" and "still relevant", as if human nature had dramatically changed within the last century.

In other news, I'm really enjoying this book.

This book has already made me cry multiple times, so it's gonna be hard to top as a first read of 2019...

At long last I’m reading this book (a Christmas gift) and so far it’s just as good as the summaries and sundry quotes I’ve come across made it sound!

Must admit, I'm flagging a little. JRRT's increasing fame seems to have been a frustrating experience for the poor man, and in the last 20 or 30 letters that I've read, he seems mostly to be dealing with repetitive issues of irritating fans, press disasters, poor health and his struggle to get the time to finish the Silmarillion. It's a little distressing actually.